Posts Tagged ‘ Iraq ’

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Boehner Still Struggling with National Security

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

John Boehner at Press ConferenceHow’s this for nerve? At a press conference on May 6, Republican Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner of Ohio accused the Obama administration of relying on “luck” to keep America safe. But Boehner’s own recipe for national security is based on even less. Rather than engage the White House in a constructive dialogue on how best to protect the nation, Boehner chose to throw political rotten tomatoes. His gamesmanship is a disturbing reminder that the House minority leader cares more about winning elections than keeping the country safe.

Amazingly, Boehner chose to lob his rhetorical garbage in the wake of the successful manhunt for would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Ignoring the incredibly efficient work of America’s defense, security, and law enforcement agencies, Boehner charged the administration with operating “without a real, comprehensive plan to confront and defeat the terrorist threat.”

But clearly Boehner doesn’t have a clue of just how hard the administration has been working. Earlier this year, the Department of Defense issued its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). And in a few weeks, the White House will release its National Security Strategy. This may come as a shock to Boehner, but the QDR — led by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, a Republican himself — and the National Security Strategy actually are the administration’s “comprehensive plans”.

Maybe Boehner missed it because he was too busy coming up with his own “plan.” Boehner actually did convene something called the National Security Solutions Group, a caucus of 18 Republicans that was supposed “to develop solutions to the current and future threats.” But to date, Boehner’s clique looks more like political theater than substantive intellect — it hasn’t issued a single new idea. And the QDR makes Boehner’s group look out-of-date, insufficient, and redundant anyway.

Perhaps Boehner failed to offer security ideas at his press conference because he lacked the confidence that any of his own might actually work. With a national security track record like Boehner’s, he probably calculated that it would be best to insult and run, rather that defend the policies he has supported in the past.

Exhibit A of Boehner’s policy stinkers? Invading Iraq.

Since that one didn’t turn out to be the cakewalk that Boehner, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush originally planned, it’s understandable why he might be gun shy about forwarding new ideas. Indeed, Boehner remains so obsessed by Iraq that his website — as of this writing — continues to insist that Iraq, not Osama Bin Laden’s home in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, is “the central front of a global war [on terror].” Never mind that al Qaeda only came to Iraq after America did.

Then there’s Boehner’s odd belief that the administration’s decision to reorient missile defense — a policy supported by Secretary Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — comes at the expense of America’s allies. So how do those allies actually feel? Just fine, it turns out. Take it from Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s Foreign Minister, who said in the first week of May that “Polish-American relations are solid” and that Poland “rather like[s] the new version better than the previous one” of missile defense.

Boehner also sided with Dick Cheney in endorsing torture. General David Petraeus had a different view, saying torture was “neither useful nor necessary” and calling on America to “occupy the moral high ground.”

The fact is that John Boehner has been consistently wrong about which policies keep America safe. He’s reckless and out-of-touch with the national security landscape of the 21st century and more concerned with winning elections than stopping terrorism. His catcalls at the Obama administration only distract attention from the serious national security challenges America continues to face.

John Boehner is right that we need more than luck to defeat terrorism. We need national leaders to rise above empty rhetoric to protect the country in a bi-partisan manner. Unfortunately, Boehner is not acting like one of those leaders.

Photo credit: republicanconference / CC BY-NC 2.0

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

Gates and Fiscal Responsibility (Again)

Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

This past weekend Secretary of Defense Bob Gates continued to talk his Kansas brand of sense about Pentagon spending. After a lecture on shipbuilding last week at the Navy League teed up tough questions to the Navy — like whether we can continue to afford $7 billion submarines — Gates took to the Eisenhower Library in his home state to expand that theme across his entire department. I’d bet you a crisp $20 bill that this is the line that caused an audible gasp in Reston and on the Hill:

The Defense Department must take a hard look at every aspect of how it is organized, staffed, and operated – indeed, every aspect of how it does business. In each instance we must ask: First, is this respectful of the American taxpayer at a time of economic and fiscal duress? And second, is this activity or arrangement the best use of limited dollars, given the pressing needs to take care of our people, win the wars we are in, and invest in the capabilities necessary to deal with the most likely and lethal future threats?

As a starting point, no real progress toward savings will be possible without reforming our budgeting practices and assumptions. Too often budgets are divied up and doled out every year as a straight line projection of what was spent the year before. Very rarely is the activity funded in these areas ever fundamentally re-examined – either in terms of quantity, type, or whether it should be conducted at all. That needs to change.

But then again, maybe the shock value has worn off — fiscal responsibility has been such a theme under Gates’ leadership that perhaps tough-minded rhetoric on defense spending now comes with little surprise.

