“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President [Barack] Obama to be a one-term president,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced after the midterm elections.  Perhaps you were under the impression McConnell’s statement was just hyperbole; his vindictive sentiment, mere posturing for the benefit of the GOP’s reanimated right wing.  If so, this business with Republicans screwing around with the START treaty should put that thought right out of your mind.

From the moment the president signed the nuclear arms reduction pact with the Russians, Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), have “kept moving the goal posts…”

Max Bergmann briefly laid out the history of Kyl’s delay tactics within his Nov. 16 Wonk Room post.

…Last summer, Kyl was whining immensely that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) was rushing the process and that a committee vote should not happen until after the August recess. After the SFRC delayed, Kyl spoke to Reuters who paraphrased Kyl:

It could be difficult to satisfy his [Kyl's] demands before November and thus the vote on New START might need to take place during the lame duck session if the Senate wants to vote on the treaty this year…

The vote was delayed, and Kyl’s demands were met, but…

In September, after the SFRC did hold its vote, Kyl and Senate Republicans argued that having a vote before the election was impossible because it would politicize the process and that a vote should happen after the election…

Predictably, now that the election has passed, Kyl and Republicans say there isn’t enough time in the Senate calendar.

Of course, for Kyl and the Republicans, that was the plan all along, as it has been with every White House initiative since Obama took office.  Playing this game with foreign policy commitments, however, has broader implications than it has with domestic legislation.

The consequences are already presenting themselves.  Steve Benen, author of Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, has been on this all week.  Regarding the risks Republicans are running, Benen wrote (11/17), “They expect this to hurt the foreign policy power of the United States, but they’re fine with that since there’s a Democratic president…” (emphasis added)

When it comes to Russia, inspection of the country’s long-range nuclear bases will remain suspended indefinitely; the country’s hard-liners will be emboldened; and Russia’s willingness to cooperate with U.S. on Iran or on Afghanistan will likely disappear.

But in the bigger picture, countries around the globe will see this as a reminder that negotiating with the United States is pointless, since the country is burdened with a Republican Party that puts partisan hatred above the country’s interests. It hurts American credibility in ways that are hard to even gauge.

Indeed, and as Matt Cooper noted in his Nov. 16 National Journal post, another bilateral agreement – a trade pact with South Korea – initially failed, in part, because “Seoul’s concern about ratification prospects in the Senate.”

Fortunately, there still a chance that Senate Democrats will force a vote on START before the next Congress.  If they do, it will be interesting to see whether or not the Republicans blink.  Only one elected Republican, Indiana Senator Dick Lugar, has called on his party to put national security before politics on this one, and numerous other non-elected officials from both sides have done the same.

I’d like to think Sen. Lugar isn’t the lone Republican voice of reason in the Senate.  Optimism, however, is difficult to muster when there are others, like Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who seems to relish the opportunity to poke the Russians with a stick.

Take Action–> Urge Senators to Support Nuclear Arms Reduction

(This post was originally published on Care2.com’s Political Causes Blog, 20 November 2010)

                          

From The National Security Archive, GWU – 8 April 2010

By:  Thomas Blanton and William Burr

Gorbachev and Reagan at one of their one-on-one sessions at Hofdi House during the Reykjavik summit, October 1986. During these meetings, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed proposals for the abolition of nuclear weapons. U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock is seated to Reagan's left. (Source: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)

Washington, D.C., April 8, 2010 – The new START Treaty signed today in Prague represents “real” but “modest” cuts in strategic nuclear forces comparable to some Cold War alternatives but still higher than the most far-reaching proposals considered by Presidents Reagan and Carter, according to documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The documents show that the Prague cuts reach levels lower than than the Carter administration’s “deep cuts” SALT II proposal in 1977 and very close to the “finite deterrence” numbers contemplated by Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke in the late 1950s. Yet the Prague cuts do not reach the far lower numbers of nuclear weapons recommended by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, or initially considered by President Jimmy Carter, or the zero nuclear forces in 10 years proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

The Prague Treaty represents the first time in this century that U.S. and Russian heads of state have agreed to a schedule of specific cuts of strategic nuclear force levels, but they are only a small down payment on President Obama’s pledge to use the power of the presidency to move the nuclear weapons states toward abolition. In light of the historical record, the Prague Treaty levels are still significantly higher than what some Cold War presidents and top officials thought was even possible. While President Ronald Reagan proposed going down to zero by 1996, his initial target, a 50 percent cut of strategic warheads and delivery systems, would have left the U.S. arsenal with thousands of strategic warheads and almost a thousand strategic delivery systems as of 1991. President Jimmy Carter also saw nuclear abolition as a desirable goal, but the first SALT II proposal he presented to the Soviet leadership in 1977 would have left both sides with around 2,000 strategic delivery systems, far more than what is currently being considered.

