Obama's Not-So-Excellent Latin American Adventure

By now you've probably heard about the Secret Service prostitution scandal that has totally overshadowed President Obama's trip to participate in the Summit of the Americas, a gathering of the nations of Latin America – plus the United States and Canada, this past weekend in Cartagena, Colombia.  After reading this report from Reuters, maybe the Secret Service distraction isn't a bad thing.

While the White House is touting the signing of a free-trade agreement between the United States and Colombia as an accomplishment from the Summit, most of the focus seems to be falling on the United States increasingly diminishing role in Latin American affairs, quite a step back for the US, which since the time of the Monroe Doctrine has considered Latin America to be our backyard.  But that attitude may be part of the reason for the split.  Latin American governments are finding the United States to be increasingly more arrogant and demanding in its bilateral dealings with them, and indications are that they are growing tired of the long-standing status quo.

The most visible sign of this split is the public rebuke suffered by the US and Canada over Cuba.  The two nations pushed a motion to bar inviting Cuba to future Summits unless Cuba engaged in massive political reforms. None of the Summit's other 32 participants signed on to the resolution.  The nations of Latin America meanwhile are charting a course that isn't dependent on the United States.  China is pouring money into investments in a host of Latin American nations, while Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has been promoting the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), as a US-free alternative to existing regional bodies like the Organization of American States.

Critics will likely be quick to blame the failure of the United States at the Summit on Pres. Obama, but as one State Dept. official noted to Reuters, many of the wedge issues between the US and Latin America have been brewing for decades.  And a number of Latin American leaders said that they truly appreciated President Obama's attendance at the Summit and his apparent interest in the discussions and decision-making process, even if they disagree with the official positions of the United States.  And a major driver of the US-Latin American split is the growing economic clout of a number of nations in the region, particularly Brazil, which is a member of the BRICS group of the world's top-performing emerging economies.  Brazil's statue will be boosted by their deepwater oil reserves, which could net the country vast amounts of money from crude oil exports, and Brazil's hosting of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

As Iraq Crumbles

Iraq is falling apart at breakneck speed.  With the dust still settling from the US troop convoy out of the country, Iraq is showing every sign of coming apart at the seams. This morning, Baghdad was rocked by a series of coordinated blasts during the morning rush hour that killed at least 50 people and wounded more than 100 others.  But those explosions are masking an even larger problem gripping the Iraqi government.

Earlier in the week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Iraq's Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi, claiming that al-Hashemi was running his own murderous hit squad.  It's worth noting here that this is Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister trying to arrest Iraq's Sunni Vice President.  In response, al-Hashemi fled to the northern city of Erbil, de facto capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, where he was granted protection by Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani.

So as of Thursday morning, Iraq's whole political system was in a three-sided stand-off broken down along ethnic/sectarian lines.  Part of the reason that this kind of situation could even happen in the first place is that Iraq's national government has obviously taken a lesson from the US Congress and developed an amazing ability to avoid making tough decisions.  The final status of Kurdistan within the Iraqi federal state has gone unresolved for years. The main sticking point is over oil revenues from the oil rich north, which the Kurds think should stay in their autonomous region and the Sunnis/Shiites think should be distributed to the country at-large.  Some oil companies have signed contracts to develop resources in the north with the Kurdish government in Erbil, which the federal government in Baghdad hasn't decided yet whether to honor or not. And then there's the city of Kirkuk, which sits in the middle of Iraq's northern oil patch, that the Kurds say was historically Kurdish and should thus belong to them, but Iraq's Arabs say was repopulated by Saddam Hussein with Shiites and Sunnis and so should not.

Of course the situation involving Iraq's Vice President has sparked claims from the Republican critics in the United States that the possible pending collapse of Iraq is all President Obama's fault for withdrawing US troops too quickly and too soon.  This line of argument ignores the fact that Pres. Obama's decision was motivated by the government of Iraq's refusal to sign an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement (or SOFA) that exempted US troops from prosecution under Iraqi law for any perceived misdeeds (you can only imagine how Obama's Republican critics would have howled if he had left US troops in Iraq without this protection). A larger question for the critics though is if after eight years Iraq's government was so fragile it would start to crack just days after the US withdrew from the country, when then would it be ready to govern? In another five years? Ten? Would the United States need a massive and permanent presence in Iraq to play referee to the feuding ethnic and sectarian groups, and is this what they're advocating?

The United States went to war in Iraq for dubious motives to remove the government of Saddam Hussein.  Our plan for the “day after” Saddam’s fall was to install Ahmed Chalabi, a shifty Iraqi ex-pat, as the new leader, a plan the Iraqis balked at.  It is clear that in the eight years following the rejection of Chalabi, the US never was able to come up with a Plan B other than to try to graft a federal system of government onto three groups with long and contentious histories, a plan that now shows signs, not surprisingly, of coming dramatically apart.

US Sends Marines To Australia

President Obama has finally made good on his twice-delayed state visit to Australia.  The announcement that is grabbing the headlines this morning is that the United States will be basing a contingent of US Marines in Australia.  The Marines will be based near Darwin in the remote, far northern part of the country; 250 Marines will start the mission though their numbers will eventually grow to 2,500.  Darwin has been a historic location for US forces in Australia.  In the opening days of World War II, the US military used Darwin as a forward operating base to defend Australia against a possible Japanese invasion, as that threat subsided, Darwin became a logistical hub for the Allies island-hopping campaign against the Japanese across the Pacific.

What the Marines will be doing in Darwin has not yet been adequately described, though fingers are, of course, being pointed towards China, which has become more assertive in the seas near their coast.  China has had what we would diplomatically call “incidents” with both Japanese and Vietnamese ships in the South China Sea in the past two years; it's likely not a coincidence that these incidents have occurred as each country explores the seabed for oil and natural gas deposits.  And then there is the launch earlier this year of China's first aircraft carrier.  Frankly, I have a hard time getting that worked up about a second-hand, Soviet-era boat from Ukraine, but others point to the ship, and China's renaming it the Shi Lang after the Chinese admiral who conquered Taiwan, as subtle signs of their aggressive intentions in the region.

On one hand, it is hard to see China actually going to war with any of its neighbors.  China seems to have learned the lesson from the Soviet Union that trying to build and maintain an empire through military force is a sure route to bankruptcy.  Instead, China has followed the post-Soviet model laid down by Russia of trying to dominate countries through economics, either as suppliers of raw materials or consumers of your goods.  In that respect, war would be bad for business, and it's worth noting that China and Australia do a lot of business together.  But on the other hand, there's demographics.  Thanks to China's “one child” policy and cultural preference for boys, the male-female ratio is seriously out of whack, one statistic I have seen puts it at 88 women for every 100 men (typically the ratios are near 50/50 with a slight lean towards women).  Historically, societies with male/female ratios of this scale have been far more likely to go to war, since war gives unattached males something to do.

And there's always the modern American policy fallback position of anti-terror operations.  The Obama Administration has quietly, though aggressively, stepped up anti-terror operations by drone aircraft and US special forces around the globe, for example places like Ethiopia and the Seychelles are now bases for US drones, while military advisers were recently sent to Uganda.  Marines in Darwin would be ideally based to carry out operations in Indonesia, the world's largest (by population) Muslim nation and one that is not unfamiliar with Islamic extremism.

If nothing else, the basing of US Marines in Darwin will help to strengthen ties between the US and Australia, a nation that in recent years has been increasingly seeing itself more and more as part of Asia.

Al-Shabaab: This Time It's Personal

A quick follow-up now to Wednesday's piece on threats of revenge coming from al-Qaeda's Somali franchise al-Shabaab, they're at it again, only this time the threats are personal: Al-Shabaab is threatening to kill Barack Obama's paternal grandmother Sarah in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALs.

