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What Khizr Khan Said That Wasn't About Trump and You Probably Won't Hear
Fresh interview comes as US expands its bombing campaign in Libya
Aug 03, 2016
As the United States this week expands its bombing campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) to Libya, Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who gave a powerful anti-Donald Trump speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), has criticized U.S. wars in Muslim nations as leaving us in a "quagmire," "more vulnerable," and creating "chaos for ourselves." But Khan's take on the war on terror is unlikely to be amplified by corporate media, as one political writer points out.
Khan, a Muslim, Pakistani-American, and father of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004, made waves last week for his speech at the DNC. Standing beside his wife, Ghazala, he directed his criticism at the Republican presidential nominee, and said, "You have sacrificed nothing and no one," and asked, "Have you even read the United States Constitution?"
As the New Yorker's Amy Davidson wrote, "Khan, though his speech centered on the loss of his son, had made the case against Trump more powerfully than almost any other speaker."
Since the convention, Khan "has become something of a media celebrity," writes Ben Norton, politics staff writer at Salon. The portrayal often used in these accounts, Norton continues, focuses on patriotism. One such example can be seen here, as posted on CNN Money on Tuesday:
Here was an in-the-flesh example of Muslim assimilation--a man who had lost his son, yet who espoused patriotism to the point of literally brandishing a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution. Not only was the couple's grief universal and relatable, but the Khans put a face on Muslims who are pursuing the American Dream just as countless other ethnicities have done.
On Monday, the same day the U.S. started its new campaign in Libya--a move one antiwar group said will only further "entrench divisions and intensify violence" in the region--the Khans gave an interview on MSNBC's "Hardball."
Asked by host Chris Matthews, "What do you think when you, or feel, when you see us attack Iraq or go into Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden, or we go attack with bombs Libya? We're bombing Syria now--all Islamic countries. What do you feel as an Islamic man?"
Khizr Khan replied, "As a Muslim-American, not just as Islamic man--as a Muslim American, I feel that these policies are not in the interest of United States of America, and we see the result of it. We are more vulnerable now. We have created a chaos and--for ourselves."
"Well, you know you're speaking to the choir," Matthews responded. (In fact, "Matthews' record isn't entirely consistent" on being against either the war in Iraq or on avoiding a military approach to confronting ISIS, Norton notes.)
"I wish this country would have listened to Chris Matthews when he was talking, when he was preaching," Khan said, "we could have saved ourselves from this quagmire."
This section of the interview, Norton points out, "is not included in the isolated clips for the episode on MSNBC's website. One has to watch the full episode to see it."
The situation may remind some of how the corporate media chose to portray Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel laureate and children's education advocate who was attacked by the Taliban. She met with President Barack Obama at the White House and told him that "drone attacks are fueling terrorism." Yet, as Peter Hart wrote at FAIR in 2013, that "didn't register in a corporate media that followed Malala's visit, and her story, very closely." Hart continued:
This is in keeping with other media patterns we've seen. Earlier this year, Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni writer and activist, came to Washington to deliver moving testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the effect of drone strikes on his country: "What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America." His words received scant coverage in the US media (FAIR Blog, 4/24/13).
If Americans wish to understand how US wars are experienced by those on the other side of the military attacks, it is important to hear these voices. But will US media allow these voices to be heard?
Meanwhile, the U.S.-led coalition's strikes on ISIS continue with deadly consequences. According to the transparency group Airwars, July 2016 had the highest number of reported civilian deaths in Syria from coalition strikes since the bombing campaign began nearly two years ago.
Also this week, the U.S. has said it will begin, based on credible evidence, a second probe into whether its strikes near Manjib, Syria killed civilians.
The second formal investigation centers around a July 28 strike, which, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, left at least 28 civilians dead.
The first formal investigation, which the Pentagon announced last week, will look into a July 20 strike which, according to the monitoring group, may have killed scores.
