Trying to be real about Trump's weird North Korea show

The Democratic response to Trump has unfortunately been plagued by a chronic tendency by the Democratic leadership to accept Republican framing of issues and thereby trying to present liberal positions in as conservative-sounding a way as possible. Up until 1992, when California voted for Clinton over Old Man Bush, that might have made some practical sense. California is a powerhouse on electoral votes and since the Second World War had been a reliable supporter of Republican Presidential candidates, despite the very strong liberal presence in state government. Up until that time, the Democrats had a much bigger need to have some ability to capture Presidential votes in the South. And conservative Democrats were far more prominent in Southern states legislatures where the Party still held a legislative majority than in Congress.

That conservative framing extended to foreign policy, where antiwar sentiment struggled to find a voice. But even during the Reagan Administration, Democrats were far more critical about military adventurism than they would be later, even under the two Bush Administrations.

But after the 9/11 attack in 2001, the Democratic establishment was dominated by a defensiveness in the face of Republican belligerence. Obama struck a more moderate tone on foreign policy, but was unwilling to draw back from military involvements in a major way. He showed more restraint on Syria than the Republicans in Congress were showing. But his intervention in Libya was not only a disaster on the ground, it also was a major blow to major nonproliferation efforts. To his credit, he was able to negotiate a meaningful nonproliferation agreement with Iran, which his successor is eagerly trying to destroy.

What's so striking is that even in the face of Trump-style radicalism, corruption, and heavy-handed blundering, the Democrats are sticking with the script of criticizing the Trump Administration for not being hawkish enough.

This presents a new situation for the peace movement - to the extent that antiwar sentiment in the US right now can be said to rise to the level of a movement. Leading nuclear nonproliferation leaders by Joe Cirincione ‏of Ploughshares welcomed the fact that the US was focusing more on talking to North Korea than on trading juvenile taunts and hair-raising threats of nuclear war:

Trump overcame a major obstacle. He brought the right, like Bolton, to the table. He did something past presidents haven't been able to do: establishing a precedent. "Yes, we talk to our enemies. This is how we solve our problems." @11thHour @MSNBC https://t.co/nu6jPs0eID

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) June 12, 2018

But that didn't make him an uncritical supporter of Trump's North Korea diplomacy, either:

I expected more, but am also struck by the weakness of the language. 25 years ago the Clinton Admin. reached a stronger agreement with Kim Il Sung (incl. verification). It was derided & later killed by John Bolton. Interested to see how he defends this. https://t.co/1LB1ZPJqxL

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) June 12, 2018

If there were any doubts that Donald Trump is permanently booked at The Grand Delusion Hotel, his early Wednesday morning tweet erased them.

The president claimed, “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” If only that were true.

There is not a single, credible nuclear-security expert who would agree that the bizarre Singapore summit and the vague communiqué it produced has eliminated the dozens of nuclear weapons, hundreds of missiles and the vast nuclear weapon complex North Korea has constructed over the past five decades. (Cironcione in The Surreal Summit in Singapore The National Interest 06/13/2018)

Sarah Lazare harshes on the Dems for how they've been approaching Trump's bizarre North Korean summit show in Liberals Are Criticizing the Korea Summit From the Right. Here’s Why They Have it All Wrong. In These Times 06/13/2018. She was bothered by these examples (internal links omitted):

Yet, there is a yawning gap between the optimistic mood in South Korea and the response among liberal media circles in the United States, where many are reacting with a mix of sanctimony and scorn. On June 12, Kevin Drum published a piece in Mother Jones in which he accused Trump of “abandoning” South Korea and agreeing to a weak deal. Vox echoed this line with rebukes of a “shockingly weak” agreement that includes “huge concessions to Kim for little in return.” MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson accused Trump of complicity in the public relations makeover of a dictator. And popular host Rachel Maddow released an episode on June 12 arguing that Trump's pledge to halt war games in South Korea is a “giveaway to N. Korea” that “suits Putin's goals”—disregarding that robust social movements in South Korea have protested the U.S. military presence for decades.

These refrains were repeated by Democratic leaders, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, who released a joint declaration ahead of the summit criticizing Trump from the right by accusing him of not being a tough enough negotiator. In this climate, the “liberal” line is virtually indistinguishable from the hand-wringing of officials from pro-war “think tanks” like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which receives major funding from weapons manufacturers. [my emphasis]

Lazare interviews South Korean-born peace activist Christine Ahn. This is the criticism she elicits from Ahn:

Sarah: Given how volatile and dangerous Trump is, it seems to me that if you don’t trust him, you should do everything you can to make sure that he doesn’t derail the peace process. This is the same person who casually threatened to annihilate the entire Korean peninsula with nuclear weapons, yet now some Democrats are pressuring him from the right. Do you think this is dangerous?

Christine: It is very dangerous to pressure Trump to be hardline. We have to put all of our efforts into ensuring this goes well and is not undermined. Look who's in Trump’s cabinet: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and tomorrow is the confirmation meeting for Harry Harris, the former head of Pacific Command — a military man with a hardline position against China and North Korea, now likely the new ambassador to South Korea.

If things don't go well, we are in an incredibly dangerous situation. We saw that Lindsey Graham ask the seven Democratic senators to join him in authorizing the use of military force against North Korea if this process does not succeeed.

Talking with various members of Congress on the Hill, I got the message that they oppose this but they don’t have any path to success - and they oppose this because they don’t trust Trump. There’s this trope that we don’t engage with dictators. Really - we don’t engage with oppressive regimes? What about Saudi Arabia and Israel? The hypocrisy is just beyond the pale.

Democrats are attacking Trump from the right and sticking to this hard line of no dialogue, no engagement. This is the same line that was used against the Iran Deal. When I went to meet with Nancy Pelosi's office, I felt like I was dealing with the Obama administration. They had this line of, “We're not going to engage until there's complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.” That approach of strategic patience got us nowhere except a nuclear armed North Korea. [my emphasis in italics]

As far as it goes, this seems like a reasonable set of cautions to me.

Human-rights advocate Scott Horton, though, was very negatively impressed with Lazare's piece, writing in Facebook 06/15/2018 that it is:

A typical piece of infantile leftist analysis of the criticism of Trump's dealings with the DPRK leadership. What's the matter with it? These critics are not in fact "attacking from the right." They are almost without exception critics who favor a negotiated settlement. They want to see an agreement which is credible, verifiable and sustainable. They are exposing an effort by Trump which is all PR glitz and no substance, and pointing to steps Trump has taken which will likely undermine a long-term effort to broker a serious deal. They are also exposing the hypocrisy of the Murdoch media which vehemently attacks negotiations by Clinton or Obama and uncritically supports them by Trump. None of these supposed liberal critics are attacking the idea of negotiations by Trump, all of them are in fact embracing the idea of negotiations. We can't allow ourselves to be trapped in the ludicrously binary framing that Sarah Lazare accepts, which is that our options are Donald Trump waging preemptive nuclear war against the DPRK, or Donald Trump giving away the shop without concessions from the DPRK in uninformed discussions. Public criticism of flaws and errors in the negotiating process is a part of the democratic process and should help press Trump to address these flaws. [my emphasis]

I have great respect for Scott Horton. But here I'm afraid he slipped into typical liberal hippie-punching. For some people, it never goes out of style. I find it hard to see how he could read Lazare's article that way.

(For those not so familiar with leftie lore, one of Lenin's most famous works was a polemic called “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder [1920]).

Gershom Gorenberg focuses on the wider picture on nuclear nonproliferation and points to a real problem with the kind of slapdash, reality-show diplomacy Trump has played the last few weeks with North Korea (The Trump-Kim Show Should Teach Israel How Little Trump's Support Is Worth The American Prospect 06/13/2018):

A few weeks ago, Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA, the accord meant to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It included strict inspections to make sure Iran was keeping the deal. It took years of sanctions and diplomacy to reach.

Trump trashed it.

Now Trump meets with the North Korean dictator, and signs a joint statement that vaguely calls for “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” With no clarity about what that means, no mechanism to make it happen, and certainly no verification process, Trump treats Kim as his new bestie and announces, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

One potential lesson for Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is that he should immediately offer a “historic meeting” with Trump, praise the Great Dealmaker in the one-on-one, and be on his way to a new accord with no irksome inspections. As Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment points out, Khamenei is probably too proud and dogmatic for that.