Despite being the grandmother of the most powerful man on earth, 88-year old Sarah Hussein Obama lives a quiet life in rural Kenya. She also seems unfazed by al-Shabaab's threats, telling ABC News: “my life has not been affected in any way…it has not restricted my movement. If the government has decided to bring more security personnel, we are OK with it,” after Kenyan authorities flooded her rural village with security personnel.

Al-Shabaab is currently fighting African Union peacekeepers for control of southern Somalia, including the capital city, Mogadishu. Though al-Shabaab's activities have mostly been limited to southern Somalia, they were blamed for a bombing in Kampala, Uganda at a 2010 World Cup viewing party that killed more than 70 people. Ugandan troops make up the bulk of the African Union peacekeepers in Somalia.

Obama Gets Osama

Even though the media coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden has been wall-to-wall, ESPN of all places ran it on their bottom-of-the-screen score ticker, I still felt like I should throw in a few of my own comments this morning. First is that along with giving credit to the SEALs team that carried out the operation on Sunday, credit also has to go to the Obama Administration for their careful handling of the intelligence leading up to the raid. I thought this graphic posed by several friends on Facebook this morning was pretty hilarious:



The raid came after six months of dedicated intelligence work that had narrowed bin Laden's likely whereabouts from a region in Pakistan to a specific mansion in the city of Abbottabad. The administration handled this analysis the way that covert intelligence should be handled – quietly, smartly and without fanfare. Unfortunately the same can't be said for some Congressional staffers who apparently leaked news of bin Laden's death in the hour ahead of the President's official announcement last night after their respective bosses had received courtesy calls from members of the administration to give them a heads-up about the soon-to-be breaking news. It shows again how Congress today, sadly, is more interested in self-promotion than in actually doing anything useful for the country. Those leaking staffers should all be fired. Today.

Other thoughts. I wasn't surprised that bin Laden was caught living in a city rather than hoping from cave to cave like a mountain goat. Ever since former Bosnian Serb president and indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic was captured after years on the run living a fairly public life in Belgrade, Serbia where he had reinvented himself as some kind of alternative medicine guru, I thought the cave-hopping scenario for bin Laden was pretty unlikely.

Bin Laden's death does provide some valuable lessons to any others who find themselves the target of a global manhunt. First is not to live in a mansion owned by a pair of unemployed brothers; one reason why intelligence officials scrutinized the bin Laden compound was that it was built in 2005 supposedly for $1 million, yet its owners of record were unemployed and apparently lacking assets of their own. Blending in is also important. Analysts were further tipped off by the fact that this million-dollar home lacked Internet or phone service, something you think you would add if you were going to spend seven-figures on building a house. And they burned their trash unlike everyone else in the neighborhood who just used the curb-side refuse pick-up; perhaps bin Laden should have invested in a good quality paper-shredder instead if he was that worried about security.

I also have to admit that the mission leaves me feeling conflicted about Guantanamo Bay. I've been critical of the “eternal imprisonment” of some at Guantanamo Bay. Last week's Wikileaks story that US officials believe roughly ¾ of the prisoners there haven't actually done anything to warrant being locked up forever, but that they're being kept in prison “just in case” didn't do anything to improve my opinion of the place. Yet the intelligence chain that led to the death of bin Laden apparently started four years ago from intel gathered from a Gitmo prisoner about a trusted bin Laden courier, who happened to be one of the owners of the Abbottabad mansion. It does make you at least have to take another look at the utility of the place.

Finally, the death of bin Laden provides a great opportunity for the United States to declare victory and come home from Afghanistan once and for all (ironically this is the eight-year anniversary of George W. Bush's infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq). The United States didn't go to Afghanistan to build democracy or fight for women's rights or to build schools or any of the other myriad of reasons that have become attached to the Afghan War. Or mission was simple: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The capture or kill part has now been accomplished, and the fact that he was hiding out in Pakistan in the first place is pretty clear indication that al-Qaeda no longer exists in Afghanistan at least as a viable force. If this isn't victory I don't know what is.

Egypt, Wisconsin

The Canadian alt-rock band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet once recorded a zippy little song called “Egypt, Texas”; listening that song recently, I wondered, could the same type of protests that drove Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt and now threaten to drive Gadhafi out of Libya happen in the United States? Far-fetched? Perhaps, but as recently as December 2010, who would have thought that we'd see popular uprisings in some of the Middle East/North Africa's staunchest autocracies? The protests had a common theme: the masses rising up against a government wholly unresponsive to their needs and uncaring about their plight. And though that lens, the ongoing protests in Wisconsin start to look remarkably familiar.

For more than a week, thousands (at times tens of thousands) have rallied in Madison, Wisconsin to speak out against Gov. Scott Walker's plan to impose not only cuts to the salaries and pensions of the state's teachers, but also a plan to essentially strip their union of its collective bargaining rights. Since the union had already agreed to the monetary cuts Walker's attack on collective bargaining rights can only been seen as what it truly is: a naked attempt at union-busting wearing a cloak of fiscal responsibility, a fact that Walker inadvertently confirmed to a journalist posing as one of his primary backers, billionaire businessman Scott Koch, the faux-Koch replied by saying: “Well, I tell you what, Scott: once you crush these bastards I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time,” to which Walker laughed in reply. Walker is not alone, governors, Republican governors, in New Jersey, Ohio and Indiana to name a few states, have launched their own attacks against the unions, blaming them for their respective states' financial plights (in New Jersey at least, the real culprit is more than a decade of fiscal mismanagement by the state government). It is shaping up as the Republicans final assault in their decades-long War on the Working Class, a war that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s – consider for a moment that the average inflation-adjusted wage has not increased since the Reagan era. The roots of this conflict though reach back even further, to the opposition against Franklin Roosevelt's “New Deal” package of social programs, something today's era of conservatives mark as the point from which we “lost” the Constitution (for a concise treatment of the conservative “Constitution in exile” movement, see the current issue of The Week magazine).

Strict conservatives see union rights, the minimum wage, environmental and labor protection laws and a host of other social programs as blatantly unconstitutional; their goal is to repeal them. All of them. In the process, they hope to turn the country back to the glory days of the 90s, the 1890s that is; a time known as the Gilded Age for its ostentatious concentrations of wealth thanks to laissez-faire government policies. Of course the 1890s were also a time of grinding poverty for the majority of Americans, who toiled six or seven days a week (children included) for wages that barely, and often did not, provide a living wage for themselves and their families. Today were seeing many of the same wild concentrations of wealth – today individuals in the top 1% income bracket control 43% of the nation’s wealth, though we still have the labor and environmental protections won over the course of decades in place, for now.

Sadly the Democrats in recent years have offered little in the way of opposition. So effectively have conservative voices dominated the economic debate that the Democrats today largely go out of their way to show they can be just as hard on the poor as their Republican counterparts. Case in point, President Obama's recent cuts to home heating assistance programs, since, he argued, fuel prices have dropped lessening the need for assistance. This may be true of natural gas prices, but in the cold Northeast, many houses are burn heating oil, not natural gas, and heating oil prices have been steadily climbing. It was an act of either utter, or willful, ignorance on the part of the President, but also one that shows how out of touch he is with the needs of the low-income population in his own country.

