In early February 2011, the first such task force made a stop in Jeddah on the way to an equally unprecedented visit to the Mediterranean.  While in the Med – as anti-regime fervor caught fire in the Arab nations – the Iranian warships visited Latakia, Syria.  According to disclosures from a Syrian who recently fled his post with the defense ministry, the Iranian warships in 2011 delivered arms to the Assad regime.

There is no public information on whether the current task force will go north through the Suez Canal.  In 2011, Iran announced the Suez passage of the first task force before the ships arrived in Port Suez on the Red Sea.

One of the noteworthy aspects of last year’s visit was that it occurred in the same time period as the visit in Jeddah of the French aircraft carrier, FS Charles de Gaulle.

This year’s deployment occurs in conjunction with a fresh Iranian naval exercise in the Strait of Hormuz.  It also occurs in the immediate wake of a speech in which Ayatollah Khamenei announced that Iran would “support and help any nations, any groups fighting against the Zionist regime across the world.” Characterizing Israel as “a true cancer tumor,” Khamenei declared:

The Zionist regime … should be cut off.  And it definitely will be cut off.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, doing his bit earlier this week to support America’s and Israel’s strategic interests, announced his suspicion that

… there was a ”strong likelihood” of Israel launching a unilateral strike against Iranian nuclear facilities in ”April, May or June.”

The helpful nature of this disclosure can hardly be overstated.  It keeps Iran on perpetual alert and tips Israel’s hand even if the Israelis are not planning a strike for the particular timeframe indicated.  I’m not sure what the Obama administration thinks it’s accomplishing with these incessant hand-wringing references to what Israel might be about to do – there are a couple of possibilities, which I have discussed before.  But the most probable consequence is Iran wanting badly to inflict another “intifada” on Israel, and keep her preoccupied with self-defense.

Outcomes and new power relationships are still in flux in the region, a year on from the Hezbollah takeover of the Lebanese government and the eruption in Tunisia that launched the “Arab Spring.”  Putting another naval task force in the northern Red Sea is an Iranian move intended to impress the region, and establish a presence and freedom of action.  It may also be intended pragmatically, like last year’s deployment, to deliver arms somewhere.  Iranian commercial ships may get stopped, but warships probably won’t.

Meanwhile, the exercise in the Strait of Hormuz does more than merely send political signals.  It provides training for the Iranian sailors – something they always need – and it begins to establish a pattern of more frequent exercises.  In the future, assuming that that pattern continues, it will be harder for the US and other navies to distinguish an exercise from a set-up for a real operation.

It is interesting to note that the Iranian warships have arrived in Jeddah just as the Russian carrier task force has departed the Med.  The RFS Admiral Kuznetsov and escorts entered the Atlantic, reportedly for the return transit to their homeports, on 3 February.  Kuznetsov visited Syria several times in December and January.  If the Iranian warships are headed for Syria – and that is not established yet – it is a good question whether any other navy in the Med would attempt to intercept them.  The navies of France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Israel have the capability to; the question is whether they would. A Russian arms carrier was allowed to deliver weapons to Syria last month.

The region is shifting away from the condition of relative stability it inhabited as little as two years ago.  Some things mean more now than they once would have, and some mean less.  It went over most Americans’ heads, for example, that the homicidal soccer melee in Egypt on Wednesday occurred in Port Said, the entry point to the Suez Canal on the Mediterranean side.  Additional follow-on violence has been seen in Port Suez, the southern access point on the Red Sea side of the canal.  A crowd of at least 3,000 besieged the governorate security-force headquarters there on Friday, and had to be fought back by security personnel, with two protesters being killed.

The Egyptian revolution in early 2011 saw long-running protests in Suez, organized by the labor unions that work the port facilities.  National authorities have assured the world that the canal will be kept safe, but the latest rounds of violence have hit the canal’s northern and southern access points within the space of 48 hours.  The interim regime’s ability to secure the canal without a fight, or without disruption of service, is not guaranteed.

In the fluctuating conditions of the Middle East, it is not clear what reaction Iran’s naval ventures will get.  Last year there was a US aircraft carrier in the immediate vicinity when the Iranian warships went through the Red Sea and Eastern Med.  This year there is not.  The US naval presence is relatively distant from the Eastern Med: two carriers in the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea area; a BMD cruiser (USS Vella Gulf, CG-72) currently in the Black Sea; a couple of destroyers on antipiracy patrol off Somalia.  We do not now maintain a deterrent, sea-control naval presence in the Med.

Would the nations of the region shrug off the Iranian naval deployment if it went further than Jeddah?  Do those nations – Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel – see a need to decide on a “post-American” posture on this matter now?  We don’t know yet.  The warships may turn around in the Red Sea this time.  But that day is coming.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The commander of the Military District of Washington has ordered a court-martial for Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the former intelligence analyst accused of giving hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Maj. Gen. Michael S. Linnington made the decision Friday after reviewing testimony and arguments from a preliminary hearing at Fort Meade in December, officials said.

There was no word on whether the as-yet-unscheduled court-martial would also be held at Fort Meade, one of three installations within the military district equipped to host such a proceeding.

While Manning would normally qualify for death (likely before a firing squad) all current reports indicate that the prosecution will only seek life in prison. Either way, the investigation has gone on long enough that the Army clearly feels they have the goods and can deliver a case sufficient to obtain a conviction. The current odds would indicate that Manning will likely never see the outside of a prison again.

What remains to be seen is if Julian Assange will be drawn into this web following revelations that his chat logs were tied to Manning from his laptop. The case is complicated, since Assange is currently awaiting possible extradition and trial in the UK for sexual assault charges.

But the real meat axe is hanging just over the horizon in what is known as “sequestration” cuts, i.e. cuts which will be made across the board because the debit committee was unable to reach a deal on the cuts in the budget (by the way, Harry Reid, it’s now been 1001 days since you, Mr. Majority Leader, passed a budget out of the Senate) for the future.   That would mean an additional half trillion in cuts to DoD, the result of which, would simply be disastrous to our national security.

Here, in this video, a group of Republican House Armed Services Committee members make a pitch for a common sense solution that would absorb the need for those sequestration cuts.  In short, cut the Federal workforce by 10% – but do it over time and strictly through attrition.

Someone, anyone, tell me we couldn’t get along without 10% of the Federal workforce.

Of course the phrase “common sense” dooms it to failure.

Just watch.

The administration appears to be doing what it thinks will avert one.  Military force is playing a quiet and relatively minor role.  There has been more “messaging” about force in the last few weeks than actual force activity.  The administration is also trying to discourage Israel from mounting an independent strike on Iran, by frequently advertising US concerns about that possibility.  Presumably the White House knows that this particular messaging campaign serves to keep Iran alerted.  Ultimately, there is more talk than anything else.  Military preparations, such as they are, are defensive in nature.  That includes the acceleration of missile-defense sales to the Persian Gulf nations.

Consider last week’s disclosures about the number of US troops in Kuwait and the announcement that a “second” carrier strike group had arrived in the Central Command (CENTCOM) theater.  News outlets across the nation reported these bits of information as evidence that the US is “boosting” our military presence in the Persian Gulf.  The direct implication is that we are doing this not only because of the Iranian threat but because of a concern in the White House that Israel will conduct a strike on her own (which would produce a backlash from Iran).

But we are not “boosting” our troop presence in the Gulf.  We decided last year to keep some of the troops coming out of Iraq in Kuwait, as a ready force to deal with contingencies.  As far as I can tell, the US administration has not explicitly implied in the last few days that the troops were “dispatched” to Kuwait, as if they had just recently deployed from North America.  But numerous news outlets are reporting the developments in exactly those terms.

The force of about 15,000 includes two Army brigade combat teams (BCTs) and a combat air (helicopter) brigade, all of which deployed in 2011 prior to the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq.  We haven’t “boosted” our ground-force presence in the Persian Gulf; we have drawn it down a little less than originally advertised.  The forces in Kuwait are insufficient to mount an attack with; they might be used instead to help defend Gulf nations if Iran retaliated against sanctions or other Western actions with regional attacks.  (The original premise was being able to go back into Iraq for security operations.)

The carrier strike group situation, meanwhile, will prove out in the coming days; we may have decided to keep two strike groups on station instead of one.  One of two carriers that are currently outside the Persian Gulf – USS John C Stennis (CVN-74), which has been on station and is due to go home to the West coast, and USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70), which has just arrived from San Diego – will probably leave shortly.  A third carrier strike group, that of USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), is reportedly headed for the theater from its last port visit in Thailand, which may mean that two carriers will be within a 1-3 day transit of the Persian Gulf, even if both are not operating there continuously.

It has been far from unusual to have two carriers in CENTCOM over the past decade.  Even Pat Buchanan seems to have given up thinking it’s a harbinger of an ill-advised attack on Iran.  Two carriers are, in fact, insufficient to launch a deliberate attack on Iran – like the ground forces being retained in Kuwait.  The presence of two carriers in the theater for an extended period is evidence of a marginally heightened defensive profile.   (It also gives the president the flexibility to send one on a dash to the Eastern Mediterranean if necessary, while keeping one on station in Southwest Asia.)  The two carriers are not a signal that we are going on offense.

Notably, if we did need to apply significant force in the Eastern Med, we’d have to send assets there.  The Russians have the only aircraft carrier task force deployed in EASTMED. The US has not maintained a robust carrier presence in the Med for some years now.  (Interestingly, Britain and France are planning to jointly deploy a large naval force – including aircraft carriers – to the Med later this year.)

Meanwhile, another media narrative, about the US sending a signal of support to Israel (and pressure against Iran) at a crucial time, has just fallen apart.

The US and Israel were set to hold exercise Austere Challenge 2012 in May, followed by Exercise Juniper Cobra 2012, a missile/air-defense exercise that would place the Theater High-Altitude Defense (THAAD) system in a “defense against Iranian missiles” scenario.

The Juniper Cobra series started in 2001, and in 2009 brought the THAAD system into Israel also.  Austere Challenge is a US European Command (EUCOM) exercise series in which the command headquarters practices operating as a joint task force HQ, commanding participants among the US forces stationed or deployed in the EUCOM theater.  US reserve forces regularly deploy to Europe for the exercise, and in 2011, the US Sixth Fleet flagship, USS Mount Whitney, participated as a HQ afloat, concluding the exercise with a port visit in Haifa.

The US and Israel were planning a large-scale combination of these exercises in April-May 2012.  But reporting in the last 24 hours indicates that the exercises will not take place then.  Turkish press, quoting Israeli reporting, says that the exercises have been postponed until later in the year.  But the most recent Israeli reporting suggests the exercises have been cancelled (with budget concerns cited as the reason).

Postponement – probably to an as-yet unspecified date – is more likely.  The US gets as much out of these exercises as Israel, and has been focusing on Juniper Cobra 2012 for validating missile-defense systems and operational concepts that cannot be effectively exercised elsewhere.   (UPDATE:  the latest from the Jerusalem Post confirms that the exercises will be held later in 2012.)

But the political signal is the opposite of the one originally talked up in the infosphere.  Rather than intending to send a signal about US support for Israel, one that would put pressure on Iran, the administration is, at the very least, not concerned that canceling or delaying the exercises will inevitably send a very different signal.

I’m sure the Obama administration would characterize its political posture as one of concern that holding these exercises on schedule would be seen as provocative in an already unsettled situation.  The unspoken premise is, of course, that demonstrating US-Israeli collaboration in missile defense and military operations is provocative.

And from the perspective of Tehran, and no doubt Damascus, it presumably is.  Well-intentioned people can argue honestly over whether it is a good idea to let policy decisions be governed by what our opponents consider provocative.  “Provocative” is always the flip side of “deterrent”; the question is whether, in a given situation, one thinks like a global leader determined to deter, or like a nation that hopes to avoid the need for exertion.

Regardless, it cannot be argued that the Obama posture is anything other than defensive.  Equally defensive is the administration’s emphasis on supplying Gulf nations with air- and missile-defense systems.  These systems are of obvious interest to Iran’s neighbors, but they cannot prevent Iran from launching attacks – of any kind.  They are purely passive, entailing no preemption or active deterrence.

It has been a mistake at every turn to look for evidence of the conventional use of US power in the actions of the Obama administration.  The operations in Libya demonstrated clearly that Team Obama is determined not to use US military power to secure transformative outcomes rapidly.  Obama is prepared to let conflicts continue as long as they must in order that the outcomes be achieved by other means.  His solicitude for missile defenses in the Gulf and in Israel is a signal that he expects to approach Iran on defense.  Our overall military posture in the Gulf simply reinforces that approach.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

THERE WERE NO BIG SURPRISES IN THURSDAY’S ANNOUNCEMENT, mainly because the most important real-world effects of the new strategy won’t be known until the president’s budget proposal is released. Reaction was mainly predictable as well – Republicans were concerned about weakening U.S. power in a dangerous world, progressives blasted it as too timid and a lost opportunity for Pentagon reform, and veterans groups are concerned about future benefit cuts.

THE REAL TEST WILL BE whether the strategy will result in a military force capable of handling the unintended consequences of world events. The president is sitting comfortably right now – he’s ended U.S. involvement in Iraq, set a path for withdrawal in Afghanistan and seriously weakened Al Qaeda. Libya looks like a success story for the multilateral cooperation the strategy emphasizes for the future, and there are signs the sanctions on Iran are starting to bite. But any or all of these situations could turn for the worse in a heartbeat, and wake up U.S. voters who right now aren’t really paying attention. Nothing is settled.

IT’S ALL ABOUT RISK - Military leaders acknowledge and accept that the new strategy brings new risks, which they consider acceptable in the current environment. The United States can get away with a smaller army because its leaders don’t expect to be fighting any large ground wars in the future …

I’d actually argue that some of the assessments made in the middle paragraph are debatable. Libya, for instance, seems anything but a success with Islamist militias poised to take over. It certainly may be seen as a “military” success, but military success should tied to a strategy of overall success, not just whether it was able to defeat a rag-tag enemy. After all the the military is but the blunt force of foreign policy, used when all less violent means have been exhausted. There should be an acceptable outcome tied to its use. Libya’s descent into Islamic extremism seems to argue against “success” on the whole. Couple that with the fact that al Qaeda has set up shop there, and you could argue that even if al Qaeda has been “seriously weakened”, it has just been given a new lease on life in Libya.

That said, let’s talk about the defense cuts. The last paragraph is obviously the key to the strategy. It is about assessing risk and accepting that risk based on that assessment. The problem is the phrase “acceptable in the current environment”. The obvious point is that what is “acceptable in the current environment” may be problematic in any future environment.

So what is happening here is a political position/decision is being dressed up as a military assessment in order to justify the political position. We’ll cut land forces and concentrate on air and sea forces.

But where are we fighting right now? Certainly not in the air or at sea.

The Army is already is slated to drop to a force of 520,000 from 570,000, but Mr. Panetta views even that reduction as too expensive and unnecessary and has endorsed an Army of 490,000 troops as sufficient, officials said.

The defense secretary has made clear that the reduction should be carried out carefully, and over several years, so that combat veterans are not flooding into a tough employment market and military families do not feel that the government is breaking trust after a decade of sacrifice, officials said.

A smaller Army would be a clear sign that the Pentagon does not anticipate conducting another expensive, troop-intensive counterinsurgency campaign, like those waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor would the military be able to carry out two sustained ground wars at one time, as was required under past national military strategies.

The last sentence is pure bull squat. National strategy goes by the boards when national necessity demands we fight “two sustained ground wars at one time” whether we like it or not. The strategy would simply mean we’d end up fighting those two ground wars with a less capable force than we have now. The other unsaid thing here is if you think we used the heck out of the Army National Guard in the last decade, just watch if something unforeseen happens after these cuts are made.

Also wrapped up in this new “national strategy” is some naive nonsense:

“As Libya showed, you don’t necessarily have to have boots on the ground all the time,” an official said, explaining the White House view.

“We are refining our strategy to something that is more realistic,” the official added.

Sorry to break it to the White House, but that’s not a “realistic strategy”. It’s a wish. I can’t tell you how many times, since the advent of the airplane in combat, I’ve heard it said that the necessity of maintaining ground troops is coming to an end.

Yet here we are, with troops in Afghanistan and 10 years of troops in Iraq. Libya was a one-of that still hasn’t come to a conclusion and as I note above, what we’re seeing now doesn’t appear to improve the situation for the US – and that should be the goal of any sort of intervention. I certainly appreciate the desire not to nation build, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need less ground troops available in a very dangerous and volatile world. Air and sea are combat multipliers, but as always, the only sort of units that can take and hold ground are ground combat units. That hasn’t changed in a thousand years. If you want to talk about contingencies, there are more of them that require those sorts of forces than don’t.

Finally, with all that said, what about the pivot toward China as our new, what’s the term, ah, “adversary”? Is there some clever guy who has managed to come up with a strategy that will require no ground troops in any sort of a confrontational scenario with our new “adversary”?

Of course not. Korean peninsula? Taiwan? Here we pivot toward what could be a massive threat which itself has a huge land army and we do what? Cut ours. Because we “think” that it won’t be necessary to have such a capability should our “adversary” become our “enemy”?

I’m not saying they will, I’m just pointing out that the strategy – cut Army and Marines and pivot toward China which has one of the largest land armies in the world – doesn’t seem particularly well thought out. But I’m not surprised by that. Again, when you tailor a strategy to support a political position/decision, such “strategies” rarely are.

Oh, and don’t forget:

The military could be forced to cut another $600 billion in defense spending over 10 years unless Congress takes action to stop a second round of cuts mandated in the August accord.

Lovely.

First, the admin. I appear to be experiencing the “System Check” malware on my primary (fast) computer, and can therefore not, at the moment, publish the better, in-depth post I was planning to prepare over the last couple of days. A system diagnostic is running to verify that the problems being reported by the “System Check” dialogue box are not actually there. The rocedure to remove the malware looks like it will take some time (link provided in case anyone else needs it, or perhaps has insightful comments on the problem). So, unfleshed-out comments only, for now.

Iran

The Iranian regime is posturing for the region. The Iranians do intend to affect thinking in the US as well, but it is a mistake to suppose that we are dealing with a dyad here: Iran and the US locked on each other in a vacuum in which all other assumptions are static or “given.”

If that were the case, the Iranian threats to the Strait of Hormuz (SOH) might be considered foolish or pathetic. US power is fully sufficient to put down an Iranian attempt on the SOH – if it is used decisively.

It may not be. The US is not, in fact, rushing aircraft carriers to the SOH; the recent passage of the USS John C Stennis (CVN-74) through the SOH, commemorated with

footage from an Iranian surveillance plane (apparently a Fokker F-27), was an exit from the Persian Gulf; and US officials weren’t kidding when they said it was a routine transit, and that Stennis was headed for already scheduled operations.

The US Navy has enough carriers in a ready status to pry the SOH open if Iran tries to close it with force, but those carriers are not in the theater. Stennis is the only one on station. The potential exists for three already-deployed carriers to be in the CENTCOM theater within a couple of weeks: Stennis could still be there (unless she has started a return transit to the US West coast); USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is heading that way, on a deployment that will end with her shifting home ports from Washington to Virginia; and USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) is in the Southeast Asia region, also scheduled to operate in the CENTCOM area (and, from a continuous-presence scheduling standpoint, the “relief” for Stennis).

President Obama has yet to rush an aircraft carrier to the scene of unrest or threats (Debka is uniformly wrong on this), and it does not appear that he is doing so here. It is important to note that in this case, that restraint amounts to more than a laconic political signal. It is also a strategic decision not to guarantee freedom of action for the US in responding to Iranian provocations, at least not on a rapid timeline. We still have land-based air forces in the Persian Gulf, which would ideally be available for any campaign to open and secure the SOH. But with the drawdown in Iraq, the numbers have dwindled (our principal concentration of air assets is at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar).

