More Duck

Since the Duck of Minerva receives about four times as many reader hits per day as this blog does, then I'm going to be posting most international relations material there.

Today, I posted "Bush on WW 3" concerning his latest statements about the Iranian nuclear program.

Monday, October 15, I blogged "UNAMI Report on Iraq: Dire, Grave Crises." The post discusses the 11th report on the human rights situation in Iraq issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

I'll continue posting here on a variety of topics, including politics, especially as the presidential race unfolds. Discussions of film, baseball, local Louisville matters and many other topics will be found on this blog as well.


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At the Duck

Readers might be interested in my recent posts at the Duck of Minerva blog:

Today, I blogged "Sarah Sewall and COIN." It concerns the efforts of the leader of a Harvard Human Rights center to make counterinsurgency less deadly to civilians.

Thursday, October 11, I blogged "Securing Our Survival" about a security conference at the University of Pittsburgh. The meeting focused on both global warming and nuclear proliferation.

Tuesday, October 2, I took note of a University of Chicago professor's appearance on Comedy Central: "Mearsheimer on Colbert."

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Is this a coincidence?

OK, so it has been widely reported that the US is missing a large number of assault rifles in Iraq:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops.

What if the U.S. does not care very much if the rifles disappear -- and end up in the hands of various insurgents?

Consider this: Phillip Killicoat of Oxford's Econ Department arrived an interesting finding in his recently completed World Bank Policy Research Working Paper called "Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles" (warning: pdf). I read it in a short item in the Atlantic Monthly, October 2007 ("The Way of the Gun."):

Most surprisingly, the study cites research suggesting that having more arms in the marketplace makes running a counterinsurgency easier, presumably because it tends to fragment rebel groups: “The more easily individual combatants can obtain weapons through independent suppliers,” the author writes, “the more difficult it will be to mount and maintain a united and coordinated insurgency.”

Hmmmm.


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Sputnik

I'm nearly a week late noting it, but October 4 was the 50th anniversary of the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

This is shameless self promotion, but one of my early publications (in Armed Forces & Society, Fall 1994; available here) focused on the importance of Sputnik in regard to cold war threat inflation. Basically, President Eisenhower had strong information about the status of the Soviet missile program -- and was not particularly worried about the threat (for good reason) -- but the satellite triggered great fear inside the U.S.

Most of that was explained by domestic politics. Democrats blamed Ike for keeping the US behind in the "space race." JFK did not actually use the phrase "missile gap," but that was the (false) fear at the time.

The U.S. image was further damaged when the Vanguard blew up on the launch pad in December, 1957. Time then named Nikita Khrushchev "man of the year" for 1957.

As explained in my article, the roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis can be found in the U.S. over-reaction to Sputnik.


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Coalition: less and less willing

October 9, William Kole of AP reported about the continued unraveling of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. PM Gordon Brown announced that the UK is withdrawing most of its remaining forces from Iraq:

At its height, in the months after Saddam Hussein was toppled, the multinational force numbered about 300,000 soldiers from 38 countries - 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.

By January of this year, though, the combined non-U.S. contingent had dwindled to just over 14,000. As of Tuesday, it stood at 20 nations and roughly 11,400 soldiers.

It's in for more unraveling: Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday that Britain will halve its remaining force of 5,000 next spring, and another official said there were no guarantees any British troops would remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2008.

Denmark pulled out most of its forced in August. Latvia and Lithuania left over the summer.

Georgia has announced, like the UK, a major reduction in its force presence -- from 2000 now to 300 next summer.

I've frequently noted the withering away of the coalition.


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"Taken with a pinch of salt"

Patrick Mercer, special security adviser to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was quoted by The Guardian today:

'There is increasing concern about the apparent evidence that America is preparing about Iranian military involvement.'
Mercer, who last month accepted a post as an adviser to the Brown government, said: 'All that I heard when I was in Iran was British authorities saying "be careful about what you hear from America". I'm not saying for one moment that it is necessarily wrong, but it's got to be taken with a pinch of salt. Is it American rhetoric, propaganda or fact?'

