Tag Archives: war

the best and the brightest

The U.S. is sending “advisors” into Syria. This reminds me of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, where he describes the gradual escalation of the Vietnam war. A small force is sent. Then more are sent to protect the perimeter of that force. Then more are sent to patrol out from the perimeter. And so on until you have a president (Kennedy started it, Nixon ended it, but this book takes aim squarely at Lyndon Johnson) with an enormous amount of blood on his hands. Johnson has been judged kindly by history for his domestic programs and civil rights, but anybody who has read The Best and the Brightest might question that. Obama must have read The Best and the Brightest.

Jimmy Carter on Syria

This Jimmy Carter op-ed in the New York Times is a bit eyebrow raising.

The Carter Center had been deeply involved in Syria since the early 1980s, and we shared our insights with top officials in Washington, seeking to preserve an opportunity for a political solution to the rapidly growing conflict. Despite our persistent but confidential protests, the early American position was that the first step in resolving the dispute had to be the removal of Mr. Assad from office. Those who knew him saw this as a fruitless demand, but it has been maintained for more than four years. In effect, our prerequisite for peace efforts has been an impossibility…

The involvement of Russia and Iran is essential. Mr. Assad’s only concession in four years of war was giving up chemical weapons, and he did so only under pressure from Russia and Iran. Similarly, he will not end the war by accepting concessions imposed by the West, but is likely to do so if urged by his allies.

Mr. Assad’s governing authority could then be ended in an orderly process, an acceptable government established in Syria, and a concerted effort could then be made to stamp out the threat of the Islamic State.

The needed concessions are not from the combatants in Syria, but from the proud nations that claim to want peace but refuse to cooperate with one another.

It’s eyebrow raising both because if it is right it makes U.S. foreign policy look pretty bumbling, and also because these statements are being made in public seemingly after many years of behind-the-scenes frustration.

I think back to the 1990 Gulf War. The Cold War was over and we still had faith in international institutions. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a clear violation across sovereign borders. A coalition was formed and backed by the U.N. Security Council. As imperfect as all of this was, at least it had the feel of the rule of law. 15 years later, we have sovereign nations invading other sovereign nations, shadowy commando activity and drone assassinations across national borders from Europe to Africa to Asia. That hope we all felt when the wall fell in 1989 (well, maybe Jimmy Carter should ask his good friend Gorbachev how he felt at the time) seems to be receding further into history. And on top of the geopolitical instability we have more people, more weapons, climate change, and a shaky global economy.

Middle East spiral?

Here’s a scenario of how the Syria war and larger Middle East instability could escalate into something much worse.

As in imperial Europe in the period leading up to the First World War, the collapse of an entire order in the Middle East is in process, while forces long held in check are being released. In response, the former superpowers of the Cold War era have once again mobilized, at least modestly, even though both are fearful of a spark that could push them into direct conflict. Each has entangling regional relationships that could easily exacerbate the fight: Russia with Syria, the US with Saudi Arabia and Israel, plus NATO obligations to Turkey. (The Russians have already probed Turkish airspace and the Turks recently shot down a drone coyly labeled of “unknown origin.”)

Imagine a scenario that pulls any of those allies deeper into the mess: some Iranian move in Syria, which prompts a response by Israel in the Golan Heights, which prompts a Russian move in relation to Turkey, which prompts a call to NATO for help… you get the picture. Or imagine another scenario: with nearly every candidate running for president in the United States growling about the chance to confront Putin, what would happen if the Russians accidentally shot down an American plane? Could Obama resist calls for retaliation?

As before World War I, the risk of setting something in motion that can’t be stopped does exist.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think any of this is Obama’s fault, but if it does ultimately lead to something very bad, the roots may be traced back to events that happened on his watch whether they were under his control or not (also, clearly, to direct actions taken by his predecessor), and his legacy could be the president who let the post-World War II and post-Cold War order slip away.

drone stikes

Here’s some more evidence that drone strikes are not as surgical as we have been led to believe.

THE FREQUENCY WITH which “targeted killing” operations hit unnamed bystanders is among the more striking takeaways from the Haymaker slides. The documents show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets. By February 2013, Haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 “jackpots,” a term used to signal the neutralization of a specific targeted individual, while more than 200 people were declared EKIA — “enemy killed in action.”

In the complex world of remote killing in remote locations, labeling the dead as “enemies” until proven otherwise is commonplace, said an intelligence community source with experience working on high-value targeting missions in Afghanistan, who provided the documents on the Haymaker campaign. The process often depends on assumptions or best guesses in provinces like Kunar or Nuristan, the source said, particularly if the dead include “military-age males,” or MAMs, in military parlance. “If there is no evidence that proves a person killed in a strike was either not a MAM, or was a MAM but not an unlawful enemy combatant, then there is no question,” he said. “They label them EKIA.” In the case of airstrikes in a campaign like Haymaker, the source added, missiles could be fired from a variety of aircraft. “But nine times out of 10 it’s a drone strike.”

regime change and refugees

Here’s an article that asks whether the Iraq War and calls for regime change in Syria are root causes of the current war and refugee crisis. This reminds me of something I have always struggled with – is it really ever possible for war to reduce suffering, or does it always hurt more people than it helps? Even in the case of a Saddam or the Taliban or possibly even a Hitler, it’s possible that intervening ultimately caused more pain and suffering than not intervening would have. It’s a difficult question.

climate change and mass migration

This article tries to make a link between current mass migrations of people and climate, giving Syria as one example.

There is not a migrant or refugee crisis. We’re in the midst of a global migration shift. While its unrelenting realities of forced displacement, whether from war, persecution or economic despair originate from disparate causes, they all share a singular fact: The nascent stages of this historical migration shift require long-term planning, not short-term designation.

Nearly 60 million people fled their homes in 2014, according to a recent UN report. Within a generation, according to estimates by numerous climate scientists and the international organizations dealing with migration, 150-200 million people could be displaced by the fallout of severe drought, flooding and extreme climate.

As the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted in a recent study, “the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought,” which has triggered some of the largest displacements of refugees across the Mediterranean, are a significant part of the roots of the Syrian civil war itself.

DoD and Climate Change

The U.S. Department of Defense believes in climate change:

DoD recognizes the reality of climate change and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally. The National Security Strategy, issued in February 2015, is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.1 These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.

Will the U.S. public finally be ready to just laugh science-denying Presidential candidates off the stage next year?

July 2015 in Review

I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

AI Weapons

Stephen Hawking and others have signed a letter urging the world not to start a new artificial intelligence arms race, arguing that these weapons will be…

…feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.