The United States & the Invasion of Iraq.

Malene Melvold Hordvik

This paper explores the reasons for the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The main argument is that the US adopted rhetorical tools such as “fighting terror” and “liberating Iraq” to disguise its real policy objectives of national interests; namely to control and protect the Persian Gulf region’s excessive oil reserves; to guard the interests of US ally Israel; and the broader desire of a US global hegemony.

The paper is organised into two main sections, in which the first section focuses on the official reasons given by the Bush Administration for invading Iraq in 2003. It highlights how the events of 9/11 changed the discourse to a “War on Terror” and was used to justify the invasion, by highlighting the Saddam regime’s alleged support for terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and the urgent need to change regime and liberate Iraq. This section also points out the inconsistencies in the evidence given for invading Iraq, and identifies that there must have been a hidden rationale behind fighting terror and implementing democracy in the Gulf region.

Hence the following section reveals the real US foreign policy objectives for invading Iraq. Through the implementation of Goldstein’s realist model, it reveals that there is continuity in foreign policy objectives through the Clinton and Bush Administrations, however tactics changed from Clinton’s policy of ‘containment’, to Bush’s unilateral approach and regime change in Iraq. Thus, the tactic change helped preserve the national interests of oil, Israel and hegemony, at least in the short term.

On 11 September 2001, global militant Islamist organisation al Qaida carried out a series of coordinated attacks on American soil, commonly referred to as the ‘9/11’ attacks. As a direct response, president George W. Bush launched the global ‘War on Terror’, with a clear message to the international society, ”We will pursue nations that provide aid and safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”^[1] Twelve days later, the President signed the Executive Order 13224, which authorised the US government to block foreign individuals and entities that commit, “or pose a significant risk of committing” terrorism, as well as those who “provide support, services, or assistance to, or otherwise associate with, terrorist and terrorist organizations.”^[2]

Whilst the Order legitimised the invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, intending to overthrow the Taliban government who supposedly hosted al Qaida, it became evident that the Order also would apply to the future invasion of Iraq. The policies that led up to the invasion were spelled out in a series of presidential speeches and statements, namely at the UN General Assembly on 12 September 2002, when Bush addressed his National Security Strategy, which “declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent.”^[3] The security strategy also authorised the US to act preemtively and, if necessary, unilaterally for national security reasons.

As a result, Iraq became the epicentre of the War on Terror. Iraq had since early 2002 been part of Bush’s Axis of Evil^[4], which consisted of "the world's most dangerous regimes"^[5] who supposedly sponsor actions of terrorism and threaten the US with WMDs. Furthermore did US government officials, most noteworthy Vice President Dick Cheney, make a connection between Iraq and al Qaida, consequently manufacturing Iraq as a key to the war on terrorism.^[6] The result was a joint Iraq Resolution passed by the US Congress in October 2002, justifying the pre-emptive military action against Iraq that would take place on 19 March 2003:^[7]

"Our cause is just, the security of the nations we serve and the peace of the world. And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people."

President George W. Bush discusses Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 22 March 2003.

Despite the crystal clear agenda, UN inspectors installed in Iraq since November 2002^[8] had still failed to discover Saddam’s alleged WMDs by May 2003, when the war was considered officially over.^[9] Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission report of 16 June 2004 concluded there was "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States.”^[10]. No link had been found between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden: the two actors were, in fact, bitter enemies: "Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world, bin Laden conceivably for the greater glory of Allah and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power."^[11]

Only by pointing out Iraq on the map, it quickly becomes evident that Operation Liberate Iraq was not in the national interest of the US. If the global superpower had been truly concerned with democracy, it would not have turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses in Iraq’s neighbouring country Saudi Arabia, which govern according to the controversial Sharia law; nor would it ignore the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks were found to hold Saudi passports,^[12] whilst none were of Iraqi origins. As Heradstveit and Hveem (2004: 2) noted,

“Washington’s new desire to introduce democracy in Iraq is merely a rhetorical device to maintain and strengthen the legitimacy of US policy in the Gulf – a kind of psychological warfare ultimately as transparent as the code-name for the war, “Operation Liberate Iraq””.

Thus, the true intentions and formulations of US foreign policy are revealed through the implementation of Goldstein’s Foreign Policy Objectives model, which illustrates how national interests, capabilities, threats and opportunities of the US shape foreign policy objectives. Evidence also proves how the four factors have remained essentially the same throughout the Clinton and Bush administration, however tactics changed from Clinton’s policy of containment towards Iraq to Bush’s desire for regime change.

