WhirledView

Attitudes Change

by Cheryl Rofer

Nuclear weapons were first developed in the 1940s. The Soviet Union detonated its first in 1949. With the development of thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s, the arms race was on. The United States had one big enemy and big weapons. So did that enemy.

Early on, some strategists recognized that these big weapons were so destructive that they could never be used in a military exchange. But new things are intriguing, the dangers of Soviet expansionism were real, as was the irreconcilability of two big worldviews. So many in the military saw nuclear weapons as something that could and, under appropriate conditions, should be used. Books were written about strike and counterstrike, deterrence, first use; how-to guides for nuclear war. Better dead than Red, the saying went, recognizing that the end state might be everyone dead.

Errol Morris, director of the film “The Fog of War,” an extended interview with Robert McNamara, reminds us of those times. He quotes General Buck Turgidson in “Doctor Strangelove”: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed” as Turgidson suggests a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union to mitigate its reaction to the dropping of a hydrogen bomb by a single, partly disabled B-52 headed toward its target.

The reason “Doctor Strangelove” spoke to the times was that it was easy to imagine generals like Turgidson and the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper. It was easy to imagine nuclear war being evoked so casually. The remarks of the real, non-movie-character General Curtis LeMay in the daily newspaper were all too similar. The drills for schoolchildren, the fallout shelters, all testified to the societal belief that a nuclear war might be fought. The movie’s release in 1964 was an early indication that nuclear war might be becoming genuinely unthinkable. Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense in 1961.

Iraq: The Long Goodbye

By Bill Stewart

The captains and the kings have not yet left, but we are beginning to say goodbye to Iraq. Last week American troops in Baghdad and other big cities began their withdrawal to safer compounds. There they will stay, beyond the reach of suicide bombers, roadside bombs and the deadly fire of snipers hidden on city rooftops. Unless they are called out in an emergency. Even so, four more Americans were killed in Baghdad that day, while scores of Iraqis were later killed up north in Mosul and Kirkuk. In other words, the war is not yet over, and Iraq is still not a safe place. And American troops may yet return to the cities if the Iraqi armed forces should prove unequal to the task. Most Americans believe this war was unnecessary, a war of choice that should never have been fought. Barack Obama began his presidential campaign on this theme. He promised a withdrawal that would be as responsible as our going to war was irresponsible. We have yet to see how this will play out, but the first step has been taken. Obama has promised that by August 2010 - fourteen months from now - all American combat troops will be out of Iraq, and that by 2011, all American troops will have left.

And then what? We are not sure as Americans what kind of legacy we will leave behind. President George Bush and his neoconservative supporters were convinced we would be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators. We had, after all, freed Iraqis from the iron grip of Saddam Hussein, perhaps the most feared man in the Middle East. That turned out to be wrong. Most Iraqis saw us as conquerors, the latest in a long line. But even if they were glad Saddam was gone, they were also apprehensive. The destruction of the old Iraq revealed the deep ethnic, religious and tribal divisions that were always under the surface. Saddam had kept them in check with a ruthless military and intelligence machine. In his absence, the divisions between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, Baathist and Islamist were suddenly revealed. The country plunged into bloody civil war pitting Shia against Sunni, Jihadi against a struggling new government, and the whole lot seemingly against the US. But would it be even worse if US troops left? On the last day of the US military presence in Baghdad, Iraqis were celebrating in the streets. Prime MInister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki declared June 30 to be a day of "feasts and festivals." Among the cheers, however, could be heard the explosions of car bombs. It wasn't over yet.

Some things have gone right. There have been several free elections producing a new government. The US "surge" in troops, combined with a political understanding with the main Sunni tribes largely restored peace in the streets of Baghdad. That is a major achievement, one that will be sorely tested in the weeks and months to come. But free elections alone do not produce a democracy. It takes a social and political compact on agreed norms and procedures to allow a democracy to take root and flourish. That has yet to happen. Politicians and the people they represent still think in tribal, ethnic and religious terms, not in national, Iraqi terms. There is still no agreement on how to share the oil revenues, the country's main source of wealth. There is a deep mistrust among the Shia political leadership, which heads up the country, of the Sunni establishment, now in a minority, but accustomed to centuries of political dominance. Reconciling the two is possible, but immensely difficult. The US has helped to establish the means for the two to meet, another major achievement, but beyond that we can do little or nothing. That is up to the Iraqis.

