States of stupidity (guest post by Peter T.)

In mid-2014, Obama defined the core of his foreign policy as “don't do stupid shit.”  Obama followed up by normalising relations with Cuba, negotiating a detente on nuclear matters with Iran that deprived the U.S. neo-cons of a potential casus belli, and refusing to be drawn into the ground war in Syria and Iraq.  Not doing stupid shit is a low threshold, and critics have charged that even so, it has not always been met.  Doubtless so, but it was a welcome contrast to the previous administration that made stupid routine.  Here, I want to look at one part of U.S. policy in the Middle East, a part that surely merits the label “stupid,” a part that just looks as if it went from being merely stupid to being moronic.

This Huffington Post piece by Jeffrey Sachs more or less covers the background.[*]  In focusing on Secretary Clinton's role, however, it misses an interesting point.  As Sachs notes, the CIA has done stupid stuff with disastrous consequences at least once a decade since its inception.  Further, as the CIA's effort in Syria has gone from muddle to failure post-Clinton, it has not therefore slackened.  Even as Kerry was negotiating a limited cease-fire (labeled a "cessation of hostilies"), the CIA stepped up arms deliveries and its foreign government partners were threatening armed intervention.

So this is not just Hillary Clinton, or Obama.  One explanation is to see this sort of thing as the real face of U.S. policy.  Another is to see it as the play of bureaucratic and other interests allowed some degree of play.  A third possibility, though, is to see it as an example of a state which has no single locus of decision – a state with multiple independent centres of power.

This challenges our ordinary conception of the state.  But examples are not hard to find. One thinks of the British and French frontier officers who often drove imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, sporadically checked by some areas of home government and encouraged by others.  Or the American settlers whose actions negated treaties with native tribes even as they were signed.  Or the way the German General Staff formulated military plans without regard for the Foreign Office, or how the French Foreign Ministry neglected to formally communicate a key diplomatic agreement to their general staff.  A final example is Japan in the 1930s.  Who was in charge: Tokyo or the young officers of the Kwantung Army?  The answer surely is both.

The possibility is that the CIA is so embedded in Washington and foreign networks of influence that it is effectively beyond the control of the formal mechanisms of the U.S. state. Certain versions of international-relations theory view states as single, "unitary" actors.  More realistic theories take into account the play of internal forces that shape decisions. Both approaches assume that, however arrived at and however discordant or contradictory, policy is at least the expression of a unified process.  The examples above suggest this is not always the case.

-- Peter T.

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[*] I have certain disagreements with the Sachs piece that I plan to address at some later point.  I will add that guest posts at this blog obviously represent the views of the guest author and do not necessarily represent, down to every detail, the views of the blog's proprietor. -- LFC

Thoughts on nuclear weapons and the Middle East

Update (3/11): This FP column by Graham Allison is to the point.

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The U.S. and the USSR had a few close calls during the Cold War, moments when the possibility of a nuclear exchange came too close for comfort.  India and Pakistan had an apparently close call during the Kargil crisis in 1999.  The existence of these close calls means that nuclear deterrence is not an airtight guarantee against a nuclear exchange.  Nor is 'the nuclear taboo' an absolute guarantee, since an exchange between two nuclear-armed countries might conceivably occur essentially unintentionally, i.e. by accident.

However, while nuclear deterrence did not provide an absolute guarantee during the Cold War and while there were a few close calls, on the whole it worked remarkably well, at least in the narrow, relevant sense of "worked".  The Cold War never turned into a hot war between the superpowers, who wreaked havoc on the Third World via proxy wars and caused an enormous amount of human misery and death, but managed to avoid the sort of cataclysmic exchange that, in the worst-case scenario, would have meant the end of anything resembling 'civilized' life on the planet.  In other words, the "delicate balance of terror" between the superpowers (to borrow the title of a famous article by Albert Wohlstetter from the late 1950s) turned out to be quite sturdy (safety as "the sturdy child of terror," as Churchill put it, in something of a metaphorical mash-up).

