Women in Afghanistan

Taylor Marsh has a strange position about the Afghanistan War. Back in January I posted about a post of hers calling for the Obama administration to make establishment of equal rights for women a major goal of the war there. She seemed to be oblivious to the fact that adopting such a goal would be a major expansion of the mission. And of the historical experience of the Soviets there, in which their requirements of schools for girls and the like became a major issue for the extremist Muslim terrorists brave mujaheddin freedom fighters the United States was actively supporting.

Today she's posting about a genuine outrage, President Karzai ‘Legalizes’ Rape 04/02/09. It's about a new law that our ally Hamid Karzai put into effect on his own authority without the action of Parliament requiring that married women have sex with their husbands under certain conditions. I'm not clear what the law actually says. According to the Canadian Press article to which she links, the law applies only to Shi'a women and says that they can't refuse sex to their husbands, apparently at all; Shi'a are a minority among a Sunni majority in Afghanistan. The account in Gesetz bestimmt Häufigkeit von Sex in der Ehe Die Welt 02.04.2009 says it requires women to have sex with their husbands once every four days (in the body of the article) or maybe four times per week (in the introductory summary). This account says it also requires the husband to agree to have sex with the wife at least once every four months.

So I'm really confused about what this new law actually says. But, once again, Taylor Marsh is outraged about the law without apparently putting it together what that means for her preferred women's-right war goal. If the very pro-American, relatively secular Hamid Karzai is imposing such a law, it says something about what kinds of obstacles women there have to overcome before gaining full equality. And it shows once again as we've seen in Iraq that the US likes to claim we're improving the status of women by making war on their country, but the practical effects are often very different than our advertised ideals.

And wars are the most unpredictable of tools to achieve anything. Optimistic views of Obama's current strategy are picturing another five years before the country can be stabilized and Karzai's government and army be at full capability. How many civilians - men, women and children - will be killed during that time? How many things can go wrong and send developments off into a very different direction? How open are men and women in Afghanistan going to be to American notions of women's equality when our planes and helicopters and drones are rocketing their villages and blowing up adults and children, fighters and noncombatants, young and old? And what kind of blowback will five or ten more years of Americans fighting in Afghanistan produce?

I'm sick of people coming up with pretty-sounding reasons to kill foreigners in wars thousands of miles away. And it's depressing to see after the experience of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars already how hard it is for many people to come to grips with the real limits of American power that we've encountered.

Tags: afghanistan war, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war, taylor marsh

"Humanitarian" war and Afghanistan

Taylor Marsh at the Huffington Post Progressive Bankruptcy on Afghanistan 01/10/09 scolds "progressives", Steve Clemons and Rachel Maddow in particular, for their supposed insufficient concern for what would happen in Afghanistan if the US and NATO pulled out.

If we keep fighting a war until women in Afghanistan have the level of recognized and practical rights that women have in, say, Australia or Spain, or even the lower level in the US, we'll likely be fighting in Afghanistan for the lifetimes of most people now alive.

Yet after scolding "progressives" over this and suggesting that Obama needs to give more concern to Pakistan in that war, she also says, "I'm not in favor of escalating in Afghanistan like Iraq, mainly because Afghans have never had a central government, so it won't work."

This is frankly just silly. War supporters get very concerned about the rights of women in Muslim countries where they want to bomb and kill people. But without vastly escalating the number of troops, without having a "central government", and without committing ourselves to decades of war there, just how are we going to guarantee women's rights there?

This is a surprisingly disingenuous post from Marsh. For one thing, the purpose of the war that started in 2001 was never for the purpose of imposing more enlightened conditions for Afghan women, or even to fight the Taliban as such. It was to kill or capture as many of the cadres of Al Qa'ida, the terrorist group that attacked the US on 9/11/01, as possible. Rummy could certainly have done a more thorough job of that.

(An occupying power does have the legal responsibility to set up a representative government, though not one that would pass the European Union's minimum requirements for membership. Even the United States doesn't have one of those.)

But no matter how we define the mission, the same issues remain. Do we have the capability to achieve those goals at an acceptable cost? Is there a reasonable chance of success? Are the consequences of the war more damaging than beneficial? How are we going to come out of this with better results than the Soviet Union did? And the USSR, by the way, did try to impose more equal and modern conditions for women there, which was one of the main sources of hostility to them among the mujaheddin. That would be the brave Afghan freedom fighters that we armed and supported in the 1980s, though today we call them murdering Muslim terrorists.

