Saturday, Iran celebrated their great victory over the “arrogant powers” by opening their first nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The opening coincided with dynamic conversation on Jeff Goldberg’s recent article in The Atlantic painting a picture of military action as a foregone conclusion, and prominent foreign policy leaders such as former UN Ambassador John Bolton fanned the flames by renewing calls for a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Dangerously, the discussion on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program has moved away from the case for bombing Iran to who and when, ignoring the painful lessons learned from depicting military action as a clean and straightforward solution. We are still reeling from the burdensome commitments of Iraq and Afghanistan: a military response by either the United States or Israel will take much more than just bombs and have major potential consequences beyond Iran, realities noticeably absent from much of the conversation.

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I just made it through Hitch 22, Christopher Hitchen’s memoir.  For those of you unacquainted with Mr. Hitchens, he – and please, never call him “Chris” – is a journalist and political dissident of the first rank who deploys with unequalled deft the English language to challenge tyranny in all its varied guises and disguises.  Mr. Hitchens has engaged in spirited struggle against a wide array of ghouls and scoundrels, from Saddam Hussein (for inflicting terror on his own people) to the Ayatollah Khomeini (for issuing a fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s head) to our own Henry Kissinger (for a range of offenses too long to list).

While reading this brilliant memoir, a thought kept haunting me about the way we think about achieving foreign policy goals with military means and methods.  We tend to think of these goals as ones that can be achieved scientifically.  For example, if you want to dethrone an insipid dictator, you must simply determine what is necessary to remove him.  Regime change, then, is a scientific problem that can be addressed with the tools of an amateur’s logic:  identify the problem, formulate a strategy, and then execute that strategy carefully.  A reasonably clever schoolboy could work it out, we seem to believe.

The problem with this little tradition of ours is not just that the military is not an institution structured to win over the hearts and minds of those who live in a life world far from our own – though this is certainly true.  The real bugbear is that many foreign policy objectives are not well suited to being achieved through bloody military campaigns.  And it’s not that the military needs to change, far from it; we must stop expecting our soldiers to handle problems best addressed through other means. (more…)

To understand how perverse the perennial debate, which in itself is a weak word for what passes as supposed scrutiny and argumentation over U.S. military spending, always deliberately and euphemistically called defense spending, one has only to read the “Statement on Department Efficiencies Initiative”  delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 9 when he proposed some modest changes in military command structures, such as the proposed closing of the Joint Forces Command,  l along with other organization adjustments which theoretically, in aggregate, could save billions of dollars over five years.

To read the subsequent whining and rhetorical rending of government by corporate CEOs and their Congressional allies one might think Mahatma Gandhi had been brought back from the dead and been made Secretary of Defense.

The fact that the prospect of “Thousands Of Defense Jobs To Be Eliminated,” as the Washington Post headlined it the following day, in a military-industrial corporate sector which employs hundreds of thousands in the most limited definition of the phrase, excited so much whining is the very epitome of farce.

First, considering Gates called for finding more than $100 billion in overhead savings over the next five years, when combined direct military spending is likely to total over $3.5 trillion dollars is what you call having very low expectations. Note this does not include other military related spending which would jack the total even higher. For detail see the newly released Report of the Task Force on A Unified Security Budget for the United States.

Second, in no way whatsoever can what Gates proposed be considered a cut, as happened in most press accounts. As Gates took pains to note, “Let me be clear, the task before us is not to reduce the department’s top line budget.  Rather, it is to significantly reduce its excess overhead costs and apply the savings to force structure and modernization.” (more…)

One of the most striking statistics from the U.S. war in Vietnam doesn’t concern Vietnam at all, but its neighbor, Laos.  Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped over 2.5 million tons of ordnance on Laos.  This works out to the equivalent of one B-52 load of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. The sheer tonnage of explosives dropped on Laos makes the tiny, land-locked nation the most heavily-bombed country in history, with half a ton of bombs dropped for every inhabitant.

This dubious distinction carries a terrible legacy. According to U.S. estimates, approximately 30% of ordnance dropped over Laos failed to detonate upon impact. This unexploded ordnance, or UXO, remains scattered and buried throughout an area that covers one third of the country. In the past five decades over 50,000 Laotians – a fifth of them children – have been killed or maimed by American UXO. Currently, around 300 Laotians needlessly die every year from accidents involving UXO. Particularly deadly have been cluster bombs, which consist of sub-munitions that scatter over a wide area and are notorious for causing indiscriminate civilian casualties. Experts estimate that of the 260 million cluster bombs, or “bomblets” American forces dropped on Laos, 80 million remain unexploded. (more…)

If nothing else, the Wikileaks release of the Afghanistan War Diaries has had the positive effect of focusing public attention back of Afghanistan. Of course, there has increasing coverage this year, as the surge of troops ordered by President Obama last fall has been implemented. But the war there has not received nearly the coverage it deserves, given the intensified fighting and increased brittleness of American strategy and goals.

Let there be no mistake, the costs are high. The United States, as this Congressional Research Service report details will, most likely, suffer more killed and wounded this year, than in any year since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. As of July 12 that was 218 killed and 2000 wounded. In 2009, by comparison the numbers were 311 killed and 2,131 wounded. Total U.S. military deaths thus far from Oct. 11, 2001 are 1,154 and wounded is 6,773.

We should note that the deaths of at least 66 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen have made July the deadliest-ever month for American troops in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. The tally includes six American service members who died in four separate attacks in southern Afghanistan last Thursday and Friday.

