Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

Winning on Ballistic Missiles but Losing on Cruise: The Missile Proliferation Battle

Arms Control Today
By Dennis M. Gormley
December 2009

Because Europe and the U.S. forces based there face a near-term ballistic missile threat, President Barack Obama’s decision to abandon a Bush-era missile defense plan makes good sense. In contrast to President George W. Bush’s approach, which focused primarily on a few potential ICBMs, Obama’s is more suited to Iran’s growing arsenal of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

The Obama decision also provides an opportunity to reflect on how the ballistic missile threat has evolved over the last 25 years. There is reason to believe that missile nonproliferation policies have contributed to preventing the flow of specialized skills and technologies that are critical to enabling the leap from medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles to intercontinental ones. This success has been reinforced by U.S. ballistic missile defenses, which have kept pace with the way the ballistic missile threat from Iran and North Korea has emerged thus far.

Yet, the situation with regard to cruise missile proliferation is different. Cruise missile nonproliferation policies are less potent, and defenses are woefully inadequate, which may explain the sudden outbreak of cruise missile proliferation in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and South Asia. Unless the Obama administration focuses on making missile controls, which are the primary focus of this article, and missile defenses function in tandem to address the threats from both ballistic and cruise missiles, the overall missile threat to U.S. interests could severely worsen in the years ahead. …

Read the full article: www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_12/Gormley

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Obama moves ahead with AFRICOM

Pambazuka News
Daniel Volman
December 10, 2009

Concerned over the supply of oil to the US and a supposed need to continue the global ‘War on Terror’, President Barack Obama has essentially maintained the militarised approach to Africa that was the hallmark of his immediate predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, writes Daniel Volman. The escalation of AFRICOM (United States African Command) activities, argues Volman, underlines a troubling commitment to an approach based on might and dominance, one entirely at the expense of promoting sustainable economic development and democracy.

In his 11 July 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, US President Barack Obama declared, ‘America has a responsibility to advance this vision, not just with words, but with support that strengthens African capacity. When there is genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems – they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response. That is why we stand ready to partner through diplomacy, technical assistance, and logistical support, and will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable. Our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world.’

And yet all the available evidence demonstrates that he is determined to continue the expansion of US military activity on the continent initiated by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and dramatically escalated by President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. …

The clearest indication of President Obama’s intentions for AFRICOM (United States African Command) and for America’s military involvement in Africa is provided by the budget requests for the 2010 financial year submitted by the Departments of State and Defense to Congress in May 2009. The State Department budget request – which includes funding for all US arms sales, military training, and other security assistance programmes – proposes major increases in funding for US arms sales to a number of African countries through the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme. The budget proposes to increase FMF funding for sub-Saharan African counties more than 300 per cent, from just over US$8.2 million to more than US$25.5 million, with additional increases in funding for Maghrebi countries. …

The same trend is evident in the Obama administration’s request for funding for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) programme. The budget request for the IMET programme proposes to increase funding for African countries by nearly 17 per cent …

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/60921

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After war, security

Open Democracy
Paul Rogers
December 10, 2009

The war on terror has been a disaster. But out of its ashes a deeper understanding of global security capable of addressing real 21st-century threats may emerge.

The days since Barack Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 1 December 2009 have allowed the immediate response to the new United States strategy in Afghanistan to settle. Many analysts note the risks that a military “surge” in Afghanistan entails; the considerable differences between Afghanistan and Iraq (and the severe doubts over the real impact of the surge there, as evidenced by the bombing in Baghdad on 8 December that killed around 127 people); and the regional linkages which make the outcome of the Afghan war inseparable from what happens across the border in Pakistan.

At the same time, a few observers point out that in coming to his long-awaited decision Obama is at every point burdened and constrained by the fact that he inherited a war of (by the time of his inauguration) seven years’ duration from George W Bush – and that this explains in great part the difficulties that the United States and its coalition partners now face (see “Afghanistan: new strategy, old problem”, 7 December 2009). The ninth year of the war is well underway, and – though Obama hopes to be able to start a drawdown of American troop numbers in 2011, following the deployment of 30,000 more in 2010 – there is every indication that their involvement will stretch over many more years.

A fantasy project

It is indeed hard to overstate the importance of the George W Bush administration’s legacy – in particular, to three key early errors it made in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001:

• it saw al-Qaida as a global enemy worthy of a war, instead of an example of brutal transnational criminality – albeit rooted in a perverse interpretation of one of the world’s main religious faiths
• it failed to help Afghanistan, in the vital 2001-02 period, make some kind of transition to a stable country when that was still possible
• it invaded and occupied Iraq.

…

Read on: www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/after-war-security

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Message to Obama: You Can’t Have Muhammad Ali

Huffington Post
Dave Zirin
December 7, 2009

On November 19th, President Barack Obama wrote a stirring tribute in USA Today to the most famous draft resister in US history, Muhammad Ali. On Tuesday, Obama spoke at West Point, calling for an increase of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, with a speech that recalled the worst shadings of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

On November 19th, Obama wrote about why Ali’s photo hangs over his desk, praising “The Greatest” for “his unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way.” On Tuesday, Obama showed neither courage nor strength but the worst kind of imperial arrogance. He asserted America’s right to go into a deeply impoverished country that — from Alexander the Great to the USSR to today — has made clear to the world’s empires that it wants to be left the hell alone.

On Tuesday, Obama summoned the spectre of 9/11 and said, “It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united — bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear.” He didn’t mention how many innocent Afghans had already died in eight years of “horrific attacks” on their homeland or how many would die in the months ahead, defending their own homeland.

On November 19th, Obama praised Ali as “a force for reconciliation and peace around the world.” On Tuesday the Nobel Peace Prize winner reconciled himself with war.

Would that Muhammad Ali still had his voice. Would that Parkinson’s disease and dementia had not robbed us of his razor-sharp tongue.

Today, Ali has been described as “America’s only living saint.” But like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, both postage stamps before people, Ali has had his political teeth extracted.

But in a time when billions go to war and prisons while 50% of children will be on food stamps for the coming year, we can’t afford Ali, the harmless icon. Maybe Muhammad Ali has been robbed of speech, but I think we can safely guess what the Champ would say in the face of Obama’s war. We can safely guess, because he said it perfectly four decades ago:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here….. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

Replace Vietnam with Afghanistan and it’s a message Barack Obama and our troops need to hear. …

www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-zirin/message-to-obama-you-cant_3_b_378429.html

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Barack Obama: imperial president, post-American world

Open Democracy
Godfrey Hodgson
December 7, 2009

There is an increasing mismatch between the demands on the American presidency and the realities that constrain it…

Every president of the United States has to play chess on more than one board at a time. The difference between Barack Obama and his predecessors is that, in a multipolar world of 24/7 media, he is obliged to play blitz-chess.

Dwight D Eisenhower had to deal with the crises of Suez and Hungary within a few months of each other in 1956. Lyndon B Johnson had to manage the civil-rights convulsion and the Vietnam war in the same period (for example, the assault of peaceful black protesters by state-troopers with electric cattle-prods and whips in Selma, Alabama on 7 March 1965 was followed the very next day by the historic landing of US marines at Danang, Vietnam).

The pace speeded up in subsequent decades. Now it is relentless. Barack Obama is playing on half-a-dozen boards simultaneously, with the clock ticking. The most benign description of this game is blitz-chess, though it is also known as bullet-chess and – a touch more ominously – as Armageddon. …

The events of the last weeks alone illustrate the sheer range and intensity of the pressures on the man reputed to be the most powerful on the planet. He has been engaging in extended agonising with his advisers about the future of American military strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan; visited east Asia to reaffirm the United States’s commitment to regional security there (and, in the case of Beijing, “to see his bank manager” as one satirist put it); had to cope with rebuffs by Israel (over West Bank settlements) and Iran (over a possible nuclear deal); and is soon to fly to Copenhagen to declare the US’s commitment in the global effort to address the climate-change peril. …

www.opendemocracy.net/godfrey-hodgson/barack-obama-imperial-president-post-american-world

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Afghanistan: new strategy, old problem

Open Democracy
Paul Rogers
December 3, 2009

Barack Obama’s fresh military approach in Afghanistan may only compound the United States’s predicament there – and postpone the moment for the hardest choice of all.

Barack Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 1 December 2009 ended the lengthy process of internal discussion within his administration about future strategy in Afghanistan by committing 30,000 more American troops to the country over the next few months – which would bring the total there to almost 100,000 (along with 34,000 from other Nato countries after their further deployment of 5,000 additional soldiers). This outcome may bear the stamp of the new United States president, but it also reflects in good part the appalling legacy left to him by George W Bush. For the ingredients of the US dilemma span both administrations: among them the way that the near-doubling of foreign combat-troops in Afghanistan in 2007-09 has actually been accompanied by an increase in resistance and in the territory the insurgents control.

