NEW DELHI - The first reports about the happening appeared in January. Now it is a phenomenon that has spread across the country, involving possibly thousands of people. In a very discreet operation, US and British security sub-contractors are seeking out Indian ex-servicemen known for their professionalism and discipline for deployment in Iraq.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Indian government has obviously got wind of these developments, but there has been no overt clampdown as of yet. There have been murmurs of protest within the Indian army establishment, with some serving officers feeling that it is wrong to indulge in mercenary activities when the Indian government has taken a strong stand against sending troops to Iraq. Others have voiced concern about ex-serviceman being privy to sensitive information related to national security.
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This is not good, government should take action against them.
If you still need them , we ask for
Arrow,Patriot,whatever the watchman at DRDO HQ wants,
No F-16s to PAF., no no you should still ask us if you want to give them Soya oil too..
Get the 20+ wanted by GoI from TSP....
No trade restrictions...
anything else guys ?
someone in BR asked for more i dont remember <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
t is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?
"Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics."
Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq â from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence â because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad. That's why they spent more time studying U.S. polls than Iraqi history. That is why, I'll bet, Karl Rove has had more sway over this war than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns. Mr. Burns knew only what would play in the Middle East. Mr. Rove knew what would play in the Middle West.
I admit, I'm a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion â as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did â I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn't just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.
Why, in the face of rampant looting in the war's aftermath, which dug us into such a deep and costly hole, wouldn't Mr. Rumsfeld put more troops into Iraq? Politics. First of all, Rummy wanted to crush once and for all the Powell doctrine, which says you fight a war like this only with overwhelming force. I know this is hard to believe, but the Pentagon crew hated Colin Powell, and wanted to see him humiliated 10 times more than Saddam. Second, Rummy wanted to prove to all those U.S. generals whose Army he was intent on downsizing that a small, mobile, high-tech force was all you needed today to take over a country. Third, the White House always knew this was a war of choice â its choice â so it made sure that average Americans never had to pay any price or bear any burden. Thus, it couldn't call up too many reservists, let alone have a draft. Yes, there was a contradiction between the Bush war on taxes and the Bush war on terrorism. But it was resolved: the Bush team decided to lower taxes rather than raise troop levels.
Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training â with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil moneymen. Why did the administration always â rightly â bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.
And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")
Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world â and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence
Last week, Stratfor published an analysis, "The Edge of the Razor," that sketched out the problems facing the United States in Iraq. In an avalanche of responses, one important theme stood out: Readers wanted to know what we would do, if we were in a position to do anything. Put differently, it is easy to catalogue problems, more difficult to provide solutions.
The point is not only absolutely true, but lies at the heart of intelligence. Intelligence organizations should not give policy suggestions. First, the craft of intelligence and state-craft are very different things. Second, and far more important, intelligence professionals should always resist the temptation to become policy advocates because, being mostly human, intelligence analysts want to be right -- and when they are advocates of a strategy, they will be tempted to find evidence that proves that policy to be correct and ignore evidence that might prove the policy in error. Advocating policies impairs the critical faculties. Besides, in a world in which opinions are commonplace, there is a rare value in withholding opinions. Finally, intelligence, as a profession, should be neutral. Now, we are far from personally neutral in any issue affecting our country, but in our professional -- as opposed to our personal -- lives, our task is to look at the world through the eyes of all of the players. Suggesting a strategy for defeating one side makes that obviously difficult.
That said, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. We normally try to figure out what is going to happen, what other people are going to do -- whether they know it or not -- and explain the actions of others. At times, people confuse Stratfor's analysis for our political position. This time -- this once -- we will write for ourselves -- or more precisely, for myself, since at Stratfor our views on the war range even wider than those among the general public.
The Mission
The United States' invasion of Iraq was not a great idea. Its only virtue was that it was the best available idea among a series of even worse ideas. In the spring of 2003, the United States had no way to engage or defeat al Qaeda. The only way to achieve that was to force Saudi Arabia -- and lesser enabling countries such as Iran and Syria -- to change their policies on al Qaeda and crack down on its financial and logistical systems. In order to do that, the United States needed two things. First, it had to demonstrate its will and competence in waging war -- something seriously doubted by many in the Islamic world and elsewhere. Second, it had to be in a position to threaten follow-on actions in the region.
