02/10/1389 10:37
واشنگتن، دوم دی، خبرگزاری «ریا نووستی»/ روز چهارشنبه مجلس سنای کنگره آمریکا قرارداد کاهش تسلیحات استراتژیک تهاجمی (استارت ـ 3) با روسیه را به تصویب رساند.این قرارداد با 71 رای موافق و 26 رای مخالف تصویب شد.
تصویب قرارداد استارت پس از 18 نشست گفت و شنود و 7 روز بحث در مجلس سنا انجام شد که در جریان آن مقامات دولت آمریکا به بیش از هزار پرسش سناتورها پاسخ دادند. همچنین در طی چند هفته بحث های بسیار شدیدی جریان داشت و درعرض چندین ماه کاخ سفید و وزارت امور خارجه در حال کار با جمهوری خواهان در این زمینه بودند.
تصویب قرارداد فعلی در مقایسه با قرارداد های قبلی خلع سلاح روند بمراتب دشوارتری بود. قرارداد اول استارت با روسیه در سال 1992 (1371) پس از 5 روز بحث با 93 رای موافق و 6 رای مخالف تصویب شد. قرارداد دوم در سال 1996 (1375) با 87 رای موافق و 4 رای مخالف پس از دو روز بحث به تصویب رسید. قرارداد مسکو در سال 2003 (1382) پس از دو روز بحث به اتفاق آرا تصویب شد.
تصویب قرارداد "استارت ـ 3" یکی از مهم ترین مسائل "باراک اوباما" رییس جمهور آمریکا در عرصه سیاست خارجی بود و حالا توفیق در آن سومین پیروزی بزرگ متوالی وی برجمهوری خواهان است. پیشتر اوباما توانست تسهیلات مالیاتی برای طبقه متوسط را حفظ کرده و به لغو محدودیت ها برای خدمت هم جنس بازان درارتش نایل آید.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Let's Un-Surge in Afghanistan
By RICHARD N. HAASS
The Wall Street Journal
DECEMBER 20, 2010
Let's Un-Surge in Afghanistan
The current policy is diverting scarce military resources when threats like Iran and North Korea loom. We can prevent the return of al Qaeda with far fewer troops.
The Obama administration has completed its third review in two years of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. It argues the current approach is making progress, with success defined as building up Afghan national army and police forces until they can hold their own against a Taliban that is being weakened by ongoing combat. Some officials also believe that several more years of military pressure will persuade many Taliban fighters to switch sides rather than fight.
There are good reasons to be skeptical. While the situation on the ground in Afghanistan should improve in areas where U.S. military forces are operating in strength, the gains are likely to fade in the wake of their departure. The inherent weakness of central government institutions in Afghanistan, the tenacity of the Taliban and their ties to Afghanistan's many Pashtuns, and the reality that the Taliban will continue to enjoy a sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan all work against what we seek to achieve.
It is possible that doubters will be proven wrong. But the more fundamental problem with the policy depends less on its prospects than its costs and benefits. What the United States is doing in Afghanistan is not justified even if the policy succeeds.
The costs of the policy are considerable. There are just under 100,000 U.S. troops in the country. This year alone nearly 500 American soldiers have lost their lives. Ten times that many suffered casualties. It is costing U.S. taxpayers between $100 billion and $125 billion a year. The commitment is tying down a significant portion of military and intelligence assets, and it is absorbing significant time and energy of U.S. officials in Washington and abroad.
Arrayed against these costs are the stakes. It is essential that Afghanistan not again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the U.S., but that goal was largely achieved before the Obama administration tripled force levels. Should the Taliban re-establish cooperation with al Qaeda and groups like it, the U.S. could respond with a counterterrorist package of drones, special forces and training of local forces, much as it is does in Yemen and Somalia.
The second interest at stake is Pakistan. Some argue that we must stabilize Afghanistan lest it become a staging ground for undermining its more important neighbor, one that hosts the world's most dangerous terrorists and possesses more than 100 nuclear weapons. This defies logic. Pakistan is providing sanctuary and support to the Afghan Taliban who have not demonstrated an agenda to destabilize Pakistan. Why should we be more worried than the Pakistanis themselves?
View Full Image
haas
Associated Press
U.S. soldiers on a patrol in Afghanistan.
haas
haas
Viewing Afghanistan as holding the key to Pakistan shows a misunderstanding of Pakistan. It is, to be sure, a weak state. But the threats to it are mostly internal and the result of deep divisions within the society and decades of poor governance. If Pakistan ever fails, it will not be because of terrorists coming across its western border.
So what should U.S. policy be? Total withdrawal from Afghanistan is not the answer, as there is an enduring U.S. interest in combating any terrorists who have global reach. But the U.S. effort there should be sharply reduced.
The next policy review, upcoming this spring, should call for reducing U.S. forces to 30,000 by mid-2012. That's the number that were there when President Obama took office. The U.S. should channel aid to provincial leaders as well as to (and through) the government in Kabul. The U.S. should continue to train and arm friendly government and regional soldiers, but U.S. combat operations should become increasingly rare.
There is a good chance that the Taliban would make significant inroads in the south and east of the country under such a strategy—although there is a good chance they will make inroads regardless. What matters most is that they not allow al Qaeda and groups like it back in, and that they are attacked from the air and by special forces if they do.
The U.S. should continue to assist the Pakistani government and press it to end support for the Afghan Taliban and all terrorist groups. But Washington should do so without illusions. Pakistan is unlikely to become a full partner. It will continue to see these groups and Afghan territory as part of a larger policy to confront arch-rival India. Only a turnabout in Pakistan's relations with its larger neighbor would alter this strategic outlook. Alas, such a change is not in the offing.
To justify adopting a more narrow policy toward Afghanistan this spring, President Obama would need to cite several factors. First, the U.S. inability to eliminate the sanctuaries in Pakistan. Second, successful counterinsurgency depends on having a solid local partner. Two years of sustained investment and multiple but fraudulent elections suggest that Afghanistan's central government will not reach the point where it is considered effective or legitimate by the bulk of its own people. All this argues for adopting a policy of counterterrorism rather than state-building.
There are also broader reasons to recast policy. The greatest threat to U.S. national security stems from our own fiscal crisis. Afghanistan is a significant contributor to this situation and could play an important role in reducing it. A savings of $75 billion a year could help finance much-needed military modernization and reduce the deficit.
Another factor is the increased possibility of a conflict with a reckless North Korea and the continued possibility of a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. U.S. military forces must be freed up to contend with these issues. The perception that we are tied down in Afghanistan makes it more difficult to threaten North Korea or Iran credibly—and makes it more difficult to muster the forces to deal with either if necessary.
Ultimately Afghanistan is a strategic distraction. U.S. interests there are limited. So, too, are the resources available for national security. It is not surprising that the commander in the field, Gen. David Petraeus, is calling for committing greater resources to the theater. But it is the commander-in-chief's responsibility to take into account the nation's capacity to meet all of its challenges, national and international. It is for this reason that the perspectives of Gen. Petraeus and President Obama must necessarily diverge.
Mr. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars" (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
The Wall Street Journal
DECEMBER 20, 2010
Let's Un-Surge in Afghanistan
The current policy is diverting scarce military resources when threats like Iran and North Korea loom. We can prevent the return of al Qaeda with far fewer troops.
The Obama administration has completed its third review in two years of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. It argues the current approach is making progress, with success defined as building up Afghan national army and police forces until they can hold their own against a Taliban that is being weakened by ongoing combat. Some officials also believe that several more years of military pressure will persuade many Taliban fighters to switch sides rather than fight.
There are good reasons to be skeptical. While the situation on the ground in Afghanistan should improve in areas where U.S. military forces are operating in strength, the gains are likely to fade in the wake of their departure. The inherent weakness of central government institutions in Afghanistan, the tenacity of the Taliban and their ties to Afghanistan's many Pashtuns, and the reality that the Taliban will continue to enjoy a sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan all work against what we seek to achieve.
It is possible that doubters will be proven wrong. But the more fundamental problem with the policy depends less on its prospects than its costs and benefits. What the United States is doing in Afghanistan is not justified even if the policy succeeds.
The costs of the policy are considerable. There are just under 100,000 U.S. troops in the country. This year alone nearly 500 American soldiers have lost their lives. Ten times that many suffered casualties. It is costing U.S. taxpayers between $100 billion and $125 billion a year. The commitment is tying down a significant portion of military and intelligence assets, and it is absorbing significant time and energy of U.S. officials in Washington and abroad.
Arrayed against these costs are the stakes. It is essential that Afghanistan not again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the U.S., but that goal was largely achieved before the Obama administration tripled force levels. Should the Taliban re-establish cooperation with al Qaeda and groups like it, the U.S. could respond with a counterterrorist package of drones, special forces and training of local forces, much as it is does in Yemen and Somalia.
The second interest at stake is Pakistan. Some argue that we must stabilize Afghanistan lest it become a staging ground for undermining its more important neighbor, one that hosts the world's most dangerous terrorists and possesses more than 100 nuclear weapons. This defies logic. Pakistan is providing sanctuary and support to the Afghan Taliban who have not demonstrated an agenda to destabilize Pakistan. Why should we be more worried than the Pakistanis themselves?
View Full Image
haas
Associated Press
U.S. soldiers on a patrol in Afghanistan.
haas
haas
Viewing Afghanistan as holding the key to Pakistan shows a misunderstanding of Pakistan. It is, to be sure, a weak state. But the threats to it are mostly internal and the result of deep divisions within the society and decades of poor governance. If Pakistan ever fails, it will not be because of terrorists coming across its western border.
So what should U.S. policy be? Total withdrawal from Afghanistan is not the answer, as there is an enduring U.S. interest in combating any terrorists who have global reach. But the U.S. effort there should be sharply reduced.
The next policy review, upcoming this spring, should call for reducing U.S. forces to 30,000 by mid-2012. That's the number that were there when President Obama took office. The U.S. should channel aid to provincial leaders as well as to (and through) the government in Kabul. The U.S. should continue to train and arm friendly government and regional soldiers, but U.S. combat operations should become increasingly rare.
There is a good chance that the Taliban would make significant inroads in the south and east of the country under such a strategy—although there is a good chance they will make inroads regardless. What matters most is that they not allow al Qaeda and groups like it back in, and that they are attacked from the air and by special forces if they do.
The U.S. should continue to assist the Pakistani government and press it to end support for the Afghan Taliban and all terrorist groups. But Washington should do so without illusions. Pakistan is unlikely to become a full partner. It will continue to see these groups and Afghan territory as part of a larger policy to confront arch-rival India. Only a turnabout in Pakistan's relations with its larger neighbor would alter this strategic outlook. Alas, such a change is not in the offing.
To justify adopting a more narrow policy toward Afghanistan this spring, President Obama would need to cite several factors. First, the U.S. inability to eliminate the sanctuaries in Pakistan. Second, successful counterinsurgency depends on having a solid local partner. Two years of sustained investment and multiple but fraudulent elections suggest that Afghanistan's central government will not reach the point where it is considered effective or legitimate by the bulk of its own people. All this argues for adopting a policy of counterterrorism rather than state-building.
