As pointed out by Isenberg (see “So What’s New?”, posted today), the Democrats are still floundering.  There are all sorts of tactical, but I would also point out a much larger, macro-level, foundational ill that keeps the Loyal Opposition from offering more viable alternatives: a bipartisan buy-in to a National Security Strategy that still, in essence, harkens back to the Cold War.

The script, in this regard, is pretty simple:

1) Most or all really bad transnational problems (like terrorism) can be linked back to an enemy state, who equips, guides, trains, and otherwise supports such nasty players;

2) There is broad international agreement on who that enemy state is (or states in plural);

3) The enemy is monolithic, which naturally leads to a “bloc” approach to security: the US finds regional friends/allies to put bases in, give financial perks and aid, sell weapons, trade with, and so forth; the enemy bars its gates with an Iron (or Iran) Curtain; (more…)

Okay, let’s review. Our Democratic congressional majority reverted to ineffectual form this week and acknowledged that they were ready to make concessions to end an impasse with President Bush over war spending after the Senate soundly rejected a Democratic plan to block money for major combat operations in Iraq beginning next spring.

The 67-to-29 vote (which included 19 Democrats joining 47 Republicans and one independent against the measure), which we should remember was, at best, symbolic, demonstrated that a significant majority of Senators remained unwilling to demand a withdrawal of forces despite their own misgivings and public unease over the war.

Even some of those who supported the measure tried to explain away their support. Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham sought to distance herself from the amendment by stressing its procedural nature,

So, the war and the killing continue. Is there any reason to hope? Not really. Consider what passes for good news. (more…)

So World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz will leave office in June….around the same time as the British Prime Minister leaves his post. As I pondered over that interesting coincidence I decided to take a look at the transcript of the press conference between President Bush and the P.M. I wanted to see if there was anything to suggest that President Bush was likely to follow the advice of this blogger and other, far more notable, commentators and consider Mr. Blair for the W.B. post.  

This portion of the transcript made interesting reading:

“BUSH: We talked about, of course, Africa. We spent a lot of time talking about Africa. I told the prime minister that the AIDS initiative that got started under my administration will continue; that I’ll work with Congress to make sure that the PEPFAR initiative that has been so effective in getting anti-retroviral drugs to people on that continent will continue. It’s an important initiative of ours. I applaud the prime minister’s education initiative on the continent of Africa. It’s a bold stroke. And we look forward to working with you on that initiative.”

and then there was this piece:

“BUSH: We talked, of course, about climate change. We spent a lot of time on climate change. And I agree with the prime minister: As I have stated publicly, this is a serious issue, and the United States takes it seriously, just like we take energy security seriously. We talked about the upcoming G-8. And I assured the prime minister we want to be a part of a solution, that we want to work constructively together. He’s got some really good ideas on how to advance the technologies that are going to be necessary to help solve this problem. And I told him I’ve got some good ideas as how to convince China and India to be a part of a global solution. We have a lot of common ground that we’ve been discussing today.”

Not definitive for sure but it certainly doesn’t hurt the P.M.

I truely believe that the winning move for the President to make is to nominate Tony Blair to be the next head of the world’s most important International Financial Institution - it would be good for the President, the World Bank and U.S.-Europe relations…I just hope the people advising Mr. Bush are listening and willing to consider such a move.

Just read Brian Vogt’s piece, and it made me realize that we’ve entered a very weird area: a failed, rather neo-imperialistic war-of-choice is steadily turning into a “Responsibility to Protect” (RTP) situation…the latter of which is not a “frame” that any side in the debate has adopted, whether Arab, Non-Aligned, Republican, or Democrat.  But it merits serious consideration.

 Notably, we may be faced with a necessary partition situation that would 1) require a haven for Sunnis, a separate province, that is ultimately financially and militarily buttressed, supported, and made feasible by all surrounding Arab countries (and Iranian tacit agreement not to cause trouble there, and pressure their friends in the South to respect); and 2) Turkish agreement not to go paranoid and panicky about the possibility of an independent Kurdistan leading to the breakup of Turkey (the latter of which may simply be impossible to guarantee or assuage Turkish fears).

Why do I say this?  Because it has become clear that the Saudi’s suspicions are right: the Al-Maliki governing coalition is frayed and weak, not just because of lack of Sunni support, but an inability to suppress and control the Shia hardliner nationalists, both political and paramilitary in nature.  We are heading in a direction where if the US just pulls out – without a clear, feasible, and protected partition – there could be a genocidal, ethnic-cleansing-type bloodbath at the hands of either a radicalized Shia government in the South, or, independent militia groups doing whatever they please, with either tacit support or hidden material support from friends in the government bureaucracies.  Which, of course, would simply radicalize the Sunnis even more, as well as become even more of a magnet for transnational Salafists fighting for their Sunni bretheren. 

