Category Archives: defense policy

Arabs’ Thoughts on Obama’s Iran Deal

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Arabia is worried, and with good reason.

The Obama administration initially said its policy was to completely dismantle Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure as a means to protect Washington’s Mideast allies.

Now, however, US officials say it is no longer plausible to eliminate all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, suggesting that any final deal would leave some nuclear capability in place. Iran denies that it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb, but a final deal providing for nuclear enrichment capacity could prompt a competition.

Indeed.

Arab officials have increasingly spoken about a possible nuclear arms race in the Mideast as the negotiations have continued for 18 months, having been extended twice.

Thus,

“At this stage, we prefer a collapse of the diplomatic process to a bad deal,” said an Arab official who has discussed Iran with the Obama administration and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks.

This is confidence our Arab allies and erstwhile allies have in the negotiating skills of the guys who sit in the President’s and the Secretary of State’s chairs. They’re not unduly pessimistic.

The John Kerry-Barack Obama Plan

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The guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair laid it out in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday.

Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.

That’s so vapid and empty it doesn’t deserve comment. I include it only as an illustration of the depth of thinking and the level of importance Kerry attaches to this as sum and total of this Plan.

And this:

We must identify the zones of greatest vulnerability…. And then we must tailor our efforts and target our resources to meet the specific needs of those places. It may be training young people so they can get jobs and envision a future of dignity and self-reliance. It may be working to eliminate corruption and promote the rule of law, so that marginalized communities can enjoy security and justice.

The Community Organizer School of Realpolitik. Offering terrorists alternative career paths will set them free.

This Plan operates from a very fundamental false premise: that these terrorists don’t already see, quite clearly, their future of dignity and self-reliance, that the path they see to security and justice is not the path we prescribe. No, the terrorists of Daesh, of al Qaeda and its associates, of Boko Haram, of Jahbat al Nusra, of the Palestinian Authority, of Hezbollah, of… all see their path to dignity, to self-reliance, to their security, to their concept of justice is through the elimination of all nonbelievers and the destruction of Western Civilization, a polity they view as evil incarnate and with which they cannot coexist.

And their freedom lies in martyrdom in pursuit of that cause.

There’s also this…laugher (because the alternative is tears):

We’ve combated violent extremism before. We know there are tools that work. …we combined our efforts most recently to fight Ebola.

Oh, and this aside:

There is no room for Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

No one is arguing otherwise, especially regarding Islamophobia. Decrying Islamic terrorists and Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islamophobia. That argument is of a piece with President Barack Obama’s statement that we’re not at war with Islam. The one is Kerry’s straw man, and the other is Obama’s. They’ll have to play with their dollies without me.

As a man said not so long ago, in America everyone has the right to be stupid.  But when it’s an American in State exercising that right, it’s downright dangerous for all of us.

5 questions every presidential candidate should answer: Terrorism Edition

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That’s the title of Michael Rubin’s article over at AEIdeas. Non-presidential candidate Hines essays some answers below.

1. How do you define terrorism? Terrorism is the use of mass killings, particularly of innocents, and associated destruction for the immediate purpose of causing terror in the hearts and minds of the target nation’s population. The intermediate and long range purpose is the use of that terror to cause the nation’s government—directly or by divorcing the population from the government through the former’s loss of faith in government—to accept in toto the terrorists’ demands.

2. Do you believe terrorism to be primarily motivated by grievance or ideology? Yes. Terrorists have an ideology—see Daesh, al Qaeda, Boko Haram for current examples, the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhoff Gang for earlier examples—and they use the excuse of grievance to articulate their ideology. Daesh, for instance, espouses a very strict and harsh version of an ideology they center on Islam, with anyone who disagrees with them apostates and subject to killing on sight. Their grievance is that they’re oppressed and unable to press their ideology freely.

3. What is the theological component to terrorism? The question proceeds from a quasi-false premise. Terrorism is evil. Full stop. Quasi-false because while there are secular philosophies and ideologies that see very grave error, it’s primarily religion that has the concept of straight-up evil. In the end, though, there is no real theological component to terrorism; terrorism is outside of religion.

4. Should terrorism be treated as a criminal matter or a military threat? Yes. There are individual acts of terrorism, like the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. These are isolated incidents, and they’re properly treated as the fundamentally criminal acts that they are.

However, when terrorism is practiced as a matter of policy by a nation-state or a polity organized along networked lines, it becomes a state of war and a military matter. While the tools of law enforcement might be helpful here, those are in this context merely tools, and they must be used alongside and subordinate to military tools.