More important, however, is the question of whether the local nations would allow us to use their territory as a base for the operations we might deem necessary. I wrote a year ago about the

declining willingness of the Gulf nations to host US military operations that could involve attacks on Iran – and forcing open the SOH inevitably would. The Gulf nations would undoubtedly be in favor of ensuring the SOH was open and safe, but it is not clear today that they would be prepared to accept a US plan that involved attacks on Iran. We would need cooperation from Oman and UAE at the very least, because their territory, and air and seaspace, are so close to Iran and so greatly affected by Iran.

The day may not be far off when

the pipeline across Oman to bypass the SOH will allow oil, at least, to flow out of the Gulf even if the SOH is under threat. Unless the US shows a determination to restore the status quo ante – a safe, open SOH, guaranteed by US power – the Gulf nations are more and more likely to simply accept the need to revise their security thinking and make new arrangements. Much oil could reach the world market by going across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea as well. The local nations would adjust if they saw a need to.

But the strategic position of the United States would be changed for the worse, and in a way that could not be reversed without much greater military inconvenience.

Iran doesn’t actually want to close the SOH; Iran wants to influence the calculations of the region by threatening to close the SOH. It’s a method of peeling partners off from the United States – little by little, and codicil by codicil in terms of our agreements with the nations of the region.

Qaradawi

Why would regional nations think the US might not be prepared to restore the status quo ante? The most important reason by far is the growing perception that Obama does not operate on the basis of traditional US security assumptions (and, for that matter, moral philosophy). A report from the Indian newspaper The Hindu last week indicated that

the Obama administration had solicited the offices of Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi to broker an agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Andrew McCarthy has a good summary of Qaradawi’s numerous philosophical enormities; there are all kinds of reasons why the US should not deal with him at all, starting with the fact that he was placed on the terror watch list in 1999.

But the narrow American perception of his association with Islamist extremism is only one aspect of the problem. Equally important is the signal it sends about the US posture in Asia if our administration is seeking the negotiation support of someone like Qaradawi. Russia thinks it’s idiotic, for example, and – given that Afghanistan is in Russia’s back yard – has

good reason to find it alarming. The problem of Islamist insurgency that torments Russia’s southern border would only be worsened by an Islamist triumph in Afghanistan, which, to all appearances, would have the imprimatur of the United States.India and Iran are also worried about the US romance with the Taliban. Irresponsible policy from the US – and throwing in with Qaradawi is toweringly irresponsible – drives the nations of Asia to make common cause with each other. Each for her own reason, none of Iran, India, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or even Pakistan wants Yusuf al-Qaradawi to be making speeches from Kabul arm-in-arm with the Taliban. From the Asians’ perception, what is setting their security assumptions in flux around them is as much the off-the-wall policies of the US administration as it is anything else.

And that means that we are not a reassuring constant in the environment of their security problems – we are an unpredictable variable that may increase them.

Qatar

One nation that is apparently not worried about the trend of our policies Is Qatar. Qaradawi, born in Egypt, lives and operates out of Qatar (he has a large Islamic center there), and the US has quietly encouraged Qatar’s growing involvement in regional issues, from the air action over Libya in 2011 to the security problems of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and the issue of the Palestinian Arabs. Al Jazeera, of course, also operates out of Qatar. In contemplating

the release of Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo, as part of a negotiated deal with the Taliban, the Obama administration reportedly proposed releasing at least one to Qatar. (The Taliban rejected that idea categorically. They want Taliban leaders released to Afghanistan.)

It is not a random choice for Qatar to host negotiations with the Taliban. The Obama administration has invested diplomatically in Qatar, turning what started under Bush II as a deepened security partnership into a kind of client (US)-agent (Qatar) relationship. Such a relationship can flourish under some conditions, but if The Hindu’s report about our use of Qaradawi is correct, accepting Qatar’s services and advice as an agent has gone dangerously off the rails. There is no aspect of US security that can possibly be strengthened by resorting to a liaison with Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Indeed, the converse is the case: the boost he can get from becoming, effectively, a front for the operation of US power, erodes the conditions of US security.

As it does everyone else’s. The world’s nations are under no illusion that the Obama administration is behaving with circumspection or sound judgment. Having celebrated our exit from a still-iffy Iraq, Team Obama is pooh-poohing the provocations from Iran – as if the American people and the world were looking for an intelligence assessment, as opposed to reassurance about US policy – and is apparently looking in the most unwise, unsavory places for a quick way to get out of Afghanistan.

If that is not what Team Obama is doing, a policy speech could certainly help to clear that up. The administration goes way overboard in “not overreacting” to events abroad. It hardly constitutes overreacting to publicly, officially clarify US interests and US policy, rather than leaving these quantities to be divined from media revelations about unannounced diplomatic activities. The most important element of diplomacy and security maintenance is not one’s plans, conferences, or military movements; the most important element is one’s overt posture, as expressed through public statements, and as validated by the other aspects of diplomacy.

Obama has simply not established an overt posture. The Middle East is starting to look very different, largely because the US has not confirmed our interest in the agreements, borders, and conventions that have underpinned its security since World War II. We have instead put our power in the service of a mishmash of ideological concepts, crony-commercial interests, and the individual visions of favored foreign associates, like Erdogan in Turkey – and now, apparently, Qaradawi and the maneuvering leadership of Qatar. We have, in fact, started behaving like Russia or China, with all the cynicism but none of the predictable consistency.

It will not be very much longer before the situation in the region has gone so much up for grabs that the nations with a security interest there will simply begin making their own arrangements. Those arrangements may spark conflict, intervention by other actors, and an increase in threats to our allies on either end of the Eastern hemisphere’s great land mass. One of the purposes in all this will be to squeeze the US out of the region; another will be to dupe and exploit us wherever possible.

If we are not resolving those threats on terms favorable to the US, their impact on our alliances and our economic security will be felt much sooner than many might think.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, and The Weekly Standard online. Her blog is The Optimistic Conservative.

According to Fox, a US official confirms the drone in the video to be the one reported missing by US operators.  A number of web commentators have suggested that the thing in the video is not an RQ-170, but a US official says, at least, that it’s the drone that is missing.

I would agree with some of the doubters that the drone in the Iranian video isn’t 100% identical to the images of the RQ-170 available on the web.  But it’s not uncommon for secretive, special-purpose platforms to exist as a small, motley collection of one-, two-, or three-offs.  The overall design is the same.  One thing I would definitely say is that the drone in the video doesn’t have the 65-foot wingspan long considered the standard estimate in aviation-tech circles.  It looks closer to the low-end estimate of 46 feet.

All that said, I’m not clear on why US officials are in a rush to publicly confirm, with colorful details, that the Iranians got our drone.  It’s not immediately obvious what the upside of doing that is.  It could be something as simple as wanting to get the bad news over with, but why go into all the detail about who was operating the drone, and where, and which plans were rejected for retrieving and destroying it? – and why make a point of how we’re concerned that Russia and China may get hold of it?

That latter consideration has to qualify as one of the biggest “DUHs” of 2011.  But aside from injecting “duhs” into the news cycle, the US government seems to be spilling its guts to a much greater degree than is warranted.

Meanwhile, alert analysts are asking whether the drone downing was related in any way to the virus found on ground-control computers at Creech Air Force Base in September.  The Sentinel is operated out of Creech, like other drone types including the Predator.  But the Air Force’s eventual disclosures about the virus suggest that that’s unlikely.  The Air Force follow-up didn’t get much play in the national media, but it was picked up by local outlets in Nevada:

“The malware in question is a credential stealer, not a keylogger, found routinely on computer networks and is considered more of a nuisance than an operational threat,” according to the Air Force statement. “It is not designed to transmit data or video, nor is it designed to corrupt data, files or programs on the infected computer.”

Air Force Space Command officials said the virus infected computers that were part of the ground-control system that supports remotely piloted aircraft operations.

“The ground system is separate from the flight control system Air Force pilots use to fly the aircraft remotely; the ability of the … pilots to safely fly these aircraft remained secure throughout the incident,” the Air Force statement said.

Since the ground-control system was not – according to the Air Force – connected to a network outside of Creech, the only way to download stolen credentials would have been for a human to use portable storage media inside the center where the ground system is operated.  And even then, the credentials would have been useless with the flight-control system – the one in use when the drone went down in Iran.

Assuming Iran did get hold of an RQ-170, it’s not a good thing.  It wouldn’t be the first time unfriendly nations got samples of US technology, of course.  It should force us to move forward with next-generation improvements; even minor ones can prolong the useful life of a state-of-the-art drone.  I’m not worried that the ingenuity of US engineers isn’t up to the challenge – as long as we prioritize keeping our edge.

The drone downing comes at an informative time, however, hard on the heels of the mistaken NATO attack on the Pakistani base in November.  These events are a reminder of the perilous geostrategic situation in Afghanistan, where it is essential to monitor Iran’s threat activities on one border, and Pakistan’s activities can’t always be distinguished from those of the Taliban on the other.

The New York Times reports foreign sources and US experts saying that the RQ-170 was probably on a mission to conduct surveillance of Iranian nuclear sites.  The drone can operate at an altitude of up to 50,000 feet, and provides long-dwell coverage allowing multiple looks at target clusters, over periods in which other surveillance assets would only provide one or zero looks.  Its high-resolution radar may have the most significant sensor technology, for experts from Russia or China.

The drone in the video certainly does not appear to have been shot down.  Iran’s radar coverage is poor for the nation’s eastern areas in any case:  besides not shooting the drone down, the Iranians may not even have detected it in flight, given its low-radar-cross-section design.  If it had flown in from the south or the northwest, where Iran’s radar coverage is better, the likelihood of detection would have been higher.

But it is also unlikely that Iran caused the drone to malfunction through an electronic attack.  Any kind of physical-effects electronic attack would have required affecting the drone at its operating altitude, probably between 35,000 and 50,000 feet.  The ability to do that from the ground is very limited in even the most advanced militaries.  A literal digital attack would have required intruding on the drone’s control signal, with the sophistication to get around the security measures built into its operating systems.

These things are not impossible – Dyer’s First Law of Intelligence is that if you can imagine it, someone is trying to do it – but prior evidence of some kind of capability in this regard would make the probability stronger.  For now, it looks too soon to say exactly why the drone went down.  Fortunately, the RQ-170 was unmanned, and we won’t have to deal with another U-2/Gary Powers incident.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Seventeen-year-old Vanessa Gibbs learned this ridiculous lesson the hard way when screeners at Norfolk International Airport flagged her clutch because of its “arresting” style, which includes a relief replica of a small pistol.

Gibbs was headed home to Jacksonville following a holiday trip when the incident occurred. She explained to agents that the gun was not real, but they told her she would have to check the bag or lose it. As she told a Jacksonville TV station:

She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun.’ I’m like, ‘But it’s a design on a purse. How is it a federal offense?’

As it turns out, the TSA has the law on its side in this case. A rule passed by the agency in 2002 strictly prohibits passengers from bringing “realistic replicas of firearms” on board an aircraft.

But if that’s the case, then why did the TSA screeners at Jacksonville International Airport fail to flag the clutch on the outbound leg of her trip? Inconsistencies like this suggest the training of checkpoint agents is still spotty, which should give anyone pause, not least of all the ironcically named TSA chief, John Pistole.

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And remember also, as President Reagan says, defense is the highest national priority of government.  If you think the world is a dangerous place now, let the sequestration cuts happen.

The weird thing is that there seems, in fact, to be a proposal for a Syrian NFZ – one in which the US would reportedly provide logistic support – and it took a GOP candidate to tell us about it.

Perry took a lot of heat for “bringing up” the idea of an NFZ for Syria.  But foreign news agencies have been furiously reporting for nearly a week that negotiations are underway for such a measure.  The plan, as sketched out to date, would involve Arab and Turkish air forces enforcing the NFZ, with the US providing logistic support.

Calm down, the aircraft carrier is not off Syria

With little having been disclosed to the public at this point, and no assurance as to what is actually being planned or proposed, speculation is rampant.  DEBKA and the Russian agency RT are hyperventilating today over a report that USS George H W Bush (CVN-77) has anchored off the Syrian coast.  But Bush actually pulled into Marseilles on the 25th for a long-scheduled port visit (and posted photos from a reception in Marseilles on Saturday at her Facebook page).  French local press confirms the carrier’s presence.

The Russians may or may not have dispatched three warships to Tartus to signal that they don’t want a Western intervention in Syria, and that they want to protect their alliance with the Assad regime.  The report originated with Syria, and Russia is being coy about the ships.  It would be very easy to disprove the Syrian news story, if the ships aren’t there.  And they may well be, calling in Tartus from the anti-piracy station off Somalia, as a Russian anti-piracy task force did in September.

Meanwhile, reports that the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is in the Med are premature.  As of 24 November, the carrier and her escorts were still in the Northern Fleet operations area in the Barents Sea, awaiting a pre-deployment inspection.  The transit to the Strait of Gibraltar will take at least 8 days once it starts; the Russian media report that Kuznetsov will be in the Med in December.  Her deployment has been scheduled for some time; of course her activities are indicators of Russian national interests, but they aren’t necessarily an indication of reaction to yesterday’s news.

Bush deployed from Norfolk on 11 May, and is on the way home at the end of her deployment (which will be 7 rather than 6 months if she arrives in Norfolk around the 11th of December).  It’s possible for Bush to be held in the Med for some reason in the next couple of weeks, but she is not the best platform for providing logistic support to an NFZ – and, indeed, is superfluous for that mission in the Med.  The Air Force, with our existing infrastructure of resources in Europe, can do the whole job, and do it better.  If Bush’s air wing were to be used for anything, it would be initial strikes on the Syrian air-defense infrastructure.  But it’s not clear that US assets are even going to be involved in that phase of the operation.  Bush is due in Norfolk before Christmas, and my money is on her continuing home when the port visit ends in Marseilles (she is scheduled to depart on Tuesday 29 November).

(Note:  USS John C Stennis, CVN-74, is in the Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean, having deployed from the US West coast in August.  She is the only carrier on-station in the region, and will not be redeployed to the Med.)

The big questions

One nagging question is why we in the US keep hearing after the fact about force deployments, uses of force, and support for “kinetic” operations, as if we’re an afterthought in the arrangements of the Oval Office.  This is particularly disquieting when other nations begin deploying military forces in one place or another, while the US administration emits little besides rhetorical shrugs and formulaic bromides.

Everyone was at least talking about the problem in Libya, and what role the US should play in it, before the president decided to “lead from behind” there.  But in mounting his non-hostile kinetic military action, he could hardly be said either to have stated a coherent policy on Libya, or presented a set of national objectives to Congress for approval.  When Congress invoked the 90-day deadline from the War Powers Act, Obama simply ignored its demands.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s decision in October to send a special forces detachment to Uganda was disclosed during the news-black-hole window on a Friday afternoon, and was done with no prior public discussion and very little explanation after the fact.

This month, the decision to begin basing a Marine detachment in Australia was announced in the multinational forum most likely to anger and alarm China, but again without prior notice to the American people.  The basing move can be read one of two ways – as a token affirmation of US engagement and bona fides, or as a provocation – and in either case, the people are entitled to know what commitments are being made in their name, and why.

That goes triple for an adventure in Syria.  There are big questions about any potential intervention, and about an NFZ proposal, in particular; e.g., why the US would support a Turkish leadership role in it, and what consequences it would produce.  A conflagration in Lebanon, an armed response from Israel, the use of northern Iraq as a corridor for support coming from Iran – these are just some of the first-order possibilities.  Syria is not Libya; for that matter, Turkey and the Arab states are not France and Britain.  Syria’s geographic situation is pivotal in the Middle East, in a way Libya’s is not, and so is the Assad regime’s association with Iran and Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, at least half a dozen nations would argue that Turkey under Erdogan is a key problem in the Eastern Med, not a solution to anything – at least not if Turkey assumes a regional leadership role in which she is not only patrolling the Eastern Med with warships, conducting air strikes in northern Iraq, and permanently stationing troops there, but is patrolling the skies over Syria as well.  In the eyes of our own allies in the region (not to mention Russia’s eyes), NATO or the United States enabling Turkey to expand the scope of her military activities is a highly unfavorable development.

The idea’s not stupid, but the execution may be

A reasonable case can be made for intervening in Syria.  The chief value of an NFZ, per se, lies not in preventing Assad from using his air force against the Syrian people (he has shown little disposition to), but in preventing Iran (or Russia, or even China) from flying arms and provisions into the country – or perhaps providing air support of their own to Assad.  Of course, the fact that that is the chief value of an NFZ is also the chief obstacle to implementing one, unless the US is in charge.  And since logistic support to Assad can come by sea (and even, theoretically, by rail, if Iraq allows it), an NFZ alone would not shut down his options entirely.

Rick Perry is right, however:  if there is to be a no-fly zone, it ought to be enforced under the auspices of overt US policy, and ideally would be a combined NATO-Arab states operation.  As with the constraints on our options in Desert Storm, having more allies would mean having a narrower charter to transform Syria.  There would have to be a greater degree of compromise on the outcome than some in Europe and the US might prefer.

But the benefits for stability from executing a combined operation under US leadership would outweigh the costs.  The most important benefit for America would be directly and meaningfully influencing the outcome in Syria.  All the positive consequences for the US and our allies and partners in the region would flow from that.

There can be only negative consequences from encouraging others to take the lead.  Unlike the situation in Libya, no important actor has the luxury of being passive about the course of events in Syria.  Syria, they’ll fight over.  Even the relatively unimportant actors are already trying to put down markers, as we see with the effort of the new Libyan government to arm the Syrian insurgents, and with unconfirmed reports that Iraq’s Shia revolutionary leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, is sending loyalists to intervene on the side of the Syrian regime.

Syria is the theater where America’s luck will run out, if we foster the leadership of others for abstract ideological purposes.  The question for Americans is how to rein in a presidential administration that is running around making – or even just implying – under-the-radar military commitments, as if they amount to shaking a talisman at a set of problems we have allowed others to define.

Military force in any guise is a big deal, as is failing to use it when a situation calls for it.  There is no such thing as “routine” use of the military element of national power. The policy and the strategic considerations behind it should always be under the glare of a public spotlight, even if the operational particulars are not.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

So the news that the US will be stationing a detachment of 2500 Marines in northeastern Australia, for what will apparently be six-month rotations, prompts a reaction along the lines of “You lucky devil dogs!”

It also raises some questions.  The first is a general but nagging one:  what is the strategic context in which this is being done?  What is the announced US national interest that it will serve?  When the US was negotiating to base missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, and then in Bulgaria and Turkey, the basing agreements mapped back to an elucidated US policy for national and alliance security.  When we made basing agreements with Pakistan, Qatar, Oman, and Kyrgyzstan after 9/11, the use of airfields in these countries was obviously related to the campaign in Afghanistan (and later in Iraq).  Beefing up our presence in the tiny Red Sea nation of Djibouti has served the war on terror and antipiracy operations off Somalia.  Etc, etc.

In a period in US history when we have been at pains to draw down military forces overseas, new deployments get lots of scrutiny in Congress and the media – and that’s a good thing.  Since the end of World War II, Congress has been friendly, in general, to the deployments and basing agreements presidents wanted.  But Congress has required that the executive justify moving the military around by referring to announced policies and an explicit concept of national security.   (This is the reasoning behind the Goldwater-Nichols Act requirement for a president to author a “national security strategy,” and for the Defense Department to translate it into a separate “national military strategy.”)   The media, for their part, have maintained a small but robust thread of commentary on the topic, offering analysis that ranges from execrable to pretty darn good, and keeping the subject of basing agreements and the reasons behind them before the public.

There has been little to no discussion in US media of the new basing agreement with Australia.  This is curious:  there are serious implications from such an agreement – implications that China has already read into it, and that our other allies in the region are likely to have questions (or, more importantly, opinions) about.  When the possibility of the US developing basing options in Australia was first raised in public a year ago, it produced a flurry of headlines and opinion pieces in Asia, and was tied at the time to the confrontation between the US and Japan over a Marine air base in Okinawa.  Choosing to pursue new basing options is never a policy-neutral act, and it is certainly not one when you already have a large and longstanding force footprint in two nations in the region (Japan and South Korea, in this case).