There are also broader reasons to recast policy. The greatest threat to U.S. national security stems from our own fiscal crisis. Afghanistan is a significant contributor to this situation and could play an important role in reducing it. A savings of $75 billion a year could help finance much-needed military modernization and reduce the deficit.
Another factor is the increased possibility of a conflict with a reckless North Korea and the continued possibility of a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. U.S. military forces must be freed up to contend with these issues. The perception that we are tied down in Afghanistan makes it more difficult to threaten North Korea or Iran credibly—and makes it more difficult to muster the forces to deal with either if necessary.
Ultimately Afghanistan is a strategic distraction. U.S. interests there are limited. So, too, are the resources available for national security. It is not surprising that the commander in the field, Gen. David Petraeus, is calling for committing greater resources to the theater. But it is the commander-in-chief's responsibility to take into account the nation's capacity to meet all of its challenges, national and international. It is for this reason that the perspectives of Gen. Petraeus and President Obama must necessarily diverge.
Mr. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars" (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
CIA launches task force to assess impact of U.S. cables' exposure by WikiLeaks
By Greg Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 12:24 AM
The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks.
Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.
The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations.
Even so, CIA officials said the agency is conducting an extensive inventory of the classified information, which is routinely distributed on a dozen or more networks that connect agency employees around the world.
And the task force is focused on the immediate impact of the most recently released files. One issue is whether the agency's ability to recruit informants could be damaged by declining confidence in the U.S. government's ability to keep secrets.
"The director asked the task force to examine whether the latest release of WikiLeaks documents might affect the agency's foreign relationships or operations," CIA spokesman George Little said. The panel is being led by the CIA's Counterintelligence Center but has more than two dozen members from departments across the agency.
To some agency veterans, WikiLeaks has vindicated the CIA's long-standing aversion to sharing secrets with other government agencies, a posture that came under sharp criticism after it was identified as a factor that contributed to the nation's failure to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Even while moving to share more information over the past decade, the agency "has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders," said a former high-ranking CIA official who recently retired. "They don't even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked."
CIA veterans said most of the agency's international correspondence is classified at the "Secret" level, same as the records that ended up online. But the agency has always insisted on using its own systems.
As recently as two years ago, the agency rejected a request to make more of its intelligence reports available on the SIPRNET, the classified network used by the Pentagon to pass information around the world.
"We simply said we weren't going to do it," another former CIA official said. "The consensus was there were simply too many people potentially who had access."
The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss agency security measures.
Among those people with access to SIPRNET was a low-level U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Bradley E. Manning, who has been charged with disclosing classified information and is suspected of using a simple thumb drive to steal the files that were sent to WikiLeaks.
The CIA has had its own computer scandals. Security clearances for former CIA director John Deutch were suspended in the late 1990s after he was accused of keeping classified information on his computer at home.
Officials said the agency has also had internal difficulty keeping track of laptops that are sent to overseas stations, as well as sensitive information shared with thousands of contractors that the CIA has hired as part of a build-up over the past 10 years.
The agency employs software measures to minimize the chance of a WikiLeaks-like leak. Agency systems send warnings to administrators whenever a large amount of data is downloaded. And most of the CIA's computers are not equipped to allow the use of a removable drive.
Asked what might happen if he had inserted a thumb drive into the machine at his desk, the former senior CIA official quipped: "There would probably be a little trap door under my chair."
Even so, CIA security experts have fretted for years about the implications of moving secret information from pieces of paper to digital files that can be distributed online.
"It's just a huge vulnerability," the former high-ranking CIA officer said. "Nobody could carry out enough paper to do what WikiLeaks has done."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 12:24 AM
The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks.
Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.
The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations.
Even so, CIA officials said the agency is conducting an extensive inventory of the classified information, which is routinely distributed on a dozen or more networks that connect agency employees around the world.
And the task force is focused on the immediate impact of the most recently released files. One issue is whether the agency's ability to recruit informants could be damaged by declining confidence in the U.S. government's ability to keep secrets.
"The director asked the task force to examine whether the latest release of WikiLeaks documents might affect the agency's foreign relationships or operations," CIA spokesman George Little said. The panel is being led by the CIA's Counterintelligence Center but has more than two dozen members from departments across the agency.
To some agency veterans, WikiLeaks has vindicated the CIA's long-standing aversion to sharing secrets with other government agencies, a posture that came under sharp criticism after it was identified as a factor that contributed to the nation's failure to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Even while moving to share more information over the past decade, the agency "has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders," said a former high-ranking CIA official who recently retired. "They don't even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked."
CIA veterans said most of the agency's international correspondence is classified at the "Secret" level, same as the records that ended up online. But the agency has always insisted on using its own systems.
As recently as two years ago, the agency rejected a request to make more of its intelligence reports available on the SIPRNET, the classified network used by the Pentagon to pass information around the world.
"We simply said we weren't going to do it," another former CIA official said. "The consensus was there were simply too many people potentially who had access."
The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss agency security measures.
Among those people with access to SIPRNET was a low-level U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Bradley E. Manning, who has been charged with disclosing classified information and is suspected of using a simple thumb drive to steal the files that were sent to WikiLeaks.
The CIA has had its own computer scandals. Security clearances for former CIA director John Deutch were suspended in the late 1990s after he was accused of keeping classified information on his computer at home.
Officials said the agency has also had internal difficulty keeping track of laptops that are sent to overseas stations, as well as sensitive information shared with thousands of contractors that the CIA has hired as part of a build-up over the past 10 years.
The agency employs software measures to minimize the chance of a WikiLeaks-like leak. Agency systems send warnings to administrators whenever a large amount of data is downloaded. And most of the CIA's computers are not equipped to allow the use of a removable drive.
Asked what might happen if he had inserted a thumb drive into the machine at his desk, the former senior CIA official quipped: "There would probably be a little trap door under my chair."
Even so, CIA security experts have fretted for years about the implications of moving secret information from pieces of paper to digital files that can be distributed online.
"It's just a huge vulnerability," the former high-ranking CIA officer said. "Nobody could carry out enough paper to do what WikiLeaks has done."
Political Divide Undermines Obama’s Nuclear Goals
DAVID E. SANGER
NYTIMES
December 21, 2010
The new arms control treaty with Russia, whose ratification now seems assured, was initially envisioned as a speed bump on President Obama’s nuclear agenda, a modest reduction in nuclear forces that would enable him to tackle much harder issues on the way to his dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.
It turned out to be a mountain. And while Mr. Obama is savoring another major victory, just days after he won repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules that dominated the lives of gay and lesbian members of the military, his own aides acknowledge that the lesson of the battle over the treaty is that the political divide on national security is widening. The next steps on Mr. Obama’s nuclear agenda now appear harder than ever.
While Mr. Obama overwhelmed Republican opponents of the treaty, called New Start, it would be a much heavier lift to get the next Senate to approve a long-languishing treaty to ban all nuclear tests. The world’s newest nuclear powers — led by Pakistan, an ostensibly close American ally — have been maneuvering to kill Mr. Obama’s plan to stop production of more fissile material, the building blocks needed by nuclear aspirants like Iran. And the next treaty with Russia on how to deal with its small, tactical nuclear weapons promises to be a bigger fight.
“If the Start treaty was this hard, you can only imagine how difficult the rest will be,” said William J. Perry, a secretary of defense during the Clinton administration and one of the four former cold warriors who helped formulate the goal of a world without nuclear weapons that Mr. Obama has embraced. “But even though it was small, it was vital — because everything we need to do in the future, starting with halting the Iranian program, requires working with Russia and showing that we are serious about bringing our own nuclear stockpiles down.”
None of that takes away from the historic nature of Mr. Obama’s victory. Democratic presidents have a terrible history of getting nuclear arms control agreements approved, especially with Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union. That was largely accomplished by presidents with names like Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Republicans, it turned out, would vote for such treaties only if they were negotiated by other Republicans.
So Mr. Obama’s accomplishment stands in contrast to President Jimmy Carter’s failure to win passage of the SALT II treaty, which was negotiated in 1979 but never ratified after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Two decades later, the Senate rejected President Bill Clinton’s treaty to ban all underground nuclear testing, in a 51-to-48 vote.
Mr. Obama came to office vowing that the United States would finally join that accord, called the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, soon after New Start passed. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. repeated that pledge this year.
So it was telling when John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who led the advocacy in the Senate for New Start, gave a curt answer for a question about the test ban treaty: “There’s just been no talk about that right now, none whatsoever.”
As Mr. Obama thinks about the next steps in his nuclear agenda, particularly how to maneuver it through an altered Senate, he has to contend with the fact that the Republican Party is now split into two nuclear camps, the formers and the futures.
The list of former cold warriors who supported New Start jumped out from the front pages of the cold war and the George W. Bush administration: Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz and Condoleezza Rice. George H. W. Bush, who signed the Start II treaty in 1993 with President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, issued a brief statement of support.
But some of the current powers in the party, including Republicans who may have their eyes on challenging Mr. Obama, from Mitt Romney to Sarah Palin, denounced it as a weakening of the United States, arguing that it limited missile defenses. Mr. Obama ultimately beat that argument back, pointing to his deployment plan of a series of layered missile defenses over the next decade, mostly aimed at containing the likes of nuclear aspirants, chiefly Iran.
“By and large, this debate has revealed two breeds of Republicans,” said Franklin C. Miller, a hawk on nuclear issues who helped devise President George W. Bush’s nuclear strategies, but also worked for his four predecessors.
“There are those who understand the history of the cold war and the need to put verifiable controls on nuclear weapons,” he said. “And there is another school which may or may not understand the issues, but is happy to treat them as a political football.”
Other opponents — including some who will remain in the Senate next year — seemed unable to let go of the dreams left over from the Reagan administration. Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said at hearings on the treaty that they were seeking a comprehensive missile shield over the United States that would protect the country from incoming Russian or Chinese missiles.
That is a vision even the most enthusiastic missile defense enthusiasts gave up some time ago, in favor of more limited defenses against a few missiles shot by the likes of Iran or North Korea.
The advocates of the treaty responded to the opposition by making claims about its powers that even left some in the White House in wonderment.
When the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, declared recently that Republicans would have to decide that “you either want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, or you don’t,” administration officials could not explain what, exactly, in the treaty’s provisions would impede terrorist access to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (Loose nuclear material in Russia, which the United States has worked for more than a decade to remove or secure, is not covered by the treaty.)
Some of the opposition Mr. Obama faced this time was on substantive grounds. Many opponents worried about everything from whether Russia would cheat to whether Washington was tying its hands in a dangerous world, an issue that will be even more potent in the future.
Mr. Obama won the day by persuading a handful of senators that that the treaty’s failure would undercut Russian cooperation on a range of future security issues, from countering Iran — on which Moscow has been increasingly helpful — to keeping supply lines open to Afghanistan.