There were many drawbacks to the invasion, ranging from the need to occupy a large and complex country to the difficulty of gathering intelligence. Unlike many, we expected extended resistance in Iraq, although we did not expect the complexity of the guerrilla war that emerged. Moreover, we understood that the invasion would generate hostility toward the United States within the Islamic world, but we felt this would be compensated by dramatic shifts in the behavior of governments in the region. All of this has happened.
The essential point is that the invasion of Iraq was not and never should have been thought of as an end in itself. Iraq's only importance was its geographic location: It is the most strategically located country between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush. The United States needed it as a base of operations and a lever against the Saudis and others, but it had no interest -- or should have had no interest -- in the internal governance of Iraq.
This is the critical point on which the mission became complex, and the worst conceivable thing in a military operation took place: mission creep. Rather than focus on the follow-on operations that had to be undertaken against al Qaeda, the Bush administration created a new goal: the occupation and administration of Iraq by the United States, with most of the burden falling on the U.S. military. More important, the United States also dismantled the Iraqi government bureaucracy and military under the principle that de-Baathification had to be accomplished. Over time, this evolved to a new mission: the creation of democracy in Iraq.
Under the best of circumstances, this was not something the United States had the resources to achieve. Iraq is a complex and multi-layered society with many competing interests. The idea that the United States would be able to effectively preside over this society, shepherding it to democracy, was difficult to conceive even in the best of circumstances. Under the circumstances that began to emerge only days after the fall of Baghdad, it was an unachievable goal and an impossible mission. The creation of a viable democracy in the midst of a civil war, even if Iraqi society were amenable to copying American institutions, was an impossibility. The one thing that should have been learned in Vietnam was that the evolution of political institutions in the midst of a sustained guerrilla war is impossible.
The administration pursued this goal for a single reason: From the beginning, it consistently underestimated the Iraqis' capability to resist the United States. It underestimated the tenacity, courage and cleverness of the Sunni guerrillas. It underestimated the political sophistication of the Shiite leadership. It underestimated the forms of military and political resistance that would limit what the United States could achieve. In my view, the underestimation of the enemy in Iraq is the greatest failure of this administration, and the one for which the media rarely hold it accountable.
This miscalculation drew the U.S. Army into the two types of warfare for which it is least suited.
First, it drew the Army into the cities, where the work of reconstruction -- physical and political -- had to be carried out. Having dismantled Iraqi military and police institutions, the Army found itself in the role of policing the cities. This would have been difficult enough had there not been a guerrilla war. With a guerrilla war -- much of it concentrated in heavily urbanized areas and the roads connecting cities -- the Army found itself trapped in low-intensity urban warfare in which its technical advantages dissolved and the political consequences of successful counterattacks outweighed the value of defeating the guerrillas. Destroying three blocks of Baghdad to take out a guerrilla squad made military sense, but no political sense. The Army could neither act effectively nor withdraw.
Second, the Army was lured into counterinsurgency warfare. No subject has been studied more extensively by the U.S. Army, and no subject remains as opaque. The guerrilla seeks to embed himself among the general population. Distinguishing him is virtually impossible, particularly for a 20-year-old soldier or Marine who speaks not a word of the language nor understands the social cues that might guide him. In this circumstance, the soldier is simply a target, a casualty waiting to happen.
The usual solution is to raise an indigenous force to fight the guerrillas. The problem is that the most eager recruits for this force are the guerrillas themselves: They not only get great intelligence, but weapons, ammunition and three square meals a day. Sometimes, pre-existing militias are used, via a political arrangement. But these militias have very different agendas than those of the occupying force, and frequently maneuver the occupier into doing their job for them.
Strategies
The United States must begin by recognizing that it cannot possibly pacify Iraq with the force available or, for that matter, with a larger military force. It can continue to patrol, it can continue to question people, it can continue to take casualties. However, it can never permanently defeat the guerrilla forces in the Sunni triangle using this strategy. It certainly cannot displace the power and authority of the Shiite leadership in the south. Urban warfare and counterinsurgency in the Iraqi environment cannot be successful.
This means the goal of reshaping Iraqi society is beyond the reach of the United States. Iraq is what it is. The United States, having performed the service of removing Saddam Hussein from power, cannot reshape a society that has millennia of layers. The attempt to do so will generate resistance -- while that resistance can be endured, it cannot be suppressed.