The other possible lesson for Iran is that when you make an agreement with America before you have a bomb, America won't honor it. On the other hand, if you make an agreement on nukes after you already have a bomb, you yourself don't need to honor it. From an Iranian perspective, the logical thing to do is to work as quickly as possible to go nuclear.

It's possible to walk and talk at the same time when it comes to North Korean nukes. There are also people who prefer to see a continuing threat of war with North Korea as a beneficial thing from the point of few of their ideology and/or the lobbies with which they sympathize. People need to pay attention and think critically, like with every important issue.

And Joe Cirincione and Guy Saperstein are right when they said a month ago, "Bipartisanship does not have to mean Democrats agreeing to right-wing positions and budgets. Democrats do not need to continue as Republicans-lite on defense. They can stand up for tough, realistic national-security policies that protect America while cutting excessive spending and excessive weapons. By doing so, they will gain, not lose, voters." (Progressives Need a New Way to Talk About National Security The Nation 05/11/2018)

And there's no inherent conflict between being serious about nuclear nonproliferation and being realistic about the actual situation. On the contrary, the latter is necessary for the first. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorializes (06/13/2018):

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists favors all dialogue aimed at reducing nuclear risks, and it therefore supports US President Donald Trump’s decision to engage with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un in Singapore.

But media pomp and video symbolism cannot substitute for arms control substance. The high-level goals listed in the joint statement Trump and Kim issued after their meeting are extremely vague, but concrete steps are required, if the nuclear risk that North Korea poses to the United States and the international community is to be reduced. The vagueness of the joint statement creates a distinct possibility that it will quickly evaporate, with regrettable — and possibly catastrophic — results for the region and the world.

The Bulletin is deeply concerned the United States has already committed to cease large-scale military exercises in Northeast Asia without, apparently, first consulting its South Korean allies. This move is part of a deeply problematic pattern, in which the Trump administration aligns with dictators at the expense of longtime US allies and important multinational agreements. It is a pattern that must end, if negotiations with North Korea are to have any chance of succeeding.

As a next step, the United States and North Korea need to agree in specific terms on the characteristics of a “freeze” in activities that would continue during negotiations that could well take years to complete. The United States should insist that the North formally agree to cease all nuclear weapons tests, missile launches, and fissile material production while talks continue. Without such an agreement, talks could drag on fruitlessly for years, perhaps even acting as a cover for continued development of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. [my emphasis]

North Korea, nuclear proliferation and regime change

Robert Parry makes an important point about a huge problem with US nuclear nonproliferation right now (How ‘Regime Change’ Wars Led to Korea Crisis Consortium News 09/04/2017):

... the current North Korea crisis, which could end up killing millions of people, can be viewed as a follow-on disaster to President George W. Bush’s Iraq War and President Barack Obama’s Libyan intervention. Those wars came after the leaders of Iraq and Libya had dismantled their dangerous weapons programs, leaving their countries virtually powerless when the U.S. government chose to invade.

In both cases, the U.S. government also exploited its power over global information to spread lies about the targeted regimes as justification for the invasions — and the world community failed to do anything to block the U.S. aggressions.

And, on a grim personal note, the two leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, were then brutally murdered, Hussein by hanging and Gaddafi by a mob that first sodomized him with a knife.

Paul Jay and Larry Wilkerson discuss that point among others related to North Korea in Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat - But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is The Real News 09/05/2017:

This report includes a recent clip of Vladimir Putin making that same point about the effect of the Iraq and Libya wars on nuclear proliferation. I suppose these days we need to specify that surely Putin has some possibly nefarious agenda in saying so. But that makes it no less true.

Wilkerson also wrote about North Korea three weeks ago, before the supposed thermonuclear test now in the news, The American Conservative 08/18/2017. And he references the regime change problem there, too:

[W]hat makes North Korean leaders so desperate about their capacity to fulfill that goal [of maintaining the current dynasty in power]? That too is not hard to answer: the military power of the United States, power that has been used to unseat Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and in the attempt to unseat Bashar al-Assad. Recently, President Trump even threatened Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with a possible U.S. military intervention in that country.

Russia talk from threat-inflating politicians

The rhetoric against Russia from the Obama Administration and our presumptive next President Hillary Clinton has gotten pretty hair-raising lately.

Russia has been a bogeyman for the Western nations many times before

I'm including this long excerpt from yesterday's debate here to convey the Cold-War-like flavor of her comments on Russia, much of it in connection with her plan to escalate US participation in the Syrian civil war:

RADDATZ: And, Secretary Clinton, let me ask you about that, because you have asked for an increase from 10,000 to 65,000 Syrian refugees. We know you want tougher vetting. That's not a perfect system. So why take the risk of having those refugees come into the country?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I will not let anyone into our country that I think poses a risk to us. But there are a lot of refugees, women and children -- think of that picture we all saw of that 4-year-old boy with the blood on his forehead because he'd been bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces.

There are children suffering in this catastrophic war, largely, I believe, because of Russian aggression. And we need to do our part. We by no means are carrying anywhere near the load that Europe and others are. But we will have vetting that is as tough as it needs to be from our professionals, our intelligence experts and others. ...

... But, you know, let's talk about what's really going on here, Martha, because our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days that the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks, the hacking on American accounts to influence our election. And WikiLeaks is part of that, as are other sites where the Russians hack information, we don't even know if it's accurate information, and then they put it out.

We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election. And believe me, they're not doing it to get me elected. They're doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump.

CLINTON: Now, maybe because he has praised Putin, maybe because he says he agrees with a lot of what Putin wants to do, maybe because he wants to do business in Moscow, I don't know the reasons. But we deserve answers. And we should demand that Donald release all of his tax returns so that people can see what are the entanglements and the financial relationships that he has...

RADDATZ: We're going to get to that later. Secretary Clinton, you're out of time.

CLINTON: ... with the Russians and other foreign powers. ...

RADDATZ: Mr. Trump, we're going to move on. The heart-breaking video of a 5-year-old Syrian boy named Omran sitting in an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble after an air strike in Aleppo focused the world's attention on the horrors of the war in Syria, with 136 million views on Facebook alone.

But there are much worse images coming out of Aleppo every day now, where in the past few weeks alone, 400 people have been killed, at least 100 of them children. Just days ago, the State Department called for a war crimes investigation of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its ally, Russia, for their bombardment of Aleppo.

So this next question comes through social media through Facebook. Diane from Pennsylvania asks, if you were president, what would you do about Syria and the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo? Isn't it a lot like the Holocaust when the U.S. waited too long before we helped? Secretary Clinton, we will begin with your two minutes.

CLINTON: Well, the situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the regime by Assad in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, the Russians in the air, bombarding places, in particular Aleppo, where there are hundreds of thousands of people, probably about 250,000 still left. And there is a determined effort by the Russian air force to destroy Aleppo in order to eliminate the last of the Syrian rebels who are really holding out against the Assad regime.

Russia hasn't paid any attention to ISIS. They're interested in keeping Assad in power. So I, when I was secretary of state, advocated and I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones. We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution, unless there is some leverage over them. And we have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground.

But I want to emphasize that what is at stake here is the ambitions and the aggressiveness of Russia. Russia has decided that it's all in, in Syria. And they've also decided who they want to see become president of the United States, too, and it's not me. I've stood up to Russia. I've taken on Putin and others, and I would do that as president.

I think wherever we can cooperate with Russia, that's fine. And I did as secretary of state. That's how we got a treaty reducing nuclear weapons. It's how we got the sanctions on Iran that put a lid on the Iranian nuclear program without firing a single shot. So I would go to the negotiating table with more leverage than we have now. But I do support the effort to investigate for crimes, war crimes committed by the Syrians and the Russians and try to hold them accountable. ...

CLINTON: I would not use American ground forces in Syria. I think that would be a very serious mistake. I don't think American troops should be holding territory, which is what they would have to do as an occupying force. I don't think that is a smart strategy.

I do think the use of special forces, which we're using, the use of enablers and trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening, but let me just ...

The Obama Administration and the Clinton campaign have laid a lot of stress on the claimed Russian interference in the election campaign. As I've said before, Trump's ties to Russia and to Putin's regime are legitimate issues. And when we look at Nixon's secret dealings with the South Vietnamese government to delay the Vietnam War peace talks in 1968, or the Reagan campaign's 1980 "October Surprise" maneuvers with Iran (for which the evidence is circumstantial but nevertheless substantial), we could argue that the Democrats have been too timid in calling out the Republicans for dubious dealings with foreign powers over national elections.