The Prague Treaty levels are in the range of what at least one Cold War military leader thought was conceivable.  During the late 1950s, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke developed a concept of a “finite deterrent” force of 45 Polaris submarines, with 720 submarine-launched ballistic missiles [SLBMs], of which 400, or 55 percent, would be on patrol (“on station”). Burke made interesting and compelling arguments for strategic forces dominated by Polaris submarines and the numbers he had in mind are close to U.S. force levels in the Prague Treaty.

Chart: From Finite Deterrence to Zero -- Force Level Alternatives during the Cold War

The Prague Treaty numbers are significantly higher than what other Cold War statesmen thought possible or worth looking into. In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara posited a force of 400 strategic warheads (one megaton)  as enough for the basic “assured destruction” deterrence mission, Years later, McNamara revisited this number when he wrote than “less than five hundred” was enough for deterrence. In 1977, when Jimmy Carter became president he contemplated the possibility of massive cuts bringing U.S. and Soviet strategic forces down to 200-250 strategic delivery systems. Even after Secretary of Defense Harold Brown questioned whether such low numbers were compatible with U.S. security, Carter remained interested in missile force levels of a “few hundred,” although his preferences could not be translated into negotiating positions.

The United States and Russia have some distance to go in order to match the low numbers–200-250 missiles, 400-500 strategic warheads–proposed during the Cold War.  And even those numbers are far from abolition, although much closer than the thousands of missile and nuclear warheads deployed during the height of the arms race. The documents suggest that the process of moving toward zero will be a prolonged and complex one necessarily involving arms control negotiations with other nuclear states, such as China, France, India, and Pakistan, as well as the enactment of other measures, such as the fissile materials production cut-off and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Read the NSArchive post and the original documents–> http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb311/index.htm

                          

Rush Limbaugh declaring Powell’s assessment to be racially motivated in 3…  2… Oh, wait.  It’s Sunday?  On Monday, then.

Digg the MMFA post –> HERE

                          

Perhaps the most important foreign perspective worth considering is that of our enemy:  Al Qaeda.  How is the argument over torture within the U.S. perceived by Osama Bin Ladin ?  More importantly, how does it impact their recruiting capacity?  To a certain extent, we already know the answers.

One extremely informed opinion was published at The Daily Beast last week.  Writing under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, a 14 year Air Force interrogator offered his assessment in a April 20 post.  Responding to Christopher Buckley’s and Michael Mukasey’s criticisms of Obama for releasing the previously classified Office of Legal Council torture memos, Alexander wrote:

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse…

In addition to increasing Al Qaeda’s pool of recruits, the torturing of detainees has undoubtedly led counter terrorism officials to waste time and resources chasing invented threats.  Former Middle East CIA field officer, Robert Baer noted in the May 4 print issue of Time that the Bush Administration selected their techniques from a 1957 paper regarding communist efforts during the Korean War:

The Crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can’t be relied on to produce more than false confessions — because people will say anything to make the pain stop.  This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore…

I’d love to know what you think.  If you’re able, set aside the moral and legal implications of the Bush Administration’s treatment of captured enemy combatants.  Then consider the implications of the above informed commentators, Alexander and Baer; respectively, that torturing our prisoners makes it easier for our enemies to recruit, and that waterboading, specifically, is more likely than not to produce false information from a prisoner.  These tactics, then, are quite contradictory to the maintenance of U.S. national security.