In short, America is coming to have the same type of out-of-touch government, which focuses its efforts not on meeting the needs of the masses but in serving the desires of the elites that we saw in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, etc. Unfortunately, the only mass movement we've seen in the United States recently has been the faux-populism of the Tea Party: a collection (I think) of well-meaning people suffering with the economic realities of America in the 21st century, who have unfortunately been taken in by a collection of shills for the nation's elites; for example much of the early organization of “Tea Party” events came from Freedom Works, a DC-based lobbying firm run by former House Republican Dick Armey – not much populism there. The hidden hand of the elites behind the Tea Party, working in concert with compliant media outlets like Fox News, have skillfully managed to conflate the concerns of the average citizen involved in Tea Party rallies about the direction of their country is headed with the conservatives “Constitution in exile” agenda: that a cadre of “liberal elitists” is trying to “dismantle” the Constitution and “take their country away from them.” So Tea Party activists fight to dismantle the very protections that insure they at least make a living wage, that they have clean air to breathe and water to drink and that their children are ensured a basic public education. George Orwell would be proud.

That is why it is impossible to overstate the magnitude of the protests going on in Wisconsin, and that have been bubbling up in other states, since this is true populism at work: Americans lobbying their government for redress of issues affecting their lives. So far Gov. Scott Walker has taken the Hosni Mubarak approach of ignoring their demands, while former US Senator Rick Santorum went the Gadhafi route and compared the Wisconsin protesters to drug addicts.

It is quite likely that Gov. Walker's ham-handed, billionaire-fueled attempt at union-busting will prevail in Wisconsin; the only thing preventing it is a boycott by Democratic lawmakers, hardly a sustainable situation. When that happens it will be a setback not only for labor, but for small-“d”-democracy in the country as a whole as tens of thousands of workers will have ample proof that their government does not have their interests at heart. More will become disillusioned, more will turn away from a political system that relies on the participation of its citizens; remember that demos is Greek for “the people”. What we've learned in this winter of protests in the Arab world is that people will live for a long time under oppressive, non-responsive regimes, until one magical day, for one random reason, they do not any longer – the wave of uprisings in the Arab world were all sparked by the suicide of one young fruit vendor in Tunisia. And every day our government grows a little more unresponsive, a little more indifferent to the plight of its people is one more day we move closer to Egypt, Texas; and Egypt, Wisconsin; and Egypt, Ohio...

Israel/Palestine - Why Now?

The big foreign policy news from Friday is that apparently the US has brought the Israelis and Palestinians kicking and screaming back to the negotiating table to try to hammer out some sort of lasting peace agreement. The big question is why?

Finding an end to the intractable Israel-Palestine problem has been something of a mania for the past several presidents; sadly it has also proved to be a fool’s errand. There's no reason to think this time will be any different: there has been no substantive change on the ground, if anything the two sides are less suited for talks than they were when the last round of negotiations fell apart under George W. Bush – the Israeli government is even more right-wing and hawkish than it was previously, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is even weaker than he once was (not to mention that his term of office actually ended a year and a half ago...). And if the two sides were just waiting for George W. to leave the scene before starting negotiations again, then talks would have started long ago, not more than a year and a half into the presidency of Barack Obama.

Given all that, I can't see why anyone in Washington can believe these talks will be anything more than yet another Mid-East fail. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is steadfast in their refusal to put a full and binding halt to Israeli settlement construction; the key irritant to the Palestinian side (they raise a good point – how can they be expected to have a country when Israeli settlements are swallowing it up bit by bit?) Meanwhile Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas, who hold half the cards in Palestine as the ruling party in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and both maintain that they won't negotiate with terrorists, which is true, except when it's not... The United States does negotiate with terrorists, and does so quite frequently in fact. The success of the much-ballyhooed “surge” in Iraq was based in large part on negotiating with “terrorists”, particularly Sunni tribes, who following the 2003 invasion became allied with al-Qaeda militants in the country. The US negotiated with, and eventually won over, many Sunni militias, rechristening them the “Sons of Iraq” who were not dedicated to rebuilding their country. Now, as we try to replicate the surge strategy in Afghanistan, a key facet is identifying and negotiating with “more moderate” elements of the Taliban – another group the US considers to be terrorists. And it's worth noting that the successful peace process in Northern Ireland came about after the British began negotiating with a group they considered terrorists, the Irish Republican Army.

The simple truth is that peace negotiations mean sitting down with people you hate. Or as the great Israeli statesman Yitzhak Rabin is often quoted as saying: “you don't make peace with your friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.” Excluding Hamas from the talks alone is a clear indication that no one is serious about this process actually yielding results. After a couple of weeks the talks will likely end after Palestinian militants launch one of their home-made rockets into Israel, or a hawkish member of the Israeli government (looking at you Avigdor Lieberman) makes another ill-timed announcement about the further expansion of Israeli settlements; or both. As other nations around the world make a bid to be big-time players on the world stage, playing moderator for the Israel-Palestine peace process is a role the United States should gladly relinquish.

The Real Jihadis of New Jersey

By now you’ve probably heard the story of Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte, two naturalized American citizens arrested in New Jersey last Saturday night on charges of terrorism – the allegations are that the two men were headed to Somalia to join up with the Islamist group al-Shabab to join a jihad against “non-Muslims”, though some reports say more specifically that they planned to kill US troops overseas.

Overall, the television news reporters I saw on the story did a fairly good job of discussing al-Shabab, quite obviously a group they’d never heard of before (though one we’ve discussed on this site numerous times); one exception though was Fox News’ “Security Expert”, former NYPD officer Bo Dietl, who mistakenly tied al-Shabab to the Somali pirates (in fact al-Shabab has been fighting against the pirates, branding them as “un-Islamic”, just about the worst condemnation that you can get from a militant Islamic group like al-Shabab). As more information is coming out about Alessa and Almonte though, it’s seeming less like they are hardcore jihadis and more like they are a couple of screwed-up young men who fell under the sway of a radical preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, who preaches global jihad via the Internet from his base in Yemen.

Newspapers in New Jersey this morning are portraying Alessa as a troubled youth who local officials felt was such a threat those around him that at one point during high school he was not allowed to be taught in a classroom with other students. Almonte’s family describe him as a shy kid who fell in with the wrong crowd – namely, Alessa, who they blame for filling his head with violent ideas. While the two were arrested while on their way to the airport to catch a flight to Egypt, it’s unclear how they planned to then get to Somalia, or to link up with al-Shabab if they did manage to get to the country. And Al-Shabab probably isn’t the best group to link up with if you’re goal is to participate in a global jihad. Even though al-Shabab has pledged its allegiance to al-Qaida, al-Shabab hasn’t engaged in acts of international terrorism, instead they are locked in a quasi-civil war in Somalia, trying to dislodge the weak Somali transitional government in Mogadishu, while also skirmishing off-and-on with other rival Islamist groups in the country, like Hizbul Islam, and occasionally with the Somali pirates as well. Killing US troops would also be problematic, since at the moment (officially at least), there are no US troops involved in operations in Somalia.

The case of Alessa and Almonte does raise two points worth pondering:

First – it again shows how the current mission in Afghanistan is an utter waste of time, money and, most importantly, the lives of American soldiers. The oft-stated reason for having American and coalition troops in Afghanistan for the past nine years is to keep the country from again turning into a haven for terrorist groups like al-Qaida. But what’s always overlooked in this argument is that Afghanistan was a base of last resort for al-Qaida, a place to flee to when they were kicked out of Sudan in the mid-90s. Remote and with little modern infrastructure, Afghanistan is a lousy place to try to fight a global jihad from (unlike Somalia, which has an 1,100 mile long coastline along some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes). Since the US-led military campaign began in Afghanistan, al-Qaida has increasingly used the Internet to recruit and organize – see preachers like Anwar al-Awlaki who radicalized Alessa and Almonte via the Web; meaning that having a physical “base” is far less important to al-Qaida, and other global jihadists, than it was a decade ago. So even if all the foreign troops withdrew from Afghanistan tomorrow, there’s no reason to assume it would revert to being a terrorist base camp, or that it would lead to a new 9/11.