The United States must recall its original mission, which was to occupy Iraq in order to prosecute the war against al Qaeda. If that mission is remembered, and the mission creep of reshaping Iraq forgotten, some obvious strategic solutions re-emerge. The first, and most important, is that the United States has no national interest in the nature of Iraqi government or society. Except for not supporting al Qaeda, Iraq's government does not matter. Since the Iraqi Shia have an inherent aversion to Wahabbi al Qaeda, the political path on that is fairly clear.
The United States now cannot withdraw from Iraq. We can wonder about the wisdom of the invasion, but a withdrawal under pressure would be used by al Qaeda and radical Islamists as demonstration of their core point: that the United States is inherently weak and, like the Soviet Union, ripe for defeat. Having gone in, withdrawal in the near term is not an option.
That does not mean U.S. forces must be positioned in and near urban areas. There is a major repositioning under way to reduce the size of the U.S. presence in the cities, but there is, nevertheless, a more fundamental shift to be made. The United States undertook responsibility for security in Iraq after its invasion. It cannot carry out this mission. Therefore, it has to abandon the mission. Some might argue this would leave a vacuum. We would argue there already is a vacuum, filled only with American and coalition targets. It is not a question of creating anarchy; anarchy already exists. It is a question of whether the United States wishes to lose soldiers in an anarchic situation.
The bulk of Iraq's population lives in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. To the south and west of the Euphrates River, there is a vast and relatively uninhabited region of Iraq -- not very hospitable, but with less shooting than on the other side. The western half of Iraq borders Saudi Arabia and Syria, two of the countries about which the United States harbors the most concern. A withdrawal from the river basins would allow the United States to carry out its primary mission -- maintaining regional pressure -- without engaging in an impossible war. Moreover, in the Kurdish regions of the northeast, where U.S. Special Forces have operated for a very long time, U.S. forces could be based -- and supplied -- in order to maintain a presence on the Iranian border.
Iraq should then be encouraged to develop a Shiite-dominated government, the best guarantor against al Qaeda and the greatest incentive for the Iranians not to destabilize the situation. The fate of the Sunnis will rest in the deal they can negotiate with the Shia and Kurds -- and, as they say, that is their problem.
The United States could supply the forces in western and southern Iraq from Kuwait, without the fear that convoy routes would be cut in urban areas. In the relatively uninhabited regions, distinguishing guerrillas from rocks would be somewhat easier than distinguishing them from innocent bystanders. The force could, if it chose, execute a broad crescent around Iraq, touching all the borders but not the populations.
The Iraqi government might demand at some point that the United States withdraw, but they would have no way to impose their demand, as they would if U.S. forces could continue to be picked off with improvised explosive devices and sniper fire. The geographical move would help to insulate U.S. forces from even this demand, assuming political arrangements could not be made. Certainly the land is inhospitable, and serious engineering and logistical efforts would be required to accommodate basing for large numbers of troops. However, large numbers of troops might not be necessary -- and the engineering and logistical problems certainly will not make headlines around the world.
Cutting Losses
Certainly, as a psychological matter, there is a retreat. The United States would be cutting losses. But it has no choice. It will not be able to defeat the insurgencies it faces without heavy casualties and creating chaos in Iraqi society. Moreover, a victory in this war would not provide the United States with anything that is in its national interest. Unless you are an ideologue -- which I am not -- who believes bringing American-style democracy to the world is a holy mission, it follows that the nature of the Iraqi government -- or chaos -- does not affect me.
What does affect me is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is trying to kill me. Countries such as Saudi Arabia permitted al Qaeda to flourish. The presence of a couple of U.S. armored divisions along the kingdom's northern border has been a very sobering thought. That pressure cannot be removed. Whatever chaos there is in Saudi Arabia, that is the key to breaking al Qaeda -- not Baghdad.
The key to al Qaeda is in Riyadh and in Islamabad. The invasion of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward policy change in Riyadh, and it worked. The pressure must be maintained and now extended to Islamabad. However, the war was never about Baghdad, and certainly never about Al Fallujah and An Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr's relationship to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the makeup of the elders in Al Fallujah are matters of utter and absolute indifference to the United States. Getting drawn into those fights is in fact the quagmire -- a word we use carefully and deliberately.
