The Brits perceive us as having a tiff with Japan.  Asia-based The Diplomat perceives us as having a tiff with Japan.  The Chinese perceive us as having a rift with Japan.  Al Jazeera perceives us as having a tiff with Japan.  The New York Times perceives us as having a tiff with Japan.  The Japanese perceive us as having a tiff with Japan.

Newsweek offers a rare contrasting view pointing out that in some key ways, even if we are, in fact, having a tiff with Japan, our relations are still strong.

But the current situation is troubling, because what it amounts to is the Obama administration being dismissively recalcitrant about something that does, in fact, involve Japanese sovereignty and Japan’s mastery of her own destiny.  The situation is that we want to move a Marine Corps air base to Futenma on Okinawa – from its previous location on Okinawa – and Okinawans don’t want the base at Futenma.  (They want it gone altogether.)  There’s been resistance to it for some time, but a previous Japanese government concluded an agreement with the Bush administration in 2006 to go ahead with the Futenma move.  Since the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, formed his government in September 2009, however, Japan has been rethinking the 2006 agreement.

There were different ways to handle this, but what the Obama administration has done is insist, with what is perceived as summary rudeness, that the 2006 agreement be honored.  Hatoyama signaled in December that his government would not simply agree to that right away, and announced that a final decision would be given no earlier than May.  Hillary Clinton called in the Japanese ambassador and gave him a talking to.  Obama himself declined requests for a personal sidebar with Prime Minister Hatoyama at the Copenhagen summit (although since he also declined such requests from Gordon Brown, Hatoyama might not need to feel super-especially slighted.  “Diss our best allies” seems to be one of the principles of Obamian Smart Power).

Now senior American officials are visiting Japan and being interviewed every other week uttering veiled threats about the consequences, if Japan doesn’t stop with the domestic politics already, and just move forward with the Futenma base.

Have we lost our minds?  For one thing, what happened to all that Obama business about shedding arrogance and being solicitous of the rest of the world?  If we went by his administration’s rhetoric and supposed aspirations, we’d think that if the Okinawans don’t want a Marine air base, Obama would be the first one to listen and take their concerns to heart.  Indeed, if Republican senators under a GOP administration were over in Japan telling the Japanese that Futenma is the place we need to put the base, Obama would probably lead the charge against such “imperialism.”

But there’s a more fundamental issue here, and it makes the Obama administration’s weird inflexibility particularly ill-timed.  The issue’s origin is very simple:  time has passed.  The world has changed in some important ways since 1945.  We haven’t given our alliance with Japan a really fresh, critical look since Nixon handed Okinawa back in 1971, and it’s high time we did.

The UK Guardian article linked above comes, like most such treatments, from the perspective that the only alternative to a divisive tiff between the US and Japan is the restoration (or at least reaffirmation) of the post-1971 status quo in our relationship.  But that status quo is losing support in Japan, and it’s not because the Japanese “don’t like us,” or because they want to reemerge as an imperial power and start talking about Co-Prosperity Spheres again.  It’s because the justification for the features of Japan’s role in the alliance is starting to crumble.

Most Americans aren’t aware that Japan pays the cost of maintaining the military bases we use there.  It costs the Japanese a lot of money to host our forces.  That feature of our relationship might not be called into question if there were no dispute over how many bases there should be, and where they should go – but there is.  If there were still a Soviet Union rattling a big saber short miles across the La Perouse Strait from Hokkaido, such disputes might loom smaller in Japan’s domestic politics.  But there isn’t.  It’s shortsighted to dismiss an emerging sense among Japanese voters that they’d be perfectly safe with fewer bases hosting fewer US forces on their islands, and it’s downright obnoxious to demand that the national government behave as if that sense didn’t exist, or wasn’t a real and serious factor in its internal obligations to its people.

Japan has every right to her own evolving perceptions about her security requirements.  This is a voluntary alliance, not the Warsaw Pact.  We may not like all of those evolving perceptions, and they may present inconvenient decision points for us, but throwing diplomatic tantrums is exactly, and I mean precisely, the wrong way to handle such developments.  The truth is, our relationship with Japan has to evolve.  We can grunt angrily and resist, or we can get out ahead of the problem and do some rethinking ourselves.  That’s what we have State and Defense Departments for:  to think ahead of current conditions to what will position us for future ones.

What we should want is to manage our way to a new, more sustainable relationship with Japan.  The day is going to come when we assume more of the cost of basing forces there, and probably have to keep fewer on the Japanese islands anyway.  This need only happen in alarming, confrontational jolts if we sit around twiddling our thumbs and assuming nothing has to change.  It’s not a bad thing to contemplate our alliance with Japan evolving to a different basis.  It’s a necessity, but it’s also a positive opportunity.

I think we will always want to count Japan as an ally – an official military ally, by treaty agreement – but our alliance in 2010 and beyond doesn’t have to have exactly the same features as our alliance up to now.  Getting on a new footing with Japan isn’t something to be feared, it’s something to be planned, negotiated, and managed.

The signals our moves send to China and Russia (as well as everyone from India to Australia) will also matter tremendously.  It’s not to our advantage at all for the US-Japan alliance to appear grudging, and maintained mainly out of fear of China.  (It’s not to Japan’s either; Japan is and will always be too big for China to intimidate militarily anyway, without China rattling sabers that would bring retribution down on her from elsewhere.)

The US has a permanent interest in an East Asia that is not under the domination of a hostile hegemon, but is as democratized as feasible and open to trade, travel, and cultural exchange.  This interest is common up the scale of national interests, from pure defense (we can’t let the other side of the Pacific become an armed imperium), to trading interests, to our national interest in promoting liberalization and consensual self-government.  This should be our starting point for strategy – not the exact wording of today’s Status of Forces Agreement with Japan.  The latter is something that can change over time without compromising our security or interests.  As Lord Palmerston famously said, it’s the interests that endure.

Update:  An alert reader points out to me, quite correctly, that the Marine air base has been at Futenma, and the 2006 agreement was to move it elsewhere.  Wet noodle to the noggin.  The desires of Okinawans, however, are to remove the air base entirely.   Thanks to L. Douglas Garrett at http://competinghypotheses.blogspot.com/.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Readers, you may consider yourselves fortunate that that’s the only line of Hamlet’s I intend to invoke here.  It is apposite, however, because events have begun proving my predictions from last year about what it would mean to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the US military.

Repealing DADT isn’t about gays serving.  They already serve.  Repealing DADT is about gays telling.  It’s about achieving endorsement of homosexuality, and gay activist agenda items, through both military regulation and military culture.

I made the point here, and will make it again, that it is not possible for the military to merely “tolerate” openly-avowed homosexuality, in the way civilians think of tolerating it.  What the military does now, with DADT, is tolerate homosexuality.  It officially doesn’t ask, and doesn’t even want to know, unless one servicemember’s activities create a discipline or readiness problem.  (As many people correctly point out, there are a whole lot of ways of creating discipline problems, and junior enlisted personnel ingeniously push the envelope on all of them.  It certainly isn’t just gays who sometimes create discipline and readiness problems.)

What the military does under DADT is more analogous than not to what you do – you civilians, in your civilian lives – to tolerate homosexuality.  DADT was designed and intended to prevent people’s sexual orientation from becoming an issue on which there had to be confrontation, for either individuals or the institution.  It was intended to keep the military out of the business that repeal will inevitably get it into:  the business of taking sides on the issue of homosexuality.

The military operates wholly on affirmative policy.  That means that it either approves things or bans them; there is no neutral state, if the thing at issue is officially acknowledged.  The military is, moreover, a “lifestyle” organization, meaning – as servicemembers themselves say – it owns you 24/7.  It can’t tell you what to think, but it tells you what to act like you think – and it metes out punishment (in performance evaluations and advancement as well as military justice) to those who don’t act like they think the institutionally required things.

The military also welcomes your spouse and children and offers them a host of support services.  And as veterans of the “military family” know, that comes with a whole regulatory and cultural environment of its own.  One four-year hitch may not be enough to familiarize a young spouse with this truth, but any military wife, husband, or child of a career servicemember would validate it.  From housing to recreation to exchange retail services to the post chapel, if the military acknowledges homosexuality at all, it will have to have affirmative policy regarding endorsements and recognition, and/or regulation, of people’s behavior.

Are you aware that the military has explicit regulations covering cosmetic tattooing?  It doesn’t prohibit cosmetic tattooing (e.g., having your eyelids permanently darkened) for female service personnel.  So it regulates the practice – just as it regulates hair length and style for all servicemembers, the jewelry with which they can adorn themselves – both while in uniform and, in some cases, while out of uniform – and how they keep their fingernails.  It also regulates, of course, their weight and body fat content.

The military offers religious ministries for recognized religions.  But if your religion isn’t a major, recognized religion, the military doesn’t offer you services.  It has an affirmative policy on that.  In fact, its policy has been under challenge from Wiccans, some of whom claim status as a religion and have demanded recognition by the military.

The military has an affirmative policy on what it will sell in the exchange retail system, including men’s magazines and where they will be displayed.  It has affirmative policies at every major base regarding personal behavior, including “public displays of affection,” or PDA, at the recreational facilities (ballfields, swimming pools, hobby shops).  It has policies on where males and females can gather together and where they can’t.

And in its personnel evaluation systems, it assesses servicemembers explicitly on their energy in, and aptitude for, upholding the services’ policies against social bias.  Today, the military requires no affirmation from servicemembers, for their tolerance of homosexuality to be tacitly assumed.  If DADT is repealed, and homosexuality openly acknowledged in official military policy, the basis will then exist for gay servicemembers to complain if others do not affirm them, in whatever ways the military – and Congress, and the courts – arrange.

This is how it will play out, and we are seeing the first signs of it already.  Allahpundit wrote week before last about the “disinvitation” of Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, from a devotional speaking engagement at a prayer luncheon on Andrews Air Force Base, reportedly due to Perkins’ “recent public comments” about repealing DADT.  As AP said, it’s hard to find any “recent public comments” from Perkins that would seem to warrant a disinvitation from a devotional event for political reasons.

But that’s how things work in the military.  And the truth is, you want them to work that way.  It’s not the military’s job to host speakers from both sides of every issue it might become embroiled in.  That’s time-consuming, eats away at leadership’s working hours, it’s inherently political anyway, and it’s just not what the military is there for.  Congress, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for American Progress, the New York Times, Glenn Beck’s show, Hot Air, HuffPo – all that messy political stuff is what they exist for.

So the military tries to head off at the pass any prospect of becoming embroiled in inherently political disputes.  It knows full well that gay advocacy groups will make it a political issue if someone who is known to oppose repeal of DADT is a specially-invited speaker at a military-hosted prayer luncheon.  So rather than let the whole thing become a political mess, the military takes preemptive action.

This is what the military is going to do at every decision point.  Get used to it.  If DADT is repealed, your military will be endorsing things you would vote against.  It will be endorsing things you would keep your kids away from when they’re done in public.  And it will become the battleground for gay advocacy groups wanting to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which provides that the federal government recognizes only traditional marriage, and that traditional-marriage states need not recognize gay marriages concluded elsewhere.

The challenge to DOMA is already being mounted as part of the military study on repeal of DADT.  It had to be.  This had to happen, and it was easy to foresee long ago, which is why I predicted it last year.  Gay partners will of course demand the same family services and acknowledgment of relationships that traditional families get in the military.  And of course, the Defense Department will be governed in this matter by DOMA.  Changing what DOD does will mean gutting DOMA or getting it overturned.  However the issue is handled, it will become a precedent for every other federal agency and all the states, and is likely to generate a flood of new lawsuits.

Keep in mind, none of this will be about military readiness or the ability of anyone to do his job.  Those have been the issues at the heart of the political confrontation over women in the military.  Women are smaller than men and not as physically strong; there is justification for being concerned about their ability to do some jobs.  Women also get pregnant and present a specific discipline and readiness concern that doesn’t arise without their presence in forward-operating units.

The big difference between “women in the military” as an issue and “open gay service” as an issue is that the former is about readiness.  The latter is just about official recognition of sexual orientation.  There is no question gay men and women can do any military job that other men and women can.  The central question with proposing to repeal DADT isn’t readiness at all, it’s politics.  It boils down to whether the military will be required to recognize and endorse homosexuality.  DADT allows the military to be neutral, and servicemembers to avoid declaring their sentiments one way or the other.  If it is repealed, neither will remain possible.

And one final note is that that’s not because of what the military is.  It’s because of what America is.  If the US military could acknowledge homosexuality and yet also allow others in the ranks to believe it’s wrong and refrain from endorsing it, or even just allow them despise it, shy away from it, or crack jokes about it, as young men in particular often do, there would be no problem.  That’s how some other militaries come to terms with open homosexuality:  they let straights who don’t want to endorse it go their own way.  This means – yes – gays sometimes get their feelings hurt.  It may even mean they are discriminated against unofficially, by seniors who base judgments about them (e.g., regarding promotion) in part on their sexual orientation and lifestyle.  The seniors may even be right – as they are likely to be, much of the time – and they aren’t then second-guessed as an institutional operating principle, or assumed to be wrong or to have unlawfully discriminatory “thoughts” in their heads.  (None of this means gays have no recourse against being assaulted, of course; they have that because they are human beings, not because they’re gay.)

But we don’t do it that way in the USA.  The reason repealing DADT must mean the military will put its institutional imprimatur on homosexuality, and require everyone in uniform to demonstrate fealty to the military’s affirmative endorsement of it, is that in the USA, we coerce institutional closed-mindedness by not only punishing thought and speech with litigation, but actively seeking thought and speech to punish.

You may have the courage, personally, to defy a Senate investigation and a bank of activist lawyers – but you wouldn’t if you had the military in your charge, and your main job was being ready to fight and win America’s wars.  If you were in that position, you’d roll over; you’d do whatever it takes to fend off the political circus-freak show and concentrate on readiness, operations, and the job you signed up for.  If your conscience wouldn’t let you make the affirmations America’s political culture now extorts at gun-point, you’d serve out your time and separate from the service.

It’s not the military’s job to fight back against America’s political leaders.  That’s your job.  I recommend undertaking it armed with knowledge.  Pay attention to what the gay advocacy groups are demanding, and watch the military react.  Understand what the advocacy groups want to do, and remember how defenseless the military has been in the past, against political correctness enforced by ending the careers of long-serving officers.  The fear of punishment for breaching political correctness is what gave us the fiery death of Navy Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen – the aviator who should never have been allowed to continue in the carrier pipeline – and the jihadist massacre by the Army’s Fort Hood shooter, whose personnel jacket glowed neon-red well before his attack last fall.

Political correctness is inherent in military culture.  What the American people decide is what its precepts are.  Please think well before you decide on this one.  This isn’t about gays serving; they already do, and for the most part with honor.  This is about gays telling – with everything that may imply.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

But as Emanuele Ottolenghi notes at Commentary’s “contentions” today, American think-tank experts who follow Iran’s nuclear program closely still considered the LEU move hard to explain.  They’ve started talking about the possibility that Iran is building a secret, covert processing network outside of IAEA supervision.

Since that’s what I’ve been thinking for a couple of months now (and wrote about here and here) – some thoughts.

There are indicators that the known stockpile at Natanz, the LEU accounted for by IAEA inspectors, isn’t all the uranium Iran has in a processing pipeline.  In other words, there could be other uranium being converted and enriched outside of the declared facilities visited by IAEA at Natanz and Esfahan.  If that conclusion is accurate, then putting the known LEU stockpile at Natanz in an above-ground facility doesn’t actually mean making all of Iran’s LEU vulnerable to an air strike.  But we would think it did, at least in terms of official estimates.

Before proceeding further, it’s important to establish that there’s a valid reason for putting any LEU in the above-ground facility in question:  that’s where Iran can enrich it to a higher level.  There’s a technical and logistic reason for moving LEU into the facility, the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, or PFEP, at Natanz.  The Iranians didn’t just do it for kicks.  When they announced their intention to enrich uranium to 20%, that meant they would, for now at least, be processing LEU in the PFEP.

The unexpected action was moving all of their known LEU to the PFEP at once.  This means the Iranians seem to have made their whole LEU stockpile vulnerable unnecessarily.  The whole stockpile is also more than they need for the stated purpose of medical application.  Those factors are why the action raised eyebrows.

But there’s context for this development, and the most important aspect of that context is that it involves Iranian actions that are not under IAEA supervision.  See my links above for the extended case; I will reiterate it only briefly here.  It’s this:  Iran has for several years had the opportunity and means to mine and process its own uranium outside of IAEA supervision.  A documented drop in uranium conversion and enrichment at the supervised sites, in late 2008 and early 2009, may well have represented the point at which Iran transferred her emphasis from processing uranium at the supervised sites to processing it in undeclared, unsupervised facilities.  I called this the “Uranium jerk.”

If you can struggle through the techno-jargon and graphs at my earlier blog piece, I think you may find it convincing.  One of the key indicators is a dramatic increase in uranium mining and refining at a site in southern Iran, between late 2007 and late 2008.  The timing of this development would make it an unbelievable coincidence with the “Uranium jerk” – the drop in follow-on processing output – if the two developments were unrelated.

Iran has plenty of underground space now in which to convert and enrich uranium outside of the declared facilities.  The underground space we know about remains entirely uninspected since 2004, except for last fall’s visit to the suspect Fordo site near Qom.  (For documentation of all these assertions, see the link to my earlier piece.)  That leaves underground sites at Natanz and Esfahan, and two suspect sites outside Tehran, just to name the best-known and most likely.

It can’t be stressed enough that the IAEA has no charter to inspect and account for Iran’s indigenous mining activities, because Iran is not allowing IAEA to act on the provisions of what’s known as the “Additional Protocol” to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  So we have had no accountability on what happens to the uranium mined in Iran.  We know from satellite imagery that there was a huge increase in 2008 – two years ago – in mining and milling at the mine site in southern Iran.  But we can’t account for what has happened to all the uranium mined from that site, either before or after 2008.

Therefore, we simply don’t know if the LEU stockpile that was moved above-ground at Natanz represents all of Iran’s LEU.  But the Iranians’ willingness to accept risk for it may well be a fresh indicator that it doesn’t.  If there is conversion and enrichment going on elsewhere, outside of IAEA supervision, the movement of LEU to a vulnerable above-ground processing plant appears in a different light.

Ostentatiously placing all of the LEU, at once, in an unnecessarily vulnerable position, could look like setting up a decoy.  On the other hand – my assessment – it could just be that if the Iranians feel a separate LEU stash to be safe, they’ll accept the risk posed to the known LEU by moving it all at once.  They claim now to have extracted the amount they needed for higher-level enrichment, which is why they’re moving the rest back below ground.  Moving the LEU that way could very well have simply been the most technically efficient method for their capabilities.