Then there's the problem that in South Asia, Pakistan and India are chronically in tension over the disputed Kashmir province. The current Afghan government of Harmid Karzai is favored by India while Pakistan sees it as "pro-Indian", not entirely without reason. Whatever the cause for which we are fighting in Afghanistan, a continued war in Afghanistan that is expanding into Pakistan seriously complicates the effort Obama has said he wants to make to diffuse the Kashmir controversy. Which is a major issue in the Muslim world, and even more importantly has a major effect on nuclear nonproliferation efforts, Pakistan and India both being nuclear powers.

There's also the issue that protracted war in a Muslim country, especially one that scarcely has a functioning modern national state, is itself a problem, no matter what the goal is.

There's also the reality of mission creep that has occurred already. We went from going after Al Qa'ida, which the US assumed to require ousting the Taliban government, to fighting the "Taliban" resistance in Afghanistan, to increasing rocketing Pakistan and worrying about the "Taliban" insurgents there. I put "Taliban" in quotes here because from what Juan Cole says about the current situation, the groups that American officials and reporters code as "Taliban" are actually not all directly connected to the old Taliban government and movement. Many of them are Pushtun warlords and guerrilla groups. They are generally Islamist and generally opposed to Western and United Nations standards for women's rights. But to simply assume, like Taylor Marsh does in that post, that they will implement identical practices to the Taliban regime that we ousted in 2001, is largely speculation. And those practices were considered extreme even in the Muslim world.

The mission creep needs to stop. If we are going to continue the war, we need to set a clear goal and strategy and some kind of reasonable time line for an exit. And whether the goal is making sure that we've damaged Al Qa'ida as much as we feasibly can with such an approach - which is likely already the case - or to keep a pro-India government in power there, or to permanently secure some considerably higher level of rights for Afghan women, we need to be realistic about what it takes. In military and economic terms, in losses to Americans, other NATO countries and to Afghanistan, in the likelihood of creating an even more massive refugee crisis in Afghanistan. The last I recall seeing, Iraq and Afghanistan were the two biggest refugee crisis in the world, even more serious than Darfur, and even if that ranking doesn't hold, it's already very serious.

All these are problems that have to be addressed no matter what war aims.

Marsh, at least so far as that post indicates, seems to think it's just a matter of that famous American Will on which rightwing commentators put such great stock. She seems to think that the main problems is that "progressives [are] losing their moral courage" to continue the Afghanistan War. To take that posture and then to say that she doesn't support escalating like in Iraq but also wants to do some kind of vague more in Pakistan, that's really just silly.

And on the change of war aim itself. She does more-or-less advocate that, though hardly in the unambiguous terms her scorn for Clemons and Maddow on the issue would indicate:

Maybe progressives against action in Afghanistan should consider looking at a broader picture in Afghanistan, one that includes women's rights, but also the rights of young girls to go to school, and whether that is a long term strategic interest to the U.S., not some luxury for which we can't afford to fight.

We shouldn't be under any illusions about this. This would be a vast expansion of the American mission in Afghanistan, and one that would take much longer and probably be more difficult to achieve than the ones we're already failing to achieve - to the extent that anyone actually knows what the ones we're trying to achieve right now really are.

But just as the US has neither the right nor the actual power to be the sheriff of the whole world, neither do we have the right nor the power to be the armed humanitarians of the world.

And it's long past time for Americans to be regularly asking questions about wars, such as, is there any right in international law for the United States or NATO to decide that we will carry on a counterinsurgency war for years or decades in order to protect women's rights as such? Or to carry on even a fast war? Not that I'm aware. Even the case for unilateral intervention (i.e., without UN sanction) in instances of actual genocide is highly questionable, for better or worse.

Failing to recognize the limits of our own power has been a key failing of the United States in the last eight years, and not for the first time in history. But the strategic consequences of such lack of recognition has been more disastrous with the Iraq War than ever before, even in the Vietnam War. Those limits are there, even in good causes.

And we always fight for good causes, don't we?

War is sometimes a necessary evil, but it remains an evil. And it sets off consequences that are often far greater than anyone envisioned at the start.

Tags: afghanistan war, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war, taylor marsh

Humanitarian intervention

An Australian participant in a Yahoogroups list to which I belong brought up a point this weekend about humanitarian intervention. More specifically, he has always been disturbed in some way about the fact that what he calls "the Left" seemed to be insufficiently outraged about Saddam Hussein's regime's human rights record. Although he's been very critical of the Iraq War and Australia's participation in it, he also argues that Saddam's human right record alone would have been a legitimate cause for war.