When Bush was elected the US President in 2000, he inherited Clinton’s policy of containment towards Iraq; however the sanctions that had lasted throughout the 1990s were costing the US excessive prestige.^[13] The Clinton administration also left to Bush the foreign policy agendas concerning the promotion of democracy, free trade and market economies, human rights, and weapons proliferation, as well as other “related issues intersected to promote continuity as well as change in American foreign policy.”^[14] Whilst Bush continued to promote the Western ‘liberal’ agenda, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s first-term national security advisor and second-term secretary of state, mediated for a new realist approach to US foreign policy, arguing that the administration should “refocus the United States on the national interests and the pursuit of key priorities.”^[15] Thus, the events of 9/11 served as Bush’s gateway to intervene and change the course of action towards Iraq, hence end the era of containment.

The previous paragraph confirms how the capabilities available to the US for pursuing its foreign policy objectives remained unchanged through the two presidencies. The current unipolar system^[16] left the two presidents with the opportunity to act unilaterally, however, it is evident that Clinton and Bush viewed their roles as president remarkably different. Whilst the Clinton doctrine (mostly) concerned the promotion of multilateralism and UN peacekeeping, President Bush used the unipolar structure and his capabilities as the US president to act unilaterally. Furthermore, it is evident that not only the capabilities of US foreign policy objectives remained unchanged throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations (and even before), but also the threats and opportunities to US national interests. The external threat of ‘international terrorism’, for instance, was adopted already in the Reagan administration as a new pretext to defend the need for a huge military budget after the Russian threat was eliminated, and to protect the Middle Eastern ‘defence industrial base’ (what Chomsky calls a euphemism for “high-tech industry”).^[17]

Iraq under Saddam Hussein had been an "immense risk" to US national security ever since the Gulf War.^[18] With Saddam in power, American companies were left outside Iraq whilst Asian, Russian and European oil companies were welcomed in.^[19] Being the world’s biggest oil consumer and importer, America has an overwhelming dependence upon oil^[20] that can only be sustained by controlling 67% of the world's proven oil reserves "that lie below the sands of the Persian Gulf."^[21] Thus, the best solution for the Bush Administration was to stop Clinton’s decade-long tradition of containment in Iraq and rather turn “a ‘friendly’ Iraq into a private American oil pumping station”^[22] by invasion. It is also important to note that representatives of the international oil, construction, security and armaments industries gained huge profits from the Iraq war, not to mention interests within the domestic sphere. As invasion in Iraq commenced, neoconservatives in the Pentagon were mediating with Vice President Cheney and President Bush to "funnel reconstruction contracts to firms in which they both had stakes."^[23]

Another significant threat to US national interests, and thus a vital rationale for the invasion of Iraq, was the alleged threat that Iraq posed on US close ally Israel. Israel has been in conflict with Iraq since it was founded in 1946, and as Mailer (2003: 97) argues, "If a war with Iraq ends with Americans installed there, Israel would feel more secure for decades to come." Mearsheimer and Walt (2006) even suggest that the “centrepiece” of US Middle East policy is its close ties with Israel. In their critically acclaimed The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer and Walt reveal that the ‘Israeli Lobby’, which is a “convenient short-hand term for the loose coalition of individuals and organizations”^[24] within the US, including pro-Israel neoconservatives with close ties to the Likud party^[25], in large part motivated the Iraq war. The group was already determined to have Saddam removed long before Bush became President^[26], however they were unable to achieve their objective until after 9/11.^[27]

Whilst Saddam’s Iraq posed a significant threat to US’ foreign policy objectives concerning the possession of Iraqi oil and its ally Israel, the invasion and regime change also opened up other opportunities, in which Mailer (2003: 50-51) proclaim, "behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Middle East as a stepping-stone to taking over the rest of the world." In his renowned book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), Chomsky portrays the American Grand Strategy of ultimate hegemony, which is achieved by injecting US policy into world politics, concurrently maintaining military and economic supremacy. Realist theorists argue that a hegemon works solely to pursue its own interest, which observably match the manoeuvres of the US in the aftermath of 9/11. Hence, a key to the US hegemonic project was to shift from the policy of containment to a preventive war on Iraq, in which 9/11 served as the catalyst “needed to make Bush's grand strategy come alive"^[28].

It is evident, indeed, that the American “imperialist agenda”^[29] started long before 9/11. Already in 1997, Kristol and Kagan founded The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an American think-tank aiming “to promote American global leadership.” The founding statement of the neoconservative agenda was based on Kristol and Kagan’s article in Foreign Affairs in 1996, Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, which argued that America should become a “benevolent global hegemony” rather than reducing its international role in the post-Cold War world. They also stressed that the US must enhance its “strategic and ideological predominance” by, namely, strengthening America’s security, advance its interests and promote its principles globally.^[30] The PNAC proved considerably influential in affecting military and foreign policies within the Bush administration, most noteworthy the policies of national security and the war in Iraq.

