According to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the US has successfully trained about 7,000 Iraqi soldiers and about 2,000 counterterrorism service personnel out of a goal of 24,000 in total. Carter said this about that rather large shortfall:
We simply haven’t received enough recruits[.]
Hmm….
Yet President Barack Obama thinks it’ll be cool to send 450 more US soldiers to Iraq to train the Iraqis.
Again I say, Hmm….
The guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John Kerry, had this to say regarding this administration’s “negotiations” about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. In particular, he was talking about this administration’s give a hoot attitude toward nearby history.
The possible military dimensions, frankly, gets distorted a little bit in some of the discussions in that we’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another.
We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to certain military activities they were engaged in. What we’re concerned about is going forward. It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.
But that’s how you know they might be telling the truth about “those activities” going forward. You match what you know with absolute knowledge (Kerry’s naïveté regarding the perfection of intelligence would be cute if it weren’t so dangerous) with what the Iranians tell you. Deviations between the two—since you already know these things without doubt—are demonstrations of Iran lying, and so you have no way of knowing that they’ve stopped “those activities.”
One more thing regarding “military dimensions…gets distorted a little bit:” for what do you think the Iranians are building their nuclear weapons except for those weapons’ military dimension?
It’s going to be a long and dangerous 18 months.
An Israeli has some. Michael Oren, lately Israeli Ambassador to the US and current Member of Knesset had this, in part, from his op-ed in Monday’s Walls Street Journal.
The abandonment of the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles climaxed over the Iranian nuclear program. Throughout my years in Washington, I participated in intimate and frank discussions with US officials on the Iranian program. But parallel to the talks came administration statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking Iran pre-emptively.
Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy. The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr Obama, though, insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional power.”
The daylight between Israel and the US could not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been greater.
What he said.
Then he concluded:
Now, with the Middle East unraveling and dependable allies a rarity, the US and Israel must restore the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles. Israel has no alternative to America as a source of security aid, diplomatic backing and overwhelming popular support. The US has no substitute for the state that, though small, remains democratic, militarily and technologically robust, strategically located and unreservedly pro-American.
The past six years have seen successive crises in US-Israeli relations, and there is a need to set the record straight. But the greater need is to ensure a future of minimal mistakes and prevent further erosion of our vital alliance.
That, Sir, must unfortunately await a change in the administration. I hope and pray that Israel can hang on that long.
Iran has launched its first official matchmaking website, hoping to encouraging millions of singles to marry.
In a ceremony marking the launch of the site on Monday, Deputy Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports Mahmoud Golzari said the estimated 11 million young unwed Iranians “justified the launching of the site.”
They need to do something. They have a fertility rate of 1.85 children born per woman, sharply lower than the population-maintenance rate of roughly 2.1.
Their impending demographic implosion (although not for a couple of generations; these things take time) also makes them the more dangerous and puts a premium on us monitoring them very carefully and alertly.
Damian Paletta asked when the one becomes the other in a Saturday piece for The Wall Street Journal. Then he conflated two different things with the question of when a cyber attack becomes an act of war in his answer. The backdrop is the People’s Republic of China’s invasion of our government’s personnel computer systems to steal a “tremendous number of personnel records—including some quite personal records.”
If the White House finds out who stole the information, what will President Barack Obama do about it?
This has nothing to do with whether the PRC’s invasion was an act of war. The question of what Obama—or any President—will or would do is strictly about what a response might be or should be. The act of war has occurred, or it has not, being merely a criminal act that wants a response.
The more serious conflation, though, is this:
But cyberattacks by nation-states are a relatively new phenomenon, in which there isn’t a road map of deterrents and responses.
That we don’t know how to respond, or that we’re presently utterly helpless and unable to respond in the face of the PRC’s actions, is wholly irrelevant to the question of whether the PRC’s actions constitute an act of war.
For the record, it’s clear to me that the PRC’s invasion is a clear, deliberate act of war, and while not as devastating (maybe, we’ve yet to learn the full range of outcomes from the invasion) as Pearl Harbor, it’s no less an act. It’s also plainly intended to intimidate a feckless and internationally weak administration, to send a signal of what’s in store if we don’t become more cooperative on a number of things of interest to the PRC (its South and East China Sea seizures come to mind), to flex PRC muscles, simply to show the school how helpless the little boy is in the face of the bully, or some combination of those.
For the record, too, a couple of things are necessary in response. One is for this (or more likely the next—and isn’t the delay a frightening thought) administration to get off the dime and get serious about cyber security. There are plenty of private and government security experts available and more than equal to the task. The biggest thing this (or the next) administration can do, then, has to do with personnel: it needs to start firing folks and disbanding agencies that don’t move fast enough to button up, including passive-aggressive resistors who won’t like the change in “corporate culture” required, and it needs to decertify unions that get in the way of such reforms.
The other thing needed is for this administration (or the next) to put together a broad-ranging response that will include cyber attacks against the CCP’s communications and data-handling computer networks with a view to erasing the hard drives, against the PRC’s port city government communications and data-handling networks with a similar goal, and the USN sailing into and around the island groups the PRC has physically seized and raising an ECM curtain around them that isolates those islands and any PRC shipping in the area from the mainland. This response need not occur in immediate response to a particular PRC attack on us, and it need not occur today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for a very long time.
We cannot shy away from this fight; the longer we let our enemies camp in our networks, the harder it will become finally to root them out. If we can find the will at all.