Second – it will be interesting to see if the escapist jihadi fantasies of Alessa and Almonte increase the pressure for American intervention in Somalia. Last October in The Mantle, I predicted that Somalia would eventually become the next front in America’s “Global War on Terror”, likely in 2011. I picked that date based on political reasons: by mid-2011 US troops will be out of Iraq, Afghanistan will remain a quagmire and heading into the 2012 elections, Barack Obama will feel pressure to show “action” against global jihadists. Since last October, Obama has continued to show that he’s committed to the Bush-era idea of the GWOT, while the situation in Afghanistan has certainly not improved - arguably it has gotten worse. According to a report on NBC’s Nightly News two weeks ago, meanwhile, American drone aircraft are already active over the skies of Mogadishu on a nightly basis. If Alessa and Almonte increase American focus on (and paranoia about) the Islamist groups active in Somalia, it could increase the likelihood of the opening of a Somali front in the War on Terror.

Israel, Iran and the Summer War

If there is a message to be drawn from Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla it is this: there will be a major war in the Middle East this summer.

The flotilla raid was more than simply a military operation; it was an outward expression of Israel’s ongoing internal political and security debates. Since the modern state’s founding, Israel’s national mythos has been built on the idea that they are an island surrounded on all sides by hostile forces. While this was certainly true during their early history, Israel has enjoyed peaceful relations with two of their next-door neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, for several decades now; Turkey too was one of their closest allies, at least until the flotilla raid. In recent years, though hard-line Israeli governments have expanded this mythos: so now not only do they have enemies on all sides, they also exist in a world that (with the notable exception of the United States) is indifferent to their plight while secretly hoping for their downfall. The generally negative reaction to the flotilla raid around the globe (again save for the US) has only given strength to this idea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s post-flotilla raid press conference gives valuable insight into the current thought process of Israel’s leadership. Netanyahu was quick to dismiss the flotilla’s stated mission of providing humanitarian aid and instead condemned it as an attempt by Hamas - the ruling force in Gaza that Israel regards as a terrorist organization - to rearm in preparation for a new conflict with Israel. Netanyahu then went a step further, to draw the line from the flotilla through Hamas in Gaza and back to Iran, at one point saying that Iran could not be allowed to “open a port on the Mediterranean [Sea].” It is a sign of how completely Iran is dominating current Israeli strategic thinking. Israel regards their main security challenge today as coming not from the Palestinian Territories, but rather from Iran and their ongoing nuclear program. Israel dismisses Iran’s claims that their nuclear research is meant to establish a domestic nuclear power program; instead saying it is a front for a secret atomic weapons program, which Israel regards as an existential threat to its very existence.

Here, it’s useful to take a look at Amos Oz’s op-ed in the June 1 New York Times. Believing that hostile forces surround them, Israel has responded by building and maintaining a formidable military. The downside to this belief, as Oz explains, is that Israel now acts as though every foreign policy problem has a military solution; Israel’s military campaigns against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008 though, both of which failed to destroy these groups, would seem to argue against this belief. Yet the Israeli leadership remains undeterred, arguing that only military action (namely air strikes) and not a new round of sanctions will prevent Iran’s nuclear program from going forward. Here Israel is buoyed by their success in 1981, when a raid against the research reactor at Osirak destroyed Iraq’s fledgling nuclear program.

To this point, diplomatic pressure and fear of a widespread backlash seem to have kept Israel from ditching the UN-based sanctions scheme and preemptively launching air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. I would argue the flotilla raid then should be viewed as a sign that these forces will no longer restrain Israel. Simply stated the flotilla raid is Israel in effect saying: “we’re surrounded, we’re going to act in our defense and we don’t care what you think about it.”

What effect would an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities have? Here it’s useful to look at a war game scenario conducted by the Brookings Institution that examined both the Israeli raid and the probable Iranian response. Rather than retaliate directly against Israel militarily, Brookings predicts that Iran will use their Lebanon-based proxies in Hezbollah (which receives a large portion of its funding from Iran) to strike back against Israel. And here is where the air strikes will spark the region-wide war. In April, Israel accused Syria of smuggling Scud missiles across the border to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria have all denied the claims, though that has not stopped Israel from pressing them. Because Hezbollah has seats in the Lebanese parliament, Netanyahu has said that Israel will regard any attack against Israel from Hezbollah as being officially sanctioned by the Lebanese government and will respond accordingly, the same goes for Syria for their role as the transshipment route for the weapons. So, if Iran’s Hezbollah proxies strike out at Israel, Israel will respond militarily against the governments of Lebanon and Syria (it’s also hard to imagine that Hamas, which also receives funding from Iran, won’t launch retaliatory strikes against Israel as well). What started as a series of air raids against a select group of targets in Iran will then quickly devolve into a war pitting Israel against Lebanon, Syria and Gaza.

The United States will find itself involved in the Summer War, by both choice and circumstance. During Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the United States provided emergency shipments of precision guided bombs when Israel’s stockpile of these weapons ran low as what they thought would be a series of air strikes and hit-and-run ground incursions turned into a month-long guerilla campaign. It’s logical to believe that the United States will again be called on to provide Israel with war material; US troops based in Iraq (still numbering in the tens of thousands) are likely to become targets of retaliation attacks from Iranian-backed militias within Iraq, or by groups in Iraq sympathetic to the Iranian cause. Since the removal from power of their long-time adversary Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iranian influence in Iraq has steadily grown – Shiites, the dominant Islamic sect in Iran also make up the largest single ethnic group in Iraq as well. If Iran chooses to play the “oil card” by attacking oil tankers and other shipping in the Persian Gulf (a possibility outlined in the Brookings scenario), the United States, with the largest naval presence in the Gulf, will be pressed into the role of securing these vital shipping lanes as well.

Wars have unusual ways of unfolding once the shooting starts. It is impossible really to script exactly how the Summer War would play out – what role Turkey will play, how the populations in Jordan and Egypt will react to the fighting and how the government in Iraq will formally respond all are difficult to predict, as is how long the Summer War will actually last. But even before it starts, we can know the war will be a strategic loss for Israel. Countries go to war with specific goals that define victory – for Israel air strikes against Iran are meant to bring an end to their nuclear program. Israel believes this is an achievable outcome because of their experience with the Iraqi reactor at Osirak. But Iran has studied Osirak as well, and they have learned from the Iraqi experience not to concentrate their nuclear program at one lightly guarded site. Iran has scattered their nuclear sites across the country and some are allegedly buried 75 feet or more underground, protected by anti-aircraft weapons systems. It is extremely unlikely that the Israelis could destroy them with air strikes alone. And the experiences in 2006 and 2008 show that it is also unlikely Israel will be able to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas through military might as well. So long as the Iranian nuclear program, Hezbollah and/or Hamas survive the conflict in some meaningful form, they win/Israel loses.

An Israeli loss will likely (again) spell the end of Netanyahu’s government. Israeli political coalitions are notoriously fragile; fighting another unwinnable war will likely turn Israeli public opinion against Netanyahu and bring down his government. The Summer War will probably spell the end of any meaningful foreign policy efforts on the part of Barack Obama as well. Support for Israel in an unprovoked attack against Iran will undo all of the outreach Obama has conducted with the Islamic world, which started in earnest with his landmark speech in Cairo last summer. It will also drive a wedge between his administration and rising powers, like Brazil and Turkey, who attempted to negotiate a deal that would defuse the Iranian nuclear situation in May – an attempt that was rebuked by the United States; and it will be another irritant in relations with Russia and China, both of whom the United States has worked hard to bring onboard for a new round of sanctions against Iran. Attempting to justify America’s support for Israel’s preemptive strike against Iran and their launching of a wider regional war will dominate Obama’s foreign policy efforts for the rest of his term in office, crowding out other initiatives.

