Tag Archives: defense policy

Signals

Posted on by
Reply

An aircraft carrier has been sent to join the little flotilla sailing up and down the Gulf of Aden, and the Obama administration is very adamant about what it’s there for.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf insisted Tuesday that the US ships were “only” there to “ensure the shipping lanes remain open and safe”—and “not to do anything in terms of those Iranian ships.”

Regarding the premise that we intended anything serious in the waters off Yemen, like intercepting Iranian ships delivering weapons to their terrorists in Yemen, Harf was indignant:

That is blatantly untrue—so this discreet movement of US assets is for a discreet purpose.

President Barack Obama repeated the premise through his Press Secretary, Josh Earnest:

…the ships are in the region primarily to “protect the freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce.”

No, the signaling is quite clear, and Iran has received the message. Obama is so desperate for his “deal” with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons program that he’s perfectly willing to watch Iranian arms shipments to terrorists in the Middle East from close up. He’s perfectly willing to put our sailors so close that they can see the Iranian sailors biting their thumbs at us.

Ramadi and Strategy

Posted on by
Reply

JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey said last week that losing Ramadi to the Daesh would be unimportant from a strategic perspective; it would have only symbolic importance.

I have a couple of thoughts about that. First, symbolism in a war has vast importance, to the morale of the defenders and to the morale of the attackers. Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo had no strategic importance whatsoever, but it was critically important: the symbolism of the raid—”we can hit you wherever we wish, whenever we wish”—had immediate impact on Japan’s strategic thinking and on American and Australian military and civilian morale, even though the raid did trivial physical damage.

So it is with Ramadi, especially for an Iraqi army that presently has no heart and little willingness to stand and fight, much less attack and fight. Tikrit, after all, was recaptured, to the extent it has been, by Iraqi militias and American bombing; the army itself played only a supporting role. Ramadi’s loss would simply add to the army’s mindset that it would only lose any encounter with Daesh. Ramadi’s loss also would add fuel to the ongoing conflict between Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq. Symbolism matters in Iraq, too, and symbolic importance is…important.

Second, Doolittle’s raid came within the framework of an actual strategic plan for wresting the Pacific and its island nations back from Japan, driving Japan from the Asian mainland, and ultimately defeating Japan. In the present case, it’s entirely possible that Ramadi has no strategic importance, but this administration has no coherent strategy against which to measure Ramadi’s importance.

It’s Their Job

Posted on by
Reply

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani doesn’t like it that in a republican democracy, legislatures, representing the plebes, get a say in what the republican democratic government does internationally—including agreeing to treaties and Executive Agreements. From this, he “accused” Congress of “meddling in sensitive negotiations” about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

What the US Senate says, or what the US House of Representatives want, or what the extremists in the US are looking for, or what the US mercenaries in the region say, it doesn’t have anything to do with our government or our people…. We announce that the side that we deal with is not the US Senate or the House of Representatives—it is a group called the P5+1[.]

However, this thing has everything to do with our government and our people—us Americans on the other side of this…negotiation. And so Congress is obligated to say, to want, to look for.

Rouhani probably wants to (re)read the letter 47 of those US Senators sent him a bit ago.

Of Course

Posted on by
Reply

Fighting raged overnight [Tuesday night] and in the early hours on Tuesday on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine despite an agreement reached by the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers a day earlier.

And a significant fraction of the rebel troops in the fight are Russian Green Men.

Russia wants Ukraine back in the Russian empire. Full stop.

Whatever Happened

Posted on by
Reply

…to the plaint that Congress’ bill asserting its capacity to approve or disapprove Obama’s coming Executive Agreement with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons program would fatally imperil those negotiations?

Now the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John Kerry, is saying

Yesterday there was a compromise reached in Washington regarding congressional input. We are confident about our ability for the president to negotiate an agreement, and to do so with the ability to make the world safer.

The only change of substance was to withdraw a requirement that President Barack Obama certify every 90 days that Iran was not supporting terrorist organizations anymore.

But the bill no longer imperils negotiations? It never did, of course, that was just Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to anything Republican. The true change, if change it was, was the bill’s passage out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and onto the Senate floor by a unanimous 19-0 vote.