This is a time of testing for an as yet largely untested Iraqi army. They have the men and increasingly the equipment. But do they have the will? That is the one component that the US cannot supply. Similarly, can the Iraqi people summon the will to live together? Can Iraqi politicians rise above their sectarian rivalries? Iraqi unity is beyond the power of the US to accomplish. But we have made a move in the right direction.

On Parenting Teens

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A few days ago the local daily front paged a midnight horror: an accident involving five teens in a car hit by an apparently drunk driver speeding down the wrong lane.   Four of the teens were dead.  One was in the hospital in critical condition.  The driver was just sixteen.  Three passengers were sixteen; one was fifteen.  The kids were heading for a party in a community about eight miles east of Santa Fe.  By the time they’d be driving home it would be, say, 2 am?

As some associates and I discussed this tragedy,  I began to have a sinking feeling.  “Is there a parenting issue here?” I wondered out loud.  Immediately I was assailed.  How callous of me to blame the victims.

Not at all  The probably (since proved)  drunk driver had indubitably caused the accident as such.  But, I found myself thinking, maybe those kids shouldn't have been on the road in the first place.  Did the accident have contributing factors relating to driver inexperience, teenage distractability  and (especially) parental dereliction of duty?   In short: were there lessons to be learned for the benefit of other kids?

A subsequent news article observed that, if the drivers saw one another at 50 yards apart at a speed of 50 mph (the legal limit on the fatal road), the girl who was driving had one second to react.  She also needed to know that the best tactic for such circumstances is to veer right, onto the shoulder or into a bush, because the other driver usually veers toward his proper lane—if and when he realizes what’s happening. 

But the teen driver was only sixteen, which means her driving experience, especially her night driving experience, was extremely limited.  Worse, as it turned out in subsequent news stories, she had only a provisional license.  In New Mexico that means no driving between midnight and five in the morning and no driving (without an adult present) more than one passenger under the age of 18 at any time of day or night.   Why, then, did her parents give her to keys to the car? 

No teen driver ever admits to insufficient experience.  Every teen promises to be careful.  But developmental physiologists have now determined that the brain is not fully mature until around 20 years of age.  Judgment is the skill that’s last to develop.  Even without that relevant bit of into, who among us expects a 16 year old driving a car full of friends to a party in the middle of the night to have her eyes on the road and her mind on the driving task every second of every mile?  

So what on earth can the five sets of parents in this case have been thinking about?  A bunch of giddy girls out partying—in a car illegally driven by a 16 year old chum—at midnight and later?  Given the circumstances, I needn’t  speculate about the likelihood of drinks and dope at a late-starting party and how that would affect home driving ability, but surely it should have had a bearing on the parents’ decision-making processes.

No!  I don’t blame the victims.  I mourn them.  I blame the parents.  Those girls should have been coming home at midnight, not heading out to a(nother) party.  Clearly it was time when parents should have set limits—even if they'd had to endure indignant daughters saying, “Everyone does it!” or  “I hate you! I hate you!”

Unresolved in Iran

by Cheryl Rofer and Patricia H. Kushlis

Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, was kind enough to participate in a conference call with bloggers today. He wanted to emphasize, that, although the demonstrations have quieted down, the movement hasn’t ended and the election results are not yet resolved.

In contrast, John Bolton is willing to ratify the victory of his alleged enemy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so that he may give the Israelis the go-ahead for (you guessed it) bombing Iran.

It’s easy to cover a demonstration of thousands or hostile words from one person or another, but Parsi emphasized the power of the quiet, patient approach that the Obama administration has taken toward Iran. An external threat always unites a country. When the head of another country, such as President Bush, threatens regime change, even the internal opponents of a regime have to mute their criticisms lest they open their country to a greater external threat. Obama’s statements of mutual respect, Parsi said, dissolves the “glue” that the regime change rhetoric provides.

If we want to see dissent in Iran censor itself, Bolton’s bluster is the way to go. But President Obama is smarter than that.

Bolton makes much of Iran’s nuclear program, his motivator for attack. Parsi said that there is no information that the nuclear program has slowed down, nor would one expect the election to have that effect. If Mousavi were president, he has said that he would continue the civilian program, but Parsi said it is likely that Mousavi would try to build confidence in the world community that the program was indeed for civilian power, probably by re-implementing the Additional Protocol Iran has signed and which allows more intrusive IAEA inspections. Iran would likely want something in return for this, perhaps moving consideration of its nuclear program back to the International Atomic Energy Agency from the United Nations Security Council.