But in the desert west and south of the Euphrates, the United States can carry out the real mission for which it came. And if the arc of responsibility extends along the Turkish frontier to Kurdistan, that is a manageable mission creep. The United States should not get out of Iraq. It must get out of Baghdad, Al Fallujah, An Najaf and the other sinkholes into which the administration's policies have thrown U.S. soldiers.
Again, this differs from our normal analysis in offering policy prescriptions. This is, of course, a very high-level sketch of a solution to an extraordinarily complex situation. Nevertheless, sometimes the solution to complex situations is to simplify them.
<b>Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy </b>
<i>One of the architects of the Pentagon's New Map of the world offers a most important guide to a) why the boys will never be coming home and b) why this is the first step toward a world without war </i>
by Thomas P. M. Barnett | Jun 01 '04
Is this any way to run a global war on terrorism? The new conventional wisdom is that the warmongering neocons of the Bush administration have hijacked U. S. foreign policy and sent the world down the pathway of perpetual war. Instead of dissecting the rather hysterical strain of most of that analysis, let me tell you what this feedback should really tell us about the world we now live in. And as opaque as the administration has been in signaling its values and true motivations, I will try in this piece to explain what Iraq should mean to us, why all the pain we have encountered there is the price we must pay to ensure a peaceful century, and why this is the birthing process of a future worth creating.
There is no doubt that when the Bush administration decided to lay a "big bang" upon the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein and committing our nation to reconnecting a brutalized, isolated Iraqi society to the world outside, it proceeded with virtually no public or international debate about the scope of this grand historical task. I, however, see a clear link between 9/11 and President Bush's declared intention of "transforming" the Middle East.
In the March 2003 issue of this magazine, I published an article called "The Pentagon's New Map" [available at Esquire.com/barnett], which was about work I had spent years doing at the Naval War College and the Pentagon to figure out the true threat environment for the United States in a post-cold-war world. The answer? Most of the world is peaceable and functioning. I call that the Core, and it is basically the parts of the world, including China, where globalization has taken root to some degree. The rest of the world, which had never been considered by the Pentagon to be a direct threat, much less the gravest threat we face, is made up of the countries that remain disconnected, either because of abject poverty or political or cultural repression: the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. This I call the Gap. The primary goal of the foreign policy of the United States should be, in my view, to shrink the Gap. Nothing about our Iraq experience has changed this view.
The only way America can truly achieve strategic security in the age of globalization is by destroying disconnectedness. We fight fire with fire. Al Qaeda, whose true grievances lie wholly within the Persian Gulf, tried to destroy the Core's connectedness on 9/11 by triggering what I call a system perturbation that would throw our rules into flux. Its hope was to shock America and the West into abandoning the Gulf region first militarily, then politically, and finally economically. Al Qaeda hoped to detoxify the region's societies through disconnectedness.
But the president decided correctly to fight back by trying to destroy disconnectedness in the Gulf region. We seek to do unto al Qaeda as it did unto us: trigger a system perturbation that will send all the region's rule sets into flux. Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the globalizing worldâfrom our rule sets, our norms, and all the ties that bind the Core together in mutually assured dependence.
Disconnecting the great disconnector from the Gulf's security scene is only the beginning of our effort, because now Iraq becomes the great battlefield for the soul of the whole region. That second victory will be far more difficult to achieve. Our efforts to integrate Iraq into a wider world will pit all the forces of disconnectedness in the region against us. Therefore we must enlist the aid of all the forces of connectedness across the Coreânot just their troops but their investment flows and their commercial networks.
America needs to demonstrate to the Middle East that there is such a thing as a future worth creating there, not just a past worth re-creating, which is all the bin Ladens will ever offer Muslim populationsâa retreat from today's diminished expectations. If America cannot muster the willânot to mention the Core's aidâto win this struggle in Iraq, we will send a clear signal to the region that there is no future in the Core for any of these states, save Israel.
History's clock is already ticking on that great task. As the world progressively decarbonizes its energy profile, moving away from oil and toward hydrogen obtained from natural gas, the Middle East's security deficit will become a cross that not even the United States will long be willing to bear. The bin Ladens of that region know this and thus will act with increasing desperation to engineer our abandonment of the region. Like Vladimir Lenin a century earlier, bin Laden dreams of breaking off a large chunk of humanity into a separate rule-set sphere, where our rules hold no sway, where our money finds no purchase, and where our polluting cultural exports can be effectively repelled. Bin Laden's offer is the offer of all would-be dictators: Just leave these people to me and I will trouble you no further.