These rather unoriginal reflections may serve as a prelude to the thought that, if Iran should one day acquire a nuclear weapon or the capacity to obtain one in a short time frame, the consequence would not be an existential threat to Israel, contrary to Netanyahu's assertions (n.b. I haven't yet read the full transcript of his speech to Congress).  Israel of course has its own (officially unacknowledged) nuclear arsenal, and there is every reason to suppose that nuclear deterrence would operate between Iran and Israel as it operates between India and Pakistan, and as it operated between the U.S. and the USSR during the Cold War.  That doesn't mean no possibility whatsoever that an exchange could occur, but it suggests it would be highly unlikely.  The Iranian leadership would have to be insane to launch a deliberate nuclear strike on a nuclear-armed state with a powerful conventional military, one closely allied to the most militarily powerful country in the world, and I'm aware of no evidence to suggest that Iran's leadership is insane.  (Though doubtless there are people who would rush to furnish some were they to read this post, which they probably won't.)

The 'threat' from an Iranian bomb, insofar as there would be one, would come, or so it seems to me, in the form of an increased boldness on Iran's part to throw its weight around in the region, engage in coercive diplomacy vis-a-vis, e.g., Saudi Arabia or Turkey, and generally become more of a nuisance in the eyes of its adversaries.  That's not nothing, of course, but it is not the existential threat to Israel that some people claim would be the result of an Iranian nuclear-weapons capacity.

The latest news from the talks is that Iran has rejected the proposal (or 'demand', whichever it was) for a 10-year freeze on certain nuclear activities.  However, the talks will and should continue.  Netanyahu's prescription of increased sanctions and an end to the negotiations does not seem like a prescription for anything other than disaster in the long run.  As Peter T. pointed out in his guest posts recently published on this blog (see here and here), Iran is, by virtue of its size, location, capabilities, and level of development, not the sort of country that can be sanctioned into submission -- not, at least, without setting the stage for precisely the kind of potentially explosive or catastrophic consequences that everyone should be eager to avoid.

A final note about how we think about security claims, which I'm tacking on because I just read Jarrod Hayes's post at Duck of Minerva.  Jarrod points out that a speaker's authority to make security claims may be undermined if the claims come to be seen by the target audience as 'political' (though all security claims are political).  Although I agree with this, I think Netanyahu's speech is an instance where one should focus on the objective merits of his claims as much as on their 'authority'.  Jarrod writes: "Even though the construction of security is intersubjective, it is spoken about in objective terms. Where the objectivity of the claim rubs thin, as in Netanyahu’s case, his ability to speak security is undermined."  

But the objectivity of Netanyahu's claim rubs thin not simply because it may be perceived as 'political' but because it lacks 'objective' merit.  The fact that the construction of security is intersubjective does not mean that there is not a world 'out there' about which one can make better or worse, more plausible or less plausible, claims.  The claim that an Iranian nuclear capacity poses an existential threat to Israel is unconvincing, for reasons suggested above.  It is unconvincing because it clashes with what history, logic, and evidence suggest about how the real world works.  Contrary to Patrick Jackson's view that the world does not exist independently of the mind (mind-world monism), I believe there is a 'real world', that it exists independently of our minds, and that claims about how the world works can be judged as more or less convincing on the basis of evidence.  That does not mean I am a neo-positivist (and actually since I have no research agenda and essentially no standing in the IR 'profession', it doesn't really matter what my meta-theoretical leanings are); what it does mean is that in this case we should not lose sight of whether Netanyahu's claims, irrespective of his authority to make them, accord with what we know about the real world. 

Peter T. on the U.S. in the Middle East (Part 1)

Note: This is the first part of a two-part guest post by Peter T.  He is a retired civil servant who worked in Australian national intelligence for 12 years, then in law enforcement intelligence and related fields.  He traveled in Asia in the 1970s and taught in Iran in 1978.  He has degrees in history and International Relations (Sydney University and University of Kent).