One of the salutary effects of the Wikileaks documents is to illustrate the incoherent response of the federal government when it comes to dealing with the reality of its policies. As the Project On Government Oversight noted:

There is no doubt this episode also exposes the ridiculous problems created by the overclassification of government information. The Administration cannot have it both ways—they claimed that there was nothing important in the 92,000 documents, then also claimed that this was a terrible breach of national security. There is no doubt that the release produced a better-informed populace about one of our most important public policy issues, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. But at what cost?

This, by the way, is a realistic appraisal of Wikileaks, as opposed to the predictable hysteria from such rightwingers as Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute.

Maybe people think that much of this is moot; that come next year the U.S. will redeploy its troops back home from Afghanistan. If so, they should ponder this exchange from the interview that ABC’s This Week with Christine Amanpour did with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on August 1: (more…)

It has been nearly two months since I last wrote about the health of American military personnel and veterans so let’s look at it again. The news, unfortunately, isn’t any better.

First, let’s look at the past. Today the Los Angeles times reports that researchers have found that soldiers who suffered brain injuries can develop seizures decades — as long as 35 years — after the initial injury. A study published in the journal Neurology found that among a group of 199 Vietnam veterans, about 13% developed post-traumatic epilepsy more than 14 years after they had suffered a penetrating head wound, such as a gunshot injury or shrapnel that entered brain tissue. Penetrating head injuries are generally linked with a higher risk for epilepsy than other types of head injuries, such as concussions.

It is unclear how the study relates to combatants returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today, the authors said. The Vietnam veterans in the study suffered from penetrating brain injuries, which are rarer in soldiers fighting in the current conflicts because helmets have improved. Today, closed-head injuries (where the brain is not penetrated) are more common, in part because of the helmet improvements and partly because of a change in the weaponry used in modern warfare. (more…)

Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet state in Central Asia, has made many headlines after its corrupt President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was toppled in April. On June 10th, riots erupted between the Kyrgyz and the Uzbek minority in Bakiyev’s stronghold Osh, leaving hundreds dead and sending a flood of refuges to neighboring Uzbekistan. The June 27th constitutional referendum ratifying a new constitution was deemed successful, but true peace is elusive in southern Kyrgyzstan. The violence continues as the Kyrgyz police abuse ethnic Uzbeks, and the unrest threatens to spread to neighboring countries. Riots may flare up anew when the local clans start vying for power in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Kyrgyzstan’s weak central authorities are unable to rein in the violence.

During this time, only the lazy refrained from opining about the Kyrgyz misfortune, but nevertheless world governments have not followed words with actions. Russia and the United States have limited their response to Kyrgyz pleas for help to providing humanitarian relief. Their continued inaction may have dire consequences. Even in the unlikely scenario that the conflict resolves itself, the indecisiveness of the two world powers will leave a bitter aftertaste in the former Soviet republics. (more…)

I was out of town when the kerfuffle about the article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine became public.

Now that I am back and have read the article I am amazed at how little it takes to get a general fired. I mean, for pity’s sake, this was not something on the order of Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur. It was not as if McChrystal was seriously criticizing Obama’s war strategy, like MacArthur did about Truman. How could he? This was the strategy, after all, that McChrystal had successfully persuaded Obama to sign off on and one that McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus has pledged to continue.  I venture to say one hears more venomous remarks around the average office water cooler than what I read in the article.

Contrary to what some in the media write this was not a sign of a “dysfunctional civilian-military relationship.” To me it is a sign of posturing on the part of President Obama and, perhaps, an attempt to burnish his hawk credibility, and to sweep under the rug, at least for a little bit longer that his Afghanistan strategy is not working. (more…)

In a room full of computer screens, a US civilian with a joystick on the console kills a man thousands of miles away. Having aced a course on drones with ferocious names like Reaper, Hunter, and Tigershark, he is competent to take down a target — a dangerous terrorist, a drug lord connected with the Taliban, a farmer planting IEDs, or, accidentally, an innocent civilian, as the drones are liable to targeting errors. The drones often save American lives and tax dollars at the expense of the lives of innocent civilians: just last month, an air strike mistake led to 23 civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

However, instead of addressing the targeting failures or keeping the drones in the combat zone, the United States sometimes dismisses problems by defining its enemies as “unlawful combatants” and keeping the drone operations secret. If Washington continues to excuse itself from the rule of law in this manner, the use of armed unmanned vehicles may create more problems than it solves.

Last week, a 29-page report to the United Nations Human Rights Council called on the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of drones outside of war zones because the use of drones undermined global constraints on the use of military force.  The report stressed that the drone technology is changing the rules of conflict and undermining the foundations of humanitarian behavior in war. Here are just some grounds on which the US use of drones could be challenged. (more…)

As a sign of how bad a mistake Israel made when its commandos boarded the Gaza bound ship Mavi Marmara on May 31 consider what Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens, a former liberal who moved rightward after 9/11 wrote yesterday:

The near-incredible stupidity of the Israeli airborne descent on the good ship Mavi Marmara, by troops well-enough equipped to shoot when panicked but not well-enough prepared to contain or subdue a preplanned riot, has now generated much more coverage and comment than Erdogan’s cynical recent decision to become a partner in the nuclear maneuvers of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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Israeli self-pity over Gaza—”You fire rockets at us! And after all we’ve done for you!”—may be incredibly unappetizing. An occupation that should never have been allowed in the first place was protracted until it became obviously unbearable for all concerned and then turned into a scuttle. The misery and shame of that history cannot be effaced by mere withdrawal or healed by the delivery of aid. It can only really be canceled by a good-faith agreement to create a Palestinian state.

Sad to say we have been down this road before with Israel. It does something wrong, countries and people object, and the pro-Israel crowd opens up the spin spigots, i.e., people who criticize Israel don’t understand that it is at war, that people who criticize are naïve leftists and terrorist travelers, or just plain old anti-Jewish bigots.  (more…)