To summarise, this paper has revealed the real multicausal rationale of the US invasion of Iraq, which were predominantly to protect and access the Iraqi oil fields, protect the Iraqi threat towards Israel and enhance and strengthen the US global hegemony. This paper has demonstrated that there is continuity in foreign policy objectives through the Clinton and Bush administration, in which the national interests, capabilities, threats and opportunities remained essentially the same. There is, however, a change in tactics used to achieve such goals, as Bush ended Clinton’s policy of containment towards Iraq and changed the regime, justified by the rhetorical War on Terror and Operation Liberate Iraq. Despite the rhetorical tools, it has later become clear that the threat of terrorism was “not a firm foundation on which to build a grand strategy”, although the “foreign and national security policies of the George W. Bush administration rest heavily on its threat.”^[31]

Bibliography

Books:

Wittkopf, E. R., Jones, C. M., & Kegley, C. W. Jr. (2008) American Foreign Policy: Patterns and Process. 7^th edition. Thomson Wadsworth. California, USA.

Burman, S. (2007) The State of the American Empire: How the USA shapes the world. Earthscan. Brighton, UK.

Fawn, R. & Hinnebusch, R. (eds.) (2006) The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. London, UK.

Chomsky (2004) Middle East Illusions. Including Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Maryland, USA.

Gaddis, J. L. (2005) Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. Harvard University Press. USA.

Hart, G. (2004) The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty First Century. Oxford University Press. New York, US.

Heradstveit, D. & Hveem, H. (2004) Oil in the Gulf: Obstacles to Democracy and Development. Ashgate Publishing Limited, UK.

Chomsky (2003) Hegemony or Survival: America’s quest for global dominance. Penguin. London, UK.

Jervis, R. (2003) A Grand Strategy for America. Cornell University Press. New York, USA.

Mailer, N. (2003) Why are we at war? Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, US.

Internet sources:

Haass, R. N. (2013) The Irony of American Strategy: Putting the Middle East in Proper Perspective. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 1 November from: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139106/richard-n-haass/the-irony-of-american-strategy

Mearsheimer, J. J. & Walt, S. M. (2006) The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Retrieved 22 October 2013 from: http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0040.pdf

Biddle, S. D. (2005) American Grand Strategy After 9/11: An Assessment. Retrieved 28 October 2013 from: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub603.pdf

Chomsky, N. (February 2002) Distorted Morality: America's War on Terror? Delivered at Harvard University. Retrieved 3 November 2013 from: http://www.chomsky.info/talks/200202--02.htm

Chomsky, N. (2001) Clash of Civilizations? Retrieved 12 November 2012 from: http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/509/509%20noam%20chomsky.htm

CNN (21 September 2001) Transcript of President Bush’s Address. Retrieved 4 November 2013 from: http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/

Kristol, W. & Kagan, R. (1996) Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy. In Foreign Affairs July/August 1996. Retrieved 9 November 2013 from: http://carnegieendowment.org/1996/07/01/toward-neo-reaganite-foreign-policy/1ea

Governmental sources:

President Discusses Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. (22 March 2003) Retrieved 24 October 2003 from: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030322.html

Address to the United Nations General Assembly President George W. Bush (September 12, 2002) Retrieved 26 October 2013 from: http://www.state.gov/p/io/potusunga/207557.html

Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. (2 October 2002) Retrieved 26 October 2013 from: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021002-2.html

Executive Order 13224 (September 23, 2001) Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. U.S. Department of State. Accessed 22 October 2013 from: http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/122570.htm

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^[1] President Bush in a speech before Congress, on the night of the 9/11 attacks.

^[2] Executive Order 13224, September 23, 2001: U.S. Department of State.

^[3] Chomsky, 2003: 2-3

^[4] Burman, 2007: 108: The Axis of Evil was coined by President Bush in his 29 January 2002 State of the Union speech. He named North Korea, Iran, Iraq, whilst John R. Bolton added Cuba, Syria and Libya.

^[5] Fawn & Hinnebusch, 2006: 2

^[6] Chomsky, 2003.

^[7] Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, 2 October 2002.

^[8] Fawn & Hinnebusch, 2006: 3: On 8 November, the UN Resolution 1441 became the compromise between the US and those "unconvinced of the danger posed by Iraq", which admitted UN inspectors to Iraq to investigate if Iraq still possessed the alleged WMDs.

^[9] Hinnebusch, 2006: 3, 309-10: By the end of December 2002, the UN inspectors in Iraq had visited 150 sites and made surprise visits to 13 sites in one month, but had discovered no WMDs.

^[10]  Hinnebusch, 2006: 309-10: There were multiple evidence that there were no WMDs in Iraq, for instance:

1) United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission UNMOVIC "did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass destruction."