But on the broader argument — the argument that America could ensure its security even without nuclear weapons — Mr. Obama appears to have made little progress in his first two years. Mr. Miller notes that among America’s nuclear-armed allies, only Britain has fully embraced eliminating nuclear weapons, though NATO and the United Nations Security Council have both embraced the vision.
To keep nations in the Middle East from acquiring nuclear weapons to counter Iran, he added, “we are likely to have to extend our nuclear shield” to countries not now covered by it — something Mr. Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review, published this year, hints at.
In fact, the ultimate test of Mr. Obama’s nuclear-free vision will almost certainly be what happens with Iran. If it succeeds in its quest for a nuclear capability, “that would do more damage to the effort than anything,” Gary Samore, the president’s top nuclear adviser, said recently. “That’s the real test of where we are headed.”
NYTIMES
December 21, 2010
The new arms control treaty with Russia, whose ratification now seems assured, was initially envisioned as a speed bump on President Obama’s nuclear agenda, a modest reduction in nuclear forces that would enable him to tackle much harder issues on the way to his dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.
It turned out to be a mountain. And while Mr. Obama is savoring another major victory, just days after he won repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules that dominated the lives of gay and lesbian members of the military, his own aides acknowledge that the lesson of the battle over the treaty is that the political divide on national security is widening. The next steps on Mr. Obama’s nuclear agenda now appear harder than ever.
While Mr. Obama overwhelmed Republican opponents of the treaty, called New Start, it would be a much heavier lift to get the next Senate to approve a long-languishing treaty to ban all nuclear tests. The world’s newest nuclear powers — led by Pakistan, an ostensibly close American ally — have been maneuvering to kill Mr. Obama’s plan to stop production of more fissile material, the building blocks needed by nuclear aspirants like Iran. And the next treaty with Russia on how to deal with its small, tactical nuclear weapons promises to be a bigger fight.
“If the Start treaty was this hard, you can only imagine how difficult the rest will be,” said William J. Perry, a secretary of defense during the Clinton administration and one of the four former cold warriors who helped formulate the goal of a world without nuclear weapons that Mr. Obama has embraced. “But even though it was small, it was vital — because everything we need to do in the future, starting with halting the Iranian program, requires working with Russia and showing that we are serious about bringing our own nuclear stockpiles down.”
None of that takes away from the historic nature of Mr. Obama’s victory. Democratic presidents have a terrible history of getting nuclear arms control agreements approved, especially with Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union. That was largely accomplished by presidents with names like Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Republicans, it turned out, would vote for such treaties only if they were negotiated by other Republicans.
So Mr. Obama’s accomplishment stands in contrast to President Jimmy Carter’s failure to win passage of the SALT II treaty, which was negotiated in 1979 but never ratified after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Two decades later, the Senate rejected President Bill Clinton’s treaty to ban all underground nuclear testing, in a 51-to-48 vote.
Mr. Obama came to office vowing that the United States would finally join that accord, called the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, soon after New Start passed. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. repeated that pledge this year.
So it was telling when John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who led the advocacy in the Senate for New Start, gave a curt answer for a question about the test ban treaty: “There’s just been no talk about that right now, none whatsoever.”
As Mr. Obama thinks about the next steps in his nuclear agenda, particularly how to maneuver it through an altered Senate, he has to contend with the fact that the Republican Party is now split into two nuclear camps, the formers and the futures.
The list of former cold warriors who supported New Start jumped out from the front pages of the cold war and the George W. Bush administration: Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz and Condoleezza Rice. George H. W. Bush, who signed the Start II treaty in 1993 with President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, issued a brief statement of support.
But some of the current powers in the party, including Republicans who may have their eyes on challenging Mr. Obama, from Mitt Romney to Sarah Palin, denounced it as a weakening of the United States, arguing that it limited missile defenses. Mr. Obama ultimately beat that argument back, pointing to his deployment plan of a series of layered missile defenses over the next decade, mostly aimed at containing the likes of nuclear aspirants, chiefly Iran.
“By and large, this debate has revealed two breeds of Republicans,” said Franklin C. Miller, a hawk on nuclear issues who helped devise President George W. Bush’s nuclear strategies, but also worked for his four predecessors.
“There are those who understand the history of the cold war and the need to put verifiable controls on nuclear weapons,” he said. “And there is another school which may or may not understand the issues, but is happy to treat them as a political football.”
Other opponents — including some who will remain in the Senate next year — seemed unable to let go of the dreams left over from the Reagan administration. Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said at hearings on the treaty that they were seeking a comprehensive missile shield over the United States that would protect the country from incoming Russian or Chinese missiles.
That is a vision even the most enthusiastic missile defense enthusiasts gave up some time ago, in favor of more limited defenses against a few missiles shot by the likes of Iran or North Korea.
The advocates of the treaty responded to the opposition by making claims about its powers that even left some in the White House in wonderment.
When the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, declared recently that Republicans would have to decide that “you either want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, or you don’t,” administration officials could not explain what, exactly, in the treaty’s provisions would impede terrorist access to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (Loose nuclear material in Russia, which the United States has worked for more than a decade to remove or secure, is not covered by the treaty.)
Some of the opposition Mr. Obama faced this time was on substantive grounds. Many opponents worried about everything from whether Russia would cheat to whether Washington was tying its hands in a dangerous world, an issue that will be even more potent in the future.
Mr. Obama won the day by persuading a handful of senators that that the treaty’s failure would undercut Russian cooperation on a range of future security issues, from countering Iran — on which Moscow has been increasingly helpful — to keeping supply lines open to Afghanistan.
But on the broader argument — the argument that America could ensure its security even without nuclear weapons — Mr. Obama appears to have made little progress in his first two years. Mr. Miller notes that among America’s nuclear-armed allies, only Britain has fully embraced eliminating nuclear weapons, though NATO and the United Nations Security Council have both embraced the vision.
To keep nations in the Middle East from acquiring nuclear weapons to counter Iran, he added, “we are likely to have to extend our nuclear shield” to countries not now covered by it — something Mr. Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review, published this year, hints at.
In fact, the ultimate test of Mr. Obama’s nuclear-free vision will almost certainly be what happens with Iran. If it succeeds in its quest for a nuclear capability, “that would do more damage to the effort than anything,” Gary Samore, the president’s top nuclear adviser, said recently. “That’s the real test of where we are headed.”
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Mullen: US `Very Ready' To Counter Iran On Nukes
MANAMA, Bahrain December 18, 2010, 01:08 pm ET
Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, posing a threat to its neighbors, and the United States is "very ready" to counter Iran should it make a move, the top U.S. military officer said Saturday.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought to reassure Persian Gulf nations nervous that an increasingly militarized government in Iran might try to start a war.
"The United States takes very seriously our security commitments in the Gulf region," Mullen said following a meeting with Bahrain's king. Bahrain, directly across the Gulf from Iran, is home to a large U.S. Navy base that would be on the front lines of any war with Iran.
"We're very ready," Mullen said, an unusually direct acknowledgment that the United States has contingency plans to counter Iran should it make a move. "There are real threats to peace and stability here, and we've made no secrets of our concerns about Iran."
In Iran, the new foreign minister — and current nuclear chief — said Saturday that he wants to build the country's relationship with Saudi Arabia and strengthen ties with Turkey, China and Russia. The latter two countries have veto power on the U.N. Security Council that could help Iran as it tries to fend off tougher sanctions.
Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, replaced longtime foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was fired Monday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without public explanation.
Iran denies it is seeking a nuclear weapon, and denies U.S. claims that it sponsors terrorists. Iran has wary relations with many of its neighbors, who are trading partners with the oil giant but distrust the theocratic government.
"Concerns about Iran's nuclear program are very real and inform a lot of the decision making" among Gulf nations, said Adam Ereli, the U.S. ambassador in Bahrain.
The U.S. fears that if Iran masters the technical challenge of building a bomb it could set off a nuclear arms race around the Gulf.
"From my perspective I see Iran continuing on this path to develop nuclear weapons, and I believe that that development and achieving that goal would be very destabilizing to the region," Mullen said.
He gave no specifics about U.S. plans or defenses, but the Navy base is headquarters for ships and aircraft that monitor Iran and could be used to deter or defend against what military officials fear would be an attack that would come without warning. The base also houses Patriot missiles.
The U.S. keeps tabs on Iran through extensive air surveillance in the Gulf and from naval patrols that regularly engage in formal communication with Iranian ships.
"I would like someday to think that they would be responsible regional and international players as opposed to what they are right now," Mullen added. "I just haven't seen any steps taken in that regard."
Mullen said he supports the current strategy of applying economic and political sanctions on Iran to try to dissuade it from building a bomb, while engaging Iran in international negotiations over the scope of its nuclear program. Iran claims it is seeking nuclear energy.
Mullen repeated his view that a pre-emptive military strike on Iran's known nuclear facilities is a bad option that would set off "unintended consequences," but one the United States reserves the right to use. The Obama administration has said it will not allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state but has never said exactly what steps it would take to prevent that.
"I've said all options have been on the table and remain on the table," Mullen said.
Iran is currently under four sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions and subject to additional penalties imposed separately by the United States, European countries and others. The most recent round of Security Council sanctions were adopted in June.
The Obama administration and its European allies are prepared to impose additional sanctions if Iran fails to meet international demands to prove that its nuclear program is peaceful, a senior U.S. official said Friday.
Gary Samore, the White House coordinator for arms control, told a Washington think tank that the U.S. and its partners will keep up pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear ambitions.
Leaders of six U.S.-allied Gulf Arab nations said this month they are watching Iran's nuclear ambitions with "utmost concern," and appealed to the West for a greater voice in the renewed talks with Tehran.
The statement from the Gulf Cooperation Council — powerful Saudi Arabia and its fast-growing neighbors — appeared to cast off a bit of the group's traditional caution and adopt a harder tone. The group warned Iran not to interfere in Gulf Arab affairs and called on it to reject "force or the threat to use it."
Iran holds frequent military drills along the Persian Gulf — primarily to assert an ability to defend against any U.S. or Israeli attack on its nuclear sites, but also to send a message to Arab neighbors on its southern border.
Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, posing a threat to its neighbors, and the United States is "very ready" to counter Iran should it make a move, the top U.S. military officer said Saturday.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought to reassure Persian Gulf nations nervous that an increasingly militarized government in Iran might try to start a war.
"The United States takes very seriously our security commitments in the Gulf region," Mullen said following a meeting with Bahrain's king. Bahrain, directly across the Gulf from Iran, is home to a large U.S. Navy base that would be on the front lines of any war with Iran.
"We're very ready," Mullen said, an unusually direct acknowledgment that the United States has contingency plans to counter Iran should it make a move. "There are real threats to peace and stability here, and we've made no secrets of our concerns about Iran."
In Iran, the new foreign minister — and current nuclear chief — said Saturday that he wants to build the country's relationship with Saudi Arabia and strengthen ties with Turkey, China and Russia. The latter two countries have veto power on the U.N. Security Council that could help Iran as it tries to fend off tougher sanctions.
Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, replaced longtime foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was fired Monday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without public explanation.
Iran denies it is seeking a nuclear weapon, and denies U.S. claims that it sponsors terrorists. Iran has wary relations with many of its neighbors, who are trading partners with the oil giant but distrust the theocratic government.
"Concerns about Iran's nuclear program are very real and inform a lot of the decision making" among Gulf nations, said Adam Ereli, the U.S. ambassador in Bahrain.
The U.S. fears that if Iran masters the technical challenge of building a bomb it could set off a nuclear arms race around the Gulf.
"From my perspective I see Iran continuing on this path to develop nuclear weapons, and I believe that that development and achieving that goal would be very destabilizing to the region," Mullen said.
He gave no specifics about U.S. plans or defenses, but the Navy base is headquarters for ships and aircraft that monitor Iran and could be used to deter or defend against what military officials fear would be an attack that would come without warning. The base also houses Patriot missiles.
The U.S. keeps tabs on Iran through extensive air surveillance in the Gulf and from naval patrols that regularly engage in formal communication with Iranian ships.
"I would like someday to think that they would be responsible regional and international players as opposed to what they are right now," Mullen added. "I just haven't seen any steps taken in that regard."
Mullen said he supports the current strategy of applying economic and political sanctions on Iran to try to dissuade it from building a bomb, while engaging Iran in international negotiations over the scope of its nuclear program. Iran claims it is seeking nuclear energy.
Mullen repeated his view that a pre-emptive military strike on Iran's known nuclear facilities is a bad option that would set off "unintended consequences," but one the United States reserves the right to use. The Obama administration has said it will not allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state but has never said exactly what steps it would take to prevent that.
"I've said all options have been on the table and remain on the table," Mullen said.
Iran is currently under four sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions and subject to additional penalties imposed separately by the United States, European countries and others. The most recent round of Security Council sanctions were adopted in June.
The Obama administration and its European allies are prepared to impose additional sanctions if Iran fails to meet international demands to prove that its nuclear program is peaceful, a senior U.S. official said Friday.
Gary Samore, the White House coordinator for arms control, told a Washington think tank that the U.S. and its partners will keep up pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear ambitions.
Leaders of six U.S.-allied Gulf Arab nations said this month they are watching Iran's nuclear ambitions with "utmost concern," and appealed to the West for a greater voice in the renewed talks with Tehran.
The statement from the Gulf Cooperation Council — powerful Saudi Arabia and its fast-growing neighbors — appeared to cast off a bit of the group's traditional caution and adopt a harder tone. The group warned Iran not to interfere in Gulf Arab affairs and called on it to reject "force or the threat to use it."
Iran holds frequent military drills along the Persian Gulf — primarily to assert an ability to defend against any U.S. or Israeli attack on its nuclear sites, but also to send a message to Arab neighbors on its southern border.
Washington’s World: December 20th – December 26th, 2010
As we commented last week, President Obama is embarking on a new phase of his presidency in which he will seek to navigate between left and right. He has started with two successes – on taxation and gays in the military. Given that both these measures passed with substantial Republican and, according to opinion polls, popular support, the question under debate in Washington is whether these successes provide a template for Obama’s next two years in office and a platform for reelection in 2012. Certainly, Democrats take comfort from signs of Republican disarray over taxes and spending. Nonetheless, our assessment is that it is too early to draw conclusions. In many ways, the present successes represent ‘unfinished business’ at the end of this Congress. The incoming Republican House majority is significantly more committed – at least rhetorically – to changing ‘business as usual’ on government spending. This will present a difficult challenge for Obama to assemble a majority for the federal budget he is doe to present in April. The political energy required on this front will inevitably subtract from foreign affairs. As we have already seen, the Middle East peace process cannot sustain itself without strong and continual presidential engagement. In his first two years in office Obama has only occasionally lent his full weight to negotiations. We doubt that this pattern will change. The same is likely to be true on Afghanistan. Here, the recent policy review has confirmed the existing policy trajectory but has done little to reconcile the internal divisions within the Administration and the foreign policy community. The split between Obama’s civilian advisers (who tend to be skeptical) and his generals (who tend to be more optimistic) is now in the open. On East Asia, however, we expect to see a more consistent focus. The level of concern about China is now deeply embedded among foreign policy experts from both left and right. Chinese policy over North Korea has been the catalyst, but suspicion of China will be a hallmark of US policy for the foreseeable future.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Gates Legacy
The Pentagon is not ready for the 21st century. But it’s not too late to change course.
The Weekly Standard
Jim Talent
December 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 13
No one questions the contributions to national security of Defense Secretary Robert Gates or his skill at getting his way within the Department of Defense and with Congress. Gates is intelligent, strong-willed, and well-schooled in the ways of Washington. Early in his tenure, he put those talents to good use in implementing the “surge” and reestablishing confidence in our Iraq policy. Gates has concentrated since then on Afghanistan, and to good effect. Though President Obama made a huge mistake in imposing a timetable there, his decisions probably would have been worse without the influence of his defense secretary.
Yet there is real concern in Washington over Gates’s leadership on other issues. It is understandable that he focused his efforts on Afghanistan and Iraq; defense secretaries have to pay attention to the wolf closest to the sled. But Gates is running the Pentagon at a time when other risks facing the United States have been growing while American power relative to those risks has been declining. A review of Gates’s record on issues other than Afghanistan and Iraq shows he has made some key mistakes that have worsened the trend. But he still has time before he leaves the Pentagon sometime next year to set the stage for a renewal of American power and a subsequent increase in the margin of safety for the United States.
Silence During the ‘Stimulus’ Debate
For two years, Secretary Gates has warned that a “resource-constrained environment” requires “hard choices.” On that basis, he has cancelled or sought to cancel dozens of major defense programs, including the F-22 fifth-generation fighter, the C-17 cargo aircraft, the VH-71 helicopter, the Air Force’s combat search and rescue helicopter, and Army combat vehicles. Yet in early 2009, Congress passed a whopping $787 billion “stimulus” bill that contained not a dime to modernize and buy equipment for the military. The record is devoid of evidence that Gates fought for the needs of the military as Congress considered the bill. In fact, many in the Pentagon privately attest that Gates stifled his department’s attempts to seek a share of the stimulus money.
The military is undeniably in a modernization crisis. The Navy has fewer ships than at any time since 1916, the Air Force hasn’t been this small since Pearl Harbor, and the average age of the Air Force inventory is 25 years old. The Army needs to recapitalize equipment lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, and will need to replace most of its tracked vehicles over the next decade.
Appropriately, Gates has been vocal about his goal to reduce wasteful spending to save money for needed programs. But after nearly four years as defense secretary, spanning the Bush and Obama administrations, he has failed to make progress in solving the Pentagon’s major management issues. Growing military health care costs continue to eat up money desperately needed for modernization; Gates has made little effort and had no success at controlling those expenses. He complains about the spiraling cost of shipbuilding but has yet to find a solution.
Nor has Gates solved ongoing issues with the F-35, the Joint Strike Fighter developed for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. He believes he can use the F-35 as a substitute for the Air Force’s F-22 fighter that he killed, and for the Navy’s F/A‑18 E/F Super Hornet, whose production he wants to end. Whatever the merits of that decision, it means that virtually the entire strike fighter capability of the U.S. military depends on the F-35.
However, the F-35 program continues to be behind schedule and increasingly over budget; the Pentagon announced last year that the cost has grown by roughly $100 billion since 2002, much higher than original estimates. Gates has made a great deal depend on a deeply troubled program that his department can’t seem to fix.
There is no way to rationalize away these trends. They spell disaster for the American military. But the trends could have been reversed for perhaps a third of the stimulus money, spent judiciously over the next 5 to 10 years and coupled with real acquisition reform.
Moreover, funding for the military would have been entirely consistent with the logic of the stimulus bill, which was to create jobs through government spending. Gates’s unwillingness to advocate using stimulus money to modernize the military may be remembered as one of the most consequential mistakes ever made by a secretary of defense. He can still recover, at least partly. By most estimates, there are up to several hundred billions of stimulus money still unspent. Understandably, House Republicans want to reclaim that money for deficit reduction. The administration will oppose that effort. Gates could propose as a compromise that a portion of the funding be used over the next two to three years to support basic procurement needs, like “resetting” Army and Marine Corps equipment and buying more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. After that period, it is reasonable to hope that the cost of Afghanistan operations will begin to come down. Part of the money currently spent there could be recaptured for modernization, which would allow room for the military to recapitalize while the defense budget still contributes to deficit reduction.
In any event, Gates should stop using “resource constraints” as an excuse for cutting defense programs. Given the orgy of social spending by the Obama administration, he is only contributing to a level of disingenuousness unusual even for Washington.
Covering for the Missile Defense Fiasco
In September 2009, the Obama administration suddenly cancelled America’s commitment to place missile interceptors in the Czech Republic and Poland. This was clearly an attempt to appease the Russians. Ever since—and in particular, after it was clear the United States got nothing from the Russians in return for such a gigantic concession—the administration has attempted to justify its betrayal of the Czechs and Poles on military grounds. The administration has claimed that a sea-based alternative (which it hurriedly is attempting to develop) is superior to land-based interceptors. Gates has allowed his credibility and that of the Defense Department to be used to promote this rationalization.
Gates contends that the long-range ICBM threat from Iran has slowed while U.S. capacity to defend against short- and mid-range missiles has developed faster than anticipated. Therefore, he argues, it was safe to abandon our arrangement with Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Yet the Pentagon repeatedly has said Iran is in rapid pursuit of long-range capability and, with foreign assistance, will be able to develop and test a missile capable of reaching U.S. shores by 2015. The interceptors in Eastern Europe would have been capable of shooting down such a missile. The administration’s sea-based plan, which Gates endorsed, will not have that capability until around 2020, if the plan ever comes on line.
To this point, the administration hasn’t been able to answer the questions Congress has asked about the costs or timetable for deployment of the sea-based alternative—not to mention the ability of the surface fleet to add yet another mission to a stretched force without getting more ships and other resources.
In short, the Polish and Czech missile interceptors were not a redundant capability. That’s why the Bush administration, with Gates’s support, pursued them so strongly. In any event, if there is one place where the United States needs redundancy, it is in the ability to defeat—and so deter—a nuclear attack. If the Obama administration really had been concerned about missile defense in Europe, it would have augmented rather than replaced the land-based interceptors.
Gates has failed to stand up for missile defense in other respects. With his approval, the administration reduced the overall budget for the missile shield last year by $1.6 billion, or 15 percent. Specifically, the administration:
♦ scaled back the planned number of ground-based “midcourse” interceptors in Alaska and California from 44 to 30;
♦ terminated the Multiple Kill Vehicle program for defeating an enemy’s countermeasures;
♦ deferred purchase of a second Airborne Laser aircraft;
♦ killed the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program for intercepting ballistic missiles in the boost phase; and
♦ purged funds for the space “test bed” for missile defense.
