Former US presidential candidate and House of Representatives member Ron Paul says people seeking to advance peace can learn much from looking to Switzerland.

Paul made his recommendation in an extensive interview with host Eric Dubin on Liberty Rising Radio focused on Paul’s new book Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity.

Paul states in the interview that he likes Switzerland’s “very successful national defense,” and adds “there is no reason that we can’t use that as a starting point.” Paul explains:

… all through the twentieth century — a century of carnage and killing and murdering in the European theater especially, they were never invaded. So they had a strong national defense, but of course it was under a completely different philosophy than what most other countries have…. if we are seeking peace and prosperity, we ought to move in that direction.

Paul, who is the chairman of the Ron Paul Institute, explores the Swiss model in more detail in Swords into Plowshare, including providing this contrasting of the philosophies behind Swiss and US military and foreign policies:

Switzerland in the center of Europe survived unscathed during the 20th century carnage of two world wars — choosing a policy of neutrality. The US, in contrast, has constantly ignored the strong advice of our early leaders, and frequently the voice of the people, to stay out of the internal affairs of other nations and avoid entangling alliances. This combined with a supposed God-directed ‘Manifest Destiny,’ a neoconservative obsession with provoking wars, and an excessive spirit of nationalism and jingoism has led to our many wars throughout the world over the past 100 years.

The Swiss have not expressed this same attitude. Basically they stay at home while we march around the world looking for “monsters to destroy.”

Listen here to the complete interview, in which Paul addresses several other matters explored in detail his new book, including the role of propaganda in convincing people to support war, how President Woodrow Wilson helped move the US toward perpetual war, and the threat posed by US debt and currency debasement.

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute

Fighting continues in Bengazi, where two soldiers were killed and 10 injured in an offensive by the Tobruk government forces against the Islamist militias in the disputed city.

According to the military spokesman Nasser al-Hassi, the airforce “bombed targets in Sabri”, an area near the strategic port, closed since last autumn.

The clashes come as the United Nations mission in the country (UNSMIL) called for an immediate cease-fire.

The international community expressed particular concern over the situation in the southern cities of Sabha, al-Kufra and Awbari, hit over the past days by heavy fighting.

(EurActiv) — US President Barack Obama told the BBC in an interview excerpt that aired Thursday (23 July) that Britain must remain in the European Union to maintain its global influence.

Britain’s EU membership “gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union,” Obama said, adding that the EU, as “part of the institutions built after World War II” had “made the world safer and more prosperous”.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, seeking to end a decades-old rift within his Conservative Party over Britain’s place in Europe, has promised to negotiate a new settlement with Brussels and hold a referendum on EU membership by the end of 2017.

Obama also said the UK was America’s “best partner” because of its willingness to project power beyond its “immediate self-interests to make this a more orderly, safer world”.

He also congratulated the British government for meeting the NATO target of spending 2% of the country’s national income – GDP – on defence. He denied putting pressure on Mr Cameron to meet that target but said there had been an “honest conversation” between the two leaders.

Of the remaining European NATO countries only Estonia has reached the 2% target and Poland is at 1.95%. Germany is at 1.08% and France at 1.5%.

Obama added in an another excerpt from the interview that his biggest frustration was the failure to pass “common-sense gun safety laws” in the United States “even in the face of repeated mass killings.”

“If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands,” Obama said in the White House interview.

“For us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing,” he said.

Obama was speaking to the BBC at the White House before departing for Kenya, where he begins a short tour of Africa on Friday.

By Kevin J. Jones

Most Americans have a favorable view of Pope Francis, but an apparent decline in their numbers may be due to his implicit challenge to American culture, one observer has said.

“Americans never react well when an international leader criticizes their culture,” Dr. Kathleen Cummings, a University of Notre Dame professor of American Studies, told CNA July 24. “Given that Pope Francis has done so implicitly in his recent remarks and writings, it is not surprising to see that his approval ratings have declined in the United States.”

A Gallup survey of U.S. adults in early July found that 59 percent had a favorable view of Pope Francis. This is a 17 percent decline from February 2014, when 76 percent of Gallup respondents said they had a favorable view of the Pope.

The latest figure resembles poll results in April 2013, a month after the Pope’s election, when 58 percent of Gallup respondents said they had a favorable opinion of Francis.

The favorability of Catholics in the U.S. toward the Pope has also declined. In February 2014, about 89 percent of self-identified Catholics told Gallup they had a favorable view of Pope Francis. In July 2015, this figure dropped to 71 percent, a drop of 18 percent. About half of non-Catholic Christians now say they have a favorable view of Francis, compared to 73 percent in 2014.

The percentage of self-identified conservatives who reported favorable views of Pope Francis dropped from 72 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2015. The percentage of liberals reporting favorable views dropped from 82 percent to 68 percent, while moderates dropped from 79 to 71 percent.

The Pope’s overall unfavorable rating is only about 16 percent, a slight rise from nine percent in 2014, and 10 percent in 2013. About 25 percent of all July 2015 respondents said they had never heard of Pope Francis or had no opinion of him, compared to 16 percent in 2014.

The July Gallup poll came soon after the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on care for our common home, Laudato Si’. The lengthy work spoke of the need to care for God’s creation. It also backed several remedies for what the Pope characterized as an environmental crisis.

He said there was a “very solid” consensus on climactic warming.

“Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it,” the Pope wrote.

Cummings, who directs the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, said Pope Francis is like previous Popes in “calling upon U.S. Catholics … to live their faith in ways that run counter to the national culture.”

“The difference is that he has highlighted issues that tend to challenge those who identify as conservatives, which explains the steeper decline among their approval ratings,” she said.

The Gallup telephone survey of 1,009 U.S. adults took place July 8-12. It claims a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Benedict XVI’s favorability peaked in 2008 at 63 percent, but had dropped to 40 percent in 2010, according to Gallup’s surveys. Pope John Paul II’s favorability peaked at 86 percent in 1998, and never dropped lower than 61 percent.

By Mark Clodfelter

For most of the world’s population, America’s air wars in Vietnam are now ancient history. The first U.S. bombing raids against North Vietnam, conducted in response to attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf, occurred a half-century ago this August. Seven months later, America began its longest sustained “strategic bombing” campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, against the North. That effort, and the Linebacker campaigns that followed, dropped a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam. Three million more tons fell on Laos and Cambodia—supposedly “neutral” countries in the conflict. Four million tons fell on South Vietnam—America’s ally in the war against communist aggression. When the last raid by B-52s over Cambodia on August 15, 1973, culminated American bombing in Southeast Asia, the United States had dropped more than 8 million tons of bombs in 9 years.1 Less than 2 years later, Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam were communist countries.

Did the inability of bombing—and innumerable airlift and reconnaissance sorties—to prevent the fall of South Vietnam demonstrate the limits of airpower, or did it reveal that the strategy that relied heavily on airpower’s kinetic application to achieve success was fundamentally flawed? From the perspective of 50 years after the bombing began, and 40 years after the last bomb fell, the answer to both questions remains yes. Yet the two questions are intimately related, and answering them reveals the enormous impact that a political leader can have on the design and implementation of an air strategy, especially in a limited war. Ultimately, Vietnam demonstrates both the limits of airpower and the limits of a strategy dependent on it when trying to achieve conflicting political goals. The legacies of the air wars there remain relevant to political and military leaders grappling with the prospects of applying airpower in the 21st century.

The reliance on airpower to produce success in Vietnam was a classic rendition of the “ends, ways, and means” formula for designing strategy taught today at staff and war colleges worldwide. Airpower was a key “means” to achieve the desired “ends”—victory—and how American political and military leaders chose to apply that means to achieve victory yielded the air strategy they followed. Much of the problem in Vietnam, though, was that the definition of victory was not a constant. For President Lyndon Johnson, victory meant creating an independent, stable, noncommunist South Vietnam. His successor, President Richard Nixon, pursued a much more limited goal that he dubbed “peace with honor”—a euphemism for a South Vietnam that remained noncommunist for a so-called decent interval, accompanied by the return of American prisoners of war (POWs).2

Yet those definitions of victory were only partial definitions of the term. They defined the positive political objectives sought—those that could be achieved only by applying military force. Equally important, though, were the negative political goals—those achievable only by limiting military force. To achieve true victory in Vietnam, both the positive and negative objectives had to be obtained—a truism for any conflict. That challenge was enormously difficult for American political and military leaders in Vietnam because the negative goals often appeared to have an equal, if not greater, weight than the positive goals, especially during the Johnson era of the war.

Johnson’s Use of Airpower in Vietnam

President Johnson had a multitude of negative objectives that prevented him from applying massive military force in Vietnam. While he did not intend to lose “that bitch of a war” in Southeast Asia, he also had no intention of surrendering “the woman really loved,” the Great Society programs aimed at reducing poverty and achieving racial equality.3 Achieving the Great Society became an important negative objective for Johnson, one that would prevent him from applying extensive military force. Doing so, he feared, would cause the American public to turn away from the Nation’s disadvantaged to focus instead on its military personnel in harm’s way. Johnson further feared that applying too much force against North Vietnam would cause its two large allies, China and the Soviet Union, to increase their assistance to the North, possibly even with overt intervention. As a U.S. Senator on the Armed Services Committee, he had seen firsthand what could happen when American leaders miscalculated regarding China during the drive to the Yalu River in the Korean War, and he aimed to prevent a similar mistake in Vietnam. Finally, Johnson was concerned about America’s worldwide image, with the globe seemingly divided into camps of communism and capitalism. Exerting too much force against North Vietnam would make the United States appear as a Goliath pounding a hapless David, and likely drive small nations searching for a benefactor into the communist embrace.

Those negative objectives combined to produce an air strategy founded on gradual response, particularly for President Johnson’s bombing of North Vietnam. American political and military leaders believed that they had to defeat North Vietnam to stop the insurgency in the South and create a stable government there. Although they knew that the indigenous Viet Cong contributed more manpower to the enemy’s cause than did the North Vietnamese army (NVA), they also believed that the Viet Cong (VC) could not fight successfully without North Vietnamese assistance. Accordingly, they designed an air strategy that gradually increased pressure on the North, allowing President Johnson to gauge reactions from the Chinese, Soviets, American public, and other global audiences while he slowly opened the bombing spigot. Rolling Thunder would creep steadily northward until it threatened the nascent industrial complexes in Hanoi and Haiphong, and North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, being a rational man who certainly prized that meager industry, would realize the peril to it and stop supporting the Viet Cong. Denied assistance, the insurgency would wither away, and the war would end with America’s high-tech aerial weaponry providing a victory that was quick, cheap, and efficient.

Those assumptions provided the foundation for President Johnson’s air strategy against North Vietnam, and all of them were seriously flawed. Battles such as Ia Drang and Khe Sanh, as well as the Tet Offensive, were anomalies during the Johnson presidency; for most of his time in office, the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies rarely fought at all. Together, they fought an average of one day a month from 1965 to 1968, and as a result, their external supply requirements were minimal. VC and NVA forces in August 1967 numbered roughly 300,000, of whom 250,000 were Viet Cong. Yet that combined force needed only 34 tons of supplies a day from sources outside of South Vietnam—an amount that just seven 2½-ton trucks could carry and that was less than 1 percent of the daily tonnage imported into North Vietnam.4 No amount of bombing could stop that paltry supply total from arriving in the South. Still, in fighting an infrequent guerrilla war, the VC and NVA could cause significant losses. In 1967 and 1968, 2 years that together claimed 25,000 American lives, more than 6,000 Americans died from mines and booby traps.5

For President Johnson, the real problem was translating the application of military force into a stable, noncommunist South Vietnam, and doing so in a way that minimized American involvement and the chances of a broader war with China or the Soviet Union while also maximizing American prestige on the world stage. While airpower had seemed an ideal means to accomplish those ends, in truth it could not do so. The original Rolling Thunder raids in March and April 1965 bolstered the morale of many South Vietnamese who desired a noncommunist government, but the South’s government was in shambles. After enduring seven different regime changes—including five coups—in 1964, South Vietnam’s political leadership faced another crisis on the eve of Rolling Thunder, delaying the start of the air campaign by 2 weeks before a semblance of order returned to Saigon. The governments that followed—those of presidents Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu—were corrupt and out of touch with the Southern populace.6 No amount of American airpower could sustain such regimes. Indeed, less than 6 weeks after the start of Rolling Thunder, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy advised President Johnson that South Vietnam would fall to the Viet Cong if Johnson did not shift the focus of America’s military involvement to ground power. The President ultimately concurred, and in summer 1965 he embarked on a program that increased American troop totals from 75,000 to more than 200,000 by the end of the year, with further escalations to follow.7 The shift in emphasis from airpower to ground power preserved the Saigon government, but did little to assure that it governed competently.

Yet Johnson never completely abandoned his hope that airpower might yield success. In the summer of 1966, he ordered the bombing of oil storage facilities in Hanoi and Haiphong, convinced that trucks were vital to move North Vietnamese men and supplies south and that gasoline was essential to keep the trucks moving. The attacks destroyed much of the North’s oil facilities but failed to affect the pace of the war. A year later, believing that the loss of North Vietnam’s meager electrical power production capability and its one steel mill and single cement factory would affect not only its ability to fight but also its will to do so, Johnson bombed those targets. The war continued as it had before, even after intrepid Air Force pilots destroyed the mile-long Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi in August 1967. In short, airpower could not affect the outcome of the conflict as long as the VC and North Vietnamese chose to wage an infrequent guerrilla war—and as long as American political leaders chose to back the inept government in Saigon. The rationale for bombing the North became to “place a ceiling” on the magnitude of war that the VC and NVA could wage in the South.8 That goal faded into oblivion with the opening salvos of the January 1968 Tet Offensive, which demonstrated that American bombing could not prevent the VC and NVA from stockpiling enough supplies to sustain a series of massive conventional attacks.

Despite the failure of Operation Rolling Thunder to achieve success, Johnson monitored it closely and tightly constrained actions that American aircrews could take over the North. His negative objectives led to a long list of rules of engagement (ROE) that did everything from preventing flights through the airspace over Hanoi or Haiphong without his personal approval to limiting how closely aircraft could fly to the Chinese border. Many of those restrictions stemmed from his “Tuesday lunch” sessions at the White House, during which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (or Walt Rostow after 1967), and Press Secretary Bill Moyers (and often joined by Johnson cronies such as lawyers Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas) met with the President to select Rolling Thunder bombing targets following lunch on Tuesday afternoons. Not until October 1967—after Rolling Thunder had been underway for more than 2½ years—did a military officer sit in regularly on the lunch sessions, when Johnson asked Army General Earle Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to begin a steady attendance.9

The political restrictions that Johnson placed on the air war over North Vietnam caused military commanders tremendous difficulty in implementing Rolling Thunder, but those constraints were not the only ones they had to overcome. Indeed, military leaders developed their own restrictions that limited airpower’s effectiveness. Probably the most onerous of those self-inflicted wounds was the “Route Package” system created in spring 1966 that divided North Vietnam into seven bombing zones. Ostensibly developed to deconflict the multitude of Air Force and Navy sorties in North Vietnamese airspace, the system soon became a warped way to assess which Service seemingly contributed more toward Rolling Thunder’s effectiveness. The Navy received four of the bombing zones, while the Air Force received the other three. Targets in the Navy zones were off-limits to Air Force fighters without approval from the Navy, and those in the Air Force zones were forbidden for Navy aircraft without permission from the Air Force. Such approvals rarely occurred.10 As a result, a competition developed between the Air Force and Navy to determine which Service could fly the most sorties into enemy airspace.11 Much as “body count” became the measure of success for commanders on the ground, “sortie count” became the measure of success for air commanders and often led to promotions. Perhaps the most egregious examples of competition occurred during the bomb shortage of 1966, when increased bombing had expended much of the surplus ordnance from World War II and the Korean War. To maintain the desired sortie rate, Air Force and Navy pilots flew missions with less than a full load of bombs, thereby endangering more aircrews than necessary.12 One Navy A-4 pilot even attacked North Vietnam’s famous Thanh Hoa Bridge with no bombs at all, having been told to simply strafe the structure with 20-millimeter (mm) cannon fire.13

“Operational controls” amplified the effects of Rolling Thunder’s political and military constraints. Those controls included such factors as environmental conditions and enemy defenses. The North Vietnamese were masters of camouflage and carefully obscured the highways and trails used to send troops and supplies south. Many of those roads were extremely difficult to identify to begin with, given the dense jungle vegetation that covered much of the country. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese supplemented their deception techniques with an extensive air defense system that guarded lines of communication and the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Soviet Union provided much of the North’s hardware, including SA-2 surface-to-air missiles and MiG fighters. By 1966, many analysts considered Hanoi the world’s most heavily defended city, an assessment that most Air Force fighter pilots would certainly have endorsed.14

In contrast to the limited inputs that American military leaders had in selecting targets in North Vietnam, in South Vietnam the military chiefs faced relatively few political restrictions. President Johnson and his advisors deemed that raids against enemy positions in the South would provoke only minor reactions from the Chinese or Soviets, and that the strikes condoned by Southern leaders on their own territory would produce a meager outcry from the American public or world community. Such attacks required approval only from the South Vietnamese province chief who was responsible for the welfare of those living in his province. Yet obtaining that approval did not guarantee a successful mission. American commanders were often uncertain of enemy positions and bombed “suspected” staging areas. In particular, American and South Vietnamese troops created “free fire zones” where they removed the populace and declared that anyone found in the area was hostile.15 The people traversing the zones, though, were often innocent villagers trying to return to their ancestral homes. Raids against such areas that killed civilians inspired hatred against the United States and the Saigon regime and made excellent recruiting vehicles for the Viet Cong. In the effort to win so-called hearts and minds and enhance the stability of the Saigon government, the airpower applied over South Vietnam was frequently a double-edged sword.