The Guardian story also reports on the activities of a new neocon group called Freedom Watch (established in March), which recently starting running TV ads emphasizing the "threat" from Iran.

The group has close links with the White House: its president, Bradley Blakeman, is a former deputy assistant to Bush. Among its founders is Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping centre magnate who helped to finance the 2000 Florida recount campaign that gave Bush his first presidency. Another is former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

A few weeks ago, Freedom Watch spent $15 million running ads in support of the US strategy in Iraq.


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Al Qaeda in Iraq

Andrew Tilghman, who was an Iraq correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper in 2005 and 2006, has published an excellent overview on the myth of Al Qaeda in Iraq. His piece appears in the October 2007 edition of The Washington Monthly.

Basically, Tilghman argues that AQI is "neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed." Size first:

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

What about lethality?

According to the Bush administration's narrative, AQI commits the lion's share of the spectacular acts of violence in Iraq that provoke civil conflict between Sunni and Shia. The Samara mosque bombing is the ultimate example:

it remains unclear whether the original Samara bombing was itself the work of AQI. The group never took credit for the attack, as it has many other high-profile incidents. The man who the military believe orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government official under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, was also a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's army.) Key features of the bombing did not conform to the profile of an AQI attack. For example, the bombers did not target civilians, or even kill the Shiite Iraqi army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which are trademark tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common among former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly destructive tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the heart of Saddam's power base, where former regime fighters keep tight control over the insurgency. Frank "Greg" Ford, a retired counterintelligence agent for the Army Reserves, who worked with the Army in Samara before the 2006 bombing, says that the evidence points away from AQI and toward a different conclusion: "The Baathists directed that attack," says Ford.

Read the entire article, it is is well worth it.


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The debate about the surge

Red S Tater is back (see comments here) and has issued a "challenge" for me to revise my comments about the report General Petraeus delivered to Congress a couple of weeks ago.

Red is touting a blog post by "Professor Engram," which purports to show that civilian violence in Iraq is down since the surge began. In other words, Petraeus is right and the surge is working.

Specifically, Red claims that Engram

"refuted the moveon.org claim and analysis completely. You DO agree with the moveon.org ad in terms of it's claim that the "books were cooked"..?" I could be wrong but it seems like that was your basic take over at Minerva a while back.

At first I was going to ignore Red since I've said nothing about MoveOn and I did not specifically argue that the books were cooked. Mostly mindless "discussions" involving people calling each other names are not of much interest to me.

Nonetheless, I looked at Red's link and readily noticed that Professor Engram doesn't address, let alone refute, most of my specific comments.

Yes, Engram compares the summer decline in violence 2007 to the same time period in 2006, but where is the data for 2005 or 2004 or 2003? Using only the data Engram highlights, it is clear that the August 2007 violence is now down to roughly the level of January through April 2006. This very strongly suggests that civilian violence in Iraq remains very high and that the surge will have no meaningful long-term effect. After all, the surge is about to end for lack of troops and the goal was not merely to return the violence to an already high level.

Moreover, I would add that nobody who looks at this kind of evidence focuses too much attention on a single data outlier. What if August 2007 proves to be a genuine anomaly? There are going to be peaks and valleys in the casualty data over a period of years. Generally, Iraq continues to be an unsafe place to live (only Sudan ranks below Iraq on the failed state index).

Engram says nothing about refugees. Iraq's population is about 27.5 million; yet, over 100,000 people are apparently fleeing Iraq per month. Over a one year period, that's over 4% of the population. We would expect nearly 100 fewer monthly dead civilians in Iraq just from a reduced population base.

Past ethnic cleansing has also likely contributed to the decline in violence. The potential victims have segregated themselves.

And, of course, none of the body count data addresses the social issue I highlighted in my critique. Most Iraqis think it is OK to kill American troops -- and the number saying that has increased significantly since the surge started. Counterinsurgency cannot succeed in that context.

One has to look at the big picture, Red. There's no evidence that the surge is winning the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis. There's been almost no genuine political progress in Iraq and even the American generals say that the insurgency won't be defeated militarily. The civil war has to end politically.