2) The report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the supposed Iraqi WMD capabilities were not at all a threat. Iraqi's nuclear program had already been suspended, whilst the chemical weapon production had been destroyed and dismantled due to effective international constraints, sanctions and weapons inspections.

3) John S. Duffield noted in Oil and the Iraq War that Saddam would never dare supplying WMDs to Al-Qaida, because if such weapons were used, they would most definitely be traced back to Saddam himself.

^[11] Mailer, 2003, p. 36

^[12] Aljazeera, 2013: “How damaged are US-Saudi ties?”

^[13] After the Gulf War (1990-91), Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program had been investigated by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which also worked on the post-war disarmament of Iraq. UNSCOM concluded that the program had stopped completely after the war, in which US and its allies responded to by maintaining the policy of ‘containment’ towards Saddam’s regime. However, the policy, which included various sanctions, has been widely criticised for causing the Iraqi people excessive damage, namely high rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies and diseases from lack of clean water.

^[14] Wittkoph & Jones, 2008: 57

^[15] Rice, 2000 as seen in Wittkoph & Jones, 2008: 12

^[16] Critics, however, argue that the bipolar system of the Cold War changed into a multipolar system after the fall of the Soviet block in 1991. Despite this, it is undeniable that the US remained the largest and strongest power.

^[17] Chomsky, 2001

^[18] Hinnebusch, 2006: If Iraq had annexed Kuwait during the Gulf War (1990-1) and gained Kuwaiti and Saudi oil fields, it would have possessed 40% of the world’s oil reserves – without a ‘helping hand’ from America.

^[19] Hinnebusch, 2006: 289: For instance, French oil and gas company Total "signed a letter of intent for oil development with the Saddam regime."

^[20] Burman, 2007: 26-8: The US imports 60% of the oil it consumes; a number projected to rise to 75% by 2030.

^[21] Ralph Nader in Mailer, 2003: 56

^[22] Youssef Ibrahim, International Herald Tribune, 1 November 2002. In Hinnebusch, 2006.

^[23] Burman, 2007: 30: One example of the internal links between business corporations and US foreign policy making is seen in the case of Halliburton, one of the world's biggest oil-services companies. The link between Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney, previous CEO of Halliburton, and Halliburton’s post-war oil production and rebuilding of Iraq is conspicuous.

^[24] Mearsheimer and Walt, 2006: 14

^[25] Hinnebusch, 2006

^[26] Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006: 33: On 20 September 2001, for example, a group of neoconservatives published an open letter to the President, stating “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

^[27] Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006: 33: In the aftermath of 9/11, the lobby established two organisations with the intention to manipulate intelligence information and portrait Saddam as an imminent threat to US security. One of the organisations, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, was ordered to find links between Iraq and al Qaida “that the intelligence community supposedly missed”.

^[28] Burman, 2007: 14

^[29] Historian John Lewis Gaddis (2004) also noted that the Bush Administration’s emphasis on unilateralism, pre-emption and hegemony is in fact a recreation of America’s 19^th century foreign policy.

^[30] Kristol and Kagan (2006) also argued that Washington needed to “spend about $ 60-$ 80 billion more each year in order to preserve America's role as global hegemon.”

^[31] (Hart, 2004 & Wittkoph & Jones, 2008)

Why the modern world is bad for your brain.

In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll. Here neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how our addiction to technology is making us less efficient

Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.

 Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebookupdater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.

In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times – one might have gone out for a walk or been between places – and so if someone couldn’t reach you (or you didn’t feel like being reached), it was considered normal.

Now more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their mobile phones to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.

Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many benefits to marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain and stress, it is well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol, activates dedicated cannabinol receptors in the brain and interferes profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve. MIT’s Earl Miller adds, “People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.” And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.

  

Then there are the metabolic costs that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.

To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break? It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. One of the first things we lose is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their daily weight of information processing by trying to multitask?

In discussing information overload with Fortune 500 leaders, top scientists, writers, students, and small business owners, email comes up again and again as a problem. It’s not a philosophical objection to email itself, it’s the mind-numbing number of emails that come in. When the 10-year-old son of my neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the Pain Genetics lab at McGill University) was asked what his father does for a living, he responded, “He answers emails.” Jeff admitted after some thought that it’s not so far from the truth. Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.

Before email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest some effort in it. You’d sit down with pen and paper, or at a typewriter, and carefully compose a message. There wasn’t anything about the medium that lent itself to dashing off quick notes without giving them much thought, partly because of the ritual involved, and the time it took to write a note, find and address an envelope, add postage, and take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t cost anything.