The biggest losers, of course, will be the many, many innocent civilians who will be killed, maimed or displaced by the fighting in an unwinnable war.

Delayed Criticism On Prompt Global Strike

It’s always nice to see the New York Times pick up on a story we covered here a couple of weeks earlier…

On Thursday, the Times published a long story on the proposed weapons system called “Prompt Global Strike”, something we covered here as part of the post on the signing of the new START treaty between the United States and Russia. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and nuclear reduction advocate Joseph Cirincione also picked up the story of Prompt Global Strike late in the week.

To recap PGS – the project would replace the nuclear warheads on some of the Untied States’ arsenal of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with conventional ones, with the goal of being able to deliver a non-nuclear strike against a target anywhere in the world within an hour or two. The “target” described in PGS launch scenarios is one that is highly mobile and that won’t remain in place long enough for the US to strike with other weapons in the arsenal - say like cave-hopping Osama bin Laden (that is if the US ever got a bead on his location in the first place). Advocates say that only PGS could deliver a strike in a short enough time to take out such a target.

Critics, meanwhile, say that such a scenario is highly unlikely to occur and that the United States has such a military presence around the world it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be other US forces in the region ready to strike a highly-mobile target using other means. The bigger problem, they say, is that it would be impossible for another nuclear power – particularly Russia or China – to know that a sudden American ICBM launch was really a PGS strike against some other adversary and not the prelude to a sneak attack against them, which could prompt them to launch their ICBMs at the US in reply. Such a scenario almost unfolded in January 1995, when Russia’s missile defense system almost mistook the launch of a scientific research rocket from northern Norway for the launch of an ICBM from an American submarine under the polar icecap. Only a quick decision by a Russian officer in their nuclear chain of command prevented the Russians from launching a retaliatory strike against the United States. According to the Times, the Obama administration would allow Russia and other interested countries to inspect PGS missile silos to ensure that there were not nuclear warheads aboard the missiles, though in the same article the Times also reports that the administration is looking at basing some PGS weapons on US submarines, which would negate the whole spot inspection idea.

And others wonder if PGS would be yet another case of the Pentagon throwing billions of dollars at a weapons system without knowing if it will ever work. That’s the gist of Cirincione’s piece in Foreign Policy magazine, where he reports that officials in the Pentagon have the PGS concept down, but really don’t know what the final weapon will look like. Both FP and the Times are reporting that the PGS vehicle would be some sort of “space plane” that would be able to maneuver in orbit and would carry a weapons payload that it would drop on its target. That has me wondering if PGS has anything to do with the launch of the Air Force’s super-secret X-37B (artist rendition above) earlier this week. The X-37B is described as a computer-guided mini-Space Shuttle. Like the Shuttle it is suppose to be reusable and can carry a payload within its cargo bay; but unlike the Shuttle it is entirely computer-guided, Air Force officials even claim to not know “when it’s coming back.” Since the Air Force is being so vague and since the X-37B fits the speculation surrounding the PGS so well, you have to wonder if the two are related.

A False START

Today President Obama wrapped up a two-day summit on reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism in the world. With that in mind, I thought it was worthwhile to take a look at the historic deal he signed last week with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. Nuclear disarmament advocates are hailing the new START treaty as an important step towards a nuclear-free world. Sadly, I think they’re overstating the importance of the treaty.

While START slashes the nuclear arsenals of both countries, it still allows each side to have 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads – more than enough to destroy all life on Earth. And since nuclear weapons need to be actively maintained in an operational state, in reality for the Russians (and to a degree for the US as well), START only means that they’ll have to replace fewer obsolete nuclear warheads then they would have needed to without the agreement. The treaty also limits each side to 700 “deployed delivery vehicles” (that’s bombers and missiles to you and me), but the Russians currently only have about 590 deployed delivery vehicles in their military, meaning that under the arms reduction treaty they can actually deploy more weapons systems than they have right now – that doesn’t seem like much of a “reduction”.

START has had some benefits, it is a major foreign policy achievement for Pres. Obama and it is a step towards the “reset” in relations with the Russians that his administration promised last year. The United States was able to negotiate the Russians past their insistence that ending American plans for a ballistic missile defense system based in Europe be part of any nuclear reduction deal. And anything that improves US-Russian relations is a plus for both countries.

But ironically, START could make the world a less safe place. That’s thanks to some of the planners in the Pentagon who have been working on an idea to repurpose some of those nuclear weapons-carrying ICBMs into a new, non-nuclear weapon system called the Prompt Global Strike. Basically it involves putting a high-explosive warhead onto an intercontinental ballistic missile that could be used to hit a target anywhere in the world, its designers say, within an hour. A high-explosive warhead, combined with a hypersonic reentry speed, would deliver a “devastating” payload to its target. Frankly, it seems like not only a pretty expensive way to blow up some remote corner of the world (those ICBMs aren’t cheap), but also a potentially dangerous one as well since the other nuclear armed countries, like Russia and China, wouldn’t be able to tell whether an ICBM was carrying a nuclear or a Prompt Global Strike payload and thus could easily misinterpret a Prompt Global Strike launch as a sneak American nuclear attack and react accordingly. Or as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it earlier this week: “world states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community.”

While the Prompt Global Strike concept has been on the drawing boards since the mid-90s, Pres. Obama recently increased the funding for its development with a goal of getting PGS into the American arsenal by the middle of the decade. Whether the other nuclear powers think this weapon flies in the face of arms reduction efforts remains to be seen, though Lavrov’s comments give you an idea of what they’ll likely think if Prompt Global Strike becomes operational.

New Missile Plans, New Problems For US/Russian Relations

So much for “resetting” relations with Russia I guess…

Just five months ago the Obama Administration gave a boost to their attempts at repairing relations with Russia with their decision to pull the plug on a scheme to base an anti-ballistic missile shield (or ABM) in Poland and the Czech Republic. Now Washington is putting new strains on that same relationship by floating plans to base elements of the US missile shield in Bulgaria and Romania instead.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with developments in anti-missile defense, a brief recap: The Bush Administration pushed to base elements of the ABM shield – a radar station in the Czech Republic and ten anti-missile missiles in Poland – in Eastern Europe to protect the Continent against rocket attacks from “rogue states”. In practice “rogue states” was translated as “Iran”. But Iran doesn’t even have ballistic missiles with the range to reach Europe, nor was it ever explained why Iran would even want to launch missiles against Europe, and there were questions about whether or not the ABM system would even work in the first place, so all in all the ABM project didn’t make a lot of sense.

The plan did however infuriate the Russians. Publicly, Russia complained that the ABM system was intended not to guard against rogue states but to oppose their own nuclear missiles, something the Americans said wasn’t true since the ten interceptors in Poland could easily be overwhelmed by the thousands of missiles in the Russian arsenal. In reality, a lot of Russia’s opposition to the ABM program stemmed from the fact that they still consider Eastern Europe to be within their “sphere of influence” (a belief held over from Soviet times). Russia likely also doubted American claims that ABM was solely a defensive system since they had received similar assurances about NATO back in the 1990s, right before NATO went on the offensive against Russia’s long-time ally, Serbia in 1999.

Ultimately, the Obama Administration’s decision to end the ABM program in Poland and the Czech Republic last year seemed to be based more on a cost-analysis of an expensive, yet strategically dubious weapons program than as a way to placate the Russians, but it had that effect also, which is what makes the Administration’s decision this week even more puzzling. Russia considers Bulgaria to be in their backyard just as much as they do Poland (maybe even more so since Russian-Bulgarian relations have historically been much better than Russian-Polish ones), so their anger over the latest ABM decision is no surprise. At the same time, Poland will likely view this as a slap against them – if the US was going to base an ABM system in Eastern Europe anyway, why not just keep it on Polish soil?