There is a reason why North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and Iran is seeking to do so. Nuclear weapons empower rogue regimes to use aggressive tactics in accomplishing their regional ambitions. That leads to ongoing conflict and the prospect of escalation into major confrontations. A fully deployed missile shield would neuter that threat and reduce the danger that the nuclear cascade will spread to other countries.
Under the circumstances, the missile defense shield may be the single most important program in the Pentagon budget. Secretary Gates should strongly and publicly support full funding and accelerated deployment of the system.
Silence on China
America’s secretary of defense has two main jobs. As a senior official in the chain of command, the defense secretary supports military commanders in executing the missions of the nation. Equally important, he must plan and shape the force of the future. And since it takes a long time to develop and deploy new equipment, the Pentagon’s planning horizon is 20 years down the road.
Gates conflates the two responsibilities, to the detriment in particular of our naval and air services. He often refers to the need to “rebalance the force” to better fight the wars of today. If he means only that the services should use current assets to win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the statement is unremarkable.
But that isn’t all that Gates means. He uses the current counterinsurgency missions as an excuse for not sustaining programs that are necessary to ensure the United States will be able to contain Russia, Iran, and especially the growing power of China.
One example is Gates’s treatment of the Navy. Its size cut in half since the Reagan years, the Navy at 288 ships is smaller today than at any time since 1916. And it is still shrinking: At the current rate of shipbuilding, the Navy will be reduced to between 210 and 240 ships. No knowledgeable person believes a Navy that size can perform its global missions.
The latest official estimate, by the chief of naval operations in 2006, held that a 313-ship Navy was the minimum necessary for American security. The current chief has endorsed that number. In a speech before the Navy League earlier this year, however, Gates dismissed the idea that the Navy is too weak. He’s since announced that he would not increase the shipbuilding budget and in fact would cut more programs. He already has ended purchases of the next-generation DDG-1000 destroyers; extended production of the next carrier from four years to five; killed the MPF-A large-deck aviation ship and mobile landing platform; and delayed indefinitely the next-generation cruiser, CG(X).
In his speech, Gates dismissed concerns by noting that the world’s other navies, taken as a whole, have shrunk even more. But that is true largely because America’s major European allies have reduced their naval capabilities since the end of the Cold War.
The Chinese, however, aren’t shrinking their navy. Within about five years, their fleet of modern submarines will nearly equal ours. China also is building its first aircraft carrier and has announced plans to build a new class of destroyers. These are two clear signals China seeks the ability not only to hold the U.S. Navy at bay in the Western Pacific, but to project power around the world.
Time to Speak Plainly
For political and practical reasons, Gates largely has escaped criticism during his tenure as defense secretary. Democrats recognize that his prestige is necessary to prop up Obama’s national security credentials. Republicans fear that if Gates is weakened, the administration’s policies may get worse. And to be fair, many of Gates’s questionable actions may have been maneuvers to maintain credibility with the president so that Gates could have more impact on issues, such as Afghanistan, that he rightly cares most about.
But there is a time to maneuver and a time for plain speaking. The time for Gates to speak plainly has come.
At the end of 2009, Congress created an independent panel to critique the Quadrennial Defense Review that the Pentagon issued in February of 2010. That panel was chaired by former secretary of defense William Perry, a Democrat, and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, a Republican. Its members came from across the political spectrum. Most were appointed by Gates himself.
The independent panel issued its unanimous report on July 29. The panel recognized Gates’s dedication to the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; otherwise its report only can be described as a polite but clear rebuke of his leadership.
The panel discussed the threats facing America, dismissed the Defense Department’s strategic plans as largely irrelevant to those threats, and comprehensively documented the growing gap between the actual strength of the military and the level of capability needed to protect America’s enduring national interests.
The panel sounds an extraordinary warning in the introduction to its report:
The issues raised in the body of this report are sufficiently serious that we believe an explicit warning is appropriate. The aging of the inventories and equipment used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition, and force structure.
Gates is nearing the end of his service as head of the Pentagon. The fewer battles he has left to fight, the less concerned he need be about political consequences. He still has the time to say that, unless Congress adds substantial funding to modernize the military and fully supports changes necessary to reform the Pentagon, no responsible secretary of defense can continue to guarantee American security within an acceptable margin of risk.
Such a statement by Gates would definitely not be business as usual in Washington. It would make him unpopular in the White House and with many in Congress. But it would end, at long last, the tortured rationalizations by which the Joint Chiefs try to reconcile the eroding position of their services with the decisions of their political masters. It would pave the way for an honest debate about the nature of the post-Cold War world and the sacrifices necessary to protect American security in the 21st century. It would be a huge service to whoever succeeds Bob Gates at the Pentagon. And in the most fundamental sense, he’d be doing his job.
The Weekly Standard
Jim Talent
December 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 13
No one questions the contributions to national security of Defense Secretary Robert Gates or his skill at getting his way within the Department of Defense and with Congress. Gates is intelligent, strong-willed, and well-schooled in the ways of Washington. Early in his tenure, he put those talents to good use in implementing the “surge” and reestablishing confidence in our Iraq policy. Gates has concentrated since then on Afghanistan, and to good effect. Though President Obama made a huge mistake in imposing a timetable there, his decisions probably would have been worse without the influence of his defense secretary.
Yet there is real concern in Washington over Gates’s leadership on other issues. It is understandable that he focused his efforts on Afghanistan and Iraq; defense secretaries have to pay attention to the wolf closest to the sled. But Gates is running the Pentagon at a time when other risks facing the United States have been growing while American power relative to those risks has been declining. A review of Gates’s record on issues other than Afghanistan and Iraq shows he has made some key mistakes that have worsened the trend. But he still has time before he leaves the Pentagon sometime next year to set the stage for a renewal of American power and a subsequent increase in the margin of safety for the United States.
Silence During the ‘Stimulus’ Debate
For two years, Secretary Gates has warned that a “resource-constrained environment” requires “hard choices.” On that basis, he has cancelled or sought to cancel dozens of major defense programs, including the F-22 fifth-generation fighter, the C-17 cargo aircraft, the VH-71 helicopter, the Air Force’s combat search and rescue helicopter, and Army combat vehicles. Yet in early 2009, Congress passed a whopping $787 billion “stimulus” bill that contained not a dime to modernize and buy equipment for the military. The record is devoid of evidence that Gates fought for the needs of the military as Congress considered the bill. In fact, many in the Pentagon privately attest that Gates stifled his department’s attempts to seek a share of the stimulus money.
The military is undeniably in a modernization crisis. The Navy has fewer ships than at any time since 1916, the Air Force hasn’t been this small since Pearl Harbor, and the average age of the Air Force inventory is 25 years old. The Army needs to recapitalize equipment lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, and will need to replace most of its tracked vehicles over the next decade.
Appropriately, Gates has been vocal about his goal to reduce wasteful spending to save money for needed programs. But after nearly four years as defense secretary, spanning the Bush and Obama administrations, he has failed to make progress in solving the Pentagon’s major management issues. Growing military health care costs continue to eat up money desperately needed for modernization; Gates has made little effort and had no success at controlling those expenses. He complains about the spiraling cost of shipbuilding but has yet to find a solution.
Nor has Gates solved ongoing issues with the F-35, the Joint Strike Fighter developed for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. He believes he can use the F-35 as a substitute for the Air Force’s F-22 fighter that he killed, and for the Navy’s F/A‑18 E/F Super Hornet, whose production he wants to end. Whatever the merits of that decision, it means that virtually the entire strike fighter capability of the U.S. military depends on the F-35.
However, the F-35 program continues to be behind schedule and increasingly over budget; the Pentagon announced last year that the cost has grown by roughly $100 billion since 2002, much higher than original estimates. Gates has made a great deal depend on a deeply troubled program that his department can’t seem to fix.
There is no way to rationalize away these trends. They spell disaster for the American military. But the trends could have been reversed for perhaps a third of the stimulus money, spent judiciously over the next 5 to 10 years and coupled with real acquisition reform.
Moreover, funding for the military would have been entirely consistent with the logic of the stimulus bill, which was to create jobs through government spending. Gates’s unwillingness to advocate using stimulus money to modernize the military may be remembered as one of the most consequential mistakes ever made by a secretary of defense. He can still recover, at least partly. By most estimates, there are up to several hundred billions of stimulus money still unspent. Understandably, House Republicans want to reclaim that money for deficit reduction. The administration will oppose that effort. Gates could propose as a compromise that a portion of the funding be used over the next two to three years to support basic procurement needs, like “resetting” Army and Marine Corps equipment and buying more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. After that period, it is reasonable to hope that the cost of Afghanistan operations will begin to come down. Part of the money currently spent there could be recaptured for modernization, which would allow room for the military to recapitalize while the defense budget still contributes to deficit reduction.
In any event, Gates should stop using “resource constraints” as an excuse for cutting defense programs. Given the orgy of social spending by the Obama administration, he is only contributing to a level of disingenuousness unusual even for Washington.
Covering for the Missile Defense Fiasco
In September 2009, the Obama administration suddenly cancelled America’s commitment to place missile interceptors in the Czech Republic and Poland. This was clearly an attempt to appease the Russians. Ever since—and in particular, after it was clear the United States got nothing from the Russians in return for such a gigantic concession—the administration has attempted to justify its betrayal of the Czechs and Poles on military grounds. The administration has claimed that a sea-based alternative (which it hurriedly is attempting to develop) is superior to land-based interceptors. Gates has allowed his credibility and that of the Defense Department to be used to promote this rationalization.
Gates contends that the long-range ICBM threat from Iran has slowed while U.S. capacity to defend against short- and mid-range missiles has developed faster than anticipated. Therefore, he argues, it was safe to abandon our arrangement with Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Yet the Pentagon repeatedly has said Iran is in rapid pursuit of long-range capability and, with foreign assistance, will be able to develop and test a missile capable of reaching U.S. shores by 2015. The interceptors in Eastern Europe would have been capable of shooting down such a missile. The administration’s sea-based plan, which Gates endorsed, will not have that capability until around 2020, if the plan ever comes on line.
To this point, the administration hasn’t been able to answer the questions Congress has asked about the costs or timetable for deployment of the sea-based alternative—not to mention the ability of the surface fleet to add yet another mission to a stretched force without getting more ships and other resources.
In short, the Polish and Czech missile interceptors were not a redundant capability. That’s why the Bush administration, with Gates’s support, pursued them so strongly. In any event, if there is one place where the United States needs redundancy, it is in the ability to defeat—and so deter—a nuclear attack. If the Obama administration really had been concerned about missile defense in Europe, it would have augmented rather than replaced the land-based interceptors.
Gates has failed to stand up for missile defense in other respects. With his approval, the administration reduced the overall budget for the missile shield last year by $1.6 billion, or 15 percent. Specifically, the administration:
♦ scaled back the planned number of ground-based “midcourse” interceptors in Alaska and California from 44 to 30;
♦ terminated the Multiple Kill Vehicle program for defeating an enemy’s countermeasures;
♦ deferred purchase of a second Airborne Laser aircraft;
♦ killed the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program for intercepting ballistic missiles in the boost phase; and
♦ purged funds for the space “test bed” for missile defense.