There’s a growing list of developments that make the most sense if Iran has a separate, unsupervised uranium processing capacity going, and perhaps already a stockpile of undeclared LEU.  Again, the most important thing to know about any of this is that the official IAEA inspection process is not going to reveal the truth about that for us:  prove or disprove it one way or another.  There is no guaranteed way to “catch” Iran doing undeclared uranium processing with the inspection regime that’s in place.  To reveal what Iran doesn’t want us to know, we’d have to enforce a change of methodology – over Iran’s objections.  That’s where we stand.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Why is now the time to worry? There are two primary reasons. One is that the arrests of the last 48 hours involve military officers of unprecedented seniority. Going after them constitutes a direct challenge to the military and its self-appointed role as guardian of the secular state. In pro-wrestling parlance, this is a “smack down.”

The earlier stages of the Ergenekon inquest could, in fact, be seen as the closing of a vise around the senior ranks of the military. In conjunction with AKP’s other activities to undermine the constitutional bulwarks of Turkish secularism (see the Middle East Forum link above), the Ergenekon drama has dismantled or intimidated much of the infrastructure the generals would rely on for their defense.

The Turkish military may respond in kind, but in 2010 it is not in the position to remove AKP from power with the issuing of an order, as it did with AKP’s Islamist predecessor in 1997. The military’s leadership accepted an effective procedural subordination to civilian politicians in the last decade – in theory a positive move. The military still has armed power, of course, but it would have to wield that power overtly in a pitched confrontation to unseat the Erdogan government. The military hasn’t done that since 1960, and in the absence of a Soviet-level threat would find it hard to justify to Turkey’s NATO allies (as well as putting the kibosh, with such a move, on Turkey’s EU hopes).

If the coming days demonstrate that AKP has achieved political ascendancy – if, that is, the military doesn’t react – the second reason for worry will come to the fore.

AKP’s trademark posture is, of course, that Islamism should be a legitimate element of politics in Turkey, a direct contradiction of modern Turkey’s founding principle of secularism. But that isn’t the only problem. A subtler but equally significant concern is that the country’s secular establishment has been the guarantor of stability, both in internal security and foreign policy. Its independence and effectiveness are the basis for Turkey’s modernization and cultivation of a middle class; for the respect with which NATO, Russia, and Iran all approach Turkey; and for Turkey’s relative freedom today from foreign-sponsored internal agitation. Erdogan can’t break the secular establishment without breaking Turkey.

A broken Turkey, one ruled by a single-party government with no effective checks on it by the courts, military, or press, would be more susceptible to internal strife rather than less. The AKP has tried to establish primacy over transnational Islamists (such as the shadowy Hizb ut-Tahrir that has deep roots in Central Asia and the Caucasus) by indicting their representatives in Turkey as part of the Ergenekon campaign. But that only works in a relatively peaceful, orderly civic situation; i.e., one in which Turkey is well-defended, her responses to Kurdish and Islamist separatists are military and have the moral support of the people, and the populace at large has a reasonable level of trust in the police and local officials. This is exactly the situation Erdogan is systematically undoing.

Turkey has been playing East and West off against each other for centuries – as we would do if we were Turkey.  Geography dictates much.  But her Ottoman history ought to remind Turks that a weak military and internal dissension make foreign political alignments indispensable: otherwise Turkey turns into prey.  Turkey will need NATO, Iran, or Russia, more than vice versa, if she turns inward, if she makes her military a politically-connected rather than professional organization, and if she vaunts religious and ethnic vindication over the leveling – unifying – secularism instituted by Kemal Ataturk.  Erdogan couldn’t take any set of steps more guaranteed than those to attract the destabilizing attentions of transnational Islamists, and ultimately of subversion by proxy.

This has to worry not just Turks but the whole region.  A vulnerable Turkey is a big swath of strategic territory begging to be exploited by someone.

There’s a possibility of correcting Turkey’s course at the ballot box in the 2011 parliamentary elections. AKP’s national support dropped from 47% in the 2007 election to 39% in 2009. It’s shaping up to be a pitched political confrontation, however, and the question grows more serious with each new Ergenekon arrest whether the 2011 election will be conducted honestly. What is needed is the prospect of a unified rival bloc with popular support, something AKP’s main opposition – the elderly Republican People’s Party, or CHP – is unlikely to come up with, at least in its current incarnation.

The most stabilizing prospect would involve a resurgence of “Kemalism” among younger citizens, and tacit support for a unified opposition political slate from the military. But as this late-2009 essay from a Turkish writer indicates, the reach of surveillance against private citizens in AKP-run Turkey has become pretty intrusive. It’s no longer a given that the opposition parties will have the latitude to plan and act independently.

Maybe the military will risk international condemnation, and the very real possibility of bloodshed across Turkey, to force out the Erdogan government. But this time, I doubt it. Erdogan is busy as I type selling his proposed revisions to the Turks’ Kemalist (secularist) constitution as measures to satisfy the EU. Indeed, detention of some of the top military officers could even be a means of keeping them locked up while he presses his party’s agenda to break the constitution’s constraints on religious party activism.

As with all things Turkish, the development of this drama will no doubt look to us like the grounds at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee:  sludgy, impenetrable, swirling with a slowness bordering on the unbearable.  But the signs are there that this is it: Turkey’s biggest constitutional crisis in a half century is underway. The outcome will matter, and sooner than we think.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

The timing and acceleration of this roll-up may be related to that dynamic, which we’ll get to in a minute.  But its coincidence with an emerging push in other areas, to get internecine business done in the world of Islamist extremism, makes me wonder if there is something else in play.  A lot of things are happening at the same time:  the resurgence of the Iran-backed Madhi Army in Iraq, and Iranian interference with Iraqi candidate vetting; the murder of Hamas bigwig al-Mabhouh in Dubai, with the cartoonishly obvious “Mossad” sign hung on it by the perpetrators (have any hit men ever left such a trail of pointed clues?) ; the Russian crackdown on Islamist insurgents in Chechnya, which last week saw the demise of the founder of Al Qaeda in the Caucasus.  Now the Pakistanis, necessarily with the approval of the Taliban’s patrons inside the official government structure, are culling the ranks of Taliban leadership.

Some of the conditions for this may have been created by the basically quiescent posture of the Obama administration.  A number of the factions may perceive that now is the time to make moves, eliminate their rivals, and gain ascendancy.  After all, we’re drawing down in Iraq, our influence with both the Palestinians and Israelis is at a low ebb, our significance is waning rapidly in the Caucasus, and we’ve invited everyone in Asia in to join in negotiating a peace in Afghanistan.  But that quiescence is a condition: the sudden scramble manifesting itself across the Middle East and Southwest Asia suggests precipitating factors.

One such factor may be Iran closing in on a working bomb.  The closer we get to that day, the harder they’ll all scramble.  The events of the last few weeks could be a foretaste of the energy to come.  The other might well be something the Pakistanis would probably know before anyone else did:  Osama bin Laden could finally be dead, and for good this time.  The internecine roll-ups and high-level hit jobs are the kind of gangland phenomena associated with the loss of an iconic syndicate leader.

But some level of scramble is inevitable in any case, because of that significant third party that shares Pakistan’s concern about an independently negotiating Taliban.  The party, of course, is Russia.  Russia has a tremendous interest in averting the Taliban’s establishment of a separate power base for negotiating reconciliation – particularly one that would have the de facto imprimatur of the UN, the US, and NATO.  Theory aside, there are two threads in Russia’s post-Cold War history to remind her of what a bad idea – from her perspective – this would be.

One is, of course, Moscow’s problem with Islamist rebels in Chechnya (and with Central Asian Islamists in general).  There are differing views as to how closely integrated the Taliban and the Chechen insurgents have truly been, from an operational standpoint, but no question about the avowed commonality of their objectives.  The Taliban government of Afghanistan became, in January 2000, the only one to ever recognize the independent nation declared by Chechen separatists.  The Taliban’s control of Afghanistan did not result so much in Taliban fighters themselves operating in Chechnya, as in facilitation of Al Qaeda support to the Chechen rebels.  Both the Chechen Islamists and the Taliban have close ties to Al Qaeda.

Chechen fighters have been among those detained in anti-Taliban campaigns, as recently as late 2009 in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Chechnya’s shadow “Islamic caliphate” leadership also celebrates Taliban “victories” in AfPak.  A regional expert at the University of Indiana, South Bend, put it this way in 2007:

Russian and Central Asian leaders continue to be concerned with the spread of Islamic extremism in Central Asia and the Caucasus… they clearly see a connection between these Islamists and those in Afghanistan. Indeed, Chechen Internet sites almost regularly publish glowing accounts of the Taliban and their successful fight against American and NATO forces. Uzbek extremists are also actively engaged in fighting in Afghanistan. The collapse of the Karzai government and the “Talibanization” of Afghanistan would be not just a huge blow for U.S. global prestige but an even more severe blow for the Central Asian states and Russia.

The other thread is Moscow’s long and bitter dissatisfaction with the US handling of Serbia, Balkan Muslims, and the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.  A US push to privilege the Taliban – essentially to make some of them protected partners in negotiation, and give them insider status – would look to the Russians too much like the Balkans dynamic, in which they have always perceived that the US and NATO have privileged the Muslims and taken sides against the Slavic Serbs.  Centuries of invasion and counter-invasion lie behind these perceptions; Russia has experienced Islam as an imperial threat in a way the most Western of powers – the US, the EU-3 – have not.  In Moscow’s eyes, the long series of events in former Yugoslavia, including Western recognition of an independent Kosovo in 2008, is a US-run process that has utterly ignored Russian claims and concerns.

Obama’s appointment of Richard Holbrooke, the Russians’ nemesis in the Balkans during the Clinton years, as his AfPak Czar, cannot have been reassuring.  Recent headlines like this one look, to Russian eyes, like déjà-vu all over again.  With Barack Obama making it clear that he prefers negotiated solutions and accommodation with the Taliban, his administration has at one stroke defined a threat for Russia, and removed any incentive for Russia to remain on the sidelines.  When we were out to destroy the Taliban, Russia could cheer quietly from off the field.  Now that Obama is emphasizing the mainstreaming and political domestication of the Taliban, Russia (a) must do something, and (b) knows the field is clear, because Obama won’t.

Asian commentators have remarked a rapprochement between Pakistan and Russia in the last year.  A fresh avowal of commitment to bilateral ties at the June 2009 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) may have sounded like diplomatic boilerplate – but it was followed with noteworthy rapidity (that is, the very next week) by the unusual visit of Pakistan’s top military chief to Moscow.  As this Indian analyst pointed out, the visit could not be predicated on longstanding military ties, since there haven’t been any.  Pakistan’s arms purchases and military-to-military exchanges have involved the US and China.

With a thousand new bilateral relationships blooming around the planet in the last year or so – every week sees new best buddies proclaiming cooperation and everlasting friendship – it would be easy to downplay the significance of this one.  (In no event would we have expected collusion between Moscow and Islamabad to be trumpeted in detail; the absence of public disclosures in this regard means nothing.)

But Russia is the other Asian nation with much the same interest as Pakistan in denying the Afghan Taliban a dangerous independence – and an independent posture oriented on a nexus with the US and Western powers, to boot. Russia also has a particular interest in the future of Al Qaeda, and in which Islamic factions control other nations in the region.  Russia being on the move – covertly, and through proxies – would help explain Iran’s energized push in Iraq, which I assess is intended to enlarge the mullahs’ power base and secure the western border.  One effect of that would be improving Tehran’s bargaining position with Moscow.

But why Russia is on the move just now, along with Pakistan and very likely the Saudi backers of the various Al Qaeda organizations (who may have been involved in the hit in Dubai) – the explanations here may all lie in the same set of causes.  If your head hurts, remember:  shadowy, Byzantine moves are the way these Asian actors traditionally work.  There’s a broad-scale maneuvering for position underway.  Significant players perceive that conditions have changed.  This is what the world looks and acts like when the US is just one of the guys.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Now the news is out that another Taliban commander has been captured in Pakistan.  This time it’s one Mullah Abdul Salam, reportedly the “shadow governor” of Kunduz Province.

Have the Pakistanis done an about-face?  Does the ISI now really want to roll up the Taliban?  Is there anything that would lead us to believe that, other than the blank fact of two recent takedowns?

The best answers are:  Unlikely; Probably not; and No.  But there is information readily available that sheds light on what’s going on.  And what it points to is the conclusion that Pakistan’s de facto leadership is determined to wield the primary influence over how any accord is negotiated between Afghanistan’s central government and the Taliban.

This priority has arisen just now because of the strong – some sources would say overriding – interest shown by the Obama administration in what’s being called “reintegration”:  negotiating with “moderate” Taliban to get them to lay down their arms and reintegrate with Afghan society and politics on a consensual basis.  That policy vector, combined with Obama’s 18-month window to begin a drawdown of US forces, means Islamabad has a limited time horizon for making key moves.

The recent captures probably represent one such key move.  Baradar, the second-in-command, is reported to have brokered a Taliban meeting in Dubai in January, with the UN’s top representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide.  To jog your memory, Dubai is one of the United Arab Emirates over in the Persian Gulf (the insolvent one with the man-made island chain and the famous al-Burj Hotel).  And while there is contrary word about this – Baradar reported as denying it, some sources saying he was detained because he refused to meet with Eide – the meeting would be in character.  Baradar is considered more conciliating and diplomatic than his chief, Mullah Omar, and was the leader of last year’s Taliban delegation to Kabul for talks with Hamid Karzai’s older brother, Qayyum.

The disquieting aspect of Baradar’s diplomacy for the Pakistanis can be found in this passage from a piece by Nouvel Observateur reporter Sara Daniel in December 2009, based on interviews in Afghanistan (emphasis added):

…i[t] seems that the political leadership of the Taliban, tossing around between Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi, would like to put an end to its wanderings in Pakistan. That’s the sense of the messages from the Quetta choura [shura] and its representatives, Baradar and Mohamed Mansour, former chief education officer. The rebels would like to install themselves somewhere, then form a government-in-exile to elaborate the conditions for a negotiation with the Karzai government. Why not in Saudi Arabia where Mullah Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, has already tried to organize a meeting between the enemy sides? Then from Riyadh, the Taliban leadership could negotiate its own neutrality in exchange for a right to return, amnesty and participation in political life after the withdrawal of foreign troops.

Pakistan’s own extremist mullahs wouldn’t like the sound of that.  Now, they may not exert all the control over regional Islamists attributed to them by one of Daniel’s main sources, Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, a member of the Afghan Senate.  Rahmani is a one-time Taliban leader who joined the new government after the Coalition victory, and Daniel reports his analysis as follows:

According to him, the key to potential negotiations is in the hands of the Pakistani mullahs, themselves under ISI – the Pakistani secret services’ – control.  As are Mullah Fazel Rahman and Sami ul-Haq, who lead the coalition of Pakistani fundamentalist religious parties. “Before the Taliban, it is they who must be convinced to make peace, because today they control al-Qaeda and bin Laden and hold the future of the region in their hands …”

This last is an overstatement.  But:  to the extent the Pakistani mullahs want to hold the future of the region in their hands, they can’t like the prospect of the Afghan Taliban building a separate power base elsewhere, and negotiating a separate modus vivendi with the Karzai and NATO governments.  The Pakistani tribal mullahs have never been fans of corrupt Saudi money anyway, and the Afghan Taliban would only channel that competing influence into the Pakistanis’ back yard by leveraging Saudi assistance to gain a negotiating position.

McClatchy reporter Saeed Shah finds confirmation from Pakistani analysts that the main hope of negotiations for Taliban “reintegration” lay with Baradar, at least before his capture:

Analysts said Baradar was the most likely point of contact for any future talks.

“This is inexplicable. Pakistan has destroyed its own credentials as a mediator between Taliban and Americans.  And the trust that might have existed between Taliban and Pakistan is shattered completely,” said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani ambassador to Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban.

He added: “Mullah Baradar was talking peace. … For the time being, there are no prospects for talks. I think it’s now going to be a fight to the bitter end.”

With his arrest, reaching Taliban officials for contacts is likely to become more difficult. Karzai and Baradar come from the same Popolzai tribe.

“If they want to talk to the Taliban, he (Baradar) was the known person, the known address. But what Pakistan’s done is disappear the address for the Taliban. No Taliban will show themselves now. For a long time, they’ll disappear again,” Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and a former prisoner at Guantanamo, told McClatchy.

I don’t buy the prediction that this has to be a fight to the bitter end, with Baradar out of the picture.  But I think this has happened:  the threat of an independent negotiating initiative by the Afghan Taliban has been removed.  The Pakistani mullahs have averted, for now, a separate process they didn’t have control over.  The Shah article even suggests they may try to make Baradar their own asset, and exert control of any negotiation process through him, after a suitable interim.

As Afghan senator Rahmani implied to Sara Daniel, the government in Islamabad has a mutual interest, with its Islamist party leaders and tribal mullahs, in averting an independent negotiation process that would leave Pakistanis without a central role.  For the government itself, this is in large part because of the long-disputed border between the two countries, in theory demarcated by the Durand Line.  Pakistan will not easily tolerate the Afghan Taliban, with their strong tribal and ethnic ties to elements within Pakistan, negotiating national reconciliation with outsiders, and abetted by outsiders.  That’s how Islamabad ended up with the disputed Durand Line in the first place.

The Great Game continues.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

You decide.

Most Americans are unaware of the arcane fact that Iran’s uranium enrichment operations were focused, until sometime in 2008, on a stash of yellowcake obtained from South Africa in the 1970s, when the Shah was still in power.  Even fewer are aware that the UN’s accountability on the amount of low-enriched uranium (LEU) Iran has on-hand depends on knowing how much raw material there was to start with.  When the IAEA certifies that it has detected no diversion of enriched uranium away from Iran’s supervised facilities, it can only do that in the context of what it knew about to begin with.

Still fewer Americans know that in 2008, Iran rapidly accelerated her use of indigenously mined uranium, to the point that by December of that year, everything being enriched in the centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment plant south of Tehran was reportedly mined in Iran.  And equally few Americans know that IAEA doesn’t inspect Iran’s uranium mines or the refining and milling facilities.  Due to a set of factors relating to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty’s “Additional Protocol,” IAEA inspects only Iranian activities closer in the pipeline to actual weaponization.