Indeed, across many parts of Afghanistan the insurgency now stretches far beyond Taliban paramilitaries to involve many other militias. This is so much the case that opposition to the foreign military presence is now close to being an insurrection – which also targets the corrupt government that depends on this presence for its own survival. …

The new approach from Washington would have to overcome four severe problems if it is to work. First, the extensive corruption within the regime of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is well established – and has become such an embarrassment to his western backers that they have been forced to raise the tone of rhetorical outrage over the issue. …

Second, efforts to train the Afghan security forces. … The upgrading of the Afghan army (whose current nominal strength is 94,000) has been severely compromised by the lack of an officer corps, and by the loss – through desertions or resignations – of a quarter of the entire force in a single year; meanwhile, many members of the police service are inefficient and corrupt, or infiltrated by Taliban and other militias. …

Third, the situation across the border in Pakistan is unstable. The military there may have been trying to curb the power of its own militants, but its inability to complete the task means that – as so often before – it will be forced into making deals (formal or informal) to create breathing-space. …

Fourth, Barack Obama’s administration is in something of a domestic vice: caught between Democrats opposed to the war, Republicans who speak of appeasement if withdrawal is even mentioned (and even invoke the Vietnam-era canard that an “unleashed” military could have secured victory), and a population that is losing faith in the Afghan project. …

www.opendemocracy.net/content/afghanistan-new-strategy-old-problem

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Pentagon seeks to build airborne infrared sensor for ballistic missile defense

Military & Aerospace Electronics Online Article
by John Keller
November 22, 2009

Leaders of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) in Washington are trying to develop an airborne infrared sensor system within the next five years that is capable of tracking and intercepting enemy ballistic missiles in boost phase at or near engine burnout. …

Click here to play video

http://mae.pennnet.com/display_article/371103/32/NEWS/none/none/1/Pentagon-seeks-to-build-airborne-infrared-sensor-for-ballistic-missile-defense-within-five-years/

Please watch the video and remember that Missile Defense is an offensive system.

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US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America

The Independent
November 22, 2009
By Hugh O’Shaughnessy

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The development – and the reaction of Latin American leaders to it – is further exacerbating America’s already fractured relationship with much of the continent.

The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington’s political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month.

So Washington turned to Colombia, which has not gone down well in the region. The country has received military aid worth $4.6bn (£2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record. Colombian forces regularly kill the country’s indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbour, Ecuador, causing at least 17 deaths. …

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-builds-up-its-bases-in-oilrich-south-america-1825398.html

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Unsettling Revelations Regarding U.S. Lease of Colombian Military Bases

Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)
by COHA Research Associate Christina Esquivel

On Friday, October 30, U.S. and Colombian officials signed the controversial Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA), granting the U.S. armed forces access to seven Colombian military bases for the next ten years… many policymakers throughout the hemisphere are now grappling with the reality of a heightened U.S. military presence in South America.

Though details were not released to the public prior to the signing of the agreement, official statements from both governments have continuously affirmed that the leased facilities would be exclusively used to support counternarcotic and counterinsurgency initiatives within Colombia. However, a recently publicized U.S. Air Force document presents a far more ominous explanation for massive congressional funding for the forthcoming military construction at the Colombian bases. It emphasizes the “opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America” against threats not only from drug trafficking and guerrilla movements, but also from “anti-U.S. governments” in the region.

www.coha.org/unsettling-revelations-regarding-u-s-lease-of-colombian-military-bases/

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Gorbachev Says Obama Should Start Afghan Withdrawal

Bloomberg.com
By Chris Burns and Patrick Donahue
November 10, 2009

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, drawing on his experience of military failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the U.S. can’t win the conflict there and should begin pulling out its soldiers.

Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban-led insurgency, is too fragmented between clans to be controlled militarily, Gorbachev, 78, said in an interview today in Berlin. While he said President Barack Obama would be unlikely to take his advice, Gorbachev said he saw no chance of success even with more U.S. troops.

“I believe that there is no prospect of a military solution,” Gorbachev said in Russian through a translator. “What we need is the reconciliation of Afghan society — and they should be preparing the ground for withdrawal rather than additional troops.” …

www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aP_6NUKjFaSM

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AFRICOM and America’s Global Military Agenda: Taking The Helm Of The Entire World

War on you
by Rick Rozoff

“The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa….[A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention.”

“AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe.”

October 1st marked the one-year anniversary of the activation of the first U.S. overseas military command in a quarter of a century, Africa Command (AFRICOM). …

Its area of responsibility includes more nations – 53 – than any other U.S. military command. By way of comparison, EUCOM includes 51 nations, among which are 19 new nations emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and the reunification of Germany.

The Pacific Command (PACOM) incorporates 36 countries in its theater of operations, down four since the creation of AFRICOM.

Central Command (CENTCOM) currently includes 20 nations in what is referred to as the Broader Middle East.

Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) covers 32 states, 19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean, of which 14 are U.S. and European territories.

AFRICOM is also the only new U.S. regional military command absorbing nations formerly in other commands; in fact in all other commands outside the Western Hemisphere. …

Africa is … the first new continent targeted by the Pentagon for a comprehensive military structure, as the U.S. created comparable commands in Asia, Europe and Latin America after World War II and during the Cold War and had fought wars in all three areas by 1918. With the exception of the bombing of Libya in 1986 and military operations in Somalia in the early 1990s and by proxy since 2006, Africa has to date escaped direct American military intervention. And until the acquisition of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti in early 2001, before September 11, there was no permanent U.S. military installation on the continent.

The beginning of AFRICOM’s second year has witnessed major military exercises on the western and eastern ends of the continent. …

http://waronyou.com/topics/africom-and-americas-global-military-agenda-taking-the-helm-of-the-entire-world/

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AfPak-Iraq: wrong war, right path

Open Democracy
Paul Rogers
October 29, 2009

The United States faces mounting problems in the three leading conflict-zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. The escape-route lies not in military escalation but in a change of thinking.

The term “global war on terror” has long since been dropped from the United States’s official vocabulary. The phrase that came to be proposed as a replacement even when George W Bush was still in office, the “long war”, has similarly fallen by the wayside, to be succeeded in March 2009 by a less overtly combative Pentagon formulation: “overseas contingency operation”. But it is easier for the Barack Obama administration to redefine the conflict it is involved in than to change the bleak current reality in three main flashpoints – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq …

The term “global war on terror” has long since been dropped from the United States’s official vocabulary. The phrase that came to be proposed as a replacement even when George W Bush was still in office, the “long war”, has similarly fallen by the wayside, to be succeeded in March 2009 by a less overtly combative Pentagon formulation: “overseas contingency operation”. But it is easier for the Barack Obama administration to redefine the conflict it is involved in than to change the bleak current reality in three main flashpoints – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq …

In Afghanistan … the war is continuing to spread to previously peaceful areas. United States forces are suffering relentless casualties … after the United States withdrew troops from four bases in Nuristan province in northeast Afghanistan (and adjacent to Pakistan), it has effectively fallen under the control of a Taliban network.

The implication of these trends is that a transition from insurgency to a broader insurrection may be occurring – and that deploying even more American and allied troops (as Barack Obama and his advisers are currently discussing) risks increasing rather than diminishing the military challenge …

Some US military and political officers on the ground are beginning to register these dynamics. Matthew Hoh, a senior US state department official and former marine who was based until recently in Zabul province, explained his resignation on 10 September 2009 by referring to his experiences in the Korengal valley and elsewhere. These, he is reported as saying, “taught him ‘how localised the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometres away.’ Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases. ‘That’s really what shook me,’ he said. ‘I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism'”.

Read the full article: www.opendemocracy.net/article/afghanistan/afpak-iraq-wrong-war-right-path

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U.S. Forcibly Deported Islanders, Gassed their Dogs to Make Way for Diego Garcia Military Base

In order to convert the sleepy, Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia into a dominating military base, the U.S. forcibly transported its 2,000 Chagossian inhabitants into exile and gassed their dogs.

By banning journalists from the area, the U.S. Navy was able to perpetrate this with virtually no press coverage, says David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University and author of “Island of Shame: the Secret History of the U.S. Military on Diego Garcia(Princeton University Press).” …

“The Chagossians were put on a boat and taken to Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles away, where they were left on the docks, with no money and no housing, to fend for themselves,” Vine said on the interview show “Books Of Our Time,” sponsored by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

“They were promised jobs that never materialized. They had been living on an island with schools, hospitals, and full employment, sort of like a French coastal village, and they were consigned to a life of abject poverty in exile, unemployment, health problems, and were the poorest of the poor,” Vine told interview host Lawrence Velvel, dean of the law school.

Their pet dogs were rounded up and gassed, and their bodies burned, before the very eyes of their traumatized owners, Vine said.

“They were moved because they were few in number and not white,” Vine added. The U.S. government circulated the fiction the Chagossians were transient contract workers that had taken up residence only recently but, in fact, they had been living on Diego Garcia since about the time of the American Revolution. Merchants had imported them to work on the coconut and copra plantations. Vine said the U.S. government induced The Washington Post not to break a story spelling out events on the island.

“Through Diego Garcia,” Vine pointed out, “the U.S. can project its power throughout the Middle East, and from East Africa to India, Australia and Indonesia. With Guam, the island is the most important American base outside the U.S.” …

http://waronyou.com/topics/u-s-forcibly-deported-islanders-gassed-their-dogs-to-make-way-for-diego-garcia-military-base/

CAAB signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to “allow the Chagos Islanders to return to their homeland without delay.” Click on to http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21080 for the Government’s response.

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America and Iran: big bombs and base politics

Open Democracy
Paul Rogers
October 22, 2009

The United States air force’s sophisticated new “bunker-buster” weapon could become a critical factor in any escalation of tension over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The United States department of defence has confirmed that it is rushing into production the world’s largest ever bomb, one designed specifically to destroy underground targets. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) weighs just short of fifteen tonnes, more than 80% of which is made up of a massively hardened ferro-cobalt alloy casing. When dropped from high altitude, the bomb will drive through earth and concrete before two-and-a-half tonnes of explosive are detonated to destroy the target …

…in particular, it is the deep tension between the US and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear plans that makes the arrival of the new weapon a significant political as well as technological event.