One explanation could be Bulgaria’s importance in two competing natural gas pipeline projects meant to ship gas from Central Asia to Europe – the Russian-backed South Stream and the American-supported Nabucco (the United States hopes Nabucco will help to lessen Europe’s dependence on Russia for their natural gas supplies). Bulgaria is a key transit point in both plans, so perhaps ABM is a way for the United States to build up relations with Bulgaria to win them over to Nabucco.

But whatever the motivation, the latest chapter in the ABM saga is already causing problems in US-Russian relations. Russia is now threatening to suspend talks on a renewal of the START nuclear arms reduction pact, while the tiny pro-Russian quasi-nation of Transdnestr (a breakaway region of Moldova) is offering to host Russian ballistic missiles in response to an American ABM base in Bulgaria.

It's AWV Awards Time!

Now that we have officially reached the end of 2009 it is time for A World View to pay homage to the notorious and the noteworthy. So read on for our collection of honors, including the announcement of the winner of the coveted “Golden Cockroach” (all irreverence and satire is most surely intentional). Happy 2010 to all!

Typo of the Year – The US State Department
In his first year in office, Barack Obama made a big deal out of “resetting” America’s relationship with Russia, officials even made up a giant novelty “reset” button for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov last March. Unfortunately, the novelty prop contained a whopping typo – it read peregruzka, which is Russian for “overcharge” not “reset” like the Secretary announced when she presented it to Lavrov. Aside from providing a moment of minor embarrassment for Clinton, the whole incident raises the question: doesn’t anybody at the State Department speak Russian?


Capitalists of the Year – The Pirates of Haradherre, Somalia
Various pirate groups operating along Somalia’s lawless coast have gotten hostage-taking and ransom negotiation down to a science, but the pirates based in the port of Haradherre have taken things to the next level by opening their own stock exchange. The exchange allows the citizens of Haradherre to “invest” in pirate missions in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean - if the pirates they fund are successful in capturing and then ransoming a ship, the investors can make tens of thousands of dollars from their share of the booty. Something tells me if the pirates of Haradherre ever decide to give up life on the sea, they could have bright futures on Wall Street…


Unintentionally Funny Terrorist Photo of the Year – Doku Umarov

Doku Umarov isn’t the warm and cuddly type. The self-styled “Emir of the Caliphate of the Northern Caucasus” is trying to establish himself as the terrorist leader of forces attempting to carve a pure Islamic state out of southeastern Russia. Unfortunately for him, the fearsome warlord image is totally ruined by pictures like this.

Obviously no one in Umarov’s entourage knew one of the basics of photo/video production – to always check the background of your shot. Otherwise it is doubtful they would have sat Umarov so that the sword on the banner in the background sticks through him like the old Steve Martin arrow-through-the-head gag. I half expect Umarov to say “I’m a wild and crazy terrorist…”


Roger Daltrey Award – President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan
Roger Daltrey of The Who once sang the line: “meet the new boss, same as the old boss…” And in that spirit we give the Roger Daltrey Award to Turkmenistan’s Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov. He is just the second leader the Central Asian state has had since it gained independence with the demise of the Soviet Union. His predecessor Saparmurat Niyazov was a humble man who crowned himself Turkmenbashi, or “Father of All Turkmen”; named a month after himself; collected his “wisdom” in a book called the Rukhnama, which he then mandated be taught in all Turkmenistan schools; and built giant golden statues of both himself and the Rukhnama. When he died in 2006 the people of Turkmenistan hoped for a less flamboyant leader.

But after a promising start Berdymukhamedov is now showing the same penchant for outlandish projects as his predecessor. This year Berdymukhamedov opened “Avaza”, a massive gambling complex on the coast of the Caspian Sea (a sort of Las Vegas of Central Asia) that cost $5 billion to build. Not to rest on his laurels, in July Berdymukhamedov personally opened the taps on a massive engineering project called the “Golden Age Lake”, an inland sea he said will “make the desert bloom.” Critics, on the other hand, say the fertilizer-laced irrigation canal runoff used to hydrate the project won’t create a living sea but rather a gigantic cesspool. Berdymukhamedov personally used a spade to open up the first feeder canal for “Golden Age Lake” before riding off on a bejeweled horse. So much for being less flamboyant…


Field of Dreams Award – “African Renaissance” in Dakar, Senegal
“If you build it, they will come”, is the famous line from the supernatural baseball movie “Field of Dreams”; the government of Senegal seems to have taken this message to heart. Work is being completed on “African Renaissance”, a massive statue of an African man, woman and child that now looms over the capital, Dakar. How big is “African Renaissance”? It’s taller than the Statue of Liberty and larger in volume than the Eiffel Tower, and built at a cost of $27 million.

Officials in Senegal hope that “African Renaissance” will become a tourist magnet. In fact, no one is hoping this more than Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade, who also cut himself in for one-third of the future revenues generated by “African Renaissance” as the project’s “designer”, much to the chagrin of his countrymen.


Plain Brown Envelope Award – EU President Herman van Rompuy
In this tight economy a piece of conventional wisdom for landing that dream job is to make yourself stand out from the crowd. It’s good advice unless you’re Herman van Rompuy, who was apparently the only person deemed bland enough for the newly created job as President of the European Union. The former Prime Minister of Belgium became the consensus pick among the 27 members of the EU, beating out the far better known (and far more controversial) early favorite, former British PM Tony Blair.

Ultimately it was felt that Blair had too much baggage – namely his support of George W. Bush during the Iraq War – for the EU to agree to tap him for the job. By contrast, everyone seemed okay with van Rompuy, who a year earlier became the Belgium PM after months of haggling among fighting political factions again because of his overall inoffensiveness. Herman von Rompuy just shows, Bland can be Beautiful.


The Golden Cockroach – President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Named in honor of nature’s ultimate survivor, this year’s Golden Cockroach Award goes to President Robert Mugabe. Earlier this year it looked like the sun might finally be setting on Mugabe’s three decades of rule in Zimbabwe. In the wake of a controversial, violence-plagued election, the international community pressured Mugabe into a power-sharing unity government that saw his bitter political rival Morgan Tsvangirai named to the newly created position of prime minister and government ministries split between their two factions.

But Mugabe was undeterred. He staffed key government ministries with his own ZANU-PF party loyalists despite the terms of the power-sharing deal; had Roy Bennett, a key figure in Tsvangirai’s MDC party, arrested twice; and froze the MDC out of financial negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. Tsvangirai, meanwhile, narrowly survived a car accident in April that many in Zimbabwe felt was far from “accidental”.

At the end of 2009, the unity government is largely in tatters, and Mugabe is talking about holding early elections in 2010 to consolidate his grip on power. The international community is offering little in the way of opposition to Mugabe’s power grab, this summer China offered Zimbabwe a billion dollar line of credit to prop up their shattered economy, no strings attached.

All in all, it was a survival performance by Robert Mugabe that is more than worthy of the Golden Cockroach.

Norway's Mystery Spiral A Mystery No Longer

You've probably seen the video of the bizarre blue spiral that appeared in the nighttime sky above Norway on Wednesday, but just in case you haven't you can watch it below thanks to YouTube:



The mystery of the spiral appears to have been solved. It was not a UFO, or as some wiseguys suggested a Star appearing in the Eastern Sky to herald the arrival of Barrack Obama in Oslo, but something much more mundane: a failed Russian missile test. The Christian Science Monitor went so far as to talk to a real rocket scientist about the Norwegian light show. Dr. William Dimpfl explained that the pinwheel effect was likely caused by a misfiring rocket motor spinning the rocket out of control.

