Category Archives: Defense policy

Bomb ’em till the mullahs bounce.

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Iran has spent thirty years and $100 billion pursuing atomic weapons. Iran is deeply hostile to the West in general and to the United States and its allies in particular. So, that’s a problem. What to do?

Either we attack Iran’s nuclear resources to forestall the development of weapons or we accept Iran as a nuclear power and then seek to contain it. The choice will be shaped by how outsiders, the Americans in particular, perceive the Iranian leadership. If it is a rational, dispassionate leadership pursuing national security, rather than expanded power, then containment might well work. If it is an irrational, hatred-driven leadership seeking to expand Iranian power by toppling the established regional order, then an attack may be the only solution.             Kenneth Pollack[1] has concluded that Iran is driven either by “the Iranian leadership’s pathological perceptions of the United States or its own aggressive ambitions.” Nevertheless, he favors containment over the short to mid-term. Over the longer term, he argues, it would be better to engineer a change of regime through keeping the economic sanctions on Iran, reducing the diplomatic support it receives from Russia and China, and supporting dissidents within the country. Anybody, he thinks, would be better than the current rulers, both for America and for the Iranians themselves.

Matthew Kroenig[2] shares the conviction of Pollack and every other informed observer that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, not a peaceful nuclear program. He bolsters the standard arguments by noting that Iran is also developing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), the standard delivery vehicle for nuclear warheads. Kroenig derides the “containment” of a nuclear Iraq.  If the United States won’t fight a pre-nuclear Iran today, why would it risk fighting a nuclear Iran in the future? He also doubts the Pollack’s dream of regime change will become a reality. He sees the government in Tehran as too deeply entrenched and too ruthless in crushing its opponents, as it did with the so-called “Green Revolution” in 2009.[3]

 

Either containment or attack will leave the future uncertain. Might a “contained” nuclear Iran later tip toward expansionism when conditions become favorable? Would a successful attack stop Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in its tracks for all time or would it just lead Iran to renew the effort after the dust had settled? Destroying a few key sites would still leave the country with scientists, engineers, and oil revenues—the real building blocks of a nuclear effort.

A creeping, largely unspoken fear is that the religious fundamentalists in Tehran share a basic mind-set with the religious fundamentalist suicide bombers of Al Qaeda and ISIS: death is to be welcomed in the service of a higher cause. It makes it hard to believe that Mutual Assured Destruction would dissuade Iran from waging nuclear war.

Finally, can the United States coerce Iran while seeking its support against ISIS? Or will the United States have to send troops to Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS if it wants to coerce Iran?

If the United States agonizes too long, will Israel attack to degrade, even if it cannot destroy, the Iranian nuclear program?

[1] Kenneth Pollack, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

[2] Matthew Kroenig, A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

[3] The defeat of both the “Green Revolution” in Iran and the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt suggest the staying power of authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

Your mind is in the Qatar.

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Qatar is about the size of Connecticut, but has a lot more going for it than insurance companies and casinos on Indian Reservations. Once an impoverished sandlot that lived from the pearl fisheries, Qatar now earns an immense amount of money from the sale of natural gas.

The ruling sheikh, Hamad bin Khalifah Al Thani (1952- ,r. 1995-2013) set out to make Qatar “important” to other people. On the one hand, he wants Qatar to be important to Americans in case the neighbors–either Saudi Arabia or Iran—took it into their minds to do his country some nastiness. What Iraq had tried to do to Kuwait in 1990, some other power might do to Qatar. He got the Americans to build a local command center for Central Command (which runs American military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia) at Doha. He enhanced the importance of Qatar for the world energy market by building a huge natural gas condensing plant to facilitate exports and earnings.

On the other hand, the sheikh wanted to be a player in the Middle East. In 1996 he created the “Al Jazeera” news network to promote an Islamist message. Beginning in 2011, Qatar has been financing upheaval in the Middle East. It has funded both the “Arab Spring” uprisings (which Westerners like to think of as “liberal” and “modernizing”) and Islamist groups (which Westerners think of as “illiberal” and “anti-modern”). Money flowed to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, to Hamas, and to the Al Nusra Front fighting the Assad government in Syria.

Blaming Qatar for pursuing a two-faced policy by seeking close ties to America while funding Islamists groups misses the point. The Middle East is torn in its attitudes toward “modernization” and “Westernization.” Islamism is one face of that controversy. The rise of Islamism threatens the established order in the Middle East. People with an interest in history will note the radical difference between American policy in Europe after the Second World War and contemporary American policy. Then, the Americans had a better solution than its opponents and they were in favor of dramatic change to solve problems. Now, the United States doesn’t appear to have any positive alternative to offer and isn’t comfortable with change.