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Quacking up

Over at the Duck of Minerva, I've posted a couple of somewhat comedic items that might be of interest to my readers:

Today, I blogged "Bush: still alone on climate change" about this week's White House climate summit. It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.

September 15, I posted "Terrorism and your neighbor's sex life." Apparently, some transnational terrorists are selling fake Viagra to raise cash for their own dirty deeds.


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HCFCs and climate

This past week, the US and nearly 200 other states agreed to an international treaty that will reduce greenhouse gases. The BBC:

Nearly 200 governments have agreed a faster timetable for phasing out chemicals that deplete the ozone layer and contribute to global warming.

The schedule for eliminating hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) comes forward by 10 years under the agreement signed at a UN meeting in Montreal.

Notice, this came out of the 1980s Montreal Protocol, not the 1990s Kyoto Protocol. While the latter is the climate change agreement, the former was designed to save the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Still, the deal is remarkable. It is arguably the most meaningful environmental agreement this decade. Even developing countries have agreed to ban HCFCs. And there are credible estimates suggesting that this deal will be up to twice as effective as the Kyoto accord in preventing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions. HCFCs are bad.

Radoslav Dimitrov, a Political Science professor at University of Western Ontario was at the meeting (reporting for Earth Negotiations Bulletin) and his take is somewhat more cynical. I think it's safe to say he's talking about the US here:

One major country displayed particular enthusiasm about taking climate-related action outside of the climate process. Reportedly, their delegation had “marching orders” to bring climate into the ozone process before an upcoming high-level meeting on climate change next week, and thus draw attention away from the UNFCCC....It also provides an easy way to take action on climate change and shift the focus away from the Kyoto Protocol.

The UNFCCC is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Kyoto is a protocol to that agreement.

Oh, Dimitrov also reminds readers that the Montreal Protocol has NOT solved the problem of ozone depletion:

The ultimate weakness of the process is that, despite all political successes in international cooperation, the ecological problem of ozone depletion has not been solved. As the scientific presentations during the meeting revealed, current stratospheric ozone levels remain low, the Antarctic hole is at its worst, and skin cancer cases are expected to multiply several times in the next decade.

The meeting did not really address methyl bromide, which depletes ozone, nor the problem of illegal trade.

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Steroids research

Professor Roger Tobin has a new paper (pdf warning) soon to be published about the effects of steroid use on home run rates. He estimates that even a modest increase in muscle mass can have a substantial effect on HR rate.

Hat tip: Alan Nathan.

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A new NPT?

Somewhat quietly, the United States is trying to close a loophole in the Non-proliferation Treaty. The NPT allows states to pursue the nuclear fuel cycle for peaceful energy-related purposes -- including uranium enrichment.

Last weekend, in hopes of ending the need for enrichment, 11 nations joined the US, Russia, China, France and Japan in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a limited number of countries including the U.S. and Russia would provide uranium fuel to other nations for powering reactors to generate electricity, and then retrieve the fuel for reprocessing. This would deprive those nations of their own nuclear fuel enrichment programs, which can be used to make atomic arms.

These are the latest 11 states to join the partnership: Australia, Bulgaria, Ghana, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

Do you see any worrisome nuclear threshold states in that group?

Like the Proliferation Security Initiative, the GNEP is a US-led "coalition of the willing" that does not work like a traditional multilateral organization. New international organizations typically form only after a sizable group of states agree to the negotiated terms of a particular treaty.

With GNEP, the US can start offering selective incentives to every state that agrees to live by American rules.

If the GNEP promotes nuclear reprocessing, however, critics are going to point out that the partnership might actually promote nuclear proliferation.

Hmmm. If the program does not reduce proliferation, what would it do? Well, GNEP supporters fairly openly embrace nuclear energy.


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"That's yesterday's tape"

For the title of this post, I've quoted a line from "Groundhog Day," the classic Bill Murray movie about a guy who discovers that he's literally reliving the same day of his life -- again and again. In the film, everyone around the main character says and does the same thing every day unless he changes the pattern.