Given the growing regional alarm over China in the year since, and the encouragement from our allies to beef up our presence on China’s perimeter, we can take it that the allies now view the US expansion into Australia with favor.  But this evolution begs the question of where the fine line will be, between a posture that deters China – surely the constructive American interest – and a posture that may not be sufficient to do so, but will ensure the US gets bloodied in any confrontation.

The question is reasonable.  The Marines to be deployed in Darwin, Australia will comprise a special purpose Marine air-ground task force, or SP/MAGTF:  a group that has plenty of capabilities for tactical action, but is not a deterrent in the terms of the threat from China.  One could theorize that the SP/MAGTF might be deployed to guard, say, one or a few of the Spratly Islands from incursions by China.  But China’s advantage in the “correlation of forces” (fine old term from Soviet military doctrine) is so overwhelming in the South China Sea that this would be an insanely unsustainable level of confrontation – unless the US simultaneously bolstered the action with a massive deployment of air and naval force.

We could come up with other scenarios involving Singapore or the Philippines, but there is little purpose in pursuing further the potential of an SP/MAGTF versus China’s strategic aspirations in the South China Sea.  The two are simply a mismatch.  Deploying an insufficient amount of force to achieve anything useful is the opposite of clever: it gets uncomfortably close to writing bad regional-security checks.  On the other hand, the alternative possibility, that getting some boots on the ground will involve the US, de facto, in skirmishes over which we may have little to no political control, is not to be dismissed.

During her years of empire, Great Britain had some experience with deploying “downpayment” forces in Europe: forces that were insufficient to deter a predatory power (principally Germany), but ultimately guaranteed that Britain would not stand by while Continental nations were menaced.  The thinking is captured in the remark of Ferdinand Foch in the months before World War I.   When asked by a British counterpart what would be the smallest British military force of practical assistance to France, Foch replied: “A single British soldier — and we will see to it that he is killed.”  The evacuation at Dunkirk, early in World War II, was the unseemly fate of a later downpayment force deployed on the Continent.

The Obama administration says the Marine basing agreement will “allow the U.S. and Australia to more effectively respond to natural disasters and humanitarian crises in the region.”  That statement doesn’t parse, which is a data point of its own.  We can’t move an SP/MAGTF to a humanitarian crisis substantially faster from Australia than from Okinawa, or even from Camp Pendleton in Southern California, for that matter.  The logistics of moving the force will involve either transport aircraft or the use of ships, either of which will have to be staged from somewhere else anyway.  Unless the humanitarian crisis is literally in Australia, or perhaps Papua New Guinea or New Zealand, there is no advantage to basing the Marines in Australia for non-combat crisis response.

But perhaps the greatest concern Americans should have is that we aren’t asking questions about this agreement.  It constitutes a change of our strategic military posture in the Far East.  Effecting it as if it’s “business as usual” detaches the move from a specific policy justification and makes it general.  Having a general, a priori disposition to base troops abroad is a characteristic of empire – as is the absence of critical interest from the citizenry when new basing proposals are announced.  Australia is an old and superb ally, but even with old and superb allies, troop deployments and basing agreements should require specific justification from a policy on identified threats, and from a strategy for using force to counter them.

One other thing we know about the agreement with Australia: it will reportedly involve support for the operation of US bombers, strike-fighters, and transport aircraft from an Australian air base southeast of Darwin.  The US Navy will make more stops in Sterling, on Australia’s west coast, as well.

Sailors and airmen have always enjoyed port calls and deployments to Australia, but the transits burn lots and lots of fuel.  Facilities in Australia are a long way from anywhere; decisions to deploy forces to them have to consider fuel and transit time to a greater extent than with any destination other than one of the poles.  Depending on how robust this new presence is, it could have a real impact on the operational posture of US forces elsewhere in the region.  Cutting $60 billion a year from the defense budget for the next 10 years, while adding deployments to Australia, doesn’t compute unless other things are curtailed.

We ought to be asking what those things are – but then, we ought to be asking for a foreign policy statement outlining why we’re doing this in the first place.  To date, Obama has basically adjusted the policies of previous presidents and reacted to security crises driven by events elsewhere.  The basing agreement in Australia is his first foreign policy move that indicates an actual initiative for change.  I can come up with reasons for an enhanced US posture in Southeast Asia, although I wouldn’t handle it in the manner Obama has chosen; but we shouldn’t have to interpret signs and oracles to figure it out.  Shifting our force footprint in this way is a major move, and it ought to be explained with, essentially, an outline of an “Obama Doctrine.”

The nature of the China problem in Southeast Asia makes a US deterrent posture important.  But the key to that posture is not ambiguous subtleties and minor, carefully downplayed force deployments.  The key, rather, is precisely the element the Obama administration has not provided: a seminal statement of US interests and will.  An SP/MAGTF in Australia is not a clearly intelligible signal in that regard – nor is it a security compact with the American people, as the clearly articulated Truman and Reagan Doctrines were.

We should never get used to our forces being based overseas without such statements and compacts.  It may seem minor and harmless to make a basing agreement with one of our best allies, but what’s missing from this action could be very costly down the road.  China is likely to probe an ambiguous signal from the US; she is certain to complain about an unambiguous one.  All in all, I’d rather have China complaining.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

When asked for their opinion about further cuts, 82% were strongly or somewhat opposed to those cuts (59% strongly opposed).

There is, it appears, a dawning realization that we as a country are again about to put ourselves in serious trouble if we don’t maintain our military edge that has served us so well since WWII.

Recently, in a reply to an inquiry into the effects of the across the board cuts that will be mandated by a Supercommittee failure, Senators McCain and Graham asked Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to detail them. In his reply he noted some very disturbing results of further cuts. The mandated cuts would amount to about an additional 20%. According to Secretary Panetta, that sort of reduction would mean major weapons systems, designed to ensure our national security for decades to come, would have to be cut:

• Reductions at this level would lead to:

o The smallest ground force since 1940.

o A fleet of fewer than 230 ships, the smallest level since 1915.

o The smallest tactical fighter force in the history of the Air Force.

All exceedingly dangerous developments. All developments which would limit our ability to respond to a national security crisis and certainly effect our ability to deal with more than one. Reducing our levels to those cited by Panetta would be extraordinarily short-sighted.

For instance, reducing our tactical Air Force to record levels puts one of our major force projection (along with the Navy) means in a position of not being able to fulfill that role. Today the tactical airframes our pilots fly are decades old and worn out. They’ve reached the end of their service life. It is critical that the next generation of fighters continue to be developed and fielded. In a letter to Rep. Randy Forbes, 7 retired Air Force generals of the Air Force Association outline the risk:

The Air Force now finds itself in a situation where another acquisition deferment will lead to the eventual cessation of key missions. Accordingly, while the recapitalization list is generally considered in terms of systems, it really comes down to a question of what capabilities the nation wants to preserve. Does the United States want to retain the capacity to engage in missions like stemming nuclear proliferation, managing the rise of near-peer competitors, and defending the homeland?

Leaders need to fully consider the ramifications of the decisions they make today as they seek to guide our nation through this difficult period. Just as our legacy fleet has enabled national policy objectives over the past several decades, our future investments will govern the options available to leaders into the 2030s and 2040s. Investing in capable systems will make the difference between success and failure in future wars and between life and death for those who answer the call to serve our nation. When viewed in those terms, failing to adequately invest in the Air Force would be the decision that proves “too expensive” for our nation.

Those two paragraphs outline the criticality of the need for continuing to fund the weapons systems of the future. We may be able to get away with not doing so right now, but we guarantee that our options will be severely limited and our national security capabilities degraded significantly 20 to 30 years down the road if we do so today.

And there’s another reason to resist the temptation to make further cuts at DoD that is particularly significant at this time. Professor Stephan Fuller of George Mason University testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the cancellation of weapons systems would have a profound negative effect on both the economy and unemployment such as:

– A loss of 1,006,315 jobs (124,428 direct, 881,887 indirect)

– Raise the unemployment rate by .6% (9% to 9.6%)

– Drop GDP growth by $86.46 billion (25% of the projected growth in 2013)

No one is arguing that DoD is or should be a jobs program. But it is obvious the impact would be severe not only among DoD prime contractors but even more so downstream. Ironically, one of the reasons our politicians justified their bailout of the auto industry was downstream job losses in a time of economic turmoil. That turmoil still exists today.

If the cited poll is any indicator, the public has come to realize the dangerous waters we’re navigating with these possible cuts. They’re realizing that what guarantees our peace is our strength and our strength is maintained by keeping the technological edge over potential enemies and developing weapons systems to deploy that technology. Without that ability to guarantee our national security, all the other things we treasure are jeopardized. Additionally, our military demise will only encourage the bad actors in the world to increase activities which are detrimental to both peace and our national security.

While it is certainly a time to look for all legitimate means and methods to cut government spending, sequestration as demanded by the Supercommittee’s failure to reach agreement isn’t one of them. Mindless cuts into that which guarantees our safety today and in the future will come back to haunt us if we allow them.

Now, in 2011, would be the worst of times for the US Senate to ratify the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS; or, “Law of the Sea Treaty”: LOST).

Ratification would presuppose an internationally agreed maritime order into which the US was buying.  The nature of that order is tacitly supposed to be one of agreements, definitions, and legalities; in essence, the form of international order to which the United Nations was intended to give impetus.

Realities of maritime order

But no such order exists, nor has it ever.  There is no overarching order for the US to buy into: nothing that exists independently of the use of force and the expression of credible intent by the most powerful nations.  That is why the early indicators of the demise of the Pax Americana are appearing in the maritime realm.  The great oceans are much like the old American frontier: regulated largely by custom and the firearm, sometimes unsafe for the vulnerable bits of civilization, and held in check by the vigilance of hanging judges and the threat of visits from the Army.

For the basis of order to change, the assumptions and activities of key players have to change.  Roving criminal bands have to perceive that their opportunities are increasingly closed off by a stronger order: that the cost of crime outweighs the benefits.  Strongmen have to accept the supervision of a civil order in which they may suffer losses or have to compromise on what they want.  The vulnerable have to be satisfied that they are safe if they relinquish a posture of armed vigilance.

Only the United States – a continent-size maritime power and the sheriff of the seas for the last 65 years – and America’s formal allies have been able to cultivate the open-minded, complacent attitude required of participants in a meaningful UNCLOS.  The basis of UNCLOS was American dominance of the seas; without it, UNCLOS is meaningless.  No independently-motivated power will voluntarily adhere to it where it requires compromise and the relinquishing of national purposes.  We are seeing that with unvarnished clarity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the South China Sea.

Turkey and China worry everyone in their neighborhoods.  Turkey is not a state participant in UNCLOS; China is.  But their attitudes toward the maritime rights of their neighbors are basically identical: neither regards international custom, UNCLOS, or the UN as an arbiter that can limit their claims or purposes.  So they behave as if international expectations don’t even exist.  Their neighbors take refuge in claims lodged with the UN, in alliances of convenience, in diplomatic protests.  Turkey and China respond with force and threats.

Cyprus, the next act

The drama off Cyprus, where US firm Noble Energy is drilling for natural gas, is now six weeks old and showing no sign of diplomatic resolution.  Turkey’s exploration ship K. Piri Reis was reportedly set to wrap up seismic profiling in the past week, but a second and third ship have been dispatched to “conduct exploration” for Turkey in Cyprus’ economic exclusion zone (EEZ).

The significance of that is overshadowed in most media reporting by the excitement of the related military activity.  But the important thing that’s happening is that Turkey is operating ships in Cyprus’ EEZ, for economic-exploitation purposes, and no one is doing anything effective about it.  The meaning of having an EEZ claim registered with the UN is thus being eroded before our eyes.

The additional ships contracted by Turkey are the Norwegian-flagged survey vessels Bergen Surveyor (now in the Black Sea following operations off Cyprus) and Oceanic Challenger, which are working for the Paris-headquartered corporation CGG Veritas.  That is interesting in itself, of course, since it’s easy to detect that the work is being done in Cyprus’ EEZ, but without the approval of Nicosia.

Cypriot sources reported Bergen Surveyor as active in the Republic’s EEZ, off the Western end of the island, as early as 6 October.  Cypriot bloggers suggested their government was appealing to France and Norway to keep their assets out of the dispute, and some concluded in mid-October that the appeal had been effective, since Bergen Surveyor was operating outside of – or no closer than the extreme northwestern tip of – the oil-and-gas deposit zone (see the blocks outlined on the map).

Outline of oil/gas blocks in the Cyprus EEZ, Levantine Basin

But the area of operations by the Turkish-contracted ships is inside the Cyprus EEZ, as that EEZ is designated under UNCLOS.  It is further noteworthy that the Cypriot exploration to which Turkey objects – taking place in Block 12 (“Aphrodite”) of the Levantine Basin deposits – is well outside of any Turkish maritime claim (or any potential claim by “Northern Cyprus,” for that matter.  See the map of Turkey’s idea of proper maritime-claim delineations).

Turkey’s move is thus not motivated by a claim to the seabed deposits in the area south of Cyprus; she has made none.  It’s not a matter of muscling Cyprus away from a gas deposit claimed by Turkey or Northern Cyprus.  It’s a general power move that places Turkey at odds with the international system of maritime claims by which Cyprus is operating.  Turkey is registering non-acceptance of maritime claims in EASTMED in general.

I don’t assess this to be a confused, abstract move on Turkey’s part; I believe the Erdogan government sees maritime claims as a key security and power issue, and views the claims of all parties in the Aegean and off the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel as of integral significance to Turkey.  This is a geostrategic view that appreciates the importance to Turkey’s security of the maritime approaches – and their importance to Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman aspirations.  By the lights of the Ottoman legacy, the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel are as much Turkey’s concern as the Bosporus, the Aegean islands, and the waters off Antalya.

For Turkey to operate from this visceral, historical sense of things is not nefarious in itself.  Geography and history are what they are.  But Erdogan is not “picking his battles” in a defensive security policy; he is starting new ones, for purposes beyond security and self-defense.  As a member of NATO, Turkey started out with presumptions in her favor, and might have approached her concerns with Cyprus and the maritime claims of EASTMED very differently.  But Erdogan has instead chosen confrontation and tacit rejection of international conventions.

Russia to the rescue, Israel over EASTMED

Because Erdogan’s NATO allies aren’t taking order to him, the other nations of the region are beginning to show force and advertise their alliances.  As previously announced, Russia sent an amphibious landing ship full of Russian marines (naval infantry) to join Greece in a naval commemoration at the end of October.  The RS Tsesar Kunikov docked in Alexandroupolis, near the Turkish Straits:  a pointed allusion to the city’s brief history.  It was built by the Ottoman Empire and called Dedeagac – a waypoint on the Ottomans’ 19th-century railroad extension into Europe – but captured by Russia in an invasion in 1877.  The Ottomans reclaimed it in 1878, but it went first to Bulgaria and then to Greece in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1911-13) and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22.  The Greeks renamed it Alexandroupolis in honor of their king at the time, Alexander I.

In last week’s commemorative ceremony, Russian naval infantry marched through Alexandroupolis with Greek marines, and the Greeks don’t appear to have been so excited about anything for a long time.  (Reportedly, anti-government protesters suspended their activities in favor of the ceremony.)  More than one website retails the story of how the enlightened Russian occupiers built a system of broad avenues through Alexandroupolis during their brief reign there in the 1870s, as opposed to the crabbed labyrinth of culs-de-sac favored by the secretive Ottomans.   If there isn’t an aphorism about how it takes the Turks to make you appreciate a Russian invasion, there ought to be.

In Cyprus, meanwhile, Israel last week dispatched a force of 16 fighter aircraft, tankers, and six IDF helicopters to conduct a military exercise with the Cypriot armed forces.  (The Turks responded but kept their distance.)  Israel has multiple security concerns for which having access to Cyprus would play a useful role; protecting her own offshore gas activities is certainly an important one.

Israel and Cyprus have in common their resistance to living under terms dictated by Turkey, whether the subject is the gas trade, their maritime claims, or their general security.  Besides her gas deposits, Israel is eying the threat from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria; even with respect to the asymmetric threat growing in the Sinai, Israel will benefit from an expansion of her geographic options.  So Shimon Peres is heading for Cyprus this week.

On the other side of Asia

Across Asia in the South China Sea, the confrontation between China and her neighbors continues at a low boil.  Unlike Turkey, China is a state participant in UNCLOS, and has registered a set of wildly excessive maritime claims with the UN.  China’s claims (see map) would leave her neighbors with little opportunity for offshore development, but accord Beijing the ability to hold almost the entire body of water at risk with coastal cruise missiles.

The Philippines has proposed, in the ASEAN forum, a concept for joint economic development in disputed areas of the South China Sea (SCS).  Vietnam endorsed the Philippine plan when President Truong Tan Sang visited Filipino President Benigno Aquino last week, signing agreements on naval and intelligence cooperation and committing to a hotline between the coast guards of Hanoi and Manila.  The Philippines has moved forward with a proposal for a special session of ASEAN defense ministers to discuss the joint-development concept – which, with momentum building for it in ASEAN, is the main idea on the table right now.

China is not a member of ASEAN, however, and a few days ago a state-owned media outlet, Global Times, issued yet another threat to China’s SCS neighbors.  An editorial in Global Times warned the “little countries” to “prepare for the sound of cannons [sic],” causing the Philippines’ foreign secretary to issue a stern rebuke.

Fishing disputes

But the SCS nations aren’t the only ones who think Global Times was referring to them.  Granted, the Philippines has been dealing for some time with Chinese fishing boats operating – with Beijing’s blessing – in her EEZ, and on 18 October, her coast guard had an accidental collision with a fishing mothership that was towing fishing boats near one of the disputed Spratly Islands.

South Korea, however, announced detaining three Chinese fishing ships, with 31 crewmembers, on 21 October, because the Chinese were encroaching on South Korean waters (a persistent problem for the Koreans as well as for the Philippines).  The ensuing brouhaha prompted editorialists at Chosun Ilbo to suspect that the “sound of cannons” comment was directed at Seoul.  And Japan had a minor incident of her own on the 25th, when the Japanese coast guard confronted two Chinese fisheries-patrol ships operating in the contiguous zone off the Senkaku Islands.

An absentee sheriff

As with the EASTMED dispute, the US is a negligible quantity at the diplomatic and strategic level.  Leon Panetta, making his first trip to Asia as secretary of defense last week, was recorded assuring ASEAN members that the US would maintain our military presence in the Pacific as a counterweight to China.  This is the kind of thing that is already less than credible if you actually have to say it.  It’s certainly not the centerpiece of a positive policy.  The momentum in the Pacific is with China and the jostling Asian powers – which ought to give us pause, in the US, since we do maintain a still-significant military presence there.

As with the NATO alliance and our defense alliance with Israel (indeed, our defense cooperation with Egypt and Jordan as well), our alliances in East Asia will begin to back us into confrontations we are not making the requisite strategic effort to ward off.  If we aren’t taking the lead in influencing events, using all the tools of state power, our alliances and military deployments can begin to look like absent-minded vulnerabilities – or ill-conceived provocations.

The US Marines, for example, conducted an annual landing exercise earlier in October with their Philippines counterparts on the west-central coast of Luzon, the northernmost of the major Philippine islands.  The coast fronts on a region of the SCS which Manila disputes with Beijing; Marine Corps spokesmen declined to address any idea of political overtones to the exercise.  As with US Naval exercises with Vietnam held in the summer, the joint events are always “annual” or “previously scheduled,” and are left otherwise without strategic context: left to communicate, in a changing geopolitical environment, whatever China and other regional nations want to divine from them.

This may sound clever to the sensibility of some people – it has Robert S. McNamara written all over it – but that doesn’t make it wise or sound policy.  The strategically significant message we want to send China isn’t actually “We will put our Marine Corps in your face and you can read what you like into that.”  That’s a negative, triangulating kind of message, one that gives hope to no one and shape to nothing.  If we are going to keep US military power in Asia, we should not be there to, in effect, provoke China, nor should we be there merely as an enforcer – a hired goon squad – for the initiatives and security emergencies of our Asian allies.