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That U.S. policy in the Middle East is a mess is very nearly a truism.  For instance, a first quick look at my local library turned up a book by an American journalist with several decades of experience in the area, Patrick Tyler.  It's a long survey of six decades of the twists and turns of U.S. policy as shaped by the personalities of Presidents and their close associates.  Page 11: “After nearly six decades of escalating American involvement in the Middle East, it remains nearly impossible to discern any overarching approach to the region...What stands out is the absence of consistency...as if the hallmark of American diplomacy were discontinuity.”  And that's from a sympathiser.

To illustrate briefly: in 1975 the U.S.'s chosen major strategic partners were Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.  Iraq and Syria were in the Soviet orbit, the Afghan central government in the U.S. one, and the Kurds had just been abandoned to Iraqi mercies after a few years of not-so-covert support. Insofar as radical Islam was on the radar, it was not favoured.  A decade later, the U.S. was actively helping Iraq against Iran and the Kurds, and was running a proxy war against the Afghan government in alliance with a radical Islamic movement funded by Saudi Arabia.

A decade after that, in 1995, the U.S. was at odds with both Iran and Iraq, again offering aid to the Kurds, and becoming less comfortable with radical Islam.  By 2005, it was bolstering the Afghan central government against the tribes and radical Islamists, trying to keep an Iranian-aligned Iraqi government and the Kurds on side, but still supporting the Saudi government even as it funded a radical Islam declared to be the U.S.’s prime enemy.  By 2015, the U.S. was in a de facto alliance with Iran against a radical Islamic movement in Iraq and Syria, supporting “moderate Islamists” allied with the radicals against a Syrian government backed by Iran, propping up the Afghan government against the tribal and radical Islamist coalition it had nurtured in the ‘80s, backing the Saudi government against both radical Islam and Iranian-supported Shia populism in the Arabian Peninsula.  The U.S. is now on all sides of all the fights in the region apart, of course, from the Israel-Arab (or Israeli-Palestinian) conflict.  And, even there, it is not obvious that Israel and the U.S. are on the same sides, or which way the leverage runs between Washington and Tel Aviv.

The policy and the arguments are now approaching farce.  The think tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has just put out a paper arguing that “pursuing U.S. regional interests must involve targeting not only ISIS but also its Shiite adversaries.”  Presumably the authors will simply assume that some alternative force conformable to U.S. preferences can be conjured into being (new improved Iraqi Army anyone?).  And that targeting both sides in a war will produce something other than anarchy.  Or take the recent announcement that the U.S. and Turkey had agreed on the training of “moderate” Syrian rebels.  They just disagreed on who the rebels will fight, ISIS or Assad.

No Friends, Only Interests?

Iraqi Kurds, Afghan Tajiks, Hazaras, Pushtuns, Iraqi Shi'ites have all been the victims of abrupt changes in U.S. policy; Iranian policy-makers have been treated to talk of reconciliation and then slapped with sanctions; Iraqi Sunnis were first treated to “de-Baathification,” then bribed to cease fire, and are now being bombed.  With experiences like this, it is no wonder that Pew reported that only 30 per cent of Middle Easterners had a positive view of the U.S. in 2014 –  by far the lowest score of any region of the world.

We've all seen those movies where the central character ends up in a nun outfit on top of a skyscraper with an ex-lover, a criminal, a banker, a lunatic, a stuffed bear and a stolen yacht.  The French do them really well.  As you watch the film, each move is explicable (“I was on my way to get some milk for the cat when....and because I love animals...and then the door opened...”), so much so that the end result is not so much a surprise as a culmination.  The foreign policies of Great Powers are not supposed to resemble these movies.