Study President George W. Bush's August 28 speech before the American Legion and you might start to think he's playing "yesterday's tape" when discussing American foreign policy.

The speech setting and content are reminiscent of Vice President Dick Cheney's VFW speech in August 2002. Indeed, many of the President's claims about Iran sound eerily familiar to those who recall the buildup to the Iraq war.

Specifically, didn't Bush give much the same speech on October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio?

Nuclear threats

Bush, October 2002:

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.....America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Bush, August 2007:

Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.

Regime change

Bush, 2002:

regime change in Iraq is the only certain means of removing a great danger to our nation.

Bush 2007:

We seek an Iran whose government is accountable to its people -- instead of to leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.

War

Bush, October 2002:

The time for denying, deceiving, and delaying has come to an end. Saddam Hussein must disarm himself -- or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

Bush, 2007:

Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late.

For those not following the larger story all that closely, Iran signed a "significant" deal with the IAEA this past summer -- and the US is nonetheless trying to get other major powers to increase sanctions and pressure.

To those who recall IAEA and UNMOVIC inspections in 2002-03, this too may sound familiar.


Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald.


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Edwards: Pakistan hawk?

On September 7 at Pace University, Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards outlined his anti-terror plan. Like several of the other Democrats, Edwards sounds somewhat hawkish on Pakistan.

His words have certainly been interpreted that way.

Is the perception accurate?

After pointing out the NIE report about the Pakistani safe haven, and the billions in aid delivered to Musharraf's regime, Edwards said:

As president, I will condition future American aid on progress by Pakistan, including strengthening the reach of police forces and working more effectively with tribal leaders and their members to ensure their acceptance of the government. But I want to be clear about one thing: if we have actionable intelligence about imminent terrorist activity and the Pakistan government refuses to act, we will.

By including the word "imminent," Edwards is highlighting his agreement with longstanding international norms.


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Iran: state-sponsored terror update

Though I have not seen a followup to the various speculative media reports from last month -- perhaps it was a trial balloon? -- Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is apparently being officially designated as terror organization. As the Washington Post explained in August, the elite 125,000-member force will be the

"first national military branch included on the list, U.S. officials said -- a highly unusual move because it is part of a government."

Former CIA officer Robert Baer wrote about the possible implications in Time, August 18:

it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities. An awe and shock campaign, lite, if you will. But frankly they're guessing; after Iraq the White House trusts no one, especially the bureaucracy.

Here's the "regime change" logic likely to underpin any future attack on the Guard units:

there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.

Reactions? Here's an old one from Bloomberg:

Subir Raha, the government-appointed head of India's biggest oil company, said the U.S. would be ``stupid'' to attack Iran and risk imposing record oil prices on the global economy.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls an attack on Iran "insane."

It has now been two and a half years since President George W. Bush himself declared that the idea of US preparations to attack Iran was "simply ridiculous."

Of course, even then, he said "all options are on the table."


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Petraeus

I posted my initial thoughts about General Petraeus's testimony over at the Duck.

Locally, you might hear me on WFPL (89.3 FM) in the next day or so.

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A day at the opera

Earlier today, three members of the Payne family watched a fourth sing in the Kentucky Opera's performance of "Turandot."

The show was entertaining and Cate was terrific. It was her first paid gig and she's really proud of that check.

I think my first job was at a Sonic.


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Quacks at the Duck

Earlier today, I blogged "Neorealism and hypocrisy 101" over at the Duck of Minerva. The post is about my latest journal article, which is now available. As the title suggests, I take neorealists to task for their apparent academic hypocrisy.

Last Friday, August 31, I blogged "War with Iran?" The post focuses on a new study produced in Britain about US capability to wage war on Iran without major military preparations -- or public debate.

Wednesday the 29th, I posted "Jacksonian baseball." The piece discusses a new study finding that southern white baseball pitchers like Senator Jim Bunning are more likely to hit a batter when they feel their "honor" has been threatened in the context of the game. They are like Walter Russell Mead's foreign policy Jacksonians.


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