CKR has speculated, although not at WhirledView, that there might be a faction of engineers and scientists in Iran’s nuclear program who very much want to build a bomb. There were such factions in Israel, in India, and in Pakistan as their nuclear programs developed. Those factions took advantage of political confusion or unrest in those countries to press their cases. Parsi confirmed that such a faction exists in Iran. Their case is very much strengthened by the neocons’ bluster.

The dissidents in Iran continue their resistance. The election is not yet a done deal. It remains difficult to get information from Iran. Bolton, as usual, has it wrong.

Many thanks to Kombiz Lavasany for organizing the call.

Getting It Wrong

by Cheryl Rofer

Here's a crabby post to start your Monday morning wrong. If you are having a bad Monday, don't click on the links. They'll make it worse.

But I found these three articles so egregiously wrong, I wanted to say something about them. Unfortunately (or maybe happily), I don't have time to work through them in detail. Maybe Tuesday will be better.

It's Not the Religion, Fareed!
I like much of what Fareed writes, but here he's reeeaaaaccchhhing for a way to distinguish the people in Iran's streets today from the people in Estonia's streets in 1989. And the other countries that emerged from Communist rule in 1989-1991. He looks around, and finds...religion! The parallels of those countries to Iran fail for a number of reasons. It was an external power, Russian Communism, that held sway in a colonial fashion. Those countries had reasonably well-developed political movements with clear paths of the insurgents to power. Religion was used in Poland as a lever, but it was much weaker in other places. That's why I've gone back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an analogy. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than the revolutions of 1989-1991.

Because They're Illegal, That's Why!
Jackson Diehl insists this morning that President Obama go back to business as usual with Israel.

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.

The gesture has been made, time to return to hypocrisy.

Diehl ignores the UN resolutions and international law on the settlements to argue that they are a trivial bit of fluff that don't matter, and anyway if Israel makes any concessions, the Palestinians won't. And Obama will have to back down and lose face. But perhaps not. A competing newspaper reports this morning that Israel may put some sort of freeze in place; not exactly what the administration is asking for, but more than Israel would have done without the pressure. And we'll see where it goes from here.

Ross Douthat's Reckless Romance
This one is just plain sexism. But what can we expect from the New York Times's pet conservative man? Douthat finds the last week to have been a good one for reckless romance.

The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

Um, Ross, those are all guys breaking up their marriages. Romance has some mutuality to it, and I can't see any of the women involved in those scenarios feeling particularly good just now. But reckless romance rules in Ross's fantasyland. Oh well, he's the guy who thought that cartoon character had to be male. I saw her as female, myself. Who else would have to correct all the guys who are getting it wrong on the internet? (That last one is safe to click.)

Whither Iran

By: Bill Stewart

The Islamic Republic of Iran is no longer a theocracy; it has become a military dictatorship. Iran was never a democracy, not even under the Shah. But much of its current institutional framework could be made to work as one. Parliament was freely elected, as was the presidency. The problem has been that there is an unelected religious framework that runs parallel to, around and through the elected secular institutions. In practice, it is this unelected body of mullahs and clerics who have the final say in all matters secular and religious.

At the top has been the Supreme Leader, chosen for life, who is thought to be - and sees himself - as God's spokesman and guardian of the principles of Shia Islam. In short, he plays the role of an all-powerful medieval pope, or an equally powerful medieval Caliph. He cannot be disobeyed. Just below him stands the 12-member Council of Guardians, which can veto any law and any candidate for parliament or the presidency. The Supreme Leader and the Guardians have played their respective roles with increasing abandon, convinced they are right because, in the name of God, they are doing God's work. We have our own examples in western history. Remember the Divine Right of Kings? In the long sweep of history, that was not so long ago. Even today, in matters of faith and morals, the pope is deemed to be infallible. The difference is that today, one does not get bloodied by the pope or his guardians for daring to disagree. That was not always the case.

Do Pictures Lie?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Not exactly.  But our interpretations may be way way off.

Look at this photo.  Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari is extending two hands and he’s smiling—grinning really, as if he’s trying hard to be agreeable. He wants to be friends, and he wants the camera to get this.  But Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, apparently isn’t buying it.  His body is rigid.  He’s allowing, just barely, his hand to be grasped.  The absolute diplomatic minimum.  Aha! I thought, when I first saw this photo, a wonderfully graphic indication that Singh and India want as little as possible to do with Pakistan, until Pakistan takes stronger action against those behind the murderous rampage in Mumbai last year. 