So this is one of those outcomes – like a depression for economics – that offers a teaching moment. There are plenty of reasons offered why the U.S. did and does intervene in the Middle East: oil, Israel, the geopolitics of anti-Communism, the “war on terror”.  There are large books (often written by the policy-makers themselves) explaining why each decision was perfectly rational and the consequences unforeseeable.  It is a journalistic trope that the Middle East is a strange, complicated place where people are irrational, extremist, un-modern....

Really? The Middle East is more complicated than the Balkans, South-East Asia, Latin America? Oil may explain why the U.S. is interested, but hardly explains why, to guarantee supply, it had to impose sanctions on Iran or wreck Iraq, or encourage, abandon, protect, discourage and then promote Kurdish autonomy (see also Northern Alliance, Pashtuns, Shi'ites....).  The same books that proclaim the regrettable irrationality of Middle Easterners often also lay out in detail the (perfectly rational) calculations behind each move – both their own and others'.

What can explain this?  One common phrase, loosely paraphrased from Lord Palmerston, is that “states don't have friends, they have interests.”  Like many such aphorisms, it dissolves on closer scrutiny.  Whose interests?  How are they identified?  How are “interests” reconciled and assigned priorities?  Don't states have an interest in being seen as reliable allies?  What interests have led the U.S. into this position?

Oil as Driver of U.S. Policy?

Oil?  The U.S. interest in ensuring oil flows to the world market was offered as a reason for supporting Iraq against Iran in the ‘80s (though the U.S. also secretly sold weapons to Iran), for U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, and for the heavy U.S. presence in the Gulf.  But it sits oddly with ongoing efforts to limit Iranian exports, particularly after chaos in Iraq, Libya and Syria markedly reduced flows from those countries.  It also sits oddly with the maintenance of sanctions on Saddam and with the strategies adopted in the Second Gulf War.  There does not seem to have been any great focus on protecting oil installations or ensuring continuity of trained personnel.  There were, of course, a few planning papers, but not so much focus on the ground.

One much-cited source is a 2001 study commissioned by, among others, Dick Cheney, which identified Iraq's oil as the key to averting a looming supply crunch.  The report recommended that the U.S. “should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.  The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies."  It should do this “with the ultimate goal of stemming the tide of anti-Americanism in the Middle-East and eas[ing] Iraqi oil-field investment restrictions.”  This is pretty much a description of what the U.S. did not do.

The Second Gulf War stands out, of course, as the nadir of incompetence and wishful thinking.  Yet it is not obvious that supposedly more professional and realistic administrations have a very much better track record.  The Bush I/Clinton sanctions regime killed nearly as many Iraqis as the second war and its aftermath.  The U.S. officials making Middle Eastern policy have access to all sorts of expertise.  The evidence is that they do not use it.  Further, they mostly can't be bothered to actually engage with even the most basic realities in terms of thinking through what they might mean for strategy.  This is largely a failure of imagination, but it's also due to the fact that, up until quite recently, Middle Eastern peoples mostly lacked the means to assert their own interests.  Various factions and interests in the major powers could use the place as a playground, policy could hop from one foot to the other and it didn't matter.  The locals were powerless.  Policy did not have to be careful, considered, cautious.  The oil would flow even if State made empty promises, the CIA played James Bond, and the Pentagon sold and tested new weapons.  There were few domestic consequences, and no other power cared either.  And if the U.S. stuffed up in one country, there was always another nearby.   The meddling was just another manifestation of Great Power status, but the incoherence was not because the Middle East was important but complex: it was because it was complex (as everywhere is) and weak.  If the meddling had had more immediate or drastic consequences, quite a few policy minds would have been concentrated.[1]

Some Realities

What are some basic Middle Eastern realities?  One is that politics in the Middle East has an embedded religious dimension.  It is, after all, mostly Islamic.  Secular alternatives are not realistically on offer.  Ignoring Sunni, Shia, Druze, Allawi identities is silly.  So is supposing that they can be easily supplanted.  This does not mean that people are doomed to fight over religion.  It does mean that policy that does not take the religious angle seriously will be fragile.  Of course, religious identities cross-cut with ethnic and national ones, but in this the Middle East is no more complicated than Europe.  A map of the current front lines in the Syrian civil war is pretty much a map of the country's religious and ethnic affiliations, down to the village level.