Whereas the air war over North Vietnam was a conflict for control waged between the Air Force and Navy, the air war over the South was an even more disparate affair. An array of air forces participated in it—the Marine Corps with its helicopters and jets, the Army with its helicopters and transport aircraft, the Navy with its fighters, the Air Force with its bombers, transport aircraft, and fighters, and the South Vietnamese air force with its small number of fighters, helicopters, and transports. Retired Air Force General Richard Myers, who flew two tours as an F-4 pilot during the war, afterward lamented the lack of unity of command: “We had seven air forces working over there. Coordination between bombers and fighters was a rarity. Seventh Air Force, Thirteenth Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, bombers, and airlift all did their own thing. It wasn’t as well coordinated as it could’ve—and should’ve—been.”16

Much to the chagrin of Air Force leaders, operational control of B-52s in South Vietnam transferred from the Joint Chiefs in Washington, DC, to the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Jr., in Hawaii, and finally to Army General William Westmoreland, America’s in-theater commander, who used the giant bombers as flying artillery to support ground forces. Air Force Chief of Staff General John McConnell believed that B-52s were inappropriate for Vietnam but nevertheless supported their continued employment there, “since the Air Force had pushed for the use of airpower to prevent Westmoreland from trying to fight the war solely with ground troops and helicopters.”17 The twisted parochialism and absence of centralized control diminished the prospects that the “airpower means” could make worthwhile contributions to obtaining the desired end of a stable, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam. Instead, such deficiencies significantly increased the likelihood that the aerial means—especially its kinetic component—would work against achieving that positive end. America’s subsequent positive goal in the war would prove easier to achieve with airpower, but that was because the negative objectives changed as well, along with the character of the war itself.
Nixon’s Use of Airpower in Vietnam

Despite the high-sounding tone of “peace with honor,” President Nixon’s positive goal in Vietnam was far more circumscribed, and he relied heavily on airpower to help him create a decent interval for the South’s development and to recover American prisoners of war. Soon after taking office in 1969, he decided that bombing was the proper means to curtail the buildup of enemy forces in Cambodia, but since Cambodia was technically a neutral country, he would have to conduct the raids secretly. The raids continued unabated until May 1970, when the New York Times reported on the covert missions that had escaped the knowledge of both the Air Force Secretary and the Chief of Staff.18 The duplicity suited Nixon with his moniker, “Tricky Dick,” given that he had run for President on the platform of ending the war and now was enlarging it, albeit at the request of Cambodian Premier Norodom Sihanouk.19

The war that Nixon inherited, though, was not the same as the one fought by his predecessor. The 1968 Tet Offensive had decimated the VC as a significant fighting force and had also severely impaired the fighting capability of the NVA. Airpower had played a key role in the damage inflicted, with the bombing around the Marine base at Khe Sanh destroying two NVA divisions. Because of the losses suffered, the NVA again reverted to infrequent guerrilla warfare. When it returned to open combat with the “Easter Offensive” at the end of March 1972, it attacked with a fury resembling the World War II German blitzkrieg, minus the air support. More than 100,000 troops, supported by Soviet-supplied T-54 tanks and 130mm heavy artillery, attacked in a three-pronged assault against primarily South Vietnamese forces. (Nixon had by then removed most American troops from the war.20) The fast-paced, conventional character of the offensive, with its heavy requirements for fuel and ordnance, made it ideal for air attack, and the now-vital logistical resupply lines and bridges running back through North Vietnam became prime targets that finally paid dividends. Nixon ordered Air Force and Navy aircraft to pound the supply lines relentlessly in Operation Linebacker. He also mined the port of Haiphong. American aircraft further provided massive doses of close air support and logistical resupply to South Vietnamese forces that gradually stiffened their resistance.

Nixon could apply liberal amounts of airpower against targets in North Vietnam because he, unlike Johnson, had few negative political goals. Nixon and his savvy National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who often acted as Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State as well, had accurately gauged the growing animosity between China and the Soviet Union and decided to make it a centerpiece of their strategy of détente. A key price for securing the promise of diplomatic recognition to China and a strategic arms limitations treaty—and a wheat deal—with the Soviet Union was a free hand in dealing with North Vietnam. To Hanoi’s dismay, both China and the Soviet Union ultimately provided Nixon with that freedom.21 Nixon also had no equivalent of the “Great Society” to restrain his actions, and he believed that his success in establishing détente with the Chinese and Soviets would only enhance his—and America’s—image on the world stage.

Nixon’s profound concern for his image—and belief in his own infallibility—often spurred impromptu actions that had dire consequences for his air commanders. Before the North Vietnamese launched the Easter Offensive, evidence of the buildup for it caused Nixon to order a series of air strikes into North Vietnam in late December 1971. Then, in a February 3, 1972, Oval Office meeting with Kissinger and U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker, Nixon increased the bombing. The President directed Bunker to notify Army General Creighton Abrams, who had replaced Westmoreland as theater commander in Vietnam, that Abrams could now attack surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites in North Vietnam, given that the North Vietnamese had begun firing SAMs at B-52s.22 Air Force General John D. Lavelle, the commander of Seventh Air Force in Saigon, was responsible for carrying out the President’s order. Lavelle’s efforts to accomplish it merit close scrutiny, for they reveal the disastrous impact that presidential ego and complex ROE can have on commanders charged with implementing a desired air strategy.

For Lavelle, the ROE for air attacks against North Vietnam had changed significantly since President Johnson ended Rolling Thunder in October 1968. According to an agreement afterward, seemingly accepted by the North Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks, American reconnaissance aircraft could fly over the North but no bombing would occur, provided the North Vietnamese did not engage in hostile actions against those aircraft.23 Air Force fighters typically escorted those missions in case the North Vietnamese displayed hostile intent. If the pilots received fire or a headset warning tone indicating that a SAM radar was tracking their aircraft, they could respond with a “protective reaction strike.”24 In late 1971, the North Vietnamese “netted” their radar systems to allow ground-controlled interception radars to provide extensive information to SAM sites that minimized the need for SAM radar tracking, thereby minimizing—or eliminating—the warning tone pilots received prior to missile launch.25

General Lavelle determined that this move automatically demonstrated hostile intent from the North Vietnamese because by merely tracking an American aircraft with any radar, they could now fire at it with SAMs. For him, this blanket radar activation was sufficient for his pilots to fire on North Vietnamese SAM sites, though he was highly selective in the sites targeted. He received an endorsement of this perspective from Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird when Laird visited Saigon in December 1971. The Secretary told Lavelle to “make a liberal interpretation of the rules of engagement in the field and not come to Washington and ask him, under the political climate, to come out with an interpretation. I should make them in the field,” Lavelle recalled, “and he would back me up.”26 Kissinger also wanted more intensified bombing, arguing for large raids on SAM sites in one fell swoop rather than attacks across several days that grabbed sustained attention in the media. The National Security Advisor told Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Our experience has been that you get the same amount of heat domestically for a four plane attack as you do for 400.”27

At the meeting with Kissinger and Ambassador Bunker on February 3, 1972, Nixon revealed that his understanding of ROE did not exactly match that of Laird and Lavelle, but the President’s intent was the same. Nixon declared that against SAMs, “protective reaction strikes” would now become “preventive reaction strikes” and that no one would know if SAMs had been fired at American aircraft first or not. He elaborated, “I am simply saying that we expand the definition of protective reaction to mean preventive reaction where a SAM site is concerned. . . . Who the hell’s gonna say they didn’t fire?” The President added, “Do it, but don’t say anything. . . . He can hit SAM sites period.”28

Nixon’s directive reached Lavelle, who then began an assault on SAM sites in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam. Nixon requested to be kept apprised of air attacks on all North Vietnamese targets and received a detailed, daily compilation of the missions. Those reports originated from Lavelle and were in turn passed up the chain of command, with Admiral Moorer, Secretary Laird, and Kissinger reviewing them before they went to the President. On no occasion did Nixon express displeasure with the bombing; in contrast, on the February 8 report, he scribbled a note in the margin for Kissinger: “K—is there anything Abrams has asked for that I have not approved?”29

Lavelle’s actions did not, however, receive universal endorsement. Lonnie Franks, an Air Force technical sergeant who recorded mission results for computer compilation in Saigon, was baffled when pilots erroneously reported enemy ground fire as the rationale for bombing Northern targets. Lavelle had told subordinates that they could not report “no enemy reaction” after raids, but he had failed to explain that any North Vietnamese radar activation constituted a hostile act that justified a bombing response. The form that Franks used to record data contained only four reasons for expending ordnance over North Vietnam: fire from antiaircraft artillery, MiGs, SAMs, or small arms—no block existed for “radar activation.” Pilots thus chose one of the listed options, and Franks, knowing that the selections were incorrect, thought that the effort to deceive was deliberate and wrote his Senator. An Inspector General investigation ensued and Lavelle was removed from command and demoted to major general following hearings by the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

When Nixon heard of Lavelle’s dismissal, the President expressed remorse that the general had been sacked for conducting missions that Nixon had ordered. “I just don’t want him to be made a goat, goddammit,” Nixon said to Kissinger in June 1972. Kissinger responded, “What happened with Lavelle was he had reason to believe that we wanted him to take aggressive steps,” to which Nixon replied, “Right, that’s right.” The President then stated, “I don’t want a man persecuted for doing what he thought was right. I just don’t want it done.” He then disparaged Sergeant Franks, comparing him to Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. Kissinger replied, “Of course, the military are impossible, too,” to which Nixon responded, “Well, they all turn on each other like rats.” Kissinger offered, “I think that this will go away. I think we should just say a . . . after all we took corrective steps. We could have easily hidden it. I think you might as well make a virtue of necessity.” To that, Nixon responded, “I don’t like to have the feeling that the military can get out of control. Well, maybe this censures that. This says we do something when they, . . .” and he stopped in mid-sentence. Then he added, “It’s just a hell of a damn. And it’s a bad rap for him, Henry.”30

A week later, Nixon decided to take Kissinger’s advice. In a June 22 news conference, the President answered questions about Lavelle’s dismissal by stating, “The Secretary of Defense has stated his view on that; he has made a decision on it. I think it was an appropriate decision.”31 Nixon further stated to the press a week later, “But he did exceed authorization; it was proper for him to be relieved and retired. And I think it was the proper action to take, and I believe that will assure that kind of activity may not occur in the future.”32

Lavelle became the highest-ranking American officer to receive a public rebuke for trying to implement his President’s air strategy, but he was not the only air commander to suffer from Nixon’s callousness and ego. Air Force General John W. Vogt, Jr., who replaced Lavelle, visited the White House on his way to Saigon and described Nixon as “wild-eyed” as he berated commanders for lacking aggressiveness in attacking the Easter Offensive. “He wanted somebody to use imagination—like Patton,” Vogt remembered.33 The President elaborated on those thoughts to Kissinger in a memorandum soon after the Linebacker campaign had begun:

I want you to convey directly to the Air Force that I am thoroughly disgusted with their performance in North Vietnam. Their refusal to fly unless the ceiling is 4,000 feet or more is without doubt one of the most pusillanimous attitudes we have ever had in the whole fine history of the U.S. military. I do not blame the fine Air Force pilots who do a fantastic job in so many other areas. I do blame the commanders who, because they have been playing “how not to lose” for so long, now can’t bring themselves to start playing “how to win.” Under the circumstances, I have decided to take command of all strikes in North Vietnam in the Hanoi-Haiphong area out from under any Air Force jurisdiction whatever. The orders will be given directly from a Naval commander whom I will select. If there is one more instance of whining about target restrictions we will simply blow the whistle on this whole sorry performance of our Air Force in failing for day after day after day in North Vietnam this past week to hit enormously important targets when they had an opportunity to do so and were ordered to do so and then wouldn’t carry out the order.34

Nixon never followed through on his threat to eliminate Air Force commanders from the air war against North Vietnam, but he continued to berate military leaders as they worked to implement his increasingly effective air strategy. That strategy proved successful partly because the North Vietnamese persisted in waging conventional war. As long as they did so, their troop concentrations in the South were vulnerable to aerial assault, as were their vital supply lines. The strategy was also successful because the positive ends that Nixon sought from it were extremely limited. Besides securing the return of American POWs, he aimed for an agreement assuring South Vietnam’s survival for a brief period of time, and personally guaranteed to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu that the South would not fall while he was in office.35 Accordingly, Nixon had Kissinger propose an “in-place cease-fire” to Northern negotiators in Paris, which spurred NVA efforts to secure additional territory despite the aerial pounding they sustained. The North Vietnamese responded to Nixon’s offer by dropping their demand for Thieu to resign, and a peace accord appeared imminent in late October 1972 when the President ended Linebacker. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger had informed Thieu of the in-place cease-fire offer, however, and once Thieu learned of it, he was incensed.

Thieu’s refusal to accept the tentative Paris settlement led to a breakdown in the peace talks and caused Nixon to return to his “airpower means” to secure his positive ends—which now included convincing Thieu that he could depend on Nixon’s promise of future military backing. In addition, the President now had a negative political objective that would constrain the amount of force that he could apply. Although he had won a resounding reelection victory in early November, the Democrats seized control of both houses of Congress and threatened to terminate spending for the war when Congress convened in early January. With limited time available to achieve results, Nixon decided to turn to the B-52, with its enormous 30-ton bomb load, to do the job. The President had already shifted more than half of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) fleet of 400 heavy bombers to air bases in Guam and Thailand. He thought that risking the B-52—a vital component of America’s nuclear triad—in raids against targets in the well-defended Northern heartland would demonstrate just how serious his efforts were to end the war. On December 14, in Washington, Nixon gave the order for bombing to begin 3 days later—December 18 in Vietnam. In customary fashion, he told Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “I don’t want any more crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war and if you don’t I’ll consider you personally responsible.”36

For the crews of more than 200 B-52s, the operation dubbed Linebacker II marked the first time that any of them had flown against targets in Hanoi; the bombers had raided Haiphong targets only once before, in April 1972. Still, as the influx of bombers in the Pacific had steadily increased, Air Force General J.C. Meyer, the SAC commander, anticipated such an operation and ordered Lieutenant General Gerald Johnson, the commander of Eighth Air Force, on Guam, to design a plan for it. Johnson and his staff submitted the desired plan to Meyer in November 1972.37 Yet when Nixon’s order to begin the assault arrived at SAC headquarters, Meyer chose to disregard the Eighth Air Force plan, and had his own staff in Omaha, Nebraska, create one instead.

The short timespan to produce a plan led to a design with minimal ingenuity. Aircraft used the same flight paths to attack targets at the same times for the first 3 nights. The North Vietnamese took advantage of the repetitive routing to mass their SAM batteries in the areas where the B-52s turned off target and then fired their SAMs ballistically, which negated the bombers’ defensive capabilities. The initial 3 nights produced the loss of eight bombers, with five more heavily damaged; another two fell to SAMs on the night of December 21. Meyer ended the repetitive routing and, after a 36-hour stand-down for Christmas, turned over planning for the remainder of the operation to Eighth Air Force.

On December 26, General Johnson’s staff implemented the plan they had designed, with 120 B-52s attacking targets in Hanoi and Haiphong from nine different directions in a 15-minute timespan. Two bombers fell to SAMs (a loss rate of 1.66 percent), and the next day, in Washington, Nixon received word that the North Vietnamese were ready to resume negotiations in Paris on January 8. The President responded that negotiations had to begin on January 2 and would have a time limit attached, and that the North Vietnamese could not deliberate on agreements already made.38 On December 28, Hanoi accepted Nixon’s conditions, and he ended Linebacker II the next day. In 11 days, the North Vietnamese downed 15 bombers, but in doing so exhausted most of their supply of SAMs. The mercurial Nixon credited the Air Force with success, telling aide Chuck Colson, “The North Vietnamese have agreed to go back to the negotiating table on our terms. They can’t take bombing any longer. Our Air Force really did the job.”39 The President continued bombing North Vietnam south of the 20th parallel until the initialing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 23, 1973.