Still, as justified as the outrage over Trump's thuggish threat Sunday night to toss Hillary in jail is, Hillary also walked up to the edge of accusing Trump of conspiring with a foreign power to illegally influence the outcome of the American Presidential election. Which would be a felony in itself.

And while the Democrats are wrong to give the Republicans the kind of passes they've gotten on incidents like those of the 1968 and 1980, this is also the kind of accusation that shouldn't be made lightly.

And so I'm glad to see some healthy skepticism about these charges from people like Marcy Wheeller, who looks at the Russian hacking charge in Argument: The DNC Hadck Attribution Was a Response to Brick and Mortar Events Emptywheel 10/10/2016. She notes that when the Administration's brief October 7 statement on the DNC computer hack is not worded in nearly as definitive a manner as the political and press discussion of it might imply. (The statement is on the Homeland Security website, Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security.) Marcy argues that "the most obvious explanation for why Putin would do all this so blatantly is because in his view the US carried out a coup in Ukraine and is attempting regime change in Syria to choke Russia strategically."

And she cites this article by Jack Goldsmith, The DNC Hack and (the Lack of) Deterrence Lawfare 10/09/2016, in which he also suggests, "For all we know the Russian DNC hack is a response to sanctions for Ukraine and an attempt to win leverage in Syria."

I notice that Goldsmith in that article uses "cyber" as a noun like Donald Trump does.

Marcy also raises a related but different factor that may be influencing the Administration's timing on making the DNC hack accusation:

But Goldsmith doesn’t consider the possibility that things may also work in the reverse way.

The US released this statement at a time when it was also making a big diplomatic push against Russia — proposing a ceasefire at the UN it knew Russia would veto, after having failed to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia directly because it asked for things (a no fly zone, basically) that Russia has neither the interest nor the legal necessity to agree to, because Russia is in Syria at the behest of the still-recognized government of the state, we’re not. As it happens, the US is ratcheting up this effort at a time when our Saudi allies’ activities in Yemen make it hard to make a principled stance against Russia, because we’re implicated in Yemen in the same way Russia is in Syria.

More importantly, things are getting very very hot, with Russia moving missiles to Kaliningrad and threatening retaliation for any strikes on Syrian controlled territory.

So I would suggest the timing of this announcement — basically confirming the same certainty and uncertainty the IC has had for months, then using it to accuse Putin of trying to intervene directly in our country — is actually our response to more concrete events elsewhere, not the reverse (though there admittedly may be some chicken-and-egg stuff here, in that we may have held off on attribution in hope we could negotiate directly with Russia).

That is, both sides seem intent on ratcheting up the conflict between Russia and the US, and blaming Putin for interfering in our elections is one tool to do that.

If I’m right, the statement may have nothing to do with deterrence. Rather, it may have everything to do with escalation of other conflicts, providing a reason to pitch Russia’s strategic moves elsewhere as a direct threat to the US. I’m not saying Russia isn’t a dangerous adversary. I’m saying that the release of this statement will do nothing to prevent more hacks, but it will provide cause to claim the increasingly hot conflict with Russia directly threatens the US. [my emphasis]

In other words, even true claims can be used in defense of questionable policy. And we should all be paying attention, including our vigilant Fourth Estate. Of course, we see in the quote above it was moderator Martha Raddaz, not Clinton or Trump, who introduced the Holocaust analogy for the Syrian civil war. Because the enemies of the United States are always Hitler.

Former British diplomat Craig Murray argues that the Homeland Security statement's claim that the Russian govenrment is behind the hack is flatly false (A Blatant Neo-Con Lie Craig Murray 10/08/2016

It is a plain lie that Russia was responsible for the leak of the Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks. It is quite extraordinary that the Obama administration formally adopted the accusation yesterday.

The US motivation is apparently to attempt to discredit in advance the further Hillary material that WikiLeaks plans to release in the coming month. The official statement that the leak was “consistent with the methods and motivation of Russian directed efforts” is carefully written by the NSA and, when you analyse it, extremely weak. What it says is “there is no evidence whatsoever but this is the sort of thing we think the Russians do”. [The latter statement in quotes is Murrahy's paraphrase.] ...

That the Obama administration has made a formal accusation of Russia based on no evidence is, on one level, astonishing. But it is motivated by desperation. WikiLeaks have already announced that they have a huge cache of other material relating to Hillary’s shenanigans. The White House is simply seeking to discredit it in advance by a completely false association with Russian intelligence.

It fascinates me that the media reports the story widely with no reference anywhere to what the DNC leak actually revealed – that the body organising the Democratic election had a consistent and active bias, doing everything possible to tilt the plating field and ensure that Hillary “won” against Bernie Sanders.

The US government cares so little about its relationship with Russia that it is prepared to launch completely false allegations at the Kremlin in order to influence a domestic election. The implications of that are chilling.

The sentence I elided there reads, "As it happens, I have direct knowledge that there could not have been any evidence as it was not the Russians." But he doesn't elaborate that comment any further to indicate the nature of his source.

Going back to Hillary comment, "We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election."

But of course, Trump and the Republicans aren't going to leave fearmongering and threat inflation over Russia to the Democrats and Martha Raddaz. Trump in Sunday's debate in a typically marginally-coherent rant warned about a supposedly surging nuclear threat from Russia. Jonathan Marshall does a reality-check in Trump’s Lies About a Nuke ‘Gap’ Consortium News 10/11/2016:

The United States currently has more deployed nuclear missiles and heavy bombers than Russia: 741 versus 521. The United States also has almost as large an inventory of nuclear weapons as Russia: 7,000 versus an estimated 7,300. The difference is meaningless: detonation of even a fraction of that total would annihilate not only both countries, but kill a large portion of the world’s population.

Washington can potentially also count on the United Kingdom and France for another 400 deployed nuclear warheads to make the rubble in Russia bounce higher in case of an all-out war.

The two countries’ nuclear arsenals are nearly matched by design — the result of many rounds of nuclear arms negotiations and treaties. By contrast, the U.S. military far outpaces Russia’s in most conventional categories.

Jerry Brown on nuclear proliferation

The defense industry is "the business of mass destruction," says California Gov. Jerry Brown.

It's in his review of former Defense Secretary William Perry's book My Journey at the Nuclear Brink A Stark Nuclear Warning New York Review of Books 07/14/2016 issue; accessed 06/28/2016. It's not the typical venue for a sitting governor.

He also observes that "presidents follow the political and highly dangerous path of sizing our nuclear force to achieve 'parity' with Russia. Such a competitive and mindless process always leads to escalation without end."

And he shares this story from the Cuban Missile Crisis:

... Perry writes [that] the Soviet ships approaching the blockade imposed by the US had submarine escorts that were armed with nuclear torpedoes. Because of the difficulty with communications, Moscow had authorized the submarine commanders to fire without further authorization. When an American destroyer tried to force a submarine to surface, both its captain and the political officer decided to fire a nuclear torpedo at the destroyer. A nuclear confrontation was avoided only because Vasili Arkhipov, the overall commander of the fleet, was also present on the submarine. He countermanded the order to launch, thereby preventing what might have started a nuclear war.

He also cites approvingly Perry's observation on how nuclear weapons don't provide real security:

Reflecting upon the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Perry says it was then that he first understood that the end of all of civilization was now possible, not merely the ruin of cities. He took to heart Einstein’s words that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking.” He asserts that it is only “old thinking” that persuades our leaders that nuclear weapons provide security, instead of understanding the hard truth that “they now endanger it.”

He also mentions the notorious "missile gap" circa 1960: "He was also part of the team assembled in 1959 by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, to determine whether or not there was a 'missile gap' with the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no gap but the report Perry worked on was kept secret for decades, as he reveals in his book."

For more on the "missile gap," see: John Prados, Review of John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap Journal of Cold War Studies 10:1 (Winter 2008)

Jerry also makes this comment about the lack of success in Dick Cheney's Iraq War, "Success unfortunately can lead to overconfidence and I wonder whether the success of the first Gulf War lulled George W. Bush into thinking that another war could be fought with similar results. We now know that technical prowess can’t necessarily overcome the human factors of ethnic division, historical enmity, and religious belief."

Obama's framing of the Iran deal

James Fallows has a good article based on President Obama's speech and a subsequent on-the-record press briefing with him talking about Obama's defense of the nuclear nonproliferation deal with Iran, The President Defends His Iran Plan The Atlantic 08/07/2015.