A second reality is that no policy that seeks to exclude or ignore Iran is likely to succeed.  One can no more exclude Iran from the Middle East than one can exclude France or Germany from Europe. Iran is simply too big, too central, and too closely linked to its neighbours.  It has withstood U.S.-supported invasion, sanctions and threats, developed its transport and other links with neighbours like Turkey, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, has close ties with the governments in Baghdad and Damascus and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and built a modest but quite formidable local defense capability.  Quite simply, Iran has the diplomatic, military, and economic capacity to withstand more pressure than the U.S. can bring to bear, and so its interests have to be taken seriously.  This means accepting Iranian control over its civil nuclear program, something that occupies the same place in Iranian politics as revocation of the unequal treaties did in Chinese politics up to 1949: the acid test of sovereignty.  The signs are that the U.S. has not yet quite grasped this.  It took 20 years for the U.S. policy establishment to grok that things had changed in China.  It looks like taking at least 40 years for the penny to drop on Iran.

So if I were a U.S. policy analyst, I would advise reaching a modus vivendi with Iran as soon as possible, resignedly accept that Iraq will be a Shia-run state aligned with Iran, back Kurdish independence, and tell State that if they get involved in the Syrian five-way dog-fight they will get bitten.  So pick one dog to back or stay out, because being bitten by a few is better than being bitten by all.  But on past form, if I were a policy analyst my advice would be entirely disregarded except as it agreed with the listener's prejudices.

-- Peter T.

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[1] There are other places that resemble the Middle East in that outside powers used them as playgrounds without regard for consistency (or for the locals).  China 1860-1949, Latin America up to the 1990s or Central Asia in the period of the Great Game fit the bill, as does, ominously, Eastern Europe post-1989.  Even the tropes are the same: there is much talk of irrationality, corruption, regimes mired in ancient superstition and needing to be dragged into the Modern World, of bringing efficiency, order, enlightenment.  As well as, of course, making money.

 

Saudi Arabia's border wall

Via Pub Editor, an item about the wall Saudi Arabia is building on its border with Iraq.  Wendy Brown, a political theorist at Berkeley, wrote a book several years ago on the wall-building trend: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010; Zone Books paperback, 2014).  Happen to own the book but haven't really read it.

The alignments in the M. East

On Friday the NewsHour had a segment with Hisham Melhem and Steven Simon talking about the somewhat tangled alliance patterns in the Middle East: starts at about 14:00 here.

ETA: The segment referred briefly to this June post at ThinkProgress, which featured a chart of the "tangled web" of alignments in Syria.

WSJ: Saudi Arabia to increase its arming of Syrian opposition

A low-tech (and somewhat inefficient) way to keep up with the news: drive five minutes to the local convenience store and take a look, while there, at the front page of the hard-copy Wall St. Journal (without, needless to say, buying it. One has already bought something else, so that's cool).

Anyway, the center-page story reports that Saudi Arabia has promised to give the Syrian opposition -- I didn't see particular groups specified -- more sophisticated weaponry, including Chinese-made "man-portable air defense systems" (which apparently means, in plainer language, shoulder-fired missiles that can bring down planes).

Noted

From NYRB (Oct. 24): Malise Ruthven reviews (h/t) Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone.

A brief excerpt:

Ahmed argues...that the acts of terror or violence directed at the U.S. or its allies are set off as much by revenge based on values of tribal honor as by extremist ideologies.... It seems fair to argue, as Ahmed does, that the values of honor and revenge inherent in the tribal systems contribute to jidahist extremism, and that by ignoring this all-important factor the U.S. has been courting disaster.

But according to Ruthven, Ahmed sees the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as "countertribal." Anyway, RTWT.