There is a reason why North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and Iran is seeking to do so. Nuclear weapons empower rogue regimes to use aggressive tactics in accomplishing their regional ambitions. That leads to ongoing conflict and the prospect of escalation into major confrontations. A fully deployed missile shield would neuter that threat and reduce the danger that the nuclear cascade will spread to other countries.
Under the circumstances, the missile defense shield may be the single most important program in the Pentagon budget. Secretary Gates should strongly and publicly support full funding and accelerated deployment of the system.
Silence on China
America’s secretary of defense has two main jobs. As a senior official in the chain of command, the defense secretary supports military commanders in executing the missions of the nation. Equally important, he must plan and shape the force of the future. And since it takes a long time to develop and deploy new equipment, the Pentagon’s planning horizon is 20 years down the road.
Gates conflates the two responsibilities, to the detriment in particular of our naval and air services. He often refers to the need to “rebalance the force” to better fight the wars of today. If he means only that the services should use current assets to win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the statement is unremarkable.
But that isn’t all that Gates means. He uses the current counterinsurgency missions as an excuse for not sustaining programs that are necessary to ensure the United States will be able to contain Russia, Iran, and especially the growing power of China.
One example is Gates’s treatment of the Navy. Its size cut in half since the Reagan years, the Navy at 288 ships is smaller today than at any time since 1916. And it is still shrinking: At the current rate of shipbuilding, the Navy will be reduced to between 210 and 240 ships. No knowledgeable person believes a Navy that size can perform its global missions.
The latest official estimate, by the chief of naval operations in 2006, held that a 313-ship Navy was the minimum necessary for American security. The current chief has endorsed that number. In a speech before the Navy League earlier this year, however, Gates dismissed the idea that the Navy is too weak. He’s since announced that he would not increase the shipbuilding budget and in fact would cut more programs. He already has ended purchases of the next-generation DDG-1000 destroyers; extended production of the next carrier from four years to five; killed the MPF-A large-deck aviation ship and mobile landing platform; and delayed indefinitely the next-generation cruiser, CG(X).
In his speech, Gates dismissed concerns by noting that the world’s other navies, taken as a whole, have shrunk even more. But that is true largely because America’s major European allies have reduced their naval capabilities since the end of the Cold War.
The Chinese, however, aren’t shrinking their navy. Within about five years, their fleet of modern submarines will nearly equal ours. China also is building its first aircraft carrier and has announced plans to build a new class of destroyers. These are two clear signals China seeks the ability not only to hold the U.S. Navy at bay in the Western Pacific, but to project power around the world.
Time to Speak Plainly
For political and practical reasons, Gates largely has escaped criticism during his tenure as defense secretary. Democrats recognize that his prestige is necessary to prop up Obama’s national security credentials. Republicans fear that if Gates is weakened, the administration’s policies may get worse. And to be fair, many of Gates’s questionable actions may have been maneuvers to maintain credibility with the president so that Gates could have more impact on issues, such as Afghanistan, that he rightly cares most about.
But there is a time to maneuver and a time for plain speaking. The time for Gates to speak plainly has come.
At the end of 2009, Congress created an independent panel to critique the Quadrennial Defense Review that the Pentagon issued in February of 2010. That panel was chaired by former secretary of defense William Perry, a Democrat, and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, a Republican. Its members came from across the political spectrum. Most were appointed by Gates himself.
The independent panel issued its unanimous report on July 29. The panel recognized Gates’s dedication to the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; otherwise its report only can be described as a polite but clear rebuke of his leadership.
The panel discussed the threats facing America, dismissed the Defense Department’s strategic plans as largely irrelevant to those threats, and comprehensively documented the growing gap between the actual strength of the military and the level of capability needed to protect America’s enduring national interests.
The panel sounds an extraordinary warning in the introduction to its report:
The issues raised in the body of this report are sufficiently serious that we believe an explicit warning is appropriate. The aging of the inventories and equipment used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition, and force structure.
Gates is nearing the end of his service as head of the Pentagon. The fewer battles he has left to fight, the less concerned he need be about political consequences. He still has the time to say that, unless Congress adds substantial funding to modernize the military and fully supports changes necessary to reform the Pentagon, no responsible secretary of defense can continue to guarantee American security within an acceptable margin of risk.
Such a statement by Gates would definitely not be business as usual in Washington. It would make him unpopular in the White House and with many in Congress. But it would end, at long last, the tortured rationalizations by which the Joint Chiefs try to reconcile the eroding position of their services with the decisions of their political masters. It would pave the way for an honest debate about the nature of the post-Cold War world and the sacrifices necessary to protect American security in the 21st century. It would be a huge service to whoever succeeds Bob Gates at the Pentagon. And in the most fundamental sense, he’d be doing his job.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Washington’s World: December 13th – December 19th, 2010
President Obama is embarking on a new phase of his presidency in which he will seek to build a constituency for his reelection in 2012. His task is daunting. As shown by his defense of his compromise over taxation policy, he risks alienating his own supporters while picking up little compensating support from independents and Republicans. Whether he is able to resolve this dilemma will define the rest of his time in office. Republicans are publicly and privately confident that he will fail. Democrats hope that he will be able to repeat Bill Clinton's revival after 1994. The implications for foreign policy are already to be seen as foreign actors react to the change in US political dynamics. The Administration has abandoned its efforts to induce Israel to suspend settlement activities and is holding open further negotiations to Iran. We have never been hopeful that the Middle East peace process would prosper, but even those officials most closely associated with the effort concede that progress will not be attainable in the foreseeable future. Regarding China, NSC officials tell us that of their concern that Beijing is exploiting what it sees as US weakness to pursue an uncooperative line over North Korea. A senior State Department delegation will visit Beijing next week, to be followed by Defense Secretary Gates in the new year in an attempt to normalize US-China cooperation. In Washington the debate about China is intensifying. Obama’s critical remarks over the Chinese refusal to allow Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo to attend the December 10th award ceremony are symptomatic of the ambivalence toward China felt by top officials. The emerging policy option in Washington is to maintain ‘leverage’ over Beijing. As one Pentagon official put it to us: “It’s easier to say that than to do it. But we do know that we must remain in a position to assert ourselves in China’s backyard.” On Afghanistan, the official line remains optimistic, but behind the scenes expectations are being lowered. While the incoming House foreign affairs leaders are hawkish on China and Iran, they are close to Administration thinking on Afghanistan. We do not expect any pressure to expand the US footprint. Instead, modest withdrawals will start in 2011.
Remarks by Senator Mark Kirk
Remarks by Senator Mark Kirk
December 9, 2010, Washington,
Thank you to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies for having me here today. FDD is doing good work –my staff worked closely with the Foundation as we developed our gasoline sanctions legislation – and you continue to be a resource to the Congress.
As a congressman, I spent a lot of my time focusing on the growing threat we face in Iran. And now as a Senator, I will do the same.
When we look at Iran today, we don’t see a lot of good news.
*
A nuclear program accelerating
*
A ballistic missile program expanding, and
*
A wholesale disregard for human rights.
On November 23rd, the International Atomic Energy Agency released its latest report on the implementation of Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards in Iran and the status of Iran’s compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1737, 1747, and 1803. Read More>>
The findings showed the average monthly rate of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) production increased with many additional centrifuges working by end of reporting period.
Iran’s total LEU production at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) as of October 31st was reported to be over 3,100 kg of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride, including 380 kg estimated by Iran to have been produced since August 6th.
As of November 5th, Iran was enriching uranium in 29 cascades with over 4,800 P-1 centrifuges, up from under 3,800 centrifuges at the end of the last reporting period.
Separately, the UN Security Council released a report on North Korea on November 10th, detailing North Korean cooperation with Iran on nuclear and ballistic missile activities.
According to the report, quote, “The Panel of Experts has reviewed several government assessments, IAEA reports, research papers and media reports indicating continuing DPRK involvement in nuclear and ballistic missile related activities in certain countries including Iran, Syria and Myanmar.”
The report continues: “Evidence provided in these reports indicates that the DPRK has continued to provide missiles, components, and technology to certain countries including Iran and Syria since the imposition of these measures.”
“The DPRK is also believed to use air cargo to handle high valued and sensitive arms exports. Such cargo can be sent by direct air cargo from the DPRK to the destination country. Some modern cargo planes, for example, can fly non-stop from the DPRK to Iran (when routed directly through neighboring air space).”
Before we ask “where do we go from here,” it’s important to quickly review where we have come from.
In 2005, Congressman Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) and I conducted a careful analysis of Iran’s economy and discovered a surprising weakness. Despite its status as a leading OPEC oil nation, the regime so mishandled its economy that it lacks sufficient refining capacity to turn its own oil into gasoline.
In 2005 and again in 2006, we introduced resolutions calling for a multilateral restriction of gasoline deliveries to Iran as the most effective economic sanction to bring Iran’s leaders into compliance with their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Recognizing its exposed weakness, Iran implemented a nationwide gasoline rationing program to reduce its dependence – and hired international firms to help develop domestic refineries. Even with these measures, most experts still put imports at 25-40% of Iran’s total gasoline supply – a critical weakness we must exploit.
In 2007, we authored the Iran Sanctions Enhancement Act, which extended current U.S. sanctions to the provision of gasoline to Iran.
Last year, I successfully offered an amendment to the State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Act prohibiting U.S. Export-Import Bank financing for any company involved in providing gasoline to Iran – the first gasoline sanction to pass the House of Representatives and become law.
Also last year, I reintroduced the Kirk-Andrews bill with Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) – and a version of our legislation was included in the final comprehensive Iran sanctions bill signed into law on July 1st.
That comprehensive bill went beyond just gasoline sanctions, and included key sanctions targeting banks with corresponding relationships with banks doing business with Iran…and sanctions targeting abusers of human rights.
In addition, the act required the Administration to make a series of reports to Congress on those in violation of the law.
In my view, we should move forward in the weeks ahead with a five-pronged strategy.
First, enforce the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) of 1996, which prohibits investment in Iran’s oil and gas sectors. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) identified a number of companies that may be in violation of ISA. Congressman Ron Klein (D-FL) and I wrote to the Administration repeatedly on this issue.
These companies may include:
*
Total of France
*
ENI of Italy
*
Bow Valley of Canada
*
Norsk Hydro of Norway
*
Gazprom of Russia
*
Lukoil of Russsia
*
GVA Consultants of Sweden
*
Sheer Energy of Canada
*
China National Petroleum Company
*
GS Engineering and Construction of South Korea
*
Statoil of Norway
*
Inpex of Japan
*
Petrobras of Brazil
*
Sinopec of China
*
PTT of Thailand
*
JGC of Japan
*
Daelim of South Korea
*
SKS Ventures of Malaysia
*
Belneftekhim of Belarus
*
Edison of Italy
*
Petro Vietnam Exploration and Production Co.