But one part of Obama's argument does concern me:

Many critics of the deal, and some supporters and others in the press, are furious about what they feel is Obama’s scare-tactic false choice: If you don’t vote for this deal, you’re voting for war. ... Eli Lake, of Bloomberg, lamented Obama’s stooping to the “politics of fear.”

He quotes Obama defending it by pointing out scenarios in which Iran could accelerate it's nuclear program much faster absent the agreement than if it's in place.

Then he quotes Obama's argument:

So in almost every scenario, our ability to monitor what’s happening in Iran, our ability to ensure that they are not breaking out, our ability to inspect their facilities, our ability to force them to abide by the deal has gone out the window.

And as I said in the speech, everybody around this table knows that within six months or nine months—I don’t know how long it would take—of Iran having pulled out of this deal, or cheated on this deal, or interpreted the deal in a way that was deemed contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the deal, that some of the same voices who were opposed to the deal would insist that the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is to take strikes. And it will be framed as limited military strikes, and it will be suggested that Iran will not respond. But we will have entered into a war.

That doesn’t mean that Iran suddenly attacks us directly. It does mean that I’ve got a whole bunch of U.S. troops on the ground trying to help Baghdad fight ISIL, and they’re now looking over their shoulders with a host of Shia militia. It does mean that Hezbollah potentially makes use of some of those rockets into Israel, which then precipitates us having to take action. It does mean that the Strait of Hormuz suddenly becomes a live theater in which one member of the IRGC, or Quds Force, or [Iranian Quds Force commander] Mr. Soleimani directs a suicide speedboat crashing into one of our naval ships, in which case I think it’s fair to say that the commander in chief of the United States will be called upon to respond. [my emphasis]

Fallows writes:

This sensitivity to fear-mongering is selective at best, considering the apocalyptic tone of many arguments against the deal. ...

So when he says it’s the deal, or war, this is the case he is making. “I do not say that a military option is inevitable just to be provocative, just to win the argument. Those are the dictates of cold, hard logic.”

Agree with him or not, to classify this as “fear-mongering,” on a topic where presidential candidates are talking about “leading to the door of the oven” and a “declaration of war on Israel,” is to stretch that term beyond meaning. (And a new term altogether would be useful for the irrepressible Dick Cheney, who most recently said that the deal would make “the actual use of nuclear weapons more likely.”)

It's very true that the Republicans pretty obviously favor war with Iran.

But is this Administration seriously worried that Iran-backed Shi'a militias would team up with the radical Sunni extremists in ISIS to fight Americans?

And it's not at all obvious to me why Hizbullah firing rockets at Israel would necessitate the US going to war with Iran!

Fred Kaplan writes about Obama's arguments for the agreement in Obama Unbound Slate 08/06/2015. This is one thing Obama seems to be doing right: "One thing he’s no longer trying to do is to convert the opponents, who, locked by justifiable anxieties or irredeemable biases, have shown that they’re unswayable by logic and uninterested in the facts."

And Kaplan gives some examples of Republicans expressing warlike intentions toward Iran:

Obama also noted the irony of the critics who howl at his suggestion that they’d rather go to war than sign the deal. He recalled, “Some of these same people, just a while back, were arguing we should just go ahead and take a strike.” Though he didn’t mention names, John Bolton, a former Bush administration official, has explicitly called for air strikes as the best option on the table. And in recent hearings, one of the deal’s most outspoken opponents, Sen. Lindsey Graham, exclaimed, “Who wins the war between us and Iran? ... We win!”

Paul Pillar gives the President a pass on continuing with some fear-mongering over Iran in this particular circumstance, in a piece where he is talking about several common but problematic assumptions in US foreign policy (Iraq, Iran, and the President on Mindsets The National Interest 08/05/2015):

Another element of this thinking that could be mentioned, but that President Obama did not explicitly do so, is a black-and-white perspective that tends to see the Middle East as starkly divided between good-guy allies and bad-guy adversaries, with Iran currently occupying the most prominent place in the latter camp. Although the president did speak of the wisdom of making deals with one's adversaries, he did not fundamentally challenge this perspective, despite its incongruence with reality. That is probably understandable and forgivable, given the need for him to maintain enough political correctness about Iran (and about Israel) to get the nuclear agreement through the Congressional gauntlet and across the finish line. [my emphasis]

What Eli Lake is doing in the column to which James Fallows objects is a very different kind of criticism. He's making a not-so-subtle suggestion that Obama is trying to motivate his (to Lake contemptible) base with anti-Semitic dog whistles (Obama Plays Politics of Fear to Get His Iran Deal 08/03/2015):

This kind of dog whistling from Obama does a disservice to his supporters. He's exploiting his base's deep fear of all things neoconservative. It's true that neocons in 2002 and 2003 supported and argued for the Iraq war. Some of them helped plan the war. But many Democrats also supported the Iraq war, including Obama's first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. And yet in 2015 many prominent progressives still obsess about the out-of-power neocons, and darkly imply that they undermine the national interest on behalf of Israel.

For Obama's base, the neocons were not just policy intellectuals on the wrong side of an unpopular war, but were instead agents that pulled off a kind of coup d'etat and foisted a war on an unsuspecting public. Most serious people don't believe this anymore. But it's nonetheless a popular fable among the net-roots to this day. What a terrifying world! Every election brings with it the prospect that our republic will fall under the power of a bunch of disloyal bureaucrats eager to shed American blood for Israel.

I'm with Fallows in his criticism of Lake's column!

Nuclear weapons are still a huge danger

Ward Wilson writes about what factors encourage anti-nuclear-weapons popular movements, which have been on the wane in recent years, in Why are there no big nuke protests? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (n/d; accessed 02/13/2015).

At the conclusion, he includes this reminder:

Just because ordinary citizens have decided to put the problem of nuclear weapons out of their minds doesn't mean that the danger no longer exists. Nuclear weapons remain the gravest threat of sudden catastrophe that we face. Warlike emotions are growing, not fading. Sudden foreign policy crises seem to come with increasing frequency. The danger of the use of nuclear weapons, in such an emotionally unstable time, is perhaps greater than it has ever been. [my emphasis]

Obama's State of the Union message, 2013

Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) speech Tuesday night has set off the usual post-speech tea-leaf reading. Here is the video:

Here are the official White House transcripts, President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address -- As Prepared for Delivery 02/12/2013, and Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address 02/12/2013.

Digby in Best SOTU analysis Hullabaloo 02/13/2013 points out one difference between the prepared text and the actual speech and has a plausible speculation on what it means.

The thing that stands out most to me from the speech is that he once again offered up cuts in benefits to Medicare and Social Security. Apart from being a terrible idea that would do needless harm to many people and that he ought to be ashamed of himself for promoting such a thing, it also signals Republicans that he's not going to go to push hard of his own accord for any controversial liberal proposal. A Democratic President who's taking the lead offering cuts in Medicare and Social Security - and that's what he's did in 2011 and late 2012 and what he was doing Tuesday night - is essentially a conservative when it comes to economics, including vital social programs from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He pretty much announced his intention to throw in the towel already on the assault weapons ban, though the press no doubt gratified him by giving him much credit for his weak insistence, "Each of these proposals deserves a vote in Congress. If you want to vote no, that’s your choice. But these proposals deserve a vote." That's not a leader who sounds like his serious on pushing through the assault weapons ban, the most controversial provision of Diane Feinstein's proposed Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 and the one that would cost firearms companies the most money.

His speech also focused the discussion of economic policy around The Deficit and austerity, continuing as he did throughout his first term to reinforce the Republicans' preferred framing of the issue. As Robert Reich puts it, "austerity economics is a cruel hoax." (Coming Tuesday (Hopefully): The State of the Union's Economy 02/09/2013)

Zachary A. Goldfarb reports that Obama plans to rely more on Executive orders to get around Republican obstruction in Congress. (Zachary A. Goldfarb, Obama weighing executive actions on housing, gays and other issues Washington Post 02/10/2013) Although I worry it's another sign of the Weimarization of the US government, there are certainly legitimate and constructive things he can do by direct action without abuse of Executive power. One very constructive one would be to use the federal government's contracting power more broadly to promote a pro-union environment. But in the SOTU's as delivered, I count one mention of labor and that only in passing in the context of immigration reform, and 14 of business. Because, as another President fond of conservative economics, Cavlin Coolidge, famously said, "The business of America is business."

