Alan J. Kuperman: useful idiot

Alan J. Kupferman

An op-ed that appeared in the Boston Globe on Thursday has been making the rounds on the anti-anti-Qaddafi blogosphere. Written by Alan J. Kuperman (a professor in the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Affairs at U. of Texas in Austin,  former legislative director for Senator Charles Schumer and a fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development), it seeks to undercut the “genocide” narrative that has been put forward by imperialist ideologues. Anybody who is familiar with the background of Samantha Power, a state department official who has a long record of defending “humanitarian interventions”, knows that it is essential to recast every foreign policy crisis as a repeat of WWII in order to get the green light for cruise missile attacks and all the rest. While Kuperman makes some good points, the article is not without some flaws. I doubt that Kuperman would go along with the anti-anti-Qaddafi crowd (especially with his Schumer and USAID connections) but unfortunately they can exploit his article despite his best intentions. It must be said at the outset that there is an element of realpolitik involved in Kuperman’s thinking—no surprise given his post in a department named in honor of one of the past half-century’s biggest mass murderers. In a 3/22/2011 op-ed piece that appeared in US Today, Kuperman wrote:

Gadhafi once was a sponsor of terrorism. After 2003, however, he converted to a U.S. ally— surrendering weapons of mass destruction, paying compensation for past attacks and providing intelligence against radical Islamists. If the U.S. now demands wholesale regime change, it not only could trigger a humanitarian disaster, it also would signal that Washington is an untrustworthy ally. And it could create a failed or hostile state that poses a greater threat.

Yes, who would want to give the impression that Washington is an “untrustworthy ally”? That would be most unfortunate and might even lead to a deepening of the Vietnam syndrome or worse maladies. It is also odd that MRZine would want to give Kuperman any credibility. By crossposting his Boston Globe article warning against intervening in Libya, one would get the impression that he is a guide to principled behavior by powerful states like the USA or Britain. But if you paid a visit to his website, you would find a link to an article titled “There’s Only One Way to stop Iran” that appeared as an op-ed in the 12/23/2009 NY Times. You can guess what his goals are from the title of the article. Here is a quote from it that we would not expect to see on MRZine any time soon:

As for knocking out its nuclear plants, admittedly, aerial bombing might not work. Some Iranian facilities are buried too deeply to destroy from the air. There may also be sites that American intelligence is unaware of. And military action could backfire in various ways, including by undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region.

But history suggests that military strikes could work. Israel’s 1981 attack on the nearly finished Osirak reactor prevented Iraq’s rapid acquisition of a plutonium-based nuclear weapon and compelled it to pursue a more gradual, uranium-based bomb program. A decade later, the Persian Gulf war uncovered and enabled the destruction of that uranium initiative, which finally deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons (a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion). Analogously, Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

As for the risk of military strikes undermining Iran’s opposition, history suggests that the effect would be temporary. For example, NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia briefly bolstered support for President Slobodan Milosevic, but a democratic opposition ousted him the next year.

Yes, indeed. Military strikes could work… A “democratic opposition” ousted Milosevic after NATO’s air campaign kicked in… Politics does make strange bedfellows methinks. I can picture Alan J. Kuperman, Yoshie Furuhashi and John Mage in their pajamas now. Turning now to Kuperman’s Boston Globe op-ed, it appears to have left egg on its authors face right off the bat. He writes the Libyan military is “not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government.” That would not square with a report that appeared in the NY Times the very next day. According to the Times, the distinction between “deliberately massacring civilians” and “targeting the armed rebels” might be lost on the people of Misurata who have been introduced to Qaddafi’s cluster bombs:

Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi have been firing into residential neighborhoods in this embattled city with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world and ground-to-ground rockets, according to witnesses and survivors, as well as physical evidence.

Both of these so-called indiscriminate weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precisely. When fired into populated areas, they place civilians at grave risk.

The dangers were evident beside one of the impact craters on Friday, where eight people had been killed while standing in a bread line. Where a crowd had assembled for food, bits of human flesh had been blasted against a cinder-block wall.

Ironically, both Fidel Castro and Edward S. Herman have warned against the use of cluster bombs in Libya but assumed that the source would be NATO. Herman wrote on MRZine: “Weapons evolution with drones and cluster bombs has tended to enlarge civilian casualties.” One supposes that they may be excused in this instance since they were being used against a “color revolution”. After all, if those bits of human flesh that had been blasted against a cinder-block wall had belonged to someone who was a regular reader of Christopher Hitchens, they deserve everything they get. Professor Kuperman also has a rather weird sense of what it means to avoid civilian casualties. He writes:

Misurata’s population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people — including combatants — have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 — less than 3 percent — are women. If Khadafy were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties.

Okay, my math is a bit rusty but let me have a stab at this. My hometown New York City has a population of just over 8 million. That is 20 times the size of Misurata. So an equivalent casualty rate for NYC over a two-month period would be about 5000, right? And over a 12 month period would be 30,000? Now of course this would not be ”genocide” but it would be a massacre of immense proportions. Consider that Gaza has a population of 1.6 million, just 4 times the size of Misurata. When Israel left 1500 Palestinians dead after its December 2008 invasion, the world cried out against such a bloody attack even to the point that a life-long Zionist by the name of Richard Goldstone felt enough pressure to head a commission that found Israel guilty of war crimes. But when the equivalent death toll in Misurata is nearly as high, our anti-anti-Qaddafi friends see this as a mere bagatelle. The fact that he has now decided that Israel was in the right is understandable in light of the fact that his tribe essentially excommunicated him. But at least one world leader besides Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu saw Israel as having no other choice:

In characteristic fashion Gaddafi sprinkled odd comparisons in his responses. He likened the clampdown on dissidents to what he called Israel’s crackdown of al Qaeda terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

“Even the Israelis in Gaza, when they moved into the Gaza strip, they moved in with tanks to fight such extremists. It’s the same thing here! We have small armed groups who are fighting us. We did not use force from the outset… Armed units of the Libyan army have had to fight small armed al Qaeda bands. That is what’s happened.”