Cordesman on the Iraqi Security Forces

Anthony Cordesman gives Congress his estimates on the prospects for the successful development of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) in Iraqi Force Development and the Challenge of Civil War: The Critical Problems and Failures the US Must Address if Iraqi Forces Are to Do the Job (Center for Strategic and International Studies) 03/28/07.

Here's his "things go well" scenario:

If things go well, Iraqi forces will steadily improve with time and play a critical role in bring the level of security Iraq needs to make political compromise and conciliation work.

Iraqi forces will largely replace Coalition and other foreign forces, at most seeking aid and limited assistance. Iraq’s military will shift its mission from counterinsurgency to defense of the nation against foreign enemies, Iraq’s National Police will defend the nation’s internal security interests and not those of given ethnic and sectarian groups, deal with counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency, and focus on crime and corruption. Iraq’s other police and security forces will act like the police and security forces of other nations, focusing on crime, local security issues, and providing border security against smuggling and low-level infiltration.

Things can only go well, however, if Iraq can create a working compromise between its sects and ethnic groups, and if US and other outside powers will have the patience and will to support Iraq as it develops into such a state for at least two to three more years of active fighting. Iraq will also need massive additional economic aid to help Iraq unify and develop. Major assistance and advisory programs will be in place until at least 2010, and probably 2015. (my emphasis underlined)

That's Cordesman's best case: something like current levels of fighting with full US combat participation until 2009 or 2010; major US assistance; an advisory combat role for the US until maybe 2015.

The not-going-so-well options? He describes them beginning on page 30 in three broad categories: continued civil war indefinitely; stability via ethnic cleansing followed by an useasy internal balance of power among the competeing groups; and, partition of the country withthe accompanying risk of regional war.

Tags: anthony cordesman, iraq, iraq war

Zorro: Capítulos 31-35 (Mar 26 - Mar 30)

Original cover of The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley (it was first published serially in a pulp magazine and then in a book as The Curse of Capistrano)

Diego was feeling pretty burned out this week. He told Bernardo that all he wanted to do was put on his Zorro mask, go steal some money from el Gobernador's tax collector and distribute it to the poor.

Because his personal life is a mess. Despite the intervention of the Contesa Marquesa Carmen Santillana de Roquette, Esmeralda decided to stay with el Comandante Montero both to protect the De La Vega family from retaliation and to help spring her mother Sara Kalí from the prison.

So the result to date of poor Diego getting mixed up with the Sanchez de Moncada sisters is that the sister he loves is pregnant with his baby (which he doesn't know yet) and married to his worst enemy. Meanwhile, he got caught nekkid in bed with the evil sister that he hates and now he has to marry her. At least she seems to have broken off her affair with her now brother-in-law Montero.

Dames. They'll mess up a masked hero's life every time!

Zorro's Jezebel, Mariángel, who's quite the schemer (Photo: Telemundo):

Zorro got a workout this week though. In addition to liberating funds from el Gobernador Fernando Moncada's men, he came to stop a gang who was running a bunch of poor people out of their houses on Fernando's orders. Fernando was doing that as a way to pressure María Pia to marry him, which she refused to do even though he had her kidnapped  and was holding her bound and starving in a stable.

This incident pretty much put to rest any question fans might have had about whether Zorro was willing to use lethal force on the bad guys. From the way he hacked away at Fernando's goons, it's safe to say he's not averse to speeding evildoers on their way to the next life when the situation calls for it.

Sor Suplicios' possesstion case improved considerably during this week. Last week she was possessed by Linda Blair and doing the Exorcist bit. This week she was possessed by the spirit of Sojourner Truth and decided that the escaped African slave she had seen was an angel rather than a devil and now the sisters are hiding him in the convent. I think it was the slave's pulling her out of a bog of quicksand at the last second that convinced her.

Esmeralda's character is old enough to do the cunning sophisticate convincingly. But she's also young enough to do a Nancy Drew girl detective role, too. She often gets caught when she's sneaking out or sneaking around. But she's pretty good about coming up with excuses on the spot. This week Olmos the hunchback helped her alibi herself when Montero caught her sneaking around the prison looking for her mother.

Speaking of whom, Sara Kalí's story picked up this week. She told her cellmate that she was really the rightful heiress to the Spanish throne. But due to dynastic politics, she had to take refuge with the gitanos (Gypsies) to escape being executed. She became their queen instead. We still don't know who Esmeralda's real father was. We also don't know that much about her male cellmate. He says he got busted for embezzling funds from the public (royal) treasury years ago to pay for medical care for his dying wife. But he also could be acting as a spy for Montero and/or Pizarro.