This may all seem like a normal part of the Iraq debate, but in a sense, it is getting into Samantha Powers-type issues of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and RTP…which makes Iraq a global humanitarian issue, not just a hegemonic superpower conundrum.

The Bush administration and some Presidential candidates have gotten so desperate these days for rationales to stay in Iraq that they fall back on scare tactics that simply don’t hold up based on their own actions.  I keep hearing the same mantra these days both from Bush and McCain:  We can’t afford to leave because if we do Iraq will degenerate into an even bigger disaster with genocide erupting and terrorists building a base of operations.   Eventually it will be necessary for us to go right back in. 

McCain said in the last Republican debate, “We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.”  In a May 10th speech Bush said, “We should be able to agree that the consequences of failure in Iraq would be disastrous for our country.” Lindsey Graham reacted to Bush’s veto of the Iraq spending bill saying, “President Bush is right to veto this legislation. It would have ensured our nation’s defeat in a war we cannot afford to lose.”

So, let’s look at the Bush administration’s track record.  Most everything that the administration has predicted in Iraq has gone exactly the opposite way.  The administration’s predictions about the future of the country are quite scary, but considering their track record in making predictions, some skepticism might be warranted. 

However, I must admit, that there are good reasons for believing that there is a possibility that Iraq will completely fall apart if we leave.  Even many of those who advocate for a pull out must admit that this is a real possibility.  This means that it is critically important that we do the pullout in a manner that minimizes these potential disasters.  Biden has proposed a partition and others have their own ideas about how a pull out would be done.  Much more analysis and thought must go into what the actual risk is in Iraq and what are the drawdown strategies that could minimize the disaster scenarios.  On the other hand, we must also remember that there are valid arguments that point to the U.S. presence in Iraq as exacerbating the conflict there rather than preventing it.  I don’t pretend to know where the causation lies, but I recognize that we may be both preventing conflict in some cases, and exacerbating it in other cases.  The answer probably isn’t cut and dry. (more…)

The clarion call is by now all too familiar: terrorism is not a monolith.  There are different groups with different motivations and reasons for existence.  America needs to discriminate.  And so on.  There has been no shortage of people trying to analyze things with a fine tooth comb: see for instance the excellent testimony by Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institution and also a Foreign Affairs article by two Nixon Center authors on the Muslim Brotherhood. 

And yet, we regularly hear legislators (not just President Bush) lump together nearly everyone: Muslim Brotherhood, HAMAS, Hizbollah, Al-Qaeda, and on and on. One senior Democratic staffer, serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee, earnestly said to me in spring 2006 that the various Agencies were seriously looking into the Hizbollah threat in Columbia (!) – that Columbia, as a criminal-failing state, gave ample room for this Lebanese-based group (or HAMAS) to expand anti-American activities to Latin America.   

More specifically, the line I hear ad nauseum from the White House and the Hill is ”rogue nations pursuing WMD who support terrorism,” implying that if a bad nation gets a nuke, rest assured, it will end up in NY – not by accident, it is implied, but by the rogue nation explicitly and purposefully and maliciously turning said nuke over to a transnational, global, radical terrorist group (never mind that Iran is Shia, and Al-Qaeda is a brand of Salafi Sunni Islam that views Shia as heretical). 

My question is fairly simple: how does one cut through this fog?  What gets in the way of accurate perception of a more nuanced and complex world?  I refuse to believe that most of our elected officials are just plain stupid. 

One almost gets the sense that there is a fear – never voiced explicitly – that a finer distinction will show that Israel’s fight is not exactly, line by line, our fight – that if we discriminate between a Shia political-miltiary-local group like Hizbollah and global Sunni nihilistic anti-globalization group like Al-Qaeda, that suddenly we won’t be supporting Israel anymore – which is nonsense.  Just because the people who set bombs off in Tel Aviv are not the same people (and same ideology) that sets off bombs in European or US cities, does not mean that – poof – all security support for Israel vanishes.  And yet, I almost get a sense that this is what is holding up an accurate, clear-eyed assessment by people on each side of the aisle. 

Given my planned trip to Iran on May 23 to take part in a new conference series on international political economy and Iran by the Ravand Institute, headed by ex-Ambassador to the UK Hossein Adeli (who broadly focuses on political economy in the Persian Gulf), I thought some words on the case of the imprisonment of Haleh Esfandiari at Evin Prison, Tehran, after four months of house arrest, were appropriate.  While her imprisonment at Evin is very recent (Tuesday of last week), her house arrest in Tehran spans a much longer period that we now know has included 8-hour stints of interrogation by authorities, apparently totaling at least 50 hours’ worth of grueling and intimidating sessions over 4 months’ time.  