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Thanks to UK and US Intervention, al-Qaeda now Has a Mini-State in Yemen. It's Iraq and Isis All Over Again
As has happened repeatedly since 9/11, the US and countries like Britain fail to combat terrorism because they give priority to retaining their alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies
Apr 15, 2016
They have done it again. The US, Britain and regional allies led by Saudi Arabia have come together to intervene in another country with calamitous results. Instead of achieving their aims, they have produced chaos, ruining the lives of millions of people and creating ideal conditions for salafi-jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
The latest self-inflicted failure in the "war on terror" is in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Sunni states intervened on one side in a civil war in March 2015. Their aim was to defeat the Houthis - labelled somewhat inaccurately as Shia and pro-Iranian - who had seized most of the country in alliance with the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who retained the loyalty of much of the Yemeni army. Yemeni politics is exceptionally complicated and often violent, but violence has traditionally been followed by compromise between warring parties.
The Saudi intervention, supported in practice by the US and Britain, has made a bad situation far worse. A year-long campaign of air strikes was supposed to re-impose the rule of former president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, whose dysfunctional and unelected government had fled to Saudi Arabia. Relentless bombing had some success and the forces fighting in President Hadi's name advanced north, but were unable to retake the capital Sanaa. Over the last week there has been a shaky truce.
The real winners in this war are al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which has taken advantage of the collapse of central government to create its own mini-state. This now stretches for 340 miles - longer than the distance from London to Edinburgh - along the south coast of Yemen. AQAP, which the CIA once described as the most dangerous protagonist of "global jihad" in the world, today has an organized administration with its own tax revenues.
Unnoticed by the outside world, AQAP has been swiftly expanding its own statelet in Yemen in 2015/16, just as Isis did in western Iraq and eastern in Syria in 2013/14. Early last year, President Obama contemptuously described Isis as being like a junior basketball team that would never play in the big leagues. Likewise in Yemen, the American and British governments misjudged the degree to which AQAP would benefit from Operation Decisive Storm, the ill-chosen Saudi name for its military intervention that has proved predictably indecisive.
The Saudi intervention turned a crisis into a catastrophe. Some 6,427 people are known to have been killed in the fighting, but these are only the figures for casualties known to the health authorities. Since the UN says that 14.1 million Yemenis, 54 percent of the population, have no access to health care, this is likely to be an underestimate. Even before the war, Yemen was the poorest Arab nation and its people are now starving or malnourished. OXFAM estimates that 82 percent of Yemen's 21 million population are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The disaster is not only humanitarian, but political, and does not only affect Yemen. As in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, foreign intervention energizes and internationalizes local differences as factions become the proxies of outside powers.
Yemen has always had Shia and Sunni, but it is only recently that sectarian hatred has begun to get anywhere near the level of Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia portrays the Houthis as pawns of Iran, though there is little evidence for this, so Yemen is drawn into the regional confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
A point seldom given sufficient weight is that AQAP is expanding so fast, not because of its own strength, but because its opponents are so weak. The Saudi and Gulf-financed media often refer to pro-President Hadi forces as taking territory, but in reality, the government-in-exile remains in Saudi Arabia. It recaptured the port city of Aden last summer, but its few officials who are there dare not leave their heavily defended compound except by helicopter. Even where Saudi-backed fighters advance, they leave anarchy behind them, conditions in which the arrival of disciplined AQAP forces may be welcomed by local people.
I have been struck, ever since the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, by the extent to which their whole strategy depends on wishful thinking about the strength and popularity of their local ally who usually, on the contrary, is feared and hated. I seldom spoke to Afghans who truly supported the Taliban, but I was always impressed by the number who detested the Afghan government. Yet when one UN official stated publicly that the foreign powers fighting the Taliban, supposedly in support of the government, had "no local partner", he was promptly fired.
There was the same lethal pretense by Western powers in Libya and Syria that the rebels they backed represented the mass of the population and were capable of taking over from existing regimes. In reality, the weakening or destruction of the central government created a power vacuum promptly filled by extreme jihadi groups.