Ensuring that we and our allies are agreed on basic objectives is, of course, a process of give and take.  We are as interested in their goals and concerns as we are in ours.  But ultimately, we have a military presence in East Asia because we have our own objectives there.  We’re not there to intimidate China on behalf of Vietnam and the Philippines – or at least, if we are, we are behaving according to a separate set of rules from those of statesmanship and accountable policy.

China is watching developments in EASTMED.  Beijing will take lessons from whatever happens there, and the principal lesson will be the involvement of the US – or lack of it – and the extent to which we shape the outcome or have it handed to us.  If Turkey is able to change the security regime to her advantage, China will be emboldened to try the same.

It’s still not too late for the US to weigh in with Turkey, bringing NATO and our bilateral relations to bear.  One of the best favors we could do UNCLOS is get Turkey to honor it in her dealings with her EASTMED neighbors.  As long as major nations like Turkey and China see UNCLOS as either a negligible obstacle or as something to be exploited, the convention itself is meaningless without assertive enforcement.  Where there is no sheriff, the law is a matter of convenience for the strong – and no protection for the weak.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Sounds like cause for celebration, right?  Between Stuxnet and the sanctions, Iran’s nuclear butt is being kicked around Southwest Asia.

But there is more to the story, and a serious danger of succumbing to a Hockey Stick effect if we don’t look at all of it.  One of the most important facts is that, according to the September 2011 IAEA report, Iran had – as of mid-August 2011 – piled up a total of 4543kg of LEU.  By Western intelligence estimates, that is enough for 4 nuclear warheads.  LEU production began in February 2007, and the rate of production can be crudely gauged by noting that (again, according to IAEA reporting) Iran had 630kg of LEU in November 2008, 1763kg in October 2009, and 3135kg in October 2010.

Let’s go to the graphs produced by the analysts of ISIS (Institute for Science and International Security) at their Iran Nuclear website.*  (See the complete set of graphs on pp. 6-9 of the ISIS analysis of the September 2011 IAEA report.)  Iran’s rate of LEU production ticked down between May and August 2011, as it had also done between May and August 2010 and between November 2008 and February 2009.  After each of the previous down-ticks, the rate of production increased again.  To date, the overall trend continues strongly positive, even in the 2-plus years following the probable introduction of the Stuxnet worm (sometime in late spring/early summer of 2009).

ISIS graph of LEU production trend, September 2011

One of the strongest points made by ISIS about Iran’s current status is that the efficiency of production has declined.  The Iranians are now using more centrifuges to produce the same amount of LEU.  This accords with the ISIS analysts’ point that the original IR-1 centrifuges are getting old, and, with known design flaws, were never that well-made or efficient in the first place.  The history of Iran’s centrifuge arrangements has something of the air of experiment:  at first using fewer to enrich more uranium; experiencing problems under that cascade configuration; and deciding to process less uranium with more centrifuges.

What the history does not have is evidence of a process grinding to a halt.  Even with the down-tick in efficiency of production between May and August 2011, Iran still produced enough LEU on an annualized basis for a nuclear warhead per year.  And again, the overall trend in the LEU production rate remains positive.  ISIS has suggested solid reasons why it may level off, at least in the Natanz facility, but it is far from clear that the process is headed for a train wreck.

All the same issues still exist.  Iran is producing LEU at the rate of at least a warhead’s worth per year.  As ISIS and others point out, the rate of LEU production is insufficient to support the reactor at Bushehr – but one has to take Iran’s word for the program’s purpose, to believe that this is a problem for program performance.

Iran is still producing “medium-enriched” uranium at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) at Natanz, and has so far produced a little over 70kg, according to the IAEA report.  The 19.75% pure uranium is the intermediate step to producing high-enriched, or weapons-grade uranium.  As of the latest IAEA report, Iran has installed more than 150 new-design centrifuges at the PFEP.  The Iranians have also installed a cascade of (old-design) IR-1 centrifuges at the once-secret Fordow site in Qom.  (The one Obama trumped Iran by announcing our knowledge of in September 2009 – which has since been accepted by IAEA and added to its inspection list.)

Beyond these activities, however, Iran has also indirectly confirmed that indigenous production of uranium is ongoing (something presaged by previous analysis, based on information available as early as November-December 2008).  The “Bandar Abbas facility” referred to on p. 4 of the ISIS report is a production installation for uranium mined in Iran.  The more indigenous uranium Iran produces, the less of a handle IAEA will have on the total amount being processed.

Not that the handle it has today can be confirmed as good.  IAEA is still prohibited from visiting key sites like the underground complexes at Natanz and Esfahan.  It has not established any regime of visiting the uranium production facilities near Bandar Abbas.  It relies on the Iranians’ own reporting for a picture of what is going on at these sites.  IAEA has been unable to verify anything related to other Iranian announcements, regarding laser enrichment and the construction of additional enrichment sites.

And, of course, all of Iran’s enrichment activities are prohibited by UN resolutions, as is the construction of the heavy-water plutonium reactor at Arak (similar to the North Korean reactor and the one the Israelis struck in Syria in 2007) – construction that continues uninterrupted.  The Iranians have given IAEA a timeframe of late 2013 for the commencement of operations by the Arak reactor.

The knowledge level by which the Iranian program is assessed has big gaps in it.  ISIS issued this plea to IAEA in September:

One special note: The IAEA continues to release less information about the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant’s operation, making it more difficult to evaluate the plant’s performance. The IAEA should again release a more complete set of data.

Meanwhile, IAEA summed up the situation as follows in its September 2011 report (emphasis added):

50. While the Agency continues to conduct verification activities under Iran’s Safeguards Agreement, Iran is not implementing a number of its obligations, including: implementation of the provisions of its Additional Protocol; implementation of the modified Code 3.1 of the subsidiary Arrangements General Part to its Safeguards Agreement; suspension of enrichment related activities; suspension of heavy water related activities; and addressing the Agency’s concerns about possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.

51. While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and LOFs declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement, as Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation, including by not implementing its Additional Protocol, the Agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.

* Important note: ISIS analysts make their assessments with more care and balance than are evident in the tone of the WaPo article.  Critiquing WaPo’s use of their information is not a critique of the ISIS product.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The group, the Lord’s Resistance Army and its bloodthirsty leader, Joseph Kony, have recruited Ugandan children in their mission, ordering them to commit atrocities, including murdering their own families, or face mutilation.

In the letter Obama writes:

Although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.

In a separate statement, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland noted that the U.S. has provided more than $40 million in equipment and training to Uganda’s military to aid in what has been a decades-long stalemate between the government and the LRA.

The decision to put boots on the ground is supported by Congress, which in 2010 passed “the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act,” authorizing U.S. efforts to eliminate the LRA menace.

The president claims in his letter that the move is being made in the interests of national security, though one is hard-pressed to justify the action on other than humanitarian grounds. I am not suggesting that those are not valid reasons, but it’s high time the president started calling a spade a spade.

It is equally hard not to feel cynical about his decision once again to bury the announcement late on Friday, at the end of the weekly news cycle, or to question why no statement was made directly to the American people.

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As the world takes off on its own, the directions it is going are predictable, but still poignant.  In some ways, it is as if the great paroxysms of the 20th century – World War I, the socialist revolutions, national socialism, World War II, the Cold War – “never even happened.”  In other ways, it’s as if the joke has ended up being on the victors from these turmoils.

With the guarantee of US supervision lifted, the old-style power and seniority that were once castigated as oppressive begin to look like sources of security.  Absurdities like the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations gain no traction because everyone’s gut sense is that something much bigger is going on.  The silly, ephemeral premises of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd are a relic, a superannuated adolescent whine from an era when there was a sense of resignation about being able to afford a little bit of sophomoric foolishness.  No more.  Papa’s broke, and we can’t afford the waste and clean-up effort.

Germans are losing patience with the chronic dysfunction of the Southern European economies.  Russia – Russia! – is stepping in to help bail out the overextended.  The Russians may have a crummy political system and a mafia-style economy and repressed individual rights, but they take no prisoners when it comes to extracting and allocating profits from the natural gas trade.  So they have something that seems more important right now: cash.

It takes a whole heap of regulating to turn Western economies into supplicants and Russia and China into comparative cash-daddies, but we’ve managed it.  We have made it so illegal and costly to invest and profit in the West that sclerotic, oligarchic Russia and the one-trick pony that is China are positioned better than Western nations are to offer cash to the West’s biggest failures.  The US Congress even sits around voting on whether to get in a huff about China manipulating her currency.  There was a time when you couldn’t make people accept Chinese currency.  They’d run screaming in the other direction.  The Chinese regime hasn’t changed that much; we have.

In what Melanie Phillips calls a “world turned upside down” (a rhetorical nod to the tune supposedly played on the occasion of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown), the Japanese last week hosted the defense ministers of ASEAN to discuss a common effort to contain China.  Japan, an observer in ASEAN, has been investing in Southeast Asia for decades now; ASEAN has met to discuss countering China before; but gathering the defense ministers in Japan is a new set-out.  Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, fellow ASEAN observer Australia – these nations meeting with Japan to discuss containing China resurrect echoes of the form international relations took before WWII, if not the particulars.

Adding to the sense of an alternate-universe reversion to the 1930s is South Korea’s decision to construct two new naval bases on islands off her coast.  One is to be on the island of Ulleung in the Sea of Japan, an island Seoul disputes with Tokyo (which calls the island Takeshima).  The other will entail the fortification of Jeju (Cheju-do), off South Korea’s southern coast at the western entrance to the Tsushima Strait, where the Yellow Sea meets the East China Sea.  Japan is not the concern behind this move; Russia and China are.  The perceived need for it has arisen for the same reason Southeast Asians are meeting with Japan to discuss security concerns: the credibility of US force and guarantees has diminished.

Islands around South Korea

It’s the same reason why Indonesia and Vietnam have agreed to set up joint naval patrols in the South China Sea, why Indonesia is looking to expand her navy dramatically and add a third geographic fleet organization, why the Philippines has been courting Japanese assistance in patrolling her sea lanes adjacent to the South China Sea, and why India is assembling her own “String of Pearls” to rival China’s South Asian maritime strategy.

India is very concerned about China in general, which leads to the title point about the US Army’s need for a motorcycle stunt team.  India’s army has one, and it did some serious riding in a display during India’s first military exercise with the armed forces of Mongolia in September.  Any army can do this (and it’s no big deal for air forces to do this, or navies to do this.  Showboating air forces can do this stuff in their sleep, and naval infantry or marines the world over, with their cool toys, have no trouble doing this, this, this, this, and this.  And anybody, basically, can do this).  But motorcycle stunt teams are few and far between, even if new strange bedfellows are now cropping up, geopolitically speaking, on a minimum two-per-week basis.

Meanwhile, over in the Eastern Mediterranean, tensions are high but haven’t bubbled over.  Both Turkey and Cyprus continue their maritime oil-and-gas activities.  Sensational rumors – almost none of them believable – abound regarding the reaction of Israel and the supposed counterreaction of Turkey.  (I give credence to the reports that Israel is keeping the Turkish warships under daily aerial surveillance, but discount the rest.)

Russia will be sending more warships to the Med after the Black Sea Fleet task force visits Greece and Montenegro later this month.  The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov will reportedly leave the Barents in late November for a Med deployment, accompanied by at least one Udaloy-class destroyer.  The last time Admiral Kuznetsov was in the Med, in 2009, the ship made port calls in Syria and Turkey.  Russian ships are very unlikely to call in either nation this time around – but will be quietly welcomed by long-time allies of the United States.

There’s also the periodic destabilizing eruption from Syria’s promising liberal reformer, Bashar al-Assad, who stated earlier this week that he would ask for Hezbollah’s help attacking Israel with missiles and rockets if other nations use military force against his regime.  In his case, however, that’s not the world turned upside down, it’s just business as usual.

The world won’t right itself automatically if the US elects a different president next year.  But we need to keep in mind that the problems the world is sinking into are the result not of what we are doing, but of what we aren’t.

The West is slothful, confused, and tired, but not from overexertion.  In one of the most remarkable trends in history, we have ordered ourselves for no good reason to assume a listless, inert posture.  Nothing would help us as much as releasing ourselves from our own ridiculous constraints.  We don’t need to live by lies about what is good and what is bad; nothing fates us to accept an artificially constructed prison of regulation, “political correctness,” and suicidal self-abnegation.

There are millions of people whose potential and power have been artificially stifled by the distorted expectations of modern Western society.  A Greek woman of 50, who has been promised a right to retire at that age from the perilous, heavily regulated profession of hairdressing – and for whom more lucrative or creative arrangements were made impossible by regulation and taxes anyway – has been discouraged and underemployed as surely as the New Soviet Man ever was.  Kings in the Middle Ages, imposing sumptuary laws in the name of the Christian church, discouraged the industry and drive of their people no more effectively than the modern public education systems of Europe and North America.

But what we have done to ourselves can be undone.  It will have to be: there is no form of social organization that does what the political and economic freedom of the West – and especially of the USA – has done.  It is because we have turned our backs on it that the world has turned upside down.

A motorcycle stunt team for our army may not be the main thing we ought to look into, but it can’t hurt.  The nation whose army has the motorcycle stunt team has at least shown itself capable of adapting and facing reality.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Starting with this Sunday’s game at what football enthusiast John Kerry called “Lambert Field,”  fans will be wanded before being admitted to the stadium. The new procedures will not be instead of the previous bag searches and pat-downs but in addition to them.

The Green Bay Press-Gazette quotes Doug Collins, Packers director of security, as saying:

Be prepared for something different. It may take a few seconds longer, so if [fans] arrive a little earlier at the gates that would be helpful. I don’t anticipate there being any lines that are so long that people miss the game or anything like that. … But every officer in every line will have those wands.

“Something different” is likely a euphemism for insane delays, at least until security personnel get their act down. Now the groaning during the first quarter when the home team is behind won’t be coming only from the stands but from beyond them, as ticket holders play an incessant waiting game.

As with the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the new security—which will ultimately extend to all 32 NFL stadiums—is reactive, not proactive. The sudden need for enhanced measures was suggested by a recent incident in which a Dallas Cowboys fan smuggled a stun gun into a game and proceeded to zap those seated around him.

“As usual,” writes the website The American Dream,“authorities have responded to a minor security incident by massively overreacting to it. In the post-9/11 world in which we live, paranoia is standard operating procedure.”

I’m not sure I’d agree that allowing a stun gun into a stadium is a “minor” security breach, but the second part of the statement is on point. “America is,” as the write further observes, “rapidly turning into a high-security prison.”

And one, moreover, where there is no time for the powers that be to think before acting. Consider that when the idea of advanced security screening was first broached two weeks ago, the initial recommendation was to replace the previous torso pat-downs with more comprehensive knees-to-ankles and above-the-waist pat-downs. Conspicuously absent from the inspection was the area from the waist down to the knees. Hard to imagine a would-be terrorist would have a weapon secreted in that area!

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The rest of the story can be summarized as follows.  On 19 September, Houston-based Noble Energy “spudded” an exploration well with its Noble Homer Ferrington drilling rig in the “Aphrodite” oil-and-gas field off Cyprus’ southern coast (you can’t make this stuff up).

Shortly thereafter, Turkey concluded an overnight agreement with the “nation” of Northern Cyprus – created by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and recognized by Turkey – for Turkey to begin seismic exploration south of Northern Cyprus’ coast, in the waters next to the Noble Energy drilling area.

The Turks got their seismic exploration vessel, the K. Piri Reis, underway, and dispatched three naval ships for escort.  Piri Reis has reached her operating area and begun exploration.  The three-ship task force doesn’t have as much firepower as it might: it is reportedly composed of one frigate – the actual warship – a training ship, and an ocean tug.

That said, the Turks issued a NOTAM for a maritime exercise in the vicinity of the drilling area last week, within a day of the Noble rig’s arrival.  According to Greek sources, the NOTAM was rejected, but the Turks conducted a naval exercise there anyway, with warships and fighter jets.  The Greeks emitted a rhetorical high-five because the Turks didn’t approach the Noble drilling rig any closer than 50 nautical miles during this event.

The Turkish aircraft did, however, operate inside the Nicosia Flight Information Region (FIR) without following correct safety procedures, and managed to incommode at least one Cyprus Airways aircraft taking off from Larnaca.

Greek sources are now reporting – because it’s important to keep the fire stoked, I suppose – that Israel has requested authorization for the IAF to use the airfield on the island of Paphos, in exchange for “ensuring the air defense of the Republic and changing the military balance in the region.”  The quid is believable here; the quo is not.  Israel might well seek an agreement with Cyprus to use the Paphos air base, but deploying the IAF to patrol Cypriot air space is something Israel would save for a later decision point, presumably if Turkey escalated maritime tensions.

It would be a mistake to think Turkey is weak and is acting silly.  For Turkey, the drilling off Cyprus (and the Turkish exploration) is, in part, a pretext for keeping warships on patrol in the Eastern Med.  The warships are not going to pack up and go home any time soon.  Turkey has already announced a more active naval posture, and Erdogan will make good on that.  Look for Turkish warships to start patrolling further and further abroad.  Having ships in place to “escort flotillas” heading for the Gazan coast is likely to be a matter of warships already on-scene for “routine” patrols.  Turkey is changing her baseline naval posture, not merely responding ad hoc to random priorities.

The Turks are hardly driving out into a traffic jam:  the naval stalwarts of NATO – the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands – don’t make it over to the Eastern Med nearly as much as they used to.  Cash-strapped Greece has just announced a drawdown of participation in NATO naval operations because she really can’t even afford to patrol her own waters.  The vacuum being left by an inattentive United States and a lackadaisical NATO is becoming apparent.

In the middle of all this, Turkey has announced the delivery of her navy’s first homegrown frigate.  The timing, dovetailing with a repulsive comment by Erdogan about Israel and the Holocaust, generates something uncomfortably close to an Ahmadinejadian vibe.  (Turkey continues to deal quite pragmatically with Iran, cooperating on the project of suppressing the Kurds while intercepting Iranian arms shipments to Syria.  Turkey and Iran will not be forming a BFF Club any time soon.)

Who, incidentally, is coming to the rescue of Cyprus’ faltering financial situation?  That would be Russia, of course, which continues to have an interest in beefing up ties with Greece and Cyprus – geopolitically “flanking” Turkey – and establishing stakes in both Mediterranean frontage and oil-and-gas deposits.

I am unconvinced that Russia has dispatched “two nuclear submarines” to patrol the Eastern Med; I consider it a better assessment that no more than one has been deployed to the Med, if any.  A Russian nuclear attack submarine (SSN) would have to come from the Northern Fleet, in the Barents Sea, which has only 11 SSNs in the current order of battle.  (There are no nuclear submarines in the Black or Baltic Sea.) No more than 6-7 of the Northern Fleet SSNs are in “constant-ready” status at a given time.  I regard 5 as a better estimate.  Assuming the 6-7, however, and assuming the Russians hope to keep their SSNs in service, they can’t generate more than 4-6 long-range patrols per year with the number they have operational.

The Russian submarine force is naturally the naval element whose patrol patterns we know the least about today, but the Russians were at pains to make clear the resumption of a global presence starting in 2007, and the operation of an SSN off the US East coast in 2009.  A Mediterranean presence would be one among several priorities, and would be likely to result in about two total Med patrols per year (with about 45-50 days on-station), probably done as single patrols and spaced over time.

There may well be a Russian SSN in the Eastern Med right now, but I would be surprised if there’s more than one.  Russian nuclear subs almost never make port visits, as US and other NATO subs do when on deployment.  A Russian diesel-powered attack sub, a Kilo-class SS from the Baltic, participated visibly in a NATO submarine exercise off Spain’s southeastern coast this summer, and diesel-powered subs are more likely in general to make port calls.  The older ones in service have to expose their masts to snorkel anyway, and require refueling during deployments; they can’t maintain stealth on long-range deployments as nuclear-powered submarines can.