The MOP is set apart by its sheer size and the much more devastating power it contains. Since it can be deployed on the B-2 it would be possible (with air-to-air refuelling) to deploy the weapon to a war-zone in the middle east from Diego Garcia, RAF Fairford in England’s Gloucestershire or, indeed, the B-2’s home base in the United States. …

… there are clear dangers in the arrival of a weapon of this size and destructive power, not least if it proves difficult or impossible to negotiate a settlement with Iran. The ambitions and unpredictability of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime, and a regional environment where Israel’s concerns and tensions with Hizbollah have ever-present combustible potential, make such deadlock a real possibility (see “Iran, America, Israel: the nuclear gamble”, 2 October 2009). In the event of continuing deadlock, there would be very heavy pressure on Obama from rightwing sources to take military action – perhaps in the approach to the mid-sessional Senate elections in November 2010. In those circumstances, the United States air force would be only too willing to utilise the new capabilities in its arsenal – including the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The very existence of this weapon would most certainly add to the pressure on the president.

www.opendemocracy.net/article/iran/america-and-iran-big-bombs-and-base-politics

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The Geopolitics Behind the Phoney U.S. War in Afghanistan

The Market Oracle
October 21, 2009
By: F William Engdahl

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.

Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured. …

The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia. …

The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they did in the 11980’s against the Russians.

The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it. …

www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14393.html

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Cashing in the War Dividend: The Joys of Perpetual War

Jo Comerford
October 20, 2009

So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?

Forget about the butter. It’s bad for you anyway. And sheer military power, as well as the money behind it, assures the country of a thick waistline without the cholesterol. So, let’s sing the praises of perpetual war. We better, since right now every forecast in sight tells us that it’s our future.

The tired peace dividend tug boat left the harbor two decades ago, dragging with it laughable hopes for universal health care and decent public education. Now, the mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to set sail. The economic weather reports may be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing is guaranteed: that won’t stop it.

The United States, of course, long ago captured first prize in the global arms race. It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our rogue enemies and former enemies — Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria — much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1% of the world military budget. Still, when you’re a military superpower focused on big-picture thinking, there’s no time to dawdle on the details.

And be reasonable, who could expect the U.S. to fight two wars and maintain more than 700 bases around the world for less than the $704 billion we’ll shell out to the Pentagon in 2010? But here’s what few Americans grasp and you aren’t going to read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget — just the bare bones, not those billions in war-fighting extras — is projected to increase by 2.5% each year for the next 10 years. In other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least $133.1 billion, or 25%.

When it comes to the health of the war dividend in economically bad times, if that’s not good news, what is? As anyone at the Pentagon will be quick to tell you, it’s a real bargain, a steal, at least compared to the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. Then, that same baseline defense budget grew by an astonishing 38%. …

www.huffingtonpost.com/jo-comerford/cashing-in-the-war-divide_b_327287.html

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AfPak: the unwinnable war

Open Democracy
Paul Rogers
October 15, 2009

The United States is preparing both to escalate its commitment and retool its strategy in Afghanistan. But the realities of war – and, crucially, the calculations of Pakistan’s elite – mean that this will only postpone the moment of real decision. …

In this delicate moment, three ingredients of the United States’s assessment of the military situation in “AfPak” are notable. The first (positive for the administration) is apparent progress in Pakistan, as the extensive use of armed drones weakens elements of the al-Qaida movement and the Pakistani Taliban; this process, it is anticipated, could be aided by the Pakistani army’s reported preparations for an incursion into the key border districts of North and South Waziristan.

The second ingredient (negative for the administration) is growing evidence that the insurgency in Afghanistan is evolving into a more general insurrection in which the Afghan Taliban and some associated warlords now form only a component of much broader opposition to foreign forces (see “Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection”, 8 October 2009).

The third ingredient is rarely mentioned. This is that the most of the direct advice available to President Obama is coming from current or former military officials. A retired colonel in the US air-force, William Astore, compares this situation to the militarised advice-bubble that enveloped Lyndon B Johnson at a key period in the Vietnam war …

www.opendemocracy.net/article/afghanistan/afpak-the-unwinnable-war

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Mikhail Gorbachev’s Letter of Congratulations to President Obama

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U.S. bases are obstacle to Korean reunification

By Peter Van Nguyen
October 13, 2009
UPI Asia.com

The United States and South Korea recently agreed on a contingency plan in case the North Korean government collapses. The plan includes joint military operations to control the influx of refugees and to secure the North’s nuclear weapons. It also outlines the reunification of the two Koreas under a liberal and democratic leadership, with the cooperation of China.

The United States believes that if the North collapsed, China would have to back reunification to demonstrate that it is a responsible player in regional cooperation. But in order to get the Chinese to endorse the plan, the United States would have to give up its strategic military bases in South Korea and order a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region. …

However, U.S. military bases in South Korea could pose the greatest obstacle to a peaceful reunification of the Koreas. Even a unified Korea might not want the U.S. military, as reunification would make the objective of providing deterrence against the North redundant.

A U.S. military base in a united Korea would only strain ties with China, as it would be difficult to explain why it was required if the North Korean threat no longer exists. …

www.upiasia.com/Security/2009/10/13/us_bases_are_obstacle_to_korean_reunification/1193/

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Barack Obama’s poisoned shirt

by Godfrey Hodgson
October 12, 2009
Open Democracy

The Nobel peace prize is intended to encourage the United States president to consolidate the great intentions of his first year in office. But it may do him more harm than good, says Godfrey Hodgson.

A Greek myth preserved in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a tale for the times.

Nessus is a centaur – half-man, half-horse – shot by Hercules for his abuse of Deianeira. The centaur revenges himself by giving Deianeira, and through her Hercules, a poisoned shirt. When, years later, the strongman comes to wear it, his flesh is consumed. It takes an Olympian god to restore his superhuman vigour.

The Nobel peace prize awarded to Barack Obama on 9 October 2009 could become a shirt of Nessus for the United States president. The presumed intention is to recognise the generous and pacific tone of his speeches in Prague (on nuclear disarmament) and in Cairo (on building a new relationship with the Muslim world), and to encourage him in his search for world peace. Yet the prize’s timing and its political context means that it is also unavoidably yet another political pressure – with consequences that could undermine its authors’ wishes.

For the award is given at a very delicate moment, when the president is attempting to make up his mind how he can free America from the trap it has walked into in Afghanistan. After an agonising debate among his advisers, he has to decide whether to send the additional 40,000 troops his Afghan warlord, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for; or move in the direction of a more limited counter-terrorist role, relying on raids by unmanned drones controlled in remote Nevada, to kill the families of al-Qaida suspects.

In this light, the Nobel prize mightily complicates Barack Obama’s task. …

Read on: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/united-states/barack-obama-s-poisoned-shirt

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US military bases in Europe – an occupation in all but name

Redress
October 9th, 2009

The Polish/Czech missile system was supposed to defend Europe and the United States against missiles from Iran and other unspecified rogue states. No-one believed this rubbish spouted by Condoleezza Rice, among others, and the reaction of the Polish and Czech governments to its cancellation proved the lie. They were aimed at Russia and everyone knew it. But why? The Russians were threatening no-one, they had embraced a market economy and wanted acceptance by the international community. …

… US strategists would have quickly realized that, by virtue of its bases, the US had since 1945 governed all Euro-Russian relationships. The European contribution to NATO’s firepower was insignificant compared with US nuclear weapons installed in Europe. If US bases were removed, the ability to govern European-Russian relations would be lost. How to keep them? The answer: new enemies were needed.

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, Osama Bin Laden’s lever to get the US out of Saudi Arabia, was therefore a gift. It enabled the US to enrol NATO in a totally irrelevant and disproportionate attack on the Afghan Taliban, who had nothing to do with it and later, Saddam Hussein and Iraq on wholly false and illegal grounds. False allegations about Iran’s nuclear programme could also generate a simmering discord that could be escalated at any time, with the possible prize of direct control of both Iraqi and Iranian oil. In the event, the conquests of Iraq and Afghanistan have been more difficult than anticipated, with extensions to Pakistan. But no matter. Enemies aplenty, too weak to threaten the US, had been found. European politicians such as Anthony Blair and Nicholas Sarkozy whose personal interests (Blair, money; Sarkozy, Israel) lay with the US, were happy to have NATO participate in this. Sarkozy brought France, which had always promoted an independent European force, into NATO for this purpose.

Europe through NATO, therefore, currently provides:

• A fig-leaf of legitimacy to the fictitious US “war against terror”
• Manpower for the USA’s territorial and oil grab as well as future adventures
• A rationale for the retention of US bases in Europe
• A European force within Europe controlled by the US

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union NATO has undergone subtle but important structural changes. Prior to that event, US and European armed forces were substantially separate and were directly controlled by their various governments. Following the USSR’s collapse, European NATO forces have become integrated with US forces. NATO itself has become a political-military entity substantially independent of European governments – but not of that of the US. …

http://www.inteldaily.com/news/162/ARTICLE/12151/2009-10-09.html

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A Dialogue on Deterrence

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation www.WagingPeace.org
By David Krieger with Lyle Brecht

The September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek carried an article by Jonathan Tepperman in praise of the bomb.  The article was entitled “Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb.”  I was disappointed to see a mainstream media source carrying an article so frivolous as to suggest, “The bomb may actually make us safer.”  In response, I wrote a short rebuttal of Tepperman’s article, “Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years.”  My article elicited a response from analyst Lyle Brecht, who sent me a copy of his excellent brief on deterrence doctrine (http://www.scribd.com/doc/16490356/Nuclear-Posture-Review-Rethinking-Deterrence-Doctrine).  We then had the following exchange of thoughts on nuclear deterrence.

Krieger: It is deterrence theory that is at the heart of our overly dangerous reliance on nuclear weapons.  If No First Use is really the basis for today’s deterrence thinking, policies and strategies should be brought into line with that thinking, and then we should move far beyond that thinking, if survival is a goal.

Brecht: The game of MAD is based on possessing a nuclear posture that enables a devastating counterattack, thus my adversary will choose NO First Use of a nuclear weapon as his ‘rational’ game strategy. For if he attacks, he is dead meat when I counterattack.

