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A Letter to the Public from World Report News

9/20/2014

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SEPTEMBER 19 2014 - MATTHEW R. BISHOP

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND CIVILIANS died in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and Gulf War between the United States and Iraq. For the next twelve years after the war, the United States bombed and, along with the United Nations, sanctioned Iraq. The United States bombed every single water treatment facility in the country and prohibited Iraq from importing the materials necessary for rebuilding those facilities. They also bombed every major electrical generation facility and limited the capability to rebuild them. As a result, Five hundred thousand Iraqis died of water-borne illnesses in this period, most of them young children whose health was most at-risk. By the time the Bush administration began speaking to the public of war against Iraq in 2002, American policy had already caused the deaths of approximately 1.1 million civilians. That number, again, is 1.1 million, out of a country of less than twenty million in 1991 (most of those who died did so in the early nineties). That toll does not include any deaths in or after the year 2003.

    Had Americans, en masse, known these numbers, seen the faces of those who had lost their lives, known their stories-- had they come to value and understand these lives as meaningful, and had they realized their government's policies had caused such awful devastation-- had all of this occurred, it is nearly inconceivable that a 2003 invasion of Iraq would have enjoyed any meaningful support from Americans. In greater likelihood, the U.S. would not have invaded Iraq. And today's awful consequences of that invasion would not be taking up our news headlines every single morning.

    Today, the estimates of civilian death in the 2003-12 US-Iraq war number between 350,000 and nearly one and a half million. The median American, when asked, however, updated for 2012, will say that just over 10,000 civilians died in this war. The median American, in other words, underestimates the incidence of civilian death in the 2003-12 war by as little as three thousand five hundred percent and by as much as nearly fifteen thousand percent. In the first half of 2007, at a time when the Lancet journal was publishing reliable civilian death estimates between 600,000-700,000, the median American pegged the civilian death toll at 9,890.

    Here is the most remarkable part of the story: In another AP/Ipsos poll in that same year, 2007, Americans answered that their estimate (less than ten thousand) was too high and was not an acceptable cost of war. Americans, in the majority, do not accept civilian deaths as a consequence of what they perceive as an unjust war. But even with this hard evidence, mass media channels still declined to publish civilian death numbers, and stayed even farther away from civilian death stories.

    Along with a talented Board of Directors, I am starting an international news nonprofit called World Report News. Our aim is to get hard, reliable facts and data out to the American people in the very earliest stages of conflict and pre-conflict development. Our tri-fold goal is conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and mass education on foreign affairs and foreign policy. My colleagues and I built this company with one underlying thought: How can we make sure that this never happens again?
     The answer, we decided, was to create a better world news company than the mass media channels offer. We want to create a service that can give Americans a tremendously higher quality of information without asking for a ridiculous time commitment-- acknowledging that most Americans are short enough on time as things are. We firmly believe that such a media channel will play an important role in education on war and peace affairs and, ultimately, could play an important role in real prevention, rapid policy response, and resolution to conflicts around the globe. If our model succeeds, what happened with the U.S. and Iraq over the past quarter century will not happen again.

    I spent four years researching media, conflict, and mass popular movements in preparation for the design of this company. I recently graduated from The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs with a M.A. in Global Communications-- this was a particular curriculum that allowed me to merge international relations, conflict prevention, and mass media communications into a single field of study. Prior to that I ran an international affairs journal and news company that succeeded in attracting hundreds of thousands of readers with just a few hundred dollars, and all-volunteer staff, and part-time work on my end, while I pursued my undergraduate degree in Ohio and also worked another part-time job. From that experience, and from my four years of study at both the undergraduate and graduate level, I realized that the need for this kind of organization is absolutely mammoth. Far larger than I had even hoped it would be. When I spoke with mass media executives on the matter, I was pleased to find that not only do they agree with my work and wish me luck-- they also endorse my beliefs and insist that such an audience numbers in the tens of millions.
    Why wouldn't they seize such an audience, you might ask? Advertisers. Although there are dozens of identified barriers in mass media structures that we have designed our own organization to overcome, in the end, once all of them are done away with, the advertising CPM profit model requires mass media companies to only air content that third party companies will be okay with. This means not talking about the realities of war. No company wants to be associated with war. That's the bottom line. No auto insurance company wants to show its cute and funny commercial after you've just heard a story about a group of children playing on a beach whose bodies were just smeared on a concrete wall by a traumatized and deranged solider firing thousand-pound shells from an artillery system anywhere and everywhere for no damn reason. But that story happens, whether or not someone wants you to know about it. And the innocence of victims demands that we hold offenders accountable. That is why we are filing as a nonprofit and running the website completely ad-free.
    But how can we expect to really make a difference?
    We are recruiting senior level experts in all fields relevant to war and peace. International affairs professionals and conflict prevention workers have been working hard to identify with certainty which factors lead a society to violence. Instead of just covering war once it begins, we want to trace those causes, the root causes of conflict, before conflict makes itself evident. Our secondary goal is to cover conflict with greater depth, meaning, and accuracy than American mass media channels. Our primary goal is to prevent conflict before it begins by informing Americans and policymakers at an early-response stage of relevant realities and policy response options conducive to peace, and by tracing the root causes of conflict with relentless fervor everywhere that we find them.

