By: Seán Kreyling
On August 30th, U.S. Senator Barack Obama wrote on op-ed for the New York Daily News about the need to confront the challenge posed by Iran. He goes on to make some valid observations: the Iranian government does present a strategic challenge to the US, the war in Iraq severely limits American policy options throughout the region, and diplomacy needs to be significantly better utilized as an aspect of national power. As President, the senator says that he will use all elements of American power to pressure the Iranian regime, including the power of tough, smart and principled diplomacy.
For diplomacy to work, we need to dial up our political and economic pressure - not just our tough talk. Iran’s troubling behavior depends in large part on access to billions of dollars in oil and gas revenue. That is why I introduced the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act last May, to build on a movement across the country to divest from companies that do significant business with Iran. This would send a clear message about where America stands, increasing Iran’s isolation and hitting the Iranian regime where it hurts.
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Tags: Ahmadinejad,
Barack Obama,
Foreign Policy,
Hezbollah,
Iran,
Iraq,
Lebanon,
nuclear weapons,
oil,
Russia,
sanctions,
UN,
World Bank
¶
Posted 15 September 2007
† Seán Kreyling §
By: Seán Kreyling
In Tuesday’s Washington Post, David E Hoffman writes about U.S. Senator Richard Lugar’s and former Senator Sam Nunn’s efforts to secure the world’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons with the help of Russia. Nunn, the current co-chairman of the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative, expressed concern about the recent dispute with Russia over U.S. plans to station a missile defense system in Europe. This dispute, coupled with the diffusion of technology, nuclear know-how and terrorism led the senator to conclude that:
“any plan for global peace and security that does not feature the Russians and Americans working together is not likely to be successful for either of us or the world.”
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Tags: Frontline,
GWOT,
Iran,
KSG,
Lugar,
Missile Defense,
nonproliferation,
North Korea,
nuclear weapons,
Russia,
Terrorism,
weapons of mass destruction
¶
Posted 28 August 2007
† Seán Kreyling §
By: Seán Kreyling
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, will brief Congress on September 11th regarding the situation on the ground in Iraq according to Think Progress. FP’s Passport notes the highly unusual timing of the briefing:
Nothing says “we need to continue the surge” like reminding Americans that Saddam planned 9/11. Somewhere, Karl Rove must be laughing.
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By: Seán Kreyling
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress and Uri Leventer, a graduate student at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, have written an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune on the growing “nuclear renaissance” in the Middle East. They conclude that the unprecedented demand for nuclear programs by Arab states is not about energy, but a nuclear hedge against Iran. Continue Reading »
By: Seán Kreyling
In Sunday’s edition of Knoxnews.com, Thomas P.M. Barnett writes about Senator Obama’s recent comments regarding his willingness to talk with America’s enemies, as well as, what Barnett believes to be Obama’s larger point: that America needs to “reach out to the rest of the world again”.
On issue after issue, the international community comes together to forge new rule sets for this tumultuous era of globalization while the United States, in its infinite capacity for internal disagreement, is sidelined by our difficult occupation of Iraq, rising protectionist sentiment and know-nothing paranoia about a world we alone imagine to be infinitely more dangerous than the Cold War.
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By: Seán Kreyling
Mike Boyer writes today on FP’s Passport that the U.S. economy just might be facing the economic equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. The story was first reported in the British newspaper the Telegraph:
The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.
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By: Seán Kreyling
On Sunday, President Bush signed the Protect America Act into law. This legislation gives the National Security Agency expanded authority to intercept phone calls and e-mails of foreigners and, under some circumstances, American citizens. According to the Boston Globe, the new law “carves out a broad exemption from a 1978 law that requires the government to obtain a judge’s permission to monitor calls and e-mails on US soil”. Continue Reading »
By: Seán Kreyling
Recently, the Boston Herald published an Associated Press report where Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama reportedly stated “…the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there”.
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now - where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife - which we haven’t done,” Obama said.
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By: Seán Kreyling
In a recent briefing, General Peter Pace, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had this to say regarding the latest U.S. military surge and counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts:
“If you try to define this in terms of level of violence, you’ve really put yourself on the wrong metric. It isn’t about X number today, Y number tomorrow, because the enemy gets a chance to vote in that,” Pace said. “The metric really should be for Iraqi citizens. Do they feel better about their lives today than they did yesterday? And do they think they’re going to feel better about their lives tomorrow than they do today?”
While Gen. Pace’s specific remarks were an attempt at explaining the recent increase in the overall level of violence seen in Iraq following the surge, the notion that violence is not the sole effective metric is applicable to understanding and gauging U.S. military efforts as well. Continue Reading »
By: Seán Kreyling
Lolita C. Baldor of the Associated Press has explored an important, but under-appreciated national security issue for the Washington Post recently concerning the declining number of blacks joining the U.S. military. According to Pentagon data on both reserve and active duty forces, there was a 38 percent decline in recruitment of black Americans between 2001 and 2006. If only active forces are counted, the number of black recruits dropped from more than 31,000 in 2002 to about 23,600 in 2006, almost one-quarter fewer.
This decline should be of concern to national security leaders, but it should also stoke discussion about the relative dormancy of the US racial equality debate. Continue Reading »
By: Seán Kreyling
“A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military’s new frontier outpost.”
In this month’s Esquire magazine, Thomas P.M. Barnett writes about the U.S. military’s new Africa Command and their initial operations. Barnett sheds light on AfriCom as the Pentagon’s new experiment in fighting what Gen. Abizaid, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, refers to as radical Islam. The new paradigm is one that has the military working under and through the U.S. State Department and on certain U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) missions.
This new approach focuses on using all of the aspects national power - Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economics, known by the acronym DIME - to combat terrorists and foreign fighters in the region, which, as Barnett notes, has been so clearly lacking in America’s recent postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
MORE:
Map: Africa Command: Inside the Mission
Tom Barnett’s Photo Album with CJTF-HOA
C-SPAN interview on Africa Command
By: Seán Kreyling
The DoD has officially acknowledged that many of the most controversial detention and interrogation techniques “exceeded the limits established in Army Field Manual 34-52, Intelligence Interrogation” and in fact were borrowed from an Army survival training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (or SERE for short). SERE was designed to train US military personnel how to deal with opponents’ harsh, abusive, coercive interrogation techniques - not how to conduct interrogations. Continue Reading »