There are probably rocket scientists among Hot Air’s distinguished readership, but it doesn’t take one to immediately recognize what’s wrong with this picture.  If IAEA doesn’t know how much uranium Iran has mined and produced yellowcake from, its only reliable accountability is on whatever amounts it sees Iran process, at the production facilities at Esfahan (where uranium is converted to uranium hexafluoride, or UF6) and at Natanz, where it is enriched.  If Iran can arrange to convert and enrich her own yellowcake elsewhere, IAEA will have no way to detect the “diversion” through tabular accounting alone.  The diversion will start before the material even gets to its first stop at Esfahan.

The possibility of Iran developing a covert uranium processing network has always been understood.  Intelligence efforts to unearth such an enterprise would focus on intention and capability:  that is, does Iran have a demonstrated penchant for being secretive and deceptive about her nuclear program?  And do we see evidence of the capabilities she would require to set up a covert network, such as unaccountable sources of uranium, and facilities that might contain the requisite processing equipment, but remain uninspected?

The answer to both questions is, of course, yes.  Iran has repeatedly been secretive and deceptive about her nuclear program, the revelation of the Fordo/Qom site in September being only the latest example.  As for capability, Iran can now mine and refine her own uranium, a process not subject to inspection for accountability’s sake.  And there remains a list of suspect sites where processing might occur, most of them uninspected and none visited at all since before 2006.  Two of those sites are the massive underground complexes near Esfahan and Natanz, which we know about by remote-sensor detection of tunneling and excavation.  The Esfahan tunnels were last visited by IAEA in late 2004, when the excavation effort there was only a few months old.  Natanz’s tunnel complex has never been visited.

Now, however, we have a new data point that ought to trigger questions about what Iran is doing with uranium, from when it’s mined to its storage as LEU.  The reason I am annoying you with all these technical factoids is that, in spite of their existence and compelling import, some civilian think-tank analysts – and the Washington Post – have decided to interpret this new data point in a way that suggests we have the breathing room to not do anything about Iran’s nuclear program just yet.

I’m referring to the study of Iran’s LEU output by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), reported by WaPo and cited by Ed Morrissey on Friday.  Briefly, the study observes that Iran’s LEU output from Natanz declined dramatically in late 2008 and early 2009, and then ramped up again, but has not resumed the high-water mark of output seen in August 2008.  (My lengthier analysis of all this, which includes documentation links for all the assertions in this post, is here.)  Thousands of centrifuges installed at Natanz are idle – but the ones in operation are producing LEU more efficiently than before.

WaPo reports this under the headline “Technical setbacks cause Iran to falter in push to enrich uranium.”  But reading the ISIS study itself, you realize that it’s on circumstantial analysis, not documented, empirical observation, that the analysts base their decision to favor “technical difficulties” as an explanation for the drop in LEU output.

That matters as we consider the key point that a precipitous drop in LEU output, followed by a resumption of output at a sustained lower level, is the kind of disjunctive “jerk” we would look for to figure out if uranium diversion is going on.  It ought to be of grave concern to us in light of everything else we know.  It’s a circumstantial concern, yes.  But the explanation favored by the ISIS analysts is equally circumstantial.  And even though ISIS, to its credit, considers other possibilities, WaPo helpfully reports the “technical difficulties” explanation as if it’s the only one.  The implication is unmistakable:  yes, Iran’s nukes are a problem, but given their technical woes, we’ve probably got some time to deal with it.

I don’t think – although I know some of you will – that either ISIS or WaPo is deliberately obscuring the obvious possibility:  that the LEU output drop reflects the point at which uranium diversion started in earnest.  What I do think is that their posture is dangerously complacent.  For one thing, it’s patronizing in the extreme to simply assume the Iranians can’t handle their equipment, and are incapable of doing what would be required to set up a covert network mirroring their declared, inspected facilities.  Another major source of unjustified complacency is blinkered reliance on the IAEA process and its reporting.

The salient truth about IAEA is that it can’t tell us if Iran is bringing a covert network online.  The fact that it hasn’t detected one in the course of its official activities is meaningless.  Just how meaningless it is has been brought home by the results of the ISIS study, viewed in conjunction with the increase in Iran’s indigenous uranium production.  An inspection process that can’t explain the “uranium jerk” of late 2008-early 2009 is not a process we should be tying our triggers for action to.  In military parlance, the IAEA inspection process has clearly been overtaken by events – is now OBE – and that’s what the WaPo headline should have been.  The fact that the headline carried exactly the opposite implication – that we should be less worried, not more – amounts to failure on a level that approaches the civilizational and systemic.

But the central drama as 11 February dawns in Tehran will actually be the Green Movement protests mounted against the regime’s anniversary celebration of the 1979 revolution.  As Amir Taheri points out in a post at NRO, the regime is so leery of popular unrest that the commander of the Revolutionary Guard has assembled a counterforce of 100,000 in Tehran.  The mullahs are importing rent-a-mob street demonstrators of their own from across the nation, reportedly a frequent procedure; but authorities also apparently plan to cordon the opposing masses off from each other, very possibly out of fear of the regime supporters being “turned” by their reform-minded countrymen.

According to Michael Ledeen, opposition leaders live in hourly expectation of being arrested, an event that they and their supporters anticipate leading to a significant ramp-up of the protests.  Taheri refers to a plan “Tanzih” – Eradication – presented by the Revolutionary Guard commander, which “envisages the arrest of some 3,000 opposition activists, including former president Mohammad Khatami and former prime minister Mir-Hussein Mussavi.”

The numbers involved, the prospective victims, and the deliberate planning are as reminiscent of the Nazis’ “night of the long knives” as any similar political event in the last 70 years.  The prospect of “Tanzih” is horrific.  But of all the developments looked for in the next 24 hours, even that one would not be the most significant.  The most significant would be if the Iranian reform protesters were able to rock the regime on its heels, and seriously jeopardize its stability and hold on power.

An achievement on this scale is not the most likely outcome, but neither is it impossible.  It would require one indispensable development:  popular uprisings erupting across Iran, in too many areas of the country for the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) to deal with.  That level of unrest may well not emerge until after there is a crackdown in Tehran more brutal than anything we have seen to date.  But it’s not infeasible for a protest movement, one with a spokesman, to gain concessions from the theocratic rulers that would usher in genuine transformation of Iran’s current government and rejection of its Islamic revolutionary doctrine.

While we focus on all the maneuvers by both sides – the mullahs’ regime and the international community – to upstage and out-jockey each other, the high card is held by the Iranian people.  The remarkable fact is that regime change from within is the best possible way of addressing the problems presented by revolutionary Iran:  bellicose nuclearization and terror sponsorship.  The terror sponsorship is an artifact of the leadership’s revolutionary Islamism – and it was tellingly repudiated by the reform protesters during the Al Qods Day (“Jerusalem Day”) counterprotests in September 2009.  The threat posed by nuclear development is likewise linked to the theocratic regime’s ideological fixations.  It is far more likely that a follow-on reform government could operate nuclear power plants peacefully than it is that anything short of military attack, and forcible regime-change, can deter the current regime from developing nuclear weapons.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have lost the political understanding that there may be security concerns great enough to justify concrete measures, as opposed to empty rhetoric and hand-wringing.  Should the United States use force to regime-change Iran?  No – not today.  But should we be ready to use all the elements of national power – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – to support the reformists, and actively hinder the IRGC in trying to suppress them and brutalize the Iranian people?

Such intervention need not be a repeat of the CIA-sponsored coup against the Mossadegh government in 1953.  It could well be carried out without any more hint of the US selecting Iran’s future leaders than attended Reagan’s support to Solidarity in Poland.  Moreover, the idea that the US would be the only nation potentially involved is ludicrous:  the Tehran regime already draws security support from China, and of course its principal patron for arms and nuclear technology is Russia.  Russia and China will both try to exploit to their benefit any attempt by Obama to further isolate Iran.  One or the other would almost certainly be involved, from the shadows, in an all-out regime crackdown on the Iranian population.

The biggest problem with a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities has always been that merely doing that isn’t enough.  A US-level strike could set the program back by years; but the nuclear technology isn’t the problem:  the revolutionary, terror-sponsoring ideology is.  Iran’s people have the will to do the world the great favor of removing that ideology from power.  But they will need help.  As the events of 11 February unfold, the greatest failure of the Obama administration will not be that it is taking its time to implement sanctions that won’t change the mullahs’ minds anyway.  The greatest failure will be the fact that, in the name of the American people, it is standing by and doing nothing to promote the best chance we have of averting a nuclear-armed Iran.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

The cost of the trial is the least of the problems New Yorkers and Americans in general have with the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, here rather than in a military tribunal. The bigger issue is the Obama administration’s weak stance on national security, a dramatically candid glimpse of which was provided on by the botched handling on Christmas Day of the underpants bomber. After 50 minutes of interrogation by the FBI, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab freely admitted that other attacks were in the works, the interview was cut short on orders from the Justice Department. The terrorist was promptly read his Miranda rights and then permitted to lawyer up after which he clammed up.

Although the administration has tried lamely to defend this decision — by, for example, having spokesman Robert Gibbs appear on FOX News Sunday to claim that “useful intelligence was gotten” — the incident made it abundantly clear that Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, subscribe to a pre-9/11 mentality. This is a recipe for disaster.

Which is why New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio drafted a letter of his in response to McMahon’s that highlights the sheer lunacy of proceeding as planned with the 9/11 trials. The letter, addressed to Congress, noted the duty of “representatives of the people to stand up not just for our own personal ideology, but for the basic views and values we swore to protect. This decision runs anathema to those basic views and values.” The letter is reprinted in its entirety at Human Events, which has also drafted a petition to Holder that currently has over 118,000 signatures. You can add your own by visiting this link.

With three quarters of the American populace now opposed to giving suspected terrorists the rights of U.S. citizens, which include the right to a “trial by one’s peers,” this misguided decision now becomes the latest in a succession of damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn’t decisions confronting Obama. As with his benighted health care agenda, if he goes forward with the plans to conduct the 9/11 trials a few blocks from ground zero, he will be viewed as resisting the will of the people. If he relents, he will lose even more political currency with his dwindling far-left base, while telegraphing the message to the entire electorate that he botched a critical decision in the first place.

As we speak, four men are in custody that Fate tied together. One, a known, wanted terrorist who’s known crimes against Americans are too gruesome to even describe on the nightly news. The other three are members of one of the most esteemed, honorable, and lauded military organizations ever created. In a time of war against Muslim terrorists, common sense would dictate that justice would be on the side of those fighting on our behalf. Logic would use the history of actions committed by terrorists, both on the battlefield and in custody, to predict the behavior of one that has been captured. Patriotism and belief in the justness of the cause for which we fight would combine to give our soldiers a wide berth when dealing with our enemies.

None of these are being implemented in the case against Matthew McCabe, Julio Huertas, Jr, and Jonathan Keefe. These three courageous boys are members of SEAL Team 10, and had been among those to capture Ahmed Hashim Abed. Abed remains a captured al Qaeda terrorist, wanted for the slaying of four Blackwater security contractors (and former commandos themselves) in a most heinous fashion. These three SEALs are being charged with either abusing Abed, or covering up the abuse.

A poll of 100 random Americans, if shown the pictures of the charred bodies of four of our citizens hanging from a bridge, would find 99 of them volunteering to “abuse” Abed. I would count myself among them. Abed does not possess the sense of decency we do. He could have held the Blackwater members captive, fed, clothed, and cared for their medical needs – as we do – in a comfortable cell. He showed no such compassion. He murdered them, burned their bodies, then dragged their charred remains through the streets among cheering crowds. Since that did not satisfy his evil desires, he then hung the bodies from a bridge to be played with by locals (including children) and called several news agencies to take pictures such as this one.

In capturing Abed, who was armed at the time of his capture, no SEAL harmed him. At that time, they could have, or even shot him, but they didn’t. He was also initially turned over to Iraqi police. It was back in U.S. custody that the alleged “abuse” occurred. It is also well known that al Qaeda training manuals instruct terrorists to claim abuse while in custody, even to the point of self-inflicting wounds as “evidence”. Abed’s word should mean nothing. The government has not released photographs or video of the injuries (it is undergoing “classification review”), and balked at allowing our soldiers to directly face him at their courts-martial. The government has also delayed the case, presumably because the only credible witness to the abuse, a third class master-at-arms, can’t seem to get his story straight. At least five different statements by the unnamed sailor have been made and appear to conflict with each other.

The SEALS initially were faced with an Article 15 “Captains Mast”, which is a non-judicial proceeding by their commanding officer. All three declined as it is viewed as an admission of guilt. These soldiers wanted their day in court knowing that a guilty verdict in a courts-martial will carry a harsher sentence. Guilty people try to find a way to avoid harsh sentences, innocent people want to clear their name.

When boiled down to the nutshell version, this smells like a witch hunt. Why the master-at-arms is lying is anyone’s guess at this point, but people telling the truth don’t give conflicting statements, though they may add or delete details as time progresses. The bigger question, however, is why does anyone care about the alleged “abuse” of this piece-of-trash? Americans don’t care. At least 40 Congressmen don’t care. In the wake of Abu-Ghraib, I can understand some heightened sensitivity toward claims of abuse, but also understand that everyone in the military does not want a repeat of those actions. Our soldiers are going out of their way, and often being put in harms way, to avoid harming prisoners of war. I have also had the honor of knowing many Navy SEALS, these men do NOT lie to their commanding officers. They are among the most honorable people I have ever met. In other words, I would take the word of one SEAL over the word of 10 masters-at-arms and 1,000 terrorists. When three SEALS tell the same story, only the direct Word of God could convince me they are lying.

And Abed’s “abuse”, seriously, is merely a punch in the stomach. It is in their charge-sheets. So apparently on top of being a complete waste of carbon, Abed also lacks the intestinal fortitude to injure himself properly or thoroughly.

The SEALS still need our help. For more information on how you can help, and more details on this case, please go here. They have sacrificed so much for us, the least we can do for them is write a letter or make a phone call. For these three men to even stand trial is the greatest travesty of justice I have ever witnessed.

• Yemen assures us that it has al-Qaeda completely under control (and they resent us pushing them around):

  Yemen showed signs of friction Tuesday with the United States over the fight against al-Qaida, insisting it has the terror group under control, as the U.S. Embassy in San’a ended a two-day closure.

• Meanwhile, John McCain — who, with Joe Lieberman, visited Yemen, that garden-spot of the Middle East, in August — warns of a mounting al-Qaeda presence. (I wonder who we should believe, McCain and Lieberman — or the Yemeni government?)

  “We cannot allow Yemen to be a base for Al-Qaeda to mount attacks on other countries in the region as well as the United States,” said McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008….

  Lieberman said an American who was working in Yemen had warned him during the August visit that “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war and if do not act pre-emptively now, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”

• Finally, in response to the Yemen problem, Barack H. Obama has decided to forego the planned release of Gitmoids to Yemen… at least until the furor dies down:

  The U.S. will not transfer any detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Yemen right now, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday.

  Ninety detainees in Gitmo are from Yemen, which is combating a resurgent Al Qaeda. A delayed return could mean they will end up in a federal prison in Thomson, Illinois, Gibbs said…

  “While we remain committed to closing the detention facility, the determination has been made that right now any additional transfers to Yemen is not a good idea.” [As you can see, with this crowd in la Casa Blanca, there's ever a "Duh" moment! -- DaH]

Recent terrorist events corroborate the McCain-Lieberman warning: We all know by now that failed boxer-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab trained in Yemen, and that is likely where he got his underwear bomb; and last August, a member of the same al-Qaeda branch in Yemen tried to assassinate Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official, using the same underwear-bomb technique as did Abdulmutallab (and Nayef informed us all about that attack last year). Finally, just a few days ago, the U.S. and U.K. embassies in Yemen were shut down due to credible bombing threats from the same jolly band of terrorists.

Al-Qaeda has strong roots in Yemen, of course; that’s whence the bin Laden family originally came, and it’s possible that Osama bin Laden himself is technically a Yemeni citizen, not Saudi Arabian (I’m not sure of the law in the two countries). The Moslems in Yemen are a split between Sunni (a big chunk of them Wahhabi) and Shia (including a great many “Twelvers”); and control by the radicals definitely appears to be growing, to the point of having the government in a stranglehold — or at least a half-nelson.

Note that this is not an example of al-Qaeda being driven out of one place, like Afghanistan, and fleeing over the mountains and across the border into Pakistan. From Waziristan and Balochistan, where we believe al-Qaeda to be headquartered today, Yemen is more than two thousand miles away: The Yemeni al-Qaeda aren’t refugees… they’re an expanding base of operations.

This is what happens when a president doesn’t pro-actively fight against the Iran/al-Qaeda Axis and take the fight to the enemy: During the years when we were going after AQ in Iraq and Afghanistan and all around the world, they were too busy defending (and losing) their home turf to branch out into other countries. They were on the run, especially after we defeated them in their self-styled center of gravity, Iraq.

But Barack H. Obama has made it quite clear that he doesn’t consider attacks on the United States and on our allies by Iran, and by Iranian-backed terrorist groups, to constitute a “war.” The One al-Qaeda Has Been Waiting For considers such mass murders merely “criminal activities,” akin to drug running or auto theft. He sends a dozen signals every month that he has no intention of making war on the evil-doers, but is content to sit back and play defense. And now they’re moving right back into the Middle East, into Yemen, which sits at the southern border of Saudi Arabia — where there is already war, terrorism, and chaos enough to feed a dozen al-Qaedas.

We cannot play defense against the Axis: If we don’t take the war to them, they’ll follow us home and take it to us.

Al-Qaeda will send as many Einsatzgruppen as necessary, so that at least one will get through; then we’ll have another London Tube-bombing sized “man-caused disaster,” or even, God forbid, a second September 11th-level catastrophe . But that’s what happens when we play defense: We must get it right every time, for all time; they only have to get it right once.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

His initial response to the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God outcome of an attempt by a Nigerian terrorist to murder 300 innocent people was silence. In Obama’s world, nothing happened — no harm, no foul — so there was no need to interrupt his vacation. But then the person he chose to play Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, spoke up, revealing her own naivete (and his in selecting her for this job for which she is singularly and spectacularly ill-equipped), and all hell broke loose. Obama was forced to appear in front of the TV cameras and make a statement. And then another statement, as the American people began to respond to their own wakeup call, realizing that the country had dodged a big bullet no thanks to Obama or Napolitano (who had already begun walking back her story).

So how bad is it for Team Obama? Judge for yourself. Today’s MSM opinion headlines are a pretty good barometer of the nation’s mood. The headline from Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post: “Red Flags Waved — And Ignored.” From the ever-flip Maureen Dowd at the New York Times: “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Can’t Seem to Find His.” But it gets even worse, when you reach the last line of her op-ed: Heck of a job, Barry.