    We, the Board of Directors, have extensive experience in this line of work. Together, our experience stretches back more than one hundred fifty years and reaches across just as many countries. If you pick any random country from around the globe, the chances are that one or more of us has worked there in a full-time capacity for one year or longer. Our experience is in both international affairs and world news media. We constructed this board deliberately to bring international relations and world media together, as a reflection of our dedication to directly connect the audience with the source.

    I am writing this letter to inform you of our plan, to engage you in our discussions about what this new network can accomplish, to explain what missing function we can fill for American and global society, and, of course, to ask for donations. We are a nonprofit, after all. You can follow this link to donate to the Kickstarter campaign, or follow this link to view in PDF form some of the organization's documents and to check out some footage of myself and board members making the case for the company. You'll find biographies, company info books, and all kinds of goodies on either link.

    We aim to facilitate peace and deter war by applying peace media and fair media theory to actual practice. These theories contend that all parties to a conflict are human, that humans, in the majority, make rational choices, and that if we can discover the particulars of why humans make conflicting choices, then we can arrive at peace faster, more effectively, and in a more sustainable manner. Current American mass media do not take this approach and seldom examine foreign affairs with such depth. Our practice contends that greater depth is conducive to greater understanding, so that if we increase the quality of information, we should, at the same time, be encouraging empathy across division.
    In short, peace is not always possible, but neither is conflict always inevitable. We aim to minimize the occurrence and severity of conflict primarily through freely provided reliable information and mass education. Our writers and editors consciously seek to fill the gaps in understanding that lead to war, instead of just accepting that those gaps are pre-existing and that war is unavoidable. Above all else, we read those polls cited in the beginning of this essay. Instead of deciding to ignore those numbers, we made the choice to respond to them. That decision requires nothing less than a brand new world news service using a totally different model. So that's what we've come together to create.

Thank you for your time. See you in the comments section!

All the best,
Matt

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Six Steps Short of War to Beat ISIS

9/14/2014

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Six Steps Short of War to Beat ISIS

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By Phyllis Bennis - Reprinted from The Progressive

President Obama is right: There is no military solution. 

Military actions will not set the stage for political solutions; they will prevent those solutions from taking hold.

Escalating military actions against this violent extremist organization is not going to work.

The bottom line is there is no immediate action that will make ISIS disappear, even if U.S. airstrikes manage to get the right target somewhere and take out an APC or a truckload of guys with RPGs or whatever. 

You can't destroy an ideology — or even an organization —through bombing (look at the efforts to do so with Al Qaeda . . . lots of members killed in Afghanistan, but the organization took root in a bunch of other countries).

 Arming the so-called “moderate” opposition in Syria doesn’t mean supporting the good guys. It means sending arms to the Free Syrian Army which, according to the New York Times, “went on to behead six ISIS fighters…and then posted the photographs on Facebook.”

A military strike might bring some immediate satisfaction, but we all know revenge is a bad basis for foreign policy, especially when it has such dangerous consequences.

As horrifying as the beheading of the two U.S. journalists was, revenge is never a good basis for foreign policy. We should keep in mind that Matthew Olson, the outgoing head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said last week that “there is no credible information that [ISIS] is planning to attack the United States,” and there is “no indication at this point of a cell of foreign fighters operating in the United States – full stop.”

Instead, we have to recognize that military solutions really don’t work. Have we forgotten the failures of the U.S. wars in the Middle East over these many years? 

We need to keep our focus on the medium- and long-term solutions, something not so easy to do in a political year. 

We have to recognize that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those strikes are making real solutions impossible.

 Why? 

We have to start by understanding just why ISIS is so powerful.

First,  ISIS has good weapons (mostly U.S. and Saudi weapons that have flooded the region for more than 15 years).  So we need to start thinking about the need for an arms embargo on all sides.

Second, ISIS has good military leadership, some of it provided by Sunni Iraqi generals who were kicked out of their positions in the military when the U.S. invaded and who are now providing training, strategy and military leadership to ISIS-allied militias and ISIS itself.  These guys are a very secular bunch. They drink and smoke, and they will be unlikely to stick around ISIS if they believe they have any chance of recovering their lost jobs, prestige, and dignity.  That could happen over time, but only if a really new government takes hold in Iraq, but it’s not going to be enough to simply choose a new prime minister and announce a new government made up of too many of the same old sectarian faces.