By the end of the week, it seemed that there were at least two, maybe three separate plots underway to spring Sara Kalí: Esmeralda and the gitanos, Zorro, and Olmos together with some mystery man. I'm thinking Pizarro may have used Sara Kalí's cellmate as a spy to get information on her. And now he's got a plan going with Olmos behind Montero's back to take her out of jail and hold her for ransom or blackmail of some kind.

In other action, Alejandro had a sword fight with Fernando when he found out Fernando was holding his sister. María Pia told Fernando that he had killed Regina/Typurnia, who was Alejandro's wife and Diego's mother. She had even found his knife with his initials on it in Regina's body and kept it. Yuck! And Padre Tomás surprised everyone by ending the Alejandro/Fernando sword fight with some masterful swordplay of his own. When Alejandro later expressed his amazement, Padre Tomás replied, "La vida es llena de sorpresas." (Life is full of surprises.)

Cardinal Oliviera finally agreed to formally approve the convent and appoint María Pia as Mother Superior. And Guadalupe/Yumalay is still after Alejandro's affection, beyond the godfather kind, I mean. She discovered a porttrait of Regina in full Indian dress, and at the end of the week was taking Alejandro's breath (and maybe sense) away by dressing identically to Regina/Toypurnia's portrait. We still don't know the exact relation of Yumalay to Toypurnia, because her tribe doesn't talk about the dead so as not to disturb their spirits.

I would say Fernando had the best part of the week. Where Montero and Pizarro are meodramatically evil, and Montero slimy to boot, Ferando's evil is a tormented-soul kind of problem. He's mean, amoral and domineering. But he also is in love with María Pia and in full stalker focus on her. And his sense of male honor is stunned by the news that he murdered the wife of his best friend - even though Alejandro had been ready to run him through a couple of hours before. Arturo Peniche as Fernando does a tormented villain well.

I'm also really enjoying Jorge Cao as the liberation-theology priest Padre Tomás. In his last telenovela gig on Amores/Amores del mercado, he also played an evil but tormented business magnate. Seeing him here as a hardened revolutionary priest is a real change of type and shows off his acting abilities well. He's kind of like Diego/Zorro's main mentor. I'm sure we'll learn a lot more about him and the secret Cofradía society of which he and Zorro are part.

See also my previous Zorro post and the Zorro telenovela Web site, Zorro: la Espada y la Rosa (Telemundo).

 

Tags: arturo peniche, jorge cao, zorro

Israel's current strategic situation - and a proposal for never achieving peace

The news issue of the US Army War College journal Parameters for Spring 2007 is available. It's good news for the country that still some of the most careful, critical-minded and reality-based analysis of military issues is being done in the services themselves. It's bad news that so little of that - either the content or the standards of quality - leak into the mainstream press.

That's not to say that all the article in Parameters qualify as enlightened, as the following example illustrates.

This issue includes Israel’s Uncertain Strategic Future by Louis René Beres, professor of international law at Perdue University. Beres was part of Project Daniel, a strategic study done for Israel's then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and completed in early 2003. Benes explains:

The underlying rationale of "Project Daniel" was the presumption that Israel urgently needs a coherent plan for dealing with existential threats, and that we (The Group) were well-positioned intellectually and professionally to propose such a plan. The project was originally based on an overriding concern for the possible fusion of certain weapons of mass destruction (WMD)-capacity with irrational adversaries. Project Daniel concluded, however, that the primary threats to Israel’s physical survival were more likely to come from enemies that were not irrational. With this in mind, the members of our study group proceeded to consider a broad variety of complex issues related to deterrence, defense, preemption, and war-fighting.

This biographical sketch of Benes at the Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR) says:

In Israel he has lectured widely at such venues as the National Defense College (IDF), the Dayan Forum, the Likud Chamber, the Likud Security Group, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, the BESA Center, and the International Christian Embassy. Professor Beres' work is well known in senior political, military, and intelligence circles in Israel...

The project's eventual recommendation is also provided by ACPR: Israel’s Strategic Future: The Final Report of Project Daniel 01/16/03.

Benes writes that Project Daniel gave top priority to avoiding Israeli involvement in any kind of nuclear conflict - but in his Paramaters article, that kind of talk is just window-dressing. The following comment about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is not surprising, but rather another confirmation of what is the most sensible assumption in this case:

Today, with a steadily advancing nuclear threat from Iran, the preemption option has likely become even more compelling. At the same time, the enormous operational difficulties that would be associated with preemptive destruction of pertinent Iranian nuclear infrastructures suggest that Israel may ultimately have to rely instead upon expanded and improved nuclear deterrence. It is almost certainly such thinking that occasioned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s public remarks about Israel’s nuclear capacity on 11 December 2006. These remarks were assuredly not a "slip of the tongue," as was reported widely in the media. Rather, pursuant to Project Daniel, they were the entirely logical first-step in taking Israel’s bomb “out of the basement."

