Paper Promises

A letter written to Stratfor:


"But as with North Korea, Iranian leaders know that nuclear weapons are more valuable as a bargaining chip than as a reality. Asymmetry leads to eradication of nuclear threats. Put less pretentiously, Tehran must assume that the United States -- or Israel -- will destroy any nuclear capability before it becomes a threat. Moreover, if it has nuclear capability, what would it do with it? Even as a deterrent, retaliation would lead to national annihilation. The value of nuclear weapons in this context is less real than apparent -- and therefore more valuable in negotiations than deployment."

- An Unlikely Alliance


Fundamentally, I must disagree with your assessment. Though the assessment that the US and Israel would do everything they could to stop a fully developed program, like that of Osirak in 1981, it becomes much less possible to launch such a strike once nuclear capability is reached. This is where the disagreement comes into play. The nuclear threat of even a handful of low-yield bombs provides deterrent enough to insure against “regime change” better than any conventional military force could.

No doubt, we’re looking at super-asymmetry. The loss of Tokyo, Seoul, Tel Aviv, an aircraft carrier battle group, or a Marine Expeditionary Unit is enough to deter all but the must warranted aggression. Though Pyongyang or Tehran would be flattened during such an exchange, it is a threat that must be made real. There is as much reality behind these threats and assurances of mass destruction as there was during the MAD years of the Cold War. However ridiculous the logic may seem, it is the working logic nonetheless. As such, there is little reason to believe that Tehran or Pyongyang would really bargain away their best and only means of survival for paper promises.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Iraq North Korea North Korea nuclear WMD negotiations Stratfor

Options in Iraq

Hey guys: I wrote this one up tonight as a sample piece for UNF's student newspaper, The Spinnaker. It wasn't supposed to have my own ideas, just analisys. I think it's dry. I had to keep it around 400 words, so I never drew a final conclusion.

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Though many lament that we are in Iraq at all facing the difficulties that we are, wisdom would urge us to make the best of the situation. Sun-Tsu argues that the only way to win on the battlefield is to know both yourself and the enemy. Bush wants Iraq to become stabilized enough for reconstruction to begin and Iraqi’s to feel say enough to have a pluralistic government, so that troops might return as quickly as possible. The enemy, and there are many, are seeking to keep reconstruction workers and money out, shake the ethnic and religious fault lines running through the country, all of which would lead to a hopefully “Vietnam-ize” Iraq and get America out.

To confront the challenges the multi-faced resistance is putting out, we must adjust our tactics to neutralize their strategy. Realizing that the current tactics are not working, Bush has finally begun opening doors to new options. There are two primary options on the table, each carrying their own distinctive advantages and disadvantages.

The option Bush favors most is the Afghanistan model, which has faced growing criticism of late. The plan involves retraining a large Iraqi police force in how to work in a pluralistic and open society capable of taking on the security needs of protecting Iraqi citizens and infrastructure. Doing this would allow us to withdraw troops from police duties and keep them relatively unseen from the Iraqi public but still stay strong enough to crush any organized threats inside and outside of the country. It would also allow Iraqi’s to feel “liberated” and self-governed and not invaded and occupied. The inherent disadvantage is that it will be prone to infiltration by collaborators to the resistance who wish to destroy the very infrastructure they are meant to be protecting, which likely helped by the Najaf bombers who killed al-Hakim and the UN bombers; it also seems to be coming quite a bit late in the game.

The second option Bush has begun considering is gathering more troops under the banner of the UN. India, Russia, and Turkey have all signaled that they might be willing to send in substantial numbers of infantry and money to Iraq, even to places within the “Sunni Triangle” to help pacify the nation and protect infrastructure. Multi-lateral military cooperation will only mean different foreigners patrolling Iraqi streets in different foreign tanks, which doesn’t resolve the humiliating issue of having foreign armies occupying your nation in the first place. Additionally, the diplomatic concessions that must be made behind closed doors before Security Council meetings might alone make the endeavor too costly.


Tags:Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Iraq

Why We Went to War

1) Weapons of Mass Destruction and Threat to Neighbors

The basis of the WMD threat argument was grounded in a belief that Saddam Hussein was insane. He was not. He was a calculating and manipulative man out for his own survival. He is the essence of Realpolitik and Machiavellianism. His invasion of Kuwait was based on a miscalculation that we helped feed to him. He felt he could do it consequence free, since the US Ambassador arguably told him that “border disputes” among Middle Eastern nations were none of America’s concern. Would he have done it again? Not likely. He was surrounded by US forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that, though relatively small, would have made short work out of an attacking Iraqi Army. The Saudi’s have also been stocking up on American weapons for decades. Hussein's military was in an advanced state of decay. Something like 2/3’s of all his military equipment was destroyed during the Gulf War and he had neither the money nor friends to resupply him in any serious way.