(Originally posted at Care2.com, Political Causes Blog 28 April 2009)

                          

Former Vice President, Dick Cheney, was at it again last Sunday.  He adamantly vocalized his disapproval of President Obama’s national security policy, and was incredulous about the idea that Bush Administration officials should be investigated for their treatment of enemy combatants.  Of course, Cheney has every right to voice his opinion in these matters, though such criticism from a former VP is highly unusual.  However, considering the Bush Administration’s past behavior in politicizing traditionally non-political government entities, how are the claims of Dick Cheney, in any way, credible?

On last Sunday’s Face the Nation, one of Cheney’s statements deserved more scrutiny than the 30 min. program allowed:

One of the things that I did six weeks ago was I made a request that two memos that I personally know of, written by the CIA, that lay out the successes of those policies and point out in considerable detail all of — all that we were able to achieve by virtue of those policies, that those memos be released, be made public.

First of all, the “two memos… that lay out the successes of those policies,” couldn’t possibly discount that torturing detainees enhanced the ability of terrorists to recruit new supporters.  So, even if the memos in question reveal productive results, those results were, at best, a push when considering the policy’s impact on US national security.

Second, and more importantly, how can two memos vindicate policies that were in clear violation of prescriptions within the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture?  Jeremy Scahill summed up why the policies can’t be excused, particularly as they apply to the latter, “This is a matter of law and US obligations to its international treaties, which the Constitution explicitly states the US will respect and enforce.”  The memos, even if they support what Cheney suggests, are illustrative of a policy that was blatantly illegal.

Finally, consider the behavior of Dick Cheney and others in the run up to the Iraq invasion.  There is a pattern of deceptive practices by Bush officials in shaping policies and intelligence to fit their goals.  The Office of Special Plans (OSP) is an instructive example.  Jason Leopold, presently of ThePublicRecord.org, reported for Truthout.org in 2007:

The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts…

…Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans “started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It’s not intelligence. It’s political propaganda.”

The OSP was developed by Donald Rumsfeld out of frustration regarding the lack of actionable intelligence on Iraq’s capabilities and intentions.  Headed by Douglas Feith — whom Gen. Tommy Franks once referred to as the “Dumbest MF’er on the planet” — the OSP did not gather new intelligence.  Rather, the Department of Defense office reinterpreted existing data, cherry-picking and restating evidence to support the invasion of Iraq.  When Dick Cheney insists upon a link between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, the OSP is the source of his evidence.  Of course, we now know there was no such link.

This is merely one example, but when considered along with Cheney’s insistence that waterboarding “worked” and “kept us safe,” how can he be taken seriously?  Let me know what you think.

Personally, I wouldn’t put it past Cheney to contort evidence to fit his narrative.  It is entirely plausible that, in calling for the release of the two CIA memos, the former Vice President is cherry-picking evidence just as he did before the invasion of Iraq.  Further, it is more than plausible, as was indicated today by FBI agent, Ali Soufan, in his testimony before Congress that the interrogation methods DO NOT WORK.  Soufan said the harsh techniques were “ineffective, slow and unreliable and as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.”:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2651108&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

When the past actions of Dick Cheney are considered along with his present public statements, it is entirely possible that torture was employed, not to discover a link between Al Qaida and Iraq, but to create one.

                          

From the press release:

The Bradley Project on America’s National Identity today released its Report, “E Pluribus Unum,”the product of a two-year study involving a number of our nation’s leading academics, public figures, journalists, educators and policy experts.  The report examines four aspects of American life crucial to American identity: historical memory, civic education, assimilation, and national security.

The project’s site links to a pdf of the report, and also contains background essays. 

Among the report’s recommendations:  “a renewed focus on the teaching of American History.”  I’m totally down with that.  Through education it becomes less likely that the concept of national identity will be misused.  Too often, racist and xenophobic organizations spout their own, largely created, conceptions of what America’s national identity is or should be.  Racially charged notions about what it means to be American recur almost cyclically in our history, usually tied to the economic conditions in the world.

The other side of the spectrum tends to say, “We are all immigrants,” while discounting the necessity for social assimilation.  Perhaps the Bradley report will be useful in finding a middle ground on the issue.  One popular historian seems to think that it might:

“This is the clearest, most powerful summons yet, TO ALL OF US, to restore the American story to its rightful, vital place in American life and in how we educate our children.  It couldn’t be more timely and important.”

– David McCullough
June 3, 2008