Then Gates delved into specifics. And now it was the soldiers’, sailors’, airmen’s, and marines’ turn to get nervous:

[H]ealth-care costs are eating the Defense Department alive, rising from $19 billion a decade ago to roughly $50 billion – roughly the entire foreign affairs and assistance budget of the State Department. The premiums for TRICARE, the military health insurance program, have not risen since the program was founded more than a decade ago. Many working age military retirees – who are earning full-time salaries on top of their full military pensions – are opting for TRICARE even though they could get health coverage through their employer, with the taxpayer picking up most of the tab. In recent years the Department has attempted modest increases in premiums and co-pays to help bring costs under control, but has been met with a furious response from the Congress and veterans groups. The proposals routinely die an ignominious death on Capitol Hill.

The resistance to dealing with TRICARE stems from an admirable sentiment: to take good care of our troops, their families, and veterans – especially those who have sacrificed and suffered on the battlefield. This same sentiment motivates the Congress routinely to add an extra half percent to the pay raise that the Department requests each year. Furthermore, the all-volunteer force, which has been a brilliant success in terms of performance, is a group that is older, more likely to have spouses and children, and thus far costlier to recruit, retain, house, and care for than the Eisenhower-era military that relied on the draft of young single men to fill out its ranks.

Those are the political and demographic realities we face. To a certain extent they limit what can be saved and where. But as a matter of principle and political reality, the Department of Defense cannot go to the America’s elected representatives and ask for increases each year unless we have done everything possible to make every dollar count. Unless there is real reform in the way this department does its business and spends taxpayer dollars.

Two quick points here.

First, America’s armed personnel and their families represent an important political constituency. No administration wants the baggage that comes with reducing benefits for America’s fighting men and women. For the time being, that includes this one. If a serious restructuring of military pay and benefits ever occurs, it would likely be in about year six or seven of the Obama administration, safely after reelection.

Even then, it might prove impossible as Congress continues to feed the beast of fiscal irresponsibility. News broke just today that the Hill is about to vote on a 1.9 percent military pay raise. Guess what? That’s a half-percent more than the Pentagon recommended.

Second, in my mind, the structure of the benefits isn’t the problem. It’s the amount of care. I wrote a paper last year called “The Pentagon’s Most Expensive Weapon,” and I concluded that once you add up all outlays — including costs associated with the Department of Veterans Affairs — for military personnel, DoD spends not the $136 billion it tells you, but more than $300 billion.

Why are these costs skyrocketing? It’s a simple function of our foreign policy — America’s service members may be getting older and costlier, but since Afghanistan and Iraq, they’re also getting injured more frequently and in greater numbers.  Here’s my conclusion:

The problem of rising personnel costs can only be addressed from higher up the chain. Extended deployments overseas invariably increase costs because of the strain they place on the force — in casualties, logistics, sustainability, and recruiting and retention costs. Once the force has recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan, it is incumbent on America’s civilian leadership to carefully weigh the extended cost burden placed on the Pentagon’s personnel account when plotting our global security strategy. In short, America must choose its wars and deployments carefully, as exploding personnel costs are the untold story of Pentagon spending in 2010 and beyond.

In other words, you can talk about trimming benefits and reducing the ever illusive “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and that is no doubt a good thing. And so is eliminating unneeded weapons systems.

But if we’re going inject real savings on personnel into the system, we can’t just talk about TRICARE, we have to stop fighting dumb wars. And ultimately, that decision is above Gates’ pay grade.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eschipul/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Four Things Obama Needs to Do in the Middle East

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Shadi Hamid


Shadi Hamid is the deputy director of the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

by Shadi Hamid

In a recent piece, I discussed the growing sense of “Bush nostalgia” among Arab reformers. Such nostalgia has less to do with George W. Bush and more to do with the period of democratic promise the Middle East experienced in 2004-5, partly a result of aggressive, but short-lived, efforts to put pressure on authoritarian regimes.