Saudi Arabia turns down seat on UNSC

See here.

Missiles in the Gulf

Karen DeYoung reports in WaPo this morning about the first "strategic cooperation forum" meeting between the U.S. and the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia).

The UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia already have U.S. Patriot missiles and the U.S. is planning to help tie these systems together into a regionally integrated system, according to DeYoung's article. (The Patriot, for those rusty on this, is a surface-to-air missile designed to hit planes and ballistic missiles; the Wikipedia article on it appears to be fairly thorough.) Presumably these Patriot missiles are supposed to deter an Iranian missile attack on Saudi Arabia or the other GCC countries. Thus it may be worth noting that a recent article in International Security [abstract] which simulated an Iranian conventional missile attack on Saudi oil installations found "no evidence of a significant Iranian missile threat to Saudi infrastructure."

'Arab spring' update

Many critics of U.S. foreign policy have long decried the close ties between the U.S. and the House of Saud. It's no secret that the Saudis have been uneasy about the U.S. role in helping nudge its long-time ally Mubarak offstage, and as David Ignatius mentioned in his Wash. Post column of April 27, Pres. Obama's national security adviser met with Saudi King Abdullah this month and gave the king a reassuring letter from Obama. 

It has been plausibly suggested that the Saudis supported the initial proposal for a no-fly zone in Libya because they thought it would distract attention from what has been happening in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region. If that was their motivation, it doesn't seem to have worked. The Libyan intervention turned into a broader effort to protect civilians (and, in effect, indirectly aid the rebels), but it has not distracted attention from the ongoing violent crackdowns on protesters in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The simultaneous repressive actions by different governments, and the variation in international response, underscores something that should have been clear all along: humanitarian interventions are always a product of more than one motive and 'consistency' is not necessarily the main criterion by which they should be judged. That said, one hopes that real pressure is being brought to bear on the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, with both of which the U.S. and Europeans have leverage, to modify what they are doing now.

The curse of oil

A piece in this past week's Wash. Post about why the countries in the Mideast now undergoing political turmoil are also in need of economic renovation had a few too many quotes from IMF people for my taste, but it did include an interesting chart (via the IMF) showing that even Saudi Arabia's GDP per capita has declined, albeit slightly, over the 1980-2010 period (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars). The article did not use the term 'resource curse' but its main point is that oil revenue (in the case of Egypt, revenue from tourism and the Suez Canal) has helped these regimes to avoid the kinds of economic measures less well-endowed countries have taken. Even an opponent of neoliberalism, which I am, would probably have to admit that the state's domination of the economy in many of these societies has not served them well.

(Note: The GDP chart is in the hard-copy version but apparently not in the online version of the article.)

A retrospective glance at G.W. Bush as supposed apostle of a democratic Mideast

In comments on the PBS NewsHour during the Egyptian crisis, David Brooks has suggested that the Obama administration has been "more like the George H.W. Bush [Bush 41] administration" in its preference for stability over democracy promotion in the Mideast and Arab world. Jackson Diehl of the Wash. Post has also argued for some time that the Obama administration retreated from the George W. Bush (Bush 43) policy of support for democratic reformers in the region.

Yet what did the Bush 43 policy of democracy promotion in the region actually amount to? It invaded Iraq, ostensibly to establish democracy there (once the other justifications for the invasion evaporated), only to end up creating a chaotic, violent mess that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, exiled and internally displaced millions more, killed upwards of four thousand U.S. soldiers, several thousand coalition soldiers, ignited a civil war, and produced a situation where car bombers and other suicide bombers still target and kill with some regularity Iraqi soldiers, policeman, and civilians. Fifty thousand U.S. troops remain in Iraq, though the number is slated to go down. The forms of democracy are present in Iraq but whether the government, which took months to form after the last parliamentary elections, is able to meet the aspirations and needs of the population is still an open question, or that at least is my impression.