*
INA of Croatia
*
Uhde of Germany; and
*
Tecnimont of Italy
Other companies identified by CRS, which have pending or preliminary deals to invest in Iran’s energy sector, include:
*
China National Offshore Oil Company
*
Repsol of Spain
*
Turkish Petroleum Company
*
OMV of Austria; and
*
Petroleos de Venezuela
But amazingly, the Administration has so far sanctioned only one entity under ISA – the Swiss-based Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO) -- despite clear evidence of involvement in the Iranian energy sector of these other firms.
In fact, five companies – ENI of Italy, Total of France, Statoil of Norway, Royal Dutch Shell of Britain and the Netherlands; and INPEX of Japan – were given an official reprieve through a “special rule” under the new Comprehensive Sanctions bill.
This “special rule” allows the Administration to indefinitely delay investigation of companies, as long as the company has “pledged” to stop doing business with Iran.
Under Secretary of State Burns stated before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week that he expected companies protected by the Special Rule to be out of Iran “within weeks.” So instead of decisive action, as authorized by U.S. law, we are still taking these companies at their word.
But according to research conducted by this Foundation, there is no evidence these firms will end their existing contracts in Iran.
Moreover, according to the Congressional Research Service as of yesterday, the Administration has not delivered to Congress two key reports that were due by October 1st:
1.
A report on investments in Iran’s energy sector since 2006; and
2.
A report on the activities of export credit agencies of foreign countries in guaranteeing financing for trade with Iran.
These reports would provide impetus to pursue violators, as mandated under the law, and the Administration should immediately provide them to Congress.
Second, we need to enforce the new gasoline sanctions enacted in the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions bill. While we have seen reports of several companies ending their business with Iran since enactment, we see others moving in to supply the regime. Sanctions are meaningless if not enforced.
According to research conducted by this Foundation, the following companies provided Iran with gasoline since July 2010:
*
Golden Crown of the UAE
*
UNIPEC of China
*
Tupras of Turkey
*
Guandong Zhenrong of China; and
*
Royal Oyster Group of the UAE
We also see the disturbing trend of China – a permanent member of the UN Security Council that sanctions Iran – stepping up to provide energy investments in Iran. As documented in the Foundation’s September 2010 report, Chinese companies including CNOOC, CNPC, Sinopec, and Zhuhai Zhenrong Corporation, continue to do business in Iran.
In fact, in July 2010, Iran’s deputy oil minister stated that China invested approximately $40 billion in Iran’s energy sector, that “the volume (of Chinese investment) in upstream projects is $29 billion,” and that China had signed roughly $10 billion worth of contracts with Iran for petrochemicals, refineries and pipeline projects.
For all of the companies I’ve named here today – no matter where they are in the world - the Administration should enforce U.S. law and sanctions designed to prevent the emergence of the greater danger.
Third, we need to start enforcing the new banking sanctions enacted in the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions bill. Under the new law, banks must stop doing business with banks that do business with Iran. If enforced, the provisions will make it more difficult for Iran to access the dollar and, potentially, other major currencies. Although the Treasury Department issued the relevant regulations on August 16th – laudably, ahead of the mandated deadline – no entities have actually been held accountable under the Act.
Separately, the Administration should move quickly to sanction Iran’s central bank – Bank Merkazi – and prohibit U.S. bank dealings with any financial institution that helps the Central Bank facilitate circumvention of U.N. resolutions on Iran. This was originally authorized by Section 311 of the USA Patriot Act and also called for in the new Comprehensive Sanctions bill.
Fourth, we must continue targeted financial sanctions against individuals and entities that support terrorism and proliferation – especially entities with ties to the IRGC. Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey has done a great job on this front to date and we should support his continued efforts.
Finally, we must do more to help Iran’s “Green Movement” and promote human rights inside the regime.
The United States needs a cohesive and comprehensive strategy to promote human rights and democracy in Iran.
I believe the threat we face in Iran has a parallel to the threat we faced in the Soviet Union: a repressive dictatorship that denies its citizens basic human rights while bullying its neighbors, building nuclear weapons and threatening doom and destruction on American allies.
History teaches us how to win. In the end, we won the Cold War because we never lost the conviction of our own convictions.
It’s time for a new American strategy to promote human rights in Iran.
To start, this Administration should make human rights a central tenant of future negotiations with Iran. No meeting should go by with Iranians without an American diplomat raising the issue of human rights, specifically including the names of prisoners of conscience.
The President should speak directly and publicly to the dissidents of Iran – name their names from the White House podium – make them heroes in homes across America.
He should invite members of the Green Movement to meet with him at the White House – and if any U.S. Government official is invited to visit Iran, they should not accept the invitation unless they are secured meetings with Iranian dissidents.
Overall funding for Iran democracy promotion should be increased in a dedicated appropriations line item called Iran Freedom Support – with control of the funds transferred from the State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy.
The United States should take the lead to facilitate Green Movement conferences outside of Iran – whether in the United States or Europe.
We need an injection of creativity and originality in our international broadcasting programs. While Radio Farda continues the mission of Radio Free Europe, we should work to establish new public/private partnerships to fund independent Iranian filmmakers and producers —a new way to foster more original content. VOA Persian and Radio Farda should set up a “Green Hour” for their broadcasts and expand their interaction with Iranian dissidents.
With the recent prison sentencing of Iran’s Baha’i leadership just for practicing their religion, this mission should be personal for Illinois families.
As Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War, the President should speak out regularly about human rights abuses in Iran and make individual political prisoners household names throughout America.
For the Bahai’s in prison, I for one am not afraid to speak their names out loud:
*
Raha Sabet;
*
Sasan Taqva;
*
Haleh Roohi;
*
Fariba Kamalabadi;
*
Jamaloddin Khanjani;
*
Afif Naeimi;
*
Saeid Rezaie;
*
Behrouz Tavakkoli;
*
Mahvash Sabet; and
*
Vahid Tizfahm.
To these and all other political prisoners in Iran we say: American families know your struggle and we think about you everyday.
And we know this: An Iranian government that respects the rights of its own citizens will be less likely to sponsor international terrorism or seek the destruction of her neighbors.
Finally, we must continue to increase our military deterrence against Iran’s growing ballistic missile threat – so that if in the end, our diplomatic efforts are unsuccessful, the United States and our allies – especially Israel – have a bottom line.
From 2001 to 2003, I worked to provide Israel with access to “Eyes in the Sky” – real time satellite data to increase Israel’s early warning time to 12 minutes from less than one.
Eyes in the Sky established the precedent of U.S.-Israel cooperation on early warning. But it only solved one challenge: missile launch detection. It did not contribute to intercept capability.
For that, we needed to deploy a forward-based X-Band radar to Israel to maximize our intercept opportunities.
For years, Israel relied on its Green Pine radar that can only acquire missile threats at ranges up to 500 km. With such a short detection range, Israel would be forced to launch its Arrow anti-missiles before the threat missile's trajectory was accurately known.
I proposed we dramatically upgrade Israel's capability with the best the U.S. had – the X-Band (AN/TPY-2) radar. This would give our ally the ability to double the current range of its radar, sending its interceptor missiles in a far more accurate and successful direction.
After months of hard work, we finally got the X-Band delivered – the first permanent deployment of the US military to Israel. And last year, I had the chance to visit the site of the deployment.
Now we must do more.
1.
Complete the Arrow-3 missile system, to give Israel a very long range interceptor to hit the more-advanced Iranian Shahab-3 missile; and
2.
Deploy the Airborne Laser to Israel to show Iran the United States and Israel are collaborating on breakthrough technology to eliminate Iranian missiles over Iran.
Ballistic missiles are most vulnerable in their earliest stage of flight, because they are moving very slowly with a fifty-foot sheet of flame to show their location.
The Airborne Laser (ABL) will provide speed-of-light capability to destroy ballistic missiles quickly, letting the Iranians to deal with their own missile garbage as it falls back on their territory.
The ABL operates at more than 40,000 feet in altitude and can fire beyond 600 km.
On February 11th, the ABL successfully destroyed a ballistic missile over central California.
Given the existential threats posed by Iranian ballistic missiles to Israel, the United States should begin full cooperation with Israel in the Airborne Laser program.
In the end, democracies are best when they stick together. And the United States has no greater ally in the Middle East than the State of Israel. But we know that Iran’s nuclear program does not only threaten Israel – it poses a direct threat to regional stability, to Europe’s security and to the national security of the United States and our interests.
An Iranian bomb will also likely give birth to a Saudi and Egyptian bomb. In Sum, the Middle East of the future could become a chamber of horrors for the coming generation of American admirals and generals.
For too long, Administration after Administration dragged its feet on meaningful, biting sanctions. We have not brought the full weight of economic sanctions to bear to bring the Iranians to the negotiating table in a serious manner.
Time is not on our side. We must act now or suffer in a very, very dangerous brave new Middle East with Iranian nuclear weapons.
Thank you, God bless you and God bless the United States of America.
December 9, 2010, Washington,
Thank you to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies for having me here today. FDD is doing good work –my staff worked closely with the Foundation as we developed our gasoline sanctions legislation – and you continue to be a resource to the Congress.
As a congressman, I spent a lot of my time focusing on the growing threat we face in Iran. And now as a Senator, I will do the same.
When we look at Iran today, we don’t see a lot of good news.
*
A nuclear program accelerating
*
A ballistic missile program expanding, and
*
A wholesale disregard for human rights.
On November 23rd, the International Atomic Energy Agency released its latest report on the implementation of Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards in Iran and the status of Iran’s compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1737, 1747, and 1803. Read More>>
The findings showed the average monthly rate of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) production increased with many additional centrifuges working by end of reporting period.
Iran’s total LEU production at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) as of October 31st was reported to be over 3,100 kg of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride, including 380 kg estimated by Iran to have been produced since August 6th.
As of November 5th, Iran was enriching uranium in 29 cascades with over 4,800 P-1 centrifuges, up from under 3,800 centrifuges at the end of the last reporting period.
Separately, the UN Security Council released a report on North Korea on November 10th, detailing North Korean cooperation with Iran on nuclear and ballistic missile activities.
According to the report, quote, “The Panel of Experts has reviewed several government assessments, IAEA reports, research papers and media reports indicating continuing DPRK involvement in nuclear and ballistic missile related activities in certain countries including Iran, Syria and Myanmar.”
The report continues: “Evidence provided in these reports indicates that the DPRK has continued to provide missiles, components, and technology to certain countries including Iran and Syria since the imposition of these measures.”
“The DPRK is also believed to use air cargo to handle high valued and sensitive arms exports. Such cargo can be sent by direct air cargo from the DPRK to the destination country. Some modern cargo planes, for example, can fly non-stop from the DPRK to Iran (when routed directly through neighboring air space).”
Before we ask “where do we go from here,” it’s important to quickly review where we have come from.
In 2005, Congressman Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) and I conducted a careful analysis of Iran’s economy and discovered a surprising weakness. Despite its status as a leading OPEC oil nation, the regime so mishandled its economy that it lacks sufficient refining capacity to turn its own oil into gasoline.