I do take as fact that he had chemical and some biological weapons, as well as a nuclear weapons program that was cut short at Menachum Begin’s order in 1981. However, I side with many former weapons inspectors when they say that chemical and biological weapons, especially low-grade 3rd World kinds, don’t have a very long shelf life. Both UN weapons inspectors and air strikes destroyed his means of production. This means the old stockpile went bad sometime in the mid to late nineties. This also explains the overwhelming evidence of WMD, but the lack of any substance. This sounds to me like the CIA equivalent of the last Mars Lander, where engineers forgot to convert over from the metric system.

Even if Saddam did have WMD, there is little serious belief that he would personally use them or share them with Theocrats/Islamicists. The reason being is twofold. First, if he used them himself it would become quickly obvious whose nuke went off by sampling the radioactive material, matching it up to which mine it came out of, and who sold whom what. The result is something just shy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), but rather just Assured Destruction. All of Baghdad and Tikrit would turn into a glass parking lot within a few days.

This same axiom also applies to Theocrats terrorist, but one can also add in the fact that Saddam, who is a Ba’athist (a secular Arab Nationalist party), is competing for power with the Theocrats. In Syria, rival Ba’athist Hafiz Assad has had his battles with the Muslim Brotherhood, incarnated as Hamas in the West Bank. In Iraq, Saddam has brutally repressed Shi’ite clerics and other Theocrats with aspirations for power. Politics is always local, and no matter how much bin Laden & Co hate America, they despise the House of Saud and the Nasserites (secular Arab nationalists) even more for corrupting their lands with Modernity and US troop presence.

2) Oil

What I have to say about oil was summed in a quote I hope I got right, “We didn’t go to Iraq to steal their oil. We went in to make sure it was pumping. We’re more than happy to pay for it.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in those words. We have leverage against OPEC, once the Resistance stops blowing up the damned pipelines.

3) Empire

A lot can be said about this. I’ll save most of it for another post. I think Empire had more to do with this war than almost any other aspect. I think of Empire in the neo-conservative way; spreading Western Civilization/Modernity, by force if necessary. I think this is where we’re going to encounter the most failure, because we’re not committed enough to Empire to do what it takes to really enforce it. A lot of what the Theocrats are rebelling against is the imposition of Modernity on their culture. All of us being victims of our perspective, we all deem our own culture as clearly the superior. Most Arabs, while discontent, are admirers of their own achievements, religion, and values and don’t quite care for the criticisms of the West. We have our own problems they don’t want that come with Liberalization – like crime and falling moral standards. I don’t imagine infidelity and shoplifting are quite the problems in Saudi Arabia that they are here.

Many liberals and neo-conservatives share a notion that if we only temp another Civilization with enough of the incentives of the West – individualism, capitalist culture, and other more worldly delights, or alternately compassion and family planning – that they will drop their silly ancient ways like a bad habit. Simply by exposing Iraq to the scents of consumerism and liberalism, the theory goes, we’ll have a domino effect in the region and it will be well on the way to Modernity by the end of the decade. Bad news: Ain’t gonna happen in our lifetime.

4) Image

This, to me, is second only to Empire. Bush sought to crush the image that most stems from our experience in Beirut, Mogadishu, and Vietnam. The rest of the world believes we are a paper tiger, imminently strong but unable to sustain casualties for causes in the Third World. Ultimately, they might be right. We withdrew from Somalia with less than 50 casualties and a big firefight. We withdrew from Lebanon because we didn’t know what was going on and got duped into taking sides, and ultimately almost 300 Marines paid the price in one blow.

Iraq was meant to demonstrate that we were prepared to drudge through a clouds of WMD, disrupt the trans-Atlantic alliance, flip the finger at the UN, and create a possible Theocratic/Anti-Western revolution in the Islamic world just to get one man. I’m still not sure Americans are prepared to accept the costs of war in treasure and lives. At heart, we’re isolationist – we’ve expanded and taken all of the Continent we want, so now it’s about protecting the Fatherland, I mean Homeland. I don’t think many Americans think GI’s dying in Iraq after Saddam ousting is doing much to protect American lives, no matter what the reality is.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Iraq WMD lies Ritter Scott Scot Ritter Bush War

The Marxist Case for Family Values

OK, I have talked about writing this one for a while. I have even delivered the lecture a few times, so hopefully I have made my case solid. This all came about while I was rereading the Communist Manifesto on the road this summer. Let me state, I am not a Communist. If for no other reason, I have taken a decidedly anti-revolutionary stance in politics. Though change is needed and oftentimes quickly, historical wisdom suggests that the slower the change comes the more lasting it is. In essence, every society and culture is going to have serious embedded flaws and needs to work at resolving those flaws: reinventing society and culture will only lead to a new system with different flaws with no historical memory of how to solve them. In other words, all of us know ways of coping with and eventually changing our current problems.