So that was the G.W. Bush democracy agenda as it played out in Iraq. What about the rest of the region? The G.W. Bush administration pressed for elections to be held in the West Bank and Gaza, and then pronounced itself horrified and astonished when Hamas won in Gaza in January 2006. What about Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, all U.S. allies? Did the G.W. Bush administration do anything besides an occasional rhetorical gesture to promote democracy in those countries? Did it ever suggest that it might cut aid to Egypt unless Mubarak took steps toward democratic reforms? Or did it content itself with saying "you really should do this" and then doing nothing when Mubarak showed no inclination to change? If the G.W. Bush administration's democracy agenda in the region had been as sincere and effective as some retrospective accounts now suggest, would the U.S. have had to face the situation in Egypt that has erupted in the last few weeks, one in which an at least apparent conflict between short-term U.S. interests, on the one hand, and U.S. values, on the other, has put policy makers in a somewhat awkward (to put it mildly) position? I think the question answers itself.

Lowther's linkages; or, could a nuclear Iran be good for the U.S. and the Middle East?

In a recent New York Times op-ed ("Iran's Two-Edged Bomb," Feb.9), Adam Lowther argues that a nuclear Iran might be a blessing in disguise for the U.S. and the Middle East. He should have settled for making the point that a nuclear Iran would pose less of a threat than is generally supposed. Instead Lowther produces an intricate and implausible linkage scenario that makes the most convoluted aspects of Bismarck's diplomacy look like tiddlywinks by comparison.

Here's the gist of his argument: (1) a nuclear Iran threatens countries in its region, including, e.g., Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states; (2) the U.S. could offer security guarantees to these countries mainly in the form of "a Middle East nuclear umbrella" and in return (3) the U.S. would demand: (a) wide-ranging democratic and other reforms in Arab autocracies that would drain some of the major breeding grounds of Islamist militancy; (b) higher oil production and lower oil prices from the oil-producing countries and (c) cost-sharing by those under the 'umbrella' for the expense of maintaining it. The result of all this, says Lowther, could be defeat of al-Qaeda and other similar groups; "a victory in the war on terrorism"; lower oil prices; a "needed shot in the arm" for the U.S. defense industry as weapons systems are exported to U.S. allies (read: client states), etc.

Now I happen to think that Western governments and foreign policy establishments exaggerate the potential bad consequences of Iran's getting nuclear weapons. But Lowther's scenario rests on some weird assumptions. First is the notion that trading a U.S. nuclear umbrella for fundamental reforms in Saudi Arabia and other allies is something these allies would go for; if they felt as threatened by a nuclear Iran as Lowther says they would, why couldn't they turn to China or Russia for security guarantees instead of the U.S.? Unlike the U.S., China and Russia would not demand those pesky domestic reforms; instead they would probably be content with economic rewards and concessions. Secondly, Lowther seems to think it would be a wonderful thing to create a Cold War-style regional balance in the Middle East, with a nuclear Iran playing the role of the USSR and Saudi Arabia et al. playing the role of Western Europe under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. How this arrangement, even if it did lead to domestic reforms in the Arab autocracies, would result in the demise of Islamist militancy is something of a mystery. Doesn't Lowther recall that one of al-Qaeda's main complaints was the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia -- i.e., in proximity to some of Islam's holiest sites -- during and after the Gulf War? The notion that the extension of a U.S. nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia would persuade al-Qaeda and similar groups that they should give up the struggle, because the price of said umbrella would be a fundamental transformation of the Saudi polity, doesn't really compute. Where is the evidence for the argument that autocracy breeds discontent which breeds terrorism; therefore get rid of autocracy and you are on the road to getting rid of terrorism? Are those attracted to the jihadist worldview really interested in seeing a parliamentary democracy in Saudi Arabia? To be sure, they want to remove the current Saudi regime, but I was under the impression that it was that regime's links to the U.S. that is one of their prime grievances.