For its part, the Obama administration has shown little real interest in democratization in the Arab world, falling back on the “pragmatic” neo-realism of the Clinton and first Bush administrations. Compared to the destructive policies of his predecessor, President Obama’s approach seems a breath of fresh air. But his foreign policy vision, while certainly sensible, has so far been remarkably conventional and unimaginative. Perhaps that’s what was initially needed. Now, however, is the time for bolder, more creative policy making. Here are four things Obama can – and should – do in the Middle East to advance U.S. interests and ideals:

  • Recognize the region’s changing balance of power. Traditional allies like Egypt and Jordan (two of the world’s largest U.S. aid recipients) are losing influence. Increasingly authoritarian, erratic and perceived as excessively pro-American, they have little credibility with Arab audiences. On the other hand, emerging powers like Turkey and Qatar are pursuing independent foreign policies and maintaining positive relations with both the West and the “rejectionist” camp (Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah). Not surprisingly, both countries, seen as “honest brokers,” have played a major role in mediating regional conflicts and supporting dialogue efforts, including on the Syrian-Israeli, Israeli-Palestinian, Hamas-Fatah and internal Lebanese tracks. The U.S. should encourage their efforts, keeping in mind that they may be uniquely well-positioned to exert influence on Iran and Syria.
  • Promote Turkish accession to the EU. Turkey is the closest thing the Middle East has to a “model,” one of only two countries in the world led by a democratically elected Islamist party. According to a 2009 survey, 64 percent of Arab respondents in seven countries believe “Turkey’s EU membership prospects make Turkey an attractive partner for reform in the Arab world.” Considering its growing regional importance, the U.S. cannot afford for Turkey to turn inward and become embroiled in conflict between its secularist military and Islamist-leaning government. For a time, Turkey’s desire to join the EU provided incentives to implement wide-ranging legal and political reforms. However, as the EU drags its feet on accession talks, and Turks lose hope in EU membership, the reform process looks less encouraging than ever. Turkey must, however, remain enmeshed in Western institutions and partnerships. The Obama administration should use its leverage with European allies to ensure the accession process moves forward.
  • Begin strategic engagement with nonviolent Islamist groups. In most Arab countries, Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, are the largest, most influential opposition groups. But Obama has so far failed to engage them, despite his emphasis on “dialogue” with diverse actors. Engagement would serve several purposes, discussed in detail here, including information-gathering, improving our credibility with Arab publics and putting pressure on autocratic regimes to open up. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or another senior official, could begin by giving a major speech on the U.S. and political Islam (something which the Clinton administration did on several occasions), stating unequivocally that the U.S. will accept democratic outcomes, even if that means the election of Islamist parties. The State Department should also issue a directive explicitly permitting State Department employees, including ambassadors in the region, to meet with and incorporate members of Islamist organizations in their programming.
  • Embrace “positive conditionality.” The U.S. gives hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Arab authoritarian regimes. Rather than cutting aid, which is unlikely to be politically viable, the U.S. could offer large packages in additional assistance, conditioned on meeting a series of explicit benchmarks on democratization. If the country failed to meet these benchmarks, the aid would be withheld and carried over to a reform “endowment” for the next fiscal year. This way, the more governments rejected the aid, the greater the incentive would be to accept it in future years.

None of these four “steps” are particularly revolutionary. But that’s the point: the Obama administration could take action immediately – if it had the political will. With the troop drawdown in Iraq, and the Iranian nuclear threat, there may be a temptation to wait for a better time. But, in the Middle East, the better time, sadly, never seems to come.

If anything, a confluence of factors appears to be converging, suggesting the time to act is now. There are critical elections in Egypt and Jordan coming up in 2010 (and 2011). For the first time in Egypt, there is an inspiring national figure, Mohamed ElBaradei, who seems capable of uniting a notoriously fractious opposition behind a common vision for reform. Egypt, along with Algeria and Tunisia, will be facing succession struggles sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, internal tensions in Turkey seem to be rising, with the threat of escalation looming in the background. In other words, this is a difficult time of transition in the Middle East and the U.S. will need to do considerably more than just tread water.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix | 4 Comments »

Our Eco-Friendly Military

Monday, April 12th, 2010
Mike Signer


Mike Signer is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Mike Signer

“The Army’s mission is not to be green. Our mission is to defend the nation. In that context, we’ve found it’s in our interest to develop sustainable projects.”

This is the powerful quote by the Army’s program director for energy security in a new must-read article in USA Today. At the E3 Initiative, we’ve been arguing for months that new energy practices are essential to upgrading our national security strategy.

The military has recently spent over $100 million to insulate tents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? It cuts the leakage of air conditioning by at least 50 percent. Taxpayers recoup their investment within 90 days.

All this is important to defense because it addresses the sluggish, dangerous practices of our old-energy defense posture. For example, truck convoys carrying water and gas (required by inefficient energy in theater) are vulnerable to roadside bombs, which themselves are the biggest killer of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. As USA Today reports, “Greater energy efficiency also helps keep troops in war zones safer, because it reduces the number of trucks on the road carrying fuel to outlying bases.”

As the Army recognizes, sustainability isn’t about ideology — being “green” for the sake of being green. It’s about making America smarter, tougher, more competitive and more resilient: lessons we should remember as we head into the inevitable fight in Congress about legislation to price and control carbon.