Everybody playing MAD understands that this is the game. Thus, the military postures with calculated ambiguity that the U.S. reserves the right to respond with nukes at any time. What is left unsaid and ambiguous is that this response is predicated on an adversary’s First Use.

This is part of weak-MAD, adding the additional layer of ambiguity to NO First Use MAD and expanding the reasons why one would use nukes.

Given the technology, the multi-party nature of the game and the stakes (world population, global warming impact, economic consequences) this game is much more dangerous (by magnitudes) and has much more complex rules than the two-party original game of MAD. But, this is what our nuclear deterrence analysts appear to not have fully calculated (at least by what we can see).

It is hard to see through the newspeak as much of the discourse is a setup for negotiations (country-to-country, internal civilian-to-military, etc.) as opposed to real information or real beliefs.

Read the rest of the dialogue here:
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2009/09/14_krieger_brecht_dialogue.php?krieger

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Cancelling missile defense will look good if Russia helps on Iran

By Tomas Valasek
DailyStar.com
Monday, October 05

The United States rankled some of its European allies and delighted Russia on September 17 when President Barack Obama cancelled plans to build missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland.

The decision makes practical sense – the bases “were to use unproven technology against a threat that does not yet exist,” as the former national security adviser during the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski put it. But the decision carries some risks as well. Obama will look naïve if Moscow does not reciprocate by cooperating in American efforts to put an end to Iran’s nuclear program. There is also a chance that a triumphant Russia will conclude that with enough bluster and bravado, the United States can be threatened into abandoning its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Whatever may be the outcome, the Obama decision would mark a watershed in Europe’s relations with the two former Cold War adversaries – the United States and Russia.

The decision has been long in coming. The Democrats have always suspected former President George W. Bush of overselling the technical capabilities of missile defense. …

www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=107132

Dangerous Missile Battle In Space Over Europe: Fifth Act In U.S. Missile Shield Drama

OpEdNews.com
By Rick Rozoff
October 3, 2009

Wars have brought untold horrors upon Europe over the centuries, especially the two world wars of the last one. Until now, though, the continent has been spared the ultimate cataclysm of a missile war. …

A dispatch quoting a Finnish defense official two days ago bore the title “US could launch missiles from the Baltic Sea” and a U.S. armed forces website yesterday spoke in reference to proposed missile shield plans of “a big, complex, dangerous battle in the space over Europe.”

On September 28 a feature called “BMD fleet plans Europe defense mission” appeared in the Navy Times which reported that “Ballistic-missile defense warships have become the keystone in a new national strategy….Rather than field sensors and missiles on the ground in Poland and the Czech Republic, the U.S. will first maintain a presence of at least two or three Aegis BMD ships in the waters around Europe, starting in 2011.” …

In a Defense Department briefing with Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright, Gates explained the logic behind the shift.

“Over the last few years, we have made great strides with missile defense, particularly in our ability to counter short-and-medium-range missiles. We now have proven capabilities to intercept these ballistic missiles with land-and-sea-based interceptors supported by much-improved sensors.

“These capabilities offer a variety of options to detect, track and shoot down enemy missiles. This allows us to deploy a distributive sensor network rather than a single fixed site, like the kind slated for the Czech Republic, enabling greater survivability and adaptability.” …

www.opednews.com/articles/Dangerous-Missile-Battle-I-by-Rick-Rozoff-091001-993.html

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Embedded danger

Philippine Daily Inquirer
October 2, 2009

The death of two American soldiers in Sulu last Tuesday refocuses the nation’s attention on the need to revisit the Visiting Forces Agreement. The agreement has been so loosely interpreted by both the Philippine and American governments as to provide carte blanche for US forces to engage in operations never contemplated by the Senate (and the public) when it was asked to give consent for the agreement. It essentially allows the Americans to undertake military operations in tandem with members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, under the camouflage of training activities.

The US government is fully capable of assessing the danger posed to their investments and the tens of thousands of people with US citizenship who reside in the country by the activities being undertaken by their troops. What remains to be answered is whether our own government has carefully thought-out the implications of its permissiveness.

Our government’s policy, particularly since it embarked on tying itself to the Bush administration’s apron-strings after Sept. 11, then cut those strings in a panic in Iraq, has been to compensate the Americans by essentially giving them a free hand in Mindanao. Asean basically wants this, too, as governments in the region, such as Malaysia, Australia and Indonesia, have a low opinion of Filipino capability in securing Mindanao and terrorist networks that find refuge there. And the Philippine government wants it because it is unable to achieve either a military or political solution to the cases of conflict in Mindanao.

This quid pro quo permits the government to eke out aid from the Americans, and our officialdom’s lapses in bringing development to Muslim Mindanao in particular, where its political alliances with warlords matters more than giving our Moro brethren opportunities to improve their lives, can be compensated, at least partially, by foreign assistance.

This foreign assistance, as all assistance does, comes at a price, and the price is the abdication of much of our sovereignty and control over the security situation in Mindanao. It comes at the price of an agreement intended, officially speaking, to beef up our armed forces by giving them access to training with friendly forces. It comes at the price of a Constitution observed more in the breach by keeping a round-the-clock foreign military presence here while skirting the basic law’s actual provisions on the conditions that should apply for such a presence.

The Americans have been effective in putting a lid on things, but medals and citations have been issued since the Bush administration to servicemen and officers wounded in actual encounters with rebels and terrorists in Mindanao. American troops are not sheltered in training camps or simply directing spy drones to provide intelligence to Filipino troops. Far more than will ever be officially acknowledged, there’s a close coordination down to the patrol level between Filipino and American soldiers.

This makes the Americans a target for forces fighting our government’s troops, and it puts US troops in many combat or near-combat situations. We only have to point to the case of Americans firing their weapons when an explosion rocked the pier in Jolo some weeks ago. And now comes the death of the two American soldiers together with a Philippine Marine.

As the Americans focus on the offensive in Afghanistan, sympathetic groups will try to take the edge off the attacks on al-Qaida and the Taliban by mounting attacks on American troops and civilians everywhere else around the world. Unless our government begins by reexamining the VFA, this situation will only continue as an irritant in RP-US relations. It will bring back the specter of the Philippines becoming part of the front line in the confrontation between the terrorist organization and the West.

And considering the motivations of our government, it means the country is increasing its risks for all the wrong, because mainly mercenary, reasons.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20091002-227925/Embedded_danger

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US Bases and Empire – looking at the Asia-Pacific

DMZ Hawai’i
October 1, 2009
By Catherine Lutz

An excellent article by Catherine Lutz, the editor of the book Bases of Empire.

Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible but equally unprecedented is the global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is able and willing to attempt to control events in other regions militarily. The start of a new administration in Washington, and the possibility that world economic depression will give rise to new tensions and challenges, provides an important occasion to review the global structures of American power.

Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories.[1] There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion. These official numbers are quite misleading as to the scale of US overseas military basing, however, excluding as they do the massive buildup of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. $2 billion in military construction money has been expended in only three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12 square mile “security perimeter.”

Deployed from those battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet corners of Curacao, Korea, and England, the US military domain consists of sprawling Army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers.[2] While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war making and ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supply, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been widespread and growing, however, and this essay provides an overview of both the worldwide network of U.S. military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries’ security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions. …

www.dmzhawaii.org/?p=4272

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Should drones be part of BNAS reuse?

The recent presence of an unmanned military aircraft at Brunswick Naval Air Station generated disapproval among local peace advocates, who decry any future testing of the “drones” here after the base closes in 2011. …

Some in the local community of peace advocates hope those reuse plans don’t include more of the unmanned military aircrafts, which the base airfield is equipped to accommodate as a testing or development facility. …

Bruce Gagnon of Bath is the coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. He told The Times Record on Monday that drones are the focus of the group’s “International Keep Space for Peace Week,” which will run Oct. 3 through 10.

“Locally, we’ve been concerned about the things we’ve been hearing about the possibility of using the base property as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) flight space after the base closes,” Gagnon said. “Among the peace community all over the state, there’s been a lot of talk and concern about this Brunswick connection, the implications for our community and how we’d be right smack in the middle of aggressive warmaking. When we start introducing robotics and drones, it makes it easier for us to go around killing people. It’s the real ethical question of our time.”

By Seth Koenig, From The Times Record September 1 2009

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Russian-NATO joint missile-defense viable option

RIA Novosti
September 29, 2009

Moscow believes it would be possible to establish a missile-defense system jointly with NATO, Russia’s envoy to the military alliance said on Tuesday.

“If we are convinced that the European missile-defense initiative is not part of a U.S. theater missile-defense system, such efforts are possible,” Dmitry Rogozin said.

U.S. President Barack Obama announced on September 17 that Washington would not deploy missile-defense elements in the Czech Republic and Poland due to a re-assessment of the threat from Iran, refocusing U.S. missile defenses on a more flexible approach.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in Washington on Monday that the Western alliance and Russia should consider linking their missile defense systems, an idea in general welcomed by Russia. …

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090929/156290240.html

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From Space, No One Can Watch You Die

By Loring Wirbel and Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado Springs/Global Network board members

Peace groups internationally are putting the pressure on President Obama this fall, as he ponders the request from Gen. McChrystal for a “surge” troop escalation in Afghanistan. Thankfully, leading Democrats and even former President Clinton are urging caution, though few are taking the wiser step of recommending a pullout. But there is an additional decision Obama must make, one which the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space sees as a fundamental issue in the upcoming Keep Space for Peace Week.

As soon as CIA Director Leon Panetta was appointed in an acting role to his post, he asked Obama for a significant escalation in armed “drone” flights, utilizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), over both Afghanistan and Pakistan. These robot planes are flown by ground-based pilots, either in-country or even in the United States, using space as the navigational medium. The UAVs can accurately send bombs to pinpoint locations, though this does not mean there is no “collateral damage” in terms of civilian human casualties.