For many air commanders, Nixon’s dramatic “Christmas Bombing” vindicated their belief that airpower could have won the war had President Johnson employed a comparable operation in spring 1965.40 Nixon himself made a similar assertion in April 1988 when he appeared on Meet the Press and stated that his greatest mistake as President was not Watergate but the failure to conduct Linebacker II in 1969 after he took office. “If we had done that then,” he said, “I think we would have ended the war in 1969 rather than 1973.”41 Such assertions demonstrate that the Commander in Chief—as well as many military leaders—never really understood that the character of the war in 1972 had changed dramatically from what it had been for most of the conflict. The change to conventional warfare with the Easter Offensive was a key reason why airpower yielded tangible results.

Moreover, the success that Nixon achieved with airpower stemmed from his pursuit of positive and negative political objectives that differed significantly from those of his predecessor. Nixon had no illusions about pursuing a stable, independent, noncommunist South Vietnam; the shock of the 1968 Tet Offensive turned American public opinion against the war and made leaving Vietnam the new positive goal. Although he labeled that objective “peace with honor,” in the end Nixon accepted a settlement that offered South Vietnam a possibility of survival, not a guarantee. He gave South Vietnamese President Thieu an ultimatum to accept that agreement, noting that without Thieu’s approval the U.S. Congress would likely cut off all funding to South Vietnam. Whether Linebacker II persuaded Thieu that he could count on Nixon for support after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords remains a matter for conjecture; the agreement that Thieu reluctantly endorsed in January 1973 differed little from what Kissinger had negotiated in October 1972.

Nixon’s lack of negative political goals enabled him to apply airpower more aggressively than Johnson. With no conflicting loyalties to a domestic agenda like Johnson, and with détente effectively removing China and the Soviet Union from the equation, Nixon had mainly to worry about the compressed time that Congress gave him to achieve a settlement. Nixon knew that his image would suffer because of the intensified bombing and was willing to accept that tarnishing, though he did not condone indiscriminate attacks. The 20,000 tons of bombs dropped in Linebacker II killed 1,623 civilians, according to North Vietnamese figures—an incredibly low total for the tonnage dropped.42 Yet in all likelihood, the comparatively unrestrained, nonstop aerial pounding that the NVA received in South Vietnam counted as much, if not more, than Nixon’s focused bombing of the North. The attacks in the South directly threatened the NVA’s survival, and without that force on Southern soil, the North faced a more difficult path conquering South Vietnam.43 Ultimately, airpower helped to assure that a flawed South Vietnamese government lasted for a few more years.

Legacies of Airpower in Vietnam

In the final analysis, several legacies emerged from airpower’s ordeal in Vietnam. The dismal lack of unity of command displayed there spurred development of the joint force air component commander concept, in which a single air commander directs the flying activities of multiple Services to achieve objectives sought by the joint force commander. In terms of Air Force doctrine, Linebacker II’s perceived success in compelling the North Vietnamese to negotiate reinforced the belief that airpower could achieve political goals cheaply and efficiently. The 1984 edition of the Air Force’s Basic Doctrine Manual noted:

unless offensive action is initiated, military victory is seldom possible. . . . Aerospace forces possess a capability to seize the offensive and can be employed rapidly and directly against enemy targets. Aerospace forces have the power to penetrate to the heart of an enemy’s strength without first defeating defending forces in detail.44

The manual further encouraged air commanders to conduct strategic attacks against “heartland targets” that would “produce benefits beyond the proportion of effort expended and costs involved,” but cautioned that such attacks could “be limited by overriding political concerns, the intensity of enemy defenses, or more pressing needs on the battlefield.”45

The impact of such “overriding political concerns” on the application of airpower is a key legacy of the air wars in Vietnam. To commanders who had fought as junior officers in World War II, where virtually no negative objectives limited military force, the tight controls that President Johnson placed on bombing North Vietnam chafed those charged with wielding the air weapon. Navy Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, who directed Rolling Thunder as the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, wrote in the preface of his 1977 memoir Strategy for Defeat:

Our airpower did not fail us; it was the decision makers. And if I am unsurprisingly critical of those decision makers, I offer no apology. My conscience and my professional record both stand clear. Just as I believe unequivocally that the civilian authority is supreme under our Constitution, so I hold it reasonable that, once committed, the political leadership should seek and, in the main, heed the advice of military professionals in the conduct of military operations.46

Many American Airmen from the war likely agreed with Sharp’s critique.

Operation Rolling Thunder highlighted how negative political objectives could limit an air campaign. Indeed, in the American air offensives waged since Vietnam—to include the use of unmanned aerial vehicles against “high-value” terrorist targets—negative goals have continued to constrain the use of military force. Projecting a sound image while applying airpower was difficult enough for American leaders in Vietnam; today’s leaders must contend with 24/7 news coverage as well as social media accounts that enable virtually anyone to spin a story and reach a large audience. In the limited wars that the Nation will fight, negative objectives will always be present, and those objectives will produce ROE that limit airpower. “War is always going to have restrictions—it’s never going to be LeMay saying ‘Just bomb them,’” stated General Myers, the most recent Air Force Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.47 Against insurgent enemies, the negative objectives may well eclipse the positive goals sought. When that occurs, kinetic airpower’s ability to yield success will be uncertain.

Yet because airpower, as a subset of war, is not only a political instrument but also one that is applied by humans, it will be subject to the whims and frailties of the political leader who chooses to rely on it. Richard Nixon saw himself as a Patton-esque figure who could swiftly and efficiently brandish military force to achieve his aims. He felt little compunction in berating his air commanders or—in the case of General Lavelle—casting one adrift when he thought that doing so might save him embarrassment. Nixon believed that airpower gave him the ideal military tool for threatening an opponent or persuading an ally, and that perspective has gained traction since he left the White House. The last four occupants of the Oval Office, to include President Barack Obama, have all relied heavily on airpower in the conflicts they have fought. The positive goals pursued—“stability,” “security,” and, on occasion, “democracy”—have proved difficult to achieve with any military force, particularly with airpower. Its siren song is an enticing one, however, as Johns Hopkins Professor Eliot Cohen has astutely observed, “Airpower is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.”48 That promise is a dangerous one, as General Myers warns:

The last thing that we want is for the political leadership to think war is too easy, especially in terms of casualties. It’s awful; it’s horrible, but sometimes it’s necessary. needs to be taken with thoughtful solemnness—with the realization that innocent people, along with combatants, will get hurt.49

Were he alive today, the Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz would doubtless nod in agreement at General Myers’s observation.

But Clausewitz never saw an airplane; if he had, though, his airpower notions would likely have been unsurprising. Had he examined America’s air wars in Vietnam, he would certainly have commented about the difficulty of achieving political objectives in a limited war. In all probability, he would have looked at President Johnson’s Tuesday lunch–targeting process, the Route Package system dividing North Vietnamese airspace, the creation of free fire zones in the South, Nixon’s condemnation of his air commanders and dismissal of General Lavelle, the repetitive B-52 routing for Linebacker II, and any number of other elements of the U.S. experience in Vietnam and stated simply: “Friction rules.” “Everything in strategy is very simple,” Clausewitz wrote, “but that does not mean that everything is very easy.”⁵⁰ Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the air wars in Vietnam is the one that applies to any military strategy—uncertainty, chance, danger, and stress will be certain to limit it. JFQ

This article was originally presented as a lecture at the Royal Australian Air Force’s airpower conference in Canberra, Australia, March 2014, and appears as a chapter in the conference proceedings A Century of Military Aviation 1914–2014, edited by Keith Brent (RAAF Air Power Development Centre, 2015).

Source:
This article was published in the Joint Force Quarterly 78 which is published by the National Defense University.

Notes:

1. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, eds., The Air War in Indochina (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 11, 168–172; and Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Crosswinds: The Air Force’s Setup in Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), 109.
2. U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970s: Shaping a Durable Peace—A Report to the Congress by Richard Nixon, President of the United States, May 3, 1973 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 59. Nixon commented about the Paris Peace Agreement: “While our essential principles were met, we and the Communists had to make compromises. Many of these were more significant for our ally than for us. . . . Our friends have every opportunity to demonstrate their inherent strength.” Two months earlier the President had told Alexander Haig: “The country would care if South Vietnam became Communist in a matter of six months. They would not give a damn if it’s in two years.” See Tape Subject Log, Conversation 416-43, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, March 17, 1973 (hereafter, Nixon Presidential Library).
3. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Signet, 1976), 263.
4. “Meeting with Foreign Policy Advisors on Vietnam,” August 18, 1967, Meeting Notes File, Box 1, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library (hereafter, Johnson Library); Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Analysis of Effectiveness of Interdiction in Southeast Asia, Second Progress Report, May 1966, Air Force Historical Research Agency (hereafter, AFHRA), file K168.187-21, 7. Robert McNamara acknowledged in 1967 that communist forces fought an average of 1 day in 30 and that they needed 15 tons of supplies daily from external sources. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had estimated in August 1965 that the enemy needed 13 tons per day of “external logistical support.” See U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Air War against North Vietnam, 90^th Cong., 1^st sess., August 25, 1967, pt. 4, 299; and Annex A to JCSM 613-65, August 27, 1965, National Security Files (hereafter, NSF), Country File: Vietnam, Folder 2 EE, Box 75, Johnson Library. The standard military 2½-ton truck could transport 5 tons of goods over roads and 2½ tons overland. Regarding North Vietnam’s import capacity, see Walt Rostow to the President, May 6, 1967, NSF, Country File: Vietnam, Folder 2EE, Box 75, Johnson Library; and The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, The Senator Gravel Edition, 5 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 4: 146.
5. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 309.
6. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 455–456, 672, 675.
7. National Security Action Memorandum 328, April 6, 1965, NSF, Boxes 1–9, Johnson Library.
8. Memorandum, McNamara for the President, July 28, 1965, NSF, National Security Council History, “Deployment of Major U.S. Forces to Vietnam, July 1965,” Vol. 1, Box 40, Johnson Library.
9. David C. Humphrey, “Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment,” Diplomatic History 8 (Winter 1984), 90.
10. U.S. Air Force Oral History interview of Major General Robert N. Ginsburgh by Colonel John E. Van Duyn and Major Richard B. Clement, May 26, 1971, AFHRA, file K239.0512-477, 65–68; and interview of Lieutenant Colonel William H. Greenhalgh by the author, Maxwell Air Force Base, May 17, 1985.
11. U.S. Air Force Oral History interview of Lieutenant General Joseph H. Moore by Major Samuel E. Riddlebarger and Lieutenant Colonel Valentino Castellina, November 22, 1969, AFHRA, file K239.0512-241, 17–18.
12. Robert L. Gallucci, Neither Peace nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Viet-Nam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 80–84; Littauer and Uphoff, 38. In July 1966, after a span of poor weather obscured targets over the North, Seventh Air Force Commander General William C. Momyer ordered his fighter pilots not to fly and called for ground crews to perform preventive maintenance on the aircraft. A message then arrived from the Pentagon telling Momyer to fly to prevent the Navy from achieving a higher sortie count. See Greenhalgh interview, May 17, 1985.
13. Interview by the author of a Navy A-4 pilot who wished to remain anonymous.
14. Air Force Colonel Jack Broughton, a veteran F-105 pilot, called North Vietnam “the center of hell with Hanoi as its hub.” See Jack Broughton, Thud Ridge (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 24.
15. Free fire zones were “known enemy strongholds . . . virtually uninhabited by noncombatants” where any identified activity was presumed to stem from enemy forces and was thus susceptible to immediate air or artillery strikes. See Sean A. Kelleher, “Free Fire Zones,” in Dictionary of the Vietnam War, ed. James S. Olson (Westport: Greenwood, 1988), 163.
16. Interview of General Richard Myers by the author, National Defense University, November 26, 2013.
17. John Schlight, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The War in South Vietnam: The Years of the Offensive 1965–1968 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1988), 82.
18. Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Setup: What the Air Force Did and Why in Vietnam (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1991), 196. The secret bombing deposited 120,578 tons of bombs on Cambodian soil. See Carl Berger, ed., The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia, 1961–1973: An Illustrated Account (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1984), 141.
19. Tilford, 194; and Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, 2 vols. (New York: Warner Books, 1978), 1: 472.
20. By May 1972, only 69,000 American troops remained in Vietnam, and most of them were not in combat units.
21. Hanoi’s communist party newspaper Nhan Dan described China and the Soviet Union’s policy of détente as “throwing a life-buoy to a drowning pirate . . . in order to serve one’s narrow national interests.” See Nhan Dan editorial, August 17, 1972, in Gareth Porter, ed., Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions, 2 vols. (Stanfordville, NY: Earl M. Coleman, 1979), 2: 568.
22. 2“Conversation Among President Nixon, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), and the Ambassador to South Vietnam (Bunker),” Washington, DC, February 3, 1972, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Vol. VIII: Vietnam, January–October 1972 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010), 71–78.
23. In addition to agreeing not to fire on American reconnaissance aircraft in return for a bombing halt, North Vietnamese negotiators also seemingly agreed that their forces would not move men and supplies across the DMZ or fire on major South Vietnamese cities. President Johnson was convinced that North Vietnamese subscribed to the “agreement.” He wrote in his memoirs: “Before I made my decision , I wanted to be absolutely certain that Hanoi understood our position. . . . Our negotiators reported that the North Vietnamese would give no flat guarantees; that was in keeping with their stand that the bombing had to be stopped without conditions. But they had told us if we stopped the bombing, they would ‘know what to do.’ were confident Hanoi knew precisely what we meant and would avoid the actions that we had warned them would imperil a bombing halt.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 518.
24. Aloysius Casey and Patrick Casey, “Lavelle, Nixon, and the White House Tapes,” Air Force Magazine, February 2007, 87.
25. Ibid.
26. Quoted in ibid. In a 2007 letter to the editor of Air Force Magazine, Melvin Laird stated, “It was certainly true that in my meetings with Gen. John Lavelle I told him that my order on ‘protective reaction’ should be viewed liberally. . . . Prior to my order, there was no authorization (under McNamara or Clifford) to destroy dangerous targets except when fired upon without special permission. Gen. Bus Wheeler , Adm. Tom Moorer, and Gen Abrams all agreed with the liberal interpretation on my order on protective reaction. The new orders permitted hitting anti-aircraft installations and other dangerous targets if spotted on their missions, whether they were activated or not.” See Melvin R. Laird, “Letter to the Editor,” Air Force Magazine, May 2007, 4.
27. “Minutes of a Senior Review Group Meeting, Subject: Vietnam Assessment,” Washington, DC, January 24, 1972, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Vol. VIII (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010), 25.
28. “Conversation Among President Nixon et al.,” 74–75.
29. “Memorandum for the President from Henry A. Kissinger, Subject: Secretary Laird’s Daily Report on Southeast Asia Situation,” February 8, 1972; Folder: Vietnam, January–February 1972 (2 of 3); Box 158, National Security Council Files, Nixon Presidential Library. Emphasis in original.
30. “Meeting between Henry Kissinger and the President,” June 14, 1972, Oval Office, WHT Reference Cassette, C-2240 RC-2, 733-6, Nixon Presidential Library.
31. “Transcript of the President’s News Conference Emphasizing Domestic Matters,” New York Times, June 23, 1972.
32. “Transcript of President Nixon’s News Conference Emphasizing Foreign Affairs,” New York Times, June 30, 1972.
33. Quoted in Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 506.
34. “Memorandum for Henry Kissinger and Al Haig from the President,” May 19, 1972, White House Special Files, Staff Member and Office Files, President’s Personal File, Box 4, “Memo—May 1972,” Nixon Presidential Library. Emphasis in original.
35. Nixon expressed this commitment to Thieu in a letter dated January 5, 1973, and sent Alexander Haig to Saigon in the middle of the month to convey the President’s commitment personally. See Nixon, RN, 2: 245–246; and Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 1459–1462, 1469. Yet in forthright conversation with Kissinger during an intense phase of the Paris negotiations, Nixon confessed, “Let’s be perfectly cold-blooded about it. If you look at it from the standpoint of our game with the Soviets and the Chinese, from the standpoint of running this country, I think we could take, in my view, almost anything, frankly, that we can force on Thieu. Almost anything. I just come down to that. You know what I mean? Because I have a feeling we would not be doing, like I feel about the Israeli, I feel that in the long run we’re probably not doing them an in—uh
    . . . a disfavor due to the fact that I feel that the North Vietnamese are so badly hurt that the South Vietnamese are probably going to do fairly well. But also due to the fact—because I look at the tide of history out there, South Vietnam is never going to survive anyway. I’m just being perfectly candid.” The conversation continued, with Kissinger concluding, “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together for a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.” See “Conversation between President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger,” Conversation 760-6, August 3, 1972, Richard Nixon Presidential Materials Project, NARA, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, available at <http://whitehousetapes.net/clips/1972_0803_vietnam/index.htm>.
36. Nixon, RN, 2: 242.
37. Interview of Colonel Clyde E. Bodenheimer by the author, January 7, 1983, Maxwell Air Force Base.
38. Kissinger, White House Years, 1457–1458; and Nixon, RN, 2: 250.
39. Charles W. Colson, Born Again (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 1976), 78.
40. See, for example, “What Admiral Moorer Really Said About Airpower’s Effectiveness in SEA,” Air Force Magazine, November 1973, 25; Howard Silber, “SAC Chief: B-52s Devastated Viet Air Defenses,” Omaha World Herald, February 25, 1973; U.S. Air Force Oral History Interview of Lieutenant General Gerald W. Johnson by Charles K. Hopkins, April 3, 1973, Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, AFHRA, file K239.0512-831, 11–13; U.S. Air Force Oral History Interview of General John W. Vogt by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur W. McCants, Jr., and Dr. James C. Hasdorff, August 8–9, 1978, AFHRA, file K239.0512-1093, 69; U.S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), 252, 255, 272; and William W. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), 339.
41. Richard M. Nixon, statement on NBC’s Meet the Press, April 10, 1988.
42. Murray Marder, “North Vietnam: Taking Pride in Punishment,” Washington Post, February 4, 1973.
43. Observed General Tran Van Tra, commander of communist forces in the southern half of South Vietnam, after having undergone 9 months of continual bombing: “Our cadres and men were fatigued, we had not had time to make up for our losses, all units were in disarray, there was a lack of manpower, and there were shortages of food and ammunition. . . . The troops were no longer capable of fighting.” Tran Van Tra, Concluding the 30-Years War (Ho Chi Minh City, 1982 ; reprint ed. , Arlington, VA: Joint Publications Research Service, 1983), 33; quoted in Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 444–445.
44. Air Force Manual 1-1, Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force (Washington, DC: Headquarters U.S. Air Force, March 16, 1984), 2–6.
45. Ibid., 2–12.
46. Sharp, xvii.
47. Myers interview, November 26, 2013.
48. Eliot A. Cohen, “The Mystique of U.S. Airpower,” Foreign Affairs 73 (January–February 1994), 109.
49. Myers interview, November 26, 2013.
50. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 178.