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix | No Comments »

Iran’s Role in Iraq

Friday, April 2nd, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble, the two definitive contemporary histories of the Iraq War, has long said that Iran has been the biggest winner since Shock and Awe.

I’ve always been inclined to agree with him, even if there was scant overt evidence to support the claim. Sure, the U.S. military would parade allegedly Iranian-made explosives out to the media to “prove” Tehran’s support of Shi’ite Iraqi militias. And it has long been assumed that the leading figure of those Shi’ite militias, Muqtada al-Sadr, put his tail between his legs and decamped to Iran as soon as the U.S. figured out what it was doing in Baghdad. But for the first time, we have unquestionable evidence of Iran’s waxing influence on the new Iraqi government: They invited (almost all of) them over to play. Or their Shi’ite cousins anyway:

The ink was hardly dry on the polling results when three of the four major political alliances rushed delegations off to Tehran. Yet none of them sent anyone to the United States Embassy here, let alone to Washington. … The Iranians, however, have shown no such qualms, publicly urging the Shiite religious parties to bury their differences so they can use their superior numbers to choose the next prime minister. Their openness, and Washington’s reticence, is a measure of the changed political dynamic in Iraq.

The uninvited fourth major political party was Iraqiya, the largest vote-getter in last month’s election, a largely Sunni party (headed by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shia), which has the first crack at forming a government with Allawi as the new prime minister. This is, of course, provided they can stave off the latest round of politically motivated witch-hunting. Incumbent PM Nouri al-Maliki is fighting for his political life, and has come out swinging. He’s trying to make it as difficult as possible for Iraqiya to capitalize on its victory by having the national election commission — a body Maliki essentially controls — begin to disqualify other Iraqiya candidates on the shaky grounds that they were members of Saddam Hussein’s old Ba’ath Party. When combined with Iran’s efforts to broker peace between the Shi’ite parties, this is the best hope Tehran has of getting a large, friendly, Shi’ite majority and prime minister in Baghdad.

Will it work? It’s obviously way too early to say. The U.S. is trying to toe a razor thin line between respecting a democratic process they created and cultivating the new government (no matter who runs it) against Iranian influence. But while Tehran’s overtures are worrisome to say the least, the U.S. will continue to hold plenty of cards in the poker game of Iraqi politics. That’s because if Mr. Allawi isn’t the next prime minister, the current one will be.

That leads to two consoling final thoughts: the U.S. will continue to have strong pull with whoever is in charge, and is legally scheduled to get out anyway. In essence, Iran’s influence may be increasing, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming at the expense of America’s.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0

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Terrorism in Russia

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Nearly 36 hours after the attacks in Moscow’s subway system, reports indicate that nearly 40 are dead and more than 70 have been injured. As of this writing, no group has claimed responsibility, though heavy suspicion has fallen on Muslim separatist groups based in southern Russia’s Caucasus region, the primary source of terrorism in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. More on that in a second.

There were two bombings, conducted quasi-simultaneously (about 40 minutes apart) at two busy metro stations in Moscow’s city center. The Lubyanka station is located near the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service (the legacy organization of the KGB), which points to a message the attackers may have been hoping to convey; the second scene at the Park Kultury Station is located a few stops to the south along the same metro line. If you’d like to see some interesting citizen-journalism of the attacks’ aftermath, click over to the NYT’s The Lede blog.

Much has been made of the attackers’ identity — two women dressed in black robes with explosives and shrapnel packed underneath their garments. Female suicide bombers have been used by Chechen separatists dating back to 2002 and are commonly — and disturbingly – referred to as ”black widows.” Furthermore, female suicide bombers are hardly a new phenomenon. If memory serves, they’ve been used as long ago as the early 1990s by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Terrorist groups — even those with no formal ties to one another — observe each others’ tactical successes and adopt the effective ones. The use of unsuspecting women has made the rounds in terrorist circles, even if Western audiences still find the tactic shocking.

It’s important to appreciate the dynamic nature and motivations of the Caucasus’ separatist groups over the last decade and the Russian government’s response to them. Boris Yeltsin first installed the then-little-known ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister in 1999, and Putin vowed to crush the Chechen separatist movement. In the early-to-mid 2000s, the group was a relatively structured militia that was responsible for mostly large-scale terrorist attacks. The group most famously conducted the 2004 siege at the Beslan school that killed over 300 people, many of whom were school children; it was also responsible for the 2002 siege at a Moscow theater.