If the SOTU is any measure, don't look for aggressive measures to support labor in Obama's second term.

David Sanger reports on the White House's plan to reduce nuclear weapons in Obama to Renew Drive for Cuts in Nuclear Arms New York Times 02/10/2013. And Obama in the SOTU did say, "we’ll engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals, and continue leading the global effort to secure nuclear materials that could fall into the wrong hands -- because our ability to influence others depends on our willingness to lead and meet our obligations."

But does the following mean that Obama is being realistic about the need to go around Congress or that he's pre-compromising, as he so often does?

The big question is how to accomplish a reduction that Mr. Obama views as long overdue, considering that Republicans in the Senate opposed even the modest cuts in the new arms reduction treaty, called Start. The White House is loath to negotiate an entirely new treaty with Russia, which would lead to Russian demands for restrictions on American and NATO missile-defense systems in Europe and would reprise a major fight with Republicans in the Senate over ratification.

Instead, Mr. Obama is weighing how to reach an informal agreement with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for mutual cuts within the framework of the new Start — but without the need for ratification. Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, is planning to travel to Russia next month, officials say, to lay the groundwork for those talks. Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin will hold two summit meetings in the early summer.

Why not force the Republicans to vote on it? Nuclear arms reduction is popular, especially if the President sells it aggressively. If they turn it down, Obama could still go the Executive route. But it's not as solid as a negotiated treaty. And, really, the sooner we get rid of the junk Star Wars program, the better. It's been maybe the biggest boondoggle in human history.

Sanger's article goes on to say how Obama plans to emphasize cyber-security and may implement provisions of a law that Congress previously rejected by Executive order. Given this Administration's awful civil liberties record when it comes to cyber-snooping by the government and severe crackdowns on leakers of non-critical but classified information, I don't like the sound of this.

Progressive achievements in the second term will have to come by public pressure reflected among members of Congress pushing him into it. I'm happy to see that defenders of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are already pressing that fight against Obama and the Republicans, as Sabrina Siddiqui reports in As Sequester Threatens Entitlement Programs, Progressive Coalition Warns Democrats Against Cuts Huffington Post 02/13/2013:

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy For America, MoveOn, CREDO Action, Rebuild The Dream, the New York-based Working Families Party and Social Security Works are endorsing a letter to President Barack Obama, signed by Reps. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) and Mark Takano (D-Calif.), warning against cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits. The seven groups are also hoping to enlist their combined membership of over 12 million people to sign onto the effort.

"We will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security benefits -- including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need," reads the Grayson-Takano letter.

That's what we should have heard Tuesday night from the Democratic President. But he is the political leader taking the lead in proposing cuts to those programs.

Jill Lawrence discusses the SOTU in some detail in What History Tells Us About the Future of Obama’s Agenda National Journal 02/13/2013. David Lauter does a briefer analysis of the speech for the Los Angeles Times, Obama takes a two-pronged approach 02/13/2013.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, nuclear nonproliferation, social security

Reagan and nuclear weapons

The best achievement of Ronald Reagan's Presidency was the new beginning he made with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms control during the latter part of his second term in office.

But a large part of the reason it was such a significant achievement is that it (partially) reversed the course on which he had put the country and the world during his first Administration. The Carter Administration had negotiated the SALT II Treaty, which Reagan opposed during the 1980 campaign. Although Reagan never pushed Congress to ratify it during his Presidency, he did agree to abide by the terms of the treaty.

On the other hand, he started a huge military buildup, including nuclear arms - large at least by the standards of that time. As Andrew Bacevich recently reminded us, "The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a 'peer competitor'"! (Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable Tom Dispatch 01/27/2011)

Reagan also kicked off a major push for what may literally be the single largest boondoggle project in the history of humanity: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),or Star Wars as it came to be known, "missile defense" in current jargon. In Reagan's original conception, the US would create a missile defense shield based on a combination of rockets and laser beams based on satellites and the ground that could reliably block all incoming Soviet rockets if a nuclear war broke out. For a brief description and timeline of the project up to 1998, see Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), The Fifteenth Anniversary of "Star Wars" Global Security 03/17/1998; also from UCS US Ballistic Missile Defense Timeline: 1945-2008 11/24/09.

There were two basic problems with the program which were widely recognized by experts in the field from the very beginning. One was that it wouldn't work, at least not at any cost the United States could manage, even assuming (as Reagan's Administration did in practice) that deficits were no obstacle; the missile shield was expensive, but countermeasures for the other side were relatively cheap. The other was that it would destabilize the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union; the nuclear balance of terror was based on the appropriately named doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and anti-missile defenses were incompatible with it. Gary Guethner's article from that time, Strategic Defense: New Technologies, Old Tactics Parameters Autumn 1985, discusses the issues involved.

But the project proceeded, to the great profit of the military-industrial complex.

Star Wars remains a boondoggle to this day, as Pavel Podwig explains in The false promise of missile defense Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 09/14/2011.

Reagan's turnaround on nuclear arms control, interestingly enough, may have been influenced by the left-leaning peace groups of which he was part in the years just after the Second World War. Nancy Reagan also pushed him to get something down on arms control during his second term so that he could leave some clear peace legacy. Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione summarizes his arms-control legacy in Reagan the Abolitionist Huffington Post 03/03/2011:

He and Mikhail Gorbachev famously discussed abolishing all nuclear weapons at their 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two leaders came very close but failed to reach agreement on a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons within ten years. Their talks, however, paved the way for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 that eliminated all of the thousands of medium- and intermediate-range US and Russian nuclear missiles that threatened Europe. To this day, neither nation has nuclear weapons of these ranges, and several experts would like to take this treaty global, eliminating these missiles from the few other nations that have them.

Reagan outlined his views on an INF treaty in a speech three years before Reykjavik, concluding: "I support a zero option for all nuclear arms. As I've said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."

Sadly, he was never able to sign a comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons, but Reagan did establish a framework for mutual and verifiable reductions -- through the INF treaty and original START treaty -- that the United States and Russia continue to this day.

Tags: military industrial complex, nuclear nonproliferation, ronald reagan

Obama's year-end victory celebration - and the dark cloud inside the silver lining

This 33-minute news report from the PBS Newshour 12/22/2010 presents Obama making his case for the success of his post-election legislative victories.



The Beltway Village take on this is illustrated by the first question he receives after his speech: she asks if this makes him the Comeback Kid. Howard Fineman, one of the Huffington Post’s less inspiring recent additions as a regular reporter, gives what could be a White House press release version of this in Obama’s Got (Found) Game 12/22/2010:

People who play basketball with Barack Obama say he's more dogged than flashy, more determined than skillful, more adaptable than unique. He'll trash talk on a dribble-drive with Reggie Love, but in the old days he was a studious, unselfish passer with classroom colleagues at Harvard Law.

And often, they say, he ended up with more points than you thought he'd have. No one noticed until it was over.

As Mark Shields said a few months ago, "The political class, of whom I guess I'm one, we're -- we're all frustrated sportswriters, and we want it to be third and long. It's the Hail Mary pass." All they really want to talk about is the horse-race stories. And sex.

Politics is in part a game, with competition, rules and, of course, winners and losers. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset even did a long essay once on the idea that the state originally developed out of sports contests; I don't know how well that would hold up in light of the most recent anthropological evidence on the topic. But the problem today is that the celebrity aspects politics has been elevated by our infotainment-oriented news reporting, especially on TV, to a level that it crowds out most of the substance. And the journalistic/infotainment obsession with point-scoring and the "horse race" produces a chronically short-sided and shallow version of political news.

For our star pundits, most of whom worship at the altar of High Broderism, the fact that Obama is making deals with generous concessions to Republicans and that liberals and labor are pissed off at him over the tax deal are themselves signs of virtue. But the experience of the lame-duck Congress these last few weeks don't bode well for the next two years.

The approval of the New START Treaty was a real victory. And it required getting Republican votes.

Joshua Pollack explains its value in The high stakes of New START Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 12/06/2010: "With approximately 12,000 nuclear warheads ... Russia remains the sole force on Earth that could terminate the existence of the United States on any given day." That is what foreign policy types mean when they talk about existential threats to the US, literally threats to the existence of the country. As he also explains, what has been true for the last 30 years is still true: the Star Wars missile defense program that the Republicans revere with theological fervor is useless, i.e., "would be of no help against Russia's arsenal."