So that’s how I was going to play it when I was writing my post on Pride and Paralysis.  

Fortunately before I’d posted that draft, I came across another photo, this one of all the principals at the BRIC conference in Russia.  Look at Manmohan Singh, who has no reason to be conveying anything negative in this situation.  The same aloof body posture.  That now familiar, seemingly reluctant participation in the rite when all the others are reaching eagerly into a two handed press-the-flesh fest for photographers.   (This time, of course, there is a ghost of a smile, which may or may not mean anything. )

So I advance another hypothesis, which I’ll share with you.  Manmohan Singh does what’s necessary, diplomatically, but maybe he really doesn’t like handshakes.  As an Indian of the old school, he may prefer a namaste.  Folded hands.  Gentle reserve.  No physical contact.

But that, too, is only a guess.

Photo Credits:  The Hindu; The New York Times.

No Time for Pride and Paralysis

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari met with India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Yekaterinberg, Russia, during the BRIC talks. The two agreed to meet again at the next non-aligmned summit, in Egypt, in July.  Between then and now their foreign secretaries will consider how to approach the topic of terrorism. 

One hopes they’ll converge on one word: cooperatively. 

The forty minute private encounter in Yekaterinberg was the first significant Pak-India meeting since the three-day bloody rampage in Mumbai last November, concerning which the Indians are still  not satisfied with Islamabad’s response.  By the time the bloodbath was over, 173 people had been murdered, 308 wounded.  One attacker survived.  Without him, it would have been much harder for the Indians to get Pakistan to acknowledge the minimum: the attackers had set off from Pakistan.  Cell phone records and evidence found in the attackers’ abandoned boats also pointed to Pakistan.  For once, after an ugly terrorist attack on India, Pakistan was well and truly on the spot, and Mohammad Saeed, head of a madrassa and charity that is coterminous with Lashkar-e-Taiba, which launched the attacks, was taken into custody—and then released.  Attack planners Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and Zarar Shah are still “in custody,” but not incommunicado.  “They may even be planning the next big attack on India,” speculates Indrani Bagchi in The Times of India.  

Given the extreme provocation, the Indians, official and otherwise, were remarkably restrained in word and deed.  Even the BJP, the opposition Hindu Nationalist Party, declined to exploit the incident.  But Pakistan has not followed up on promises to act decisively if compelling evidence were presented.  Unfortunately,  compelling for India is not necessarily compelling for Pakistan.  No one has been charged.  No trials are on the horizon—not even now, when Pakistan has declared itself at  war against the Taliban within its borders. 

Zardari is said to have told Singh in Russia that

he was battling the Taliban in NWFP and FATA in a bruising operation, which was creating millions of refugees and opening old ethnic faultlines, particularly Sindh and southern Punjab.  He said he didn’t think Pakistan could open another front just yet.  Even so, Indian officials say Pakistan they [sic] will have to take some steps for India to walk the extra mile. 

Indeed, a crux approaches.  If Pakistan is to overcome fierce, well-armed Taliban forces determined to clamp their severe way of life on all of Pakistan, the military will need to assign every possible soldier to the battle. Yet most of Pakistan’s military might has been arrayed along the Indian border, despite the millions the U.S. has funneled into Pakistan, having been assured of strong cooperation in the campaign against Al Qaeda and its Pakistani sympathizers.  Until recently, even General Kayani, whose ascension to Chief of General Staff when Pervez Musharraf finally took off the uniform was greeted with some optimism by the U.S., seems to have been fence-sitting. 

Tweetering to a Fall

By: Bill Stewart

Hundreds of thousands of people have been demonstrating in the streets of Tehran this week, and perhaps in other Iranian cities as well. Because of a government news blackout of the demonstrations, we simply don't have very much information. Much of what we do know comes from the crowds who have been text messaging each other as well as the outside world, and the use of amateur cell phone videos. What we see is what the demonstrators have sent us. The crowds are young; indeed more than 50 percent of Iranians are under 25. So far, the Iranian government seems at a loss, refusing to accept the demands of the protestors for new elections, but also unable to stop the demonstrations, at least stop them without massive bloodshed. This is the greatest Iranian crisis in 30 years, when the Shah was deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to create the Islamic Republic.