Put somewhat differently, it’s easy to call Dick Cheney Darth Vader and George W. Bush a cowboy when no one’s spitting on your lawn. Let Al Qaeda launch a loogie that narrowly misses its target, and suddenly — grudgingly — even the most diehard socialist loses that smirk of assured confidence in a leader who knows better, who promises he’ll sweet talk the Islamofascist beast into submission.

In order to escape with his political life, Obama needs to offer up a sacrifice. And in this case, the call is an easy one. Janet Napolitano: Say hello to the underside of the bus. You can tell she’s already gone, because Obama has released a statement indicating that her job is secure. The timing on this is also easy. My guess is that she will tender her resignation at precisely the stroke of midnight on December 31st.

But her head isn’t the one the American people should be content to see on a pike this time. There is a cancer on the White House, to borrow a well-worn coinage. The tumor is as aggressive as it appears outwardly benign to observers on the left. And unless it is excised soon, next time we may not be so lucky.

1. That Abdulmuttalab meant to murder the passengers on the Delta flight he was on and anyone on the ground in the general vicinity of the approaching flight, and
2. That America — and, indirectly, the Obama administration — lucked out in that the explosives failed. (Consider Obama’s likely approval ratings change had the attack succeeded on “his watch,” after 7 years of vigilance under the Bush administration.)

Another reality that is inescapable is the patent falsity of Obama’s claim (upon finally making a statement) that the government is doing everything in its power to keep the homeland safe. Everything in its power would not include reading Abdulmuttalab his Miranda rights and permitting him to lawyer up within minutes of his capture. On the contrary, when a combatant is captured on the battlefield — as he was — he should be considered a critical resource, as was the case during the Bush years. Abdulmuttalab should immediately have been isolated and questioned on details of the operation, who else was involved, and what other plans are in the works.

A final reality is that Obama and his attorney general are systematically leading the country toward, not away from, another attack on the Homeland. The longer they remain in denial, the greater that likelihood becomes.

We all lived through one 9/11. No one needs another one to prove Obama wrong.

Each deadly scenario puts the American military and national command authority in disastrously untenable situations just a few to several years from now, and each would be world-historical (not in a good way):

• collapse in Pakistan involving the U.S. in a nuclearized and Islamicized regional war
• politically and economically de-stabilizing pandemic plague
• a series of nuclear attacks in the American homeland brought off by an effectively unidentifiable (and therefore un-targetable) sponsor
• a 1914-like Middle East outbreak of war, centered on Israel
• Chinese moves on Taiwan forcing a choice between global war and the loss of the Pacific Rim (and more)
• systematic Islamist assault on global resource and supply chains leading to economic catastrophe
• civil war in an abandoned Iraq leading to a re-alignment in the Gulf:  the U.S. on the outside; China, Russia, and Iran on the inside

In short, 7 American catastrophes – and each entailing blows not just to our abstract “interests,” but to the very concrete counterparts of those interests:   our lives and our way of life.

Now consider further that there’s nothing preventing two or more of these or similar scenarios arising concurrently.  Indeed, there’s good reason to suspect that each such crisis may increase the likelihood of others, leading to and in turn being accelerated by the simultaneous exhaustion of American resources, will, and credibility.

If, for instance, the Chinese have an itch for Taiwan, how much more likely are they to make a move when we’re already stretched to our limits with war and nuclear terror well off to the left on the map, and when we’re already devastated by global economic sabotage?  Or if China moves first on Taiwan, wouldn’t that be a perfect time for Islamists to escalate subversion in Iraq and Pakistan, confront Israel, and assault off- and inshore oil facilities and container mega-ships?  And it must be said that there are other potential major and minor threats – some of them more purely economic, some of them merely familiar and therefore addressed if not truly mastered by current military doctrine and deployments – that may also feed or be fed by the slew of cyber-subversions, area denials, global double-crosses, terrorist depredations, and acts of sabotage that pop up repeatedly and all across Krepinevich’s narratives.

We could spin up chain reactions and “mother of storms” scenarios all day:  As Neil Young once sang, “It’s a wonder tall trees ain’t laying down.”

Krepinevich himself might consider such speculation a gross misuse of his work.  He’d like to see a modernized, permanent version of Eisenhower’s Planning Board integrated into the contemporary military and fully resourced.  He’d probably like to see much larger investments in a range of anti-missile, special forces, deep strike, cyberwarfare, and other capacities.  And I think he’d like to see our real world Defense Secretary, who receives a couple of uncomplimentary mentions, get his head on completely straight about what he’s publicly dismissed as “next war-itis.”

In short, Krepinevich advocates prudent investments, not apocalyptic proclamations.  In his forward, he presents a scenario composed in the late 1990s, describing a war and counterinsurgency difficulties in Iran, in order to make a key point:  A useful scenario neither needs nor attempts to foretell the future.  Having addressed the limitations in planning, equipment, and doctrine that eventually come to plague his fictional warriors on the eastern side of the Gulf ca. 2016 would likely have helped a decade earlier when real world warriors were fighting just one country over in either direction.

Well, sure, but the thing is:  His Iran scenario still mostly makes sense – so make that Eight Deadly scenarios.  Or take a step back and you’re facing One Great Big Deadly Scenario made up of major and minor sub-scenarios – and you may be feeling like fictional Defense Secretary Summers, reacting to President Reynolds’ temporizing response to terrorist nukes going off in American cities:

The country is now at war, [Summers] says, against a group of states and nonstate entities that are practicing a form of ambiguous aggression against the United States.  The United States can attempt to sue for some kind of peace, although with whom he hasn’t a clue; or it can accept the fact that it is at war – a war that has already caused more damage to the American homeland in a few weeks than all of World War II – and mobilize its full resources to defeat its enemies.  Summers declares that he has no interest in negotiation; he is interested only in the total cooperation of these rogue states, and their capitulation to American demands for unfettered access, so that they may avoid “their complete and utter destruction.”  It is time for the nation to mobilize its resources to fight the war that has been waged against it ever since radical Islamists seized the first American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran over thirty years ago.

To state the obvious, there are more than a few Americans who not too long ago were already on board with the above – well before the destruction of downtown San Antonio, Chicago, San Diego, and Boston.

As for Krepinevich, if he’s not ready to call for anything remotely resembling full mobilization for global war, it’s less clear whether, in his heart, he believes a complete strategic re-orientation, implying a very different national leadership style than the American political system has been producing, is necessary.  Still, whatever he himself believes, the one factor that ties his scenarios together is that Presidents Reynolds, Simmons, Dickson, Collingwood and so on all tend to resemble President Merkin Muffley (now there was a scenario), flailing with outmoded sanities against realized insanity.

Under a Muffley Administration, it probably wouldn’t matter much whether the Pentagon had three times as many SpecForces operatives to call upon, five times as many anti-missile systems, a 6000-ship blue and green water navy, and a $50 Billion Planning Board budget:  Our committed adversaries – and the larger circles of spoilers, opportunists, and passive supporters – would with good reason fear us too little, and know the world is far too small for us to remain insulated, yet always too big to be fully defended.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions
other books reviewed and discussed

…With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounding determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God.
— from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s December 8, 1941 speech to Congress.

68 years ago today, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, making December 7, 1941 the day that would forever live in infamy.

The number of survivors of Pearl Harbor is dwindling. There are less and less of them every year. Our Greatest Generation is leaving us. But even now, all these years later, they still remember. And they still honor the fallen.

At Pearl Harbor, Jerry Mintz fought back against the Japanese surprise attack by grabbing a 50-caliber machine gun and firing at the planes that strafed the anchored Navy fleet and pulled the U.S. into World War II.

In the 68 years since that fateful day, the former Army Air Corpsman started a family and flew 193 missions into tropical storms for the U.S. Weather Bureau.

And he kept alive the memory of the 1941 attack in Hawaii by serving as president of the Gold Coast Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

Now 87, the Plantation resident is engaged in another battle, to recover his strength after a bout with shingles and a diagnosis of myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder.

“There aren’t many of us left,” said Mintz as physical therapist Connie Lamons put him through a tiring round of exercises last week at the Springtree Rehabilitation Center in Sunrise.

“We are dying off. And those who aren’t dying are becoming like me — they can’t drive.”

Indeed, earlier this year Mintz and a handful of other survivors association members in South Florida voted to disband the group because of the difficulty of getting together.

Yet Mintz and one other Pearl Harbor veteran, Bill Merz, 86, of Hollywood, did attend commemoration ceremonies Sunday at the Coast Guard station in John U. Lloyd State Park.

“It’s our duty,” said Merz, a retired New York City policeman. “We do it to remember the guys who didn’t make it.”

In Boca Raton, Anthony Mancini, 93, said he didn’t know of any other Pearl Harbor survivors who live nearby.

“I lost a lot of guys I knew,” said Mancini, who was stationed on the USS Minneapolis. “The last guy I knew lived on Cape Cod. He died a couple years ago. I have no contact with any survivors. It’s 68 years; that’s two lifetimes.”

In Boynton Beach, the Veterans Council and the city of Boynton Beach are to unveil a monument to the 2,400 Americans killed or wounded at Pearl Harbor in ceremonies beginning at 12:30 p.m., Monday in Bicentennial Park, 400 N. Federal Highway.

Though their numbers are small, the survivors’ message of vigilance remains constant.

“Learn from history,” said Pearl Harbor survivor and Delray Beach resident Harold Shore, who fought in many of the big battles in the Pacific theater, including Guadalcanal and Okinawa.

“Just like it happened then, it can happen again.”

… For Mintz, just 19 years old the Sunday morning of the attack, “Pearl Harbor is something you never forget.

“We survived because maybe God wanted it that way. So I take every opportunity to talk about it, because I want the public to know what really happened.”

Edie Gates, 79, Mintz’s companion for the past six years, said, “Jerry and the other survivors association members are men who love their country. And he feels a responsibility to tell the story.”

Honor. Do we remember what honor is in this country? The attack on Pearl Harbor was, at the time, the worst attack ever on American soil. It was supposed to be the day that forever lives in infamy, but it seems to me like every year, we forget a little less. A few more survivors leave this Earth, and less people care about the attack that happened 68 long years ago. The Japanese are no longer our enemy, so really, what does it matter to keep remembering Pearl Harbor, right?

Well, in my opinion, it is our duty to remember Pearl Harbor. It’s our duty to honor those who fought and died that fateful day. The day we stop being vigilant to our enemies is the day we open ourselves up to another attack, just like the one we were surprised with that morning. Remember Pearl Harbor. Honor the fallen. And never, ever let their deaths have been in vain. Many of them may not be with us anymore, but we can still honor their sacrifice by keeping their memories alive.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

Ahmed Ashim Habed, the alleged mastermind of the murder of four Blackwater operatives in Fallujah in 2004, was one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq. Either in the process of capturing him, or while he was in captivity, the terrorist claims he was assaulted. There is apparently no physical evidence to back this up, but the military is acting quickly against the three heroes responsible for catching this animal. The following video sums up the situation pretty well:

CNS News has more on the story, including information on how the attorneys for these heroes are getting denied their discovery rights, because the government can’t decide what’s classified and what isn’t. The SEALS face one year military confinement, discharge for bad conduct, and forfeiture of two-thirds of their pay for a year.

The accuser, Ahmed Hashim Abed, is the alleged architect of the murder of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. The bodies of the four Americans were burned and hanged from a bridge for display.

The three Navy Seals–Matthew McCabe, Jonathon Keefe, and Julio Huertas–will be arraigned on Monday in Norfolk, Va. They are facing a special court martial–which is equivalent to a misdemeanor charge–and have each denied the allegations of abuse and cover-up.

The trial date for McCabe, the Seal charged with the alleged assault, is tentatively set for Jan. 19, 2010, McCabe’s attorney Neal Puckett said.

Defense attorneys told CNSNews.com that they are waiting to see the evidence from military prosecutors because it is still under review to determine if it is classified. Even the charges, the only court filings in the case thus far, are still under review.

“The government has not handed over anything,” Huertas’ attorney Monica Lombardi told CNSNews.com. “They are now claiming that things are classified, but they are not saying what’s classified and what’s not classified. I filed my discovery request, and they denied it, pending a classification review. … We have no photographs of the alleged injuries. We have no medical reports of these alleged injuries.”

Attorneys for both McCabe and Huertas said they would insist on cross-examining Abed. The Constitution grants Americans the right to face their accuser at a trial.

“If somebody was trying to claim that you assaulted them, but they refused to come into court, what prosecutor in what state would deny you your right to confrontation of the alleged victim?” Lombardi said.

When CNSNews.com asked what would happen if the military declined to bring Abed to the United States to testify for security reasons, Lombardi said, “It would be, at that point, we could ask the judge to dismiss the charges.”

McCabe, a special operations petty officer, second class, is charged with assaulting the detainee for reportedly punching him in the midsection; with dereliction of duty for failure to safeguard the detainee; and with making a false official statement on the matter.

Though news reports differ on whether it was a punch to the gut or a bloody lip, Puckett says the official charge is a punch to the mid-section.

Huertas, a special operations petty officer, first class, is charged with dereliction of duty, making a false official statement and impeding an investigation.

Keefe, a special operations petty officer, second class, is charged with dereliction of duty and making a false official statement.

Under special court-martial rules, all three defendants would face the same maximum penalty, Puckett said, even though the charges against each one deviate slightly. The maximum penalty for the charges would be one year in military confinement, reduction of two-thirds of their pay for a year and discharge from the military for bad conduct.

Lombardi said Huertas greatly appreciates the public outpouring of support since the reports first surfaced of the arrest.

“My client is extremely grateful for all the support from the American public,” Lombardi said. “He’s a career professional who’s just doing his job. It boosts your morale when you know that you go over there and are doing your job and the American public actually does care about what you’re doing. He’s really humbled by it.”

The military first sought non-judicial punishment, called a “captain’s mast.” It would have spared them any chance of imprisonment but would have severely harmed and possibly ended their military careers, Puckett said.

“There was some pressure on them to accept a lesser form of punishment,” Puckett said. “That would have meant that some commander had predetermined their guilt and would have punished them in a way that would have ended their careers. They weren’t willing to accept that and felt that it would not be a fair hearing.”

They each refused the captain’s mast and opted for a court martial, which is a military trial, to clear their names. The punishment from a court-martial conviction could be greater.

Though it was a better option than accepting guilt, Puckett said, such charges should have never been brought.

“Forget what the punishment would be, even a conviction would be a federal conviction for these guys,” Puckett said. “A federal conviction alone–even before you consider what punishment they get–is grossly disproportionate to the misconduct that’s alleged.

“If we’re talking about the detainee getting punched in the gut by Petty Officer McCabe, given the evil that guy [Abed] is alleged to have wrought on American contractors back in 2004 in Fallujah, it seems that it’s overkill to think that it’s appropriate to send these guys to court martial,” Puckett added.

Puckett suspects this was an overreaction by military brass in regards to detainee abuse.

“The most obvious speculation to me seems to be that the American military and particular Army commanders, and this was an Army commander, are overly sensitive to allegations of detainee abuse in the wake of Abu Ghraib,” Puckett said. “I think they feel a need to overly punish, overly react to these allegations to keep future ones from happening again.”

The alleged punch happened on Sept. 1 when Abed was in captivity.

Abed, after his capture, was held at Camp Baharia, a U.S. base outside of Fallujah. He was briefly handed over to Iraqi authorities and then returned to U.S. custody. Another petty officer, not a Navy Seal, reported the alleged abuse, Lombardi said. It then went up the chain of command, and the commanding general ordered the charges.

Lombardi believes if there was any abuse, it might have happened on the Iraqi side.

“He was turned over to the Iraqi police,” Lombardi said. “He is an Iraqi citizen. Eventually, he’ll go home. Wouldn’t it be a lot better to claim the Americans abused you than the Iraqi police?”

Lombardi said there is a legal defense fund for the Seals, and that she is glad the public can see the Seals were doing the right thing.

“They were capturing a terrorist that we’ve been searching for, for five years. They did it in a professional manner,” Lombardi said. “When you think you’re doing everything right and you’ve got somebody saying, ‘no, you did it wrong,’ it’s really nice to know everybody is saying, ‘you did it right. You did us a favor. Why are you being punished?”

The PDFs of the charges are here.

Let’s consider the worst case scenario. Let’s say that the SEALS really did “assault” this terrorist. Is the punishment really equal to the crime? Does punching a terrorist responsible for the brutal murders of four Americans deserve one year in a military prison, reduction in pay, and a discharge? Maybe the SEALS should get some kind of minor slap on the wrist for what they did, but in my opinion these three men are heroes. If they are found guilty, then I still don’t agree with the course of action the military and our government is taking.

What’s disturbing is that it isn’t clear whether or not the alleged assault ever even happened. There is apparently no physical evidence to prove it, and the only proof the military has is this terrorist’s word that he was assaulted. Who should we believe — the terrorist responsible for the slaughter of four Americans, or the brave SEALS who caught him? I would think that we would be trusting the SEALS here, if all we have is Abed’s word that he was punched. And, as one of the attorneys said, Abed was also being held by Iraqi police for some time. How do we know for sure who actually punched him? And if he was punched in the stomach… well, who gives a damn? It’s not the most professional behavior, but really… even if he got a fat lip, kids give themselves a fat lip playing basketball or football in their front yards every day. It’s not exactly a major war wound. It isn’t like they broke any bones or caused him any lasting pain or injuries. He maybe felt uncomfortable for, what, a whole minute? And yet these SEALS are going to face a year’s imprisonment and a discharge from the military over it? This is an outrage. If our men and women in uniform aren’t going to be free to fight this war without constantly looking over their shoulders and second-guessing themselves because of idiotic bureaucratic red tape, then what’s the point of even fighting? This is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

A website has been set up called Support The SEALS. You can sign a petition supporting the SEALS here. Please go and sign it. Also, here is some contact information. Please feel free to call or e-mail the people listed below and express your support for the SEALS and ask for these charges to be dropped. As always, please remember to be polite and courteous — firm, but polite.

To file a citizen’s complaint, e-mail holly.silkman@soccent.centcom.mil or call 813-828-4976.