Sure, there’s the money you paid for your computer and your internet connection, but there is no incremental cost to sending one more email. Compare this with paper letters. Each one incurred the price of the envelope and the postage stamp, and although this doesn’t represent a lot of money, these were in limited supply – if you ran out of them, you’d have to make a special trip to the stationery store and the post office to buy more, so you didn’t use them frivolously. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them.Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”

There are also important differences between snail mail and email on the receiving end. In the old days, the only mail we got came once a day, which effectively created a cordoned-off section of your day to collect it from the mailbox and sort it. Most importantly, because it took a few days to arrive, there was no expectation that you would act on it immediately. If you were engaged in another activity, you’d simply let the mail sit in the box outside or on your desk until you were ready to deal with it. Now email arrives continuously, and most emails demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a baby panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch with a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.

Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication we used signalled its relevance, importance, and intent. If a loved one communicated with you via a poem or a song, even before the message was apparent, you had a reason to assume something about the nature of the content and its emotional value. If that same loved one communicated instead via a summons, delivered by an officer of the court, you would have expected a different message before even reading the document. Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transact different business from that of telegrams or business letters. The medium was a clue to the message. All of that has changed with email, and this is one of its overlooked disadvantages – because it is used for everything. In the old days, you might sort all of your postal mail into two piles, roughly corresponding to personal letters and bills. If you were a corporate manager with a busy schedule, you might similarly sort your telephone messages for callbacks. But emails are used for all of life’s messages. We compulsively check our email in part because we don’t know whether the next message will be for leisure/amusement, an overdue bill, a “to do”, a query… something you can do now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant.

This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?

Now of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication used only by “old people”. In its place they text, and some still post to Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email. Many people under 20 now see Facebook as a medium for the older generation.

For them, texting has become the primary mode of communication. It offers privacy that you don’t get with phone calls, and immediacy you don’t get with email. Crisis hotlines have begun accepting calls from at-risk youth via texting and it allows them two big advantages: they can deal with more than one person at a time, and they can pass the conversation on to an expert, if needed, without interrupting the conversation.

But texting suffers from most of the problems of email and then some. Because it is limited in characters, it discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting’s hyperimmediacy. Emails take some time to work their way through the internet and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you’ve got a recipe for addiction: you receive a text, and that activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out “More! More! Give me more!”

In a famous experiment, my McGill colleagues Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens. This structure regulates dopamine production and is the region that “lights up” when gamblers win a bet, drug addicts take cocaine, or people have orgasms – Olds and Milner called it the pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar; they even ignored the opportunity for sex. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A 30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu (Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by his going into cardiac arrest.

Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload

© Daniel J. Levitin. Extracted from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, published by Viking (£13.60 from Amazon)

Obama: 'We have to twist arms when countries don't do what we need them to'.

President Barack Obama has said the reality of “American leadership” at times entails “twisting the arms” of states which “don’t do what we need them to do,” and that the US relied on its military strength and other leverage to achieve its goals.

In a broad-ranging interview with Vox, which Obama himself described as a venue "for the brainiac-nerd types," the US president both denied the efficacy of a purely “realist” foreign policy but also arguing that at times the US, which has a defense budget that exceeds the next 10 countries combined, needed to rely on its military muscle and other levers of power.

Lauding the rule-based system to emerge in the post-World War II era, Obama admitted it wasn’t perfect, but argued “the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be.”

He argued, however, that the efficacy of this idealistic, Wilsonian, rule-based system was severely tested by the fact that “there are bad people out there who are trying to do us harm.”

In the president’s view, the reality of those threats has compelled the US to have “the strongest military in the world.” Obama further says that “we occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do if it weren't for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had — if we didn't have that dose of realism, we wouldn't get anything done, either.”

Obama argues that the US doesn’t have “military solutions” to all the challenges in the modern world, though he goes on to add that “we don’t have a peer” in terms of states that could attack or provoke the United States.

“The closest we have, obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear arsenal, but generally speaking they can't project the way we can around the world. China can't, either. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined,” he said.

Within this context, Obama said that “disorder” stemming from “failed states” and “asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations” were the biggest challenges facing the international community today.

Obama also argued that tackling these and other problems entailed “leveraging other countries” and “other resources” whenever possible, while also recognizing that Washington is “the lead partner because we have capabilities that other folks don't have.”

This approach, he said, also led to “some burden-sharing and there's some ownership for outcomes.”

When asked about the limits of American power, Obama conceded that there were things that his administration simply cannot do in terms of power projection, but remained upbeat.

“Well, American leadership, in part, comes out of our can-do spirit. We're the largest, most powerful country on Earth. As I said previously in speeches: when problems happen, they don't call Beijing. They don't call Moscow. They call us. And we embrace that responsibility. The question, I think, is how that leadership is exercised. My administration is very aggressive and internationalist in wading in and taking on and trying to solve problems.” meeting in New York September 25s/Kevin Lamarque)

This appeal to US leadership, which has often been couched within the notion of American exceptionalism, has regularly been questioned by Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took issue with the notion past September, following Obama’s speech before the UN in which the US president named “Russian aggression in Europe” along with the Ebola epidemic and ISIS as threats to international peace and security.