In Beres' account, Project Daniel emphasized the value of "striking first (preemption) against enemy WMD development, manufacturing, storage, control, and deployment centers - a recommendation fully consistent with longstanding international law regarding 'anticipatory self-defense.'" That argument about international law is not right, though, at least not in the form just quoted. The form of preemption that is acceptable as "preemptive" war by internationally-recognized standars requires an imminent threat. Storing stocks of chemical weapons in a warehouse doesn't count as imminent threat.

Beres describes what is known as the Samson Option, the informal but well-known policy in which Israel would resort to nuclear weapons:

not for prevention of war or even for war-waging, but simply as a last spasm of vengeance against an enemy state that had launched massive (probably unconventional) counter-city and/or counterforce attacks against Israel. In this situation, Israel’s leaders, faced with national extinction, would conclude that even though the Jewish State would not survive, it would “die” together with its destroyers.

Samson, for those not up on their Hebrew Bible, was the legendary strong-man who got seduced by Delilah the Phlistine but regained his super-strength just in time to pull down the temple of Dagon on the Philistines' heads. Samson also died in the process.

Beres recommends something that would have warmed Dick Nixon's heart in concept, though Nixon was enough of a pragmatist that he would have worried seriously about the practical consequences in the case of Israel. He recommends giving the world the idea that Israel's leaders are crazy enough to use nuclear weapons in situations much less drastic than the one pictured in the Samson Option:

But what if Israel were to fine-tune its “Samson Option?” What if it did this in conjunction with certain doctrinal changes in its longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity? By taking the bomb out of the “basement” and by indicating, simultaneously, that its now declared nuclear weapons were not limited to existential scenarios, Israel might go a long way to enhancing its national security. It would do this by displaying an apparent departure from perfect rationality; in essence, by expressing the rationality of threatened irrationality. Whether or not such a display would be an example of “pretended irrationality” or of an authentic willingness to act irrationally would be anyone’s guess. It goes without saying that such an example of unorthodox behavior by Israel might actually incite enemy first-strikes, or hasten the onset of already planned strikes. There are ways, however, in which Israel could make Sun-Tzu’s “unorthodox” appear as “orthodox.”

In a telling argument, Beres uses the Bush Doctrine of preventive war to justify such wars on Israel's part:

Faced with imminent and existential attacks, Israel, taking a cue from The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, dated 20 September 2002, could preempt enemy aggression with conventional forces. American strategy of preemptive attack affirms the growing reasonableness of anticipatory self-defense under international law. If Israel were to draw uponsuch expressions of US policy, the targeted state’s response would determine Israel’s subsequent moves. If this response were in any way nuclear, Israel would assuredly undertake nuclear counter-retaliation. If this enemy retaliation were to involve certain chemical and/or biological weapons, Israel might also determine to undertake a quantum escalatory initiative. (my emphasis)

In other words, instead of using its nuclear arsenal, which is various reported as consisting of 100 to 400 warheads, Israel would expand the use of its nuclear weapons as a deterrent against any state that dared to retaliate against a preventive war launched by Israel.

In order to justify such a strategy, Beres essentially defines an "existential" threat, i.e., a threat to the nation's existence, as anything the Israeli leadership decides it to be at a given moment.

In short, proposes that Israel follow a policy of escalation of nuclear threats and enhancement of its nuclear capabilities. It's hard to see how this leads to anything but disaster for Israel in the end. A effective regionwide nuclear non-proliferation agreement is what is needed to pull back from this downward spiral toward catastorphe. Beres mentions that concept only in passing in the Parameters article.

Yet if Israel intends to hold on to its settlements in the West Bank and expland them, some sort of open-ended arms race, periodical preventive wars and nuclear brinksmanship are likely to be the result. Much the kind Beres recommends here.

Beres' article is an example of how any kind of preventive war can be justified with abstract references to the possible future dangers that could be presented by hypothetical possibilities. What preventive war looks like in practice the last few years has been the Americans in Iraq and Israel in Lebanon in 2006.