Michael Krepon in Victory Kudos Arms Control Wonk 12/22/2010 takes stock of the Senate vote approving the treaty. In doing so, he reminds us that "bipartisanship" has different meanings:

Vice President Biden led a well-crafted vote-getting process on Capitol Hill, which succeeded, for the first time ever, in garnering a two-thirds super-majority in the Senate against the preferences of the Minority Leader and his Republican Whip. [my emphasis]

But it's a measure of the pathology of US politics right now that START was virtually a non-issue. We spend half the military budget of the entire world. And our main current justification for it is "Al Qa'ida", a terrorist band headed by Osama bin Laden that consists of at most a few hundred zealots hiding in caves and small villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If Bin Laden's organization even exists in a meaningful sense any more. Regardless of the status of his group, terrorism is a real problem for the US, both international jihadists and the more threatening far-right domestic terrorism.

So terrorism worries alone should make disposing of old nuclear weapons and the control of nuclear weapons proliferation a major concern of the Congress and the public. It's even more important to stop their proliferation to governments. If our politics could deal with the real problems of national security in an overall rational way, this would be a hot issue year in and year out.

But for most voters and viewers following the news, the approval of what the President calls the most important arms-control agreement in two decades was very close to a non-event. Because for our star pundits, it's just another point in a basketball game.

Still, it does have political significance. The Congressional Republicans, bless their little hearts (and I do mean little hearts), are good at playing the long game. Unlike our Broderian President, they are willing to fight and lose to set the stage for what their authoritarian Party sees as a better result down the road. Michael Krepon notes:

Senator Kyl and the Heritage Foundation also deserve recognition: they turned a modest, moderate, uncontroversial treaty into a cause célèbre. In doing so, they have narrowed the administration's options and solidified opposition to nuclear arms control by Republicans on Capitol Hill and among those running for their Party's presidential nomination in 2012. [my emphasis in bold]

And while the White House takes its well-deserved victory lapses on this one, Democrats who can walk and talk at the same time should remember how the bipartisanship on this vote compares to this one taken during the bitterly anti-Clinton majority Republican Senate. Krepon again:

Thirteen tradition-minded, yet forward-looking Republican Senators who remembered that their Party has championed nuclear-arms reductions and who understood the down-side risks of torpedoing New START. They are a dwindling breed. The last arms control treaty to be ratified by the Senate, the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, garnered 29 Republican 'Yeas.' [my emphasis]

Tags: nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear proliferation, obama administration

Gen. Hugh Shelton and the "Clinton Rules"

Retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), has published a memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (2010). Shelton appeared on ABC's This Week on Sunday, and among other things complained about the Obama Administration's deadline for beginning withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. (Joshua Miller, Fmr. Top General: Afghanistan Deadline May Be 'A Bridge too Far' ABC News undated; 10/25/2010 ?)

David Hoffman in What's Missing Foreign Policy 10/22/2010 calls attention to a scary, strange - and scarcely credible - claim Shelton makes in his book:

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, says in his just-published memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, that President Bill Clinton’s White House lost the "presidential authorization codes" for launching a nuclear strike, and they were missing "for months." Shelton writes, "This is a big deal—a gargantuan deal -- and we dodged a silver bullet.”

Shelton says the system "failed" and asks "how in the hell could we have lost the codes and not known it?"

Hoffman points out that the story hardly makes any sense. And on the face of it is unlikely in the extreme. This seems to be a case of the General playing by the famous Clinton Rules: you can say whatever you want, as long as you say it about the Clintons.

Shelton leaves the impression that President Clinton went for months without the ability to order a nuclear strike in an emergency. Grim as it is, that is still a key part of American defense strategy. But:

It doesn't add up.

The president does not possess the actual codes to authorize the launch of nuclear weapons. What the president does carry (or an aide) is a small laminated card which is used to authenticate the president's identity in the event of an emergency. The cards contain date-time groups and alphanumeric codes in columns and rows, according to Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute who has written several books on nuclear command and control. In an emergency, a president would use this laminated card to verify that he is the commander in chief making decisions.

Is this the "code" that the Pentagon checker was looking for, and was somehow lost? Well, if Clinton misplaced one, or an aide did, then it would not have been difficult to replace -- immediately, not months later. The Defense Department was the custodian of the system. [my emphasis]

Would a former JCS Chairman be unaware that the President doesn't have the actual codes? If the card was what was supposedly missing, why did he not say that?

In addition to the laminated card, the president is also accompanied by a military aide carrying the "football," the briefcase which contains war plans and decision guides for a president in the event of an alert. The football is carried everywhere a president goes. It is a symbol, and a potent one, of the nuclear age. Shelton knows about the football, and describes it earlier in his book. Is this what he means by the lost codes? The device is a critical link in our system of command and control, is handled by a military aide, and if it were missing, I am certain it would have been noticed -- immediately, not months later.

So, what was actually lost? Shelton may have a story to tell here, but so far, it does not hold together. [my emphasis]

As Hoffman notes, even if it were the card rather than the codes that were missing, it would be a big deal. But why is a JCS Chairman making the claim of such a significant problem in a way that doesn't hang together?

Hoffman uses the report to remind us that we still have a long way to go in minimize and ultimately eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons in the world:

There is one lesson to be taken away from this, relevant today. Both Russia and the United States still keep nuclear-armed missiles poised on launch-ready alert. The land-based U.S. missiles can be launched within four minutes of an order from the president. Keeping missiles on such high alert may have provided an extra edge for deterrence in a time of intense superpower confrontation, but it is not needed today, nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War. Both countries should find a way to de-alert those land-based missiles, building in some kind of pause, say hours or days before the missiles could be launched, giving a president some extra time to avoid a mistake, such as a launch based on a false alarm. In a crisis, finding the president's authenticator card ought to be the least of his concerns.

Tags: clinton administration, hugh shelton, nuclear nonproliferation

Obama and nuclear arms control

Tara McKelvey in A New Start: Prospects for Obama’s “Global Zero” Boston Review May/June 2010 gives some perspective on the Obama administration's nuclear arms control policies and their prospects:

While the proximate concern is nuclear terrorism—Obama has warned that terrorists are “determined to buy, build, or steal” a nuclear weapon—the larger goal is “global zero,” a world without nuclear weapons. In pursuit of that goal, Obama has generated a level of activity around the nuclear threat that is without recent precedent.

Still, the obstacles to achieving these ambitious aims are considerable. In Washington many officials, guided by unilateralist ideas about national security, cling to a robust U.S. arsenal. And while Obama and Medvedev have reached an agreement on a new START, Republicans may hold up its ratification when the treaty is submitted to the Senate later this year. The administration itself is filled with hawkish holdovers from the Bush era and new blood who support the status quo either because they think it is sound, or because they prefer to concentrate on domestic issues.

For their part, Russian officials feel manipulated and betrayed by their U.S. counterparts, regardless of who is in the White House. Obama and Medvedev may have joked around during the START signing in Prague—highlighting their “personal chemistry,” as Medvedev described it—but their warm feelings are not shared by many of their colleagues. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is famously hostile toward the United States and has stalled negotiations over nuclear arms. Following his example, many high-ranking Russian officials have been looking quietly for ways to undermine the new START. [my emphasis]

Progress is progress in nuclear arms control, even when it's accompanied by bone-headed ideas like the non-nuclear ICBM proposal that would give the US military the ability to carry out the dubious policy of targeted assassination by firing a rocket from the United States that would look to other countries' detection systems exactly like a nuclear rocket. That idea is the opposite of progress.

But it's also important to be realistic about how much or how limited progress is when it happens:

It will restrict both nations to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, which means a real reduction. But both countries have hundreds of additional “non-strategic” nuclear weapons, designed for use against a modest nearby target rather than an entire distant city. Although their yields make them less destructive, these weapons still are terribly lethal. “In the real world, a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon,” says Pierce Corden, a former State Department office director in the Arms Control Bureau. “Just like a rose is a rose.”

According to Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), when all warheads are taken into account, the new START reduces Russia’s nuclear inventory by a mere 8 percent and the United States’s by even less—5 percent.

I'm not quite sure what Corden or McKelvey mean by the "a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon" quote, though. There is a difference in having arsenals of a type and amount that can destroy an entire large country like the US and Russia, or whose effects in their usage could literally wipe out the human race on earth, and having a highly destructive arsenal that lacks the capacity for such total destruction.