In America, we have the highest divorce rate of any country. Sexual activity generally begins in the teens, which has led to a substantial increase in teen pregnancy. Many of the nuclear families that are together are highly dysfunctional with all parties feeling alienated from one another. This is something both American Political parties have hit up on, both offering their own solutions. The Republicans seem bent on ignoring the situation fiscally. As if by banning giving a condom to sexually active 15 year olds is going to stop them. Many feel that Democrat’s have gone off the deep end at times with Sex Ed, in that it might create the impression that because the subject is being taught to a perceived sexually active group, those not in on the subject matter are likely to succumb to the conformity pressure seeming to emanate from the teachers pulpit. I tend to take the Democratic stance, only because I believe the problem is embedded in our Capitalist culture.

“How so, pinko,” you might ask me. We live in a culture of commodification in which nothing is sacred. Everything is a commodity and often spoken with the language of economics. In the Manifesto, Marx laments the state of the lawyers and doctors that such honorable professions have been dragged down to the level of hourly wage slaves. That complaint sounds odd to us, since we live in a time where we are all hourly wage slaves (or at least wishing we could get an hourly rate instead of a salary). I think that perhaps Marx meant that these professions now must succumb to commodification – instead of working for the well being of all, they work for the well being of the few who can now afford to pay the wage. Doctors, lawyers, and statesmen all work for the highest bidder.

The situation repeats itself in most aspects of society as well. Consumer choice is now an embedded right. Though it is considered sacrilege to criticize freedoms (and trust me, I’d rather live in that sort of society!), we apply this right to every aspect of our lives in the sense of a permanent transience. We feel bound to nothing. Religion, leadership, courtship, families, and friendships are bound to supply and demand as well as consumer choice. We feel bound to something only insofar as we need it, and even then we have a right in deciding how best to fulfill those needs.

Consider the language used in courtship: One is on the market, available. Single men and women dress like walking advertisements of themselves. In fact, a new fad in clothes stamps short expressions or words in block lettering across the chess or butt: “Princess”, “Flirt”, “Pay Attention to Me.” Kind of sounds like “Coke is it,” and “Refreshing,” no? Sense consumerism pervades the dating process – a 30-day free trial (plus setup fees), ought it not pervade a relationship if established? Many of the youngest among us look at it all in purely materialist – “Look, I got one too!” Unfortunately, that perception never fades with age for some. Even for the older and more “committed”, one always feels able to escape and get a different product once the cost of repairs exceeds the perceived cost of the item itself. There is no obligation. Kids hatched are like miles on a car – it breaks the car in, but it wears it out too. It also decreases the resale value of the car. Marriage is a contract – and like all contracts in Capitalist societies, it can be broken if one will pay the penalty (protective tariff?) the court assigns.

Less and less in this world is sacred and priceless. The natural human desire for expansion is becoming the moral. Capitalism, to me, is only a concept of how best to make money. It would be foolish to shrug off capitalism. As with all realist theories, one plays with fire when they let expansionist and self-serving mentalities slip into every other aspect of their life.

Jane Jacobs hits on this in “Systems of Survival”, going so far as to identify two “moral syndromes” that every modern day man must carry to morally cope with his world. The first is a commercial syndrome; the second is the guardian (government/protector) syndrome. Though she doesn’t quite approach it at the same angle I have, I believe the ultimate truth she has found is that the modern individual needs to be flexible (not soft) on their moral values depending on their situations. Her thesis worked more to rebut the growing idea that government needs to operate more like a business, but we can apply the same idea here too: Wall Street ethics and mentality ought not be applied in the bedroom or at the family dinner table.

Like all great liberal pundits, I offer no better alternative other than raising awareness of the issue. Bare in mind that I am not entirely trashing the mentality; take this more as an observation than a judgment. We Americans take our freedoms very seriously (when we know they’re being violated), and perhaps then it makes sense then that we have moved these freedoms into every aspect of our lives. Maybe the driving point of the Enlightenment and birth of Liberalism was the belief that nothing is sacred and free from personal choice. As with all progress, it comes with a trade-off. The trade-off we have made for these freedoms is security (as in job security, not airline security) and dignity. By subjecting one another to market forces and competition, things are apt to abruptly change and people removed from contact for better or for worse.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Gay Marriage Gay Marriage Marxist Family Values Family Values Conservative