I have to admit that this latest news has knocked the wind out of me – but not in regards to my own personal safety, which of course all my family from Kansas to Iowa to North Dakota are worried about.  I’m not worried about myself because Haleh was and is, technically, an Iranian citizen as well as holding an American passport and citizenship, and she has been a critic of women’s treatment in Revolutionary Iran in her capacity as an Iranian citizen.  And we all know that the current regime has been cracking down on Iranian citizens who attend Western events or travel abroad, or who have shown the impudence to re-settle somewhere else after the Revolution turned in a theocratic direction in the period 1979-1981.  So I’m not particularly concerned that a purely American citizen (like myself) will have his/her passport stolen and thrown in Evin Prison. 

What I am concerned about is what this means – what precedent it sets – for people I would call “global citizens,” and which constitutes a growing number of experts and former officials across the world’s capitols. It is actually this one case that, for me, has brought my own institution’s vision statement into sharp relief, to whit: “The [Stanley] foundation seeks a secure peace with freedom and justice, built on world citizenship and effective global governance…The foundation’s concept of principled multilateralism means working respectfully across differences to create fair, just, and lasting solutions.”   

Of course, we all know that the world operates largely according to cultural boundaries and nationalist sentiments.  Whether it takes the form of American Exceptionalism (on both sides of the partisan divide) - in the most egregious form in cases such as Git-mo, Eastern European prisons, arrests without charge of Arab-Americans, and renditions to other countries for torture and interrogation – or whether it takes on a Saudi, or Iranian, or Indian, or Turkish etc. etc. slant, the international system still lacks many of the ingredients of a true community (yes, I’m giving a slight nod to neo-cons’ critique of “international community” here).  Nationalism everywhere is on the rise – whether secular, Asian, Latin American, ethnic, religious, or other.  And certainly, political Islam itself - purportedly based on universal Islamic law – notably diverges in social and political practice across different nations and state boundaries and is no stranger to nationalist sentiments, as explained in detail by two Nixon Center authors in Foreign Affairs).  (more…)

Hmm, let’s see; speaking on This Week On ABC Barack Obama reminds us of how different he was from all the others running for President, regarding whether to invade Iraq:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s talk about Iraq. President Clinton says it’s ludicrous to characterize Hillary and Obama’s positions on the war as polar opposites. Is he right?
 
OBAMA: Well, I don’t think they’re polar opposites. I would agree with that. I think that my position, though, has been clear from the start and has been consistent, which is that I thought this was a bad idea. I said so from the start. I also said even as I said it was a bad idea that once we were in, it was going to be tough to get out and that we were going to have some responsibilities to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in and I’ve been consistent in that position.

Meanwhile, over on Fox News Sunday, Rudy Giuliani, who makes a point of constantly proclaiming his decisive, take charge, brook no doubt, personality, fearlessly hedges: (more…)

Hello all – this is Michael Kraig of the Stanley Foundation, taking the place of Christopher Preble for this week. 

I’ll start off the festivities by expounding on my favorite theme of late: the extremely limited utility of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and the larger issue underlying it, which is the idea that US national security and global security can be based on the perfection of deterrent, threat-making, and warfighting capabilities.

To start, it’s good to remember what the RMA ultimately means: a better ability to track, identify, and destroy targets of strategic or tactical value, in order to assure victory in warfare.  So a first place to start is asking, “to what degree does the ability to destroy targets at any time, anywhere, provide security for the average US citizen?”  This basic question usually gets lost in the jumble of acronyms and impressive-sounding concepts such as Full Spectrum Dominance.

My thesis is that the RMA is the conventional extension of a once-nuclear military strategy and nuclear operations (STRATCOM now is in the conventional surveillance and warfighting game, that is, the mission of “global strike,” not restricted to nukes alone), and that by sheer inertia and bad/absent policy guidance, has become our de facto national security strategy (not just our military doctrine or defense posture). 

If there were true bipartisan agreement on a wider national security strategy, the technical and tactical utility of spending billions on R&D and procurement for fighting the next major power war would be judged on its true merits toward fulfilling that strategy.  The problem is, in the absence of such agreement, the RMA, as an extension of nuclear deterrence and warfighting doctrine/operations, essentially has become our national security strategy – at least if one judges things by our budgetary choices (as the existentialists say, “you are what you do”).  The 1996 brief by Harlan Ullman and James P. Wade on Shock and Awe, in short, is not just a tactical military doctrine; due to the strategic vacuousness of Clinton years NSS’s and the purposeful machinations of the Bush Administration, what should be a tactical tool is in fact our entire approach: identify an enemy; coercive that enemy to make them back down (they have no legitimate interests we should consider recognizing or satisfying); destroy that enemy’s will to fight; achieve victory (or convince them to back down without hostilities); and then achieve policy aims through total subjugation of the enemy (regime’s) demands and interests. (more…)