In large part, Putin was responsible for successfully dismantling the organizational hierarchy behind those acts, killing leaders like Shamil Basayev and Abdul Khalim Sudalayev in 2006. He used victories like those to consolidate power behind the Kremlin, saying political power-grabs like eliminating the direct election of regional governors were necessary to defeat terrorism. Can you imagine if Bush had eliminated the election of state governors after 9/11? Just a bit of a stretch, right?

But as often happens with insurgent organizations, cutting off their head rarely kills them. Moscow’s success only caused the resistance to morph over the last four or five years from a top-down military-style structure to more of a flat, non-hierarchical, Islamic-based motley crew. Here’s an excellent run-down on the insurgency’s changing nature and motivation from WaPo’s Philip Pan late last year:

Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.

In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs’ brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.

It would appear on the surface that the Kremlin has failed to appreciate this change. In my mind, the new shape and motivations of the Chechen insurgency would call for more of a counter-insurgency style strategy that has been adopted by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, Putin has vowed a continued heavy hand, saying, “The terrorists will be destroyed!” This is of course what any national leader must say to placate a fearful and confused domestic audience, but may begin to ring a bit hollow in light of Putin’s similar rhetoric of 1999:

“Putin said [before these attacks], ‘One thing that I definitely accomplished was this [stopping the Chechen threat],’ and he didn’t,” said Pavel K. Baev, a Russian who is a professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.

“My feeling is this is not an isolated attack, that we will see more,” Mr. Baev said. “If we are facing a situation where there is a chain of attacks, that would undercut every attempt to soften, liberalize, open up, and increase the demand for tougher measures.”

In my next post, I’ll take a look at how the U.S. has responded to the attacks.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Democracy, Iraq-Style

Monday, March 8th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Everyone knows that America’s attempt to implant democracy in Iraq was a fool’s errand. Everyone, that is, but the Iraqi people.

Stubbornly defying terrorist bombings and official incompetence, they turned out in force to vote in national elections over the weekend. Although the outcome isn’t yet known, the elections confirmed Iraq’s status as the Middle East’s most important, if precarious, experiment in democracy.

The process hasn’t been pretty, but there’s no denying that something like a normal, pluralistic politics is emerging in a society brutalized by a sadistic tyrant and scarred by the sectarian violence that followed the U.S. invasion. The big question now is whether Iraqis will continue along the path of power-sharing and representative government, or give up on democracy and opt for some form of authoritarian rule, which is the norm in their neighborhood.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about Iraq, so let’s start with the positive side of the ledger. First, al Qaeda has been defeated. Though it still perpetrates atrocities against Iraqi civilians, it has scant popular support and cannot stand up to Iraq’s army and police. Sectarian strife also has subsided, at least for the moment; the Economist reports that civilian casualties are at a six-year low.

Second, politics is becoming less sectarian as communal groups splinter and forge cross-cutting alliances. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has broken with the main Shia groups, which failed to field their own candidate for his post. Also expected to do well is former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a nationalist whose coalition includes Shia and Sunnis. In the north, a reform movement called “Change” has broken with the two dominant Kurdish parties on the issue of local political corruption. And in pointed contrast to Iran, Iraq’s Shia clerical establishment stays out of politics.

On the other side of the ledger, Iraq’s emerging political order faces several enormous challenges. One is a fatal combination of governmental weakness and corruption. The central government still cannot supply basic infrastructure, including electricity. Rampant bribery and cronyism are giving democracy a bad name and feeding popular sentiment for strongman rule. It’s not hard to imagine Iraq moving toward a “soft authoritarianism” like Egypt’s or perhaps the even more stifling models of Syria or Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqi economy is in shambles. Unemployment is pervasive and private industry is weak; government is the employer of first and last resort in Iraq. Although the country has enormous oil reserves, there’s a real danger it could use them to foster dependence on state subsidies rather than private sector work.

Finally, there’s the question of what happens when U.S. troops are no longer around to backstop Iraq’s political evolution. Under the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the Bush administration and Baghdad, all U.S. forces must be out by the end of 2011. As Peter Beinart warns, this deadline may not allow enough time for the consolidation of democracy in Iraq. The United States plays a quiet but vital role in mediating sectarian conflicts and helping Iraqis set up nonpartisan governing institutions. In our absence, civil war could flare up again, Iran might escalate its internal interference in Iraqi affairs, or there could be a military coup in reaction to public anger over the chaos and incompetence of civilian government.

Of course, the United States cannot unilaterally change the Status of Forces Agreement. But Obama should be vigilant and open to a request from the Iraqi government to do so should that become necessary. We have come too far, at enormous expense to both Iraqis and Americans, to give up now on Iraq’s struggles to build a decent government that rules by popular consent.