The Global Network wants to remind people that standoff war using robotic technology is neither surgical, nor antiseptic, nor moral. It can be appealing to the White House and to the American public, because it is allows nearly infinite kill ratios – thousands of so-called adversaries can be killed with very little chance of U.S. casualties. With no American soldiers coming home in body bags, few U.S. citizens care about anything else.

Yet turning the Afghanistan-Pakistan war into a UAV turkey-shoot is little different from the assassination squads approved by former Vice President Dick Cheney. In fact, it is no accident that, on two successive days, the New York Times reported on Blackwater (now Xe) being assigned to Cheney’s death-squad team, and the same Blackwater group being used for outsourcing of armed UAV flights. One method of killing is being used to replace the other.

Not so long ago, UAV pilots used joysticks to control UAVs, emulating a video game. Now they use Google Earth on touch screens to point to a location they want a robot plane to bomb. Within a year, those Google Earth applications will be available for special iPhones and Blackberries made for U.S. troops. And all those means of delivering death use space. Many of the war-fighter tools that are employed from space also take advantage of the Pentagon’s new cyber-warrior tools, which have culminated in the establishment of a dedicated Cyber Command to control computer networks here and abroad.

Moral review of space policy is ruled out because the critic can never have access to the “secret information” needed for evaluation. Hiding the truth from the enemy means hiding it from the public. Real public discourse cannot happen, either, because the body politic cannot be trusted with all the facts.

The Global Network has had reason to see optimism in recent months: No true weapon in space has yet been fielded by any nation. Obama has canceled planned missile-defense ground-based components in Poland and the Czech Republic. The world’s leaders are pledging to work harder to banish nuclear weapons. And Obama has called for a review of the October 2006 National Space Policy that calls for virtual U.S. “ownership” of orbital space.

But like so many national-security realms where Obama has taken tentative half-steps, the struggle for peace in space is far from over. The U.S. military remains by far the largest user of orbital space. Its satellites for intelligence, communications, and navigation remain the key enabling components that allow the U.S. and its allies to conduct war. And Obama’s new sea-based missile-defense plans allow a more provocative stance in challenging the nations like Iran and North Korea that are trying to foil global management plans.

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President Obama is exerting unprecedented leadership for a US president in chairing a session of the UN Security Council on Thursday focusing on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. Below is a short article describing the importance and potential of this session of the Security Council.

The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council possess over 98 percent of the more than 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world. This week, on September 24th, President Obama will lead a session of the Council focusing on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. He has invited the other heads of state of the member states on the Security Council to join him for that meeting. It is an opportunity ripe with potential for needed change.

The Security Council is the organ of the United Nations with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security….” The Council has not been pressing for nuclear disarmament because its five permanent members (US, Russia, UK, France and China) are the five principal nuclear weapons states in the world. These five states are required by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue good faith negotiations on nuclear disarmament, but they have been dragging their feet and consequently they’ve placed the NPT in jeopardy. There are four additional nuclear weapons states that are not parties to the NPT (Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea). These states must also be brought into any serious effort to prevent nuclear proliferation and achieve nuclear disarmament.

President Obama has called for action to achieve a nuclear weapons-free world, but has indicated that it might not be possible within his lifetime. At this special meeting of the UN Security Council, President Obama will have a major platform to lead in his pursuit of that goal. He should make clear on this global stage that this is a goal that can no longer be deferred without serious consequences for the human future. He should underline that this is an issue of continuing danger to present and future generations that demands deliberate but urgent action. Bringing these issues to the UN Security Council opens the door for the Council itself to become far more active in pursuing nonproliferation and disarmament, including taking the following steps.

First, reaffirm the 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

Second, make commitments by the permanent members of the Council to never use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are parties to the NPT, and pledge policies of No First Use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances.

Third, endorse the five-point program proposed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, including engaging in negotiations on nuclear disarmament; strengthening security through the nuclear disarmament process; attaining universal membership in multilateral treaties; acting with transparency; and anticipating dangers from other weapons, including eliminating other weapons of mass destruction and limiting missiles, space weapons and conventional arms.

Fourth, instruct its Military Staff Committee, in accordance with the UN Charter, to work out a plan for the total elimination of nuclear weapons and bring this plan back to the Security Council for implementation and enforcement.

Fifth, exercise control over the process of nuclear disarmament, overseeing the manner in which inspections are carried out to assure that weapons are not retained or reintroduced.

It is, of course, not possible for all of this to happen in a single meeting of the members of the UN Security Council, but a bold start could be made and the members could agree to hold such meetings in the future on a regular basis to assure that the task of eliminating nuclear weapons receives high priority among the major threats to global security.

President Obama should be thanked for his initiative in convening this meeting of the Security Council. What has been missing up to now has been the leadership and political will to move forward the nuclear disarmament agenda. President Obama has demonstrated this leadership. Now it is time for other governments and for ordinary citizens to demonstrate the necessary political will to support this leadership to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.

David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a Councilor on the World Future Council.

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The issue of US bases in Japan (Okinawa) – The Guam Treaty as a Modern ‘Disposal’ of the Ryukyus

By Kunitoshi Sakurai
Source: Japan Focus

Little attention internationally was paid to the agreement signed in February, 2009 between the newly commissioned Obama government in the US and the declining and soon to be defeated Aso government in Japan — the Guam Treaty. Many commentators drew the bland conclusion that by choosing Tokyo as her first destination Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was merely showing how highly the Obama government intended to regard the Japan alliance. Another view, advanced in these pages, was less benign. (See “Hillary in Japan – The Enforcer,” 22 February 2009) It was that Clinton went quickly to Tokyo fearing the Aso government might collapse in order to tie it and any successor government to the extraordinary deals that had been done between the Pentagon and Japanese governments over the preceding years. The Guam Agreement was the culmination of those deals, Okinawa the sacrificial victim. …

The year 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of the Satsuma clan’s invasion of the Ryukyu Islands [today known as Okinawa], and the 130th anniversary of the “Disposal” of the Ryukyus by the Japanese Government in the Meiji Era. Both are pivotal incidents in the history of Ryukyu/Okinawa. Both are remembered as shobun or “disposal.” They were events of such moment as to change the fate of the islands forever, and both were the consequence of overwhelming external intervention. Today in Okinawa it is feared that the “Japan-U.S. Agreement on the Implementation of the Relocation of a Part of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force Personnel and Their Dependents from Okinawa to Guam” (hereafter abbreviated as “Guam Treaty”), which was concluded on 17 February 2009, may become a modern “Disposal of the Ryukyus”. …

This article is very interesting, long and a comprehensive analysis of the history of US bases in Japan – to the present time.
Read the entire article here: www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22658

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Rid Europe of ‘tac nukes’

Following Obama’s decision to drop the missile defence system in Eastern Europe, he should now remove remaining ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons from Europe. Retained for reasons of NATO unity only, they are militarily useless, says former Pentagon official Wayne Merry

President Obama has publicly echoed bi-partisan American advocates of a world free of nuclear weapons. He has done so partly in preparation for the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference next year, after the near failure of the acrimonious 2005 Conference. More helpful for the NPT than mere rhetoric, and long overdue in terms of military reality, the United States and five European governments should remove the two hundred-odd remaining American ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons from Europe.

‘Tactical’ nuclear weapons (also called ‘nonstrategic’ and ‘theatre’ weapons) have an inglorious Cold War history. At one point, the United States had about ten thousand such weapons – warheads for short- and medium-range missiles, bombs, artillery shells, mines, torpedoes, depth charges – and the Soviet Union at least twice as many. In the Seventies, Washington based over seven thousand such weapons in Europe at over one hundred facilities, to ‘extend’ nuclear deterrence to its NATO allies.

Slowly, American generals and civilian planners discovered a basic problem: there is no such thing as a ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon use anywhere is inherently strategic. There was no imaginable useful role for these weapons in a crisis or conflict. …

Today, five countries host ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany each maintain about twenty ageing B-61 gravity bombs under so-called ‘dual key’ arrangements whereby the US controls the weapons which the host government’s F-16 attack aircraft would deliver in wartime. The basing countries thereby have many of the responsibilities of nuclear weapon states but little of the ultimate authority. Italy hosts about fifty of the same B-61 weapons and Turkey nearly a hundred, plus the US combat aircraft to deliver them, in old-style so-called nuclear ‘forward deployments’.

These are the only nuclear weapons of any power still on foreign soil (the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact ended Soviet foreign deployments). The obvious question is, ‘why are they still there?’ …

www.opendemocracy.net/article/openrussia/rid-europe-of-tac-nukes

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Fairford operations and staff cuts planned

Stars and Stripes
By Geoff Ziezulewicz,
September 19, 2009

RAF MILDENHALL, England — In an effort to cut costs, England’s RAF Fairford will lose its permanently assigned airmen and greatly reduce its daily operations starting next year.

For years, the west England base served as a standby airfield for bombers and other transient aircraft, including the initial wave of B-52s heading toward Iraq in March 2003. Starting in August 2010, it will be operational only when aircraft actually need it, according to 3rd Air Force officials.

As a result, the 112 airmen stationed there with the 420th Air Base Group will be relocated and the unit deactivated. The base’s capabilities will remain, but there will be no U.S. airmen there when aircraft are not passing through, said Capt. Kelley Jeter, a 3rd Air Force spokeswoman in England.

Instead, U.S. personnel will be moved onto the base to support aircraft when needed, arriving one or two days before the jet arrives, Jeter said.

The Fairford consolidation is part of a U.S. Air Forces in Europe effort to cut costs across the command’s wings and is expected to save USAFE about $16 million annually, she said. …

www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64873

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10 years of VFA: The return of US bases and the combat involvement of US troops in the Philippines

September 17, 2009

Renato M. Reyes,Jr.
BAYAN Secretary General
Submitted to the Legislative Oversight Committee on the VFA
August 27, 2009

In 1999, Bayan and other people’s organizations and legal experts warned that the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement would bring back US bases in the Philippines, even after the Philippine Senate rejected a new bases treaty in 1991.