5. What countries do you believe are state sponsors of terrorism today? Any country that harbors terrorist organization(s) (note that a nation that has terrorist organization(s) within them but that is attempting to do something about that is not harboring them) is such a sponsor, as are nations that support terrorist entities and/or engage in terrorism themselves. Such nations include Russia, Iran, the Palestinian Authority (post-merger with Hamas), Turkey, Syria, northern Korea, Qatar, Venezuela, Cuba.

Journalistic…Naiveté

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Throughout the long negotiations over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, President Hassan Rouhani has withstood scathing criticism from hard-liners at home by sticking to his case that a deal with his country’s longtime enemies will bring peace and prosperity.

So the political stakes are high for the moderate president as talks enter their homestretch toward a June deadline.

If he succeeds in sealing an agreement, Iran could see much-hoped-for relief from withering sanctions that are dragging down the economy at a time when the OPEC producer is trying to ride out a severe slump in oil prices.

This AP article goes on in this vein, touting the economic benefits to Iran, and so the political benefits to Rouhani, of “sealing an agreement.”

This is naïve. Success in “sealing an agreement” means Iran gets its nuclear weapon. Full stop. Economic and political benefits in the near term are purely side effects. Political benefits in the longer term are nuclear Iranian domination of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel.

So, unfortunately, is Dubai-based political analyst Theodore Karasik naïve.

Rouhani was elected on, promoted and supported the idea that he would help the Iranian economy recover. And of course the nuclear agreement is tied to that because of the sanction. If there is no nuclear deal, the presidency will go back to a more ultraconservative leader—under a nuclear Iran[.]

Iran remains under, has been under for quite some years, ultraconservative leadership. The mullahs, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are in charge. Their global face, Rouhani, is just smoother about it than Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

What the AP (and, apparently, Karasik) constantly miss in this is that getting the weapon is the purpose of these “negotiations,” and the drive for the weapon is to satisfy Iran’s goal of wiping Israel from the map and beyond that of emphasizing that regional domination. The mullahs, after all, are less Islamic than they are political descendants of Cyrus, Darius, and the Xerxes. (A longer term side effect is the ability to arm Iran’s terrorist allies, don’t forget.)

Collateral Damage

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In an era of antiseptic war, one fought with drones and precision weapons that limit to an amazing degree the collateral damage done by these limited strikes executed during very limited conflicts, we’ve gotten spoiled. We expect war generally to be antiseptic.

And our “leaders” in DC have gotten spoiled, too.

Several large-scale cyberattacks in recent months have prompted a number of lawmakers and policy makers to call for a more forceful response, including suggestions that the US engage in counterattacks that would disable or limit the culprits’ own networks.

But White House officials and some technology security experts remain skeptical that such “offensive” cyberattacks would work, saying they are concerned about the difficulty in targeting specific hackers without causing widespread spillover, among other things.

And so, in the face of this wide-open cyber war being waged against us, these White House officials and those “some others” insist that we do nothing, since what we would do would be imperfect and cause collateral damage.

…cybersecurity experts are mostly split on the merits of retaliation, with some saying it could distract companies from doing more to prevent breaches.

Because defense and offense cannot possibly be carried out simultaneously. Yeah.

Bob Gourley, late of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

Once the planners and everyone looks [into retaliation], it puts it on an escalation ladder we don’t want to be on. The first thing we need to do is protect our systems. Until we do that, we’re almost inviting them to attack, saying “Come on, take our stuff.”

Wait, what? You’re saying that after years of suffering cyberattacks from Russia, the People’s Republic of China, northern Korea, Iran, individuals, you still haven’t bothered to “protect our systems?” How does that work, exactly?

 

Certainly collateral damage should be limited to the extent possible, from both moral and efficiency perspectives. But this is war. Collateral damage is part of the messiness of war. If we let our fear of collateral damage paralyze us, we will lose the war, with catastrophic consequences to us, completely subsuming any collateral damage done us by this war.

It’s for those who sit in leadership chairs in DC to stop wasting their energy looking for excuses to do nothing and instead direct their energy to responding. Forcefully. As tidily as possible, but with recognition that there will be messes, sometimes big ones.

That response must include actually defending our systems, and it must include correcting this failure:

Businesses are largely prohibited by law from a practice known as “hack back,” which could either be done to punish a cyberthief or take back information that was stolen from any specific firm. That has left companies relying on the government’s response, which so far largely has come in the form of sanctions or criminal indictments.