You can send letters here:

US Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps
The Office of the Judge Advocate General
Public Affairs
1322 Patterson Ave., Suite 3000
Washington Navy Yard DC 20374-5066

HQ USSOCOM
ATTN: SOCS-PA
Admiral Eric Olson
7701 Tampa Point Blvd.
MacDill AFB, FL 33621-5323

AJAG, Military Law
1254 Charles Morris St., SE
Washington Navy Yard, DC 20374-5047

1322 Patterson Ave., Suite 3000
Washington Navy Yard, DC 20374-5066

Here are some phone numbers you can call:

SPO Public Affairs: 813-368-9885
Washington Navy Yard: (202) 685-5190
Pentagon: (703) 614-7420
JAG: (202) 685-5493

You can also call and send letters to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Room SR-228, Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-6050
202-224-3871

A list of the House Armed Services Committee staff is here, as well as all of the members. A list of the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee is here. Subcommittee members are here. Don’t hesitate to get politicians involved. If politicians feel that their constituents are angry about this (and therefore feel threatened themselves) they will get involved. Again, be polite, but maybe suggest to them that if they just stand by and allow this to happen, it could cost them your vote.

There is also a rally in Norfolk, VA tomorrow to show support for these SEALS. You can get the information on the event here.

Jonathan Keefe is from Yorktown, VA and enlisted in 2006, beginning his SEAL training the same year. He is 25 years old.

Matthew McCabe is from Perrysburg, OH and enlisted in 2003. He is 24 years old.

Julio Huertas is from Blue Island, IL and enlisted in 1999. He has served with special warfare units since 2002 and joined the SEALS in 2006. He is 28 years old.

These are the heroes being persecuted.

These SEALS were fighting for us, defending our country, and bringing retribution to one of our most-wanted terrorists. They fought for us — and now it is our turn to fight for them. We cannot just abandon them, so please, take action. Do not let this stand. Together, we can show these heroes that we support them. Remember, these SEALS are claiming that they are innocent and that they did not harm the terrorist in any way, so it’s the word of a terrorist against three Navy SEALS. Let’s show them that we stand with them, and not with a murderous terrorist.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

Now on the inside looking out, as an adviser on the Afghan surge, Cordesman can be found turning his customary skepticism on the skeptics, as in the following video (especially after the midway point ca. 2:30):

If Cordesman weren’t on the inside, I suspect he’d be sounding a lot more like the Anthony Cordesman who gave the Iraq surge a “less than even” chance of success, or like the Anthony Cordesman who has consistently downgraded any prospects for Israeli action against Iran. Over the years, such Cordesman assessments, though hedged and guarded on their own terms, have frequently been seized upon by anti-war activists, pundits, and politicians, and I tend to believe that the same pattern would be repeating itself if he was again on the outside looking in.

I think Cordesman would in fact be sounding more like the British military historian Max Hastings, whose nuanced take on the Afghanistan enterprise – “Obama’s Afghan Surge Is Not About Winning the War, but Managing Our Looming Failure” – falls squarely within the pessimist camp, though with decidedly more understanding and sympathy for the President and his predicament than shown by American critics like George Will, Andy McCarthy, or Ralph Peters. At the same time, it’s not far from the worst-case/acceptable trade-off position implicitly acknowledged, but rarely advertised, by those who hold out greater hope for eventual success, but remain aware of significant obstacles between where we are and some final victory – with the uncertain, ever-receding, in-the-eye-of-the-beholder quality of unconventional “victories” not least among those obstacles.

Before going any further, it’s worth noting that, in addition to being a historian (his books on World War II are humane, balanced, very well-written, and greatly rewarding), Hastings himself has his own history. Like Cordesman, but even more so, he was a convinced pessimist on the the Iraq surge. In April 2007 he summed up his views as follows:

At the end of my own spasm of soul-searching, I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. It is hard to believe that, whatever tactical military successes Petraeus’s people are achieving – and these are real enough – Iraq’s leaders, security forces and citizens can take the strain in real time. We still look like losing.

Yet this should never become cause for exultation, even among the bitterest foes of the Washington neocons. If defeat, chaos, regional war indeed come to pass, the Iraqi people and the security interests of the west will suffer a disaster for which the disgrace of George Bush and Tony Blair will represent wholly inadequate compensation.

On one level Hastings’ current view on Afghanistan seems to reprise the same theme – essentially that the whole thing can’t work because the locals are key, and just aren’t up to it:

[I]t seems highly unlikely that the West can achieve its purposes unless – a huge ‘unless’ – the Karzai government dramatically raises its game. It must get the bulk of the Afghan population on side, as today it certainly is not.

Our soldiers can play three quarters of an hour each way against Taliban forces week after week , and win every time. But none of it means a thing ‘unless’, in the phrase of an American officer of my acquaintance, ‘there is something to join up to’ – a viable Afghan administration.

Hastings’ contacts and his analysis lead him to what becomes a critical judgment, one that he believes the Obama Administration must share: “I do not believe President Hamid Karzai and his cohorts in Kabul are capable of getting their act together.”

Similar arguments – skepticism about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and his notoriously corrupt, ineffective government – were also at the nub of Cordesman’s skepticism on the Iraq surge. Still, though Hastings might merely be repeating past errors – again “taking counsel from his fears,” as General David Petraeus, paraphrasing Andrew Jackson, might put it – there’s at least one good reason to wonder if he might be right this time: The people designing and implementing this policy include more people like him, including our current Decider, and fewer like our last one, who, we should recall, was in the minority in his own war-focused administration.

In short, there was every reason to believe, even prior to the President’s announcement, that the people on the inside had gloomy constitutions somewhat like Max Hastings’. For that reason, when Hastings suggests that Obama’s real intention is “to establish a framework for withdrawal,” the fact that Hastings himself probably thinks that’s the best policy may lend extra credence to his observation. This notion would also explain the peculiar and somewhat confusing and contradictory two-step that we all watched Obama perform last week before the West Point cadets and the world – the announcement of an escalation joined to the announcement of a withdrawal date.

Those who accuse Obama of a failure in war leadership, of sounding an uncertain trumpet, of committing a blunder vis-a-vis friendly and enemy morale, may simply be failing to recognize in which direction he is leading. For numerous reasons, according to this view, withdrawal is the overarching goal, but an immediate retreat (or even non-escalation), though it would be a lot easier to sell to the isolationist right and the anti-war left, remains politically and militarily impossible. As a total reversal of an oft-repeated and long held position, one reiterated in March 2009, anything but escalation would be devastating to Obama’s political credibility. It would be as or more destructive to overall American and allied credibility, and might cause an earthquake in the region, especially in Pakistan. Instead, the President is, in Hastings’ view, executing what amounts to a strategic feint, giving cover to a more drawn-out retreat. At the same time, he mollifies, or at least splits, the war hawks – and even gives the generals a chance, however small, of surprising him.

After making some useful comparisons to France, under de Gaulle, escalating in and then quitting Algeria 50 years ago, Hastings sums up the strategic package as follows:

If all this sounds confusing, so it is. It is a dangerous game – being played for the highest stakes – for national leaders to act in one way while really intending something else.

The soldiers think they know what they are doing – using extra men to secure key areas of Afghanistan. But almost everybody else is looking towards the exit.

The danger that flows from this approach, and that Hastings doesn’t address except by referring in passing to the “delicacy” of the game, is, of course, that such pessimism may decrease whatever chances there are of final success – durable, Jihadist-suppressing state power in Afghanistan and Pakistan – that, even before any facts on the ground are re-assessed, the underlying lack of conviction may be too readily apparent to the most important observers: those who are doing the fighting, including the ones supposed to think the wrong thing about “what they are doing,” as well as their immediate adversaries and those in the middle making life-or-death bets on the eventual outcome. In the meantime, the general public is left with a queasy, uncertain feeling – a sense that they’re being pushed along down an uncertain path, perhaps suspecting rightly that they’re being lied to – misled or mis-led, or both.

If Hastings is right, in addition to creating a framework for leaving – after a “decent interval” – Obama may also be laying a trail back to his own lack of leadership. Many in the military and to Obama’s right on the war, especially those who believe that victory is possible and necessary, and least of all those expected to risk all, would not appreciate being used – sacrificed – on the altar of “a dangerous game.” General David Petraeus on Fox News Sunday today (video not yet available) did not sound like a man pulling a fast one, or like an officer interested in capping off his resume with an epochal setback and betrayal.

The Commander-in-Chief may perceive the inevitability of failure, and for good and bad reasons feel unable to say so openly, but, if that’s our predicament, the political gap between “managing failure” and “failed management” may not be very wide. As Robert Kagan has pointed out, come the magic month of July 2011, Americans may remain as reluctant to accept defeat as ever. Kagan, contrary to Hastings, anticipates a further refusal to accept failure, under whatever management. If, however, at that time or later, worse comes to worst, the President’s opponents, including his allies of current convenience, will surely argue that his lack of determination and vision sabotaged the project, and will seek to hang any perception of failure on him and his party.

It may not be fair in all senses, but, given the President’s past political exploitation of Afghanistan’s complexities and his current insistence on telegraphing his intentions to the enemy, it may still stand as fair play.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Good thing this bozo was a community organizer and not a community planner before taking the oath of office as president. As a planner, he might have arranged outings for community members in which he would, for example, put 80 people on one of two chartered buses, 1 on the other.

But let’s get serious for a minute. Why did he give the speech he did last night? In a half-baked effort to appease both sides. This decision is supposed to make liberals happy because it entails sending fewer troops and promising to end the war, win or lose, by a fixed date not too far into the future. And it’s supposed to make conservatives happy because it gives the illusion of seriousness, this coming from the most unserious president ever to defile the Oval Office with his presence.

So how’s the liberal press handling this grand bargain? President Obama Sticks to His Guns is the headline of a piece by Michael Crowley in the The New Republic. Chalk up one for the Commander in Chief. Writes Gabor Steingart in Der Spiegel Never Before Has a Speech Felt So False. Whoops! A goose egg from our newly won allies in Europe. I could offer a few more, but you can imagine the general drift of the headlines this morning.

Roughly half the mainstream media has Obama’s back. The rest are disappointed or worse. And that’s only the MSM. On the whole, not a good morning the Great Decider.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Obama has a really big report due on Tuesday. In it, he will tell the class (the nation as a whole) and his teacher (those of us who will determine his fate in 2012 by voting our conscience) how he intends to prosecute the war in Afghanistan going forward — whether he will accede to his general’s demands for more troops or to his party’s to get out of Dodge. It has taken him a ridiculous amount of time to research his topic; he’s gotten extension on top of extension. I’m guessing his report will earn him a C- at best. All his reports seem to.

But he’s designed a swell cover for it. It’ll be decorated with a backdrop of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Maybe, if he can borrow a uniform, he can even be in costume when he delivers the report.

Obama’s abiding concern with the covers of his reports, rather than the information contained within them, is one of the reasons he continues to fail as a leader. He is never content to speak to the American people one-on-one, sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. He always needs to be before a crowd (a joint session of Congress will generally do nicely) and with plenty of atmosphere to show he is for real.

But the simple fact is that he is not for real. If he were, he wouldn’t need the pomp and circumstance, the artifice to sell his ideas. The plain truth is he has no ideas. He does what he does — everything he does — for precisely two reasons: (1) to get people to like him (to be the most popular kid in class); (2) to get reelected (to be promoted to the next grade).

Ask any C student, and they’ll tell you that this is a recipe for failure. The only way for Obama to get ahead at this point is to start doing his homework. I just don’t think he has it in him.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

President Obama’s nine-day trip to Asia is worth a look back to fix two potent problems, past and future. First, the trip’s limited value per day of presidential effort suggests a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power. On top of the inexcusably clumsy review of Afghan policy and the fumbling of Mideast negotiations, the message for Mr. Obama should be clear: He should stare hard at the skills of his foreign-policy team and, more so, at his own dominant role in decision-making. Something is awry somewhere, and he’s got to fix it.

Better idea: Obama should abandon the fantasy of being leader of the free world — a job way, way above his pay grade — and go back to doing what he does well (assuming there is something he does well: community organizing mayhaps?). In any case, for the good of the country, he should get out of Dodge (aka Washington), where he is stinking up the works big time.

Again, it is hard not to be struck by how often he appears to make decisions based on one and only one factor: his personal popularity. How else to explain his utterly off-the-wall declaration this past weekend that he needs to find a viable exit strategy from Afghanistan because he doesn’t want to leave this “burden” for the next president. Let’s do Obama and ourselves a gigantic favor. Let’s get Obama out, elect the next president, and get the guy sworn in. We can all worry about Obama’s burden then.

How idiotic is it for a president to make decisions on a war the advocacy for which was part of his campaign platform (“the real war on terror,” “a war of necessity”) on the basis of what others will think about him, including his successor? I think he is already on a course to wrest away from the aforementioned Carter the dubious title of Worst President in History. I think he’s overly concerned at this juncture about how “worst” he’s going to be.

I know that Arlen Specter and other great minds in DC are advocating an immediate troop withdrawal. That has been the Democrats’ prescription for every war we’ve been in since World War II. Surrender is hard-wired into them. That doesn’t mean that Obama needs to listen to them or to follow his own worst instincts on this matter. He should proceed with the plan he began with. He started out advocating a counterinsurgency strategy, and he should continue that course by sending Gen. McChrystal the troops he requested. Doing so might enable the general and his troops not just to leave Afghanistan at some point but to leave victorious. By agreeing to that, Obama can actually alter for the better his all-important legacy. No, he won’t escape being Worst President in History. That’s already carved in stone. But he might at least avoid going down in history as the president whose inexperience and ego helped bring another 9/11-style attack to the homeland.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

• The war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis is over! It ended on January 20th, 2009, when the One We Have Been Yearning For was finally inaugurated.
• It was just one more of those failed policies from the previous administration. The war criminal Bush brought it on himself when he enraged the world by launching an unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

• There are still a few criminal gangs that want to commit crimes against individuals inside the United States. The attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the attacks on the World Trade Centers and some other public building — these were crimes: serious perhaps, but no different in substance from a home-invasion robbery or a residential burglary.

  And we already know how to deal with crime: After the next 9/11, we’ll issue an immediate and sweeping flurry of indictments against the suicide perpetrators.

• Of course, you can’t stop a burglary with missiles and bombs… therefore we should stand down all those needless, senseless military defenses — think of the money we could save!

And to gain the love of the whole rest of the world, we should proudly and publicly proclaim that we’ve done so:

The commander of military forces protecting North America has ordered a review of the costly air defenses intended to prevent another Sept. 11-style terrorism attack, an assessment aimed at determining whether the commitment of jet fighters, other aircraft and crews remains justified….

The review, to be completed next spring, is expected to be the military’s most thorough reassessment of the threat of a terrorism attack by air since Al Qaeda’s strikes on Sept. 11, 2001, transformed a Defense Department focused on fighting other militaries and led to the Bush administration’s “global war on terror.”

Think of it: No more fighter jets fueled and ready to shoot down airliners… no more American troops sent all over the world… no more Guantanamo Bay… no more torturing innocent farmers and scholars kidnapped from Tora Bora. With all the protections against crime we now have — security screenings at airports, locked cockpit doors, no-fly zones around wherever the Obamacle happens to be — who needs military force?

The eight-year national nightmare is over; it turns out that the entire premise of “war” was flawed to begin with, as the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other criminals prove. And the money, the expense! Just think how all those billions that could be better spent on seizing control of health care and crippling America’s energy production:

The assessment is partly a reflection of how a military straining to fight two wars is questioning whether it makes sense to keep in place the costly system of protections established after those attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though the last of the air patrols above American cities were discontinued in 2007, the military keeps dozens of warplanes and hundreds of air crew members on alert to respond to potential threats.

“The fighter force is extremely expensive, so you always have to ask yourself the question ‘How much is enough?’ ” said Maj. Gen. Pierre J. Forgues of Canada, director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which carries out the air defense mission within the United States military’s Northern Command.

What could possibly go wrong?

We cannot stick with the old regime of military defense anyway; we just don’t have the resources:

General Forgues said the American and Canadian fleets of fighters, refueling tankers and radar planes “are always in high demand and low supply.”

Rather than do something crazy and counterproductive, like increasing the supply of fighters and refueling tankers to match the demand, it’s so much easier simply to reduce demand by ending the air defenses.

But of course, nothing is carved in stone yet; that Canadian general who runs the American air defense at NORAD, Pierre Forgues, is merely conducting a review. Who can say how it may turn out?

General Forgues cautioned that there was no predetermined outcome of the review and that it was possible the commitment to the air defense mission would remain the same, or even increase.

Just as Obama, after careful consideration, may actually choose a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and send even more troops than Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested — who can say? It’s still under review.

The Times notes the truly staggering expenditures of the Bush regime’s warmongering and jet-jockeying over the skies of America: Combat air patrols over our cities cost (brace yourselves) in excess of $50 million every week. That’s more than $2.6 billion each and every year — an utterly unsustainable expense, fully equal to an entire week of the price for ObamaCare. How can we possibly continue to bankrupt ourselves by paying for such unnecessary, imperialist, neoconservative militarism?

Thank goodness our nation came to its senses in time to elect a president who believes in strength through disarmament. It’s no wonder he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Barack Obama is Mother Teresa on steroids.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Meantime, the president is feeling increasing heat from the left, who feel jilted over his apparent unseriousness about climate change legislation and calls to bring the troops home from the “war of necessity” in Iran Afghanistan. Then there is the matter of recovery.org claiming job creation in 440 congressional districts that do are non-existent.

Some Democrat strategists are trying to figure out how, with majorities in both houses and a radical president, they are faced with such a mess. Makes you wonder — not about the mess but about the Democrat strategists. Who could have not predicted that the American public would spit up Obama’s efforts to nationalize health care, his efforts to plunge the economy into a full-scale depression by taxing energy, and his dishonesty about Afghanistan? Who could have not predicted that a president with no leadership experience and an ego the size of the great outdoors would find the job of leading the free world to be “above his pay grade”?

Right now, the White House claims to be confident that they’ve got the wind at their backs. To which I say, “Wait until next year.” Wait until the mid-term elections come around and Dems trying to save their seats have to explain to constituents how Obama’s promises — e.g., that unemployment would not rise above 8 percent if his stimulus were passed — turned out to be false. Or why there are no real jobs being created — permanent jobs in the private sector, not make-work jobs improving stretches of highway that need no improvement. Or wait until 2012, when the “messiah” himself has to defend his handiwork in debates with the Republican contender for his job.

Sarah Palin a joke? Not to anyone whose been watching the generally left-leaning Saturday Night Live in recent months. She’s yesterday’s news. Their sights are trained now on a new target, who — the more he says and does — makes their writers’ work that much easier.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Namely, he reminds the reader of a very unfortunate consequence of the Clinton administration’s decision to prosecute those responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing in federal court in New York. For those too liberal to remember, Lynne Stewart, attorney for the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, leaked strategic government information gathered through discovery to the cleric’s cohorts in al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, a terrorist organization. For this act of treason, Stewart, who should have faced a firing squad, was sentenced instead to 28 months in prison and was disbarred.