That meshes well with the Russian Defense Ministry's account of the latest test of the submarine-launched Bulava missile, which they say went out of control when its third stage became "unstable". Of course the Russians built the Bulava to be the high-tech, interceptor-dodging next generation of their ICBM forces, not to put on spectacular light shows over Norway. And that's where the troubles start - so far the Bulava has failed in seven of its twelve test launches, one Russian analyst said that only one test flight was a "full success".

Some in the Kremlin say that the Bulava's design itself is flawed and are pushing for the construction of more of an earlier generation, but reliable, missile. Others in the defense ministry are offering the excuse that the Bulava is failing because of poor production quality due to outdated, Soviet-era factories, which is a pretty lousy excuse if you think about it.

No word yet on when the Bulava's next test may be, but the Norwegians will likely be watching the skies when it happens.

Obama's Phantom Town Hall Meeting

I had trouble sleeping last night, so I turned on the TV and was able to catch some of President Obama's townhall meeting in Shanghai with an audience of Chinese university students. Laying in my bed I was able to do something most Chinese were not, to watch Obama engage in a Q&A session with the students.

The townhall was suppose to be one of the key events of Obama's visit to China, a chance for the country to see the new president in action. The original idea was for the event to be broadcast nationwide on China's state-run TV network. But after two weeks of negotiations, the best the White House could get was coverage on the local Shanghai affiliate station and in Hong Kong, as well as on the Internet. But if the Obama Administration was hoping that the Internet would bring the townhall to the masses, they were badly mistaken - access to streaming video via Whitehouse.gov was said to be "unreliable" in Beijing, while Chinese authorities blocked access through Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Comments critical about the government posted to Chinese news sites were reported by several Chinese bloggers to have been quickly scrubbed by the authorities.

Perhaps all that censorship was unnecessary - the audience in Shanghai was said to have been carefully pre-screened by the local branch of the Communist party and was only about a quarter of the size Obama had hoped for. And to a degree Obama was self-censoring, soft-pedaling the topic of human rights in China. Obama did take a stand against Internet censorship, but only in reply to a question asked not by a student but by the US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (from an email, he said, sent to the US Embassy in China). Perhaps the most effective form of censorship really is self-censorship.

Fox News "Expert" Shows She's Clueless On Russia, India

Every time I need inspiration to do this site I happen to see something like the the exchange I saw this morning between Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer and FNC "foreign policy expert" KT McFarland, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs and speech writer during the Reagan administration.

Bill and KT were breathlessly discussing the "breaking news" on Fox that the Russians were developing some kind of super-missile. I figured out that they were talking about the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, a weapon so secret that it has its own page on Wikipedia. Not only that, but this only counts as "breaking news" if this is, say, 2003 - India and Russia have jointly been developing, and now producing, the BrahMos for several years, in fact the missile is currently in service with the Indian military. Bill and KT wondered aloud why, since President Obama "reset" relations with the Russians, were they even developing new weapons in the first place? (Probably for the same reason the US, China, Great Britain, France, Israel, etc. keep developing new weapons systems...)

But KT wasn't done flaunting her ignorance yet. She went on to say that Russia now had a stranglehold on energy supplies to Europe thanks to their new Nord Stream and their second "southern" pipeline. The problem here is that construction on Nord Stream, which will run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, won't even start until next year. South Stream (the "southern" pipeline) is still on the drawing board and facing stiff competition from the Nabucco Pipeline (also still in the planning stages), which would link Central Asia and Europe, bypassing Russian territory entirely.

She then went on to chide Obama for cutting funding for the anti-ballistic missile shield bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, leaving us vulnerable to the new Russian super-missile (which the ABM system would have been useless against anyway since the BrahMos is a cruise missile that flies just meters above the ground, not a ballistic one that flies in a high, arching trajectory - the target of the ABM system). Finally she said (and Bill agreed) that India's decision to work with Russia on the BrahMos was because Obama had "weakened" America on the world stage - apparently ignorant of the fact that Russia (and before them the Soviet Union) had been a major arms supplier to India for decades, and that among other systems, Russia is in the process of supplying India with an aircraft carrier, and once the Nerpa completes its sea trials, a nuclear attack submarine.

That's an awful lot of misinformation to pack into just three minutes...Frankly, I don't blame Hemmer so much for this ridiculous segment - he's just a typical news channel talking head, someone who looks pleasant and can read a teleprompter, but who has no real knowledge about, well, anything. McFarland though is another matter. Someone who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs should know a little something about two of the world's larger military powers. Next time Fox News wants to put on an "expert" on foreign affairs, they should find someone who knows what they're talking about in the first place.

Nuclear Free Follies

Apparently part of the rationale behind awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was to support his efforts at ridding the world of nuclear weapons. This has been a theme in some of his keynote speeches as President, like his address to the United Nations last month; other commentators like Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund have regularly been campaigning for a nuclear-free world he specifically in numerous posts at the Huffington Post.

But on this topic, I'll defer to Rush - the band, not the blowhard. Their song about the development of the nuclear bomb "Manhattan Project" contains this line, which I think sums up the current debate nicely:

The big shots tried to hold it back,
Fools tried to wish it away...

I don't mean to imply that Obama, Cirincione and others in the disarmament campaign are fools, but they are pursuing a goal they'll never attain. Mind you, I wish that disarmament would happen, I remember as a child being scared witless by the movie "The Day After", a made-for-TV film on ABC that showed the aftermath of a limited nuclear war by following a collection of average people in Kansas. An estimated 100 million people watched that movie, even Ronald Reagan said the effects of nuclear war depicted in the film left him feeling "greatly depressed." So yeah, I'd love to see a world free of nukes, I just know that it won't ever happen.

As for the why, let's take a quick look at the world's nuclear powers, starting with Russia. Russia sees itself as one of the world's great powers, but its military is a shell of the mighty Red Army thanks to a couple of decades of neglect and underfunding. The one area where Russia can still claim superpower status though is in its nuclear forces, estimated to be either the world's first or second largest nuclear arsenal depending on the source you use. Russia will agree to reductions in their nuclear forces - largely because they have thousands of warheads nearing or past their effective lifespans that need replacement - the fewer they need to replace, the more money they will save. It's naive to think though that the Russian military will totally give up the one thing that makes them a formidable force.

Then there's India and Pakistan, two nations which in their post-British Empire history have fought three wars, though none since Pakistan officially became a nuclear power in 1998. The two states are mutually suspicious of each other, therefore it's again naive to think either side would believe claims that the other had disarmed, thus it's impossible to imagine either giving up their arsenal.

China views both India and Russia as potential competitors for influence among the nations of Central Asia, so it's hard to imagine the Chinese giving up their nukes so long as Russia and/or India keep theirs (or so long as the United States has its arsenal). And then there's Israel, a country that won't even admit to having nuclear weapons in the first place. Israel's nukes are their ace up the sleeve - a last resort should they ever face another Six Day War scenario, where a pan-Arab army is moving against them on several fronts. Israeli planning dictates that if such a conflict were going badly, it could be quickly ended by use of nuclear weapons (it's also the reason they're so dead set against Iran ever getting the bomb).

So there you have Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel - five nuclear powers all of whom, despite what the anti-proliferation side argues, will never totally give up their nukes since each will argue giving up nuclear weapons will leave them weaker in the face of potential adversaries. And don't think the Pentagon will sign off on a plan to eliminate America's nuclear arsenal either, so long as a half-dozen or so countries are keeping theirs - or that a president will order the Pentagon to fully disarm under those circumstances, no matter how many Nobel Prizes they're awarded.