Third,  ISIS has support from Sunni tribal leaders – the very people President Obama says he wants to "persuade" to break with ISIS.  But these are people who have suffered grievously – first during the U.S. invasion, and especially in the years of the US-backed Shi’a-controlled sectarian government of Nuri al-Maliki. They were demonized, attacked, and dispossessed by the government in Baghdad, and many of them thus see ISIS at the moment as the only force they can ally with to challenge that government. And many of them control large and powerful militias now fighting alongside ISIS against the government in Baghdad.

Fourth, ISIS has support from ordinary Iraqi Sunnis, who (also largely secular) may hate what ISIS stands for, its extremism and violence, but who have suffered terribly under Maliki's sectarian Shi’a-controlled government from arrests, torture, extra-judicial executions, and more. As a result they also are willing to ally with ISIS against Baghdad, at least for now.

So, weakening ISIS requires ending the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis.   The key question is how do we do that?

Step One: Stop the airstrikes.  Because what we in the U.S. see as “hooray, we got the bad guys” is seen by many in Iraq, especially the very Sunnis the president wants to persuade to break with ISIS, as the U.S. acting as the air force for the Kurds and the Shi’a against the Sunnis. Thus the airstrikes defeat the important goal of ending popular support for ISIS, and instead actually serve to strengthen the extremist organization.

Step Two: Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.” In announcements during just the last few weeks, the White House has acknowledged sending close to 1,300 pairs of boots to the ground in Iraq. And who knows how many unacknowledged pairs of CIA and JSOC (special operations forces) sneakers may already be in Iraq? We need a call to “Stop the Slippery Slide Towards Even More Boots on the Ground!”  The U.S. must also stop flooding the region with arms that only result in more violence against civilians, and end its policy of ignoring the violations of human rights and international law committed by its allies.  We need enforcement of the Leahy Law (that prohibits assistance to foreign military units known to violate human rights) here at home.

Step Three: Organize a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS.  Even though the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes and deploying new troops in Iraq, everyone agrees there is no military solution.  So diplomacy must have center stage. That means serious engagement with Iran, among other players. Tehran has more influence in Baghdad than Washington does. If we are serious about wanting to encourage the Iraqi government to accept a truly more inclusive approach, joint pressure from the U.S. and Iran holds the best chance. Even though Iran is predominantly Shi’a itself, the country’s leaders are very worried about the instability in their next-door neighbor resulting from the years of Shi’a sectarianism in Baghdad. The U.S.-Iran nuclear talks appear to be moving very well; this is the moment to broaden those talks to include discussion of a real “grand bargain” between the U.S. and Iran, to include all the regional crises.

Step Four: Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United Nations. That means working to build a real coalition aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria. All the regional governments have their own concerns. Turkey, for instance, knows that joining a U.S.-led military assault on Iraq could threaten the lives of its 49 diplomats and their families now held by ISIS. A real coalition is needed not for military strikes but for powerful diplomacy. That means pressuring U.S. ally Saudi Arabia to stop arming and financing ISIS and other extremist fighters; pressuring U.S. ally Turkey to stop allowing ISIS and other fighters to cross into Syria over the Turkish border; pressuring U.S. allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others to stop financing and arming everyone and anyone in Syria who says they're against Assad.  We don't need another Coalition of the Killing (see Step One for why). Why not work to make it a Coalition of the Rebuilding?

Step Five: Push the UN, despite Lakhdar Brahimi's resignation, to restart real negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means everyone involved needs to be at the table: the Syrian regime; civil society inside Syria including non-violent activists, women, young people, refugees, etc.; the armed rebels; the external opposition; the regional and global players supporting all sides – the US, Russia, Iran, Saudi, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, and beyond. This could provide a moment to work with Russia on Syria policy, thus building on the successful joint effort to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons and perhaps lessening tensions over Ukraine. An arms embargo on all side should be on the long-term agenda.

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

 _________________________

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her books include Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror.

************************

Resources: 

“Obama’s Iraq Airstrikes Could Actually Help the Islamic State, Not Weaken It” in the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/08/how-obamas-iraq-airstrikes-could-help-the-islamic-state/ 

​“Don't Go Back to Iraq - Five Steps the US Can Take Without Going Back to War”  in Foreign Policy in Focus.

http://www.ips-dc.org/dont-go-back-iraq/

“If There’s No Military Solution, Why the Military Actions?” in The Hill.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/216435-if-theres-no-us-military-solution-why-the-military-actions

“Five Things the US Can Do to End the Syria Crisis” in The Nation.

​http://www.thenation.com/article/179872/5-concrete-steps-us-can-take-end-syria-crisis



- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/09/187851/six-steps-short-war-beat-isis#sthash.5k2TNn9r.dpuf
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    About the Authors: Foreign Policy

    Matthew Bishop is the founder of World Report and is conducting research in the history of political media in revolutions. He specializes in US foreign policy, Palestine/Israel, media politics, revolutions, and revolutionary politics

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