It was just over twenty years ago, on June 23 1988, that Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a U.S. Senate committee that the year’s record temperatures were not the result of natural variation. As a result global warming irrevocably became part of official political discourse.

Last year Hansen said that a global tipping point will be reached by 2016 if the human population is unable to reduce greenhouse gases. He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for future sea level rise do not take into account ice sheet disintegration, which could cause several meters of sea level rise during the next century.

It is important to remember that even before his 1988 testimony Hansen was sounding the alarm. In 1981 he and a team of scientists at Goddard had reached the conclusion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming sooner than previously predicted. While other climatologists had already predicted that a trend would be apparent by 2020, Hansen predicted, in a paper published in Science, that the change was already occurring and that there would be record high temperatures as early as 1990. He also predicted that it would be difficult to convince politicians and the public to react.

The history of Hansen is instructive for what it says about the American government’s ability to deal with a real global threat. After decades of even acknowledging there could be a problem it then switched to minimizing the dangers. When even that became impossible it switched to suppressing information about it.

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In a recent article published by the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick traces John McCain’s views about foreign conflicts all the way back to 1974.  During that year, McCain submitted an essay to the National War College in which he argued that the American soldiers held captive in prison camps during the Vietnam conflict often collaborated with the North Vietnamese because of the antiwar movement in the United States.  Fidelity to one’s country, no matter how strong at the commencement of a military campaign, can quickly disintegrate when soldiers perceive that there is little or no public support for a war effort.  In McCain’s own words, detainees stuck in these camps “were easy marks for Communist propaganda” because large portions of the American public did not support the conflict in Vietnam.

McCain doesn’t seem to be saying that the antiwar movement was the sole cause of the traitorous collaboration he experienced as a P.O.W.  Rather, the antiwar movement enhanced the emotional appeal of collaboration in the minds of captured American soldiers by making the war seem pointless and immoral.  How did the antiwar movement accomplish this exactly?  Well, that’s where the fundamental premises of McCain’s argument get a bit difficult to articulate and disentangle.  It seems that the underlying logic goes like this:  Where a conflict like Vietnam comes to seem pointless and counterproductive, it becomes natural and reasonable for the soldiers captured during battle to change sides and support the social and political institutions seeking a quick end to the conflict.  And, if you can convince these soldiers that the war has no sound moral or political justification, ceteris paribus their loyalties and sympathies will naturally tend to shift as they increasingly come to identify with the enemy.  As a result they will begin to proactively collaborate with their sworn enemy, despite the fact that doing so makes them traitors.

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The Partnership for a Secure America presents

A Bipartisan Foreign Policy

for January 2009

With

Ambassador Tom Pickering

Robert (Bud) McFarlane

Frederick (Rick) Barton

Monday, June 23, 2008, 9 – 10:30 am

1111 19^th St, NW, 12^th Floor, Washington, DC 20036

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How many ways can one shaft America’s veterans? Let me count the ways. 

First, when on active duty send them to fight in a war that need never have been fought. Second, after deploying them to a combat zone increase the odds of their being wounded or killed by providing inadequate or non-existent equipment such as lack of properly armored vehicles or no body armor. Third, increase the odds against them by failing to promptly recognize new threats such as improvised explosive devices. Fourth, after they have been wounded give them a lack of proper facilities in which to recover, as evidenced by the Walter Reed scandal. Fifth, be inexplicably slow to recognize or screen for, let alone treat, neurological injuries from bomb blasts, which have become the war’s signature injury. Sixth, due to an inadequate military mental health system, fail to recognize increased suicidal tendencies on the part of returning veterans. These, by the way, are not all the ways I could list. 

And, if all that isn’t enough to screw veterans who just want to get on with their life and rejoin the society they fought for, one can always screw them over by providing inadequate educational benefits. 

Which brings us to what should be a bipartisan no-brainer, but sadly, isn’t. As Henny Youngman would say, take my GI Bill, please. That venerable institution, dating back to the WWII era has been modified numerous times over the years.

When I did my undergraduate work at the end of 70s and early 80s it was very helpful, but hardly sufficient. Since then, its relative contribution, as a percentage of overall educational costs has declined.

If a veteran is lucky he or she may get enough to cover about 60% of the costs of the average four-year public college. Currently, active-duty members who have continuously served for at least two years, and who forfeit $1,200 of their pay in one year, are entitled to receive $1,101 a month as a full-time student for up to 36 months, which is equivalent to four academic years. (more…)

Hmm, flowers are blooming, cherry blossoms emerged; it can only mean one thing. Yes, that’s right, it’s time once again for the semi-annual Congressional circus show, also known as putting lipstick on the pig, starring Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This morning these gentlemen will testify before Congress on the state of affairs in Iraq and what the chances of success are for the U.S. there. Of course, nobody knows what constitutes “success” but even so it is a daunting prospect.

As Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote yesterday, “the risks in Iraq remain high enough so that no one can yet say whether the odds of any kind of US success are better than even.” Of course Cordesman is hardly a proponent of withdrawing U.S. forces any time soon, which is why his next sentence was so revealing. “The fact remains, however, that there is still a marginally better case for staying than for leaving.” When respected analysts like Cordesman state that the case for staying is only “marginally better” than leaving you know that the United States has problems.