The dire consequences of the Saudi intervention and the rise of AQAP has been largely ignored by Western governments and media. Contrary to their grim-faced declarations about combating terrorism, the US and UK have opened the door to an al-Qaeda mini-state.
This will have an impact far beyond the Middle East because what makes the atrocities orchestrated by Isis in Paris and Brussels so difficult to stop is that they are organized and funded by a real administrative apparatus controlling its own territory. If one terrorist cell, local leader or bomb expert is eliminated, they can be replaced.
As has happened repeatedly since 9/11, the US and countries like Britain fail to combat terrorism because they give priority to retaining their alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, even when their policies - as in Yemen - wreck a whole country and enable al Qaeda and Isis to use the chaos to establish safe havens.
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Defending Attack on Libya, Clinton Blames Obama--And Suggests Repeat for Syria
Former secretary of state mounts questionable defense of disastrous intervention in Libya during Democratic debate
Apr 15, 2016
During a heated Democratic debate in New York on Thursday night, Hillary Clinton sought to both defend and deflect responsibility for her central role in destabilizing Libya--by blaming President Barack Obama.
"The decision was the president's," she said in response to criticism from rival Bernie Sanders over her leadership as then-Secretary of State during the 2011 military intervention to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
"Did I do due diligence? Did I talk to everybody I could talk to? Did I visit every capitol and then report back to the president? Yes, I did. That's what every secretary of state does," Clinton said. "But at the end of the day, those are the decisions that are made by the president to in any way use American military power, and the president made that decision, and yes, we did try without success because of the Libyans' obstruction to our efforts, but we did try and will continue to try to help the Libyan people."
The remarks come just days after Obama admitted in an interview with Fox News that "failing to plan for the day after" Gaddafi's toppling was the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
In a previous debate, Clinton said the president had made "the right decision at the time" and blamed the instability that followed on the Arab Spring and "a lot of other things."
The contrast in perspectives was quickly noted by observers, who also pointed out that Clinton's seeming blame of the president comes after she criticized Sanders for his disapproval of Obama's policies.
Hillary Clinton used Obama's name 45x in last nites #DemDebate except when she refused 2 accept her failed policy in Libya as he has
-- GAPeach (@PoliticsPeach) April 15, 2016
\u201cUnless she genuinely feels none, shouldn't @HillaryClinton express some regrets or lessons learned on Libya? #demdebate\u201d— David Axelrod (@David Axelrod) 1460686339
\u201cPresident Obama got thrown under the bus on #Libya by Secretary Clinton. #DemDebate\u201d— Linda Sarsour (@Linda Sarsour) 1460686701
Sanders also questioned whether Clinton's judgment in Libya would follow in Syria.
He criticized Clinton for "getting actively involved to overthrow and bring about regime change without fully understanding what the consequence of that regime change would be.... I know you keep referring to Barack Obama all night here, but you in Syria, you in Syria talked about a no-fly zone, which the president certainly does not support, nor do I support because, a) it will cost an enormous sum of money, [and] second of all, it risks getting us sucked into perpetual warfare in that region."
Clinton responded with both another seeming criticism of Obama--and by suggesting regime change in Syria.
"Yes, when I was secretary of state, I did urge along with the Department of Defense and the CIA that we seek out, vet, and train, and arm Syrian opposition figures so that they could defend themselves against [President Bashar al] Assad. The president said no."
"I think it's only fair to look at where we are in Syria today and yes, I do still support a no-fly zone because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and so they have some place they can be safe," she said. "Nobody stood up to Assad and removed him, and we have a far greater disaster in Syria than we are currently dealing with right now in Libya."
That comment was noticed as well.
\u201cIn defense of going to war in Libya (a war w/no day after plan, as Obama conceded), Hillary says should have gone to war in Syria #demdebate\u201d— Lee Fang (@Lee Fang) 1460686500
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