In 2005 and again in 2006, we introduced resolutions calling for a multilateral restriction of gasoline deliveries to Iran as the most effective economic sanction to bring Iran’s leaders into compliance with their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Recognizing its exposed weakness, Iran implemented a nationwide gasoline rationing program to reduce its dependence – and hired international firms to help develop domestic refineries. Even with these measures, most experts still put imports at 25-40% of Iran’s total gasoline supply – a critical weakness we must exploit.
In 2007, we authored the Iran Sanctions Enhancement Act, which extended current U.S. sanctions to the provision of gasoline to Iran.
Last year, I successfully offered an amendment to the State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Act prohibiting U.S. Export-Import Bank financing for any company involved in providing gasoline to Iran – the first gasoline sanction to pass the House of Representatives and become law.
Also last year, I reintroduced the Kirk-Andrews bill with Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) – and a version of our legislation was included in the final comprehensive Iran sanctions bill signed into law on July 1st.
That comprehensive bill went beyond just gasoline sanctions, and included key sanctions targeting banks with corresponding relationships with banks doing business with Iran…and sanctions targeting abusers of human rights.
In addition, the act required the Administration to make a series of reports to Congress on those in violation of the law.
In my view, we should move forward in the weeks ahead with a five-pronged strategy.
First, enforce the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) of 1996, which prohibits investment in Iran’s oil and gas sectors. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) identified a number of companies that may be in violation of ISA. Congressman Ron Klein (D-FL) and I wrote to the Administration repeatedly on this issue.
These companies may include:
*
Total of France
*
ENI of Italy
*
Bow Valley of Canada
*
Norsk Hydro of Norway
*
Gazprom of Russia
*
Lukoil of Russsia
*
GVA Consultants of Sweden
*
Sheer Energy of Canada
*
China National Petroleum Company
*
GS Engineering and Construction of South Korea
*
Statoil of Norway
*
Inpex of Japan
*
Petrobras of Brazil
*
Sinopec of China
*
PTT of Thailand
*
JGC of Japan
*
Daelim of South Korea
*
SKS Ventures of Malaysia
*
Belneftekhim of Belarus
*
Edison of Italy
*
Petro Vietnam Exploration and Production Co.
*
INA of Croatia
*
Uhde of Germany; and
*
Tecnimont of Italy
Other companies identified by CRS, which have pending or preliminary deals to invest in Iran’s energy sector, include:
*
China National Offshore Oil Company
*
Repsol of Spain
*
Turkish Petroleum Company
*
OMV of Austria; and
*
Petroleos de Venezuela
But amazingly, the Administration has so far sanctioned only one entity under ISA – the Swiss-based Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO) -- despite clear evidence of involvement in the Iranian energy sector of these other firms.
In fact, five companies – ENI of Italy, Total of France, Statoil of Norway, Royal Dutch Shell of Britain and the Netherlands; and INPEX of Japan – were given an official reprieve through a “special rule” under the new Comprehensive Sanctions bill.
This “special rule” allows the Administration to indefinitely delay investigation of companies, as long as the company has “pledged” to stop doing business with Iran.
Under Secretary of State Burns stated before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week that he expected companies protected by the Special Rule to be out of Iran “within weeks.” So instead of decisive action, as authorized by U.S. law, we are still taking these companies at their word.
But according to research conducted by this Foundation, there is no evidence these firms will end their existing contracts in Iran.
Moreover, according to the Congressional Research Service as of yesterday, the Administration has not delivered to Congress two key reports that were due by October 1st:
1.
A report on investments in Iran’s energy sector since 2006; and
2.
A report on the activities of export credit agencies of foreign countries in guaranteeing financing for trade with Iran.
These reports would provide impetus to pursue violators, as mandated under the law, and the Administration should immediately provide them to Congress.
Second, we need to enforce the new gasoline sanctions enacted in the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions bill. While we have seen reports of several companies ending their business with Iran since enactment, we see others moving in to supply the regime. Sanctions are meaningless if not enforced.
According to research conducted by this Foundation, the following companies provided Iran with gasoline since July 2010:
*
Golden Crown of the UAE
*
UNIPEC of China
*
Tupras of Turkey
*
Guandong Zhenrong of China; and
*
Royal Oyster Group of the UAE
We also see the disturbing trend of China – a permanent member of the UN Security Council that sanctions Iran – stepping up to provide energy investments in Iran. As documented in the Foundation’s September 2010 report, Chinese companies including CNOOC, CNPC, Sinopec, and Zhuhai Zhenrong Corporation, continue to do business in Iran.
In fact, in July 2010, Iran’s deputy oil minister stated that China invested approximately $40 billion in Iran’s energy sector, that “the volume (of Chinese investment) in upstream projects is $29 billion,” and that China had signed roughly $10 billion worth of contracts with Iran for petrochemicals, refineries and pipeline projects.
For all of the companies I’ve named here today – no matter where they are in the world - the Administration should enforce U.S. law and sanctions designed to prevent the emergence of the greater danger.
Third, we need to start enforcing the new banking sanctions enacted in the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions bill. Under the new law, banks must stop doing business with banks that do business with Iran. If enforced, the provisions will make it more difficult for Iran to access the dollar and, potentially, other major currencies. Although the Treasury Department issued the relevant regulations on August 16th – laudably, ahead of the mandated deadline – no entities have actually been held accountable under the Act.
Separately, the Administration should move quickly to sanction Iran’s central bank – Bank Merkazi – and prohibit U.S. bank dealings with any financial institution that helps the Central Bank facilitate circumvention of U.N. resolutions on Iran. This was originally authorized by Section 311 of the USA Patriot Act and also called for in the new Comprehensive Sanctions bill.
Fourth, we must continue targeted financial sanctions against individuals and entities that support terrorism and proliferation – especially entities with ties to the IRGC. Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey has done a great job on this front to date and we should support his continued efforts.
Finally, we must do more to help Iran’s “Green Movement” and promote human rights inside the regime.
The United States needs a cohesive and comprehensive strategy to promote human rights and democracy in Iran.
I believe the threat we face in Iran has a parallel to the threat we faced in the Soviet Union: a repressive dictatorship that denies its citizens basic human rights while bullying its neighbors, building nuclear weapons and threatening doom and destruction on American allies.
History teaches us how to win. In the end, we won the Cold War because we never lost the conviction of our own convictions.
It’s time for a new American strategy to promote human rights in Iran.
To start, this Administration should make human rights a central tenant of future negotiations with Iran. No meeting should go by with Iranians without an American diplomat raising the issue of human rights, specifically including the names of prisoners of conscience.
The President should speak directly and publicly to the dissidents of Iran – name their names from the White House podium – make them heroes in homes across America.
He should invite members of the Green Movement to meet with him at the White House – and if any U.S. Government official is invited to visit Iran, they should not accept the invitation unless they are secured meetings with Iranian dissidents.
Overall funding for Iran democracy promotion should be increased in a dedicated appropriations line item called Iran Freedom Support – with control of the funds transferred from the State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy.
The United States should take the lead to facilitate Green Movement conferences outside of Iran – whether in the United States or Europe.
We need an injection of creativity and originality in our international broadcasting programs. While Radio Farda continues the mission of Radio Free Europe, we should work to establish new public/private partnerships to fund independent Iranian filmmakers and producers —a new way to foster more original content. VOA Persian and Radio Farda should set up a “Green Hour” for their broadcasts and expand their interaction with Iranian dissidents.
With the recent prison sentencing of Iran’s Baha’i leadership just for practicing their religion, this mission should be personal for Illinois families.
As Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War, the President should speak out regularly about human rights abuses in Iran and make individual political prisoners household names throughout America.
For the Bahai’s in prison, I for one am not afraid to speak their names out loud:
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Raha Sabet;
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Sasan Taqva;
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Haleh Roohi;
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Fariba Kamalabadi;
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Jamaloddin Khanjani;
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Afif Naeimi;
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Saeid Rezaie;
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Behrouz Tavakkoli;
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Mahvash Sabet; and
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Vahid Tizfahm.
To these and all other political prisoners in Iran we say: American families know your struggle and we think about you everyday.
And we know this: An Iranian government that respects the rights of its own citizens will be less likely to sponsor international terrorism or seek the destruction of her neighbors.
Finally, we must continue to increase our military deterrence against Iran’s growing ballistic missile threat – so that if in the end, our diplomatic efforts are unsuccessful, the United States and our allies – especially Israel – have a bottom line.
From 2001 to 2003, I worked to provide Israel with access to “Eyes in the Sky” – real time satellite data to increase Israel’s early warning time to 12 minutes from less than one.
Eyes in the Sky established the precedent of U.S.-Israel cooperation on early warning. But it only solved one challenge: missile launch detection. It did not contribute to intercept capability.
For that, we needed to deploy a forward-based X-Band radar to Israel to maximize our intercept opportunities.
For years, Israel relied on its Green Pine radar that can only acquire missile threats at ranges up to 500 km. With such a short detection range, Israel would be forced to launch its Arrow anti-missiles before the threat missile's trajectory was accurately known.
I proposed we dramatically upgrade Israel's capability with the best the U.S. had – the X-Band (AN/TPY-2) radar. This would give our ally the ability to double the current range of its radar, sending its interceptor missiles in a far more accurate and successful direction.
After months of hard work, we finally got the X-Band delivered – the first permanent deployment of the US military to Israel. And last year, I had the chance to visit the site of the deployment.
Now we must do more.
1.
Complete the Arrow-3 missile system, to give Israel a very long range interceptor to hit the more-advanced Iranian Shahab-3 missile; and
2.
Deploy the Airborne Laser to Israel to show Iran the United States and Israel are collaborating on breakthrough technology to eliminate Iranian missiles over Iran.
Ballistic missiles are most vulnerable in their earliest stage of flight, because they are moving very slowly with a fifty-foot sheet of flame to show their location.
The Airborne Laser (ABL) will provide speed-of-light capability to destroy ballistic missiles quickly, letting the Iranians to deal with their own missile garbage as it falls back on their territory.
The ABL operates at more than 40,000 feet in altitude and can fire beyond 600 km.
On February 11th, the ABL successfully destroyed a ballistic missile over central California.
Given the existential threats posed by Iranian ballistic missiles to Israel, the United States should begin full cooperation with Israel in the Airborne Laser program.
In the end, democracies are best when they stick together. And the United States has no greater ally in the Middle East than the State of Israel. But we know that Iran’s nuclear program does not only threaten Israel – it poses a direct threat to regional stability, to Europe’s security and to the national security of the United States and our interests.
An Iranian bomb will also likely give birth to a Saudi and Egyptian bomb. In Sum, the Middle East of the future could become a chamber of horrors for the coming generation of American admirals and generals.
For too long, Administration after Administration dragged its feet on meaningful, biting sanctions. We have not brought the full weight of economic sanctions to bear to bring the Iranians to the negotiating table in a serious manner.
Time is not on our side. We must act now or suffer in a very, very dangerous brave new Middle East with Iranian nuclear weapons.
Thank you, God bless you and God bless the United States of America.
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