And he's sympathetic to calls now for outside intervention to effect "regime change" in Zimbabwe.

Following are some of my (slightly edited) comments which I shared with that group on this general topic.

Fans of invasion and war in Zimbabwe might want to look at the results of "regime change" in Iraq - a million-plus deaths, millions of refugees, sectarian civil war, devastation of the infrastructure, etc. - before they dream up new wars for noble purposes. But then all wars are for noble purposes, aren't they?

American conservative bloggers were cheering the Ethiopian Army when they marched in to Somalia (with American backing) to change the "Islamic Courts" regime that was briefly in power. For a week or two, they were suggesting the US could take lessons from Ethiopia on how to do "regime change". Then that quickly descended into the Ethiopian Army raping and pillaging, and unable to keep order between competing Somali warlords. And the US rockets a Somali village now and then to kill "terrorists". But I'm sure the Ethiopians and Dick Cheney have pure intentions.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for African military actions to cheer for, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is asking European countries to send more troops to the Republic of the Congo to contain a rebellion there that is creating an enormous humanitarian crisis. Or does cheering for war in Zimbabwe mean that you think the people in the Congo just deserve to suffer? Come to think of it, anyone who's not in favor of Australia and the US invading and occupying the Congo to set things right must be a fan of slaughter, starvation and disease! (In case it's not clear in the context, those last two sentences are meant ironically.)

No matter how good the cause, the limits of power on behalf of the intervening nations is still a factor that has to be considered.

War in itself is an evil. Climate change may eventually outdo it. But war has been the greatest source of self-inflicted damage the human race has come up with so far. War should be the last resort. It's never an easy solution. And it's the "solution" with most potential to spin out of control and have destructive effects not anticipated.

It seems to me it's more than a bit of a cop-out to say that we should have overthrown Saddam Hussein on the basis of human rights and not realize that the death and destruction the war has caused is the real-world result of actually overthrowing him. Yes, we can always say that we should have had smarter American viceroys, that we should have kept the Christian cowboys from Blackwater on a shorter lease, and so on.

But in 2003, no matter what the excuse was, the US military had the same deficiency in counterinsurgency warfare, very few Arabic speakers, an enormous dependence on and immense faith in the magic powers of air war, and the same tendency to lie their hineys off whenever something went wrong. We can make up all kinds of fairy tales about how the war might ideally have been. But the basic results wouldn't have been essentially different.

And while things are looking promising for the US to get out of Iraq over the next couple of years, it's still true that it's harder to get out of a war than to get into one. That's as true in southern Africa as it is in Mesopotamia or South Asia. There's likely to be another outbreak of civil war - Arab vs. Kurd, Shi'a vs. Sunni, Shi'a vs. Shi'a - after we leave or while we're leaving Iraq. It will be an immense accomplishment if we can manage to avoid direct intervention by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. All those countries are actually intervening in some way now. Turkey periodically crosses into Iraqi airspace to bomb some Kurds.

International law is also important, as much as today's American Republicans love to sneer at the whole concept. That part of the American tradition most of them seem to dearly despise. And even though the UN General Assembly in 2005 recognized something like a "responsibility to protect" in cases of massacres, there is really no criteria comparable to the legal prohibitions on preventive war. Basically, the UN can declare any situation a "threat to international peace and security". But there are no clear standards for "humanitarian intervention".

And it's also the case that American Republicans always become deeply, passionately concerned about the human rights of political prisoners and the oppression of women - in countries they want to invade. But even the most besotted Republican would find it hard to argue that the social position of women in Iraq is improved over what it was in the Baathist years. It's probably marginally better in Afghanistan than it was before, at least in the capital city of Kabul, which is basically the only place the pro-Western government - which rules under a form of Islamic law, sharia - actually controls. To see exactly how much today's segregationist-minded Republican Party cares about human rights, read up on what's been going on with the lynch-law system they use in Guantanamo and other stations of the Bush Gulag.

Maybe Australian politicians are honest enough that none of them would ever use a humanitarian justification for a war they want to wage for less noble ends. They're lucky if that's the case. It ain't that way in the United States, though. Really not.

I also don't think there's anything hypocritical about being concerned for human rights in some other country while also not being in favor of going to war to rectify the conditions in that country.