So the Russians can make claims that may or may not be true about deploying nuclear submarines, as a means of influencing the political situation.  It will be interesting to see if Russia lets the region glimpse, however briefly, a submarine that may be in the Eastern Med.  The implied long-term outcome of the Russian push with Cyprus (and Greece), coupled with the announcement of the sub deployments, is Russian use of their ports.  Making an SSN visible, even if only for half an hour, would reinforce that implication most effectively – especially assuming the SSN carries the SS-N-21 Sampson (RK-55 Granit), or “Tomahawkski,” land-attack missile.

Meanwhile, Russia will be reinforcing the general message about seapower and land influence in the Med with the deployment this fall of an amphibious landing ship to the Balkan Peninsula.  Ropucha LST Tsesar Kunikov will deploy from the Black Sea in October and November to conduct port visits in Greece and Montenegro (a Serb region of former Yugoslavia, located on the Adriatic Sea, where the port of Tivat, long used by the Soviet Navy, is situated).  The landing ship will participate in a ceremony on 20 October to commemorate the Battle of Navarino, a key confrontation of the year 1827 in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Empire.  (The Russians were on the side that defeated the Ottoman fleet.)

Such commemorations of history are typical of Russian policy, and never more so than when they make a strong point with modern rivals – in the present case, Turkey.  At this point, there is little reason to refer any longer to a Pax Americana.  The linchpin of the Pax Americana, the NATO alliance, is precisely what is being undermined by the migration of NATO allies Turkey and Greece away from common strategic objectives.  Russia – once the motivating factor for NATO – is now sought and cultivated by one ally out of concern about the other.  All things old are new again, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and peace in our time has some tough innings ahead of it.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Bill Roggio at Long War Journal is concerned about our increasing reliance on drones.  So am I.  I concur with his reservations expressed here (don’t miss his whole piece, well worth reading):

The “drones” are an excellent tactic to keep al Qaeda and allied groups off balance, but their use is not a substitute for denying terrorists from physically holding ground. Despite eight years of Predator strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Taliban remain firmly in control of the region.

He’s right.  Our drone attacks in Somalia have made no difference to the situation on the ground either (or in Yemen, for that matter).  And that’s important.

It is a new and different kind of “warfare” that sets up sniper perches on the territory of others and simply goes on picking people off, year after year, without transforming the conditions that make the “war” necessary.  No, we can’t invade and regime-change every nation that terrorists use as bases.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t owe ourselves a strategy check – and frankly, a morality and precedent check – on what we have chosen to do instead.

One of the first questions – a pragmatic question – is whether we consider it a good precedent to expand and normalize the practice of drone assassinations (or other drone attacks).  We’re not the only nation with really smart drones.  Other nations are going to have more and more of them.  Drones’ capabilities don’t require especially advanced computing any more, and the airframes are cheap.  If we launch drones from Ethiopia, why should Iran not launch them from Eritrea?

To use this kind of force, the implication is that you don’t need to have a traditional-warfare justification.  Alternatively, you could say that this kind of force – drone-targeting; anti-personnel tactics untethered to the idea of securing a “better peace” – is now a way war can be defined.

In either case, these suppositions raise questions in terms of the Geneva Conventions and the law of armed conflict.  More fundamentally, they raise questions as to what we are, in effect, doing.  It’s one thing if drones are used as an adjunct to an overarching strategy of closing in on militant jihadism by denying it territory and transforming the political conditions in which it has thrived.  But it’s something else when drones become the go-to tool, for a go-to method of simply killing as many jihadis as possible.

The latter model begins to resemble the methods of guerrilleros and the bloody conflicts of crime syndicates.  What those models presuppose is the absence of a possibility of strategic resolution:  a felt need to keep killing because, when baseline conditions aren’t expected to change, it’s the only option for harassing, culling, and deterring the enemy pack.  Is that the light in which we see this “war on terror” conflict?

Classical guerrillas dedicate themselves to perpetual insurgency, not just because they think it’s exciting but because they lack a vision for victory and resolution, and they lack the means to bring those things about.  Guerrillas can be useful in a campaign directed by a commander with a strategy and traditional firepower, but in the absence of that ability to concentrate force and achieve big objectives, they remain in the role of antagonists, always operating “against” the existing order.

Crime syndicates, meanwhile, fight among themselves on the understanding that they may kill each other and intimidate populations, but the ultimate resolution, in terms of who is in charge and what national idea a territory will be claimed by, is not up to them.

Accountable nations fighting to win – fighting for what B.H. Liddell-Hart called a “better peace” – fight differently.  Their objective is not to kill as many people as possible but to transform the conditions of people on the territory they inhabit.  Bill Roggio is right:  if you don’t transform what’s going on on territory, the important things – the things that produced the need to fight in the first place – will not change.  That transformation need not involve forcibly changing foreign regimes, but it unquestionably involves changing foreign regimes’ will and intentions.

When the GWOT was launched, the Bush administration had that as a key objective.  Along with a host of new agreements and cooperative programs with Muslim nations, significant transformation was achieved in Iraq.  It is not clear today that the gains there will be sustained, with the drawdown of US troops.

Meanwhile, NATO has been engaged in a perilous holding action in Afghanistan for the last 5-6 years, and the regional strategic conditions there are now worse, on balance, than they were in 2006.  Cooperation with Pakistan has seriously deteriorated, and NATO security operations in Afghanistan are failing to deter bold, broad-scale attacks by the Taliban, like the 22-hour firefight at the US embassy and NATO facility in Kabul last week.

Under these conditions – and in the absence of policy statements – what we are ramping up as opposed to drawing down (or looking dithery and ambivalent about) is the key to our posture and intentions.  And what we are ramping up is our drone profile in the Horn of Africa.

Yet we can never achieve the condition we desire – a condition in which we do not have to fight Islamist militants – by killing lots of them with drone attacks.  The method doesn’t match the implied objective.

This doesn’t mean drone attacks are inherently useless or even immoral, but it does mean that their utility and moral justification depend on their being used in the service of a justifiable strategic objective.  If we aren’t interested in consolidating the gains made for security and peace in Iraq, and if we are only looking to use Afghanistan as a sniper perch for as long as we can, do we have a justifiable strategic objective anymore?  Are we fighting for a better peace?

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

An essential point of understanding is this: the problem with MAD in the Cold War was that it didn’t work on the Russians nearly as well as it worked on us.  The Soviet Russians never wanted to shoot nuclear missiles at us.  They just wanted to be able to hold us at risk so that our behavior would be constrained, and theirs could proceed on schedule.  Most of the time, they achieved that goal (rare exceptions would include Nixon’s deterrence of Soviet intervention in the 1973 war).

The MAD regime inhibited the US, but did not inhibit the Soviets when it came to the things they really wanted to do:  hold the Warsaw Pact nations under their boot, foment revolution, and arm Marxist insurgencies in third-party nations abroad.  Indeed, MAD did the opposite:  it gave cover to Soviet revolutionary adventurism.

So it is a terrible idea to implement a de facto Cold War-like regime with Iran.  This is not solely because the Iranian leadership is uniquely committed to a lunatic policy of immanentizing the eschaton.  That matters, but it’s not the most important downside to a MAD regime with Iran.  The important weakness of the idea is something even likelier: that an institutionalized standoff with Iran would give Iran cover for an accelerated career of foreign troublemaking.

Iran doesn’t want to hunker down like a turtle within her borders.  Revolutionary Iran wants the latitude to push outward across the region through Islamist insurgencies and “cultural jihad.”  Tehran already sponsors Hezbollah, Hamas, the homicidal Assad regime in Syria, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.  Iran arms the Taliban and other Islamists fighting US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and has a close, arms-and-supplies-based relationship with Shia Islamists in southern Iraq.  Iran also backs elements of the Shia opposition in Bahrain (an especially problematic situation given that Shia Bahrainis have legitimate grievances against the minority Sunni ruling class).  Prior to the Arab Spring, Iran was using cultural centers in Arab nations across the Middle East and North Africa for jihadist recruitment.

But the Iranian threat isn’t just in the Eastern hemisphere.  Through the magic of foreign alliances, Tehran now has the prospect of using territory in Central America – Venezuela, perhaps eventually Nicaragua and Bolivia – for military purposes.  This is a late-coming option, of course; Hezbollah has been in the Americas for years.  But Iran has never been this close to being able to deploy medium-range ballistic missiles (in Venezuela) that can hit the Southeastern United States.

In such a situation, it would be exceptionally foolish for the US to institute a crisis hotline with Iran.  Yet this is one of the options reportedly under consideration for addressing a recent series of dangerous incidents at sea in the Persian Gulf.

The incidents primarily involve the speedboats operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC); another set of incidents involves Iranian naval aircraft.  In both cases, the swift-moving nature of the encounters makes a hotline linking higher headquarters irrelevant to the developments on-scene.  A hotline in such cases would be used mainly to register complaints.  Whether Iran took advantage of the medium or not, the prospect of the US developing a standard operating procedure for complaining to Iran has farce written all over it.

This is undoubtedly well understood by the Defense Department chain of command and the experienced diplomats at State.  There is reason to hope that a hotline is not being seriously proposed to address fleeting incidents at sea.  On the other hand, the WSJ article mentions some form of an “incidents at sea” agreement with Iran, like the INCSEA agreement concluded with the Soviet Union under Nixon.  That is equally problematic, for one thing because the particulars of the US-USSR INCSEA agreement have little applicability to Iran and the Persian Gulf.

But the main reason it’s a bad idea to seek an INCSEA agreement is that a crucial element is missing in the situation with Iran:  acceptance of US legitimacy in the region.  Tehran would not approach negotiating an INCSEA as Soviet Moscow did, on the basis of two legitimate powers agreeing to a naval modus vivendi.  Iran’s negotiating objective, under her current leadership, would be at a minimum the departure of the US Navy from the Gulf.

Details aside, proposals like a hotline or an INCSEA do one especially inadvisable thing:  they open the door to legitimating and institutionalizing Iran’s posture of armed hostility.  In striking the tocsin of the Cold War, they suggest a fatalistic, temporizing mode of thinking in the White House.

They also violate the first principle of the carrot-and-stick method:  reward good behavior.

We can be glad that WSJ quotes an unnamed official as saying the question of setting up a hotline is “premature,” but it is disquietingly premature for anyone to even be thinking about one.  Iran is no Soviet Union; revolutionary Iran can only become a partner in hotlines and INCSEA negotiations – and presumably, down the road, MAD – if the US prematurely treats her as if she has us checkmated.

Only the US can boost Iran to the trappings of Cold War-style superpower status.  Iran can’t do it on her own. The last thing the US administration should be doing is talking about it.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

According to Turkish press, as quoted by Ynet, the Turkish air force will be fitting its F-16 fighter jets with new IFF systems, which will not treat the signal from an Israeli IFF transponder as friendly, and will thus facilitate more efficient attack.  The F-16’s original IFF system is made to US/NATO specifications, and identifies an Israeli IFF response as friendly.  This creates an inconvenient requirement to override the system’s restrictions preventing engagement of friendly aircraft, in order to fire on an Israeli plane.  (A serious inconvenience when both the shooter and the target are traveling at 500 knots or more.)

The difference to Turkey’s air combat posture is neither inconsequential nor militarily earth-shattering.  But announcing it to the public has no military function.  It’s a political move.  And the most important point is that Turkey has no fear of making it.

If nothing else, given the mutual-defense aspect of the NATO alliance, the Turkish move should give the rest of NATO pause.  Having a unique national perspective on which nations’ militaries are “friendly” and which are not is something that quickly becomes untenable in a security alliance.

This consideration is hardly abstract:  Israel has participated in a number of NATO-sponsored exercises in the last several years, including air and sea exercises in the Aegean Sea.  It is no accident that Turkey has announced retrofitting her air force’s IFF systems, and planning to do so with her ships and submarines, a few days after Israel and Greece signed a military cooperation agreement.

The Turkish announcement was also made two weeks before the target date for offshore oil drilling to begin south of Cyprus, in the area where Cyprus and Israel have established a maritime claims agreement.  Independent Cyprus, with a Greek heritage and culture, has been a client of Athens since independence, and will naturally seek support from NATO, and Greek support in the EU, to counter whatever actions Turkey takes against the drilling operation.  The IFF modification for Israel is one Turkey couldn’t direct at Greece without burning all her bridges, but there is certainly an element of Turkey seeking to drive a wedge between Greece and Israel.

This move by Turkey will have little effect on the prospects for an Israeli attack option against Iranian nuclear facilities.  That option has been severely constrained for some time; even assuming a quiescent IFF posture vis-à-vis Turkish forces, Saudi Arabia is now the only potentially viable path for the IAF.  Meanwhile, the scope of attack required in 2011, to do enough damage to justify launching it outside of a hot-war situation, has all but expanded beyond the IDF’s conventional capabilities anyway.

The significance of this Turkish action is that Erdogan expects no pushback for reckless behavior.   It’s even possible that he means this move to create a bargaining chip with the US, like the leverage he now has with his agreement to host an X-band radar for the NATO theater missile defense system.  Turkey’s warning on the IFF issue has the potential to circumscribe and even stymie the plans of NATO nations in the region, if a resolution in Israel’s favor is not forced on Ankara.

The coming days will reveal whether Erdogan has read the Obama administration correctly.  Obama could direct US contractors to suspend or abrogate their defense-systems agreements with Turkey, and many in Congress will certainly push for that.  That would be a politically satisfying reaction, and an understandable one, but it would also leave Turkey in the driver’s seat and keep the focus on a side-issue rather than the big picture.  This move is not designed to offer a constructive path forward for regional or US security.

Frankly, Turkey’s announcement should be handled as an issue of NATO integrity.  The US should rally the other members to put stern pressure on Turkey as a group.  But Erdogan apparently calculates either that such a response is unlikely, or that he can turn it to his advantage.  His behavior is very much that of a chess player who believes he has his allies checkmated.

Maybe he does.  One thing is for sure:  inert as the NATO West may be, Erdogan’s career of initiative will soon start meeting with counter-initiative from the region.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Turkey’s efforts around Iraq are multidimensional and aimed at more than merely suppressing the Kurdish separatist group PKK.  The activity that has been in the news in August, of course, is the bombing of Kurdish targets in northern Iraq.  Early in the August campaign, the Turks announced their decision to establish a more permanent military presence in northern Iraq, a move that will obviously affect strategic calculations in the region.

Baghdad has been largely silent about the incursions on Iraqi territory, although the Turkish ambassador was summoned last week to hear a complaint from the Iraqi foreign ministry.  Iraq’s position is difficult:  both Turkey and Iran are bound to be concerned about the Kurds’ use of northern Iraq as a redoubt for their different factional campaigns against Iraq’s neighbors.  Iran began attacking Kurdish targets across the border as early as July (see here and here), and with the emerging regional rivalry heating up between Ankara and Tehran, Turkey’s strategic interest in the real estate of northern Iraq was guaranteed to assume a more complex, and even a more urgent, character.  If Iraq can’t control the Kurds’ use of her territory, Nouri al-Maliki knows there is a limit to either neighbor’s willingness to refrain from intervention.

The US posture in the area is a question mark: the quality of our military power hasn’t changed, but the amount of it has, while our policy stance has grown flaccid.  Even two years ago, Turkey would have expected pushback from Washington if she proposed to establish permanent, significantly enlarged military bases in northern Iraq.  It is clear now that Erdogan is justified in assuming there will be no pushback.

The move in the south

In this context, Turkey’s latest move has about it the aura of wasting no time.  Down at the other end of Iraq, on the al-Faw peninsula, which runs down the west side of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway as it courses into the Persian Gulf, the Iraqis are finally on the verge of building the major new port they have been planning since 2005.  Kick-starting the investment consortium in late August 2011?  Three Turkish companies.

(Admin note: I can’t get Hot Air’s WordPress template to accept an image tonight, so if you’d like to view a map of the geo features mentioned below, please see this post at The Optimistic Conservative.)

It’s not any direct conflict with an Iranian commercial interest that makes this a pointed strategic move; it’s the location and the tactic.  The Shatt-al-Arab waterway, representing the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as they empty into the Persian Gulf, has long been disputed between Iran and Iraq, for reasons that reach back centuries.  Iran occupied the al-Faw peninsula for a period of time during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s; Saddam’s nominal pretext for launching the war was his repudiation of the 1975 accord on the Shatt-al-Arab signed between Iraq and the Shah.

The area is one of Iran’s (and Iraq’s) most sensitive.  As the link above outlines, it is also the subject of a bitter dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over port development.  Kuwait is already building a rival port on Bubiyan Island, less than a mile off the al-Faw peninsula (and disputed with Iraq until a settlement was achievedon a UN demarcation line in 1994).  Iraq is strenuously opposed to Kuwait’s port plans; Kuwait naturally sees no reason to relinquish them.

The threats issued by Hizballah Kataib, the Hizballah group operating in Iraq, against Hyundai and other South Korean firms building the Kuwaiti port have suggested that Iran is opposed to Kuwait’s project as well.  Tension between Iran and Kuwait has been fed this year by Kuwait’s discovery in March of an Iranian spy ring inside her borders, along with Kuwaiti accusations that Iran is trespassing in Kuwait’s waters to conduct seismic exploration.  Kuwait closed ranks with Saudi Arabia on the issue of suppressing the protests in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, a policy that sat poorly with Iran, which backed some (not all) of the factions seeking to overthrow the Bahraini emir.

Iran’s general attitude toward the Shatt-al-Arab region is conveyed most effectively in this summary by a British analyst of Iranian political and military activities there.  Basically, it’s a throbbing vulnerability for Iran over which her leaders prefer to exert as much positive control as possible.  Development of a Kuwaiti port at its mouth promises to set up an uncontrollable condition, whereas promoting an Iraqi port there would enable Iran to keep a finger on what happens.  Since Iran has her own ports and free-trade zone on the Shatt-al-Arab, it has suited her interests well for Iraq’s port plans to languish, and for Kuwait’s to be subject to threat.

Given these factors, Erdogan’s approach is informative.  One option for stymieing Iran would have been simply backing the Kuwaiti port.  Already under construction, likely to be completed on time and operated well, it has much to recommend it.

But backing it would not be a way of supplanting Iran as a strategic patron of Iraq.  Nor would supporting the Iraqi port politically but remaining in the background.  With this month’s move, the Turks have done for the Iraqis’ port aspirations what the Iranians have been no help with: they have come up with money and organization.  From a Persian Gulf PR standpoint, the message of Turkish effectiveness is certainly amplified by her naval port visit to the Emirate of Abu Dhabi – the “first one in centuries” – in June 2011.

From Turkey’s perspective, it would be intolerable to have both Syria and Iraq acting under the sway of Iran.  There is a defensive reason for Turkey’s actions.  But two things must be noted.  One is that the catalyst for Ankara’s current activism is not a fear of growing Iranian strength.  Iran’s regional power arrangements are actually under threat from multiple sources at the moment, and much of her strategy is being executed in reactionary mode, not from confident assertiveness.  What Turkey sees is opportunity, and what created it is the disorder and passivity of US policy.  There is a vacuum, and Erdogan is filling it.

Meanwhile, back in the West: “We were here, are here, and will always be here”

The second observation is that Turkey containing Iran isn’t likely to turn out a lot better than Hitler containing Stalin.  It sounds clever, but its hazards outweigh the potential benefits.  Sooner or later, Erdogan’s objectives are going to collide with the interests of others in the Middle East, with those of NATO, and with at least one of the great powers of Asia.

One of the early flashpoints may be over on Turkey’s other flank, in the Balkans, where Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu helped Bosnian Muslims celebrate Eid in Sarajevo on 30 August.  In language guaranteed to alarm Bosnia’s non-Muslim population, Davutoglu and the Grand Mufti pretty much laid it on the table:

Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric welcomed Davutoğlu, telling worshippers that “today is a day we waited for centuries” in Sarajevo. “Today is a day to cherish because the Turkish foreign minister is with us,” he said.