Coalition Forces fighting Houthi militias in Yemen have declared a five-day cease-fire effective midnight Sunday.

A Saudi Press Agency said the decision was made upon the request of Yemen President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who said the truce is meant to allow delivery of humanitarian and medical assistance to people affected by the fighting.

Hadi’s supporters had earlier liberated the southern port city of Aden from Houthi rebels.

Since the liberation of Aden, Saudi Arabia has flown relief goods and medical supplies to the city. The United Arab Emirates also sent a planeload of supplies on Friday, said Maj. Gen. Ahmed Al-Assiri, spokesman of the Saudi-led coalition.

Coalition forces continue to bombard areas being held by Houthi militants and forces of ousted Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh, including the capital Sanaa and the central city of Taiz.

SPA said that in case of violation of the truce by rebels, the coalition reserves the right to respond appropriately.

The protests in Bosnia last year were portrayed as the beginning of a ‘Bosnian spring’. However, the potential and pitfalls of popular movements need analyzing against the backdrop of a missed opportunity for a local solution to Bosnia’s problems.

By George Rossetter*

Bosnia has remained largely divided along ethnic lines since the wars of the 1990s. Yet 2014 saw Bosnia’s population unite against what some consider the most complex and contradictory political system in the world, as well as its corrupt leadership. Bosnia’s ‘plenums’ movement was brief, but highlighted both the potential and pitfalls of local movements for positive change within this often deeply divided society.

Largely motivated by the botched privatisation of state industries, Bosnia’s workers took to the streets of the north-eastern town of Tuzla in February 2014. Students and other young people joined them in voicing their dissatisfaction with Bosnia’s shape and state, with the protests spreading to Sarajevo in days. Social media helped connect this popular movement, which saw ethnic divisions melt away in the face of the bigger social and economic issues. This was exemplified by protesters employing satirical slogans such as ‘we are hungry in all three languages’, in their ‘act of rebellion against the government and the ruling structure’.

Unity in unrest

The international media often illustrated this unrest through images of burning buildings and cars, focusing on incidents of violent confrontation between the protesters and authorities. Yet this fixation on the extreme ignored the unifying nature of the unrest, which found a mouthpiece in the plenums, or ‘citizens’ assemblies’, that took shape in towns and villages. Like the protests, the plenums were open to all, regardless of background and ethnicity. Connected through networks – specifically through information and communications technology (ICT) and social media – the plenums enabled ordinary individuals to engage in the political discourse of the time. Consequently, the plenums quickly drew up lists of demands at both national and local levels, which some consider ‘an articulation of the voice on the street’.

Network theorists are optimistic for these types of networks of civil society actors. They argue that their flexibility and breadth, particularly in light of developments in ICT, significantly challenge state structures, enabling the development of a bottom-up democracy which counters the traditionally hierarchical state structure. Both the protests and the plenums movement displayed aspects of this networked bottom-up democracy. Indeed, ICT were highlighted as fundamental in facilitating the national coordination of actions, and the spread of information and ideas. Furthermore, those involved considered social media to be the only tool through which their voice could be transmitted: as one anonymous activist said, “All prominent [national] TV stations and newspapers stand as puppets of different parties, manipulating [a] wide variety of people.”

Some of the demands were partly met – and some even completely. To an extent, this supports the idea of decreasing state authority in the face of unified, networked popular movements. Much of the commentary on events was highly optimistic, citing them as Bosnia’s ‘new model of democracy’, and others calling for ‘all power to the plenums’. However, history has shown that the predictions of a ‘Bosnian Spring’ overstated the impact and longevity of this popular movement. Indeed, following their inception in early February, the plenums ceased to exist by the following April.

The limitations and possibilities of popular movements

This provides an insight into both the limitations and possibilities for future popular movements that seek to change state structures. Although officially apolitical, the plenums quickly adopted a left-wing character. This was perhaps unsurprising, especially given their origins amongst factory workers and students. However, this distracted attention from the dysfunctional political system, and simultaneously isolated the movement from institutions such as the US and EU governments, leading to minimal external support for their cause.

Indeed, the international response to the plenums highlights the contradictory position taken by such powerful international players. Despite longstanding external pressure on Bosnia to take ownership of its problems and provide locally driven solutions, the locally driven solution that occurred was not the solution that these external influences sought.

Furthermore, the movement decided to remain separate from the political mainstream, isolating it from influential political decision makers whose support may have given their voice both greater weight and a broader reach. Yet scepticism of engaging with the ‘kleptocratic’ political elite as well as a strong desire for redistribution given elite mismanagement of state assets have been highlighted as focal points for any Bosnian popular movement.

In addition, heavy handed police tactics and threats of repercussions in case of continued protests and involvement in the plenums both drove activists away from engaging in the established political process and led many to abandon the cause altogether.

Thus, the plenums’ short life may provide an example of the limited extent to which networked protest can challenge state power and organisational hierarchy. However, the forcefulness of the state’s response to the plenums also highlighted the unease felt by political elites in the face of such unified dissatisfaction. Furthermore, their brief existence indicated that the domination of ethnicity over the lives of Bosnia’s citizens is not an inevitability. Whilst Bosnia has remained relatively peaceful since, considerable discontent within the population persists.

The plenum movement was a clear opportunity to engage and develop locally driven solutions to Bosnia’s difficult situation. Now, with warnings from citizens such as ‘how long we can actually suffer,’ highlight the need to take the populations’ desires seriously, it is becoming ever more apparent that their failure was a huge opportunity missed.

Balkan Diskurs is a non-profit, multimedia platform created and run by a regional network of journalists, bloggers, multimedia artists, and activists who came together in response to the lack of objective, relevant, invigorating, independent media in the Western Balkans.

This article was originally published by Insight on Conflict and is available by clicking here.

Despite the repressive measures of the Russian occupiers, Crimeans of all ethnic groups have found various ways to quietly express their continuing identity with Ukraine, according to Viktor Vorobyev. They wear blue and yellow clothes, they purchase items like footballs with Ukrainian labels, and they even carry blue and yellow flowers.

(For a selection of photographs of some of these displays of pro-Ukrainian positions by Crimeans and for a comment about this phenomenon, see

ru.krymr.com/content/article/27148307.html).

Commenting on this phenomenon, Irina Brunova-Kalisetskaya, a psychologist at Kyiv’s Institute of Social and Political Psychology, says that for many in Crimea now, this is the only way for them to express their position without getting them in trouble with the Russian occupation authorities.

“It is no secret that far from all the residents of Crimea asked Russia to come and were glad of the occupation,” she continues. But at present, “they do not see any other opportunity to express their position on this issue.” The fact that so many of them choose to do this, however, indicates that they feel they have to do something, acts that others should be attentive to.

“It is natural that for those who continue to consider themselves to be citizens of Ukraine and who await the day when de facto Ukraine will return to Crimea,” to want to do this and to declare in this way: ‘We are citizens of Ukraine; we are here,” Brunova-Kalisetskaya says in conclusion.

In Japan in the good old days, Binyamin Netanyahu would by now have committed hara-kiri.

In England at that time, the monarch would have appointed him governor of the most remote little island in the Pacific Ocean.

In Israel, his popularity rating is bound to go up.

Because in our country, the old adage is getting a new twist: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure.

And what a failure! Wow!

He has practically declared war on the President of the United States, the Leader of the Free World, the Supreme Protector of the Jewish State.

Not so long ago, one would have thought this impossible. But nothing is impossible for Binyamin Netanyahu.

For anyone just arrived from the planet Mars, here is a brief summary of Israel’s dependence on the US: it gets from it the bulk of its heavy arms and does not have to pay for them, it can depend on it to veto all UN Security Council resolutions that condemn Israel’s deeds and misdeeds, it receives from it billions of dollars every year although the Israeli economy is flourishing.

There is another benefit which is often overlooked. Since the world believes that both houses of the US Congress are totally subservient to Israel, all countries pay Israel for access to Congress. One has to bribe the doorkeeper to get in.

For an Israeli prime minister to start a quarrel with the President of the US looks like sheer lunacy – as indeed it is.

Yet Netanyahu is not insane, though his actions suggest that. He is not even a fool.

So what the hell does he think he is doing?

There are several possible explanations I can think of.

One is pampering the Israeli public. Far from creating a New Jew as Zionism promised, the Old Jew dominates Israel. The Old Jew believes that the entire world is anti-Semitic, and any new evidence fills him with satisfaction. You see? The Goyim haven’t changed at all.

Netanyahu’s popularity ratings are bound to rise with every new manifestation of foreign hostility. If even the Americans, who for so long pretended to be the closest friends of Israel, sell us out to the anti-Semitic Iranians, we need a strong and steadfast leader. In short – a Netanyahu.

Another plausible explanation for Netanyahu’s behavior may be his genuine belief that no US senator or representative would ever dare to buck AIPAC’s orders, knowing that this would be the end of his (or her) political career. Like the worst of the anti-Semites, Netanyahu believes that the Jews rule the world, or at least the US Congress. At the crucial moment, Congress will vote for AIPAC, against the US president.

Another explanation may be, paradoxically, a blind belief in President Obama’s integrity. Netanyahu thinks that he can hit him on the head, spit in his eye, kick his behind, and still Obama will act coolly, rationally, and support Israel all the way, except on the Iranian deal. He will go on sending arms and dollars, vetoing Security Council resolutions, receiving phone calls from Israel in the middle of the night.

You know how these Americans are. Subservient. Especially black ones.

But there may be another explanation, that trumps all others.

Affronting the US president, his administration and his party, Netanyahu is gambling with our future. Which brings us to the emperor of the gambling world, the king of Las Vegas, the prince of Macao: Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson does not hide his support for Netanyahu the man, the family and the party. He spends huge sums of money on a Hebrew daily newspaper that is distributed gratis to Israelis, whether they want it or not. It is now the largest-circulation paper in Israel, and devoted personally to Netanyahu and his wife. It has no other purpose.

Yet Adelson seems to have no real interest in Israel. He does not live here, even part time. So what is he getting in return?

Adelson has bought Netanyahu for one single purpose: to place a stooge of his in the White House. It is an aim that any other multi-billionaire cannot even dream of.

To achieve this aim, Adelson needs to use the Republican Party as a ladder. He has to select its candidate for the presidency, derail Hillary Clinton and win the elections. To succeed in all these tasks, he has to mobilize the immense power of the pro-Israel lobby over the US Congress and destroy President Obama.

The first step in this long march is to defeat the Iranian deal. Netanyahu is just a cog in this grand design. But a very important cog.

Does this look like a caricature of Der Stürmer, the infamous anti-Semitic Nazi rag, or, worse, like a page out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-Semitic forgery? It is the classical anti-Semitic picture: the ugly finance-Jew striving for world mastery.

For an Israeli, there is something revolting in this picture. The Zionist vision was born out of the total rejection of this caricature. Jews would cease dealing in stocks and shares and money-lending. Jews would till the land with the sweat of their brow, do productive manual work, reject all kinds of parasitic speculations. This was considered such a high ideal that it justified even the displacement of the indigenous Arab population.

And here we are, a state following the orders of an international casino mogul whose line of business is perhaps the most unproductive in the cosmos. Sad.

Is there a valiant opposition to this course in Israel? None. Literally none.

In all my long life in Israel I have never seen anything as close to a total absence of opposition as we have now.

A few voices in Haaretz, some solitary pronouncements on the extreme leftist fringe, and that’s that.

Apart from these (including Gush Shalom), nothing except thunderous applause for Netanyahu or the dreadful silence of the graveyard.

The treaty is “bad”. Not just bad, but “catastrophic”. Not just catastrophic, but “one of the most terrible disasters in the entire history of the Jewish people”. Something close to a “second Holocaust”. (I am not making this up.)

Netanyahu’s shallow arguments are accepted as sacred truths, like the utterances of the other great Jewish prophets. Nobody bothers to ask the relevant question: Why?

The sun rises in the morning. The rivers flow into the sea. Iran will build an atomic bomb and drop it on us, even though it will thereby bring upon itself a historic disaster. The mullahs are Nazis. The treaty is another Munich agreement. Obama is the new Neville Chamberlain, only black.

Nobody takes the trouble to argue for these assertions. Things are self-evident. Day is day and night is night.

I have seen many situations of a near unanimous public opinion in my life, especially in times of war. But in all of my life I have never experienced such a situation of total unanimity, of total absence of doubting and questioning, as now.

This situation is not without its absurdities. For example: the Iranian Supreme Leader is obviously faced with his own extremists, who accuse him of selling out to the American Satan. To appease them, he has to claim that the treaty is a tremendous victory for the Islamic Republic, that he has brought the US (and Israel) to their knees. The huge Netanyahu propaganda machine is taking up these quotes and selling them as gospel truths. Everyone knows that Iranians always lie, but this time they tell it as it is.

Yair Lapid, the leader of a shrunken “centrist” party now in opposition (the Orthodox did not allow Netanyahu to bring him into the government) denounces the treaty as a historic disaster for the Jewish people. This being so, he asks loudly, why is Netanyahu not compelled to resign after his failure to prevent it? The more so since there is a much more able leader ready to take his place and lead the fight, a man named Lapid.

There is indeed something of a paradox in Netanyahu’s situation: if the treaty is such a historic disaster, “one of the worst in Jewish history”, why is Netanyahu continuing in his job?

To throw out a prime minister, a country needs an opposition to take his place. Actually, that is the main job of the opposition.

Not here.

The Leader of the Opposition (an official title in Israel) condemns the treaty in as strong terms as Netanyahu himself. He has volunteered to go to the USA to help the fight against it. His competitor, Yair Lapid, the son of a far-out nationalist, is even more extreme than him. The leader of the third opposition party is Avigdor Lieberman, compared to whom Netanyahu is a leftist softy. There is, of course, a fourth opposition party – the joint Arab one – but who listens to them?

One would suppose that, faced with such a historic disaster, Israel would be alive with debates about the treaty. But how can one have a debate, if everybody agrees? I have heard not a single real discussion on TV, nor read one in the printed papers, nor on the internet. Here and there a small whisper of doubt, but a debate? Nowhere!

Indeed, one can live happily in Israel for days and hear no mention of this historic disaster at all. The price of cottage cheese evokes more emotion.

So we are happily moving towards disaster – unless one of Sheldon’s stooges, with the help of Bibi, enters the White House.

By Ravi Joshi*

Those of us who learn about world events only from the western press, in general and of the recent nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) in particular, are likely to be quite amazed at the narrative of the Iranian leaders and their media on the matter. While the EU Foreign Minister Mogherini, the coordinator of the talks, gushed at its conclusion that it was a ‘historic deal’, the Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif qualified the adjective by adding that it was an ‘imperfect’ but nevertheless a historic deal. It was imperfect because it did not lift all the bilateral sanctions of the US and EU countries on Iran, the day the deal was signed. Only the UN imposed sanctions have been lifted as of now.