It is clear that a titanic struggle is underway for the future of the country. Islam itself is not an issue, as some of those leading the crowds are ardent Muslins themselves. The crisis has moved beyond a dispute over election results to a struggle over the balance of power in the country and Iran 's future orientation. There is a deepening split in the country's governing elite and institutions. On the one hand are the religious, social and political conservatives, who fear rapid social change and cling to an angry confrontation with the West, especially over nuclear issues. They include the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and much of the religious and military establishment. They would seem to be invincible, and yet they are not. The conservatives remember only too well the crowds of students and others in the streets of Tehran in 1979 that brought down the Shah, who also seemed invincible as he controlled the more obvious levers of power. Indeed, many elderly clerics, including the Supreme Leader himself, were instrumental in the move to get rid of the Shah and install the Ayatollah Khomeini. Moreover, there are the recent "rose" and "yellow" revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, popular movements that began in the streets and eventually got rid of oppressive governments in those countries. The rulers in Tehran know this only too well. And yet the Supreme Leader has vigorously endorsed Ahmadinejad as the winner and called for an end to the demonstrations with threats of violence. So far, his threats have fallen on largely deaf ears.

On the other hand are the reformers, whose principal leader at the moment is former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Musavi. He is no flaming liberal, and at one time was a political and social conservative. But he is well remembered for his adroit handling of the Iranian economy in the 1980s, and in his subsequent years out of office as an architect and professor, he seems to have mellowed. Moreover, he is married to Zahra Rahnavard, the popular former chancellor of Alzahra University and a close advisor to former President Mohammad Khatami, a definite reformist, whose many attempts at political and social reform were thwarted by the ultra conservative Guardian Council, the body that is Iran's political, religious and social watchdog. They have banned many of the country's principal reformers from standing for office.

The principal thing to note about Musavi is that while he supports Iran's nuclear program - indeed he virtually began it - he appears willing to discuss it with the west and perhaps come to some sort of compromise. That alone makes him deeply suspect in the eyes of the hardliners, especially Ahmadinejad. There is also a lot of discontent over the economy and the country's tenuous living standards. The economic situation alone makes Musavi attractive to middle class voters. Moreover, there is a growing discontent among women -the majority of voters - about restrictions placed upon them by an increasingly religious and conservative government. They don't like it and they want a roll-back. Ahmadinejad, however, appeals to the poor and the religiously conservative. We need to bear in mind that it is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad actually won the June 12 election. What has called the results into question is the super-swift government counting of the vote that gave Ahmadinejad a two-thirds majority, even in such places as Tabriz, Mousavi' home town. That would be like President Barack Obama losing the African-American vote. Possible? Yes. Likely? No.

Mousavi insists upon a brand-new election and no mere partial recount as offered by the Supreme Leader. He is determined to avoid the kind of provocation that could bring down on the crowds in the streets - and on himself as well - the full force of the government. That force is formidable, especially the 125,000 member Revolutionary Guard and its auxiliary, the Basij militia, both defenders of the Islamic revolution. On the other hand, it is not known whether these forces would actually fire upon their fellow citizens if push came to shove. The governing conservative establishment remembers from its own experience in combating the Shah, that military power can be an illusion when fighting people in the street.

There are many possible outcomes from the present crisis, which is why it is essential for President Obama to move carefully. So far he has resisted the siren calls from our own conservatives to rally overtly behind the Iranian demonstrators. That is precisely what he must not do until matters are clarified. At the end of the day, he must deal with whatever government is in power. Momentous events are underway, and we do not yet know their outcome.

Bits and Pieces - Nuclear Good News Edition

by Cheryl Rofer

President Barack Obama's speech in Prague on April 5 has started the ball rolling. It's rolling slowly, but we can expect it to pick up speed.

In response to Obama's speech in Cairo, Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said that Indonesia will ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when the United States does. It's not unusual for nations to tie themselves in this way to a more powerful nation's actions. It gives their politicians cover against the nay-sayers. And having nations say that their ratification depends on America's gives a bit more encouragement to the US Senate.

During the unveiling of Ronald Reagan's statue in the Capitol, Senator John McCain recalled Reagan's desire to eliminate nuclear weapons and pledged himself to that goal with words very similar to President Obama's. He added in a bit about getting tougher with North Korea and Iran, but he probably needed to in order to continue to be considered a Republican by his fellow party members.

And the United Nations Conference on Disarmament formed a working group to negotiate a treaty banning the production of fissionable material for nuclear weapons and another to discuss preventing an arms race in outer space. The Conference on Disarmament has been almost moribund for the past decade, so two working groups is quite impressive. They're not likely to move fast, but at least they won't have John Bolton throwing rotten tomatoes at them.