The damage was done, however. Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya knew all they needed to know about how U.S. intelligence monitored acts of terrorism, who was on their watch list, and how to circumvent these pitfalls in planning future terrorist acts. No doubt, the information was passed along to al-Gama’s deadlier sister organization, Al Qaeda. In essence, treating an act of terrorism as a law enforcement matter in 1993 may have been a factor in Al Qaeda’s finishing the job of bringing down the WTC in 2001.

You’d think future generations of leaders would learn from experience. Not Barack Obama and his loon in the Justice Department, Eric Holder. It’s too important for them to make a political statement to the American electorate on how “differently” this administration is from its predecessor. So my question for Holder and Obama is: Do you feel lucky, punk?

There is no reason to suspect there will be another leak in the civilian trial of KSM and his fellow scum. Neither is there a reason to suspect something won’t slip through the cracks. Should that happen and there is another attack, I hope the government will find a special way of thanking Obama and Holder for their service.

UPDATE: Talk about your coincidences. I just learned, via a post by Ed Morrissey, that Lynne Stewart, who had been set free on bail while appealing her conviction, is on her way back to the slammer. “Today, the federal appeals court not only upheld her conviction and revoked her bail, but they also sent the case back to the district court for reconsideration of the shockingly light 28-month sentence Stewart initially received.”

AG Eric Holder made a statement to the press yesterday in which he expressed his confidence in a “successful” verdict in the case. Most analysts interpreted the comment to mean Holder believes the case will end with convictions. I wish I shared their optimism. I’m not a lawyer, but to most lawyers a successful case is one in which relevant evidence is presented and fairly weighed by the judge and jury in arriving at a verdict. Could it be that Holder would be perfectly fine with acquittals across the board so long as rules of jurisprudence were followed?

Even more troubling is the history of civilian trials in this country, and specifically one: O. J. Simpson’s. What happens if KSM is found not guilty? As a resident of New York, I’m not exactly thrilled at the prospect of this man being turned lose on the streets of my city to vanish among the teeming crowds.

I know the liberal arguments on behalf of this decision. Patrick Leahy said it best when he said, “[B]y trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world.” How much trust will the world or Leahy, for that matter, have in our judicial system if the trial backfires and four of the guiltiest men alive walk?

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

So consider the caveat posted.  In the interest of fairness, we must also note that it took George W. Bush time to decide to adopt the surge strategy in Iraq; although that situation is an imperfect analogy with Obama and Afghanistan in some key ways.  Unlike Obama, Bush had not announced a new strategy in Iraq only to begin backtracking on it when presented with the requirements for executing it.  Even more important, Bush did not at any point between 2003 and 2009 revise his objective for the campaign in Iraq.  All the deliberations in the period between the first battle of Fallujah and implementation of the surge strategy centered on what strategy to use, to achieve that constant objective.

Which leads me to the import of the deliberations currently underway in the top circle of Obama’s advisors.  I made the point at Commentary’s “contentions” blog that the real debate is over our objective in Afghanistan.  If Obama sends substantially fewer additional troops than McChrystal is asking for, he perforce chooses against the objective of securing the Afghan countryside from exploitation by the Taliban.  That choice carries decisive consequences:  the Taliban will own the countryside, they will use it to lay siege to the cities – through isolating them from the agricultural heartland as much as through rocket attacks on them and predation against the trade routes – and the Taliban will be waiting to fall on any trained Afghan security force that tries to protect the cities, once NATO forces leave.

The difference can’t be split on this one; it’s either the 40K troops General McChrystal is asking for, or it’s a decision to relinquish the Afghan countryside to the Taliban.  There is no middle way.

But there’s another point we must not miss.  Throwing it into relief for us is the fact that the “Biden faction” in the Afghanistan deliberations has expressly questioned the need for or utility of securing the Afghan countryside.  It has been my impression that, however administration officials couch the issues for public consumption, the key players do understand that they are not merely discussing strategy.  The outcome of this decision will be either one objective or another.

The point we mustn’t miss is that the objective favored by the Biden faction – protecting key cities but not trying to either hold the countryside or defeat the Taliban – was the perennial objective in Vietnam from 1954 to 1969.  The reason we never defeated North Vietnam was that we were never trying to.

The key to this comparison is that both of the objectives – the Vietnam objective and the emerging Afghanistan objective of the Obama administration – omit the element of defeating the enemy or denying him the territory he needs as an operational base.  Here, for your perusal, is the Obama administration on the objective shaking out of its current deliberations:

At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force — nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.

A strategy of protecting major Afghan population centers would be “McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country,” as one administration official put it.

This formulation, of course, misses the point that “Biden for the country” means no “McChrystal for the city,” since in McChrystal’s plan, securing the countryside is essential to strengthening the viability of civil government in the cities.  But for our purposes, the passages above are what compare so well with the following statements of US objectives in Vietnam.  First, from the Eisenhower administration in 1954 (the following passages are quoted from a 1998 article by Stephen B. Young from Vietnam magazine, available online here):

In a letter to South Vietnam’s new leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, dated October 1, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained the rationale for his support of South Vietnam: ‘The purpose of this offer is to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means … . Such a government would, I hope, be so responsive to the nationalist aspirations of its people, so enlightened in purpose and effective in performance, that it will be respected both at home and abroad and discourage any who might wish to impose a foreign ideology on your free people.’

The Kennedy administration’s policy on the Vietnam objective:

National Security Action Memorandum 52, issued on May 11, 1961, set forth the Kennedy administration’s policy for South Vietnam, essentially affirming the previous Eisenhower policy. It stated, ‘The U.S. objective and concept of operations stated in the report are approved: to prevent communist domination of South Vietnam; to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society, and to initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and covert character designed to achieve this objective.’

Young goes on to describe how the diplomacy of Ellsworth Bunker and the military planning of General Westmoreland were designed to comport with the objective stated by Lyndon Johnson in his April 1965 policy speech on Vietnam:

Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam, and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves, only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.

We will do everything necessary to reach that objective. And we will do only what is absolutely necessary.

In recent months, attacks on South Vietnam were stepped up. Thus it became necessary to increase our response and to make attacks by air. This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires.

We do this in order to slow down aggression.

We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely borne this brutal battle for so many years and with so many casualties.

And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam, and all who seek to share their conquest, of a very simple fact:
We will not be defeated.
We will not grow tired.
We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.

Young outlines clearly how these ringing words were compatible with the absence of any intention to defeat the North Vietnamese so that they could not fight another day – and indeed, with the preparation for withdrawal of US forces.

The emphasis in statements from the Obama administration so far has been on precisely the elements of the Vietnam objective:  protecting a seat of government that is to be strengthened and enabled to defend itself, but not – as Johnson might have put it – doing more than necessary to achieve that objective.  Not, in other words, defeating the attacking enemy, or denying him territory, but only fending him off from an area we have staked out – until we decide to leave.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions”.

The story follows the first military campaign launched in the wake of these events, and mainly consists of combat amidst converging stratagems in the contaminated environs of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. It becomes clear that the only people standing in the way of a global war of annihilation and the end of American democracy are in fact the soldiers and officers of the old US armed forces, originally assigned merely to support the new US Christian forces. Since Peters is, it seems, determined to tell a cautionary tale rather than an entertaining or inspiring one, the good guys, represented by assorted front-line grunts and especially by a crusty old school general, must fail, and fail they do – comprehensively.

That’s not a spoiler: We know from the first few pages that the conniving Christianists direct from left-world central casting, at the head of their own “Military Order of Brothers in Christ,” are going to triumph, to all our woe. The only questions the narrative leaves open are secondary ones: How miserably and explosively the catastrophe will unfold , whether some at least symbolic seeds of hope happen to be planted along the way, and, incidentally, what the rest of the world is doing with itself while the flower of America’s youth and the flower of Islam’s are busy annihilating each other and countless innocents .

Peters has retained the skills he’s honed over the course of writing 23 previous books, including an ability to render character and combat economically and vividly, but I won’t pretend the results held my interest long enough to prevent me from starting to skim – a fact that may have to do with why I missed any explanation, I’m guessing a religious one, of what happened to all the women in American uniform. (This is a nearly 100% all-boy novel.) Eventually, I found myself skipping all the way to the obscenely violent final massacres and dreary epilogue – during which latter, while looking back from twilight years on the main storyline and subsequent horrors, our narrator finally reveals his own decisive role in the unhappy events, and helpfully informs us that “killing a billion people was difficult” (italics in the original). 

Revealed as a traitor to his own highest values and aspirations, he lives in a world defined by faith but utterly unredeemable – in a word, hopeless. I can’t help but wonder whether, at bottom, Peters sees our own world, and his own place within it, any differently.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

“The world,” Malzahn writes, “has been waiting for clear words from the White House for months. Obama has had government and military analysts studying the military and political situation in the embattled Hindu Kush region since early January.”

Clear words from the White House? Isn’t clarification what the White House specializes in? Isn’t the Bartlett Quotation Obama will be best remembered for “Let me be clear”?

Apparently not. As Malzahn writes several paragraphs later, “So far Obama has only made it clear that he doesn’t intend to withdraw any troops and that he hasn’t decided yet whether to add more soldiers.”

I wouldn’t bet the farm on Obama’s not withdrawing any troops — or all the troops. He is already feeling heat from the left. Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd recently wrote at the Puffington Host that he has become “deeply concerned that . . . the reason for the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan has become lost, consumed in some broader scheme of nation-building which has clouded our purpose and obscured our reasoning.” Translation: Time to pick up our marbles and head home.

Forgive my cynicism, but I believe that for Obama another “clear choice” looms, and it is this choice that will drive his decision regarding Afghanistan. The choice is how best to placate his dwindling base in the likely event ObamaCare is stripped of its public option before the bill arrives on his desk. The only way to mitigate such a grievous loss is by giving them something they want — a complete withdrawal of troops on the ground and a return to the Clintonian strategy of lobbing bombs in the general direction of Osama bin Laden’s likely location.

War of necessity? Let’s see him be perfectly clear about what he meant when he said that.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Following this analogy, I would recommend nothing so much as studying how Ronald Reagan – who famously heeded the analysis and advice of the Committee on the Present Danger – approached our national security policy.  He actually reversed the policy trend of 35 years’ worth of predecessors, and he did it on four key principles that remain centrally relevant today. We cannot do better than to look at those principles to establish a sound basis for national policy.

The first principle was reducing the import of nuclear arsenals in the relations of the superpowers, the US and USSR.  The clear indications of the last month, that the Russians still see nukes the same way they did in the 1980s (see here and here), make this a timely and salient principle.  Reagan’s vision transcended that of most of his contemporaries:  he was able to see that as long as “deterrence” and the nuclear arms balance occupied a central position in our national security calculations, the Soviets’ would always have an advantage, and we a disadvantage.

Nuclear arms constituted the only realm of defense in which the Soviets could really compete with us.  By letting that be what our relations were “about,” we handed them a gift.  Moreover, the Soviets were able to use their nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which to fight proxy wars for the Third World, from Asia and Africa to our Caribbean doorstep.  Reagan’s vision, from his first arms reduction proposal in 1981 to the signing of the INF Treaty in 1987, was to eliminate this dysfunctional dynamic by reducing arsenals and building missile defenses, so that a MAD-type deterrence – used against America and the West – could no longer be leveraged to enslave populations on the Soviet model.

The need to resurrect this principle is emerging very quickly, with Obama having scrapped the East European sites that were to be part of our global missile defenses.  He has effectively given up on the global defense concept, and the Russians are taking prompt advantage of this retreat to press their case for a power equation based on nuclear arsenals.  This concept was terrible for politics and cohesion in the West during the Cold War, and it should be discouraged and beaten back.  To reduce the significance of nuclear arms to our power relations with Russia, China, and any other nation, we need to press ahead with a comprehensive global missile defense system, and energetically seek mutual nuclear arms reductions, predicating our own reductions on concurrent and verifiable reductions by others.

The second principle discernible in Reagan’s policy was a purposeful “geographization” of our national security ideas.  He turned sharply from the disembodied abstractions of nuclear diplomacy and defensive deterrence, and looked instead to weighing our security in terms of power and influence exercised over territory.  He was the first president to win back territory seized by Marxist clients of the Soviet Union, when he invaded Grenada in 1983.  He implemented the “Maritime Strategy” originally proposed (but not implemented) under Carter:  not just building up the US Navy but deploying it into the Soviets’ fleet “bastions.” Reagan resisted Soviet demands to put cruise missiles like the then-new Tomahawk on the bargaining table – and instead, by deploying such missiles into the armed forces in Europe and the Far East, in conjunction with a comprehensive force build-up, he shifted the theater “correlation of forces” in our favor.  The Pershing-II ballistic missile deployment in 1983 was just such a concrete game-changing measure.

Reagan did not neglect security issues beyond the Soviet Union, mounting military responses to both Libyan terrorism and maritime terrorism in the Persian Gulf, during the Iran-Iraq War.  We can find fault today with the scope and character of some of his measures; but his predecessors had, with the exception of Carter’s failure to rescue the embassy hostages from Tehran, attempted little or nothing.  Reagan did not stamp out Islamic terrorism, by any means, but he did render it less of an avenue for Soviet exploitation against the West than his predecessors had managed to.

Reagan also, of course, supported local freedom movements against Soviet-proxy governments, in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, and Central America.  He provided them supplies, cash, and means of communication.  He further implemented a “Latin American Marshall Plan,” intended to foster democracy rather than authoritarian caudillo-ism throughout the region, along with – indispensably – encouraging economic market reforms, and strengthened ties with the US.  At every step, his approach was to hold territory, retake it, build up an intimidating presence next to it, or threaten the Soviets’ hold on it.  The implications of his success for current issues like Afghanistan and Iraq are not to be missed.

This territory-oriented approach was pursued in natural concert with the third Reagan principle:  emphasizing the outcome of liberty and self-determination for the peoples of disputed or menaced territories.  To a significant degree, Reagan “re-moralized” American foreign policy, changing the emphasis from expedience in our own defense, narrowly conceived, to the concept of achieving our security through actively promoting the greatest freedom for others.  Besides not fearing to challenge the USSR as an evil empire, Reagan unabashedly brought a moral commitment to fostering liberty and self-determination, in the then-peripheral nations that were perennial prey for Moscow.

Many peoples, from Poland to China to Vietnam to Cuba, were much less impressed than American policymakers with the success of nuclear deterrence and “containment” in the Cold War, because they and their children and livelihoods were the sacrifices for the West’s defensive posture.  Reagan’s unique vision was to see it as important to our security that these people be free.  Their freedom of self-determination may not mean precisely our form of constitutional government, but their option for self-determination is in every case better for them than living under brutal dictators with ties to the former Soviet Union.  It is also better for us.

Maneuvering cynically to shore up a defensive national position, regardless of the fate of other peoples, is often seen as necessary in traditional security policy.  It is usually referred to as “realism.”  America has been guilty of it along with other nations.  But it is not the American way of security, and the blunt truth is, its promise is always false.  It never achieves what we think it will.

The Reagan approach of pursuing security through promoting the freedom and self-determination of others is often disparaged as “Wilsonian idealism,” but it is actually a very different thing, looking not to international collectivization – Wilson’s signature concept – but to national self-determination for subjugated peoples.  To put in perspective which promotes security and stability better – a nation enslaved to a dictator or one whose people are free to determine their own fate – we need only compare North and South Korea.

The last principle of Reagan’s security policy applied to all his actions:  bargain hard.  The reason Reagan was able to obtain nuclear arms reductions, where his predecessors had only managed poorly verified limitations, was that he was willing to make tough demands, make good on threats, relentlessly improve his bargaining position, and walk away if the deal wasn’t good enough.  He usually did this at great cost in bad press, and even in the approval of his fellow conservatives and closest advisers.

Reagan’s November 1981 nuclear arms reduction proposal met with near-universal scorn from the media and the arms control profession, and alarmed a whole wing of American conservatives.  Gorbachev proposed the same deal back to him in 1985, and by then Reagan was able to leverage the Pershing-II deployments and SDI as bargaining chips, to ultimately get an ever better deal.  To get that better deal – the INF Treaty and the START process – he had to walk away from it in Reykjavik in 1986, when the price Gorbachev demanded was relinquishing SDI.  The Reykjavik walk-out was approved by very few of even Reagan’s most trusted advisers.  He had to walk that path virtually alone.  But it was the key to getting a remarkable deal that critics had called everything from foolish to insane when he outlined the vision back in 1981.

In issues from Iran’s nuclear program to Russia and missile defense, from Russia and the Caucasus to North Korea and China, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, hard bargaining on the Reagan model is an indispensable adjunct to policy.  It will not always look to everyone – even one’s staunchest political supporters – like the right thing to do.  There will almost always be tremendous political opposition, both at home and abroad, to building an effective bargaining position.  But hard bargaining works to achieve game-changing agreements – and Reagan showed it can work without, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, firing a shot.

Many specific security issues will face us in the next few years, and all their unique features will swirl around them begging to be viewed in narrow and oblique contexts.  But in approaching these issues, a group like Keep America Safe could look long and hard and not find a better set of basic principles than the ones Reagan used to defeat the Soviet Union and make America more secure.  The benefit to us of avoiding the disadvantageous abstractions of nuclear diplomacy, and the profitability of defending and extending the freedom and self-determination of peoples over territory, have no prospect of fading in this epoch of human history.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions”.

I wrote a much longer piece on this a few months ago, and will not rehash the whole argument here.  For links and documentation, and the extended arguments, please visit that one.

What I’ll do here is outline, first, the main arguments made by the “open gay service” advocates, and then the principal ways in which ending DADT would damage the military.

The Arguments for Ending DADT

1.  Gays already serve in the military, and are not undermining military readiness or unit cohesion.  However, their inability to be open about their orientation discourages gays from joining or staying in the military.

2.  The latter dynamic has, in a popular talking point, been encapsulated as “losing Arabic linguists” at a time we can ill afford to.  The argument many people buy into is that DADT is forcing us to dismiss Arabic linguists, and is therefore a dysfunctional policy.

The Arguments that Open Gay Service Would Harm the Military

1.  Open gay service cannot be achieved without a thorough politicization of the military.  Gay activists would ensure that everything from personnel policy to unit leadership became “about” people’s individual opinions on homosexuality, and on publicly displayed gay behavior.  DOD’s leadership, the servicemembers, and their families would all have to deal with demands for the uniformed military to march in gay parades, demands for military bases to host gay-themed events, demands for military family services to endorse and support gay unions, and a host of other social issues.  The lawsuits would start immediately.