President Rouhani, speaking soon after President Obama who had emphasized that the ‘deal was NOT based on Trust but Verification’, called it an ‘unnecessary crisis’. While President Obama insisted that this deal had postponed Iran’s break-out period (its ability to produce a nuclear weapon) from 1 year to 10 years or may be 15 years, President Rouhani reiterated that Iran had no intention whatsoever to produce a nuclear weapon, as the Supreme Leader Ayotallah Ali Khameni had long ago issued a fatwa against it and had declared it un-Islamic. Hence, it was an ‘unnecessary crisis’. Was it truly so?

Well, not if you read the Western Press and even the IAEA reports. Remember, the IAEA inspectors kept insisting that Iraq under Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction, until its Director General Hans Blix quit in disgust and Gen. Colin Powell apologized for misleading the UN General Assembly. But by then President George Bush Jr had already bombed Iraq into the Middle age and Saddam Hussain was driven under a manhole. This time too, the IAEA kept finding a ‘smoking gun’ in Iran, some yellow cake here and a blue-print for a centrifuge there and finally the undeniable proof – the existence of a nuclear reactor in Fordow in a cave under a mountain. All this intelligence was provided to the IAEA by the CIA and the Mossad. Despite all the provocation, it must be said to the credit of President Obama that he refused to bomb Iran, even under pressure from Senator John McCain who kept singing ‘bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ during the Presidential campaign in 2008.

But then, Iranians have been accused of cheating the West. Of course, the western press does not consider what President George Bush did and advised Gen. Colin Powell to do in the UN as cheating. That is merely Republican style of functioning; you cannot quarrel with that.

What has this deal accomplished for Iran, that it was not already entitled to under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which it is a signatory. The NPT recognizes the inalienable right of every sovereign member-state to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and permits enrichment of uranium (without specifying the per centage of enrichment) for light water nuclear reactors to generate electricity. Now this deal recognizes the same very inalienable right of Iran. It is a matter of detail as to how many centrifuges it is allowed to run or how much stockpile of enriched Uranium it is allowed to keep. What is important is that once you have the technology and the capability to enrich uranium, it is just a matter of time before you produce enough of it for making a bomb. So what this deal does is to reinforce a stringent inspection regime by the IAEA inspectors to inspect ‘when necessary, where necessary’.

Iran has not accepted the Additional Protocol but the terms of this deal broadly adhere to the same. It had already agreed to oxidize the earlier stock of 20% enriched Uranium, change the design of the core of its Plutonium reactor and convert Fordow reactor into an R&D centre with only about 1000 centrifuges in operation. In return for this, the US, UK, France and Germany will lift all their bilateral and multilateral (EU) sanctions on Iran. The West will now graciously bring Iran into the ‘mainstream’ from the isolation into which it had been pushed! Even for that little gesture there is such a howl of protest from Israel, Saudi Arabia and all the Republican Senators in the US.

Do the Iranians perceive it that way? Firstly about the deal itself, President Rouhani was very pragmatic, when he said that Iran had only four objectives and they have all been met.

The first objective was to continue its nuclear activity, the second was to remove “wrong and cruel” sanctions, the third was to annul all the “illegal” sanctions resolutions in the UN Security, and the fourth was to remove Iran’s nuclear dossier from the agenda of UN Security Council. Elsewhere in his remarks, Rouhani stated that 12 years of illusions and disinformation about Iran’s nuclear activities came to an end and now a new chapter has been opened in Iran’s relations with the world?

He noted that the implementation of the agreement is reciprocal and Iran will be committed to the agreement if the other side lives up to its commitments. The President went on to say that the main achievement of the talks is the establishment of a new atmosphere to expand international relations.

Is this the language of an isolated country with a crippled economy, or is it mere bravado in the face of repeated threats of a ‘snap-back of sanctions within 65 days’? Does not appear to be so. For the US President is as weak and vulnerable as the Iranian President. He knows very well that if there is no agreement now, neither Russia nor China will support any extension of the sanctions regime. Even the EU-3 were desperate to get back into business with Iran. Look at the hurry in which the German Foreign Minister visited Tehran. The French Foreign Minister, who was most aggressively defending the interests of Israel and the Saudi kingdom during the talks, is arriving next week. The depressed economies of Europe are desperate for cheaper energy sources and the prospect of Iranian oil hitting the world market has already pushed the oil price down.

Finally, does anyone in Iran think that they have been pushed into a hole? Well, the sanctions have certainly circumscribed Iran’s trade and commerce with the rest of the world, but within its region, Iran has continued to act as a regional power with huge influence over the internal affairs of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen. That’s what threatens Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Kingdoms and America’s rapproachment with Iran is the beginning of a tectonic shift in the regional balance of power.

*The writer is a Visiting Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Delhi

Courtesy: Economic Times

Russia is set to form an air force and an air defense force within the Northern Fleet, its commander said on Saturday.

The decision to establish these forces in the Northern Fleet was announced by the head of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov in late 2014.

“We have started the development of air force and air defense force armies within the ranks of the Northern Fleet,” Admiral Vladimir Korolev said.

He added that an air defense division as well as a composite air force regiment had already joined the Northern Fleet.

The admiral described the building up of infrastructure in the Arctic as a priority. The fleet is beefing up the capabilities of its coastal defense troops and is improving their command, he said.

Korolev added that the Northern Fleet is developing “the most advanced tracking system” which is already partially in operation, building up a picture of air and water surface movement.

At the end of 2014, Russia organized a joint strategic command using the Northern Fleet. It is tasked with protecting Russia’s national interests in the Arctic.

An international team of researchers have presented a new routing network they say paves the way for internet-scale anonymity.” A more secure alternative to the Tor, the new HORNET suggests better scaling and much greater browsing speeds.

The “High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer” (HORNET) was developed by five researchers from the UK, the USA and Switzerland. A research paper, presented earlier this week, outlines details of their project which is yet to undergo large scale tests and a peer review process.

HORNET seems on the surface to be a reaction to a volley of revelations concerning the global surveillance programs, which essentially destroyed the notion of online privacy and anonymity. The developers sought to combine the anonymity of the Dark Net with the high-speed browsing internet users are accustomed to.

“HORNET is designed to be highly efficient,” researchers said. Without sacrificing security, the network supports data transfer speeds of up to 93GBps and can be scaled at little cost.

In the so-called onion routing networks, the data packet is encrypted by each node as it passes to its destination. However the process takes time and resources, especially when the number of users grows. So HORNET researchers decided to overcome the weaknesses of Tor and reduce the cryptography work required from each node.

“Instead of keeping state at each relay, connection state (such as onion layer decryption keys) is carried within packet headers, allowing intermediate nodes to quickly forward traffic for large numbers of clients,” says the paper.

While often associated with illegal activities such as drug and arms traffic, Tor is designed to enable anonymous communication and browsing. And the HORNET, researchers say, is a new routing scheme paving the way for “internet-scale anonymity” that will “frustrate pervasive surveillance.”

The technology offers one more opportunity for future HORNET users: it makes the system more secure. Intermediate nodes, indeed, do not waste time on processing information about sender and recipient and become thus even less vulnerable to surveillance attacks. However it is not the only method of improving security which has been used in the creation of HORNET.

“To protect against these and other surveillance threats, several anonymity protocols, tools, and architectures have been proposed”, says the paper. “HORNET offers payload protection by default, and can defend against some global observation attacks.”

Each year, seasonal influenza affects around 10% of European citizens, causing hundreds of thousands of hospitalisations across the continent. And while vaccines do exist, the highly variable nature of the influenza virus means sensitive groups like children and the elderly have to get vaccinated every year.

Since these vaccines are based on predictions of the evolution of virus strains, mismatches occur quite frequently – which explains why the development of a universal vaccine, capable of tackling all variations of the virus, has been high of researchers’ agendas for years. Most recently in 2015, the strain has changed at last minute, making the vaccine less effective than initially expected.

A new study conducted on mice has just brought researchers at the United States’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) one step closer to this achievement. By presenting a cocktail of flu proteins to the immune system, the team found out that they can induce immunity to strains that the animals have never encountered.

‘For a decade or more, it has been a big dream of the influenza community to develop a universal influenza vaccine, one that would provide you protection against multiple current or future strains of influenza, whether they are from humans or animals,’ study researcher Jeff Taubenberger, a pathologist and infectious-disease specialist at NIAID, said. ‘What we have done is design a strategy where you don’t have to think about matching the vaccine antigen to the virus at all.’

To get to this result, the team used a virus-like particle vaccine cocktail that expressed four of the 16 common H proteins (H1, H3, H5 and H7). H1 and H3 have been the major causes of human seasonal flu since 1918, while H5 and H7 have caused flu outbreaks among bird populations which had pandemic potential.

‘What we got was really kind of unexpected and kind of remarkable,’ Taubenberger said. ‘Almost all of the animals that received the novel vaccine survived, including mice infected with the 1918 influenza virus, H5N1 or H7N9 bird influenza viruses, and importantly mice that were challenged with viruses that expressed hemagglutinin subtypes that were not in the vaccine at all, viruses that expressed H2, H6, H10, and H11. You are challenging the mice with viruses that have a completely different protein on its surface that are not in the vaccine, so the mice should theoretically not have immunity to it.’

About 95 percent of the mice administered with the mix were found to be protected against the eight strains of flu tested. This level of protection surpassed the expectations of the team, to the point that they are still unsure how it even works. Unlike in other vaccines, it would seem that the antibody response is not the main reason the new spray works: T cells, a type of white blood cell, might also be playing a role, according to Taubenberger.

The researchers are now investigating how the vaccine works, and they already demonstrated that it was effective for at least 6 months. They’re also testing it in ferrets, which are the animals most often used to mimic how humans catch and resist the flu. If those tests show promising results, human safety trials for the new vaccine could begin next year, with clinical trials for effectiveness starting the year after that, Taubenberger said.

Source: CORDIS

By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi for Syria Comment

As the Syrian civil war has dragged on with no recent decisive breakthroughs for the Assad regime and the loss of many peripheral territories including all major towns in Idlib and Palmyra, the problem of avoidance of conscription into the regular armed forces has only become exacerbated. Thus, at this point, a strategy of entrenchment and defence of vital areas seems most reasonable to ensure the regime’s survival, having locals recruited instead to focus on defending and retaking territory within their own provinces. For example, this approach is now well in evidence in the predominantly Druze province of Suwayda, which has remained under regime authority but is now threatened on two fronts by the Islamic State to the northeast and the Deraa insurgency to the west, with many Druze refusing to serve in far away fronts to no avail.

The formation of the Coastal Shield Brigade (Liwa Dir’ al-Sahel) for Latakia province is part of the same trend. Indeed, Latakia also finds itself under increasing threat with the Idlib losses, and even some of the Iraqi Shi’a militias deployed in Syria, such as Liwa Dhu al-Fiqar, have played a role in contributing manpower and fighting in Latakia province in recent months.

As is apparent from the Coastal Shield Brigade’s emblem and other media output, it is a local front militia for the elite Republican Guard. The militia first announced the opening of its doors for recruitment in late May this year:

“The Republican Guard announces the formation of the Coastal Shield Brigade accepting those who desire recruitment contract for two years, or permanently, and in reserve and compulsory service, as well as for the sorting out of affairs for those who avoided the reserve and compulsory military service call and deserted before 1 January 2015. Salaries will be paid with monthly remunerations reaching up to 40,000 Syrian pounds. To join and inquire, head to the Republican Guard centre opposite the Naval College, School of Arts in al-Qardaha.

Phone numbers: 0988293892/0936713408/890353/825805.”

It should be noted in particular that the potential salary on offer here amounts to more than $200 a month, which is not only much higher than the salaries of regular army conscripts but also of many rebel fighters. For comparison, it is some 2-3 times higher than the salary of an average Northern Storm fighter from the Azaz area. Wishing to extend its recruitment further, the Coastal Shield Brigade put up another notice in June, pushing forward the cut-off date for draft-dodgers to widen the recruitment pool and emphasizing local service:

“The Republican Guard, Coastal Shield Brigade, is accepting those who desire recruitment contract for two years, or permanent, and required for reserve and compulsory service. Commission is accepted for employees in government foundations and offices. Sorting out of affairs for desertion and those who avoided service before 1 March 2015. Ages from 18 to 45 years. Service on the Coast [Latakia]. To submit applications and for any inquiry, head to the Jableh Republican Guard Centre/al-Qardaha Naval College/School of Arts.

Coastal Shield Brigade
Lions of the Republican Guard.”

On 20 June, the Coastal Shield Brigade reiterated the advertisement for recruitment, announcing that the doors for recruitment would be closed soon. But on 28 June, some clarifications were noted: first, by order of the Defence Minister, the issue of ‘sorting out affairs’ would only apply now to those who deserted from the ranks of the Republican Guard, on account of the supposed large number of recruits and applicants to the Coastal Shield Brigade. Second, the recruitment contract of two years would take into account compulsory military service. As far as required documentation goes, one should submit a personal photo and ID photo.

So far, evidence of significant operations for the Coastal Shield Brigade has been somewhat limited, but on 9 July the militia announced its first fallen fighter in one Ibrahim Makana, who died fighting in the Kherbat Sulas area towards the north-east of Latakia province, which continues to remain under insurgent control.

It remains to be seen how effective the Coastal Shield Brigade will be as a fighting force as there has been no major insurgent offensive to push deeper into Latakia province since spring 2014 when a variety of groups spearheaded by jihadists seized the Armenian Christian border town of Kessab (desecrating the churches there despite rebel media attempts to downplay this) and reached the Mediterranean Sea. The Syrian army, bolstered by the elite Desert Falcons and irregular forces in Latakia province such as the Muqawama Suriya, eventually retook all the lost ground, but the process was sluggish and dragged out until June of that year. Further, the Muqawama Suriya’s own effectiveness was put into doubt with the rapid losses of Idlib city and Jisr al-Shughur in the spring of this year, as the group had a notable presence in both places. Meanwhile, the Desert Falcons failed to prevent the loss of Palmyra and other towns in Homs desert to the Islamic State. These developments besides the potential high salary may add to the attractiveness of the Coastal Shield Brigade as an alternative local defence force that at the same time purports to counter the problem of breakdown of regime authority on account of proliferation of irregular armed groups.

On Friday as the 8th meeting between the Ethnic Armed Organizations’ Senior Delegation (EAOs’SD) and the Union Peace Working Committee (UPWC) for conclusive negotiations of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) ended without a breakthrough, the US embassy in Yangon conveys its deep concern in a strongly worded statement about the escalating tensions in the coutry’s north undermining the trust that is essential to achieving a nationwide ceasefire accord.

In Kachin State and northern Shan State “continued fighting needlessly puts the lives of vulnerable communities at risk and undermines the trust that will be essential to achieving a nationwide ceasefire agreement,” the statement said, calling on humanitarian access to affected communities. “We also strongly urge restraint on all sides and call for dialogue in the service of genuine, lasting peace,” it added.

Sai Nyunt Lwin, a lawmaker from the Shan Nationalities Democratic Party reflecting on the prospects of finalising the NCA, said in an interview with the Radio Free Asia, “We see that the government army is engaging in this fighting intentionally, not accidentally” which might work as a “deterrent” to the ongoing talks. To add more, according to a recent Jane’s Defense Weekly report, Myanmar’s military has quietly launched its largest war effort in Shan State’s Kokang region since the country achieved independence in 1948, and sporadical clashes continue to occur between the govt forces and Karen, Arakan and Palaung rebel groups.

Now at this juncture, as the country is nearing its national polls in November, avoiding skirmishes and facilitating the air to reach upon an “inclusive”, and effective Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement is very critical to organizing credible elections. But recent reports from the ground furnishes a counter-narrative to the government’s professed commitment to peace, exhibiting a tendency to drive tandem: on the one hand insisting on peace talks with, and, on the other, launching military offensive, against the Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs).

Major T San of the KIA, operating in Hpakant, says, “Tatmadaw is increasing attacks on us. Fightings are breaking out on daily basis.” Meanwhile, the military apointees’ Veto against major amendments, including allowances for federalism, to the 2008 constitution last month had weakened “already weak trust between the stakeholders” in the ongoing peace talks, said Nai Hong Sar, a leading ethnic negotiator.The military, on the other hand, is ‘committed’ to a “multi-party democracy” with the proviso that it must maintain a political role until the country is at peace, as reaffirmed by Commader-in-Chief of the Defense services Senior General Min Aung Hlaing in a recent interview with the BBC. The military’s massive war effort against the EAOs might be a tactic to pressurize them to sign the National Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) without effecting any changes demanded by the ethnic armed groups’ leaders in the draft NCA signed by Nationwide Ceasefire Co-ordination Team (NCCT) and Union Peace Working Committee (UPWC). The demands, if accepted will loosen the military’s grip on power. Hence it is highly unlikely for the military to concede to these demands.

Conversely, it is uncertain whether the EAOs will finally sign the NCA without these changes being effected. Delegates from the stakeholders will further discussions earlier next month. However, these efforts, if do not address the root cause of the conflict, will only freeze the problem, not solve it.