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The Iraqi Election You Haven’t Heard About

Friday, March 5th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Iraq is having a major election on Sunday. No way, really? Yup, really. The leader of the winning coalition gets to be prime minister even. Suffice it to say, I’m pretty sure this one has slipped under the radar for most Americans. My quick and informal poll of friends — “Are you aware that Iraq is going to elect a new prime minister on Sunday?” — drew a mix of blank stares and disbelief. Gone are the days of George W. Bush’s PR blitz, where the ex-prez’s attempts to build public support for his war hung on selling the country on wistfully wrapped, grandiose concepts of liberty and freedom.

This time around, the Obama administration has opted for a more low-key approach. Democracies aren’t built overnight, a lesson the Bush folks probably knew, but since they had staked so much political capital to a quick victory and transition in Iraq, they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. The reality is that this election is more important than the last one, and the next one will be more important than this weekend’s. The mere act of holding elections is of course highly significant, but they must continually confirm the growth and strength of state institutions to truly build a democracy. That’s what this election is really about — how stable is Iraq?

So who’s going to win, and what issues are Iraqis concerned with? Man, if I could answer either of those with granularity, I could probably figure out how to make a lot of money with it. For starters, click here for a guide to all the different coalitions. Current polling predicts that incumbent PM Nouri al-Maliki’s coalition will win 30 percent of parliamentary seats, ex-PM Ayad Allawi’s (a Shia, running with a Sunni and secular Shia on a national unity coaition) bloc will take 22 percent, and the Iraqi National Alliance (a conservative Shia group) will get 17. But this doesn’t necessarily determine the “winner” because all the main groups will have to form a governing majority by reaching out to some of the millions of minority blocs in a coalition-of-the-coalitions government. In other words, Allawi might become prime minister if he can form a bigger coalition alliance with a few critical minority groups.

“Issues” in Iraq don’t carry — at least for now — the same weight and implications they do as in Western democratic politics. Iraqis aren’t going to bicker about abortion language in a health care bill in Baghdad, for example. Rather, Iraqi politicians are still debating the first two levels on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and wants: basic security, public services, and the like.

Which is why incumbent PM Nouri al-Maliki has named his coalition “State of Law,” which is of course designed to appeal to those who desire security. It’s also why there has been an uptick in attacks across Iraq over the last few months, as various groups try to disprove al-Maliki’s claim that he has the upper hand in the security situation.

I think we’ll really know how far Iraqi democracy has come based on sectarian voting patterns. Are Shias just voting for other Shias? Sunnis for Sunnis? Kurds for Kurds? We’ll know that democracy has really come to Iraq when a Shia will vote for a Sunni based on issues, not patronage. But since the issues are still so rudimentary, sectarianism still probably carries the day.

Finally, the post-election period will be the most critical. How easy will it be to form a governing majority? Will there be a peaceful transfer of power? How bad is sectarian violence? These questions all hinge on one another, I’m afraid. There may be calls for the U.S. to extend its presence in Iraq if the post-election period is really messy. But as I’ve written here, that’s a lot tougher than it might seem.

So pay attention, America — Iraq still deserves your attention.

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Must Read: Admiral Mullen’s Speech at Kansas State

Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

If you are at all interested in the future national security of the United States, do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to read Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen’s speech yesterday at Kansas State University. It’s clear that Adm. Mullen understands the changing nature of warfare in the 21st century and that the military must adapt along with it. Mullen’s fears that U.S. foreign policy is “too dominated by the military” is particularly striking given that Adm. Mullen is, well, the highest ranking military officer in the U.S. military. Or, to quote Nathan Hodge of Danger Room, Mullen seems to be saying that, “avoiding wars is as important as winning them.”

Adm. Mullen endorses a strong, smart and principled national security worldview that progressives should embrace. Here are a few extended excerpts (they’re long, but worth it), which should double as powerful rebuttals to any conservative who accuses progressives of being “weak on security”:
On the nature of war:

[T]here is no single defining American way of war. It changes over time, and it should change over time, adapting appropriately to the most relevant threats to our national security….[T]he military may be the best and sometimes the first tool; it should never be the only tool. The tangible effects of military engagement may give policymakers a level of comfort not necessarily or wholly justified. As we have seen, the international environment is more fluid and more complex than ever before.
[…]
Contrary to popular imagination, war has never been a set-piece affair. The enemy adapts to your strategy and you adapt to his. And so you keep the interplay going between policy and strategy until you find the right combination at the right time.
[…]
Trying everything else is not weakness. It means we don’t give up. It means we never stop learning, and in my view if we’ve learned nothing else from these two wars of ours, it is that a flexible, balanced approach to using military force is best.