During the days of Communist East Germany, the Green Party in West Germany distinguished itself by highlighting the democratic opposition and human rights cases. And that had some real effects in giving the democratic movement more room to act and got some dissidents out of prison or otherwise mitigated their treatment. But the Greens never advocated invading East Germany because, among other things, doing so would have kicked off global thermonuclear war.

The US government under Jimmy Carter (1977-81) made a point of highlighting human rights abuses under the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina in 1976-83. So did international human rights NGOs and other governments whose citizens were "disappeared" by that hateful regime. But no one except Britain went to war with them. And that was over the Malvinas/Falklands Islands, not over human rights. Actually, I think Argentina had and has good claim to the Malvinas. But the dictatorship's defeat in that war was also the final blow to its existence. What was the pure position there? To cheer for the democracy going to war to assert an illegitimate claim to territory? Or to cheer for the dictatorship when they were fighting for something genuinely in their country's perceived interest? But, again, the human rights protest against the regime did make a difference in saving lives and restraining the regime's hand to some extent.

Tags: argentina, ddr, deutschland, east germany, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war, iraq+war

Humanitarian intervention and the Iraq Syndrome

Fairness and Accuracy in Media's (FAIR) Extra! for Jan/Feb 2008 includes an article by Julie Hollar on The Humanitarian Temptation: Calling for war to bring peace to Darfur.

I hope that American political culture will experience a major "Iraq Syndrome" in which the public and Congress will scrutinize US involvement in wars more closely, skeptically and realistically than what occurred with the Iraq War.

Hollar's article is a reminder that even wars for legitimate purposes, such as an international intervention to halt genocide, can go badly wrong. We're seeing right now in Iraq and Afghanistan that American military power has definite limits, more constricting limits than most Americans would like to believe exist.

Resolving a bitter civil war is not easy for outsiders to accomplish. It may require a broad range of counterinsurgency operations, all of which risk turning a humanitarian intervention into a nationalist war against the intervening power(s). Language skills are also a critical factor. So is religion. In the case of Darfur and the Sudan, it may be difficult for many Sudanese and for Muslims in other countries to look at an intervention on the part of armies from Christian or Buddhist or Hindu nations against an Arab Muslim regime as motivated by entirely benign purposes.

It's also the case that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles of the world will always find "humanitarian" glosses for their cynical and militaristic foreign policies. After all, the often savage acts of nineteenth century imperial powers was crowned with the rhetoric of civilizing supposedly lesser peoples, e.g., the "white man's burden".

And military forcies large enough and well-trained enough to credible undertake a humanitarian intervention in a hostile, difficult, "non-permissive" environment is also a military that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles can use for their own truly dark purposes.

And war is war. It's about killing the enemy. Whatever the legitimacy of the war aims, the notion of "humanitarian war", as Helena Cobban has observed, is a hideous oxymoron. She writes in The myth of 'humanitarian' war 07/15/04 at her Just World News blog:

But trying to claim that any war can be 'humanitarian' is fundamentally dishonest. No war is 'humanitarian', ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights--their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves 'humanitarian' aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war--facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.

Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing 'humanitarian' war aims... Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of 'humanitarian' rhetoric... Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an 'unjust' or even 'unjustified' war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping. (emphasis in original)

In Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), former humanitarian hawk turned skeptic David Rieff co-authors the article on "Humanitarian Intervention" with Anthony Dworkin. Referring to the often-cited Rwandan genocide as one of his examples, they write:

In practice, humanitarian intervention has often served as a justification for States to act in conflicts where there is no domestic support for more straightforward political interventions. The public in North America and western Europe has, for all the talk of compassion fatigue, proved remarkably sympathetic to the use of force to avert of bring to an end a humanitarian disaster. On the other hand, humanitarian intervention has also been a justification for other political motivations. In Rwanda, in 1994, it was commonly assumed that the French humanitarian intervention dubbed Operation Turquoise used the humanitarian imperative as a cover for France's decision to continue to try to influence events in the Great Lakes region of Africa with military force and, more specifically, to save the French-supported, but genocidal, government. And, historically, many of the imperial campaigns launched by the European colonial powers in the nineteenth century were justified on humanitarian grounds. (my emphasis)

They conclude by observing:

After the American invasion of Iraq, the morality and practical efficacy of armed intervention seem more problematical to many people than they did previously, and the rich world's appetite for humantiarian intervention appears at least temporarily to have wanted. However, the continuing victimization of civilians in internal conflicts such as Darfur means the use of military power for humanitarian purposes is likely to retain an enduring appeal, even in these chastened times.