Can there be true ‘multi-party democracy’ without genuine peace ? And can genuine peace be attained without addressing the root causes of the decades-long ethnic conflict in Myanmar ? One thing for sure, if instability persists, which is very likely, in several areas of Kachin state and Shan State elections will have to be suspended for security reasons, barring maximum voter participation, and thus rendering the elections not fully representative of popular will.

The Root of the Conflict

Burma (or Myanmar) is a classic example of the serious mess between “state-building” and “nation-building” processes where nationalism has emerged as a political paranoia. Francis Fukuyama wrote, “While ‘nation-building’ is a process of building a community of shared values through rites and rituals, culture and language, collective memories and historical experiences; ‘state-building’, on the other, is a process of constructing political institutions, establishing common economic and legal systems, promoting economic development, and protecting the security and well-being of its citizens.”

A modern nation-state, which receives its legitimacy from the people, requires some sort of identification from its citizens. In a homogenous nation-state there are no such hurdles in forming that identity. But in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural state like Burma where the ethnic minorities have been striving to assert their ethnic ‘national identities’ within a federal politico-judicial structure (that is state) of Burma, it is congenial to seek ”state identity” instead, basing on the founding ideology of the state, which can accommodate within it the different ethnic national identities. Unfortunately in Burma this did not happen. The country’s history is replete with efforts and instances of forced assimilation and expediting a ‘nation-building’ process. The ‘nation-building’ process belongs to ‘subjective values’ : values that can not be shared objectively but differentiate one group of people from another.

Hence, to quote Saunder, nation-building is “hostile to multiculturalism and diversity.” But in Myanmar exactly this conflict is at the root of the long-persisting civil war. U Nu’s policy of state religion, Ne Win’s national language policy and the later regimes’ constant effort of Burmanisation of the country which were strongly resented by the minorities bear testimony to this nation building process which was done on the basis of ‘Myanmar-lumyo, Myanmar batha-ska,Myanmar thatana’ (one ethnicity, one language, onereligion) policy.Interestingly, Pyi-duang suh, the Burmese word for Federal Union, literally means ‘coming together’ of ‘nations’ implying the combination of ‘shared rule’ and ‘self-rule': shared rule for all ethnic nationalities under the union, and self rule in their respective homelands.Therefore, any genuine peace is unlikely to be reached without underscoring these aspects.Jiwon Lee, of the Yale University, has convincingly argued in her paper “Civil Wars of Myanmar and Srilanka : The Success, Failure and Deception of the Peace Process” that the govt simply regards the peace process as parts of its state buliding mechanism, but that does not promote lasting and genuine peace unless a political solution is devised.

Points of Disagreement in the Peace Process

Apart from the EAOs’ demands of including these rebel groups : the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the ethnic Kokang’s Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Arakan Army (AA)—all of which have had recent skirmishes with the Myanmar army, and also three smaller groups : the Wa National Organization (WNO), Lahu Army and Arakan National Council (ANC)—in the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, the two sides disagreed on these key points: disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, natural resource management, and whether President Thein Sein and the legislature can be signatories to the peace accord. Further negotiations for reaching an agreement over these remaining issues have been scheduled in the first week of August. However, while negotiating on these issues the stakeholders will be nearing to some of the root causes of the decades-long conflict; for instance, conflict over access to natural resources in the resources-rich ethnic minorities’ areas being one among them. Therefore it is likely that that stage of the talks will determine the future of the NCA.

Summing Up

In conclusion I will refer to an anecdote, prevalent about the eighth century Chinese painter Wu Daozi, which is pertinent in portraying the nature of the attempts of peace in Myanmar. The master painter Wu was commissioned by the Tang emperor Xuanzong to paint a landscape on a palace wall. The emperor admired the wonderful work, for a long while, discovering forests, high mountains, waterfalls, clouds floating in an immense sky, birds in flight, men trudging up hilly paths. “Look, Your Majesty”, said the painter pointing to a particular place in the artwork, “in this cave, at the foot of the mountain, dwells a spirit.” The painter clapped his hands and the entrance to the cave opened. “The inside is splendid, inexpressible in words. Please let me show Your Majesty the way.” The painter entered the cave; but the entrance closed behind him, and the painting vanished from the wall instantaneously, before the astonished emperor could move or utter a word. Likewise, the peace processes in Myanmar have been historically elusive, giving the impression that fruition is imminent, but eventually ending up in renewed tensions—as if the path to peace closes ahead just at the threshold. Given the recent developments in the ongoing negotiations, and war-torn Kachin it is still unclear whether this time an inclusive and effective NCA will be inked before the November polls—deemed as stepping stone for successful democratic transition in the former British colony.

*Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya is a student of Bachelor’s degree in Tezpur University. As a freelancer he has contributed to The Assam Tribune, The Telegraph, www.youthkiawaaz.com and also to several vernacular newspapers on issues relating to political developments across Southeast Asia.

By Horace G. Campbell*

Barack Obama is visiting Kenya and Ethiopia when the people of Eastern Africa are desperate for peace. Last week Wednesday July 15, top Kenyan athletes, including former world marathon record holders, set off on a 22-day “Walk for Peace” against ethnic violence. The 836-kilometer (520-mile) walk is organized by a former Commonwealth marathon champion. This walk for peace is a striking example of the initiatives being undertaken in a country where the people want an end to all forms of violence. As President Barack Obama heads to Kenya to participate in the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) in Nairobi this week, the peoples of Kenya are excited and there is pride that the President of the USA will be visiting Kenya. Obama will be meeting with entrepreneurs but this should be an occasion where the government of the USA should seek to work with the peoples of Kenya and Somalia who want peace. This visit should be an occasion to spell out the process of demilitarizing the relations between the peoples of East Africa and the United States.

Kenya inherited the massive investment in the militarization of the Horn of Africa from the era of anti-communism and this militaristic link to the West was deepened during the so called War on Terror. This Global War on Terror has now backfired against the peoples and the insecurity generated within Kenya and East Africa reinforce the influence of the US military when Barack Obama and his Administration want to focus on “Doing Business with Africa.” In 2014, the Obama Administration with much fanfare called the first major US Africa summit but the present Washington sequestered bureaucracy has not worked to turn the page with the new engagement with African peoples. There have been no resources from Congress to support the much touted Power Africa.

We will maintain here that there are personal and political pressures for the USA to change its policies in Africa and the trip to Nairobi by the President is one of the most explicit efforts to turn against the securitization of relations with Africa. Kenya is one of the spaces in Africa bursting with innovative entrepreneurship ideas, especially in telecommunications and banking. The infrastructure planning of Kenya with the Lamu Port-South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) is being undertaken to transform the economies of Eastern Africa, without significant US participation. China is the principal partner in the infrastructure projects in Kenya.

As one of the vibrant centers of capital accumulation in Africa, Obama recognizes the vitality and energy of the Kenyan people. Prior to his departure he said that, “Despite poverty, despite conflict, there is a strength and a resilience there. The opportunities are extraordinary, and we just have to break down the stereotypes and the barriers.” Obama is traveling to break down stereotypes, but this is insufficient to change the 50 year program of militarism. There is in Kenya a vibrant popular force of progressives who are willing to work to ensure that the entrepreneurship engagement does not reward the current rich barons who are intent on rolling back the positive gains of the Kenyan Constitution of 2010.

CONTEXT OF THE VISIT

When the Obama Administration negotiated with the leaders of Iran to seal the nuclear deal to end the sanctions, he was working against the conservative wing of the political establishment in the USA but he also had the gaze of the US on the potential economic might of Iran in Eurasia. With the Iran deal under his belt after the success of the cementing of the Affordable Care Act along with the Diplomatic breakthrough with Cuba after 54 years, Barack Obama was seeking to extend his break with neo conservative wing of the US polity. On social questions such as the rights of gays and lesbians, the Obama Administration took credit for the Supreme Court ruling in June 2015 that States cannot keep same-sex couples from marrying and must recognize their unions. At the funeral of those who were slain in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama spoke forcefully against racism and for the placing of the Confederate Flag in a museum.

Barack Obama, as the 44th President, in the pursuit of a credible legacy was moving outside of the paths of the consensus of the old status quo in the USA. The opening to Cuba and the renewal of diplomatic relations with Cuba on July 19 was celebrated in Washington by progressives who had long called for the normalization of relations between Cuba and the USA. These progressives are now calling on Obama to use Executive powers to lift the embargo against Cuba.

What is important about the thrust of the Cuba policy or the decision on marriage equality was that Obama was acting in concert with a vocal constituency in the USA. The decision on Cuba and the negotiations with Iran have not been welcomed by those sections of the militarists who oppose the closing of Guantanamo Bay as a base for the US military. The militaristic elements in the USA oppose what they see as the reversal of aspects of US foreign policy that have underpinned the projection of force by the United States for decades. The US right wing establishment along with the Murdoch papers such as the Wall Street Journal and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are publicly opposing this shift that is being pushed by the Obama Administration.

In Eastern Africa, this section of the US establishment are working with those “traditional allies” of the USA such as Saudi Arabia and Israel to ensure that there are no dramatic shifts in the US alliances in Eastern Africa and in the Persian Gulf. The same Saudi Arabia that opposed the Iran deal had been named as one of the financiers of radical extremists in Somalia and other parts of East Africa. Essentially, all over the coast of Eastern Africa, from Beira up to Djibouti, the resources of the Wahabists are being poured into the pockets of groups that had been set in motion in the waning days of the Cold War when the CIA recruited Jihadists to fight in Afghanistan.

In seeking to devise new initiatives such as the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, Barack Obama was looking for ways to turn a new corner. In 2013, after he was elected for the second term, President Obama announced at West Point in May that “The War on terror is over.” This declaration, that the USA will not wage war on a tactic, was accompanied with the words that the military and intelligence agencies will not wage war against a tactic but will instead focus on a specific group of networks determined to destroy the U.S.

“We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘Global War on Terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. “ This attempted policy shift in Washington by Obama had threatened the long standing relations that had been established in East Africa that led Kenya to be compromised in the rendition schemes and in the duplicitous relationship with military entrepreneurs in Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Eastern Congo and Rwanda. The Kenyan army had invaded Somalia in 2011 and since that incursion the levels of attacks inside Kenya have intensified. The US military, private contractors and Special Forces are operating out of Kismayo in Somalia, bringing further spotlight on how the Kenyan military had been integrated into the old War on Terror. In a report in the magazine Foreign Policy in early July it was reported that US Special Forces were carrying out counter terrorism operations in Somalia with “Boots on the Ground” in areas “controlled” by Kenyan troops, operating under cover and involved in a massive drone operation. [1] What this report did not say was that the presence of the US military personnel and private contractors in Somalia have guaranteed intensified attacks on Kenyan targets in Somalia and in Kenya.

Kenya had been caught in the vortex of the militarization of US foreign policy and the trip of the President to Kenya is coming at a moment when the investments from the Global War on Terror have unleashed insecurity in all parts of Kenya. The Global War on Terror had created another layer of violence in Kenya on top of the Cattle rustling, militia intimidation and revenge killings between rival communities that became common in certain regions of Kenya where there were loads of automatic weapons in the hands of unemployed youth open to manipulation by regional leaders.

The bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and the siege of the Westgate Mall in 2013 were two of the most publicized episodes of extremist violence, but all along the Coast of Kenya there have been attacks on civilians, with one attack in Mpeketoni killing more than 60 persons in 2014. The massacres of innocent students at the University College in Garissa in April took the lives of over 148 persons and in the aftermath the tourism industry had a further downturn with Western embassies issuing travel advisories. According to the New York Times, Kenya was caught in a Catch 22 in so far as Western terror alerts gave greater publicity to the extremists who are termed terrorists.[2]

REAPING THE FRUITS OF MILITARY INVESTMENT

From the first year after independence in 1964, sections of the US political establishment had decided to mobilize the Kenyan government as a base to undermine the true independence of Africa. This episode in the US relations with East Africa is celebrated in the book by William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks. Inside Kenya this external involvement was accompanied by the politicization of ethnicity and region. The assassination of Tom Mboya and the early passing of Barack Obama Sr. were seen as episodes on the intersection of local accumulation and alliance with Western forces, especially the British.

At the end of the Cold War when saner voices in the US establishment wanted to demilitarize the US engagement with East Africa, the neo- conservatives decided to use the people of Somalia as a pawn and manipulated the sectional differences in the society. Even a former Cold Warrior, such as Smith Hempstone Jr., became an advocate for human rights and democracy in Kenya when he was appointed ambassador in 1989. However, the requirements of an alliance with President Arap Moi to secure the US incursion into Somalia in 1992 meant that the Administration of George Bush Sr. ignored the warnings of Ambassador Hempstone about the endemic corruption in Kenya and how the US “humanitarian” mission in Somalia was linked to this corruption.

Up to today, the US military have not learnt the lessons of Black Hawk Down (that humiliation of the US military in Mogadishu in 1993) and have doubled down in the region of East Africa extending the militarization of Somalia and building up a massive military presence in Djibouti, for the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). Although the Djibouti base is the military space on the soil of the Somali peoples, it is from Kenya where the planning and logistics were organized. From time to time Western papers reported on front organizations such as Bancroft Global Development, which has the contract to train African Union (AMISOM) troops in Somalia. Terms such as terrorists and terrorism have been mobilized by the ruling elements in Kenya to disguise all forms of repression and conceal business relations with their Somalia class allies.

This current investment in militarism and NGOs in Kenya had been recounted by this author in the experience of the Office of Transition Initiatives in Kenya to ensure that the revolutionary capabilities of the Kenyan youths were not realized.[3] CIA and the militaristic operations in Kenya and Somalia reached its apogee when the US security establishment financed the military entrepreneurs (called Somali Warlords) of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) in the duplicitous engagement with the Kenyan and Somalia peoples. Over US $100,000 per month was being paid to Somali operatives who were business partners for warfare with a section of the Kenyan establishment under Daniel Arap Moi. A top US official (Michael Zorick) handling Somalia in the US embassy in Nairobi was transferred from his job (as Somali Political Affairs Office, Kenya) after criticizing payments to militarists who were at the core of the fueling some of Mogadishu’s worst-ever fighting. Zorick’s exposure of the CIA in Somalia had exposed a rift inside the US government on how to handle Somalia — whether efforts to build peace should come before counter-terrorism — and the effect Washington’s perceived role has had in inflaming fighting there.

OBAMA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH KENYA

Barack Obama had personal links to Kenya, and there is genuine excitement in Kenya at the prospect of the visit of the President of the USA to Kenya. Kenyan newspapers have been printing the names of all of the known living relatives of the current President of the USA. He first journeyed to Kenya for five weeks when he visited the grave of his father in 1988 and his recollections of the apartheid forms of political life in Kenya at that time was explicitly spelt out in the book, Dreams from My Father. Obama had returned to Kenya in 1992 with Michelle, then his fiancé. Again in 2006 during his first year in the US Senate Obama visited Kenya and in that journey he had demonstrated his knowledge of the malaise of the forms of accumulation in Kenya that is called corruption.

It is usual that Presidents of the USA identify with their ancestry (most publicized example was John F. Kennedy’s trip to Ireland) but with the vitriolic campaign by the neo-conservatives (called Birthers) that Obama was not a US citizen, Barack Obama had retreated from overt identification with his very close relatives in Kenya. In private, however, Obama was very much preoccupied with the absence of democratic participation. During the primary campaign in Iowa in January 2008, we learnt that candidate Obama had invited his sister Auma to Iowa who briefed him on the contradictions between the Kenyan peoples that had exploded into violence after the elections in December 2007. Later, in June 2013 when as President he made his first trip to Senegal, Obama invited the Chief Justices of Africa to focus on the role of the judiciary in the democratization process in Africa.

The Kenyan political leaders (President Uhuru Kenyatta and Vice President William Ruto) had been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for complicity in mobilizing the elements who killed over 1000 persons, and the cloud over their heads had meant that these same leaders became vocal anti-imperialists. The Kenyatta Administration worked hard to mobilize the African Union against the ICC. Although the United States was not a signatory to the Rome Convention, US diplomats were active in calling for the ICC to pursue what it called “justice.” In the face of the activism of the US and EU diplomats on the ICC question, Kenyan leaders of the ruling Jubilee Coalition started to project a diversified foreign policy for Kenya. In their offensive against “Western imperialists,” the Kenyan leadership threatened to revoke the Defence Cooperation Agreement that had sustained relations between British and Kenyan intelligence elements since 1963. In the process of the active foreign policy to minimize dependence on Western sources of capital and security, the Kenyan leadership started a Look East policy seeking to strengthen relations with China and India. One by-product of the new orientation of the Kenyan leaders since 2008 was that the financial barons of Nairobi started to invest heavily in real estate in Kenya.