On the relationship between defense and diplomacy:

Defense and diplomacy are simply no longer discrete choices, one to be applied when the other one fails, but must, in fact, complement one another throughout the messy process of international relations….[W]e cannot count on military might alone. We have to invest in our homeland security; we have to improve and better coordinate our intelligence; and we will have to use diplomacy, because no one nation can meet the challenges of an interconnected world acting alone. My fear, quite frankly, is that we aren’t moving fast enough in this regard.

U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military, too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands. Secretaries Clinton and Gates have called for more funding and more emphasis on our soft power, and I could not agree with them more. Should we choose to exert American influence solely through our troops, we should expect to see that influence diminish in time.

On the use of force:

Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way….[P]recisely applying force in a principled manner can help reduce…costs and actually improve our chances of success. In this type of war, when the objective is not the enemy’s defeat but the people’s success, less really is more. Each time an errant bomb or a bomb accurately aimed but against the wrong target kills or hurts civilians, we risk setting our strategy back months, if not years.

Precise and principled force applies whether we are attacking an entrenched enemy or securing the population. In either case, it protects the innocent. We protect the innocent. It’s who we are. And in so doing, we better preserve both our freedom of action and our security interests.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejointstaff/ / CC BY 2.0

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Assessing the Marja Offensive

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

I haven’t written much on the Marja offensive—the joint US/Afghan/NATO operation in the Helmand province city of the same name—because I wanted to see how it played out before drawing sweeping conclusions.

The assault on Marja (population 80,000) is now in its third week. It is the largest offensive in Afghanistan by U.S./NATO/Afghan troops since 2002, involving some 5,000 total troops. Marja had been one of the last significant Taliban strongholds in Helmand province, and NATO and Afghan commanders had eyed it as potentially excellent example of the alliance’s new force posture and growing inter-operability with the Afghan military. “Force posture,” you ask? That’s right—lost in last year’s debate of how many American troops to send was the more important point about why extra forces were needed.

General McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy was a page ripped from General Petraeus’ Iraq playbook of early 2007, when violence in that war began to decrease significantly. It’s a military mindset that values protecting the local population over killing the enemy. General Petraeus rightly pointed out, “We don’t want to destroy Marja to save it.”

The mantra “clear, hold, and build” has been the recipe for success: clearing Taliban out of an area, holding the area so Taliban don’t immediately return, and building basic governing capacities that show locals that NATO and Afghan forces are serious about improving people’s lives, not just destroying. To execute this strategy, you need more boots on the ground.

It’s important for progressives to realize that though American casualties have been rising as our forces live among Afghans, that’s because they’re putting themselves in the firing line between civilians and the Taliban. Of course, civilians are killed, whether it’s because our forces have mistakenly identified a location as a Taliban hideout or because the Taliban has ruthlessly used civilians as human shields. There have been, depending on whose numbers you believe, probably somewhere around 25 civilian deaths in Marja thus far. They are all tragedies. But as Sarah Holewinski (full disclosure: a friend through the Truman National Security Project) of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Combat (CIVIC) says, care to avoid civilian casualties is at its highest in years:

Soldiers on the ground are telling us, ‘look, we’re restricting our air power. We’re going in on foot. We are shooting only when we know that that other combatant is carrying a gun. So we’re trying to distinguish as clearly as possible between civilians and combatants.’ ….And then when an incident actually does happen, they are very quick to do an investigation, and then pay compensation.

The offensive was repeatedly announced in the Afghan press weeks before it happened. Sounds crazy, right? But the military knew that even though many Taliban fighters would flee out of town, the better course of action was to give civilians time to prepare.

The military side of the campaign was relatively swift and effective. The Afghan flag now flies over Marja, and mid-level American officers are happy with the progress. Taliban certainly remain scattered throughout the countryside, but as long as they are dispersed away from the city with no real power-base, that’s acceptable for now.

But here comes the hard part—the “building” phase. General McChrystal says, “We’re not at the end of the military phase, but we’re clearly approaching that….The government of Afghanistan is in the position now of having the opportunity, and the requirement, to prove they can establish legitimate governance.”

McChrystal has said that there’s an Afghan “government in a box” (allegedly trustworthy Afghans set to temporarily run Marja) ready to roll in and start working on basic public services. That’s a plus because it clears out the local corruption-laden crew and stands a better chance of success, but potentially dangerous because the government transplants are aliens to the local power structures and traditional Afghan system of family-based patronage.