Qatar falls into a larger pattern. Qatar’s ruler may believe that you can’t get anywhere by pandering to the Americans. You’ll just end up living in Los Angeles and selling rugs at craft fairs. The military government in Egypt and the moderate Islamist government in Turkey also have both bridled at American policy of late. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates combined to bomb rebels in Libya without bothering to inform the United States first. Turkey refuses to have its army fight ISIS until the Americans agree to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.

Qatar also seeks to influence American opinion through “Al Jazeera America” and donations to the Brookings Institution. For American conservatives, this is an illegitimate international influence on American policy. For them, it falls into the same category as Islamist illegals entering the US through our porous border with Mexico. There is another way of looking at it, however. American journalism no longer invests many resources in foreign reporting. American journalists rarely have the language skills or the cultural competence to get outside of a restricted safe zone, either physically or intellectually. (It’s hard to understand the exaggerated importance assigned to the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square otherwise.) Qatar seeks to enrich the information and perspectives offered to American to help them better understand events in the Middle East. Maybe people should spend more time watching an alternative news source? You don’t have to believe what you see and hear. It’s a free country.

“The tiny nation that roared,” The Week, 27 September 2013, p. 9.

Bang for the Buck

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How much defense spending is enough?  Faced with big budget deficits, a reluctance to pay taxes, and a sluggish economy hard put to square the circle by generating wealth, inquiring American minds want to know.  In 2007 the American defense budget was about $470 billion.  In 2012 the defense budget was running about $550 billion a year. That’s a lot of bucks.  What did Americans get for the money?  They got an Army of 569,000 soldiers on active-duty; an Air Force with 1,990 fighter planes; and a Navy with 286 ships.[1]  That’s a lot of bang.

It’s a common-place that the American defense budget is equal to the combined defense spending of the next seventeen countries on the list.[2]  That bald statement argues for cutting spending without sacrificing security.  However, it needs interpretation.  On the one hand, it assumes that the “interests” of the United States and those of the other countries on the list are symmetrical.  They aren’t.  China’s primary interests are in the Far East; India’s in South Asia; Russia’s in the countries bordering it around the huge arc from Eastern Europe to Eastern Siberia; South Korea’s in Northeast Asia; France’s in Western Europe and the Mediterranean.  Decision-makers in Washington have to worry about the Far East, South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Latin America all at the same time.  In terms of possible operations, the American military has to face a range of threats from nuclear war to conventional war to guerrilla warfare to terrorism.

On the other hand, it assumes that fighting power is closely linked to budgets.  It isn’t.  Russia and China pay, house, feed, and care for their troops at a much lower level than does the United States.  Military equipment also is comparatively cheap in low-wage economies.  More importantly, how big is the Taliban’s defense budget?  Drones at a million and a half dollars a pop kill enemies, but the culture of a primitive area causes new ones to spring up like dragon’s teeth.

Perhaps it isn’t how much money a country spends that tells you something about its attitude toward military power or its sense of pressing danger.  Perhaps it is the share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) a country will devote to military power that is key.[3]  In 2012 the United States devoted 4.7% of GDP to defense, Russia 4.4%, the People’s Republic of China 2.1%, and the European Union countries 1.7%.  China’s neighbors don’t appear to feel deeply threatened–yet.  Japan spends 1.0%, Taiwan 2.3%, Vietnam, 2.5%, South Korea 2.7%.  On the other hand, not all of Russia’s neighbors seem to feel secure.  Georgia spends 5.1% of GDP on defense.

On one SIPRI list Iran devotes a nominal 1.8% to defense.  Other estimates put it at 2.7% and back in 2006 the commander of the US Central Command called the Iranian military the most powerful in the region.  Moreover, the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons and willingness to use proxies in Iraq and Syria make them far more menacing to their neighbors than the statistics alone suggest.  As a result, Saudi Arabia spends 8.9% of GDP on defense, Oman 8.4%, and the United Arab Emirates 6.9%.  Perhaps those high figures reflect doubts about an American security umbrella.  They may also hint at an informal alliance with Israel to prevent Iran from finishing its drive for nuclear weapons.  War is coming to the Persian Gulf if the Iranians don’t blink.

[1] “Downsizing the Military,” The Week, 5 October 2012, p. 13.

[2][2] See the rankings by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) presented at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

[3] Ibid.