Davutoğlu said Ceric’s sermon was “emotional” and added: “We were here, are here and we will always be here.”

Ceric further commended Davutoğlu after his sermon at the mosque, saying “Allah created him to make history.” Calling Davutoğlu’s Eid prayer at Gazi Husrev Bey Mosque a “historic moment,” Ceric said it symbolized the “rebirth of a new politics and new realities in the Balkans, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

Davutoğlu said after the prayer that he was honored to be in Sarajevo, calling the city as “home.” He said: “In our traditions, we celebrate Eid at home. This is what I am doing, I celebrate the Eid with my family in Sarajevo. Bosnia is our home and Bosnians are our family members.”

As Today’s Zaman demurely puts it, however:

Davutoğlu rejected [the] “neo-Ottoman” label for his government’s foreign policy and said such a label stemmed from the uneasiness some have felt in the face of Turkey’s growing influence in the region.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Now I’ll grant that the idea of progressive hope and change candidate Obama as head of the nation’s spy agency sounds strange to the ear, but news of another Al Qaeda leader’s death in Pakistan has me thinking that–whatever his failures in other important areas like the economy, foreign policy, etc.–Barack Obama has a knack for killing people abroad who threaten the US. A few highlights:

• April 2009 – In the first few months of his administration, Obama sent a team of SEALs to kill Somali pirates who’d taken a ship’s captain hostage. Three pirates were shot in the head, one was captured alive.
• August 2009 – Drones kill militant Baitullah Mehsud along with his wife and family.
• October 2009 – Abu Ayyub al-Masri an Al Qaeda explosives expert is killed in Pakistan.
• March 2010 – Hussein al-Yemeni an Al Qaeda planner is killed by a drone strike.
• May 2010 – Saeed al-Masri, Al Qaeda’s 3rd in command is killed by drone strikes.
• June 2010 – Al Qaeda leader Abu Ahmed Tarkash is killed in a drone strike.
• April 2011 – Obama authorizes a SEAL mission that kills Osama bin Laden.
• June 2011 – Suspected senior Al Qaeda operative Ilyas Kashmiri is killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.
• August 2011 – Drones kill the aforementioned Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.

Since taking office Obama’s drone strikes have reportedly killed at least 1,300 in Pakistan, most of them terrorists. This is up substantially from the number of drone strikes under President Bush. And of course the death of Osama bin Laden is all the qualification he needs. The fact that Obama is a progressive won’t make much difference running drone strikes from Langley. It hasn’t seemed to in the last three years and that’s too his credit.

There would be political advantages to having Obama in a position like this as well. Under Bush, the left threw fits over the legality of the CIA’s attempts to keep us safe. No doubt Obama’s increased drone strikes would have been seen as the work of a lawless, imperial presidency had they been undertaken by Bush. But Obama, for the most part has been given a pass because of his domestic politics. (Another case in point, the invasion of Libya which would have caused liberal heads to explode if Bush had tried it.) Rick Perry, should he win the White House, will certainly face a resurgent, anti-war left. Placing Obama in the driver’s seat of our covert military response to terrorism would help insulate Perry from those attacks.

Whatever his failings, and they are legion when it comes to getting America back to work, Barack Obama has given the CIA the kind of free reign abroad that Dick Cheney only dreamed about. Should Obama lose the 2012 election, there’s no reason he can’t continue to serve where his service will do the nation the most good.

More good news for a Monday:  Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul (the head of state, as opposed to Prime Minister Erdogan, the head of government), sent Syria’s Bashar al-Assad a letter last week.  In it, he warned that if Assad continues on his current path – making war on his people, joined at the hip with Iran – he can no longer count on Turkey’s friendship.  According to a Turkish press interview cited by Haaretz, Turkish officials are now open to the possibility of participating in a coalition military intervention in Syria, something Turkey has not been openly in favor of before.

Iran has lost no time in delivering a riposte.  Iran will expand and update the air base at Latakia (adjacent to a naval base on the Syrian coast, and formerly used by the Soviet Union) in order to facilitate weapons shipments to Syria.  Turkey has stopped at least two weapons shipments through Turkish territory from Iran to Syria this year, and the Israeli navy – or possibly a NATO navy – would prevent any attempted deliveries by commercial shipping.  (Iran violates UN sanctions by exporting arms, regardless of who they’re going to.)

Iran’s logistic and strategic outreach

An air base alone would be of little use to Iran and Syria, unless Iran can route planes over Iraq.  If that isn’t possible, the air base at Latakia buys Tehran and the Assad regime little, at least in the near future.  The planes have to approach Latakia somehow, and if they can’t go through Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, there is no feasible direct route.

Nor would any country on the Mediterranean side knowingly allow a planeload of Iranian weapons to use its air bases as a waypoint.  Few if any potential Asian partners would be willing to allow that use for their air bases.  Iran has dealt in third- and fourth-party cut-outs for years (e.g., the recent attempt to route arms clandestinely through Nigeria), but intelligence agencies are fully alerted to Iranian tactics.

But might Iraq allow Iranian aircraft to transit her airspace en route Syria?  Observers in the Middle East are starting to see that as very possible.  The news site Iran Focus ties Nouri al-Maliki’s diplomatic support of the Assad regime to the fact that he “owes his hold on power to Tehran” – a reference to his (relatively enthusiastic) accommodation with Iran-backed Shia elements in Iraq.

Some level of friendliness is to be expected, of course, between neighbors who don’t want to be at each other’s throats.  Regional observers see more than that in Iran-Iraq relations, however.   In an editorial taking it for granted that Assad’s days are numbered, UAE’s The National calls the growing Iran-Iraq rapprochement “Iran’s back-up plan,” and links it with recent reports that Iran has ramped up covert support to the Shia Houthi rebels in western Yemen, whose activities create instability for the governments in both Sana’a and neighboring Saudi Arabia.

There may be a certain level of wishful thinking in The National’s dismissive attitude toward Assad.  Iran’s entrenchment in Syria is of a different order from her efforts in Bahrain, and will not be defeated as easily as in the small Persian Gulf nation.  But the perception that Iran is investing in her hold over Iraq is widespread in the region – and it’s an investment with multiple uses.  Iran doesn’t just want to retain her hold in Syria; she needs to block Turkey, and the urgency of that requirement has just increased significantly.

Iran won’t go quietly from Syria.  The air base, with an approach route through Iraq, is probably her preferred option for delivering arms.  But a fallback would be sending naval supply ships, with warship escorts, to deliver arms in Latakia.  That option would require would-be sanctions enforcers to challenge Iranian ships of war rather than commercial cargo vessels, and potentially to commit an act of war to stop the delivery.

Russia’s diplomatic gambit

Another important factor is Russia.  With the implication that Turkey will be willing to join a military intervention in Syria, Ankara has effectively broken ranks with Russia.  Russia has been unalterably opposed to that option, and is almost certain to remain so.  Besides opposing the West’s armed endorsement of revolts against Russian clients (in both Libya and Syria), Russia is concerned about both losing her naval base in Tartus and seeing Syria incorporated in an alliance with Turkey.

So it is interesting that as the Syrian navy pounds civilians on the coast, Turkey opens the door to armed intervention, and the US demands that Russia stop selling arms to the Assad regime, Moscow’s new push this week is to get everyone back to the table with Iran to haggle over the Iranian  nuclear program.

It’s a trademark Russian tactic, to get negotiations going so that various forms of “linkage” can be brought to bear.  Turkey, in her approach to Syria, is being comparatively dismissive of Russia, largely because there is more profit in proposing to participate in a Western effort in Syria – if the West can be egged into it.  But Russia can get back in the game, if negotiations with Iran can be made a forum for introducing – or leveraging – other regional issues, as either incentives or threats.  The Iranian nuclear problem is one the other P5+1 will find hard to ignore, as well as being a diplomatic issue for which Russia is guaranteed a seat at the table.

It’s a gambit, at any rate, and a fairly intelligent one.  The wild card is the United States.  If the Obama administration had a discernible vision for regional relations with a post-Assad, post-Iranian-client Syria, that would be one thing.  But it doesn’t, and that’s why the governing dynamic in the situation is the rivalry for Syria between Iran and Turkey.  If the US takes Russia up on the renewal of negotiations with Iran, that will prolong, for at least a while, the appearance that the conventions of the old Pax Americana are still in force.  It would not be a bad thing to be at the table with Russia, Iran, China, and our major European allies right now – it’s certainly better than laying out a red carpet for a Turkish military deployment into Syria.  Iran probably sees that as well.

How the US responds to the Russian proposal will be a key test of the Obama administration’s willingness to bolster the conventions that attend the global status quo.  Failing the test would constitute a true “reset,” not only of our relations with Russia but of our stature with the rest of the world.  We can hope that the conventional diplomatic thinkers at State and NSC win out over the advocates of non-hostile kinetic military action.  Neither will guarantee protection of the suffering Syrian people from their government – but the consequences of the NHKMA option in Syria would be exponentially worse than in Libya.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

ABC features the Obama administration response as if – well, as if it deserves featuring:

As China’s first aircraft carrier takes to the open seas today for its inaugural sea trials, the U.S. government directed a pointed question at the Chinese military: Why would you need a warship like that?

“We would welcome any kind of explanation that China would like to give for needing this kind of equipment,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters today. “We have had concerns for some time and we’ve been quite open with them with regard to the lack of transparency from China regarding its power projection and its lack of access and denial of capabilities.” …

“We are prepared to be extremely transparent with regard to U.S. military positions and equipment, and we’d like to have a reciprocal relationship with China, and that’s what our presidents have said we ought to aspire to,” Nuland said. “Transparency in itself is a confidence builder between nations.”

That’ll fix their wagon, over there in Beijing.  Of course, the hazard of demanding an answer to a question is that you may get one.  The Channel News Asia website today quotes a piece from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily, the state-run military news outlet, in which the author says the carrier should be used to “handle territorial disputes”:

“Why did we build it if we don’t have the courage and willingness to use the aircraft carrier to handle territorial disputes?” he asked in the article.

“It is reasonable to use the aircraft carrier or other warships to handle disputes if there is any need.

“The reason why we built a carrier is to safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests more efficiently. We will be more confident and have more determination to defend our territorial integrity after we have carriers.”

A pointed question for the US administration would be: What did they think China’s purpose was in launching an aircraft carrier?  Does it really require explanation?  Why do nations usually put aircraft carriers in service?  (China didn’t actually build this one; the Russians did.  China finished it and fitted it out with combat systems.)

Another pointed question would be:  What obligation could China possibly have to account to the US for why she has put a carrier in her fleet?  China’s not an ally and is bound by no treaty requirement to explain the introduction of new aircraft carriers.  Why ask a question that can’t put China on the spot and only invites a destabilizing answer?

The PLA Daily piece is being linked fervently all over Asia.  In the wake of multiple warnings from Beijing to the rival maritime claimants in the South China Sea (most recent here), the PLA Daily statement about the purpose of the aircraft carrier looks pretty, well, pointed.

The new carrier, which according to some reports will be named Shi Lang, has just begun sea trials.  It still needs to conduct operational testing of all kinds, and integrate its airwing, before it is ready for combat deployments.  China officially debuted the J-15 strike-fighter that will form the core of the airwing earlier this year; the first photos of the prototype emerged in 2009-10, so it’s a new aircraft for the Chinese military and is still being shaken out itself.  The J-15 is based on the Russian Su-33, the follow-on to the Su-27 designed for the Admiral Kuznetsov-class ski-jump aircraft carrier.  (Russia has Admiral Kuznetsov in service; China’s new carrier is the ex-Varyag, the other unit of the class.)

A full combat complement for the airwing will probably be three squadrons of J-15s, or about 33 aircraft, plus support helicopters.  China is reportedly developing a fixed-wing air control and early warning (AEW) aircraft, to fill the role of the US E-2C Hawkeye, and if the ex-Varyag were to carry such an aircraft, that would mean fewer J-15s, as there is a capacity limit for airwing parking.  Integration of a fixed-wing, carrier-based AEW airframe may be delayed to the inauguration of the Chinese-designed, indigenously built aircraft carrier.

What these various details mean is that China will not be deploying a combat-ready aircraft carrier tomorrow.  Although the Chinese have sped up their typical timeline for operationalizing new capabilities, I would guess the ex-Varyag won’t be in combat service for at least another 15-18 months, and its capabilities will be limited.

That said, the “problem-set” for operationalizing ex-Varyag is of a different scope from that of the path to combat readiness for a US carrier.  The ex-Varyag will never have the capabilities of its US counterparts; its size and other limitations prevent that.  But it doesn’t have to have those capabilities to be a game-changer in Southeast Asia.  Much of what a US carrier totes with it everywhere – making it the famous “four and a half acres of sovereign US territory” – China can provide separately to the maritime battlespace from shore.  Distances are short in the South China Sea, and the Chinese build-up there huge.  China doesn’t need this carrier to attack and subjugate Taiwan, and couldn’t use it to project power at great distances – but it’s the ideal platform to “handle territorial disputes” with the Philippines or Vietnam.

It turns out there are stupid questions.  The Obama administration just asked one.  The good news is that there may be at least a reason, if not an excuse, for the apparent confusion.  The Chinese launched two aircraft carriers this week:  the other one is a luxury hotel in Tianjin, on the Yellow Sea coast in northern China.  The former-Soviet carrier Kiev, which China bought in 1996 to use as a recreational facility, has undergone a multi-million-dollar transformation into a luxury destination for the exotic-travel connoisseur.  There are reportedly five presidential suites, along with cheaper accommodations.  Room rates haven’t been published yet, but you can tour the Binhai Military Theme Park for a ticket cost of 110 yuan, or about $17 US.

China's other aircraft carrier; photo Xinhuanet

For naval/carrier buffs, excellent pictorial history of ex-Varyag here.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

You’ve got to feel for Cyprus.  The island starts out divided between Greek Cyprus and “Turkish Northern Cyprus,” an entity created by a Turkish armed invasion in 1974 and recognized by, well, Turkey.  With her historical Greek roots, Greek Cyprus – an independent nation – has extensive exposure to Greek government bonds, and has been fighting a rearguard action throughout 2011 to prevent a faster downgrading of Cypriot public debt.  (Some US states now face a somewhat similar potential domino effect from the downgrading of US debt.)

Arms and the explosion

Back in January 2009, Cyprus was the unfortunate flag state of the M/V Monchegorsk, chartered by Iran to transport arms to Syria in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1747.  Cyprus lies off Syria’s coast, and wanted nothing to do with confiscating the Assad regime’s prohibited arms delivery.  But Cyprus ended up – under tremendous pressure – accepting the confiscated cargo: 98 containers of arms and explosives.  (Sprightly account of the history on this here.)

On 11 July 2011, the arms shipment, which had been held without further processing under a makeshift structure at a Cypriot naval base for over two years, found itself in the path of a summer fire.  Exploding, it killed 13 people, including the chief of the Cypriot navy, and destroyed the electric power plant that provided 53% of the power used by Greek Cyprus.  The loss of power has put Cyprus in an economic tailspin.  Moody’s downgraded Cypriot debt to just above junk status in late July, making it likely that EU member (and Eurozone participant) Cyprus would at some point seek a bailout along with Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.

Cypriots, blaming the government of old-style leftist Demetris Cristiofas (and, without electric power, having little else to do), have been flooding the streets in protest.  Cristiofas’ parliamentary coalition was split when its major ally (the centrist Democratic Party) abruptly pulled out on Wednesday 3 August.  Cristiofas holds the office of president and will not face the voters again until 2013, but the loss of his coalition means the government will be paralyzed on contentious issues.  He appointed a new cabinet on Friday, but was unable to bring in any new ministers from his former ally, the Democratic Party.  Nevertheless, his new finance minister put a brave face on things, asserting that “there is no issue at the moment” of Cyprus requesting a Eurozone bailout.

Gas and Turkey

This may well be due in large part to Cyprus’ determination to forge ahead with offshore gas drilling.  The government in Nicosia has put the word out repeatedly over the last couple of weeks that it expects drilling off the southern coast to start on (or before) 1 October.  Cyprus has been moving smartly to explore and get drilling underway since concluding a maritime boundary agreement with Israel in 2010.

USGS map of Levant Basin oil/gas survey area

But Turkey is unalterably opposed to this course.  Turkey’s position is that, having invaded Cyprus and established a Turkish entity there which no one else recognizes, she is entitled to forestall all activity in the Cypriot economic exclusion zone (EEZ) until the status of Cyprus is worked out through negotiation.

That won’t be happening any time soon.  On 19 July, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a significant change in the country’s negotiating stance:

The Turkish Prime Minister has sent a thunderbolt to the United Nations and leaders of Cyprus by announcing that his country is no longer prepared to accept the concessions it has agreed to in order to help with the reunification of Cyprus in line with a UN plan back in 2004.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Turkish side will accept nothing short of recognition of a two-state solution on the island, effectively meaning if the current round of UN sponsored talks fail Turkey will likely seek international recognition for the break-away state.

The “two-state solution” thing is certainly going around (and that’s a whole other post).  But in the wake of this “thunderbolt” from Erdogan, Cristiofas pulled out of the UN-sponsored negotiation meeting scheduled for Friday, 5 August, without indicating a date on which he would be prepared to resume negotiations.   Certainly his governing-coalition woes are a key reason for the pull-out, but they are extremely unlikely to be the only reason.  It is not clear what options Cyprus has now, with the Erdogan government renouncing the previous basis for negotiations, and determined not on reunification of the island, but on a two-state solution.  Cristiofas cannot feel that there is much to say to Turkey right now.

But 1 October is less than 8 weeks away.  Turkey expresses continued determination to prevent a drilling start, and for implied threats of that kind there is a history.  The Turkish navy has harassed exploration vessels operating in the Cypriot and Greek EEZs before – to the point of preventing their activities.  In mid-November 2008, a Turkish warship prevented a Norwegian survey vessel from operating off the southern coast of Cyprus.  In March of 2011, a Turkish warship interfered with an Italian vessel in the Greek EEZ off Crete, which had Athens’ permission to survey the seabed for a communications cable to be laid between Italy and Israel.  (See here for an account of an escalation with Greece in 2010, via a NOTAM duel and Turkish fighter patrols over a new undersea oil/gas find.)

Greece has taken note of a pointed statement by Erdogan at a 2011 naval conference in Ankara:

We want a navy to dominate the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, and also stand before the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

Nothing is happening in isolation in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Cyprus, geographically and politically, is in the middle of it all.  The Arab Spring has upset one set of assumptions, putting Syria (and Egypt) in play.  The perennial security concerns of the major nations – Russia, Greece, Turkey – are dictated by geography and history: if Syria is in play, that causes strategic discomfort for the other big nations.  Russia’s concern is particularly acute because Turkey lies across her maritime path out of the Black Sea, and on the other side of the restive, largely Muslim Caucasus.  Turkey asserting a new, peculiarly Turkish realm of influence (e.g., by pilfering Syria as a client from Iran) would regenerate an Ottoman-like vulnerability on Russia’s southern flank.

Geography and geostrategy

The facts of geo-history combine with undersea resources to make Cyprus a strategic prize in the Eastern Mediterranean.  Considered in the light of Erdogan’s recent electoral victory, his suppression of internal checks on his power, and his various statements indicating neo-Ottoman aspirations, the July 2011 about-face on Cyprus policy comes off as a clear determination to keep Turkey in absolute control of at least part of Cyprus.  There are two geographic reasons for this:  Cyprus’ proximity to the Levant Basin oil and gas reserves, and Cyprus’ relation to the coast of Syria.  Basically, Cyprus commands the Syrian coast.  Holding Cyprus and being able to fortify it is a means of holding Syria at risk from the sea.