Fearing the sanctions against the leaders and the freezing of their vast assets, the Kenyan economy received a boost as the real estate barons and the financial barons transformed the urban landscape of Kenya. Nairobi had become a magnet for “entrepreneurs” and accumulators from all over Eastern and Central Africa; resources looted from Eastern Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and Rwanda found their way into the financial institutions and social networks of Kenya strengthening the Kenyan barons who understood the linkages between political, military and economic power.

THE PEOPLE INTERVENE AND THE 2010 CONSTITUTION

This consolidation of power in the hands of a few induced a climate of intensified struggles by those who wanted a new form of political governance. Progressives in Kenya had worked hard since 1992 on a new Constitution and when this Constitution was put before the people in 2010, it was overwhelmingly ratified, despite opposition from the ruling circles around President Mwai Kibaki. The new constitution bought a more decentralized political system, which limited the powers of the President and replaced corrupt provincial governments with local counties. This 2010 Constitution also created a second chamber of parliament – the Senate – and set up a land commission to settle ownership disputes and review past abuses. Despite this new Constitution, the 2013 elections was fought against the background of the ICC charges hanging over the Presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and the Vice Presidential Candidate William Ruto.

Before the elections, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (Johnny Carson) who had been a former US Ambassador to Kenya made the statement that Choices have consequences. In a radio interview before the elections Mr Carson said. “We live in an interconnected world and people should be thoughtful about the impact that their choices have on their nation, on the region, on the economy, on the society and on the world in which they live. Choices have consequences.”

This statement was interpreted to mean that the US government opposed the election of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto and this statement itself became part of the election campaign. Uhuru Kenyatta and Ruto represented themselves as nationalists defending the sovereignty of Kenya and rallied supporters with the claim “that foreign nations must not dictate who should lead Kenya.” The Jubilee Coalition of Kenyatta and Ruto won the elections in March 2013, so when Obama visited Tanzania in 2013 he bypassed Kenya.

KENYA LOOKS EAST

In the past ten years, the orientation of the Kenyan capitalist class has been to develop closer relationship with India, China, Turkey and other emerging powers. The 50 kilometer highway from Nairobi to Thika stands as one of the construction projects of the new leaders and confident peoples of Kenya. By the time the government of Kenya rolled out their Vision 2030, Chinese Construction companies were at the forefront of the planning stages for the ambitious projects being launched by the government of Kenya. About 50 Chinese companies have been contracted for 80 projects with a value of billions of dollars in sectors including transport, housing, water processing, power upgrading, energy, and sea ports and airports. The Chinese English language news service, CCTV, established its African base in Nairobi and the University of Nairobi hosted one of the Confucius Institutes in Africa.

However, in all those projects, it is in infrastructure and specifically road construction that China has stood head and shoulders above others. Of these mega projects, probably the biggest was the $11 billion Lamu Port and Lamu Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) This LAPSSET project includes the construction of the massive Lamu port at Manda Bay, road and rail links from the port to South Sudan and Ethiopia, and the construction of crude oil and product oil pipelines from South Sudan. This infrastructure will be more significant than any kind of competition going on now and will propel the transport barons of Kenya at the center of trade and commerce at precisely the moment when the East African Community, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Southern Africa Development Community initiated the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA).

The US establishment had no answer to this LAPSSET and the neo- con scribe Robert Kaplan wrote for many in the foreign policy and military circles when he opined that the LAPSETT project was part of a larger strategy in the “ Geography of Chinese Power: How Far Can Beijing Reach on Land and at Sea?.” US planners received the answer when over the next five years the massive infrastructure plans were laid out for the upgrading of the port of Mombasa, for the Chinese involvement in road, port and bridge construction in Tanzania and the deals all over the region worth close to $100 billion dollars. These projects of East Africa were integrated into the African Union project of the Programme for the Infrastructural Development in Africa (PIDA).

OBAMA’S VISIT IN THIS CONTEXT

While the US was concentrating on drone strikes in Somalia and operating out of Kenya, the tourism industry suffered in Kenya while the general climate of insecurity intensified. US policy makers were concerned about the inroads of China in Kenya and the vitriolic anti-imperialist rhetoric coming from the leaders. In 2013 Senator Chris Coons of Delaware chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, said in a report issued by his office that “China, which has made dramatic inroads across the continent in recent years, may undermine or even counter value-driven U.S. goals in the region, and should serve as a wake-up call for enhanced American trade and investment.”

In order to respond to this wakeup call, the Obama presidency had called and launched the GES, US Africa Summit and launched the Young Africa Leadership Initiative. President Obama elevated entrepreneurship to the forefront of the United States’ engagement agenda during a speech in Cairo in 2009. Since 2010, when the U.S. hosted the first Summit in Washington, D.C., GES has expanded to a global event, subsequently hosted by the governments of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Morocco. According to the communique from the White House,

“The 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, on July 25-26. It will be the sixth annual gathering of entrepreneurs at all stages of business development, business leaders, mentors, and high-level government officials. The established tradition demonstrates the U.S. Government’s continued commitment to fostering entrepreneurship around the world.”

In August 2014, over 40 African heads of States and governments were feted in Washington when Obama again touted the Power Africa project. On June 30, 2013 in Cape Town, South Africa, President Barack Obama had announced the Power Africa as an initiative to increase the number of people with access to electric power in Africa. Kenya is supposed to be one of the first six countries targeted for this project. However, because this initiative remains unfunded, Obama was seeking to link African billionaires to US corporations such as General Electric and Blackstone. Obama mobilized his personal charisma to entreat African billionaires such as Aliko Dangote, Tony Elumelu, Mo Ibrahim, James Mwangi (among other tycoons) to align with US corporations.

What came out of this US Africa summit were pledges and nationalistic African business persons questioned the efficacy of Obama’s call for partnering with US corporations. At one meeting on Capitol Hill, a prominent Kenyan business person said to the other Africans: “Why are you here in Washington looking for money? We have money enough in Kenya to invest in all of Africa.”

The Obama Administration was not blind to the new confident posture of the Kenyan society. What is known is that the Kenyan youths are among the most innovative and vibrant in the areas of telecommunications. New applications such as Mpesa and Ushaidi have set the Kenyan society apart in the novel use of new technologies. In a country where that are over 100 new Universities in the past 15 years, the state is planning an entire technology location called Konza City with a new University to tap into this energetic section of society.

Obama’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit is also one other attempt to tap into the energy of the Kenyan youths and to mobilize the society ideologically to be more positive to the ideas of neo-liberalism. Progressives are very clear that the neo-liberal order has been quite compatible with the militarization of the planet. The Obama Administration wants an end to the War on terror without curbs on the other sections of the military, financial and information complex. The GES is seeking to buck the plans of the Pentagon and the neo-con section of the State Department to intensify the militarization of the Indian Ocean. This year, for the first time John Kerry, the Secretary of State, visited Somalia and the US sent an envoy to Mogadishu for the first time in over 20 years.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and sections of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are not keen on peace in Kenya and Somalia and the demilitarization of the Indian Ocean. These forces are aligned to one wing of the Kenyan leadership who have invested in the military and security. To strengthen these forces, neo- conservatives and right wing Christians have fanned out over rural Kenya spewing hatred of humans who are same gender loving beings. These right wing Christian forces seek to associate followers of the faith of Islam with terrorism.

UHURU KENYATTA AND HIS “ANTI-IMPERIALISM”

According to Forbes Magazine, the President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, is reputedly the richest man in Kenya. As such, his leadership is based on the consolidation of the top financial barons in the country. When the charges against Uhuru Kenyatta were withdrawn by the ICC, he was emboldened to be more aggressive in establishing himself as a leader who could rally African opinion against Western imperialists. His challenge to the British about the renewal of the British military training has been followed by seeking to make links with the progressives inside and outside of Kenya. In June he met with Ngugi wa Thiongo who for the past two decades has lived in exile in the USA. Kenya will host the regional Pan African Congress for East Africa in Nairobi in August.

In seeking to establish himself as a leading statesman, Kenyatta has invited the Pope to visit Kenya. The World Trade Organisation ministerial conference will take place in Nairobi, bringing together 200 ministerial delegations from around the world. Uhuru will have a sense of being on the world stage when he co–hosts the Global Entrepreneurship Summit with President Obama. He had only recently opened the Japan-Kenya Conference on Infrastructure.

Obama will be giving legitimacy to this section of the Kenyan financial barons in his Entrepreneurship conference because in the past ten years US officials have been unconcerned about sweat shop conditions of workers in Africa. Kenyan entrepreneurs have been lobbying Washington for the renewal of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), but there is no discussion in the media about the rights of Kenyan workers.

Obama will travel to Ethiopia after Kenya where the human rights record of the political leaders are as atrocious as those of the government of Rwanda. Obama will not welcome the leaders of Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda to Kenya but the deployment of military forces from Uganda and Burundi to Somalia has emboldened these leaders to defy constitutional arrangements in their own societies to extend their hold on to political power. One immediate task in relation to this visit is for a clear program for the demilitarization of Somalia and for the USA to identify and expose those forces from the Arabian Gulf who are financially supporting Al Shabaab.

While there is real joy that Obama is visiting Kenya, this moment should provide another platform for progressives to push for the demilitarization of the relations with Africa. This calls for the dismantling of the US Africa Command, the withdrawal of the Special Forces from Somalia and the end of drone strikes. Normal air traffic and commerce in the area of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia has been negatively affected by the drone srikes being launched in this region. Real entrepreneurship and commerce cannot prosper in conditions where one section of capitalists want to engage in warfare as a business.

African progressives can take a leaf from the progressive forces in the USA who for five decades have called for the renewal of diplomatic relations with Cuba. These same progressives must take the political initiative to expose the Israeli and Saudi alliances that support elements who do not care about the lives of Africans.

Both the USA and Japan are very concerned about the foothold of China all over Eastern Africa but as long as the priority of the USA is for extending military relations with Africa via the US Africa Command and the so-called NGOs such as Bancroft Development, there will not be much traction for initiatives such as the US Africa Summit, Power Africa or the GES. Obama has surrounded himself with elements such as Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, Samantha Powers, John Brennan and others whose careers have been linked to military support for warlords in Libya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda.

From the start of his Presidency, Obama was caught between different forces in the United States and in Kenya. On the one side were the accumulated investments of the US military and private contractors in league with the neo-conservative Christians who proclaimed themselves to be Born Again Christians. These neo-conservatives had a base in the media with subsidiaries of the Rupert Murdoch Empire very involved in information manipulation inside Kenya. Western, especially US supported, non-governmental organizations were aligned with this section and they were silent on the role of the US military and the US Africa Command in Eastern Africa.

Obama is very concerned about his historical legacy and in the past year he has pushed by the organized forces in the USA who wanted to end the isolation of Cuba. The struggles against police killings and brutality in the USA have inspired a new movement organizing to defend Black lives. The Kenyan athletes who have embarked on 836-kilometer (520-mile) walk for peace are also proclaiming that the lives of ordinary Africans matter. Progressives in Kenya cannot stand aloof from the debates about entrepreneurship, electric power, infrastructure and mobile applications. Kenya needs peace and an end to the violence that is killing innocent people. Patriotic entrepreneurs who are not compromised by the cut throat forms of accumulation must stand out to push for conditions where business practices do not rob the peoples of Kenya of basic dignity.

The barons of real estate, banking, telecommunications, drugs, land and agriculture, sugar and transportation now dominate the agencies of government in Kenya and came into conflict with sections of Western Capital as they accumulated immense fortunes. The financial barons were willing to use violence to stay in power and were sophisticated enough to develop multilateral relations with new emerging economic behemoths such as India, Turkey, China, and sections of the European Union, especially France.

The processes of accumulation of wealth in Kenya were not sufficiently independent of state power for the barons to yield to popular votes in elections so the violence of the aftermath of the elections in 2007 was one manifestation of the huge stakes in Kenya. By travelling to Kenya at this time, Obama is caught between the homophobic neo-cons and the drone, Special Forces types on one side and the barons who want respectability on the other. This visit to Kenya has left Obama between the devil and the deep blue sea. Ultimately, in the short run, it is the Uhuru Kenyatta branch of the robber barons who will make hay out of this visit, regardless of what Obama says in his speeches to the Kenyan people.

Kenyan progressives must remain vigilant, be engaged with the debates about infrastructure and entrepreneurship to build a different relationship between the peoples of Kenya and the USA than that which has produced violence and insecurity over the past fifty years.

* Horace G. Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science, Syracuse University. Campbell is also the Special Invited Professor of International Relations at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity, Monthly Review Press, New York 2013.

Notes:
[1] “U.S Operates from Secret Bases in Somalia,” Foreign Policy, July 2, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/02/exclusive-u-s-operates-drones-from-secret-bases-in-somalia-special-operations-jsoc-black-hawk-down/
[2] Jeffrey Getleman, “A Catch-22 in Kenya: Western Terrorism Alerts May Fuel Terrorism, “ New York Times, February 25, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/world/africa/as-tourism-sags-on-kenyan-coast- terrorists-could-lure-the-unemployed.html
[3] Horace G. Campbell, “ the Office of Transition Initiatives and the Subversion of Societies, “ Counterpunch, May 2, 2014 http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-office-of-transition-initiatives-and-the-subversion-of-societies/
[4] Robert Kaplan,”The Geography of Chinese Power: How Far Can Beijing Reach on Land and at Sea?.” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2010, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2010-05-01/geography-chinese-power

By Francis Njubi Nesbitt*

President Obama needs to unveil a new foreign policy initiative on Africa during his trip to Kenya and Ethiopia or risk going down in history as the worst president for Africa in recent memory.

It would be a shame if the first American president of African descent ranks last in meaningful engagement with Africa when compared to other presidents in the recent past. Although both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton came under intense criticism for doing nothing in the face of genocide and war crimes, they were able to recover somewhat by launching signature initiatives during their second terms.

During his first term, Bill Clinton pulled out of Somalia in a spectacular debacle immortalized in the Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down and then refused to intervene in Rwanda, standing by as tens of thousands were slain during one of the worst outbursts of fratricidal violence in the 20^th century. During his second term, however, Clinton launched a series of health and development initiatives that partially mitigated his failures in Somalia and Rwanda. His Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) helped double U.S. trade with the region and triple U.S. exports estimated at $22 billion in 2012.

George W. Bush was excoriated for ignoring war crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Darfur. Yet today he’s remembered on the continent for a health initiative known as PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving thousands of lives and transforming the treatment of AIDS in Africa. The Bush administration also played a significant role in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended a brutal 30-year war and led to the relatively peaceful separation of Sudan and South Sudan.

Shrinking Expectations

Africans were elated when Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008. Expectations were understandably high after eight years of the Bush administration’s version of gunboat diplomacy. Obama increased those expectations during his 2009 trip to Ghana and Egypt when he promised to transform U.S. relations with Africa and the Middle East.

The glimmer of hope soon faded into the distance as Obama doubled down on Bush’s policies. Like his predecessor, he saw Africa through a national security prism that focused on terrorism and counterterrorism. He expanded the reach of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and increased the use of drones to assassinate alleged leaders of terrorist organizations. The continued militarization of U.S. foreign policy on the continent is reflected in a 2014 initiative called the Security Governance Initiative for Africa, which proposes combining economic and military policies to create a secure environment for U.S. investors.

This continued emphasis on military solutions was mostly ineffective and counterproductive. The NATO-led invasion of Libya, for instance, destabilized the region, turning Libya and Mali into terrorist havens and strengthening terrorist organizations such as Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In Somalia, drone strikes and support for regional “peacekeeping” forces degraded the capabilities of al-Shabaab within Somalia but has yet to tackle the task of state- and institution-building. The group continues to export terror in East Africa and exacerbate the region’s refugee problem. Meanwhile, Washington has maintained strong bilateral relations with Egypt despite the brutal tactics deployed against pro-democracy activists by the country’s strongman, president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Missed Opportunities

The Obama administration failed to ride the wave of optimism about African economic development in international business circles. While Obama was focused on the terror threat, other countries were forging strong economic ties with Africa.

China overtook the United States in 2009 as Africa’s main trading partner. Brazil, India, and even Turkey expanded their presence on the African scene, filling the space previously occupied by Africa’s traditional trading partners in the United States and Europe. These countries recognized the opportunities represented in Africa’s economic growth over the last two decades. They appreciated that Africa has the fastest growing economies in the world, a burgeoning middle class, and a youthful educated population. They forged partnerships with states and private sector investors that have revitalized Africa’s infrastructure and stimulated exponential growth.

Despite these setbacks, Obama reiterated his pledge to transform U.S. relations with Africa during his 2013 trip to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania. His solution seemed to be a shift toward the Clinton administration’s emphasis on entrepreneurship and trade. He touted his administration’s Power Africa initiative to deliver electricity to millions (albeit often via fossil fuels), a scholarship program for young leaders, and continued efforts to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases. He expanded Clinton’s Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and pledged to hold the largest White House summit on Africa ever. Once again this initiative echoes Clinton’s Africa-America summits held periodically during the 1990s.