By taking down Saddam Hussein and turning Iraq into a magnet for every jihadist with a one-way ticket to paradise, America has really thrown down the gauntlet in the Middle East; it has finally begun exporting security to that part of the world for real. In the past, we always had ulterior motives: to keep the Soviets out, to keep the oil flowing, to keep Israel safe. But reconnecting Iraq to the world is so much bigger than any of those goals. It is about creating a future worth living for a billion Muslims we could just as easily consign to the past.
<b>POWELL DOCTRINE, R.I.P</b>
What does this new approach mean for this nation and the world over the long run? Let me be very clear about this: The boys are never coming home. America is not leaving the Middle East until the Middle East joins the world. It's that simple. No exit means no exit strategy.
One of the worst strategic concepts the Pentagon ever came up with was General Colin Powell's notion that America should never intervene militarily overseas unless and until an exit strategy is clearly defined. The legacy of that dictum has poisoned the U. S. military's strategic planning ever since, generating the force we have todayâperfect for drive-by regime changes and understaffed for everything else.
Fortunately, the Powell doctrine has died with Operation Iraqi Freedom, and with it dies America's decades-long tendency to blow off all the suffering and instability that plagues the Gap, or what we used to call the Third World. What is so amazingly courageous about what the Bush administration has done in trying to generate a "big bang" throughout the Middle East is that it has committed our nation to shrinking a major portion of the Gap in one fell swoop. By doing so, I believe this administration has forced America to finally come through on promises repeatedly offered during the cold war but never delivered upon. The irony, of course, is that the administration is guilty of such grotesque dissembling over its rationale for the war that it is unable to fully take credit for this historic achievement. And its dissembling has also aroused the passions of the empire crowd.
The concept of an "American empire" is very chic right now in literary and academic circles, and since the Bush administration never seems to offer a sufficiently comprehensive answer to the question weighing on most Americans' minds ("Where is this all leading?"), many of our best and brightest have connected the relevant dots and declared Washington the de facto Rome of a new imperial age.
This is all nonsense and bad history to boot. Empires involve enforcing maximal rule sets, in which the leader tells the led not just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been the American way of war or peace and does not reflect our system of governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the most obviously destructive behavior. Our goal must be to extend the Core's security rule set into the Gap and, by doing so, shrink the Gap progressively over time. This is not about extending America's rule but about extending the genuine freedom that collective security provides. All this talk about empire mistakenly seeks to impose a nineteenth-century simplicity upon a twenty-first-century complexity. In short, this era's version of globalization comes with rules, not a ruler. To deny that achievement is to discount the vast improvement America brought to the system administration of globalization following World War II compared with earlier, deeply flawed efforts by Europe's monarchiesâBritain included.
There is no doubt that many governments in the Core still view the world system as a balance of powers, and so any rise in U. S. influence or presence in the Middle East is seen as a loss of their influence or presence there. Too many of these "great powers" are led by small minds who prefer America's failures to the Core's expansion, because they perceive their national interests to be enhanced by the former and diminished by the latter. They prefer the Gap's continued suffering to their own loss of prestige, and they should be ashamed of their selfishness.
But America is far from alone in this great historical quest. As we realign our global military-basing structure to better reflect our continuing role as military Leviathan throughout the Gap, we leave behind old friends in Western Europe and embrace new ones in Eastern Europe. We increasingly trust East Asia to police itself while we export security to West Asia. We even go so far as to imagine and work toward future bases sprinkled throughout the African continent, a region long abandoned by the West to suffer decades of endemic conflict and disease.
<b>THE NEW STRATEGIC PARADIGM: DISCONNECTEDNESS DEFINES DANGER, OR, KISS THOSE DICTATORS GOODBYE</b>
So, why all the dissembling on the part of our political leadership? Well, the truth is, we are just coming to terms with a new grand strategy for the United States, the historical successor to containment, and our government doesn't yet have the words to explain this vision to the world. So we come off as dishonest, which is a terrible mistake, because this vision describes a future worth creating: making globalization truly global. This is something to be proud of, not something to run from.