Although, not surprisingly, he argues that preventive war and nuclear war are the best policies for achieving peace, Beres also gives us a glimpse of the nighmarish possibilities of his policies:

To the extent that certain Middle Eastern states are permitted to develop WMD capabilities, Israel may have to someday deal with an anonymous attack scenario. In such a scenario the enemy state would not identify itself, and Israeli post-attack identification might be exceedingly difficult. What is Israel to do in such a situation? The Group recommended to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that “Israel must identify explicitly and early on that all enemy Arab states and Iran are subject to massive Israeli reprisal in the event of a BN attack upon Israel.” We further recommended that massive reprisals be targeted at between ten and 20 large enemy cities (counter-value targeting) and that the nuclear yields of such Israeli reprisals be in the high range. Such deterrent threats would be very compelling to all rational enemies, but at the same time have little or no effect upon irrational ones. In the case of irrational adversaries, Israel’s only hope for safety will likely lie in the appropriate and operationally feasible acts of preemption.

This kind of endless-brinksmanship strategy is typical of the "neoconservative" permanent-war, national-security-state thinking. And neocon-type thinkers in Israel and the US feed on each other's ideas. Beres' might even be read as a shadow argument for such a policy on the part of the United States. American hardliners have been known to project their wet dreams about war onto Israel, as in "what Israel might do..."

Tags: israel, louis rené beres, nonproliferation, nuclear nonproliferation

Maverick McCain visits peaceful Baghdad

That old straight-talker Maverick McCain has been blowing smoke lately about how safe things are getting in Baghdad thanks to the success of the McCain escalation, aka, The Surge. The Maverick himself visited Baghdad over the weekend. With massive security provided by US soldiers, he was able to walk around parts of Baghdad. Juan Cole reports in an Informed Comment blog post of 04/02/07:

Look, I lived in the midst of a civil war in the late 1970s in Beirut. I know exactly what it looks and smells like. The inexperienced often assume that when a guerrilla war or a civil war is going on, life grinds to a standstill. Not so. People go shopping for food. They drive where they need to go as long as they don't hear that there is a firefight in that area. They go to work if they still have work. Life goes on. It is just that, unexpectedly, a mortar shell might land near you. Or the person ahead of you in line outside the bakery might fall dead, victim of a sniper's bullet. The bazaars are bustling some days (all the moreso because it is good to stock up on supplies the days when the violence isn't so bad). So nothing that John McCain saw in Baghdad on Sunday meant a damn thing. Not a goddamn thing.

It makes my blood boil.

This is really the secret behind the war fans' endless claims of "good news". Yeah, even in a country being devastated by civil war and insurrection, you can find moments of calm and seeming normalcy. But that doesn't mean it's "good news" for the overall political and military objective. It's how many moments of attacks and explosions are shattering the moments of normalcy and the political significance of the attacks that make a difference for the war effort.

Cole also reminds us of what the Maverick's fakery means:

Because McCain, you see, knows exactly what I know about guerrilla wars and civil wars. Hell, people used to shop freely in Saigon in the early 1970s! And if he is saying what he is saying [, it is because he is attempting to convey an overly optimistic picture with which to deceive the American public.

The deception will get even more of our young men and women in uniform blown up, at a time when their mission has become murky and undefined. If the American public sacrifices the lives of the troops with their eyes open, for what they see as the sake of the security of the United States, then the loss of life is regrettable but the mission is clear, defined, and has public support. But if the American public is lied to and only thinks a mission is being accomplished as a result, then the sacrifice of soldiers' lives is monstrous. The Iraq War has become monstrous in this way. And John McCain, whom I had long respected as a straight shooter, has now been seduced into playing illusionist with the lives of our troops.

I guess there was a time when I bought the "straight shooter" hype about the great Maverick, too. But how people like the Maverick have responded to the Iraq War, the torture policy and Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of Presidential lawlessness has told us a lot about people who might one have been more easily mistaken for "independent-minded" or "moderate" Republicans.

You can read a report on the Maverick's jive talk on the Iraq War in McCain lauds security during Baghdad visit CNN.com 04/02/07.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, juan cole, mccain

Terror, terror, everywhere

This report appeared on Sunday: Rail lines in Tucson could be terror bait by Enric Volante Arizona Daily Star 04/01/07. It reports:

More than 1,600 rail tanker loads of poisonous gas vulnerable to terrorist attack roll through Tucson in a year, potentially threatening most of the city.

A chlorine disaster could kill people up to 5.6 miles downwind of Union Pacific Railroad in Tucson.

In a less-likely or "worst-case" scenario in which the weather and other conditions are ideal for toxic terrorism, the deadly fog could maim and kill up to 9.6 miles away, newly disclosed emergency-planning documents show.