The idea that "a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon" also could play into the threat inflation of those who want to paint jihadist terrorist groups as an existential threat to the US, i.e., literally a threat to the country's existence. You don't have to minimize the risk of nuclear terrorism - what that level may really be is a topic for other posts - to recognize that an arsenal like Russia's that could presumably still level every major American city threatens the existence of the United States as a viable country, while even a worst-case terrorist attack that takes out one American city is not the same level of danger. Grim as such calculations are, they really are necessary. For American security, containing nuclear proliferation and continuing to bring down the number of American and Russian nuclear weapons is enormously more critical than the "war on terrorism", important as anti-terrorism efforts are.

And there is a difference between the Cheney-Bush administration and Obama's on nuclear proliferation. McKelvey quote Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, "The Bush administration gutted [arms-control] offices, transferred people to other places and took away a lot of State Department arms-control expertise."

And they undertook the Iraq War, which vastly increased the practical pressure perceived by Iran and other nations to acquire nuclear weapons to deter future American invasions of their countries.

Tags: nuclear nonproliferation

Robert Gates' new presentation of the military's strategic needs

I mentioned in the previous post an article by McClatchy's Nancy Youssef in which she cites the article by Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Helping Others Defend Themselves: The Future of U.S. Security Assistance" Foreign Affairs May/June 2010, as a broad statement of an allegedly new perspective on counterinsurgency wars that Pentagon-related sources are promoting. In this post, I'm relying on the full version publicly available at Scribd.com; all but the first four paragraphs are behind subscription at the Foreign Affairs website.

As such articles or speeches by senior administration officials typically are, this one mostly presents concepts on a fairly high level of abstraction. So I'll focus here on some items that raise important concerns.

Gates uses it as an I-feel-your-pain type sales pitch in this article. But it's worth noting that he says in it:

As a career CIA officer who watched the military's role in intelligence grow ever larger, I am keenly aware that the Defense Department, because of its sheer size, is not only the 800-pound gorilla of the U.S. government but one with a sometimes very active pituitary gland.

Yes, the Secretary of Defense for both Cheney-Bush and Obama is saying that the Pentagon is so huge it inevitably throws its weight around in the unending contests for budget resources in a way that no civilian agency is capable of doing. What he means by its "very active pituitary gland" is a bit enigmatic. Presumably, he is referring to its role as a growth hormone. The Pituitary Network Association defines that part of its role this way: "the pituitary gland produces growth hormone for normal development of height."

But their definition also includes this:

The pituitary is a small, pea-sized gland located at the base of the brain that functions as "The Master Gland." From its lofty position above the rest of the body it sends signals to the thyroid gland, adrenal glands, ovaries and testes, directing them to produce thyroid hormone, cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, and many more. These hormones have dramatic effects on metabolism, blood pressure, sexuality, reproduction, and other vital body functions.

So the Secretary of Defense could be said to be implying that the Pentagon has an inappropriately central influence on the federal government as a whole.

Like I say, it's more of a sales line. But it's worth remembering the next time some conservative commentator suggests that it's "anti-military" for anyone to make comments along the same lines. Gates also repeats his earlier public comment about the danger of the "creeping militarization" in US foreign policy.

Gates' article presents several red flags to me. One is this:

... there continues to be a struggle for legitimacy, loyalty, and power across the Islamic world between modernizing, moderate forces and the violent, extremist organizations epitomized by al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other such groups.

This is essentially the neoconservative framework for the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In most of the Islamic world, groups of Al Qa'ida's type are not serious contenders for power or mass influence in any meaningful sense of the word. If we had to describe some two side characterizing politics in Islamic countries, Islamic modernizers that don't take anything like the "jihadist" approach to politics and conservative Islamic dictators of various sorts would be a more realistic pair. Al Qa'ida itself probably doesn't exist in anything much resembling its 2001 form, although their jihadist ideology has inspired many other extremist groups. But elevating such small, extremist bands - however dangerous they might be as terrorist threats - into one of the two powers likely to dominate the entire Islamic world in the foreseeable future is major-league threat inflation.

This threat inflation is probably reflected in an odd precedent he cites to suggest a shift from direct combat to what he calls "partner building capacity," which primarily means playing the role of providing aid and assistance to governments fighting opposition groups that the US wants to specially target. He uses the example of US weapons and equipment to Great Britain and the Soviet Union in the early months of the Second World War, "the period before the United States entered World War II." Ever since then, the analogies our policymakers use have had us going to war with essentially nobody but Hitler. North Korea's Kim Il Sung was Hitler, Ho Chi Minh was Hitler, Saddam Hussein was Hitler, now Osama bin Laden hiding out somewhere is Hitler.

But there is an obvious other side to Gates' Second World War analogy. He refers to the time before US entry into the war. Those examples of military assistance to (technically informal) allies was followed by the biggest foreign war in US history. In this case, it was not the military aid that caused the US to enter the war. But eemingly small commitments of military assistance can often start looking like an investment too big to fail. A failure in the initial levels of aid can easily lead to threat inflation of the opposition, which leads to larger commitments, which means that United States Prestige is on the line even more, and we can't afford to back down or [insert your favorite version of the Munich analogy here].

He opens the article by saying:

In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States' safety and security -- a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack -- are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time.

This is also a favorite neoconservative justification for widespread interventions. It's also a very misleading formulation. Bin Laden may have been in Afghanistan, his presence tolerated by the Afghan government under Mullah Omar and the Taliban during the planning of the 9/11 attacks. But most of the actual planning and logistics for them were done in Germany and the United States by the plotters involved. Bin Laden at the time had concentrations of personnel in Afghanistan, a model that Al Qa'ida and other jihadists abandoned after the US attacks took a heavy toll on the Al Qa'ida cadres of 2001. And, though it's heresy to the neocons and most Republicans, the anti-terrorism fight is primarily a matter of national and international law-enforcement as well as necessary security precautions in such places as airplanes, an approach which is infinitely more cost-effective in combatting the actual terrorist threat than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been.

And, as evidenced by the number of violent attacks, killings and foiled plots of the last couple of years, domestic far-right groups are currently the most significant source of potential terrorist threats on American targets. And outside of that same far-right milieu, I don't know of anyone who would describe the United States itself as a failed state. Gates' formulation, in which he has to be presumed to be speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, is an inaccurate statement of the sources of current terrorist threats.

Gates argues for approaching counterinsurgency commitments by "building the institutional capacities) such as defense ministries)" and "the human capital (including leadership skills and attitudes) needed to sustain security over the long term" for regimes we choose to favor with our help. He cites Lebanon, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines as examples of some countries where we have successfully done this in the previous years of the GWOT. It strikes me that there has been painfully little Congressional investigation or mainstream news coverage or public debate over our "assistance interventions" (to coin my own phrase) in any of those five countries but Pakistan. That relative secrecy and lack of scrutiny from outside the Executive Branch or even outside the Pentagon is surely a very appealing aspect of this proposal to Gates and many of our infallible generals.

Another particular red flag for me in Gates' article comes near the end:

Convincing other countries and leaders to be partners of the United States, often at great political and physical risk, ultimately depends on proving that the United States is capable of being a reliable partner over time. To be blunt, this means that the United States cannot cut off assistance and relationships every time a country does something Washington dislikes or disagrees with.

He mentions earlier that prior to the 9/11 attacks:

... Washington cut off military-to-military exchange and training programs with Pakistan, for well-intentioned but ultimately shortsighted - and strategically damaging - reasons.

The main well-intentioned but shortsighted reason was Pakistan's role as the greatest purveyor of nuclear proliferation. This may be the most disturbing single piece of Gates' article. Containing nuclear proliferation is a more vital interest of the United States than fighting terrorism. Though the two are obviously related in some ways.

Gates is suggesting a kind of once-in-never-out theory of US military assistance. His statement about "being a reliable partner over time" only makes sense if it means taking cuts in military assistance off the table as a diplomatic tool. Which would be even more of that creeping militarization of US foreign policy about which he claims to be concerned. Since our military aid dwarfs other forms of foreign aid, taking military assistance off the table as a potential tool of diplomatic pressure would drastically reduce the United States' ability to use normal tools of diplomacy. This is true with Pakistan and India on nonproliferation issues. It's true of Israel, where only a significant reduction in US military aid is ever going to bring them to halt and reverse the settlement policy in the West Bank, a goal which is at least nominally the official policy of the United States. And there are many other situations where that would be the case, as well.