Lavrov said that Obama’s address to the UN was the “speech of a peacemaker – the way it was conceived,” but added that he had “failed to deliver, if one compares it to real facts.”

The Russian foreign minister added that Obama had presented a worldview based on the exceptionality of the United States.

“That's the worldview of a country that has spelt out its right to use force arbitrarily regardless of the UN Security Council's resolutions or other international legal acts in its national defense doctrine,” Lavrov said.

In a September 2013 Op-Ed article in the New York Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the concept of American exceptionalism was a precarious one in the global arena.

"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation," Putin wrote. "There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." Published time: February 11, 2015 11:37 RT.com.

Ukraine ultra-nationalist leader rejects Minsk peace deal, vows 'to continue war'.

Ukraine’s Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh said his radical movement rejects the Minsk peace deal and that their paramilitary units in eastern Ukraine will continue “active fighting" according to their "own plans."

The notorious ultranationalist leader published a statement on his Facebook page Friday, saying that his radical Right Sector movement doesn’t recognize the peace deal, signed by the so-called 'contact group' on Thursday and agreed upon by Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia after epic 16-hour talks.

Yarosh claimed that any agreement with the eastern militia, whom he calls “terrorists,” has no legal force.

In his statement, Yarosh claimed that that the Minsk deal is contrary to Ukraine’s constitution, so Ukrainian citizens are not obliged to abide by it. Thus if the army receives orders to cease military activity and withdraw heavy weaponry from the eastern regions, the Right Sector paramilitaries, who are also fighting there “reserve the right” to continue the war, he said.

The Right Sector paramilitary organization continues to deploy its combat and reserve units, to train and logistically support personnel, while coordinating its activities with the military command of the Ukrainian army, paramilitary units of the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry, he said.

The breakthrough Minsk agreement was reached on Thursday following marathon overnight negotiations between Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia, and offer hope the fighting in Eastern Ukraine may come to an end. The talks were part of a Franco-German initiative. President Francois Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Kiev and Moscow before meeting the Russian and Ukrainian leaders at the negotiating table in Minsk.

Bluntly rejecting the German and French initiative, Yarosh said President Petro Poroshenko should have turned to the US or UK which “observe a consistent anti-Kremlin policy.”

“This could be devastating for the whole agreement,” Lode Vanoost, a former OSCE security consultant, told RT. “It could destroy it before it even starts. Now the fact that they announced it already one day ahead could of course mean that they sort of tried to force some kind of provocation so that the other side would react giving them an excuse to go on. But nevertheless this is indeed a very dangerous situation, yes.”

In March 2014, Yarosh appealed to Doku Umarov, Moscow's most wanted terrorist before he was reported dead, asking him “to take a chance and win over Russia.” He also later threatened to destroy Russian pipelines on Ukrainian territory calling Moscow “an enemy.”

The Russian Investigative Committee started criminal cases against several members of the radical Ukrainian groups over charges of fighting against the Russian military in the Chechen wars of the 1990s. Right Sector’s Dmitry Yarosh also faced a separate criminal case over public calls for extremist activities. Moscow charged Yarosh in absentia, demanding his arrest.

In July last year the Interpol put Right Sector leader Yarosh on its wanted list. This January, Russia’s Supreme Court banned the activitiesof the Right Sector within the country.

The radical movement was formed as a coalition of nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations during the Maidan protests in Kiev at the end of 2013.While wearing Nazi insignia, Right Sector fighters used clubs, petrol bombs and firearms against Ukrainian police during the EuroMaidan protests.

Last year, Kiev organized the National Guard force comprising former and current Ukrainian troops and volunteers from EuroMaidan “self-defense” squads. The National Guard was enabled to carry out the functions of any law enforcement agency by a decree signed by then-acting President Aleksandr Turchinov.

However Yarosh denies any of his fighters joined the National Guard. He believes his own units are better organized.

A number of volunteer pro-government battalions were also organized in Kiev – among them Aidar, Azov and Donbass. Human rights group Amnesty International reported in September that Aidar members operating in the north of the Lugansk Region “have been involved in widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion and possible executions.” Troops from the Ukrainian Azov and Donbass battalions were reportedly seen wearing Nazi paraphernalia such as swastikas and SS badges.

In March 2014, the extremist Right Sector decided to become a political party, nominating Yarosh for president. The same month over 1,500 nationalists from Right Sector circled the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev, threatening to storm it and capture Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

In May 2014, Right Sector radicals reportedly descended on Odessa, where a standoff with anti-Kiev demonstrators resulted in dozens of people being shot, burned alive and even butchered with axes in the city’s Trade Unions House massacre.