So, is this a real threat? Or excessive fear after years of vague hype about the "global war on terror"? A publicity campaign by some homeland-security company selling whatever you might use to detect whatever some terrorist might do to unleash a whole trainful of chlorine gas into the air at perfect weather conditions? Lobbying by state and/or local governments for bigger federal grants? A ploy by homeowners associations to stall a planned Union Pacific rail expansion?

The article does mention, "The chemical industry is scrambling to design rail cars less likely to break open if they derail." That would be "scrambling" in response to the 9/11 attacks of, uh, five and a half years ago? I don't object to the idea of more durable rail cars for chemicals. But it's a reminder that we don't have a national effort to realisticly examine priority anti-terrorism measures. And who in the Cheney-Bush administration could we trust to tell us the truth about them, anyway?

Tags: global war on terror, terrorism, war on terror

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 2: The Christian beauty of slavery

Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes about the role of religion in the evolving proslavery ideology of the Southern slaveholders and their apologists in The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (2001). Looking at the desire of Southern ideologues to provide a rationale for modernizing while holding on to their "peculiar institution" of slavery, he writes:

The basis of this [intellectual] enterprise lay in the evolutionary nature of the institution itself. Slavery changed as society changed. In a crude way, the historian may trace a progression from the beginning to the end of slavery. Three ways existed whereby masters could perceive the system: first, as crude chattel bondage, wherein slaves were more or less beasts of burden to meet the possessors' needs and whims; second, as familial proprietorship, in which reciprocal, parent-child obligations and affections gave meaning to those involved. That system required a deeper appreciation of the psychology and wants of the dependent class, yet it still mandated that those beneath were obliged to give more in love and service than those who ruled. Finally, the institution could be characterized as state racial regulation, an interposition of government between white and black. Under that relationship limits could be set on proprietary powers and there could be a strictly denned set of racial boundaries. None of these perspectives was ever exclusive to one era or another. Roughly speaking, however, "chattel bondage" was rather characteristic of colonial thralldom. Slaves were part of the household and its possessions, but they were not often regarded as intimate family members, even if the number extended no farther than the kitchen and parlor of the big house and seldom included the ordinary slaves in the quarters. Stage two, the familial concept, became more prominent in early national years. It was largely an outgrowth of Christian evangelicalism. Contrary to the claims of slavery's apologists, slaveholding benevolence never achieved more than spotty success. The ideal of Christian stewardship over bonds-people was established as a way to distinguish respectability from churlishness. Stage three, state racial interposition, based on the growing use of civil bureaucracies and legal professionalization, had made only limited progress by 1861.

Sketchy though this description is, it helps to explain the point from which proslavery vindicators departed and points in the direction to which they were heading.

In addition to the evolution over time of which Wyatt-Brown speaks, there was also an inter-regional difference within the slaveholding South in the favored argument for slavery, which in part accounts for the fact he notes, "None of these perspectives was ever exclusive to one era or another."

The original justification for slavery in the US involved the idea that slavery represented an historically transitory state for backward peoples from Africa. By the time of the Civil War, the Lower South states tended to justify slavery as a permanent institution, based on the racial inferiority of blacks. The paternalistic explanation that Wyatt-Brown describes as a post-colonial development influenced by evangelical Christianity by the time of the Civil War was still used by many Upper South apologists for slavery in states like Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia.

But as he explains in the passage quoted above, the more explicitly race-based justification was becoming more dominant by the time of the Civil War. And, sadly, the white ministers of the Christian gospel were all too willing to provide white Christian slaveowners religious alibis for holding their dark-skinned fellow Christians as property in perpetuity.

 

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, civil war, confederate heritage month, neo-confederate, slavery, us civil war

Doom on the horizon for Democrats?

Ronald Brownstein, LA Times political columnist whose wife works for John McCain (as he mentions in his column), sees Warning signs for the Democrats Los Angeles Times 03/30/06.

Brownstein sees a couple of dire problems for the Democrats. One is that the Democrats have to fight with the Cheney-Bush adminsitration a lot. God forbid that the voters should see the Democrats fighting for what the voters want!

Another is that the Democratic Presidential contenders don't always beat the Republican candidates in every opinion poll. And it's only 19 months until the election! How, how, how will the Democratic candidates win with numbers like that this close to the election?!?

Brownstein doesn't mention one of the biggest hurdles for the Democrats in 2008: the fact that our dysfunctional press corps, including those whose spouses aren't working for Republican Presidential candidates at the moment, are such suckers for GOP talking points.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream press, mccain, ron brownstein