All in all, I don't see a lot that's encouraging when it comes to a more realistic and pragmatic military policy in Gates' article.

Tags: counterinsurgency, nuclear nonproliferation

Missile madness

Obama's nuclear arms control treaty with Russia is an important step forward in removing the worst immediate danger to human survival.

Sadly, though, we've seen Obama do a kind of "two steps forward, one step back" dance a number of times on various policy issue where he takes a progressive stance. Sometimes, like on his evaporated promise to close Guantanamo, it's more "one step forward, two steps back."

So it's consistent with his approach that we get this: Noah Schachtman, Obama Revives Rumsfeld’s Missile Scheme, Risks Nuke War Danger Room 04/23/10:

The Obama administration is poised to take up one of the more dangerous and hare-brained schemes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon. The New York Times is reporting that the Defense Department is once again looking to equip intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. The missiles could then, in theory, destroy fleeing targets a half a world away — a no-notice “bolt from the blue,” striking in a matter of hours. There’s just one teeny-tiny problem: the launches could very well start World War III.

Over and over again, the Bush administration tried to push the idea of these conventional ICBMs. Over and over again, Congress refused to provide the funds for it. The reason was pretty simple: those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. “The launch of such a missile,” then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in a state of the nation address after the announcement of the Bush-era plan, “could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

The Pentagon mumbled all kinds of assurances that Beijing or Moscow would never, ever, never misinterpret one kind of ICBM for the other. But the core of their argument essentially came down to this: Trust us, Vlad Putin! That ballistic missile we just launched in your direction isn’t nuclear. We swear!

This is a bad idea.

Sharon Weinberger at AOL News offers a cheerleading puff-piece on these plans, 5 Ways to Kill Osama Bin Laden in 2 Hours or Less 04/23/10:

The weapons are under development, though not yet deployed. They would provide "conventional alternatives on long-range missiles that we didn't have before," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week in a television interview.

Of course, the No. 1 scenario envisioned for Prompt Global Strike is for hitting what is called a "time-critical target," such as a terrorist who is known to be at a specific location but may soon leave. The most-often-cited case is the 1998 attempt to kill bin Laden. President Bill Clinton ordered a strike after receiving intelligence that bin Laden was at a specific location. By the time cruise missiles hit the intended target, the elusive al-Qaida leader was already gone.

But what exactly are these weapons and how do they work? The idea is to have a weapon that could strike anywhere in the world in two hours or less, something that today can only be achieved using a nuclear-tipped missile.

Sounds great, doesn't it? We can nail Bin Laden without having to send soldiers to get him. Shoot, we want have to go to war any more at all, our magic missiles will just blast any bad guys we decide to kill.

Great except that whole likely-to-start-a-nuclear-war thing.

What goes through the minds of our infallible generals when they plan stuff like this? Are they caught up in boys-with-toys fantasies? Are they hoping for cushy post-retirement jobs from arms manufacturers?

Following up on Schachtman's post, Robert Farley writes in Prompt Global Strike: Still Not Actually Dead. Kind of Alive, in Fact Lawyers, Guns and Money 04/23/10:

Yeah, I’m really not sure that changing to an atmospheric quasi-ballistic missile from SLBMs really helps. For one, the shift would somewhat reduce the promptness of the global strike (although probably not by much). More importantly, it doesn’t really solve the dilemma. If Putin/Medvedev/Hu/Whomever are inclined to worry that a detected launch was the prelude to an all-out nuclear attack, they’ll likely not be reassured by the news that it comes from some “special” location in the US. If the US decided to launch a preventive nuclear assault on Russia or China, wouldn’t we initiate the attack in the most deceptive way possible?

Tags: nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear proliferation

Obama's nuclear developments

Obama has had several major news events on the nuclear front lately. He completed a Nuclear Posture Review: Nuclear Posture Review (or Nuclear Public Relations?) by Stephen M. Walt Foreign Policy 04/06/10; 'Obama's Nuclear Strategy Is a Small Revolution' Der Spiegel International 04/07/10. He held a nuclear summit in Washington, "the largest such gathering on U.S. soil since the San Francisco conference that launched the United Nations in 1945", according to John Aloysius Farrell in Nuclear security summit: a historic gathering Global Post 04/12/10. And he negotiated a new START Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear armaments: Arms Deal More 'Illusion than Reality,' But Still a Good START Der Spiegel International 04/09/10.

As the titles of the articles I linked may hint, I'm cautiously optimistic about these developments. In the grand scheme of things, nuclear arms control is still the most important responsibility of world leaders, even if the politics don't play out that way. If we can't avoid a big nuclear war, global warming won't have time to devastate the planet.

It's hard to imagine that any treaty Obama negotiated would be able to get through the Senate with the Republicans pursuing their policy of fundamental (just-say-no) opposition to the President and the Democrats. And we can no longer count on the Republicans to honor such agreements even though they were signed but not technically ratified, which is what the Reagan administration did with the SALT II Treaty. With the precedent now of the Cheney-Bush administration "unsigning" the International Criminal Court treaty and the Republicans firmly committed to a unilateralist foreign policy, we can't count on them acting rationally even about a major nuclear arms-control treaty that is very much in the national interest.

And speaking of the Reagan administration, I've always given Reagan credit for three significant, constructive accomplishments: the Social Security financing plan; his 1985 tax reform (not to be confused with the "supply side" tax cuts of 1981); and, his intermediate nuclear-arms treaty with the Soviet Union.

Joe Conason has a good column on the latter today as he refutes Sarah Palin's pseudohistory about Saint Reagan, What Sarah Palin forgets (or never knew) about Ronald Reagan Salon 04/12/10:

Beginning in November 1985, at a meeting in Geneva, Reagan and Gorbachev sought to slash nuclear weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and the Soviet Union by 50 percent or more. A year later they met in Reykjavik to discuss proposals to completely eliminate nuclear weapons from the arsenals of both nations. The U.S. president's approach was so radical -- and radically sincere, according to everyone close to him -- that it alarmed many of his more conservative advisors. His hawkish defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was appalled. Relieved when the Reykjavik talks ended without agreement because of a fundamental disagreement over missile defenses, the hawks were disturbed, to put it mildly, when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.

The INF treaty was truly historic, both because of its own deep cuts in the superpower arsenals and because of its symbolic portent of the imminent end of the Cold War. No treaty between the U.S. and the USSR had been signed and ratified by the Senate for 15 years by then -- and this agreement stipulated the drawdown and destruction of nuclear weapons by both sides for the first time ever.

Morever, at a moment when conservative opinion widely distrusted Gorbachev and urged Reagan to maintain bitter antagaonism [sic] toward "our enemies," he employed summitry and arms negotiations to reassure the Soviets that they could pursue liberalization without fear. It was a decisive moment in world history and one for which the intuitive president deserves great credit. [my emphasis]

The Republicans with their postmodern "reality is what you want it to be" approach to history have transmogrified a theatrical moment of no practical significance - Reagan in Berlin saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" - into a symbol of how bluster and belligerence "defeated" the Soviet Union. But Conason has it right. Stating it slightly differently, the most significant step Reagan took that encouraged the developments that lead to the end of the USSR was the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, not the useless "Star Wars" boondoggle or backing the fanatical Muslim terrorists brave mujaheddin freedom fighters in Afghanistan.

My understanding of Reagan's actions in the matter of the INF Treaty is in line with Conason's. Despite his dogmatic conservatism, the influence of his and Nancy Reagan's being active in peace groups in the years immediately following the Second World War remained with him. Nancy pushed him to achieve something that would be remembered as a substantial legacy for peace. And the INF Treaty qualified.

It's always tempting for liberals to look back to some period ten or twenty years ago and try to say, oh, look how much more sensible conservatives were back then. Conservatives play the same game. But when it comes to crackpot rightwing radicalism, Richard Hofstadter's famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", published in 1965 in book form, reinforced that particular tendency for liberals. And it's become kind of a bad habit. In most matters of domestic and foreign policy, Republicans are being realistic when they look to Reagan as having blazed a trail for them. Reagan's "Iran-Contra" foreign policy adventure became the template for the entire foreign policy of the Cheney-Bush administration.

But on the issue of nuclear arms control, Conason is right on the mark in contrasting the constructive nature of Reagan's nuclear arms policies in his second term with the unreflective militarism and reckless worship of nuclear arms that prevail in today's Republican Party.

Tags: nuclear nonproliferation, ronald reagan