Back then, BAYAN argued that the VFA was too broad in its application and indefinite in its duration. We warned that the VFA would allow an unlimited number of US troops to enter the country for an indefinite period of time, to conduct a broad range of activities not limited to military exercises. …

Subsequent events from 1999 to the present have shown that the presence of US troops in the Philippines has become permanent and continuous. Various accounts now show that US forces have maintained several structures in Mindanao from 2002 up to the present. There are also accounts that point to US combat participation in the Philippines.

For all intents and purposes, we can safely say that the US bases are back. Or better yet, it’s as if they never really left.

Unlimited troops, indefinite duration …

It is our belief that the US troops stationed in Mindanao are part of a Forward Operating Site of the US military. An FOS hosts a rotational force and pre-positioned equipment. It is a base that, judging from the past seven years, has a acquired a permanent status. …

http://natoreyes.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/10-years-of-vfa-the-return-of-us-bases-and-the-combat-involvement-of-us-troops-in-the-philippines/

Scrapping European Missile Defense is the Right Move

Union of Concerned Scientists
September 17, 2009

President Obama’s announcement today that his administration is scrapping plans to deploy a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic was seen as a "victory for common sense" by experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). As noted by leading scientists in a letter to the president (pdf) in July, the missile defense system slated for Eastern Europe "has not been proven and does not merit deployment. It would offer little or no defensive capability, even in principle."

Below is a statement by Dr. David Wright, a physicist and co-director of UCS’s Global Security Program:

"The decision to scrap plans to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe makes sense for a number of reasons. First, the system wouldn’t have stopped a missile attack. The interceptors the U.S. planned to use in Poland and the Czech Republic have not been tested, and they could readily be defeated by decoys and other countermeasures that any country with the capability of developing a long-range missile could use.

"Second, the decision will strengthen U.S. security by bolstering our frayed relations with Russia, whose concerns about the system were based on an exaggerated view of its capabilities against Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Today’s decision will help secure Russian assistance in dealing with potential Iranian threats, as well as their cooperation on cutting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.

"However, the decision to deploy the Aegis SM-3 defense system against shorter-range missiles does not square with technical realities. While the Aegis interceptor has done well in recent tests, it has not been tested under real-world conditions that would show that it would actually work. Like U.S. ground-based interceptors, the Aegis system operates in the vacuum of space, making it vulnerable to simple countermeasures like balloon decoys.

"Finally, Marine Corps General James Cartwright, at a Pentagon press conference today, said that the United States faces ‘thinking’ adversaries. Those adversaries will certainly be thinking about deploying decoys."

The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969, UCS is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in Berkeley, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama surrenders to Russia on Missile Defence

Telegraph.co.uk
September 17th, 2009
By Nile Gardiner

I blogged a couple of weeks ago that the Obama administration was about to abandon its plans for Third Site missile defence installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. I wrote then that “if enacted, this would represent a huge turnaround in American strategic thinking on a global missile defence system, and a massive betrayal of two key US allies in eastern and central Europe. Such a move would significantly weaken America’s ability to combat the growing threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missile program, and would hand a major propaganda victory to the Russians.”

It now looks as though the president has surrendered to Russian demands to kill off Third Site. Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard is reporting that:

“According to reliable sources, Obama administration officials are on their way to Poland and the Czech Republic to deliver very bad news. The administration intends to cancel completely the missile defense sites that had been promised to these governments by the previous administration.” …

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100010237/barack-obama-surrenders-to-russia-on-missile-defence/

Japan wants US to clean up

Straits Times
September 14, 2009

JAPAN incoming government plans to oblige US forces stationed in the country to clean up any environmental damage when they move bases, a report said on Monday. …

US forces are not obliged to make good any pollution or other damage within their bases under the 1960 agreement and local governments that host US bases have demanded a clause for environmental restoration.

Under a 2006 accord between Japan and the United States, the Futenma Marine Corps base on southern Okinawa island is set to be relocated from a crowded urban area to a coastal site, which is to be constructed by 2014. …

The United States has been Japan’s main ally since defeating the country in World War II and now has around 47,000 troops stationed in the nation.

More than half of them are based on Okinawa, where their presence has often caused tensions with local residents, especially when American service members have committed crimes. …

www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Tech%2Band%2BScience/Story/STIStory_429568.html

Big U.S. Bases Are Part of Iraq, but a World Apart

The New York Times
By Marc Santora
September 8, 2009

It takes the masseuse, Mila from Kyrgyzstan, an hour to commute to work by bus on this sprawling American base. Her massage parlor is one of three on the base’s 6,300 acres and sits next to a Subway sandwich shop in a trailer, surrounded by blast walls, sand and rock.

At the Subway, workers from India and Bangladesh make sandwiches for American soldiers looking for a taste of home. When the sandwich makers’ shifts end, the journey home takes them past a power plant, an ice-making plant, a sewage treatment center, a hospital and dozens of other facilities one would expect to find in a small city.

And in more than six years, that is what Americans have created here: cities in the sand.

With American troops moved out of Iraq’s cities and more than 100 bases across the country continuing to close or to be turned over to Iraq, the 130,000 American troops here will increasingly fall back to these larger bases. …

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/world/middleeast/09bases.html?_r=2&ref=middleeast

Attack of the drones

The Economist
September 3, 2009

FIVE years ago, in the mountainous Afghan province of Baghlan, NATO officials mounted a show of force for the local governor, Faqir Mamozai, to emphasise their commitment to the region. As the governor and his officials looked on, Jan van Hoof, a Dutch commander, called in a group of F-16 fighter jets, which swooped over the city of Baghlan, their thunderous afterburners engaged. This display of air power was, says Mr van Hoof, an effective way to garner the respect of the local people. But fighter jets are a limited and expensive resource. And in conflicts like that in Afghanistan, they are no longer the most widespread form of air power. The nature of air power, and the notion of air superiority, have been transformed in the past few years by the rise of remote-controlled drone aircraft, known in military jargon as “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs).

Drones are much less expensive to operate than manned warplanes. The cost per flight-hour of Israel’s drone fleet, for example, is less than 5% the cost of its fighter jets … “almost all” IDF ground operations now have drone support. …

Drones are acquiring new abilities. New sensors that are now entering service can make out the “electrical signature” of ground vehicles by picking up signals produced by engine spark-plugs, alternators, and other electronics. A Pakistani UAV called the Tornado, made in Karachi by a company called Integrated Dynamics, emits radar signals that mimic a fighter jet to fool enemies.

UAVs are hard to shoot down. Today’s heat-seeking shoulder-launched missiles do not work above 3,000 metres or so, though the next generation will be able to go higher, says Carlo Siardi of Selex Galileo, a subsidiary of Finmeccanica in Ronchi dei Legionari, Italy. Moreover, drone engines are smaller—and therefore cooler—than those powering heavier, manned aircraft. In some of them the propeller is situated behind the exhaust source to disperse hot air, reducing the heat signature. And soldiers who shoot at aircraft risk revealing their position.

But drones do have an Achilles’ heel. If a UAV loses the data connection to its operator—by flying out of range, for example—it may well crash. Engineers have failed to solve this problem, says Dan Isaac, a drone expert at Spain’s Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology, a government research agency in Madrid. The solution, he and others say, is to build systems which enable an operator to reconnect with a lost drone by transmitting data via a “bridge” aircraft nearby. …

www.economist.com/search/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14299496

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Should drones be part of BNAS reuse?

The recent presence of an unmanned military aircraft at Brunswick Naval Air Station generated disapproval among local peace advocates, who decry any future testing of the “drones” here after the base closes in 2011. …

Some in the local community of peace advocates hope those reuse plans don’t include more of the unmanned military aircrafts, which the base airfield is equipped to accommodate as a testing or development facility. …

Bruce Gagnon of Bath is the coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. He told The Times Record on Monday that drones are the focus of the group’s “International Keep Space for Peace Week,” which will run Oct. 3 through 10.

“Locally, we’ve been concerned about the things we’ve been hearing about the possibility of using the base property as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) flight space after the base closes,” Gagnon said. “Among the peace community all over the state, there’s been a lot of talk and concern about this Brunswick connection, the implications for our community and how we’d be right smack in the middle of aggressive warmaking. When we start introducing robotics and drones, it makes it easier for us to go around killing people. It’s the real ethical question of our time.”

By Seth Koenig, From The Times Record September 1 2009

Is Japan’s sun rising or setting?

September 1, 2009
By Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk

It’s tempting to dismiss the weekend election landslide victory of Japan’s opposition Democratic party (DPJ) as reflecting no more than a bad-tempered “throw the bums out” mood among recession-hit voters. European commentators transfixed by China’s rise have jumped two-footed into this trap. They play down the result’s wider significance for a country they view as a declining power while predicting that little will change in practice. …

American reactions have been notably less complacent, reflecting real unease about where the DPJ’s untested, vaguely anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation stance and its vow to forge a “more equal” relationship with the US may lead. The Obama administration said it was ready to work together “to further cement this indispensable alliance”. But it quickly stressed Washington had “no intention” of re-opening negotiations on American bases and troop re-deployments in Japan, as urged by DPJ leaders. …

“The vast tracts of land set aside for US forces in Japan impede community development and have a major impact on the lives of our citizens,” said Matsuzawa Shigefumi, governor of Kanagawa prefecture, abutting Tokyo. Crime and environmental damage associated with the bases were of especial concern, he said. The 1960 Status of Forces agreement between the two countries should be reviewed or, failing that, specific Japanese laws should be applicable to US bases and personnel. …

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/01/japan-election

US Troops in Philippines: America Pursues Expansionism, Protects Economic Interests

August 28, 2009
By Alexander Martin Remollino

In her revelations of the violations committed by US troops while on Philippine soil, former Navy officer Nancy Gadian also affirmed what has always been the core of US expansionism: using its military power to exploit the wealth and resources of another country. This was the core strategy in practically all the wars America had fought. Its so-called “war on terror” in the Philippines is no exception.

