Steve Coll's Blog, page 9

Images of War

On August 18th, Omran Daqneesh, who is five years old, survived an air strike on the apartment building where his family lived, in Aleppo, Syria. Rescue workers pulled him out of the rubble and took him to an ambulance. Mahmoud Raslan, of the Aleppo Media Center, who works in areas controlled by the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, photographed the child on video. His face was coated with blood and dirt; he sat staring silently. Within days, millions of viewers had seen Omran’s image on social media; the Times put it on the front page. The picture recalled Nick Ut’s iconic Vietnam War photograph of a nine-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, taken as she fled naked and screaming from a napalm attack, or the images widely shared last year of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned off the Turkish coast, and whose body washed up on a beach. For adults to pause and reflect upon the costs of war, they sometimes require confrontation with a child’s suffering.

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The D.N.C. and the Summer of Discontent

On August 20, 1978, in East Jerusalem, a K.G.B. agent slipped a document into an American diplomat’s empty parked car. The paper contained false claims about Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser and an irritant to the Soviet Union. Operation MUREN failed to discredit Brzezinski, yet the Soviets persisted with “active measures” to influence American politics until the Cold War’s end, according to archives smuggled out by Vasili Mitrokhin, a K.G.B. defector. During the nineteen-seventies, Soviet spies dug for dirt on Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Democrat who twice ran for President. (They didn’t find anything.) For a 1984 operation to thwart Ronald Reagan’s reëlection, the K.G.B. warned its residencies worldwide, “Reagan Means War!”

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Defying Conventions

On August 20, 1978, in East Jerusalem, a K.G.B. agent slipped a document into an American diplomat’s empty parked car. The paper contained false claims about Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser and an irritant to the Soviet Union. Operation MUREN failed to discredit Brzezinski, yet the Soviets persisted with “active measures” to influence American politics until the Cold War’s end, according to archives smuggled out by Vasili Mitrokhin, a K.G.B. defector. During the nineteen-seventies, Soviet spies dug for dirt on Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Democrat who twice ran for President. (They didn’t find anything.) For a 1984 operation to thwart Ronald Reagan’s reëlection, the K.G.B. warned its residencies worldwide, “Reagan Means War!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Global Trump

In 1967, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson gave up on the remnants of Pax Britannica. His Labour Government pulled British forces from Malaysia, Singapore, Yemen, Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and other Persian Gulf emirates. Denis Healey, the Defense Secretary, explained, “I don’t very much like the idea of being a sort of white slaver for the Arab sheikhs.” He did not wish for the indebted nation and its armed forces “to become mercenaries for people who would like to have a few British troops around.” That truculent retreat handed responsibility for security in the Gulf and the Strait of Malacca to the United States. Half a century later, American warships still call at Dubai, Bahrain, and Singapore. U.S. fighter jets fly from a massive base in Qatar. The inheritance has brought expense and diplomatic complications. Yet, over the decades, Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates have rarely questioned the value of our global-defense commitments, whether in the Middle East or in the form of nuclear and defense guarantees to our European and Asian allies.

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ISIS After Paris

In the week since the attacks on Paris, there has been a great deal of talk about waging war on the Islamic State, but scant clarity about how such a war might succeed. In a season when the improvisations of Vladimir Putin shape geopolitics, and those of Donald Trump shape American politics (Trump has remarked that Putin is “getting an A” for leadership), it is perhaps unsurprising that public discourse about what comes next has been informed by opportunism and incoherence. Yet even the sober, often stirring rhetoric of the French President, François Hollande, has often elided the main problem, which involves aligning aims with realistic means. “France is at war,” Hollande told his parliament last week, as French jets struck Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s self-declared capital. He vowed to “eradicate” the organization. But how, and how long will it take?

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Keeping Secrets

Hillary Clinton, in her memoir “Living History,” recounts her struggle to defend her privacy while residing in the White House. Some of her stories have a gothic tone. After Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, Harry and Linda Thomason, friends from Hollywood, found a jocular note under a pillow in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was from Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host. How did the note get there? “I don’t believe in ghosts, but we did sometimes feel that the White House was haunted by more temporal entities,” Clinton writes.

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The Deal

In the late nineteen-eighties, in Switzerland, Iranian officials met with collaborators of A. Q. Khan, the scientist who fathered Pakistan’s nuclear-bomb program. The parties may also have met in Dubai, where Khan maintained a secret office above a children’s store called Mummy & Me. In 1987, the Iranians received a one-page document that included the offer of a disassembled centrifuge, along with diagrams of the machine. They reportedly ended up paying as much as ten million dollars for information and materials that helped Iran advance its nuclear program during the nineteen-nineties. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a scientist sometimes described as the closest thing to an Iranian Robert Oppenheimer, oversaw the Orchid Office, working secretly on detonators and on the challenge of fitting something like a nuke on a missile. In 2003, the agency confronted Iran with evidence that it maintained a clandestine nuclear program. Tehran denied any wrongdoing and parried inspectors, then built a centrifuge facility under a mountain near Qom, whose existence was revealed by the United States, Britain, and France in 2009.

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Saudi Shakeup

Last January, Salman bin Abdulaziz ascended to the throne of Saudi Arabia and installed his son Mohammed bin Salman as Minister of Defense. The Minister, who is thirty-four, holds an undergraduate degree in law from King Saud University. In late March, the Saudis launched a bombing campaign against neighboring Yemen, to contain a rebel force known as the Houthis, whom the Saudis see as allies of Iran, a rival. Bin Salman oversaw pilots flying advanced U.S.-made jets that, according to Human Rights Watch, dropped U.S.-made cluster bombs. Since the campaign began, Saudi-led strikes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians in schools and homes and at a camp for internal refugees. The Houthis have expanded the area under their control since the bombing started.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Warren Weinstein and the Long Drone War

“As President and Commander-in-Chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” President Obama said in a press conference at the White House on Thursday. Obama was announcing the news that C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan last January killed two hostages being held by Al Qaeda—Warren Weinstein, an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian—along with two American-born Al Qaeda members. Obama added, “I profoundly regret what happened.”

That is what a President ought to say at such a moment. Obama owns the decision to prioritize lethal drone strikes over other counterterrorism strategies. He owns the record of civilian and other collateral deaths that those strikes have created—a record still frustratingly shrouded in secrecy. But the President’s mea culpa masks an important and timely question: How exactly did this mistake at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center happen, and who will be held accountable for it? By putting the President out front and withholding all but the broadest details about the failed operation, the Obama Administration apparently hopes to evade that question.

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Dangerous Gamesmanship

During the early nineteen-thirties, Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over an arid borderland called Chaco Boreal. Congress passed a resolution permitting President Franklin Roosevelt to impose an embargo on arms shipments to both countries, and he did. Prosecutors later charged the Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation with running guns to Bolivia. The company challenged the resolution, but, in 1936, the Supreme Court issued a thumping endorsement of a President’s prerogative to lead foreign policy. “In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems,” the majority wrote, only the President “has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. . . . He alone negotiates.” In this respect, the Justices added, Congress is “powerless.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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