Of course, nobody expects this carefully scripted event to have serious questions or sincere answers if, for not other reason, than the hearing will be attended by Sens. Clinton, Obama, and McCain. Republicans will seek to defend the Bush Administration’s stay the course policy. As senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, “No one can deny the dramatic improvements in security in Iraq achieved by Gen. Petraeus, the brave troops under his command, and the Iraqi Security Forces.” Well, actually I could, but that would take another article. Democrats will just as fervently use it to make the case for withdrawing troops. (more…)

Last week, John McCain became the Republican nominee for President of the United States. Because of his early and unwavering support, the war in Iraq is sure to be a central theme. McCain will trumpet the security gains of last year’s surge, while the Democratic nominee will argue for withdrawal (in Obama’s case, within 16 months of inauguration day). While the campaign rhetoric is sure to fly fast and loose, one thing Americans should know is that there will be no easy answers. Since the end of the invasion, American policy makers have been flummoxed about how to pacify and build Iraq after decades of tyranny and a mismanaged occupation. American voters, and eventually policy makers, will have to make difficult choices and these choices will be based on how we prioritize the mission in Iraq in relation to both foreign and domestic policy. (more…)

I am sorry to be late with this post. I just returned after being away for a funeral for a close and beloved relative; my uncle, who was a WWII veteran.

Speaking of death the Administration has just released its Fiscal Year 2009 budget request. That, of course, brings us to the Department of Defense (DOD) , or what we used to call in a more candid century, the War Department, budget.

At his news briefing yesterday at the Pentagon Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “The investment in defense spending being presented today is $515.4 billion, or about 3.4 percent of our gross domestic product.” 

Hmm, “investment in defense spending.” So that’s what we’re calling it these days. 

Gates noted that the budget request is a 7.5 percent increase, or $35.9 billion, over last year’s enacted level. When accounting for inflation, this translates into a real increase of about 5-1/2 percent. The request includes a $70 billion emergency bridge fund that would cover war costs into the next calendar year. A more detailed request will be submitted this spring when the department has a better picture of what level of funding will be required.    

If passed by Congress, that would be the largest military budget — adjusted for inflation — since World War II. I guess that means Osama bin Laden must be the most dangerous menace since Adolph Hitler.

With Congress having already approved $691 billion in war spending since 2001, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined could rise to just under $900 billion by next spring and could near the $1 trillion mark by the end of 2009. (more…)

If the Partnership For A Secure America stands for anything it is, to quote from the mission statement, to recreate the “bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy.” As a PSA blogger from day one I agree with that. It is hard enough, in the best of times, which these days clearly are not, to try and formulate and implement a national strategy. We don’t need interminable backbiting and stale rhetoric about “stay the course” or “cut and run.”

Still, the PSA premise is one that has as its foundation the assumption that the era of liberal internationalism, U.S. power plus cooperation, which guided U.S. policymakers during the post WW II to at least Vietnam era and beyond, is something we can and should return to.

Most people assume that current U.S. foreign and national security policies are a sort of temporary aberration; a sort of passing madness brought about by the Bush administration and various neocons. And that once we reach January 2009 and a new president is in office things will return to normal.

But here is a question. What if we can’t? What if that era is so dead and buried that revival is impossible. What’s that, you say? Surely, I jest. Well, I like a joke as much as the next person but I’m actually serious.

Consider the article in the new issue of International Security by academics Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz. (more…)

Once the scourge of reflexive internationalism, the Bush administration is now dressing in multilateralist garb. The president’s latest concession is pushing the Law of the Sea Treaty, appropriately known as LOST.

The treaty declares all seabed resources to be the “common heritage of mankind,” hits Western mining companies and their sponsoring nations with fees and royalties, and creates a new global bureaucracy to divvy up the spoils. There are authorities, enterprises, committees, commissions, tribunals, and rules galore.

Unfortunately, decades ago the so-called Group of 77, the developing nations’ political lobby, appended this money-making scheme to [add] proposals to improve ocean resource exploitation, regularize petroleum exploration, improve environmental protection, and strengthen navigational freedom. Turn over the globe’s unowned resources to us, the Third World states offered, and we’ll recognize some of your rules–many of which already had been accepted as customary international law. (more…)

Judging by his appearance on the talk shows it appears that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates must have a twin brother, or perhaps a clone. And evidently they are not talking to each other. 

Consider what Gates said on Meet The Press:

GATES: Well, there’s no question that it’s disappointing that the Sunnis have left the government. Some of the ministers, such as the minister of defense, who is a Sunni, have remained in place. But their inability to reconcile among themselves at this national level and to get some of this legislation passed, clearly, is disappointing, and therefore makes some of the positive developments outside of Baghdad or outside of the national political arena more interesting.

But nevertheless he left open the possibility that some troops could be withdrawn before the year is out: 

RUSSERT: Is there a possibility we could draw down troops by the end of this year?

GATES: It’s a possibility.

RUSSERT: A good possibility.

GATES: There is a possibility. (more…)