Hollar's article on various media appeals for armed intervention in Darfur observes:

A “humanitarian intervention,” as benevolent as it may try to sound, at its core means non-consensual military action against a foreign country—war under the banner of humanitarianism. The remarkable thing about nearly all of these media calls for intervention is that, beyond the appeals to urgency and morality, virtually no effort is made to explain exactly why or how one should believe that aggressive military action is what will bring peace to Darfur; readers, apparently, are to take that as self-evident. “If the United Nations is not willing to intervene,” the St. Petersburg Times asked (7/27/04), “how can it be taken seriously as a force for peace and humanitarianism?”

The equation of intervention with peace and humanitarianism is particularly remarkable in the wake of Iraq. Despite the [Sacramento] Bee’s declaration that “nothing” is more globally urgent than rescuing the people of Darfur, Iraq is unquestionably a much larger humanitarian crisis. Best estimates put the death toll in Iraq at over a million. (See page 22.) According the UNCHR, 4.4 million Iraqis are currently refugees or internally displaced, despite widespread media attention on a relative handful of Iraqis returning home.

The "liberation" of the Kurds and Shiites from a genocidal dictator was from the beginning presented as a key justification for the Iraq War, increasingly so as the WMD argument lost all credibility with the public. Even now, calls for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are based primarily on claims that a pullout will “result” in a humanitarian crisis - as if one were not already well underway. (my emphasis)

Hollar also has some important observations about the experience of the Kosovo War, something on which I hope to post more soon.

I've written before about the distinctions that Steven Metz of the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute makes among various types of situations that may involved the US in counterinsurgency and the kind of careful realism that is required in evaluating those cases. He presents some of those arguments in the Winter 2007-08 issue of the Army War College journal Parameters, New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency. His distinctions are also relevant to humanitarian interventions, which are likely to involve some sort of counterinsurgency/anti-guerrilla operations, especially if "regime change" is one of the goals of the intervention. He sees three major categories of such cases:

Rather than a “one size fits all” American strategy for counterinsurgencies, the United States should recognize three distinct insurgency environments, each demanding a different response:

• A functioning and responsible government with some degree of legitimacy in a nation with significant US national interests or traditional ties can be rescued by foreign internal defense (El Salvador model).

• There is no functioning or legitimate government but there is a broad international and regional consensus favoring the creation of a neo-trusteeship until systemic reengineering is complete. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational force operating under the auspices of the United Nations.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In such cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict through the support of regional states and, in cooperation with friendly states and allies, creating humanitarian “safe zones” within the region of the conflict.

And his concluding observation on counterinsurgencies are also relevant to humanitarian interventions:

Perhaps we need to transcend the idea that insurgency is simply a variant of conventional war and amenable to the same strategic concepts. Such a conceptual and strategic readjustment will not come easily. It will be hard to simply contain an insurgency and possibly witness the ensuing humanitarian costs when no salvageable government or multinational consensus exists that is capable of reengineering the failed social, political, or economic system. It will be particularly difficult to conform to the notion of serving as mediators or honest-brokers rather than as active allies or supporters of a regime. But to not do so — to confront new security problems with old ideas and strategies — is a recipe for disaster. (my emphasis)

Elaborating the same idea in the body of the article, Metz makes the important observation reminding us that the risk of protracted conflict a problem in itself:

Such actions suggest that the US military and broader defense community need a very different way of thinking about and undertaking counterinsurgency strategies and operations. At the strategic level, the risk to the United States is not that insurgents will “win” in the traditional sense, gain control of their country, or change it from an American ally to an enemy. The greater likelihood is that complex internal conflicts, especially ones involving an insurgency, will generate other adverse effects: the destabilization of regions; reduced access to resources and markets; the blossoming of transnational crime; humanitarian disasters; and transnational terrorism. Given these possibilities, the US goal should not automatically be the direct defeat of the insurgents by the established regime (which often is impossible, particularly when a partner regime is only half-heartedly committed), but, rather, the rapid resolution of the conflict. A quick and sustainable outcome which integrates most of the insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to US national interests than a protracted conflict that may lead to the total destruction of the insurgent base. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

That threat can be just as real in a humanitarian intervention as it is in a Cheneyist intervention.

Tags: anthony dworkin, darfur, david rieff, helena cobban, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war

The Afghanistan War and NATO's present and future

This paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) looks at the options for the future of NATO alliance: Recasting the Euro-Atlantic Partnership by Franklin D. Kramer and Simon Serfaty 02/01/07.