Eastern Mediterranean region

That would come in handy if either Russia or Iran got in a position in Syria to project power from the Syrian coast.  It’s a blocking move on Turkey’s part as much as anything.  Iran, fighting hard just to keep the Assad regime in power (see here and here), is somewhat distracted at the moment, but Russia has a very long historic and geostrategic vista of security concerns about formerly-Ottoman Turkey, the Aegean, and the Black Sea.  That is why Russia has sought to maintain at least one Mediterranean base whenever possible over the last two-plus centuries, to be able to flank her Black Sea neighbors and influence conditions in the Mediterranean when necessary.

Cyprus has become uniquely vulnerable at a uniquely unstable time.  It doesn’t all boil down to oil and gas:  Americans are almost the only people on earth who don’t have to think 24/7 about geography as a key component of their security, and we foolishly dismiss the geographic security orientation of other nations, supposing that everything is “about” either oil or ideology.  But Russia can very easily be held at risk by Turkey because of geography, and the more Ottoman-sounding Erdogan’s rhetoric and actions are, the more Russia will worry about that and take steps to avert it.  Maneuvering over Cyprus because of her relative location is as high a priority as anything else.

The unreliability of US power contributes to the uneasy mindset of various actors around the “Great Crossroads” of Europe, Asia, and Africa.  The EU, the US, and our collective defense organization (NATO) are failing in Libya and looking tired and dispirited in Afghanistan.  It is less and less unthinkable that Turkey will render the UN process in Cyprus moot because she has no intention of giving up her free hand in Northern Cyprus – and that she will add new offensive capabilities to the 30,000 troops she has occupying the island.

Unfortunately, the stage is set for Cyprus to matter a great deal.  If having a naval base in Syria becomes untenable for Russia, having the use of bases in Greece – perhaps even in Greek Cyprus – is not out of the question.  So much has the Pax Americana faded that Britain, France, and Italy would be likely to quietly welcome such a development, rather than regarding it with suspicion and alarm.

Naval postures

If Turkey’s posture in the Eastern Med seems to come off somewhat like China’s in the waters of East Asia, it should not be surprising that the two nations, which have conducted unprecedented military exercises together over the last year, have also been conducting unprecedented naval task force deployments to distant seas.  In 2010, China, for the first time ever, sent an operational naval task force to the Mediterranean for a series of port visits.  Turkey, for the first time since Ottoman days (i.e., World War I), deployed a task force for a non-NATO “patrol” of the Mediterranean.

This summer, Turkey sent a four-ship naval task force to the Indian Ocean and East Asia.  Turkey (like China) has maintained a presence in the antipiracy operations off Somalia, but this summer’s deployment has so far entailed port visits in Oman, Abu Dhabi (UAE – “for the first time in centuries”), India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Japan.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

According to the UK Telegraph, the Turkish top brass resigned en masse on Friday to protest the Erdogan government’s plans for a military promotions board scheduled for next week.

The generals apparently want to promote officers whom the Erdogan government wants to block, based on the claim that the officers participated in the alleged “Ergenekon” conspiracy of 2003 (known as Operation “Sledgehammer”) against the civilian leadership.

The Turkish General Staff has had a history of occasionally enforcing centrist, secular government by mounting coups.  The most recent occurred in 1997, when the General Staff induced the government of Necmettin Erbakan to resign by imposing conditions on it – largely prohibitions against instituting Islamic customs.

During the Soviet era, the General Staff was concerned about internal threats from Soviet-backed as well as Islamist and Kurdish-nationalist factions.  Since the end of the Cold War, with Islamism on the rise, the Turkish military, along with the judicial and education systems, has been instrumental in enforcing the Kemalist idea of a secular republic.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected as the leader of an explicitly Islamist party in 2003, however.  Much of Erdogan’s agenda has involved weakening the independence of the military, judiciary, and education officials.  Many observers believe that the allegations about the “Sledgehammer” conspiracy, even there is a core of truth to them, are being misused to simply entrap the blameless opponents of Erdogan’s political program.  (Other observers believe the Ergenekon conspiracy theme is entirely fabricated.  See links.)

More than 40 military officers are currently being held on charges of being involved in the conspiracy.  It’s hard to pinpoint what the generals’ intentions are with their mass resignation.  They are too old and experienced to believe that they would be currying popular support by perpetrating a dramatic action.  They can’t expect their resignation to put popular pressure on Erdogan, who just won reelection with a healthy majority of the seats in Turkey’s parliament.

The alternative possibilities are that they have simply given up, and decided to spend their golden years doing something else (perhaps outside of Turkey), or that they are organizing to confront Erdogan.  Militating against the latter interpretation is the fact that Erdogan does have popular support in Turkey, and trying to control the aftermath of a coup against him – even one executed, as in 1997, by memorandum – would be a dicey proposition, with no precedent paralleling the conditions of 2011.

It’s possible that the situation looks different to them, considering the turmoil in Syria, the Arab Spring in general, and the jockeying of Iran for influence in every nation in Turkey’s immediate vicinity.  These exotic considerations have little meaning for Americans at the moment, but for Turkey, they naturally loom large.  The stakes may appear high enough that taking significant risks seems warranted.

Now – this week – isn’t the least propitious time for such a move either, given the world’s absorption in the US budget fight.

In my view, the only way the General Staff could mount a coup under the conditions of 2011 is to have the explicit (if covert) support of Erdogan’s major political opposition, and probably of an outside actor as well.  (The main possibility would be Russia.)  Are any of these things in place?  There is no immediate evidence of it.

Perhaps the mass resignation is the last whimper of Kemalist secularism.  That seems the most realistic assessment.  Only time will tell.  If that is the case, the rate at which civil life deteriorates in Turkey will accelerate more rapidly now, and a key brake on Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman aspirations will be removed.  The world will not be the same place when Americans go to the polls next November.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

It is one of Dyer’s Axioms that a nation doesn’t change its naval posture because it is content with the status quo.  Iran continues to validate the axiom, and the latest announcement from her busy naval leadership is that the Islamic Republic will deploy a naval task force to the Atlantic in the near future as “part of a program to ply international waters.”

The development is not surprising, considering that Iran has maintained an antipiracy task force presence off Somalia for nearly three years now, sent a two-ship task force on an expedition to Syria earlier this year, and announced the deployment of a submarine to the Red Sea in June.

Granted, the Iranian navy hasn’t precisely bolstered its credibility with a near-simultaneous Pyongyang-style announcement that “enemies are dazed (amazed/surprised) by Iran’s huge naval achievements.” But an Atlantic deployment will be no particular stretch for the seamanship or technical capabilities of the navy (Iranian civil mariners ply all the world’s oceans anyway).  Iran can get a three-ship task force – two warships and an auxiliary – over to the Atlantic without exhausting her capacities.  The question about this deployment, assuming the political leadership remains constant, is not “if” but “when.”

There is another question about the deployment, however, and that is what the waypoints will be.  To begin with, Iran will have a choice of going through the Suez Canal versus going around Africa.  The task force may very well go around Africa – not because of any real concerns Iran would have about the Suez Canal or the Mediterranean, but because her navy is likely to find a readier welcome in sub-Saharan African ports along the way.

With Syria and Libya in turmoil, Iran’s (previous) most-likely port-call stops in the Mediterranean are effectively out of the running.  The Mediterranean, while perfectly safe for a non-stop transit, is not a hospitable route for a show-the-flag progress to the Atlantic.  On the East coast of Africa, on the other hand, Iran probably has a choice among Kenya and Tanzania, at the very least, and possibly Mozambique and South Africa, as ports of call for refueling, military-relations events, flag-waving, and R&R.

Iran has been cultivating these and other African nations intensively in the last several years:  with Kenya, for example, Iran has signed a number of cooperation agreements (including one on maritime cooperation and sea routes) since 2008, and exchanged several high-level visits with Prime Minister Raila Odinga (yes, the socialist radical whom Obama campaigned for in 2006, and who signed an agreement with Islamic leaders before his election to establish shari’a law).  With Tanzania Iran has centuries-old ethnic and Shi’a religious ties, but in the full-court press since 2008, Tehran has concluded plenty of new agreements with Dar Es-Salaam, including a defense cooperation agreement signed in 2009.  As with neighboring (landlocked) Zimbabwe, Iran plans to buy uranium from Tanzania; it remains to be seen if Iran will establish a helicopter repair “base” in Tanzania like the ongoing project in Zimbabwe, or train Tanzanian security forces under an agreement like that with the Mugabe regime.

With South Africa, Iran has had long and intensifying ties.  Tehran’s ties with Africa as a whole are extensive and growing.  To ensure port call and refueling opportunities, the Iranians are likely to route a naval task force around Africa to get to the Atlantic.

If they cross the Atlantic, which seems likely, they will probably make stops in Venezuela and Cuba at a minimum.  To visit Ecuador, another of Iran’s BFFs in Latin America, the task force would have to transit the Panama Canal, an expense Tehran won’t necessarily want to go to.  Another potential stop, however, particularly since it has a maritime “hook,” is Nicaragua, where Iran has been eyeing a joint project to develop a port and a cross-isthmus transportation infrastructure (a putative “rival” to the Panama Canal).  The two nations professed continued enthusiasm for their interhemispheric romance last month.  (For more on Iran in Latin America, see here and here.)

That an Iranian naval task force wouldn’t be able to “do” very much, naval-power-projection-wise, isn’t actually the point with a deployment like this.  An embarked helicopter, a few naval guns, a few anti-ship missiles and torpedoes – these weapon systems don’t amount to much in an order-of-battle comparison with the Navy.  But the important point is that Iran won’t be venturing out into friendless waters.  The geopolitical infrastructure is there to make a deployment like this look like any other major naval power’s task force deployment: with port calls, politicians, pierside ceremonies, bilateral exercises, and youth outreach activities all along the way.

The path may not lie through the Mediterranean, but it is there.  That’s what has changed – and from a strategic point of view, it sends an even more powerful message to Europe and North America if Iran approaches the Atlantic by another route.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Nothing says the administration has the issue of the border well under control, like publicly posted threats towards your chief enforcers of anti-drug smuggling policy. Following on the heels of some disastrous results in the entire keeping-the-illegal-guns-out-of-the-hands-of-these-guys efforts, one wonders how long The One can continue to afford these types of headlines to hit…

…CBS News.

Next thing you know, some mischief maker in the middle east will decide to start sending weapons to Iraq and Afghanistan to give President Obama a bit of encouragement to draw down even faster… Ooooooops!

Parting “Binge Think” Question: Does President Obama even think any of this stuff is real? Or is it like a virtual game of ’24′ for him?

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think.”
I also was the first to say it…

This isn’t really a surprise is it?

Well, maybe Harvard doing a study that came to some relevantly accurate conclusions is a surprise. But the outcome of the study itself?

And when you think about it, exactly why does it happen?

Very simply put. It’s all about the freedom, money, and reliance…

If what America stands for on “Independence Day” is being independent of other power’s oppression, tyranny, and control of the lives of the individual then July 4th is about the most Republican or Free Market holiday ever to come along.

Democrats on my show this morning took great exception to me implying that Democrats don’t wrap themselves in the flag (or show other forms of patriotism) because they don’t really like the ideals of the original concepts of America’s founders. If the progressives that are led by President Barack Obama are any indication, then what he sees America as is far different than a rebel republic throwing off dependency.

In Obama’s world – it’s more like a great big hug of uber-Government wet kisses. I detail much of this in my new book: “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change.”

In Obama’s world – the best America can be, is apologized for, overseas, for months on end, as he began his term. (Is that patriotic?)

Is it a sign of “love for one’s country” to far more often than not see the worst in her?

July 4th parades – of which I’ve normally missed most of my 40-something years on this planet – are filled with red, white and blue, fire trucks, first responders (which here in the NYC can be very moving).

They also include that one moment, where a flat bed truck will be carrying several men (fewer each year) who are aged, some unable to stand who charged Normandy, survived Guadal Canal, or chased Nazi’s out of France.

When that truck appears all the pomp turns into cheers of respect, long loud seasons of applause, and usually with me nary a dry eye.

Then behind them are the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf War and War on Terror vets that fall in, usually walking behind the vehicle carrying the WWII’ers.

Never has any nation on earth spent more resources to bring freedom to more people than all of the rest of the world’s historic militaries combined.

If kids going to July 4th parades tend to come away from them resonating with more original ideas of the founders, if they walk away with a deeper appreciation of the sacrifice it has required to keep us free, and those ideas, and that appreciation are by extension more championed by Republicans, then the study got it dead on.

I wonder if the fact that this study was produced by Harvard would have any impact on the President’s willingness to lend any credence to it?

Heh… who am I kidding, whoops… almost forgot – time to go pick up my welfare check.

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think”
Peddler of Compassion: “Cares Project 2011″
Author: No He Can’t

This move puts Iran in the aspiring-nuclear-power category of the former USSR and China – not that of Britain, France, India, Pakistan, or North Korea.  Iran is still in the “aspiring” stage, but has already revealed the scope of her ambitions for deterrence.  The radical Islamic regime has no intention of merely deterring a single neighbor, maintaining its independence inside a foundational alliance, or even just brooding dementedly inside its borders.  Revolutionary Iran aims to achieve regional dominance, and sees deterring the West as the first step.

Just to be clear, when Iran offers a missile umbrella to the Muslim nations of the Middle East, she means she can, and under certain circumstances will, launch missiles at the non-Muslim nations she can reach with her arsenal, which right now include Israel, Southeastern Europe, and Russia.  When the joint missile base in Venezuela is completed, Iran will be able to reach the territory of the United States with her missiles.    A secondary meaning is that Iran can threaten with missiles those Muslim nations that collaborate with the West (e.g., by hosting military forces), like Bahrain, Kuwait, and UAE.

The missile umbrella propounded by Larijani is precisely the form of deterrence employed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War.  The Soviet deterrent – to which the Russians still, to this day, refer as their “strategic deterrent” – was used as an umbrella to give cover to the Soviet oppression of Eastern Europe, and to Soviet support of Marxist insurrections further abroad.  It was a very successful deterrent, because it changed the most fundamental calculations of the United States about what was possible.

We took off the table, with NSC-68 in 1950, the possibility of doing anything so effective against Communist incursions abroad that it might incur a Soviet nuclear response.  We constrained ourselves instead to accept losses of territory, half-measures, and unfinished business that we would not have thought necessary in the absence of a Soviet strategic deterrent.  (I wrote more about this in February 2009, precisely apropos of Iran’s prospects for a nuclear deterrent.)

Our strategic deterrent did not deter the Soviets from supporting and fomenting Marxist insurgencies and civil wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  The Soviets’ strategic deterrent did deter us, until the Reagan presidency, from pushing back decisively against those insurgent efforts.  The latter is the lesson learned by Iran’s current leadership.  Iran has revolutionary cadre making trouble abroad already; it’s the deterrent umbrella she has lacked.  The Larijani statement has been made before the Iranian missile umbrella becomes a nuclear one – but that will come soon enough.  We can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

*UPDATE*  Daled Amos steps into the fray with an interesting twist.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Ed had a useful piece Thursday on the latest strikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen, and asked whether that amounts to inaugurating another “new war” for which President Obama failed to seek Congressional authorization.  His conclusion was that it doesn’t, because the strikes on Al Qaeda are a continuation of the global war on terror (GWOT), for which there is ongoing authorization.

I don’t disagree with that conclusion, but I also don’t think it answers the right question.  The better question right now is not whether Obama has the authority to conduct strikes in Yemen, but whether continuing the GWOT on its previous basis, despite changing conditions in the Middle East, is a good application of policy.

Yemen is fast sinking into a civil war.  President Saleh, injured and evacuated for medical treatment, almost certainly won’t be going back.  Al Qaeda in Yemen is no longer merely a rogue element against which the US and a recognized government in Sanaa are making common cause.  It is now one of the factions seeking to influence the outcome of Yemen’s internal struggle.  Some in the mix of factions – namely, the Shia Houthi tribe – have support from Iran; others from Saudi Arabia.

Now, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room for US policy as it pertains to the fate of Yemen.  It would take a tremendous effort to pursue a favorable outcome in Yemen without armed intervention – and armed intervention is unthinkable.

Granting that, however: is continuing the air strikes on Al Qaeda, using the same rhetoric and gloating press releases as in 2009-10 – as if nothing has changed in Yemen – really the right thing to do?  We can insist that we are not involved in the internal melee there, but we’re attacking one of the factions in it.  In this strange situation, we have taken a giant de facto step away from the semi-fiction of “cooperating with the Yemeni government,” because that “government,” whatever is left of it, is in no position to “cooperate” with anyone.

Instead, we are – in effect – entering an all-but-lawless territory at will and opening fire, for no purposes but our own.  We assume no responsibility for Yemen’s internal problem, while nevertheless using force that will affect its outcome on Yemeni territory.  Aside from other considerations, this approach lacks any assumption of moral or political leadership on the part of the United States.  “Who cares what happens to Yemen, as long as we can kill Al Qaeda operatives?” is a not-unreasonable reading of the policy effectively at work here.

The narrow cynicism of that may resonate with some Americans, on both sides of the political spectrum.  But it is the opposite of global leadership.  It tacitly posits the United States as a nation wholly on the defensive, without vision, moral confidence, or compunction, reduced to using the territory of others for a sniper perch.  That is not the United States we have been for the last 70 years – but the “GWOT on autopilot” is making it seem like that’s the nation we are becoming.

I faulted George W. Bush for not sufficiently engaging on the moral and political side of counter-jihadism.  But with the Obama administration, the bottom has simply fallen out in that regard.  However imperfectly, Bush did make an effort to bolster the civic position of average citizens and potential reformers in the Muslim world.  He used stand-off attacks on jihadist cadre far less than Obama does, and “hearts and minds” engagement substantially more.

Obama has reverted to a lowest-common-denominator mode of execution favoring drone strikes.  Perhaps he thinks military force “works” to produce outcomes the way a piston fires, by a morally neutral set of physical rules.  However he sees it, his understanding doesn’t seem to extend to this: that when you wade into someone else’s civil war and start shooting, you are sending a big signal of some kind.  Sound policy acknowledges when a condition of that magnitude has changed, and checks to see if its assumptions and goals should be revised.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Neither US nor Iranian sources have specified how many submarines are actually involved.  My supposition would be that the deployment involves a single Kilo-class submarine (Iran has three constructed by Russia), which is built for transits and patrols at relatively long ranges.  The submarine is in company with a surface task force (recently deployed for antipiracy duty), which includes an Iranian destroyer.

On one previous occasion, in December 2008, regional reporting suggested an Iranian submarine showed up briefly in the Eritrean port of Assab on the Red Sea.  I was skeptical of that report at the time and continue to be so.  In any event, this month’s deployment represents the first time the Iranian government has announced putting a submarine in the Red Sea.

Egypt is unlikely to allow an Iranian submarine to transit the Suez Canal, at least for the time being.  Iranian submarine operations will probably be confined to the Red Sea while the current government is in place in Cairo.  But the Red Sea is far enough to go to send shivers through the region.

Analysts have focused on different purposes for signal-sending from Tehran; Stratfor emphasizes the impending US drawdown in Iraq and says “this is all about Iran calling dibs on the Mesopotamian sphere of influence.”  DEBKAfile – rather weirdly – calls the deployment a “riposte” to the indictment handed down by IAEA of the secrecy and actionable discrepancies in Iran’s nuclear program.  (DEBKA usually goes for more sensational theories.)

In my judgment, both evaluations are missed tips.  I’m sure Iran did have these issues in mind in deciding to go forward with this deployment, but it is always a mistake to go out of your way to discount the obsessive concern of Iran’s current leadership with two things: Israel, and revolutionary Iran’s overseas adventures in terrorism and nation-torturing (e.g., with Hamas in Gaza, and in Lebanon and Syria).

The Iranian submarine (probably) can’t get into the Mediterranean for now.  But it can reconnoiter Israeli naval operations from the base at Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, as well as the operations of the Egyptian and Saudi navies in the Red Sea.