The defense community spent the entire post-cold-war period scanning the strategic horizon, desperately searching for the fabled "near-peer competitor" that would someday replace our late beloved foe, the Soviet Union. About eight years ago, most defense strategists fell in love with China, convincing themselves that here was an enemy worth plotting against. Since then, the great bureaucratic push to "transform" the U. S. military into the high-tech warrior force of tomorrow has focused almost exclusively on that conflict modelâbasically China's invasion of Taiwan in 2020.
It was a beautiful dream, one easily sold to a Congress whose only interest in national-security planning is "Will you build it in my district?" It also corresponded to the Bush administration's view of the world prior to 9/11, which focused exclusively on great powers while expressing disdain for the Clinton administration's feeble attempts at nation-building in Third World wastelands. Frankly, it made everyone in Washington happy, because casting China as the future enemy provided the national-security establishment with a familiar villain: big, bad, and communist.
Naturally, the defense and intelligence communities reshaped themselves for this "new" challenge. We hired China experts by the barrelful and scripted all our war games to feature a large, unnamed Asian land power with an unhealthy interest in a small island nation off its coast. You want to know why we don't have a clue about what goes on inside the Gap? Because our military strategists spent a decade dreaming of an opponent that would not arise, for a war that no longer existed. We're the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the streetlamp instead of near his car a block away, because "the light's better over here."
The new rule set here is a simple one: We need to refocus all of our war-planning and intelligence systems from the Core to the Gap. This doesn't mean we still don't maintain a hedge against possible Chinese mischief. It just means a new strategic paradigm rules the roost: Disconnectedness defines danger. You want to locate the real danger in the system? Focus on those countries or regions most disconnected from the global economy, not those desperately working to integrate themselves with the outside worldâlike China.
What the intelligence failures on Iraq and al Qaeda should tell the Bush administration (and any that follow) is that it's time to get explicit with the American people and the world about how there are simply two very different security rule sets in the world today: one that corresponds to the stable and overwhelmingly peaceful Core, and another that corresponds to the violence-ridden and increasingly unstable Gap. What scares most people about the Iraq war is the sense that the Bush administration lied to them in order to whip up sufficient popular support for taking down Saddam Hussein. The White House comes off like the cop who yells out, "He's got a gun" and then airs out the "suspect" with a barrage of shots, only to discover later that he was just pulling out his wallet.
Without reopening the entire debate on Saddam, who I think we'll all admit had multiple priors and a number of outstanding warrants for his arrest, just take a minute and ask yourself why this administration felt it needed to hype its case for "present danger" to such an unseemly degree. The majority of Americans had already expressed support in polls for removing Saddam simply because of all the bad things he had done and continued to do to his people. So why all the unnecessary drama?
I'll tell you why. The international system today lacks any sort of recognized institutional rule set for processing a politically bankrupt state. We have one for economically bankrupt states, and it's called the IMF bailout and rehab process. We may argue incessantly about that rule set, but at least we've got one. So when an Asian financial "flu" disabled a number of states in 1997, the system processed that entire crowd within a couple of years.
What do we have for the Saddams and Mugabes and Kim Jong Ils of the world? Just a toothless UN Security Council whose only "weapon" is sanctions that inevitably kill innocent civilians while doing nothing to change the behavior of the regime. The UN is at best a legislative branch for the global community, whereas the U. S. is clearly the closest thing we have to an executive Leviathan able to prosecute criminal actors across the system.
The new rule set on this one is relatively straightforward but difficult to achieve; we need an IMF-like international organization that is set up to process dangerous Gap leaders who have ruled beyond their expiration date. It's not a long list, but imagine how much better a world we'd have if we could somehow manage to ditch all these dictators in a manner the entire Core could buy intoâeven the French.
As for the American public, what the intelligence failure on Iraq should translate into is a new and frank understanding of the limits of arms control. Again, different worlds (Core, Gap) require different rule sets on security. Getting any state from the Gap into the Core means, first and foremost, getting that state to accept the Core's fairly clear rule on security with regard to WMDâbasically "just say no." I know it's hypocritical for nuclear powers to tell smaller states to "Do as I say, not as I do," but on WMD I think that it's better to err on the side of order over justice.