During the 2014 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, the president announced a $7 billion package designed to promote U.S. exports and trade deals and $14 billion in pledges from U.S. corporations. Obama evoked the Africa Rising mantra, praising the assembled heads of state for “embracing economic reforms [and] attracting record levels of investment.” He extolled the continent for its record economic growth, its growing middle class, and youthful population. He promised a new “partnership of equals” focused on African goals and solutions. “Africa’s rise,” he said, means “an opportunity to transform the relationship between the United States and Africa.”

Despite the positive rhetoric, analysts saw the summit as little more than “business as usual.” According to Emira Woods of ThoughtWorks, a technology firm committed to social and economic justice: “If there is business as usual, we will continue to have a situation where people on whose land resources lie will be pushed further and further to the brink, left without health care, housing, education, or any means of benefiting.”

Woods’ caution is confirmed by a comment by a key organizer of the summit, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who let slip the real motivations behind the summit: “We kind of gave Africa to the Europeans first and to the Chinese later, but today it’s wide open for us.” The goal, therefore, is to help U.S. corporations compete effectively in the scramble for African resources. The positive rhetoric about “partnership of equals” and “African goals and solutions” serves as a cover for looting Africa’s resources.

The Legacy Trip

Given these setbacks, the current trip represents a last chance for the president to fulfill his transformative agenda. The president is expected to hold bilateral meetings with leaders in Kenya and Ethiopia, address the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi, and meet with African Union leaders in Addis Ababa. According to a press release from the White House, the trip “will build on the success of the August 2014 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit” and continue efforts to “accelerate economic growth, strengthen democratic institutions, and improve security.”

Obama has definitely stepped up his engagement with Africa during his second term. He visited three countries in 2013 and announced visits to Kenya and Ethiopia in 2015. He hosted of 40 heads of state and government in 2014 and announced billions of dollars in financing to promote U.S. corporate interests in Africa. He held bilateral talks with Nigeria’s newly elected president Muhammadu Buhari on July 20. He’s also expanded trade and health initiatives started by his predecessors. Channeling predecessors’ achievements, however, does not make for an inspiring foreign policy.

Contrast this record with that of former Chinese premier Hu Jintao, who visited Africa five times — and covered 18 countries — between 2009 and 2012. His successor, Xi Jinping, signified Africa’s importance by visiting the continent on his first trip abroad. During that trip, he pledged $20 billion in loans to African countries over the next three years, in addition to signing deals to build ports in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Republic of the Congo. In 2014, China announced that it was increasing the loan guarantees by an additional $10 billion.

The Chinese president has already hosted dozens of African heads of state during a high-level summit held every three years since 2000. The Sixth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation is scheduled for South Africa this year, where China is expected to announce new loans guarantees and infrastructure projects.

The charm offensive is calculated to garner support for China’s economic interests, which have grown exponentially since the 1990s. China increased its trade and investment in Africa by 1,000 percent between 2000 and 2010. This trade is driven, for the most part, by China’s need for raw materials to feed its industries. In return, China has helped transform many African countries with its infrastructure projects. Chinese firms are building hundreds of roads, bridges, ports, and airports across the continent. Bilateral trade with African countries was an estimated $198 billion last year. U.S. trade lags behind at $100 billion.

Breaking Out

How can Obama break out and make a lasting impression in this competitive environment? Does the United States have a special message for Africa?

Although the United States cannot compete with China in the volume of trade and the scale of infrastructure investments, the president still has some political capital that he can deploy on the continent. To succeed, he’ll have to push back against his image as a shill for security firms and corporate interests.

His Power Africa initiative is to be commended, but it has yet to deliver electricity two years after he announced that the program would double electricity access in Africa over the next five years. The project is still too closely associated with the corporate profit agenda to make a real difference.

There’s nothing wrong with corporations seeking profits: That’s what they do. Private investment for profit, however, cannot form the basis for long-term partnerships for African development. Chinese firms, for instance, are able to invest in long-term infrastructure development projects because they’re financed by the government and are not seeking immediate returns on investments. Transforming U.S. relations with Africa, therefore, requires imagining different means and alternative ends.

Obama has, so far, failed to break out of the mold of security- and corporate-based foreign policy. A truly transformative policy would find a way of engaging the vigorous civil society movements on the continent, including environmental and peace movements.

Kenya, for instance, is the home of the Greenbelt Movement founded by the late Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Members are encouraged to replace trees they use for firewood and other domestic needs. Since 1977, the movement has planted over 51 million trees to replace forest cover in Kenya. Greenbelt is an excellent example of a grassroots indigenous movement that mobilizes women’s groups to empower women and girls, promote democracy, and build sustainable lifestyles. The United States could back these efforts by seeking creative financing involving innovative ideas such as carbon exchanges, renewable energy certificates, and other inventive solutions.

The United States could lead the way in crafting international regulations that curb the awful land grabs that are destroying the lives of millions of indigenous people in Ethiopia and other African countries. In Ethiopia, for instance, indigenous people are losing their livelihoods, and in many cases their lives, to multinational agribusiness corporations. It is critical that the international community put pressure on governments to protect the rights of indigenous people. Unfortunately, Obama’s agriculture initiatives continue to emphasize the profit motive at the expense of the environment and the interests of indigenous people.

Increasing U.S. engagement with the burgeoning peace movements on the continent would be commendable. Advocates for peace have long contended that Africa’s myriad conflicts cannot be resolved by military means. Only a political solution that deals with root causes can facilitate dialogue and set the stage for meaningful conflict management. In the case of Somalia, for instance, U.S.-backed government forces and African Union peacekeepers have degraded al-Shabaab but failed to lay the groundwork for the transition to democracy and state-building that are critical for long-term stability.

If even George W. Bush could break out of the mold of U.S. foreign policy and build a unique legacy in U.S. relations with Africa, surely Obama can do the same in his remaining time in office.

Foreign Policy in Focus contributor Francis Njubi Nesbitt is a professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University. He is the author of Race for Sanctions and has published numerous book chapters and articles in academic journals.

Terrorism, regrettably, is not an unfamiliar menace to Turkish people. For the past 40 years, Turks have experienced their own dreadful version of terror attacks.

And it consistently had one origin: The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as PKK, and other communist organizations like The Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (or, DHKP-C) that worked as contractors to PKK. After a cease-fire period with PKK that started officially in 2013 in a so-called ‘peace process,’ the number of these attacks went down.

The effects of the ongoing battles in Syria and Iraq, which shared a total border of 910 km with Turkey, were limited with couple of events. This relatively quiet period for Turkey was disrupted a couple of days ago, when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive in the midst of a large crowd in Suruc, a Turkish town along the Turkish-Syrian border. The attack targeted a group of young leftists.
Needless to say, the international media largely covered the attack. However, some of the comments and speculations made after the incident as well as the image created and the suspicious details that emerged, call for a comprehensive analysis.

One of the most important details was the fact that, only 15 minutes after the explosion took place at 11.30 a.m., some international media outlets announced it to the world as a ‘Daesh attack.’ Even though, such a large-scale attack was clearly a sensitive issue that required days long investigation and evidence collection, and before even the Turkish prime minister, governors or the security forces made any comments, the said sources interestingly reached a firm conclusion only after one-and-a-half minutes. Not surprisingly, PKK administrators, as well as the leaders of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is supported by PKK, wasted no time declaring this as a Daesh attack and started saying that Daesh posed a big threat to Turkey.

Shortly after the incident, new details began to emerge like how 27 mobile phones were actively used during the moment of the incident, and that the surveillance cameras in the area didn’t work and that this crowd, which went to a high-risk area like Suruc, surprisingly weren’t frisked by police after municipality’s approval. We have to remind at this point that Suruc Municipality is an HDP-affiliated one. The fact that right at the moment of the explosion 27 cell phone calls were made, the cameras didn’t work, shows that this was a highly professional attack. It will be expedient to add a small note here: HDP is a political party in Turkey. But the fact that it gets the support of PKK, and actually is pressured by PKK, makes these details noteworthy.

The suicide bomber was a female, which immediately shut down those speculations that Daesh was behind the attack, as Daesh does not use female suicide bombers in its attacks. However, PKK makes special effort to use female members in suicide bombing attacks for years and there is an important reason behind this: To encourage men in the terrorist group to be more active in the fight. Many PKK informants confirmed this point in their statements.

When people began to realize this detail, tone of the statements began to change. Some even said that “the assailant was probably a male in female’s clothing” and speculated over an ID card of a person that wasn’t known by anyone in the group.

On the other hand, HDP leaders declaring Daesh as “the biggest threat to Turkey” raised many questions. It is because there is and has been only one terrorist group that posed any threat to Turkey for the past 40 years and it was clearly PKK. Daesh, on the other hand, didn’t carry out a single attack by that day in Turkey.

More importantly, Daesh, which does everything in full view of the world, going out of its way to publicize and air its actions to use fear as leverage, clearly didn’t have any reservations about claiming responsibility for its actions. Yet, it didn’t claim responsibility for the attack. Such a covert operation clearly didn’t match the profile of Daesh attacks. To sum it all up: Daesh clearly carries out very bloody attacks in the Middle East that we would never condone.

However, it is also clear that the Suruc attack wasn’t carried out by Daesh. There might be those thinking: “Daesh uses violence everywhere else, so what does this change?” It changes a lot for Turkey. All details surrounding this incident show that this attack was actually carried out in a joint operation by PKK and the secret states of Turkey and of some Western countries that are seeking to reshape Turkey and particularly the region. One might think, “PKK got hurt as a result.”

No, PKK hasn’t gotten hurt as a result. What PKK did was getting some university students that lived in Western Turkey and that sympathized with PKK for ideological purposes, to go the region and targeting them. So the ones that got hurt as a result were only those 31 young people that were gruesomely murdered. Yet, somehow PKK managed to appear as the victim. The goal is legalizing PKK in Turkey, whitewashing it to make it appear innocent and persecuted, and provoke Turkey into waging a war against Daesh. It is a known fact that US secret state in particular, needed cheap military force on land in its fight against Daesh in Syria, and after using Kurds for this, largely sought to deploy Turkish military for this purpose. And clearly some thought it would be a good idea to concoct a plan to realize all this.

Furthermore, this is clear proof that it is PKK that capitalizes on terror in Turkey as they used the attack as an excuse to wreak havoc on the streets of Turkey and cowardly martyred one Turkish soldier and three police officers. Two important points should be stressed at this point: One is the fact that Turkey will never launch a military campaign beyond its borders and will not allow its troops to be used as paid soldiers of the Western powers. The only possible intervention of Turkey in Syria could be for the purposes of safeguarding its borders and of peace and negotiation. The second is the fact that attempts to make people forget that PKK is the real threat to Turkey and efforts to legalize it, will fail completely.

Turkey is an experienced country that has battled with terrorism for the past 40 years and the secret agencies of the western countries better know this fact and abandon their goals of making subtle efforts to convince Turkish people to accept PKK.

This article appeared at Arab News.

By Mohammad Mahdi Mojahedi*

The true importance of the recent nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries, more than being related to its text, should be seen in two other aspects of the deal. The first aspect is the process of the negotiations and the method that was “invented” through the negotiations, which led to this agreement. The second aspect is wanted or unwanted “outcomes” of the deal.

Invention of this useful negotiation process, along with the outcomes of the deal, will not only divide the history of international relations and Iran’s foreign policy into two parts – before and after the Vienna nuclear agreement – but is also a certain sign of the emergence of a new Middle East, which will come into being within the next couple of decades.

Due to clear geopolitical and geostrategic reasons, following the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, none of the policies of the world’s big powers in the Middle East could have been designed and pursued in the absence of due attention to Iran’s role. The Middle Eastern policy of big powers, especially during two world wars, in addition to all the developments that took place in the Cold War era, are good evidence to this fact.

Before the nuclear deal, however, Iran, either as a partner or as a rival country or as a strategic foe to this or that global power in the region, always saw itself faced with fait accompli with regard to regional plans implemented by big powers.

A review of many historical examples, including the most important impulses that shook the Middle East region during the 20^th century, will make it possible to show that big powers imposed their own dreams for the region on regional countries by convincing them that this was their inevitable fate. As a result, they faced the Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, with fait accompli through unilateral pursuit of their plans.

However, the nationalization of the oil industry in Iran, and most importantly, the unexpected breakout of the Islamic Revolution in the country proved that even big powers could be taken by surprise in the Middle East. Iraq’s failure in the proxy war that big powers had launched against Iran, once again, took big powers by surprise. All these developments took place in the context of the confrontation between the national will of Iranians and regional plans of big powers, which at the end of the day, led to a zero-sum game.

The process and trend of nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China plus Germany and the European Union) in the past two years was, nonetheless, of a quite different type. The essential change in the quality of the political dialogue between Iran and big Western powers through recent talks – from a state of confrontation to a state of interaction and cooperation – has been a function of important factors all of which cannot be enumerated here.

But out of all factors, a mention should be made of the outlook of developments related to the Greater Middle East plan and the inevitable change in the approach of big powers, especially the United States, to future prospects of the Middle East. This change of policy has been the result of a renewed assessment by big powers of the change in the gravity center of power, stability and security in the region.

Such an assessment shows that those countries, which were considered as the West’s allies in the region during the past 30 years, are now prone to fall, collapse, or at least, escalating crises, which will be incurable and rapidly spreading in some cases.

Iran the sole stable and powerful option

At the same time, Iran will remain the sole stable and powerful option for future cooperation with the West. Of course, Iran will change from a maximal foe to a regional ally for the Western powers during the coming decade. However, from the viewpoint of big powers, this rival has a clear and rational environmental understanding of resources and interests, and threats and opportunities in the region.

More importantly, this time, its understanding of those factors happens to be in line with that of big powers. Therefore, for a couple of decades to come, this state of rivalry will be the sole stable option that the West will have for “competitive and cautious partnership” in various strategic fields in the region.

As such, the content of the nuclear deal should be considered as a test for involved countries – both Iran and the P5+1 countries – and also as a price that all of them have paid through this process in order to reach a framework for management of regional differences and initiate competitive cooperation in the context of the Middle East’s developments.

This unwritten implication of the nuclear talks is more important than all its written outcomes. In fact, the written results are a price or a guarantee for the realization of these historical, though unwritten, outcomes of the nuclear deal.

Signs emerging from these negotiations, along with all daring actions taken and amazing records broken, were an “unthinkable” experience in the course of the current policies in the Middle East. As a result, they were indicative of the emergence of a new regime of political relations aimed at the resolution of hostilities and even promotion of “cautious and competitive” interaction between Iran and the big global powers. In the absence of such a new regime, the forthcoming developments in the Middle East would have easily gotten out of hand.

Now, it would be logical to expect that the pace of developments in the Middle East will increase; developments that will change political and strategic geography of the Middle East in their course. In the course of these changes, Iran and big global powers will play complementary roles. However, important domestic and national grounds for the establishment of these cautious, competitive, simultaneous, and cooperative relations should be provided and guaranteed.

In the absence of national consent among various types of political and social tendencies; efficiency and cooperation among three powers of the government to support competitive production; upliftment of the indexes of living; control of inflation, unemployment and corruption; and efficient management of sovereign and environmental crises, Iran will not have necessary power for active engagement in cautious and competitive cooperation with big powers in the region.

Adoption of transparent economic policies

To provide such domestic conditions in economic terms would require adoption of transparent economic policies while observing financial discipline and fighting corruption. From a political angle, provision of these conditions would need balanced and overarching observance of all articles of the Constitutions including those articles that are related to the people’s rights.

Differences in opinion and taste as well as political and social interests cannot be ignored in favor of a specific interest and taste just in the same way that diverse religious concerns of the country’s people with a Muslim majority and many religious minorities cannot be reduced to a specific reading of Islam. All these differences should turn into peaceful competition through fair implementation of the Constitution.

Two forthcoming elections that will be held at the end of the current year will be a good litmus test against which our erudition and wisdom at national and sovereign levels can be measured. If our society and politics and sovereign government pass this test, the powerful role of Iran in the region will be greatly guaranteed.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was the start of these negotiations and his name will be most probably remembered among dignitaries of Iran as well as a sophisticated diplomat in the world. He frequently warned the member states of the P5+1 group that they have to choose among two options with regard to Iran: hostile confrontation or respectful interaction. It seems that the international community and especially the big powers have already made their choice.

Now, it is our turn to make a similar choice inside the country to determine the fate of Iran: either overarching national cooperation and engaging in respectful, fair, and equitable competition based on the Constitution; or confrontation, hostility, pursuit of excessive demands, seeking factional supremacy, and impunity in the face of law.

* Mohammad Mahdi Mojahedi is Professor of Department of Political Science, University of Berlin. This article originally appeared in Iran Review on July 22 with the headline Iran, Pivot of New Middle East as translation of from the Iran Newspaper.  It is being reproduced (after some editing) by arrangement with the Iran Review