2.  This dynamic would quickly permeate the military’s promotion and leadership systems, and make promotion contingent on a soldier’s or sailor’s positive affirmation of the overtly-advertised sexual orientation of others.

3.  Admitting gay activism to the military is an excellent way to guarantee challenges to freedom of religion and conscience.  All the major religious texts contain language proscribing homosexual behavior, and although neither Christian nor Jewish nor Muslim chaplains ever make a point of preaching on this topic, many of them would also, if asked, affirm their belief in the texts of their faiths.  So would many soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

4.  The combination of 1, 2, and 3 would distract the military from its true and valid purpose, and cause morale to decline.

Discussion

The freedom of everyone to remain silent on this issue, neither endorsing homosexuality nor objecting to it, is maintained by the DADT policy.  That is why it was selected in the first place.  The military would face a nightmarish morass of lawsuits, and hijacking of leadership time and organizational purpose, if gay activists were able to press their agenda throughout DOD.  Most Americans, if presented with the actual dilemmas that will arise, would favor reverting to DADT.  Why should an Army major with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly find his promotion to lieutenant colonel held hostage to an endorsement of homosexuality?  Why should a Navy petty officer with twelve years of service and sacrifice, including months at a time away from her family, have to affirm her support of homosexuality in order to become a chief?

One reason the military is such a big prize for gay activists is that this is how their agenda must play out, in one of the world’s most top-down organizations, premised on unity and obedience.  If DOD can be leveraged at the senior civilian level to endorse homosexual demonstrations – gay officer organizations, gay NCO organizations, gay pride month, gay-themed events for unit personnel – it will become necessary and expected for commanders and unit leaders throughout the services to show positive allegiance to, and endorsement of, these manifestations.  Failure to do so will guarantee the prejudicial attention of gay activists and their lawyers.

If you think this is an exaggeration, please visit my longer piece and review the long and growing list of things just like this being encountered in the civilian world, from the US State Department to the San Diego Fire Department to local school systems and express delivery services.  Military policy, out of self-defense if nothing else, would require leaders at all levels to evince positive affirmations about homosexuality, in order to get Congressional partisans and activists off DOD’s back, and allow it to spend some time on its primary function.

The average gay servicemember is not interested in becoming a poster child for the gay activist agenda.  Such personnel serve successfully because they, like the overwhelming majority of their uniformed fellows, are willing to live and let live.  It is true that gays serve now.  DADT doesn’t prevent them from serving.  What DADT does prevent is their service being leveraged on behalf of gay activism.  That is the crux of the matter.

Some questions Americans need to ask themselves:

– Do you think people should have to affirmatively endorse homosexuality, or explicitly disavow the pronouncements of their religious faith regarding it, in order to be promoted in their professional work?  If so, would you require a Muslim Air Force officer to disavow the Koran’s statements about the status of women, before he could be promoted?

– Is forcing the military to endorse homosexuality a good use of the taxpayer money going to national defense?

– Which is more important:  requiting the yearning of gay servicemembers for greater openness about their personal lives, or keeping the military focused on its actual purpose, rather than preoccupied with adapting to every requirement of a gay activist agenda?

– Does it really make sense that we can only have enough Arabic linguists in the military if we allow openly gay service?  My longer piece works through the case for why this problem is both misstated and overstated by the media.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.

Russia has been informing us of that in no uncertain terms.  Obama’s offense is having decided to continue down this confrontational missile defense path, but by other means.  Instead of ground-based interceptor missiles, he proposes to defend Europe (and perhaps eventually North America, although that’s somewhat fuzzy) against Iranian missiles using Aegis warships, and maybe some tactical ground-based systems (e.g., Patriot).  It’s cheap, it’s ready now, it’s not in Poland or the Czech Republic – what’s not to love?

But the Russians aren’t welfare mothers in Chicago, overcome by the charisma.  They do their homework.  And they immediately detected the flaw in this plan.  Obama can’t fool them:  it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that if we deploy Aegis warships for missile defense, anywhere around Europe, the North Atlantic, or the Arctic, we could defend Europe and/or North America against missiles launched from Russia.

The Reuters report summarizes it nicely:

Russia remains suspicious about Washington’s new anti-missile plans and fears its strategic nuclear weapons could still be threatened by the reconfigured scheme, the country’s envoy to NATO said on Tuesday.

As Russia’s NATO envoy Dmitri Rogozin asks:

“Where are the guarantees that this mobile thing, be it a boat, a cruiser, or a battleship with a mounted missile-defense system and with missile interceptors, will not sail into our northern seas?”

Where, indeed?  The telling passage of the Reuters piece follows:

Russia opposed the original U.S. plans because it did not believe assurances from Washington that they were directed at future missile launches from countries like Iran. It feared the scheme would target its own arsenal, upsetting the strategic nuclear weapons balance in Europe.

“The strategic nuclear weapons balance in Europe.”  See, there they go again, still living in the Cold War.

This is a point Americans need to understand.  The Russians still predicate their concept of national power on being able to hold Europe and the US at risk with long-range ballistic missiles.  They will never cease objecting to American missile defense plans, because all of the ones we would reasonably come up with might, in fact, be used to defend us and our allies against Russia’s missiles, as well as against anyone else’s.

Very few Americans are aware today that we officially renounced the concept of security based on a “nuclear weapons balance” – the premise of “MAD” during the Cold War – in George W. Bush’s first year in office.  The 9/11 attacks preempted this whole issue in our national consciousness.

But a memory jog may call to mind the fact that Bush abrogated the old ABM Treaty, by which we had agreed not to develop defenses against ICBMs and SLBMs (the submarine-launched versions).  He did this by the treaty’s terms, which allowed abrogation by one party on notification; and his purpose was, precisely, to repudiate the concept of security through mutual assured destruction.  Doing so left the US free both to develop and deploy missile defenses, and to minimize the significance of a “balance,” among nuclear arsenals, to our decisions about our own.  By abrogating the ABM Treaty, we specifically withdrew acknowledgment of a Russian “right” to hold us and our allies at risk, as a guarantee of Russia’s security against us.  By the same token, we no longer asked Russia to acknowledge an American “right” to hold Russia at risk.

Bush outlined the posture underlying this policy as early as a 1 May 2001 speech at the National Defense University.  He enshrined this major shift in national policy in the Treaty of Moscow, signed with Russia in May 2002.  The treaty, also known as the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), was intended as a follow-on to the stalled START II negotiations, which sought to bring US and Russian arsenals down significantly below even the START I levels.  Although the parties agreed in principle on nuclear arms reductions, a key point remained unresolved, as affirmed through diplomatic exceptions:  the US asserted the national right to build and deploy a missile defense, while Russia was in disagreement with that posture.

Russia has consistently, since 1983, expressed her position as follows:  if the US resists being held at risk by Moscow’s strategic missile force, we are seeking a destabilizing advantage over Russia, and imperiling her security.  Russia never accepted the shift in US policy announced by Bush, and continues to operate on the assumption that missile defenses are destabilizing.  Stability, in a Russian view that has been expressed absolutely without variation for more than two decades, depends on Russia being able to hold the US and other nations at risk with her nuclear arsenal.

Obama made a huge de facto concession to this view with his announcement that we would scrap the East European missile defense sites.  The Russians are now pointing out that any missile defense that could intercept Russian missiles violates Russia’s view of her security requirements.  The argument is more difficult in the US now, because there are dozens of geographic permutations for a mobile missile defense against Iranian missiles, and it becomes absurd to earnestly argue – as many well-intentioned but shortsighted pundits did about the East European missile defense sites – that none of them could be interpreted as a defense against Russian missiles.

The fact is, if we deploy a system that can defend us and our allies against missiles from Iran, it will be able to intercept missiles coming from Russia.  Even if we never once put Aegis warships (or improved sea-based follow-ons) in the waters of the Arctic, where they would have to be stationed to intercept ICBMs aimed at us over the North Pole – we could.  Russia won’t simply take our word for it that we aren’t going to.

I’m not counting on Obama to get this dialogue with Russia on a better footing, and inform Russia that her objections do not constitute a veto over our missile defense plans.  Bush started down the right track, but wanted to avoid a pitched confrontation with Russia over this issue.  His administration thus never acknowledged what is true:  that interceptors in Poland could have taken out Russian missiles launched on certain vectors, particularly missiles launched at Europe.  Of course they could have.  Well-meaning media commentators had to use a set of static, narrow, and easily-breached assumptions to insist that the Polish site was out of position to intercept Russian missiles – and it would have been far better for us to spare ourselves the trouble, and acknowledge that we and Russia differ on this issue.

The question remains, and Russia knows her answer to it.  Should Moscow be able to hold us and our allies at risk with nuclear weapons, as the primary means of retaining a basis of national power and guaranteeing her security?  This question, however simple it is for Russia, has been a tough one for us.  Obama is acting as if we have agreed on one particular answer.  Is he right?

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.

Unfortunately, the video link to the entire address at the Institute’s website is down, but YouTube has the following two-minute clip, which captures the speech’s flavor.

Then of course there’s the article. In it, Krauthammer lays out the argument put forth by the left that our time is indeed at hand — that we have already begun our descent into ordinary nationhood as China rises up to assume the role as the world’s next America. Face it, they say. China already owns the U.S. national debt. All that remains is for us to leave the keys in the mailbox on our way out.

As the above clip reveals, Barack Obama is no small cheerleader for the new order. He seems to believe, as do the Europeans who have so eagerly embraced him on the world stage, that we have it coming to us. In the Obaman view, the decline in American hegemony and exceptionalism is redress for our past sins, which include unilateralism when multilateralism was called for (which is always), arrogance, derision toward Europe, and — let’s not forget — mistreatment of natives here at home.

Peter Wehner at Contentions suggests that Obama’s repeated mea culpae for these and other transgressions, many of them made while standing on foreign soil, are the reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Krauthammer also presents the opposing view, that fears of China’s preeminence are exaggerated and that “declinist” predictions are cyclical. Then he rejects both views. Krauthammer maintains that the “question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no” because ultimately it comes down to a matter of choice. America, he insists, can write its own future — that “America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands.”

Which brings us back to the Obama Doctrine, which in turn suggests the choice has already been made for us. It’s a grim picture, but one countered correctly I believe by Max Boot, also of Contentions. Boot notes that Obama, whether it was intention or not, has already assumed the reins of leadership on a variety of International issues, including renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and global warming.

Boot also notes optimistically that the

U.S. economy remains the most dynamic among all the industrialized nations; our defense budget remains the largest in the world — bigger, by some measures, than the rest of the world put together; and our population remains young and energetic — not aging as rapidly as Europe, Russia, Japan, or even China.

These “fundamental ingredients of American success” are so deeply woven into the American fabric, Boot argues, that Obama may find it more difficult than he imagines to relinquish superpower status.

One can only hope.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

No, nothing has happened. The meeting is to go over the same ground the president and his advisers covered in the meeting one week ago — to discuss whether to comply with McChrystal’s call for an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops or whether to heed the advice of foreign-policy “expert” Joe Biden, who recommends a counter-insurgencyterrorism strategy, conducting air strikes designed to bomb key targets from afar.

So, why the second meeting in so short a space of time? The answer is simple: Afghanistan is suddenly a hot topic in the media and on the minds of the electorate. It is on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. It is the subject of countless op-ed pieces, some pro troop surge, some anti, some mixed. It is a topic being discussed and hotly debated around water coolers and dinner tables across the country.

Obama has called for another confab because, as with virtually everything he does as president, it looks like the right thing to do. When there is concern in the country about a particular topic or policy, the president puts on his “concerned leader” face and springs into “concerned leader” mode.

For this president, unlike any other I can remember, appearances are everything. You want to persuade the American public that physicians are on board with ObamaCare? You stage a photo op in the Rose Garden surrounded by 150 doctors, making sure that you have instructed them to wear their lab coats so that they look official. What happens if some of them show up in street clothes instead? The White House Office of Looking the Part goes into its wardrobe department and then hands out white lab coats.

This tendency on Obama’s part to play a president on TV and in the public eye, rather than be a real one, goes back to his campaign days. When the conservative press revealed that he had spent twenty years in a black nationalist church with a virulent racist as its pastor, Obama suddenly appeared concerned about racism, as though it had been on his mind all along. He gave an historic speech about the need to have an honest dialogue about race (which, nota bene, he has yet to follow up on).

The speech in which he accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency wasn’t held in some stuffy auditorium. That wouldn’t have conveyed the right look and feel. So the event was held rather at Invesco Field in Denver, on a stage moreover dolled up to look like a Greek temple. The goal was to give the appearance of an Olympian god descending from the heights to greet 80,000 lucky suppliants.

The nation is currently beset with a host of problems — two wars, record unemployment, a still-foundering economy, a health-care fiasco that could ultimately end in socialized medicine, and an energy proposal guaranteed to lead us deeper into recession. Not all of these problems are of Obama’s making. Nevertheless, right now we need a real president. We need a leader who can meet the issues head on and effect policies that will begin to move us toward solutions. Sadly, we don’t have one. Instead, we have someone more interested in looking good than acting good — which in the end is a recipe for disaster.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Cohen is a smart man with a deservedly-excellent reputation as a scholar of politics and the military, and his argument had a number of sound elements and a lot of pertinent history.  But the glaring shortfall I found in his thesis was his dismissal of the atypical character of presidential policy during the Vietnam years.  The other examples he uses are Lincoln, Churchill (in WWII), Clemenceau (WWI), and Ben-Gurion (Israel’s war of independence).  The point he derives from surveying the five separate situations is that generals do disagree with the strategies and methods selected by their civilian (or at least ultimate) bosses, and that doesn’t mean the civilian bosses have erred, or ought to be mistrusted or undercut.  Ultimately, the supreme commander, particularly when he is chosen by a constitutional process, has the “right to be wrong.”

In a sense we would all agree with that, with the proviso that the supreme commander’s “right to be wrong” is subject to the review of the people.  But what Cohen doesn’t acknowledge is that one of these things – Vietnam – is not like the others.  In all four other cases, and indeed in most cases we could come up with, the supreme commander was trying to use armed force to change the existing situation in a decisive way.  Each of the four supreme commanders Cohen considers, even Clemenceau, had a clear objective that sensible people would refer to as “winning” or “victory.”  That quantity was, by the conscious choice of our political leaders, missing throughout our engagement in Vietnam.

And that is why the generals were appalled and disgusted by the political decision-making, particularly through the earlier years of that conflict (the dynamic changed significantly with Nixon), and why so many in the ranks of the armed forces still resent the way the military was employed there.

Ask most military officers what were the worst uses of armed force since WWII, and you will hear:  Vietnam, Somalia, and Lebanon.  All three of these actions share the same character:  deployment of force to act as a placeholder – a national marker – in a dangerous and unstable situation we had no intention of trying to fundamentally alter.  Servicemembers do tend to resent being deployed as bullet-sponges.  An officer’s worst nightmare is having to beat up his troops day after day in a situation that, by political choice, we have elected not to try and change for the better.  That use of the military – that one right there – is the one that becomes unjustifiable, and loses the moral commitment of the troops.

This brings me to our policy in Afghanistan, and how McChrystal’s recommendations are emerging as a de facto challenge to Obama.  We did not see this under Bush, even in the darkest days of 2005 and 2006, because there were three things no one in the chain of command doubted: that Bush’s objective was a fundamentally altered situation in Iraq, that he would not leave the troops to merely hunker down on defense there, and that he would be ready to recognize what would not work, and who could not be compromised with.  Bush’s approach was more like fixing what’s wrong with your car.  Identify it, get the job done, pay the bill.  The Vietnam approach was more like improvisational theater:  let’s send some troops, do a little bombing, try a little finesse at the conference table, see what that buys us.  There will always be people to whom this sounds clever and interesting – but the military will not be among them.

What appears to be emerging with our Afghanistan policy is the attitude, at the national level, that gave us the Vietnam years of 1964 to 1969.  Obama has resisted acknowledging that his stated objective – to defeat, dismantle, and disrupt Al Qaeda – cannot be achieved without immunizing the Afghan populace against the guerrilla tactics of the Taliban.  Afghan territory must be secured against the Taliban guerrillas, through the concerted will of a persuaded people:  that is what McChrystal is telling him.  Otherwise, Obama’s main objective cannot be obtained.

Granted, the vice president disagrees, as apparently does National Security Adviser Jim Jones. Perhaps it is possible to argue about whether we can effectively hunt Al Qaeda without pacifying Afghanistan.  (I’ve written on that here and here.)  But here is the supreme point.  Obama’s tendency appears, regardless, to be disavowing any intention of using armed force to change the existing situation in a decisive way.  If Obama decides to shift to a Central Asian manhunt, and use our troops in Afghanistan solely for that, he will be turning them into bullet-sponges, in a deteriorating situation he has no intention of transforming in our – their – favor.

The difference Eliot Cohen did not recognize, between Vietnam and all the other statesman-soldier situations he surveyed, was that in Vietnam, Washington was trying to use our military not to achieve a political decision, but as a beleaguered police force, in a holding action whose parameters shifted on a whim.  Generals will typically have serious philosophical objections to lending themselves to this approach:  they know what it is their soldiers will be asked to do.  Policemen in tough urban areas at least get to go home at night.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.

The campaign in Afghanistan, already a multilateral action for the record books, is now framing that question in stark and concrete terms. One reason the Obama administration may have been caught so flat-footed by the troop request from General McChrystal is that the multilateralism of our approach to the Afghan problem has rarely, if ever, been surpassed. Afghanistan has been both NATO-ized and Asianized: it is the major preoccupation of the NATO alliance today, representing the largest overseas deployment of almost every NATO contributor; but it is also the main overseas military commitment of Japan (now under reconsideration), as well as a regional issue with its own standing working group under the Russia- and China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO, in fact, held a summit conference devoted to Afghanistan in March, attended by U.S. and other NATO representatives, and has treated Afghanistan as one of its main issues at each conference in the last five years. (See a good summary of the SCO and Afghanistan here.)

For at least two of those years, as any online search will reveal, pundits and politicians have been making the case that more cooperation between NATO and Russia is the key in Afghanistan. Russia is now embedded in the humanitarian effort there, and has assumed a de facto patronage of Hamid Karzai’s government. India has become a major commercial investor in Afghanistan, although China is holding back because of the ongoing danger. Pakistan has roused itself to a significant effort against the Taliban in its northwest territories. Even Iran has been welcomed to the fold of multilateral diplomacy on Afghan issues.