What Americans need to understand about the potential (and real) proliferation of WMD inside the Gap is that all the arms-control treaties in the world won't do a damn thing to stop it. All such treaties reflect the conventional wisdom of life inside the Core, where mutually assured destruction has basically ended great-power war. That logic, or that security rule set, simply does not penetrate the Gap. So when states or transnational actors inside the Gap make moves in the direction of acquiring WMD, the new security rule set called preemptive war not only makes sense, it is imperative. If the Core lets the Gap's lawlessness on WMD infect our long-standing stability on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, then we will be doing nothing less than throwing away the cold war's most important peace dividend.
<b>PENTAGON VS. PENTAGON: WHY WE WILL SOON HAVE TWO MILITARIES, NOT ONE </b>
The second reason why so much of the world is unhappy with the current state of affairs in Iraq is that it's now clear that the Bush administration did a terrible job of thinking beyond Saddam's takedown. In effect, it is guilty of planning for war within the context of war when it should have been planning for war within the context of everything else. This is an acute and continuing problem for President Bush himself, who has gone so far as to color his reelection campaign with the imagery of his being a "war president," when both the public and the world at large clearly want evidence that his administration isn't myopically focused on this global war on terrorism but instead has learned to locate that much-needed security effort within the larger political, social, and economic context of globalization's advanceâor everything else.
Don't get me wrong. I don't lay all the blame for this sad state of affairs on the Bush administration alone. The Pentagon has spent the last decade and a half willfully ignoring its growing workload throughout the Gap. We've spent the entire post-cold-war period engaging in what are derisively known throughout the defense community as "military operations other than war" (MOOTW, or Moo-twah to insiders), and yet we have adamantly refused to rebalance our forcesâespecially our National Guard and Reservesâto account for this dramatic uptick in the Gap's demand for our services. Simply put, we currently have a military that can do two or three Saddam-style takedowns every year but cannot pull off even one Iraq-style occupation.
But that is changing rapidly, and for the better. Already, senior Defense Department leaders are pushing for the creation of a "stabilization force" component within the U. S. military. A year ago, such a proposal would have been summarily rejected, but today it strikes most serious defense analysts as a crucial task of defense transformation. In this new era, our military interventions will be judged primarily by whether or not we leave the country more connected to the outside world than we found it, not whether we generate an instant democracy or win the war in record time.
The importance of this new direction within the Pentagon cannot be overstated, because it signals a "back to the future" outcome that will return America's national-security establishment to the structure that served our nation so well prior to the historical aberration known as the cold war. Before we created the all-encompassing Department of Defense in 1947, America had two very distinct security establishments at its disposal: a Department of War and a department of everything else called the Department of the Navy. The War Department served as the "big stick" force that we busted out as required, while the Navy Department (especially the embedded Marines) served primarily as the "baton stick" force that we employed around the world on a regular basis.
Why did America fuse these two entities into a unified whole? As the cold war was beginning, defense strategists correctly foresaw a decades-long hair-trigger standoff with the Soviets over nuclear weapons. In effect, national defense (War Department) and international security (Navy Department) became interchangeable and virtually indistinguishable; to defend America was to deter the threat of global nuclear Armageddon.
As one small part of humanity that survived the madness of the cold war, let me be the first to applaud that historic decision. But let's be clear: The dangers to system stability that we face today do not involve global nuclear war among great powers; they involve undeterrable rogue regimes and transnational actors located exclusively inside the Gap, with the exception of the cold-war tailbone known as North Korea.
What the Iraq occupation is making clear throughout the defense community is that we currently have a Department of War and a Department of Everything Elseâthe latter underfunded and overworkedâcoexisting uncomfortably inside the Department of Defense. Over time, a great divorce will occur because no house divided against itself can long stand. This progressive bifurcation of the U. S. military into a Leviathan force focused on waging wars and a System Administrator force focused on winning the peace has been years in the making, but it took the painful lessons of Iraq to really get the ball rolling.
What this splitting of the force will mean to future presidential administrations is clear: greater flexibility in dealing with the world as we find it. The Leviathan force will remain your father's military: testosterone-fueled, lethal, and not subject to civilian law. The Sys Admin force will end up being more your mother's military: supportive, nonlethal, and willing to submit to recognized authorities such as the International Criminal Court and the UNâTeddy Roosevelt meets Woodrow Wilson.