Despite his notoriety, Yarosh was elected to be a member of the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovnaya Rada) to head the Right Sector political party. The radical movement has refused to acknowledge the authority of the Kiev government and even threatened its top figures. In September 2014, Yarosh said he could oust Poroshenko “like Yanukovich” while Right Sector radicals staged a violent rally in front of the presidential HQ in Kiev.

In January, Poroshenko’s aide told national TV that Right Sector paramilitary units had refused to come under the command of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Yury Biryukov said that he “personally proposed a full legal clearance scheme to Right Sector,” but they “turned down this service,” expressing a wish to remain autonomous and report to nobody.

Meanwhile, the US military has recently announced it would deploy soldiers to Ukraine this spring to train the country’s National Guard.

Published time: February 13, 2015 15:45 RT

BBC airs Maidan fighter admitting he fired on police before Kiev massacre.

Nearly a year after the massacre on Kiev's Maidan left over 50 dead, the BBC has aired footage of an opposition fighter who says he fired at police in the early morning that day, bringing into question the popular narrative that riot police fired first.

"I was shooting downward at their feet," says a man the broadcaster decided to identify as Sergei. "Of course, I could have hit them in the arm or anywhere. But I didn't shoot to kill."

According to Sergei, he took up a position in the Kiev Conservatory, a music academy located on the southwest corner of Kiev’s Independence Square, on February 20.

One day prior, he had met up with a man who offered him two guns. The first was a 12-gauge shotgun, while the other was a hunting rifle – a Saiga that fired high-velocity rounds.

He chose the Saiga and hid it at a post office that, along with the conservatory, was under the protesters’ control. Sergei told the BBC he was later escorted to the Conservatory, where, with a second gunman, he spent 20 minutes before 7:00 am firing on police.

Other witness testimony has corroborated his account. Andriy Shevchenko, who was an opposition MP at the time and also part of the Maidan movement, said he had received a phone call from the head of the riot police on Maidan Square claiming his officers had come under fire.

"He calls me and says, 'Andriy, somebody is shooting at my guys.' And he said that the shooting was from the Conservatory," Shevchenko said.

Shevchenko, in turn, says he contacted Andriy Parubiy, who headed up security for the protesters and was known as the Commandant of Maidan. It’s at this point where the details of what followed become murky. Parubiy says he sent a group of “his best men” to scour the Conservatory and determine if anyone was firing from it. Parubiy, who now serves as deputy speaker in the current Ukrainian parliament, claims his men found no gunmen in the building.

A photographer who had gained access to the Conservatory later in the morning just after 8:00 am, however, took pictures of men with guns in the building, though he never saw them discharge their weapons.

All the while, Shevchenko claims he was getting increasingly panicked calls from the head of the riot police, who said that five officers had been wounded and another killed before he decided to pull out. Sergei's account appears to contradict Parubiy’s.

"I was just reloading," Sergei told the BBC. "They ran up to me and one put his foot on top of me, and said, 'They want a word with you, everything is OK, but stop doing what you're doing.'"

(Reuters / Konstantin Chernichkin)

Sergei says he was convinced the men who dragged him away were from Parubiy’s security unit, though he admits he did not recognize their faces. After being taken out of the building, he was dropped off outside of Kiev by car, though it appears no further harm came to him.

By this point, the BBC notes that three policemen had been wounded fatally and the mass killings began that ultimately left more than 50 protesters dead.

 

February 20 was the bloodiest day of protests since they started in November 2013, and the bloodshed ultimately led to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. Both sides have blamed each other for being behind the sniper fire that brought the Euromaidan revolution to a head.

RT's Aleksey Yaroshevsky, who was reporting form the scene that day, came under fire from unidentified gunmen at the time.

Witnesses at the time said they saw snipers shooting at both protesters and security forces.

A leaked recording of a conversation between European Union foreign policy Baroness Caroline Ashton and Estonia’s foreign minister, Urmas Paet, also appeared to confirm the possibly that it had been members of the opposition, and not Yanukovich’s security forces, who fired the first shots.

“There is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers – it was not Yanukovich, it was somebody from the new [ruling] coalition,” Paet told Ashton, citing claims that “there were the same snipers killing people from both sides.”

Ukraine’s former State Security chief, Oleksandr Yakymenko, would also blame Ukraine's current Euromaidan government, saying they hired the snipers who precipitated violence on the square.

The protest leaders, many of whom hold positions in the current Ukrainian government, insist that Yanukovich and his security forces bear full responsibility for the shootings.

In April, almost two months after the shooting, Ukrainian prosecutors arrested several Berkut riot police officers as possible “Maidan snipers.” The investigation, however, seems to have ended there.