And there's something the disarmament proponents never discuss, let's call it the Japan Option, which is this: just because you get rid of all your nuclear weapons, that doesn't mean that you immediately forget how to make more. While Japan isn't a nuclear state, it's generally admitted by the folks in the nuclear weapons field that Japan could have a nuclear arsenal if they wanted one: Japanese industries produce some of the world's most advanced electronics, while decades of using nuclear power have left Japan with several tons of plutonium, a by-product of operating nuclear power plants, and also the raw material of choice for making an A-bomb.

Let's imagine for a moment then that tomorrow we were to wake up and all of the world's nuclear arsenals had disappeared. The bombs might be gone, but the knowledge of how to make them would not. And it's hard to believe that some country wouldn't start up production again, especially if they thought it would give them a quick advantage over everyone else.

The nuclear genie is long out of the bottle and sadly she can't be stuffed back in. It would be great to think there could be a world where a city might not be snuffed out in the glow of a mushroom cloud, but realistically that's not the world in which we live. There are some huge issues facing the world, one's that need the international community to come together to address. Maybe it would be best then for our leaders to focus on the problems they can solve, rather than ones - like nuclear disarmament - that they can't.

Obama's Nobel Prize? (and an honor for Bill Clinton too)

I'll admit, I was pretty surprised to wake up this morning to hear that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's nice to know that he was pretty surprised himself.

Don't get me wrong, I think Obama, in broad terms, is on the right path in International Affairs: his multilateral approach to world affairs is correct - no single power dominates the world and future cooperation will depend on building coalitions to tackle global problems; I agree with his calls in Ghana and at the United Nations for countries to work together on common problems and for people around the world to hold their governments accountable fpr their actions (or inactions); he's right to try to "reset" relations with Russia; and while I think trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons is a pipe-dream, the goal at least is a nice one.

But I have to wonder what the Nobel Committee was thinking - Obama has great promise (their rationale in giving him the Prize), but little concrete success so far. Historically the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to people or groups in recognition of a past success, like when Menachem Begin and Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat won in 1978 for signing the historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt, not to people for what they may do in the future.

And as Obama was getting his Nobel Peace Prize, former President Bill Clinton was getting an award of his own - a giant statue of himself to be unveiled in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. The Kosovars hail Clinton as the man who convinced NATO to launch an aerial bombing campaign against Serbia, bringing to an end what the Kosovars say was a Serbian genocide against them and eventually setting the stage for them to declare independence from Serbia.

No word yet on whether Clinton will travel to Kosovo to see his likeness unveiled.

Rio Wins the Olympics, is India Next?

So you've probably heard by now that Rio de Janeiro won the rights to host the 2016 Summer Olympics yesterday, despite a last-minute appearance by Barack Obama on behalf of America’s entry, Chicago. And you've probably also heard that the President's critics are slamming him for not bringing the games to Chicago, saying it's a sign of his ebbing political fortunes both at home and abroad.


Politics did play a huge role in the selection of Rio as the host city, but the critics are wrong - Obama had nothing to do with Chicago getting, or not getting, the Games, instead the selection of Rio is best seen as the product of the International Olympic Committee's own bizarre internal politics.

Going into the vote, the folks from Chicago were actually worried that, despite having a strong bid, they'd lose in the first round. Why? Because of geography. IOC members tend to support host cities in their neighborhoods, so the Europeans were expected to back Madrid; the Asians, Tokyo; and the South Americans (and likely Africans), Rio. That left Chicago without a real base of geographic support, and their fears of a first-round exit came to pass.

Meanwhile, Juan Antonio Samaranch - the powerful former head of the IOC and the man largely responsible during his two decades of leadership for transforming the Olympics from a quaint quadrennial sporting event into a marketing and merchandising juggernaut - made a personal plea on behalf of his hometown, Madrid, a factor that is probably responsible for Madrid making it to the final round of voting.

And there were other factors at play. The Huffington Post ran a piece suggesting that some IOC members voted against Chicago because of the United States' tough visa regime post 9/11. An IOC member from Pakistan was quoted as saying coming into the US these days for a foreigner can be "a harrowing experience" because of strict visa requirements. Finally, there is a long-running dispute between the IOC and USOC over issues of private funding for the Games as well as sharing television revenues that likely soured some voters on Chicago’s bid.

But the biggest factor working against Chicago was simply that there was a huge desire within the IOC to continue their commitment towards bringing the Games to new parts of the world, and South America (and with the exception of Australia, the entire Southern Hemisphere for that matter) has never before hosted an Olympics Games. This was a fact played up by the Rio delegation, who passed out maps before the vote showing the locations of previous Games - North America and Western Europe were well-covered, the were a few cities highlighted in Asia, but starkly none in South America. While Olympic votes are usually close-fought things, in the final round Rio won by a 2-to-1 margin.

My prediction is now that Rio has won the rights to the 2016 Games, look for India to make a serious push to bring the 2020 Games to Delhi (the 2020 Games will be awarded in the summer of 2011). India is now the only one of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China - the countries seen as having the largest, most-dynamic emerging economies in the world) not to be selected to host an Olympics. Last year China used the Beijing Games as a national coming out party, a chance to show the world China had arrived as a major industrial and cultural power. Russia will use the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi as a similar showcase for their rise from the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course Rio 2016 will be Brazil's chance to show that they too have arrived among the 'First World' of nations. It only follows then that India will be eager to show that they too belong in the club, and in the 21st century, there’s no bigger way of showing that then to host the Olympics.

US and China's Pledges to Fight Climate Change: Progress or Hot Air?

Environmentalists were happy last week to see China's President Hu Jintao commit his country towards fighting the greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for global climate change. In his UN address, Hu pledged that China would get 15% of their power from non-fossil fuel sources by the end of the next decade and would plant an area of China roughly the size of California in forests to help offset emissions from other sources. Not to be left out, President Obama used his UN speech, in part, to re-commit the United States also to fighting climate change.

Having the two countries responsible for almost half the world's greenhouse gas emissions talk about taking the threat of climate change seriously is a step in the right direction in the view of many environmentalists. But I'd argue that there's actually less here than meets the eye.

This December, nations from around the world will gather in Copenhagen to try to agree to a new global climate change agreement to replace the expiring (and many would argue ineffective) Kyoto Protocols. And that's the problem with the statements of Presidents Hu and Obama - in addition to promising grand, though ultimately vague, goals for projects to fight climate change, each president proposed domestic solutions to a global problem - both China and the United States would set their own goals and judge themselves on how well they meet them.

The problem is that global climate change is a global problem (see the world 'global' is even there in the title). Logically a global problem needs a global solution. But what Hu and Obama are saying is basically: here's our idea on how to curb greenhouse gas emissions within our countries, now wait and we'll tell you how well we do at reaching it. Heading into Copenhagen, diplomats from industrialized nations are pushing for a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that global temperatures only rise to 2 degrees C (or 3.6 degrees F) over what they historically were before the world began to industrialize. But without the US and China, and our nearly 50% of the world's emissions, on board it's hard to imagine how that goal could ever be met. And Obama and Hu are already signaling that they'll excuse their respective countries from any kind of global standards on capping and reducing emissions.

Copenhagen is seen as really the last chance to seriously fight global climate change in the coming century. Even the 2C goal is seen by some of those most affected as a weak target. Lost in the shuffle of the UN General Assembly last week was a meeting of the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, a group of 42 island nations, many of them very low-lying island nations; some, like the Maldives fear they could disappear entirely if ocean levels continue to rise due to the melting of the polar ice caps. AOSIS is pushing for a global warming goal of only 1.5 degrees C, though they admit even limiting global warming to that small amount might be too much for the future survival of their island homes.