Recently in U.S. Foreign Policy Category

Today I have another post up over at the DMI Blog about some of the connections between the ICE deaths in detention scandal and Tom Lasseter's recent McClatchy article investigating the dozens, possibly hundreds, of innocent people wrongfully imprisoned at Guantanamo. 

Check it out!

Last night I went to see two heroes of the progressive blogosphere, Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias, promoting Yglesias’s new foreign policy book, Heads in the Sand at the Strand bookstore in New York City.

The book is a critique of the gutless, ineffective reaction of the Democratic Party to executive branch overreach, unprovoked war, and demonization of the “other,” all policies the GOP has used effectively to consolidate political power since 9/11. 

Well, “had used effectively” may be more accurate in 2008.  Yglesias, with some satisfaction, predicted last night that the GOP would be “wiped out” in Congressional elections this fall due to their failure to distance themselves from the Bush fiasco in Iraq after the 2006 elections when they had the chance. 

I’ve only just now started the book, but I’ve already learned that the movie Groundhog Day has much in common with the writing of Nietzsche (I see that I’m not the first to make this connection, though it seemed novel to me on the train ride home).  The book looks promising, and Yglesias continues to cogently argue for a return to sanity in U.S. foreign policy, something that can only be achieved if Democrats support a coherent alternative to the failed policies of the last eight years. 

The core of Yglesias’s argument is that the U.S. had a good thing going back in the ‘90s supporting the liberal international institutions that Roosevelt and Truman had built and that the U.S. had supported throughout the Cold War.  Then Bush and the neoconservative opportunists he enabled saw an opening after 9/11 to push forward their vision of a hyperpowerful U.S. that was strong enough to cast aside the shackles of multilateralism.  That promptly led to disaster, but the center-left foreign policy establishment has been too deeply invested in the flawed assumptions Bush was working from to engage in any effective pushback.

But would bringing back the ‘90s really be a return to sanity?  

[Image: AP/Wide World Photos - Donald Rumsfeld and Islam Karimov]

Sabrina Tavernise wrote yesterday in the NY Times about how the U.S. is starting to remember that Uzbekistan is resource-rich and strategically located while starting to forget that its government slaughtered hundreds of its own citizens three years ago at Andijan. 

Western governments say further ostracizing Uzbekistan by extending sanctions — America’s come up for consideration in June — will cause it to close back up, increasing instability in a region of vital energy transportation routes and strategic proximity to the war in Afghanistan.

A newly softened tone has already paid political dividends. After Andijon and a volley of criticism from Washington, Uzbekistan ejected the United States from a military base that was supplying the war effort in Afghanistan. Though there are not yet plans for the base to reopen, the Uzbeks have allowed the Americans limited access to a German base at Termez, and Uzbekistan recently offered NATO the use of its railway to ship goods to Afghanistan.

That highlights the difficult questions that relations with Uzbekistan raise for American foreign policy: How much influence should the United States try to exercise — if any at all — over another country’s behavior? And will that country be receptive, given the abuse, indefinite detentions and closed tribunals that have been part of the United States’ record in recent years?

It looks like majority world migrants aren't the only ones getting rounded up and shipped back to their countries.  Watch this Real News Network video on a U.S. soldier who deserted to Canada to avoid fighting the War in Iraq, and is now being deported back to the U.S. where he will likely go to prison. (sombrero tip to Renata Avila of Global Voices Guatemala).

One consequence of the myth of sovereignty propagated through our current international political system is the war in Iraq.  Another is our broken immigration system.  Yet another is the skyrocketing death toll in Burma, caused in part by the massive storm and entrenched poverty, but in large part by an incompetent and corrupt government that makes George Bush look like Cory Booker.

It may comfort some in the U.S. to imagine that the first two problems listed above are rooted in the misdeeds of a particular leader, or a particular political party, or even in the dysfunction of the contemporary American political system.  

However, these diagnoses are mistaken.  The dysfunctional international political system permits an unconstrained superpower like the U.S. or warped polities like Burma or Zimbabwe to push far past the bounds of civilized conduct, but while culpability may lie with leaders and the voters who support them, the framework that allows such bad actions to persist is structural. 

CNN reports on another Haitian migration tragedy (via Immigration Prof Blog): 

The bodies of 20 migrants have been recovered from the sea near the Bahamas after their boat apparently capsized, the U.S. Coast Guard said Monday as it searched for survivors.

The bodies of 19 Haitians and one Honduran were recovered and three survivors -- two Haitians and one Honduran -- have been found, said Barry Bena, a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami. Authorities are interviewing the survivors to determine what happened.

The search-and-rescue mission began Sunday after fishermen heard people screaming in the water.

The accident happened about 15 miles (25 kilometers) northwest of Nassau, Bahamas, according to the Coast Guard. A cutter, helicopter and a jet from the Coast Guard and two Bahamas military vessels continued searching the area Monday, Bena said.

Every year, thousands of Haitians try to leave the Western Hemisphere's poorest country aboard rickety, overloaded boats for other islands or the United States.

Soaring food prices have pushed many into abject poverty and triggered riots earlier this month in Haiti, but this has not yet translated into a spike in the number of migrants.

Last year a migrant boat capsized near the Turks and Caicos islands, pitching Haitians into shark-infested waters. At least 61 people died.

I've been away for a while doing work for the pro-migrant community and work that will get more exposure for this blog and all of its amazing writers.  Something that's been taking up a lot of time is videos for MTV, but I finally made my first decent one and had it featured on the front page of the Choose Or Lose website.  Click here to see it.

This story (via Yglesias) from 60 Minutes about America’s clandestine prison system for foreign nationals has my jaw on the floor.  I didn’t think I would be this easily shocked after the last seven years of abuse the Bill of Rights has undergone. 

The story is simply amazing. 

(CBS) At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

The story Kurnaz told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is a rare look inside that clandestine system of justice, where the government's own secret files reveal that an innocent man lost his liberty, his dignity, his identity, and ultimately five years of his life.

I was having trouble posting a comment to DREAMActivist’s tough questions in a recent post at A Dream Deferred, so I thought I’d just put it up here.  It’s kind of long for a comment, anyway.  I hope to have more to contribute to kyle and Dave Neiwert’s conversation on putting forward an alternative paradigm for discussing issues of immigration and nationality, a conversation that really started before any of us were born and has been going on mostly unheeded for a long time.  I’ve been meaning to put my thoughts on this issue together in a more comprehensive fashion, but in the interest of continuing the conversation, here is an initial volley.

(Photo by Flickr user bnittoli used under Creative Commons 2.0 license.)

Watching Occupation Dreamland, a 2005 documentary about the war in Iraq, it occurred to me that the effects of the citizen/noncitizen dynamic we’ve seen in the U.S. with inhumane and unjust treatment of immigrants in places like Don Hutto, New Bedford, and Oklahoma—presumption of guilt, inhumane treatment of noncitizens, fear and demonization of outsiders, and racism—are exponentially more devastating in Iraq in a war setting. 

Iraqis have been arrested and locked up without charge or trial.  They have been beaten, tortured, raped, and killed by their ostensible protectors—U.S. soldiers and contractors—very few of whom have faced serious consequences for their actions.

What few procedural guarantees exist for noncitizens in the U.S. are almost entirely lacking in Iraq.