In October, Reuters published the results of its examination, which analyzed Kiev’s probe into February’s Maidan shootings. The news agency’s reporters uncovered “serious flaws” in the case against Berkut officers. Dozens of families of Maidan victims are still demanding "an objective and accurate investigation." 

Published time: February 12, 2015 16:25 RT.

READ MORE: Reuters investigation exposes ‘serious flaws’ in Maidan massacre probe

READ MORE: Kiev snipers hired by Maidan leaders - leaked EU's Ashton phone tape

Sarkozy: Crimea cannot be blamed for joining Russia

Crimea cannot be blamed for seceding from Ukraine – a country in turmoil – and choosing to join Russia, said former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. He also added that Ukraine “is not destined to join the EU.”

 “We are part of a common civilization with Russia,” said Sarkozy, speaking on Saturday at the congress of the Union for a Popular Movement Party (UMP), which the former president heads.

“The interests of the Americans with the Russians are not the interests of Europe and Russia,” he said adding that “we do not want the revival of a Cold War between Europe and Russia.”

Regarding Crimea’s choice to secede from Ukraine when the country was in the midst of political turmoil, Sarkozy noted that the residents of the peninsula cannot be accused for doing so.

“Crimea has chosen Russia, and we cannot blame it [for doing so],” he said pointing out that “we must find the means to create a peacekeeping force to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine.”

In March 2014 over 96 percent of Crimea’s residents – the majority of whom are ethnic Russians – voted to secede from Ukraine to reunify with Russia. The decision was prompted by a massive uprising in Ukraine, that led to the ouster of its democratically elected government, and the fact that the first bills approved by the new Kiev authorities were infringing the rights of ethnic Russians.

Concerning Kiev’s hopes of joining the EU in the near future Sarkozy voiced the same position as had been previously expressed by some EU leaders. “It is not destined to join the EU," he said. “Ukraine must preserve its role as a bridge between Europe and Russia.”

While the West has been criticizing Russia’s stance on Crimea, the Russian Foreign Minister said on Saturday that the peninsula’s residents had the right to “self-determination” citing the March referendum. He gave the example of Kosovo, which despite not holding a referendum, was allowed to leave Serbia and create its own state.

 “In Crimea what happened complies with the UN Charter on self-determination,” Lavrov said during his speech at the Munich security conference. “The UN Charter has several principles, and the right of a nation for self-determination has a key position.”

On Saturday, French President Francois Hollande called for broader autonomy for the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. They need “rather strong” autonomy from Kiev, he said speaking on France 2 TV.

The comment comes after Hollande together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Kiev and Moscow this week for talks on the resolution of the Ukrainian conflict, that has escalated in January. 

Published time: February 08, 2015 01:45 RT.

US president responsible if Iran nuclear talks fail: Larijani

Iran’s Parliament (Majlis) Speaker Ali Larijani says US President Barack Obama will be held responsible if the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program fail.

Speaking on Saturday, Larijani pointed to the attempts by some lawmakers in the US Congress seeking more sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program saying  Obama should manage the domestic pressure himself.

“The issues they raise about the US Congress are not relevant to us. If Obama can’t solve his problems, he himself will be responsible for the disruption of the negotiations,” the Iranian speaker said.

Larijani said Obama’s problems do not concern Iran, adding that Tehran has shown enough flexibility in the negotiations.

Certain lawmakers in the US are drafting legislation to impose new sanctions against Iran as the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 are negotiating to reach a comprehensive nuclear agreement. This is while an interim agreement reached between Iran and the six other countries in November 2013 stipulates that no more nuclear-related sanctions should be imposed on the Islamic Republic as long as the deal is in effect. The agreement has been extended until July this year as the two sides continue to negotiate to reach a final agreement.

Obama has called on the new Republican-controlled Congress not to impose more sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, saying he would veto any draft bill that may reach his desk. “New sanctions passed by this Congress, at this moment in time, will all but guarantee that diplomacy fails,” Obama said on Tuesday.

Larijani rejected claims that sanctions have forced Iran to the negotiating table. “They made something called sanctions so that they can pressure Iran with them but realized later that the bans were not effective either, and Iran advanced [despite the restrictions],” he said.

Iran and the P5+1 (China, Russia, France, Britain and the US – plus Germany) have been holding talks to secure a final comprehensive deal over Iranian nuclear work. Since an interim deal was agreed in the Swiss city of Geneva in November 2013, the negotiating sides have missed two self-imposed deadlines to ink a final agreement.

Iran and the P5+1 countries now seek to reach a high-level political agreement by March 1 and to confirm the full technical details of the accord by July 1. Sat Jan 24, 2015 10:17AM PTV