It can lay mines, although we need not assume that that is imminent.  It can hold other shipping at risk with torpedoes.

But it can also attempt covert cargo transfers at sea to anyone who can get a boat into the Red Sea or Gulf of Aden: Hamas, obviously, or Iranian-supported factions in Yemen or Somalia.

Iran surely cares about Mesopotamian dibs and the plans of the Western nations to counter her nuclear program.  But in terms of her priorities and her modus operandi – undermining Israel, extending the reach of her brand of Islamism through covert action, and supporting terrorist insurgencies – a submarine in the Red Sea has direct, tactical application, and at a political juncture never seen before.  No six-month period in history has combined the destabilizing political eruptions of the Arab Spring with the concerted effort of the Palestinian Authority and its supporters to press for a multilateral fait accompli against Israel.  Those factors, in my view, are the ones at the top of the mullahs’ priorities list.

Iran will want to get the region accustomed to a “forward presence” posture from her submarines.  The announcement was undoubtedly geared partly to that consideration.  The submarine may show up shortly in a Red Sea port – perhaps Eritrea’s – in which case the prior announcement would showcase and defuse that event.

An Iranian Kilo is not a ballistic- or cruise-missile equipped submarine; it cannot be in the Red Sea to hold the territory of Israel or Saudi Arabia at risk.  There is some strategic value, in terms of signal sending, to proving that Iran can bring this deployment off.  But analyzing this development solely in that more abstract light is insufficient.

The final consideration is that Iran is probing the US with this move.  No one in the region thinks it’s a good idea for an Iranian submarine to be driving around the local waterways loaded with mines and torpedoes.  A blasé US attitude is the opposite of a leadership posture.  This matters, and to speak as if it doesn’t is to appear clueless.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The import of the predicted 5 June event, according to the Ahmadinejad faction, was supposed to be that Khamenei would become dispensable to the ongoing immanentization of the Mahdist eschaton.  It would no longer be an act of heresy or rebellion against Allah to attack Khamenei and his regime, because the Mahdi was ready to be represented in his earthly emergence by the warlike “Shoeib,” military conqueror of Jerusalem, whom Ahmadinejad conceives himself to be.

What did occur on Sunday, according to IranBriefing, was a speech by Khamenei in which he emphasized the need for unity among political factions in Iran.  The speech, given on the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, is “being interpreted [in Iran] as an implicit show of support for embattled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”:

 In an implicit show of support for Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khamenei insisted that attacks against “forces that are loyal to the foundations of the system and Islam” are a deviation from the path of the founder of the Islamic Republic.

If this interpretation is accurate, Khamenei’s address represents an attempt to prevent the divisions in the regime from provoking a crisis of government.  A key implication of the move, however, is that Khamenei didn’t have the latitude to deal more summarily with Ahmadinejad – or didn’t want to.  But Ahmadinejad’s enemies aren’t going away.  Neither case portends an amicable resolution of the internal strife in Iran.

The stakes are high for national unity. A recent report that Iran already has two nuclear warheads seems garbled or incorrect; it doesn’t fit with previously known details about Iran’s program, although it isn’t in conflict with them either.  But the statement of a RAND Corporation analyst that Iran could have enough high-enriched uranium (HEU) for a warhead test in two months is not unreasonable (h/t The Weekly Standard).

Two months would be a “worst-case” estimate; I would consider 6-9 months more likely, for completing the necessary enrichment.  If the Iranians are already enriching uranium higher than the 19.75% purity they achieve at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz, they haven’t disclosed that to the IAEA.  They may be enriching uranium to 93%+ today, operating in an undisclosed and uninspected facility, but if we assume they haven’t started yet, the likelihood is high that it would take at least 6 months to do a 2-month job.

From the information available to the public, it continues to appear that Iran has not performed a warhead detonation test (which presumably will be done underground).  If Iran is to manufacture and deploy nuclear weapons of her own – as opposed to being given such weapons by others – this step is indispensable.  If Israeli or European agencies (or IAEA) detected it, it would be hard to keep that quiet.  The strongest likelihood is that it hasn’t happened yet.

So when the RAND analyst speaks of a “breakout capability” for Iran, he means the ability to perform a detonation test and then assemble whatever warheads can be made with the HEU on hand.  Early this year, it was estimated that Iran now has enough total enriched uranium to produce 6 warheads, once the low-enriched stock is turned into HEU.

Gregory Jones, the RAND analyst, asserts that the only option we have now to prevent Iran from completing a nuclear weapon is “occupation” by the US.  With that I disagree.  Iran’s revolutionary government is deeply divided.  There are signs that tensions within it are escalating and Ayatollah Khamenei may not be able to control them.  Meanwhile, there are viable reform groups in Iran, led by experienced politicians and commanding very broad support from the Iranian populace.  Inducing the radical revolutionary regime to fall, in favor of the reform movement, would be by far the best outcome.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Strange winds

For the last 40 years, Russia, China, and Japan have each relied on the presence and policy of the US to act as a stabilizing counterweight to the other two.  US policy in the region has not changed in its fundamentals since Nixon signed Okinawa back over to Japan in 1971.

But in late 2010, rumors were accumulating in East Asia that the US, tiring of a dispute with Japan over the placement of a Marine Corps air base in Okinawa, was beginning to look further south along the Asian perimeter for places to base American forces.  The Obama administration’s activities fed those rumors.

The reported intentions of the US about rebasing forces carried implications of a particularly destabilizing nature: first, that the US commitment to Japan might be weakening; and second, that America was looking to base Marine Corps and naval forces closer to the South China Sea and Strait of Malacca.  Hillary Clinton did nothing to dispel alarms about US military intentions in July 2010, when she proclaimed the disposition of the disputed South China Sea archipelagoes to be a US “national interest.”  (The US position had always been couched previously as an interest in freedom of the seas through chokepoint areas rather than the disposition of the islands.)

August 2010 saw a historic joint naval exercise between the US and Vietnam in the South China Sea, punctuated by the equally historic visit of USS George Washington (CVN-73) to Da Nang.  Much to Beijing’s chagrin, George Washington has also been a frequent visitor to the Yellow Sea in the last two years, after she became, in October 2009, the first US carrier to penetrate those waters since the Korean War (see here, here, and here).

The dual perceptions that the US may be losing interest in Japan, but is out to probe China’s most sensitive areas, are a potentially explosive combination.  China is bound to react badly to them, and that cannot fail to alarm Russia.

Russian forces in the Far East

So observers of the Russian military were interested, but not surprised, to learn in May that Russia would be deploying the first squadrons of her new Ka-52 army assault helicopter to the Far Eastern base of Chernigkova – instead of to a base in the Western theater facing Europe.  Other Asian reporting indicates Russia’s newest fighter jet, the Su-35, will also be deployed to the Far East.  Both types of aircraft will be based to the east of China’s extreme northeast border, facing the Sea of Japan; they are not being placed on the border with China in the Asian interior.

Russia is also planning to put the Mistral-class amphibious assault ships being purchased from France in the Far East.  The emerging character of the build-up in the region is one that would enable Russia to project power around China’s eastern flank, rather than confront China head-on in the continental interior.

Continued in Part 3.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

One is related to the nature of the payload.  According to a Venezuelan official this week, the satellite will have a surveillance mission:

Ricardo Menendez said Thursday that the earth-observation satellite, to be built at a cost of $140 million, would be used to monitor troop movements and illegal mining as well as study climate change and the environment.

In other words, it will carry an imaging sensor or sensors, taskable by the Venezuelan authorities.  Although satellite imagery has been available commercially for some time, it makes a significant difference to timeliness (and other aspects of coverage) to be able to downlink the signal directly, without a middleman, and define and task the image parameters yourself.  Depending on the orbital path, Venezuela may have regular “looks” at areas of interest to Hugo Chavez’s buddies abroad.  Presumably, the orbit will be optimized for Central America, which will limit how much it can be optimized for coverage of El Norte.  In any case, it will be optimized for military applications.

The other implication involves rocket technology.  Launching satellites into earth orbit is a significant step in developing the capability to build long-range missiles.  Chavez is already building a joint missile base with Iran in northwestern Venezuela, a project that includes collaborating on the development of a new missile series.  The technological boost from Chinese rocketry will go together with joint missile development like a horse and carriage, accelerating Venezuela’s timeline to medium- and long-range missiles of her own.

Being corrupt, oppressive, and ill-managed has yet to stop rotten dictatorships from developing capabilities like these, especially when China and Iran are there to lend a helping hand.  The US has no plan for defense against missiles from the south, nor a concept for collaborating on missile defense for our friends in Latin America.  But the missiles are coming, as is an enhanced, military-grade intelligence capability for Hugo Chavez.

Photo: China Great Wall Industry Corporation

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Putin, Medvedev, and their diplomats couch their objections as follows:  American missile defense plans “threaten Russia’s strategic deterrent.”  And the proper response – the honest, consistent response – is:  “Of course.  That’s what they’re supposed to do.”  In Reagan’s original vision, effective missile defenses would make it meaningless for anyone – Russia, the US, China, India, Pakistan – to have an arsenal of strategic nuclear missiles.  When George W. Bush withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2001, he explicitly delinked US security policy from the symmetrical, “nuke-versus-nuke” deterrence concept of the Cold War era.  The whole point of layered missile defense is to void that concept.

That doesn’t mean Russia must be fated to be insecure.  It means the US does not agree to be held hostage as the guarantee of Russia’s security.  Nor do we agree to consign our allies to that fate.  The Russians are doing everything in their power to induce us to revert to the old “balance of terror,” however, and in 2011, the Reagan vision for escaping it hangs by a thread.

Obama’s 2009 decision to cancel the ground-based interceptor (GBI) deployment in Poland was not enough to reassure Russia about American missile defense plans (some of us predicted that at the time).  Obama’s concept for deploying tactical assets instead is meeting with the same resistance from Moscow.  The original GBI plan, besides defending Europe, would have given the US a defense against ICBMs launched across Europe from Asia.  The new plan, involving only tactical interceptors, provides no defense for North America; it can only intercept medium-range theater missiles targeted at Europe.  But even that is more than Russia will accept.

The Russians have been perfectly explicit as to their concern.  Even supposing that the purpose of the missile defense plan is to defend Europe against missiles from Iran, Russia is unwilling to have defenses deployed that might conceivably prevent Russia from launching nuclear missiles at Europe.  That’s why the Russians proposed last month that they have a “red button” veto over the use of a joint NATO-Russian missile defense system.  It’s why they are threatening to withdraw from the New START agreement that took effect in February.  It’s why they are threatening a new “MAD arms race.” And it’s why they have conducted two launches of their new-generation Sineva ballistic missile (modified SS-N-23 SKIFF) from the Barents Sea in the last month.

There’s a tendency to dismiss the Russian military as hollow today, and that tendency is dangerous.  The Russian military is hollow – but nations with hollow militaries rely more, not less, on strategic nuclear arms for their concepts of national security.  It doesn’t matter to the performance of a nuclear warhead whether the army that fields it is feeding its soldiers dog food or not.  The force build-up Russia has undertaken since 2007 has been weighted toward the “strategic nuclear triad” of the Cold War, and principally toward two legs of it:  land-launched ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).  (The third leg is strategic bombers.)  While the US has allowed our strategic nuclear forces to stagnate, Russia has been updating hers.

Going back down the path of MAD because Russia wants it and Americans don’t bother to understand that it’s happening is a terrible idea.  Russia isn’t the only nuclear-armed non-ally out there.  China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are all nuclear armed; Iran is moving heaven and earth to become so; and unstable nations like Burma and Venezuela are hanging out with just the rogue elements that can put them on the list as well.  In 2011, we should be putting everything we can behind establishing missile defense, rather than MAD, as the global basis for security.

This doesn’t mean missile defense is perfectly seamless, of course.  One day it may be so, but it isn’t now.  What it can do, right now – today – is ensure that no first strike can possibly cripple the US and our allies so that we can’t mount a debilitating second strike.  That reality is as much a deterrent to the first use of nuclear weapons as the threat of annihilation under MAD.  And Russia could implement a missile defense for her own security – against China or Iran, as well as against NATO – quite as well as we could.  We have repeatedly offered our technology for that project, but the Russians also have missile defense programs of their own.

If we don’t think missile defenses will deter Iran, in particular, then clearly the threat of a massive counterstrike won’t deter Iran either; the two go together.  The argument that a missile defense won’t deter Iran is not an argument for MAD; it’s an argument that Iran is undeterrable under her current leadership.  Regime change is the remedy for that condition – ideally, the regime change the Iranians themselves are more than willing to undertake.  MAD is the last thing we should rely on.

Russia is trying to get the US (and by extension, Canada and NATO Europe) to accept reverting to MAD, largely because it’s more convenient for Russia to remain a great power and retain outsize leverage that way.  We cannot let that consideration drive our national security decisions.  It’s better for America – and ultimately better for Russia – to press forward with the concept of missile defense as the basis for security.  Unlike a proliferation of layered, interlocking, or chaotic MAD regimes across the globe, missile defense offers the possibility of defanging nuclear arsenals altogether.  Giving in to Russia on her missile defense demands would send us back in the other direction – this time with multiple nuclear-armed wolf packs snarling and snapping at our heels.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Die Welt has a new report this month, however, recounting details like the visit of an Iranian engineering team to Venezuela in February, and the prospective site of the missile complex on the Paraguana peninsula off the northwestern coast.  (English write-up based on the 13 May Die Welt article here.)  I use the expression “missile complex” for a reason.  Details in the Die Welt report indicate that what Iran and Venezuela are planning to construct is not just a base for a missile battery; it’s a complex of underground silos for the Shahab-3 medium-range missile.

The report refers to constructing missile silos 20 meters deep, and the need to provide for fueling the missiles underground, and for the release of toxic gases.  These factors in combination mean that the plan is to deploy missiles in underground silos, from which they will be launched.

Counter-missile tactics for Venezuela’s potential targets – e.g., Colombia (or the US) – will therefore not be solely a matter of the “Scud-hunting” process readers may automatically think of:  reconnaissance aircraft and satellites searching for mobile launchers.  (The Shahab-3 is moved on a “TEL” – transporter-erector-launcher – that is more elaborate than a Scud launcher but allows mobility on a similar principle.)  Mobile Shahab-3s could well be provided to Venezuela, but there will apparently be an underground launch complex as well.  It is likely to be hardened and ingeniously designed.

Iran began using underground silos for the Shahab-3 in 2008, with the first silo complex near the city of Tabriz.  That complex is designed quite simply, however.  Reporting in 2009 revealed a more elaborately constructed – and hardened – complex at the Imam Ali base near Khorramabad.  (The video simulation of the launch silos at Imam Ali is worth checking out.)  Presumably the complex in Venezuela will be built based on the design of the one at Khorramabad, with adjustments for local terrain conditions.

When Iran tested an extended-range Shahab-3 in 2009, US and other defense analysts indicated the missile’s range was up to 2000km, an improvement over the 1600km demonstrated by the baseline Shahab-3.  The difference that makes to the missile base in Venezuela is that using the Shahab-3 ER would put Miami in the threat envelope.

The base is to be jointly operated, according to the original reporting from Die Welt last year.  Iran probably won’t hesitate to deploy newer missiles like the longer-range, solid-fueled Sejjil (in testing since 2008) when they become operational.  The 13 May Die Welt article states that the missile-base agreement provides for Iran to be able to attack her enemies from the base – presumably referring to the US.

Meanwhile, Iran and Venezuela will jointly develop a medium-range missile, apparently for Venezuelan production.

Analysts were quick last fall to allude to 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis.  But we don’t want President Obama negotiating as JFK did in 1962.  JFK was maneuvered into giving up NATO’s new-generation missile deterrent in Turkey as the price of getting Soviet missiles out of Cuba, a reality that was owned up to by mainstream historians only in the 1990s.  In the aftermath of the crisis, moreover, the only thing that left Cuba was the land-based missiles.  The Soviets used the island as a military base, maintaining a listening post and a secretive ground-forces brigade, and bringing in strategic bombers and missile-equipped submarines, for the next 30 years.

It will not be a good outcome for Iran to acquire a bargaining chip, with a missile base in Venezuela, and use it to extort the US as the price of “removing the missiles” from it.  That prospect is preventable now, without quarantines, standoffs, and brinkmanship.  It would take some serious regional arm-twisting, but that’s what “smart power” is for.

Once the missiles are in Venezuela, however, the probability is high that we would have no way of verifying compliance with any agreement on their removal – even one disadvantageous to us.  This problem, if not headed off at the pass now, will only get bigger.

Missle complex location

  J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Let me expand on that.

As we all know, he’d been holed up in that fortress cum “mansion” for 6 years with no land line or internet connection – so he was dependent on trusted couriers for news of the organization he’d founded and had little ability to influence the day to day operations of al Qaeda.  Obviously he would have still been a valuable intelligence asset, but not quite as valuable as one might think.   I get the impression that bin Laden’s real value to the jihadist community was that of figurehead – that as long as he lived, his existence continued to demonstrate to his followers how powerless the “great Satan” really was.   Every day he drew breath, he rubbed in the fact that he could take 3,000 lives in a single day and the US couldn’t even take his.

With each video or audio clip he had smuggled out of his lair and posted among jihadi sites, he tweaked the nose of the US and inspired his jihadist followers.  His stature grew with each tweak.  His survival helped him sell the “righteousness” of his cause because he could claim the protection of his god as the reason he was still untouched.

Bin Laden, given his experiences prior to 9/11, honestly believed that the US was too decadent and cowardly to ever take real action against he and his followers.  He’d tried to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993, did bomb Kohbar Towers and two African embassies as well as attacking the USS Cole.  In all case the reaction was pitifully inadequate. He also believed we didn’t have the fortitude or courage to take casualties and stick it out for the long run.  His planning got more ambitious.  He, like many throughout history, badly underestimated his foe.

His first indication of his future fate came with the capture of Saddam Hussein.  Hussein shared bin Laden’s beliefs about the US and found himself to be horribly wrong.  Not only did we destroy his regime, we were relentless in his pursuit, finally capturing him months after the culmination of combat operations in Iraq.  He went to the gallows a thoroughly defeated man.

Bin Laden didn’t expect to have to live as he’s had too these past 6 years.  He believed at some point soon after we invaded Afghanistan we’d tire of the combat deaths and the commitment and leave.  He felt his beliefs about the US would be vindicated.   But not only did we stay in Afghanistan, we invaded Iraq and stayed there as well.  And when it was clear we were going to be successful there, the first realization that he was dead wrong about the US had to dawn on him.  To quote Admiral Yamamato, he had awakened a sleeping giant with his 9/11 attacks, and that giant wasn’t going to roll over this time and go back to sleep.

The Sunday operation that led to his death was the culmination of years upon years of effort to find the man.  It was a relentless pursuit.  It cost us lives.  It took a lot of money.  It took a lot of time.  But when that Navy SEAL pumped two rounds into bin Laden’s head, he not only killed bin Laden, but he killed forever the narrative bin Laden had built up among his followers for years.

No longer could his followers take comfort in the belief that the US was a decadent, cowardly paper tiger.  Iraq and 10 years in Afghanistan had blown that myth away.  No longer could his followers believe that his survival demonstrated the righteousness of their cause.  He was now fish food.

More important was the message his death sent to the entire jihadist community – something his capture couldn’t do – it may take years, lives and money to find you, but we will find you.  And when we find you, we will kill you.

That’s an incredibly powerful and important message to send.  Bin Laden’s death was the very best way to send it.  It will reverberate throughout the jihadist community and the hopeful result is a further lessening of al Qaeda’s influence and a peeling away of the less committed among that community.  It is clear that his death was a greater “value” for the US that was his capture.

Hats off to all those who made it happen.  As someone said, “5.1.11 is the day we got even”.  And the jihadist community will remember it, and hopefully its lesson,  just as we remember 9/11.

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Bruce McQuain blogs at Questions and Observations (QandO), Blackfive, the Washington Examiner and the Green Room.  Follow him on Twitter: @McQandO