When former Navy Lt. Senior Grade Mary Nancy Gadian gave a press conference in Quezon City on Wednesday to expose the wrongdoings of US troops stationed in the Philippines, she mentioned, among other things, the economic agenda behind America’ continued presence in the country.

“The US is after the natural resources of the Philippines,” she said, adding that the Philippines has a “strategic location” in relation to the rest of Southeast Asia. …

www.bulatlat.com/main/2009/08/28/us-troops-in-philippines-america-pursues-expansionism-protects-economic-interests/

Here is the nancy-gadian-affidavit on the direct involvement of U.S. military forces in combat operations in Mindanao.

It was presented before the Legislative Oversight Committee on the Visiting Forces Agreement, Philippine Senate, Aug. 27, 2009. Navy Lt. SG Gadian had earlier exposed anomalies in the handling of funds for the Balikatan exercises for which she was an operational officer of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Please refer to Para 21 for reference to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) used in the Philippines.

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The Afghanistan War: Origins and Consequences

Paul Rogers, July 2009

During the course of late June and through much of July, US and British troops engaged in major combat operations in southern Afghanistan, principally in Helmand Province. There was substantial fighting, with British troops taking some of the heaviest casualties of the eight-year war. Although there were still frequent instances of violence in Iraq, including major suicide bomb attacks, it was evident that the focus of western military operations had moved from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This did not mean that the US military presence in Iraq was coming to an end – even though a substantial withdrawal of troops is likely over the next eighteen months, it is still probable that at least 30,000 US military personnel will remain in the country and that the Iraq War may continue at a lower level for some years. Even so, the focus for the United States is now on Afghanistan and there are indications that a military involvement stretching over decades is in prospect. …

Given that the Taliban and associated paramilitary groups have increased their influence in Afghanistan in recent years, there appears to be a connection between the increased numbers of foreign troops and the incidence of violence. This could be readily explained by those foreign forces “taking the war to the enemy” with this inevitably involving more combat, rather than any increase in strength by the insurgents. The problem with this conclusion is that it does not take into account the increasing influence of the insurgents across the country. If the reinforced foreign troops were diminishing that degree of influence through greater military activity then the argument could be made that more use of force will enhance prospects for a negotiated settlement.

Instead, it seems likely that for significant parts of the Afghan population, especially in the south and south east of the country, the foreign forces are seen as occupiers to be resisted, not liberators to be supported. If this is the case, then the more the foreign troops increase in number, the more the resistance will increase. …

http://oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/monthly_briefings/afghanistan_war_origins_and_consequences_0

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England.

Guam Resists Military Colonization

Having No Say When Washington Tries to Increase your Population by 25%
by Ann Wright

The United States and the Chinese governments have some remarkable similarities when it comes to colonization. The Chinese government has sent a huge Han population to inhabit Tibet and overwhelm the Tibetan population, even building the world’s highest railway to get people and materials there.

The United States government, with virtually no consultation with the local government and citizens, is increasing the population of its non-voting territory, Guam, by 25%. 8,000 U.S. Marines, their dependents and associated logistics units and personnel-a total of 42,000 new residents-will be moved to the small Pacific island (barely three times the size of Washington, DC) that has a current population of 175,000. The move will have a tremendous impact on the cultural and social identity of the island.

These military forces are being relocated to Guam, in great measure, because of the “Close US Military Bases” campaign organized by citizen activists in Okinawa, Japan. …

www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/17-6

Public consultation launched by NATO on its new Strategic Concept:
window dressing or a genuine attempt to listen to concerned citizens?

By Ian Davis
13 August 2009

NATO has come under criticism from a variety of sources, including myself, over its lack of transparency and accountability procedures.  However, new Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has made a promising start to his reign by opening up the review of NATO’s Strategic Concept to the public, albeit in a limited and tightly managed fashion. 

On 3 August, NATO launched a web module on its new Strategic Concept with a video introduction by Rasmussen.  In addition to providing access to background information, related opinions and an extensive bibliography, the website also includes a public discussion forum, with a promise that: 

Comments posted on this Discussion Forum will be periodically transmitted to both the Secretary General and the group of eminent persons as an input to their deliberations.  NATO will give feedback as appropriate.

In his first press conference, the new Secretary General—among a list of priorities that included assistance to Afghanistan, NATO-Russia relations, cooperation with Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative countries, and the situation in Kosovo—also placed a strong emphasis on public consultation in the process towards a new Strategic Concept:

It should be by far the most open and the most inclusive process of policy development NATO has ever conducted….  I want to hear the views of the public on what NATO should be and do in future…  I will also conduct town halls in as many NATO countries as I can, to hear from all walks of life.  And I want to assure everyone who shares their views with us that they will be heard. 

The real driving force behind the review, however, is the 12-person Expert Group appointed by the Secretary General and chaired by Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State.  The Expert Group represents a “broad spectrum of large and small NATO members and offers a balanced combination of insiders and outsiders, including from the private sector, think tanks and the academic community”.  The Group is tasked with consulting as widely as possible, in NATO and far beyond, with governments, think tanks, NGOs and other international organisations.  The Group will then submit its conclusions to the Secretary General (in April 2010) and he will then lead the final phase of negotiations with member nations.  If all goes well, a new Strategic Concept will be agreed at the next NATO Summit in Portugal in late 2010. 

This commitment to undertake a widespread and complex multinational and multi-level consultation is to be welcomed.  But the proof of the pudding, of course, will be in the eating.  Key ‘known-unknown’ ingredients at this stage include the quality, size and coherence of the public contribution to the process and the extent to which these views are reflected in the final document.  In regard to the former, I would urge anyone who has ever questioned any aspect of NATO policy—from the intervention in Afghanistan to NATO nuclear policy—to post a comment on the NATO Discussion Forum.  (If you are short of ideas, a progressive reform agenda for NATO can be found here).  Otherwise NATO is likely to conclude that citizens care little about these issues (a view that is already fairly widespread among many officials) and the exercise in engagement is unlikely to be repeated or developed further.

Whether the public contributions end up on the cutting room floor or genuinely help to shape the final document will be even more difficult to fathom, although it is in NATO’s interest to make this as transparent as possible.  NATO also needs to be cut a little slack given that the Expert Group faces a difficult balancing act in reflecting the views of such a diverse array of stakeholders.  Having said that, there remain legitimate grounds for concern.  In particular, NATO needs to loosen its access to information rules so that the public can make as informed contributions as the Expert Group.  Too many of the significant background studies, such as the advice of the Military Committee, remain off-limits to the public.

Two elements in the "consultation phase" appear particularly crucial: the presentation of the Group of Experts’ analysis and recommendations to the Secretary General and Rasmussen’s own subsequent report ("based on the experts’ analysis and recommendations and Allies’ initial reactions").  It will be important for NATO to make these two reports public so that there is room for further debate prior to the final drafting and negotiation phase.  Finally, parliamentarians and the media should also exercise greater scrutiny over the process – although the failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue to date and the absence of a single national parliamentary committee dedicated purely to NATO affairs anywhere in the Alliance (leaving aside the separate role of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly) does not give grounds for optimism.

We know from experience that poor consultation practice wastes people’s time and can seriously undermine the public’s trust in government.  To access true public opinion about such a high stakes issue as NATO’s Strategic Concept, the public consultation could have been clearer, more integrated into the overall process, more independent, and conducted over a longer time-frame.  Nonetheless, the new Secretary General has cast the door ajar.  It is now up to concerned citizens to walk through it.

Notes:

• NATO’s Strategic Concept is its core mission statement, and the current 1999 version predates the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the sending of NATO forces to Afghanistan.  The 60th Anniversary NATO Summit held in Strasbourg/Kehl in April this year launched the process that will lead to a new NATO Strategic Concept.  The Guiding Principles for the process call for: an inclusive and participatory approach from the biggest to the smallest Ally.  Moreover, the process should engage Partners in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, the Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative as well as partners across the Globe.  Furthermore, the process should be transparent and engage other key international actors such as the EU and UN as well as other types of NATO interlocutors, like NGOs.  Finally, an interactive dialogue with the broader public is encouraged.
• NATO Watch is a new, independent project that collects and disseminates information and research on NATO and Euro-Atlantic security issues.  It is the only independent NGO with a remit to monitor and analyse NATO on a daily basis.  A web-based information portal www.natowatch.org will be launched in the autumn to provide comprehensive, accurate, reliable and up-to-date information about NATO. 

Dismantling the global nuclear infrastructure

by Mary Kaldor, August 10, 2009

Arms control belongs to an era when an absolutist view of state sovereignty prevailed. We need the courage to move to global nuclear disarmament.

Over the last couple of years, a new anti-nuclear movement has emerged led by former politicians and officials of the Cold War era. They want to rid the world of nuclear weapons and they have put forward proposals for achieving this that largely consist of business left unfinished when they were in power. If they are to succeed in their ultimate goal, they need to be complemented by an anti-nuclear movement composed of citizens and politicians of the emergent global era who could develop a new set of proposals aimed at challenging outdated ways of thinking about nuclear weapons.