So what do the locals think? As far as I’ve observed, quotes from local tend to fall into three general categories, something along these lines and in roughly equal numbers:

  1. “Good riddance to the Taliban. This operation was needed.”
  2. “Life wasn’t so bad under the Taliban. It wasn’t great, but I was surviving. What are the Americans doing?”
  3. “The Afghan Army is completely incompetent. If they Americans don’t stay engaged in Marja, the whole deal will have been for nothing.”

Thus far, Marja seems to have been an effective demonstration of the first two aspects of counter-insurgency strategy (“clear” and “hold”), but the “build” will take months upon months to come to fruition. If the NATO/Afghan engagement produces an effective local government with decent public services, public opinion will begin to swing towards the first quote above. That’s a big “if.”

And if it is indeed one of the last major Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan — I’m not expert enough to weigh whether that’s true — the Marja operation will have certainly been worth it.

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Leaving Iraq

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Take a minute to soak in Tom Ricks’ column in NYT today. Here are a two key excerpts:

IRAQ’S March 7 national election, and the formation of a new government that will follow, carry huge implications for both Iraqis and American policy. It appears now that the results are unlikely to resolve key political struggles that could return the country to sectarianism and violence.  If so, President Obama may find himself later this year considering whether once again to break his campaign promises about ending the war, and to offer to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for several more years. Surprisingly, that probably is the best course for him, and for Iraqi leaders, to pursue.

[...]

The political situation is far less certain, and I think less stable, than most Americans believe. … All the existential questions that plagued Iraq before the surge remain unanswered. How will oil revenue be shared among the country’s major groups? What is to be the fundamental relationship between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds? Will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what will be the role of Iran (for my money, the biggest winner in the Iraq war thus far)?

Ricks goes on to advocate slowing down the U.S. withdrawal, which can really only occur if the Iraqis offer to re-open negotiations on the status of forces agreement (SOFA). It was signed in the waning days of the Bush administration and establishes December 31, 2011, as the date when “all United States forces shall withdraw from Iraq.”

While the future in Iraq certainly continues to look murky and Ricks’ suggestion should be kept in mind, I don’t think we’re quite at the point of seriously debating a change to the SOFA just yet. Let’s wait until the March 7th elections have passed and the mood of the country and new government shake out until we think about it. After all, it’s not our call anyway — as the SOFA clearly states, “The United States recognizes the sovereign right of the Government of Iraq to request the departure of the United States Forces from Iraq at any time,” and that’s a politically weighty sentence to revisit if you’re a brand new Iraqi government.

That’s why I don’t think the announcement of General Odierno’s contingency plan to delay withdrawal is much of a definite harbinger at this point. That’s what the military does — it plans for things. They’re the best Boy Scouts (motto: Be Prepared) in the world. And just because it plans, doesn’t mean the commander-in-chief is about to put those plans in motion. After all, we have a plan on the books to attack Iran. And I’ve got $20 that says we have a plan to attack Canada.

But then again, invading Canada would make winning the hockey gold medal a lot less fun.

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The GOP on Terrorism: Hypocritical, Disingenuous, Ineffective

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

This is unbelievably rich. Check out this exchange from Dick Cheney’s appearance on the ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday:

DICK CHENEY: I think, in fact, the situation with respect to al Qaeda, to say that, you know, that was a big attack we had on 9/11, but it’s not likely again, I just think that’s dead wrong. I think the biggest strategic threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind. And I think al Qaeda is out there even as we meet, trying to figure out how to do that.

JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: And do you think that the Obama administration is taking the necessary steps to prevent that?

CHENEY: I think they need to do everything they can to prevent, and if the mindset is it’s not likely, then it’s difficult to mobilize the resources and get people to give it the kind of priority that it deserves.

Every time Dick Cheney claims or infers that the Obama administration isn’t fighting al Qaeda as hard as the Bush administration supposedly did, repeat after me: Remember the Iraq War? If the Bush administration was as focused on al Qaeda as Dick Cheney misremembers, would we have gone into Iraq?

It’s even more astounding that Republicans are so desparate to criticize the administration on national security that they’re now claiming that the Obama administration is being too harsh. You read that correctly. Here’s Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee:

Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused. If given a choice between killing or capturing, we would probably kill.

If Senator Bond will take the flowers out of his hair for a second, he might remember an exchange with CIA Director Leon Panetta as Panetta revealed the cancellation of a legally questionable CIA program to kill al Qaeda operatives. Bond seemed far more in favor of killing AQ members back in July when he asked the director:

Why would you cancel [the program to kill AQ operatives]? If the CIA weren’t trying to do something like this, we’d be asking ‘Why not?’ ”

I guess he was for it before he was against it.

Keep in mind that none of the Republican attacks on national security are working anyway, as evidenced by the latest polls.

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