The main argument of Lowther's column has the feeling of a fantasy, of a Rube Goldberg contraption dreamed up at a desk. Instead of arguing that a nuclear Iran could lead to all good things from "victory" in the "war on terror" to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Lowther should have written a column about why in fact a nuclear Iran poses less of a threat than is widely thought, how states that acquire nuclear weapons generally do not become irrational or insane in their foreign policy behavior, and why the West should therefore not be getting its knickers into such a twist over the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Now Lowther does make the point at the end of the piece that "unless the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, and his Guardian Council chart a course that no other nuclear power has ever taken, Iran should become more responsible once it acquires nuclear weapons rather than less." But this sensible sentence has been preceded, unfortunately, by so many non-sensible sentences that I doubt many people will still be reading.

Afghanistan: Can "a disastrous situation" be salvaged?

I've just finished watching the excellent Frontline (PBS) program "The War Briefing" about the situation in Afghanistan. (That is, I was watching when I wasn't twisting the antenna and cursing the picture on my non-cable TV.)

The quotation in the title of this post is from former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who declared in an interview in the program that Afghanistan is "a disastrous situation for the U.S." It's hard to disagree with him on the basis of the evidence summarized by Frontline. Here are some of the essentials: 1) a weak central government widely perceived as corrupt, opposed by 2) a resurgent insurgency taking advantage of sanctuaries in Pakistan and benefiting from support by the growing Pakistani Taliban movement, with 3) a grossly insufficient number of U.S. troops on the ground (33,000) given the size of the territory (larger than Iraq), leading to 4) an over-reliance on airstrikes that have produced significant civilian casualties (civilian deaths generally have doubled in the past two years), which in turn 5) increases support for the insurgents. There's a lot more going on, but that boils it down to a few of the basics.

You don't need to be a strategic studies or counterinsurgency expert to realize that the current U.S./NATO policy is failing and that one or two more brigades, as Scheuer said, are unlikely to solve the problem. Nor, probably, will getting rid of the so-called 70 caveats -- the current restrictions on rules of engagement (see earlier post and comments). Nor will more monetary support from non-fighting NATO countries, though I'm sure it would be welcome.

Someone should be, and perhaps is, asking: What will be the security consequences for the U.S. of a re-takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban? Maybe the consequences will not be as dire as some suppose. In that case maybe the best course is to try to negotiate with the Taliban, with a view perhaps to either some power-sharing arrangement with Karzai or even a de jure division of the country into separate spheres of control. That might allow the U.S. and NATO to cut their losses in Afghanistan and focus more attention on the situation in Pakistan which, as Colin Kahl says in the program, is potentially a much more serious situation for the U.S., given the recent increase in strength of the Pakistani Taliban and the fragility of the current Pakistan government. That this is not a totally crazy thought is indicated by very recent reports that the U.S. is considering the possibility of negotiating with at least elements of the Taliban. Moreover, as David Ignatius discussed in a recent Wash Post column, Saudi Arabia has begun to host a mediation effort involving the Karzai government and the main Afghan insurgent groups. Obviously it's too early to say whether anything will come of these developments.

In the meantime, it seems unfair to the 33,000 U.S. troops, and British, Dutch, Canadian, and other NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, to continue under-resourcing their operations. Of the roughly 15,000 additional U.S. troops slated for (or requested by generals for) Afghanistan, only 4,500 are currently available, according to the Frontline program. This at a time when 28,500 U.S. troops are sitting in South Korea, and thousands more are in Japan and Germany. It creates at the very least a perception of skewed priorities. I'm sure someone at the Pentagon might have a reasonable-sounding explanation for this, but few members of the public have heard it because no reporters, as far as I'm aware, have bothered to ask the question. And as I've indicated before, I do not think "reasonable-sounding" means a simple appeal to our alliance with South Korea. There is no reason the alliance cannot survive a reduced U.S. troop presence there.

Update: The exchange in the comments has got me re-thinking this last paragraph.