This new movement was launched in an article in the Wall Street Journal in January 2007 signed by George P.Shulz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. A follow-up article in January, 2008 outlined more detailed proposals for reaching their goal. Mikhail Gorbachev responded enthusiastically in the Wall Street Journal (January 31 2007) and subsequently organised a series of meetings within the framework of the World Political Forum, which he founded. The initiative was also taken up by politicians of a similar standing from other countries such as Britain (Malcolm Rifkind, Douglas Hurd, David Owen and George Robertson in The Times June 30 2008), Italy (Corriere della Sera July 24 2008), Germany (Helmut Schmidt, Richard von Weizäcker, Egon Bahr, and Hans Dietrich Genscher in the International Herald Tribune 9 January 2009), and Poland (Aleksandr Kwasniewski, Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Lech Walesa in Moscow Times 7 April 2009). In December 2008, the Global Zero campaign was launched calling for a ‘a legally binding verifiable agreement, including all nations, to eliminate nuclear weapons by a date certain.’ Its signatories are a roll call of famous names, including many who vigorously defended nuclear weapons in the last years of the Cold War, like Richard Burt, Reagan’s nuclear adviser, or Zbigniew Brzezinski, the arc of crisis theorist, as well as most of the above. …

Mary Kaldor is professor of global governance at the London School of Economics (LSE), and convenor of the human-security study group that reports to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief Javier Solana

Read the rest of the article: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/dismantling-the-global-nuclear-infrastructure

The nuclear-weapons opportunity

(Hiroshima’s echo: an end to nukes)
by Paul Rogers, August 7, 2009

An alignment of factors – strategic, political, attitudinal – is creating space for movement towards nuclear disarmament. The nightmare of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 is a permanent reminder of what is at stake.

The nuclear bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 is marked around the world every year on this date in memory of the tens of thousands of victims and as an awful warning of the horror of this form of weaponry. But sixty-four years after this terrible event – and, propitiously, a year before the next five-year review conference of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) – there are at last some positive signs of progress on nuclear disarmament. …

The first half of the 2000s saw little change in either policy or mood – the George W Bush administration had other concerns, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia regarded its nuclear arsenal as one of its few claims to great-power status. But in the mid-2000s signs of a shift were emerging, notably statements from high-level former offici policy-makers (and nuclear negotiators) such as Henry Kissinger and George Schultz to the effect that the world needed to move towards a greatly diminished number of nuclear weapons (and perhaps with the ultimate aim of eliminating them altogether). …

Most of these comments came in the context of the work of initiatives such as the Canberra Commission and the Middle Powers Initiative. But the single factor that has given substantial impetus to the prospect of serious nuclear disarmament is the election of Barack Obama as United States president, and the early attitude of his administration. …

Perhaps least recognised of all is that a new generation of armed-forces officers in the United States and elsewhere has grown up in a military environment in which nuclear weapons have lost most of their salience. These systems dominated much of the military thinking of the cold-war era, but they seem so much less relevant now. …

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England.

www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-nuclear-weapons-opportunity

America’s new-old military thinking

Paul Rogers: July 27, 2009

From Somalia to Iraq, Afghanistan to Lebanon, an emerging global landscape of variable security threats is provoking United States military analysts into an intense process of reflection.

The centre of the wars that the western powers, principally the United States and Britain, are involved in has moved east. Afghanistan, where the “war on terror” was launched in October 2001, has replaced Iraq as the site of their principal military effort. But as the campaign there becomes increasingly mired in difficult local terrain, a larger effort is being made to use this shift in the major theatre of war to think about the fundamental purposes of what these powers are engaged in.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001

Bradford’s peace-studies department now broadcasts regular podcasts on its work, including a regular commentary from Paul Rogers on international-security issues. Listen/watch here

What are the wars and local insurgencies the United States and Britain are seeking to win, manage or contain now about? How are the different “small” conflicts around the world related to each other? How do military analysts now understand the current security threats faced by western states? Such questions shadow the increasingly fraught atmospherics of the anti-Taliban effort in Afghanistan.

A tough summer campaign by British forces in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand is incurring almost daily casualties that are widely reported by the media. There is a fairly even split of public opinion between those supporting and those opposing a continued presence in the country; while overall backing for the troops is often accompanied by doubts over their mission and military strategy. What is most striking about mid-2009 is that these doubts and concerns have been voiced by senior military and political figures …

The British government has been on the defensive in a controversy over equipment limitations. This itself can become a diversion from the reality on the ground, namely the unexpectedly strong resistance that the Taliban and other paramilitaries are offering in Helmand. Moreover, in many ways the experience of the British troops is little different to that of the other national contingents (Canadian, Dutch or American) that have been heavily involved in direct combat. All forces in southern Afghanistan have been struggling with the same problem: how to bring in larger numbers of heavily armoured vehicles and helicopters, as they face paramilitaries adept at disrupting road patrols.

www.opendemocracy.net/article/america-s-new-old-military-thinking

Pushing South Asia Toward the Brink

by Zia Mian, Foreign Policy In Focus
July 27, 2009

The contradictions and confusions in U.S. policy in South Asia were on full display during Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s recent visit to India. U.S. support for India, which centers on making money, selling weapons, and turning a blind eye to the country’s nuclear weapons, is fatally at odds with U.S. policy and concerns about Pakistan.

By enabling an India-Pakistan arms race, rather than focusing on resolving the conflict and helping them make peace, the United States is driving Pakistan toward the very collapse it fears. …

… The emerging Indian middle class is large — … about 300 million — and greedy for a more American lifestyle. But the focus on India as fundamentally a market for U.S. goods and services, and a source of cheap labor for U.S. corporations , marks a remarkable shift …

… The U.S. silence on India’s nuclear weapons and missile programs is all the more telling, given that it was the Clinton administration that proposed United Nations Security Council resolution 1172. In 1998, this unanimous Security Council resolution called on India and Pakistan to “immediately stop their nuclear weapon development programs, to refrain from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.” The Bush administration ignored it. It seems the Obama administration will too. …

… The Pakistani army, which rules the country even when civilians are in office, will not easily shift its view of India. The army and those who lead it see the threat from India as their very reason for being. …

A basic reordering of U.S. priorities in South Asia is long overdue. The first principle of U.S. policy in the region should be to do no more harm. This means it has to stop feeding the fire between India and Pakistan. Only an end to the South Asian arms race can begin to undo the structures of fear, hostility, and violence that have sustained the conflict in the subcontinent for so long. The search for peace may then have at least a chance of success.

Read the full article: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6295

How U.S. exploited N. Korea missile tests

Richard Halloran, Honolulu Advertiser
July 12, 2009

Publicly, President Obama and senior officials in his administration berated North Korean leader Kim Jong Il last week for firing 11 ballistic missiles eastward into the Sea of Japan, four short-range missiles on July 2 and seven medium-range missiles on July 4. It was the biggest North Korean missile barrage seen so far.

Secretly, U.S. officials informed on missile defenses were pleased, for two reasons. First, the elaborate U.S. missile defense in place in Japan, Alaska, California, Hawai’i, aboard Navy ships and in satellites was severely tested and worked well. In particular, the fusion of data from sensors based on land, at sea and in space produced swift and clear images of what the missiles were doing.

Second, U.S. intelligence gathered information about the missiles that otherwise could not have been had. An official in Washington said: “We learned an incredible amount about where exactly North Korea is in their long-range missile development program.” Because North Korea has only aging radar, he doubted that North Korea “learned anything close to what we learned about their tests.” …

www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090712/NEWS08/907120361/How+U.S.+exp%5CBy

How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

By Alice Slater: 14 July 2009
counterpunch.org

Although Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged to work for a nuclear weapons free world this spring, they failed to take meaningful steps at their July summit to put the world on the proper path to nuclear abolition. Disappointingly, they only agreed to minor cuts in their respective weapons arsenals due to US unwillingness to cancel its plans to put missile and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic which Russia views as a threat to its security. Essentially we have come full circle to the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, when negotiations for the total abolition of nuclear weapons tragically collapsed because Reagan wouldn’t give up U.S. plans for a Strategic Defense Initiative to dominate space. …

http://www.counterpunch.org/slater07142009.html

C.I.A. Had Plan to Assassinate Qaeda Leaders

As more revelations emerge about the paramilitary JSOC assassination team operating out of Dick Cheney’s office, the comments made in LA Times and NY Times actually play right into the theme of the poster for Keep Space for Peace Week. The LA Times article pointed out that death squads became less necessary as the missiles fired from Predator UAVs became more accurate. And the NY Times quotes Republican Christopher Bond with saying that there is little difference between an accurate Hellfire drone missile and a person with a pistol, except that the latter represents less of an international-law problem, since it constitutes death at a distance.

Read the article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/us/14intel.htm

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Read Obama’s 1983 College Magazine Article on Nuclear Disarmament

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U.S.-Russia nuclear deal: spin or deep cut?

Reuters: Jul 6, 2009
By Guy Faulconbridge

President Barack Obama and Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev on Monday agreed a target of cutting vast Cold War arsenals of deployed nuclear warheads by around a third from current levels to 1,500-1,675 each.

The pledge by Obama and Medvedev puts the world’s two biggest nuclear powers further along the path to finding a replacement for the landmark 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1) which expires on December 5.

But the cuts announced on Monday only take the United States and Russia 25 operationally deployed warheads below a range of 1,700-2,200, which both sides had already committed to reach by 2012 under the 2002 Moscow Treaty.

After the cuts — which have to be made within seven years of a new treaty taking force — the United States and Russia will still have enough firepower to destroy the world several times over. Many hurdles remain to finding a replacement to START by December.

Russia and the United States are still haggling over what exactly constitutes a nuclear weapon and the Kremlin is deeply opposed to U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Europe. …

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE56552I20090706

How to Deal with America’s Empire of Bases

A Modest Proposal for Garrisoned Lands
By Chalmers Johnson
Published on Thursday, July 2, 2009 by TomDispatch.com

The U.S. Empire of Bases — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.

Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase. …

www.tomdispatch.com/post/175091

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