America’s top officials in Afghanistan, fully aware of all these dynamics, assembled and forwarded a plan to implement President Obama’s new strategy-one that incorporates and relies on these multilateral, diplomatic, and economic factors. In the process they determined that if we are to “defeat, dismantle, and disrupt Al Qaeda,” it is essential to deny the Taliban territory by immunizing the population against the Taliban’s guerrilla tactics. But the means to do that cannot be found in cooperation with Russia, commercial investment by India, or the discussion points of SCO working groups. The means for immunizing the Afghan population against the Taliban is boots on the ground.

If Albert Brooks scripted a send-up of self-important “smart power” multilateralism, it would look like the effort in Afghanistan. And in Brooks’s hands, of course, the inevitable comeuppance would be handled with painful honesty. All the multilateralism in Afghanistan-a pragmatic holding strategy for Bush, an ideological sine qua non for Obama-cannot achieve what a unified, military-centered offensive can. If Obama’s objective remains defeating, dismantling, and disrupting Al Qaeda, he will choose the military-centered option or he will not achieve it.

Our European NATO allies remain unwilling to make more than token additions to their troop strength in Afghanistan. The SCO nations have consistently declined to make military contributions in Afghanistan. If there is to be a military-centered initiative to drive back the Taliban, it will have to undertaken by the U.S. In this most multilateral of operations, the way ahead comes down, as it has since 1945, to an American decision.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.

To be sure, the president has proved a tough read at times. I myself have spent time pondering the motivations for some of his actions. I think I have finally hit on an answer. Barack Obama, age 48, is belatedly going through adolescence. His mind obviously is on girls and fast cars, not affairs of state, which are BOR-IINNG!

In the same way your teenager needs to be told twice to take out the garbage, so Barack of the raging hormones needs to be told repeatedly to meet with his general in Afghanistan. Say what one will about George W. Bush’s famous infelicity with the English language, at least he conducted himself like an adult. Faced with a similar situation in the Middle East, Bush spoke with his generals on the ground every week or two. Not Obama — not until the conservative press (which nags, nags, nags) finally goaded him into meeting with his security team in the White House Situation Room yesterday to conduct a meeting by satellite with Gen. Stanley McChrystal. (“You should really visit your grandma. She’s not getting any younger.” “Aww, I don’t wanna. I’ll call her, OK?!”)

Like an adolescent, Obama has plenty of homework right now. He has health care reform, which he chose to make a priority in his young presidency. He has a still-flagging economy to contend with. (He also has a history report due Wednesday.) So what does he do? He hops on a plane (in the back seat of a friend’s car) and heads off to Denmark to make a pitch to the International Olympic Committee on behalf of his buddies in Chicago (heads to the arcade at the mall).

To make matters worse, teen Obama has no conception of — or at least no concern for — what things cost. His trip to Copenhagen, by some estimates, will cost taxpayers $10 million, partly because his “girlfriend” had to be included and went in a separate plane (car).

And finally there’s the matter of “chipping in for gas.” Can you imagine the carbon footprint of a 747 and a 727, each carrying essentially one half of a married couple, for a trip destined to last 15 hours? Can Obama imagine it? Isn’t he concerned that he might be called into Vice Principal Gore’s office tomorrow?

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

1. First, Kristol now believes for the first time that President Barack H. Obama is paving the groundwork for rejecting Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation of a COIN strategy for Afghanistan, including increasing troop levels.

Note that it was the Obamacle Himself who appointed McChrystal to head up his present commands, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A), just three months ago; and he it was who ordered McChrystal to undertake a complete review of the Afghanistan policy.

I suspect Obama expected McChrystal to recommend declaring defeat and pulling out. But in response to Obama’s order, McChrystal released a 66-page report to continuing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that called for significantly increasing troop levels there and redeploying the force in a counterinsurgency mode, similar to Iraq.

Ever since, as several bloggers have argued (notably John Hinderaker at Power Line), Obama has acted like a man who deeply regrets having picked an actual fighting general in the first place — and who wants to prepare the American people for the complete rejection of his own appointee’s report, in favor of a phased withdrawal from “the war we should be fighting,” as some guy named Barack Obama called it during the campaign (in contrast to Iraq, the war we were supposed to lose, one presumes).

2. Second, and far more shocking, is some political intel that Kristol received from a person who is in “cose contact” with top Defense officials: That holdover George W. Bush Defense Secretary Bob Gates will be asked by Obama to step down at the end of the year… and that Obama plans to name former senator Chuck Hagel, who never met a war he didn’t want us to withdraw from, as his new Secretary of Retreat and Defeat.

Hagel was an infantry grunt in Vietnam for two years, leaving shortly after the Tet Offensive; that experience seems to have colored his attitude towards all subsequent conflicts: He sometimes votes for them (as for example the Iraq war); but as soon as the going gets tough, Hagel demands an immediate and aggressive surrender.

• He was one of only four Republicans in July 2007 who voted in favor of cloture on a bill to force withdrawal from Iraq starting 120 days from that vote; the other three were Olympia Snowe (ME, 12%), Susan Collins (ME, 20%), and Gordon Smith of Oregon, liberals all.
• In railing against the Iraq COIN strategy of Gen. David Petraeus, Hagel called it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out.” (I don’t recall Hagel ever issuing an apology, or even a statement, after the Petraeus strategy proved decisive in our victory in Iraq.)

• Speaking about Israeli’s incursion into Lebanon to stop Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on their northern cities, Hagel blurted out:

  “The sickening slaughter on both sides must end and it must end now…. President Bush must call for an immediate cease-fire. This madness must stop.”…

  “How do we realistically believe that a continuation of the systematic destruction of an American friend — the country and people of Lebanon — is going to enhance America’s image and give us the trust and credibility to lead a lasting and sustained peace effort in the Middle East?” asked Hagel, the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Yes, the perfect man to defend America — Barack Obama style. I can just picture the furious and manly letters of strong disapproval Hagel will shoot off whenever some dictator funds and gives safe haven to a terrorist group while they blow up another American embassy.

Currently, Chuck Hagel is Chairman of the Board of the Atlantic Council, a foreign-policy think tank cum policy advocacy group that appears to lean heavily towards diplomacy above everything — talking loudly and forgetting to bring any stick at all, big or small. (E.g., its International Advisory Board is headed by Brent Scowcroft and includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Edelman, Lawrence H. Summers, and a huge inflation of bankers and CEOs of vast multinational corporations.)

Hagel replaced outgoing Chairman Jim Jones, who was tapped to serve as Obama’s National Security Advisor; Jones was last seen offering what we called “the weirdest explanation to date for cancelling the long-range ballistic-missile defense system in Eastern Europe — while simultaneously betraying our allies, Poland and the Czech Republic.”

Since the Jim Jones appointment as security sock puppet worked out so well for Obama, it certainly seems plausible that he would go back to the same well to draw out a bucketful of Defense Secretary. Admittedly, Kristol just lost his father, Irving Kristol; but it was hardly the sort of shocking or unanticipated demise that might throw William Kristol into a blue funk and darken his normal optimism.

The threatened appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense would be catastrophic for the war efforts, all of them: Iraq, Afghanistan, the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis, intelligence gathering, interrogations, dealing with Pakistan, North Korea, China, Russia… and of course, Hagel would be a disaster for Israel, as he would almost certainly back Obama to the hilt in the latter’s quest to force Israel back to the indefensible borders of the pre-Six Day War era. (In exchange for the Palestinian’s promise that they might seriously consider deciding whether or not to recognize Israel sometime in the distant and not very likely future.)

Appointing Hagel would seriously diminish our ability to protect our allies or even defend ourselves, and in general would signal the end of American power and leadership in the world, at least for a while (say until 2013). Therefore, I conclude that Obama is already plotting to make the appointment.

I must also conclude that the Senate will swiftly approve the nominee;, Hagel was once one of them… therefore, “comity of the Senate” and all that, Republicans will probably support him, though he rarely supported them while in that august body.

And there you have it, your recommended minimum daily allowance of political pessimism and national-defense despair.

Gross-toasted to Big Lizards…

That’s a pretty pressing agenda. So what’s the ol’ boy up to these days? Which of these many key issues is he doubling down on? I’m afraid the answer is “None of the above.” Obama, with the Mrs. in tow, is on his way to Copenhagen to try to persuade the Olympic Committee to choose the Prex’s adopted hometown of Chicago as the site of the 2016 Olympic Games.

Sounds pretty important to me. Here he’s got decisions awaiting him with respect to sending more troops to Afghanitan, unemployment reaching double digits in several states, and he’s got time to fly to Denmark to try to get the Olympics for his hometown? I say why not? Whether he succeeds or not, 2016 will be an occasion for Americans to recall what an astonishingly, mindbogglingly bad choice the country made when it elected this bum in 2008.

As to the likely success of his pitch, Chris Lehane, a staffer to former Vice President Al Gore, said the expectations will be high for Obama’s trip: “If they don’t come back with the gold, clearly there will be the same questions that American basketball would get if they don’t come back with the gold — they are expected to win.”

Speaking of Gore, doesn’t he have the least bit of concern over the amount of carbon Obama will be spewing jetting to Copenhagen and back the next day?

The Journal reports that Sarkozy in particular “had been ‘frustrated’ for months about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to confront Iran” about its secret enrichment plant “and saw an opportunity to change momentum.” He had favored releasing the information a day earlier in front of the U.N. Security Council, seeing this as way of rallying international support for strong action against Iran. The Obama administration had scotched the idea, insisting that it would “’spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons.” Can’t have an international crisis upstaging one of Obama’s “moments” in his well-rehearsed role Leader of the Free World.

Nor was Sarkozy thrilled with Obama’s tone once he let the cat out of the bag. Iran, Obama said, is “going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice.” That’s it? Not exactly the sternest rebuke in the history of the U.S. presidency. In any case, it seems as though Iran has already made a choice, and that’s to poke a finger squarely in the eye of the pansy the American people elected to lead them. The day after Obama issued his statement, Ahmadinejad made a statement of his own, telling Obama essentially to take a hike.

As Richard Cohen notes in the Washington Post, Obama is all about issuing deadlines and ultimata and then promptly forgetting all about them. Ahmadinejad, apparently mindful of this, knows enough to ignore what little bluster Obama summons up.

Sarkozy in the meantime has not been so passive in his condemnation of Iran or Obama’s continued desire for talks. “[W]hat have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community?” he said following Obama’s G-20 bombshell. “Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Bush erroneously says Iran announced desire for nuclear weapons
March 20, 2008: President Bush contended that Iran has “declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people” and that the Islamic Republic could be hiding a secret program. Iran, however, has never publicly proclaimed a desire for nuclear weapons and has repeatedly insisted that the uranium enrichment program it’s operating in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads…

NIE Report on Iran Contradicts Bush Claims
December 3, 2007: A new U.S. intelligence report on Iran says that Tehran may be able to develop a nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015. But the National Intelligence Estimate finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in the fall of 2003 due to international pressure — contradicting claims by the Bush administration…

01:18:42 PST: Port of Los Angeles

An unmarked cargo van drives cautiously into a warehouse complex adjacent to America’s busiest container port.

04:18:45 EST: Port of New York, New Jersey Marine Terminal

A small van parks in an alley abutting the Customs facility at the East Coast’s busiest seaport.

04:20:12 EST: In Dearborn, Michigan, six messages are sent to six different text pagers, three of which ride in a van in Los Angeles; three others of which sit in a van parked in New Jersey.

Two occupants in each van receive the messages. The text of each message reads: A’uzu billahi minashaitanir rajim. Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.

In the back of each van is a three-by-three-by-two plywood box, which contains a carefully packaged and shielded device. The occupants of each van meticulously unbox their respective devices.

Inside each device is a core of approximately 60 pounds of enriched uranium, produced in an Iranian nuclear reactor ostensibly for purposes of “clean, safe energy.”

Once unboxed, each device exposes an igniter on one of its sides. The design of the igniter reveals that each device is a “gun-type” atomic weapon.

The gun device is similar to “Little Boy”, the bomb detonated over Hiroshima. While such a design is obsolete for technically advanced countries, the gun method does not require significant engineering or manufacturing prowess. It is therefore made-to-order for terrorist organizations and rogue regimes.

Within moments of the pages being received, a tidal wave of fire engulfs Manhattan, rolling to Harlem to the north, Brooklyn to the east, Staten Island to the south and Jersey City to the west.

And a massive plume of smoke rises over the Port of Los Angeles.

At 4:26 EST, secure phones throughout government begin ringing. Including one on the President’s nightstand.

Hat tip: WetBonder. Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

Barack Hussein Obama!

He strategizes like a pro,

To Mean Iran’s nukes he says NO!

Barack Hussein Obama!

If I hadn’t read it myself I would not have believed anyone could write something as sycophantic and credulous as Joe Cirincione’s HuffPo piece today on The Obama Maneuver.  Let the opening speak for itself:

Obama knew all along that Iran had a secret uranium factory. He may be more of a master strategist than his foes–and even his friends–have realized.

In no hurry to move on from this theme, Cirincione continues thus:

The key to understanding today’s announcement on Iran is this: President Obama knew about the secret Iranian facility nine months ago. Before he began his strategy of engagement, he knew Iran was lying about its program. When he extended his hand in friendship, he knew Iran had built a secret factory to enrich uranium. Before he offered direct talks, he knew Iran was hiding a nuclear weapons breakout capability.

He can see you’re still not getting it, so Cirincione adds this clarification:

Each move was denounced as “weak” and “naïve” by the right. That talk looks foolish today. These were the moves of chess master, carefully positioning pieces on the board, laying a trap, and springing it at the opportune moment.

A trap, I tell you.  A trap!  And so cleverly laid.

We now know that Obama was not acting on impulse, or philosophy or general principles, but on deep strategy. He knew better than his critics that Ahmadinejad could not be trusted. He just had a better plan for how to deal with him.

I should probably stop picking on Cirincione.  He reveals a certain analytical naiveté of his own in the next sentence:

Obama is now well positioned to unite world leaders in a long-term strategy to back Iran away from nuclear weapons.

This is a key weakness in his argument, because the truth is:  Not really.  Obama is dealing with the same world leaders he was dealing with on Wednesday, and there is no evidence their positions have changed.  Britain, France, and Germany are with us on sanctions, although the extent of their commitment is untested yet.  Russia’s Medvedev, as Jennifer Rubin points out, does not exclude sanctions on Iran, but in clarifying Moscow’s position expresses as little favor toward them as ever.  China’s diplomats have not evinced a change of front today, after the US revelation, as opposed to their firm dismissal of sanctions yesterday.  Nor are Russia and China the only variables.

Of the other nations currently serving on the UN Security Council, we cannot necessarily expect consensus in favor of “tough” sanctions.  Turkey’s and Croatia’s may be the only “safe” votes for truly punishing sanctions.  Japan and Austria, also serving terms, have significant and growing commercial ties to Iran; Japan has had reservations about sanctions during previous efforts to impose them. Moreover, Japan’s new prime minister, the first in more than a generation not elected from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (and billed as the “Japanese Obama”), has been making a tremendous point of changing the relationship of Japan with America, and entering a new era of relations with Russia and China.  His avowedly “Asian” focus could well militate against breaking ranks with the Asian giants, Russia and China, on the Iranian problem in “their” back yard.

Among the other nations on the Security Council right now – Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Libya, Vietnam, Mexico, and Uganda – there are no automatic votes “for” tougher sanctions on Iran.  We can expect still other leading nations, like India and Brazil, to resist a toughening of sanctions.  The UN has had sanctions imposed on Iran since 2006, and these nations, along with a number of others, are likely to agree among themselves that a continuation of lighter sanctions – perhaps with some minor and non-punitive tweaks – represents the right mix of politics and operational methodology.  Certainly Venezuela, and Chavez’s growing flock of president-for-life associates in Central America, will oppose stronger sanctions on Iran.  A number of African nations will join Libya, which is almost certain to oppose tougher sanctions.

Obama himself proclaimed in his UN speech that the era of American leadership is over.  But it will take some serious leadership to get the UN to impose serious sanctions on oil-exporting Iran during a global recession.  The disclosure of the undeclared uranium enrichment site at Qom is a revelation only to the Western left:  everyone else was already clear that Iran has been systematically lying to and deceiving the international community.  Obama’s presentation of a new data point will not change minds that already grasped the underlying trend.  Arm-twisting, horse-trading, playing the leader card – these are the methods of obtaining a grudging consensus to do difficult things.  Obama has basically promised that we will not use them.

As for the rest of Cirincione’s ode to Obama, counterfactual assertions occur early and often.  ”Obama’s missile defense decision,” he says, “a move that puts more military assets in position more quickly against the Iranian missiles…increases the pressure on Iran.”  This is an absurd statement.  Scrapping the East European missile sites instead assures Iran that we will be unable to intercept the long-range missiles it is developing.  It was wholly unnecessary to scrap those sites in order to deploy tactical anti-missile forces against Iran’s shorter-range missiles.  Since our tactical capability already exists, is mobile, and is well-known to Iran, the relevant point for Tehran’s planners is whether we have it deployed at a given time.  To the announcement that we plan to deploy it as a shield against shorter-range missiles, Iran’s logical response would be: “Du-uh.  Tell me something I can’t figure out by reading Aviation Weekly.”

It is wearying, and would take too long, to deconstruct every sentence.  Cirincione does make the superficially sensible point that “The obvious solution is for Iran to agree to intrusive inspections.” In a bubbling cauldron of goo like this piece, the superficially sensible is a welcome relief.  But even here skepticism is in order.  This is an obvious solution, but is it an effective one?

Iran has been inspected frequently since 2003, accepting varying levels of intrusiveness.  Of course, what Cirincione has in mind is more intrusive inspections.  But who will execute and supervise them?  The same IAEA that has backed and shuffled on Iran’s deceptions for the last six years?  The IAEA that has come out two or three times a year with eye-opening reports, accompanied by warnings that the situation is of grave concern - but that also phrases its communications to blunt the appearance of urgency in its message, because of its leadership’s political opposition to confrontation?  The politicization of the IAEA’s mission in Iran has been well established.

What the Obama Maneuver is likely to buy us is the appearance of Iranian cooperation, under the beaming satisfaction of a UN relieved, by that chimera, of immediate responsibility.  Iran has agreed to “more intrusive” inspections before, and may do so again.  The P5 and other parties may profess themselves satisfied, with the usual proviso that there be rigorous verification; and photo ops are sure to abound.  Iran may even find it the better part of valor to ostentatiously “give up” the newly revealed site at Qom, perhaps turning it into a facility for renewable energy research. And yet none of this will mean that Iran’s nuclear purpose has been deflected.

We have a new line of effort in the Iranian nuclear game.  But we have all the same old players, factors, and influences.  The Obama Maneuver is most likely to end up a sideshow, distracting us from the set-up going on in the center-ring.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions“.