The ongoing Afghanistan War gets such poor coverage in the American press. But that war is a NATO operation, in which our NATO allies Germany, France and Spain are actively participating in line with their commitment after the 9/11 attacks to support the US war there to go after Al Qaida and the Taliban regime that was allied with and protected it.

But the Afghanistan War is getting more criticism in Europe and it drags on with little progress, and even a deteriorating military situation with the increased activity of the Taliban, although some of what gets called "Taliban" in the press could turn out to be local warlords or tribal groups, or other Islamic fundamentalists not specifically affiliated with the actual Taliban. Kramer and Serfaty write that among NATO countries, "there is a general consensus that progress in the stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan is far from satisfactory."

And they elaborate in a passage that is a real reminder that even "humanitarian" military interventions of the 1990s need to be re-examined realistically in light of subsequent developments:

Other interventions do not suggest that Afghanistan is an aberration. Based on the existing record, the Euro-Atlantic countries can hardly guarantee that their involvement in future interventions will necessarily resolve any given situation. Bosnia is still far from an effectively functioning state; East Timor has had significant problems; Haiti remains a miasma. Somalia and Iraq are worse. Kosovo is yet to be resolved. Each of these interventions has had significant international involvement, substantial resources, and long-term commitments. But none has had clear success.

To be sure, there are examples of positive results - the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo put an end to significant killings, and, despite the difficulties since then, those instances had great benefit for that reason alone. But Bosnia and Kosovo show the difficulty of moving from humanitarian efforts - "halt the killing" - to the broader requirements of creating a functioning polity; and other cases, such as Somalia and Iraq, show that interventions do not even always result in the end of killing (though, of course, non-intervention can result in a great deal more, as in Rwanda and now Darfur). (my emphasis)

Kramer and Serfaty in this article essentially take it for granted that the NATO alliance will continue on a long-term basis. They describe a number of major areas on which the US and Europe need to cooperate: "failing" states; "radical militant Islam"; weapons of mass destruction; energy cooperation; and, global structural competition. And they talk about how Europe's view of the world tends to differ from America's:

Europe, of course, faces these issues as well, arguably even more acutely than the United States. For most European countries, the impact of radical militant Islam is not only an external issue but also one of domestic concern. Unlike the United States, it is Europe that is within the range of Iranian missiles. When Russia puts its thumb on the gas pipeline, it is Europe whose energy is affected. And while the global markets have the potential to hurt the United States, Europe has already been enduring relatively high unemployment and lower growth rates for some time. In all these manifestations, Europeans face much the same issues as Americans do. Reflective of this fact, the European Security Strategy put forth by the Union and the U.S. National Security Strategy are remarkably, but not surprisingly, parallel.

In responding to the issues, however, the European and American processes are often different. This stems from an additional critical question faced by Europe - namely, the institutional finality of the EU. The Union (and the broader issues surrounding it) continues to raise serious questions of identity for Europeans, reflected in numerous levels of torn sovereignty, parallel structures, and political steps that have moved forward (the euro) and back (constitutional treaty). The EU, originally an economic project with political consequence, is now far more — a legislative and judicial sovereign entity (though not always with sovereign power), a diplomatic actor (though with parallel and often superior actors in member states), and a military power (though with quite modest assertion so far). Thus, the Union is both sovereign in itself and composed of sovereign member states, which have not given up their economic capacities, their diplomatic endeavors, or control over security and military policy. (my emphasis)

Their formulation that the EU was "originally an economic project with political consequence" is likely to reinforce a common American misunderstanding; the description is arguably outright wrong. Moving toward greater political union was always the primary long-term goal of the EU and its post-Second World War predecessors institutions. The EU itself is first of all a political union. Their description makes it sound like the EU's political, diplomatic and military roles came about almost by accident - which is pretty much the opposite of the actual case.

But, otherwise, they do a decent job of outlining some important differences between US and European positions. The observation, "Unlike the United States, it is Europe that is within the range of Iranian missiles," raises an obvious question: why does Dick Cheney seem to consider Iran's alleged (and likely) efforts to develop nuclear weapons as a far more urgent issue than the nations of Europe who are much more at risk in that eventuality?

I would also note that the most controversial aspect of the current Cheney-Bush US official national security strategy, the use of preventive war (though it's euphemistically called preemptive war in official documents, presumably for legal reasons) is definitely not part of the EU member nations policy - even though Britain and some other EU members participated in the preventive-war invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Tags: afghanistan war, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war, nato