What this bifurcation offers the rest of the world is twice as many opportunities to contribute to America's current scattershot efforts to export security throughout the Gap. The Leviathan is the classic come-as-you-are coalition of the willing, and since this flies-on-eyeballs crowd will feature Special Operations Forces as the pointy end of its spear, any nation able and willing to contribute its own small contingent of tough hombres can join this bandwagon on a first-come, first-to-serve basis.
But contributing to the war-fighting half of the pie won't be the only way to gain a seat at the table, because the follow-on Sys Admin effort will allow those nations unwilling to field combat forces in certain situations to nonetheless participate in the peacekeeping force that must necessarily stand watch over the longer haul. Having both forces is crucial for this reason: There is a strong temptation for any administrationâespecially the pointlessly vindictive Bush White Houseâto tell allies that if they do not join in the war effort, they cannot participate in the rebuilding that follows. What having both forces means is that we will be able to tell potential allies not only to "come as you are" for the war but also to "come when you can" for the peacekeeping.
As we have learned in Iraq, America can lose about 150 soldiers in six weeks of combat and/or lose about 500 soldiers to terrorism to date in the ensuing occupation. Either way, it hurts just the same. If any country is willing to help out on one side of the war-peace equation, we should simply be grateful for the sacrifice offered, not picky about the timing.
Here's what this splitting of the U. S. military means to the American people: The National Security Act of 2005 tentatively sits on the far side of this national election. I fully expect that if Bush is reelected, this piece of legislation will be profound, moving America down the pathway of seriously reordering its national-security establishment for the better. Does that mean a Kerry administration wouldn't do the same? Not at all. In fact, that administration may well be the far better choice to pull off such a dramatic reorganization, given the growing distrust of many Americans and the world regarding the Bush administration's integrity on matters of security.
My point is not to tell you how to vote, but simply to make sure you ask the right questions. If you think "preemptive war" and all that violence in the Gap are going to go away simply by voting Bush-Cheney out of office, you're kidding yourself. The next administration is going to have its hands full with international-security issues no matter how much it may want to focus on other things. So don't let either ticket off the hook on how it proposes to reshape our national-defense establishment for the big tasks that lie ahead.
As Americans seeking to choose our next president, we all need to understand better the stakes at hand, for it is not the danger just ahead that we underestimate but the opportunity that lies beyondâthe opportunity to make globalization truly global. America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization's tipping point from a closed club of the privileged few to a planetwide reality. Making that strategic visionâthat happy endingâcome true will end war as we know it.
America has made this effort before and changed the world. Now is the time to rededicate this nation to a new long-term strategy much as we did following World War II, when we began exporting the security that has already made war only a memory for more than half the world's population, enabling hundreds of millions to lift themselves out of poverty in the last couple of decades alone. It is our responsibility and our obligation to give peace the same chance in the rest of the world.
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Thomas P. M. Barnett is the author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, just published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. From November 2001 until June 2003, he served in the Office of Secretary of Defense.
<b>India blips again on UN radar for Iraq</b>
K.P. NAYAR
New York, May 31: The Bush administration plans to draw India into discussions on getting involved in Iraq as soon as the new government in New Delhi settles down in office, according to American sources at the UN.
Contrary to the popular perception in New Delhi that the Congress-led, Left-backed government of Manmohan Singh has come to office with a hands-off policy on Iraq, hopes are high here at the UN that India will not stay out of Iraq in the post-June 30 phase when Washington is promising to hand back sovereignty to Iraqis.
They are confident that in the coming months, external affairs minister K. Natwar Singh and national security adviser J.. Dixit, faced with the realities of diplomatic realpolitik, will find themselves trying to convince the Left parties in favour of Indian involvement in Iraq instead of following their pre-election script of being hands off on that country. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040601/asp/...ory_3304231.asp
The American occupation of Iraq is formally ending this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.
The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes that began with an inadequate commitment of resources and deepened with a misunderstanding of how politics, religion and society would evolve in occupied Iraq, these participants said.
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long article but worth reading.....
<b>U.S. returns sovereignty to Iraq</b>
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Members of Iraq's interim government took an oath of office Monday just hours after the United States returned the nation's sovereignty, two days ahead of schedule.
Led by Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, each member of the new government placed a hand on the Koran and promised to serve with sincerity and impartiality. Iraqi flags lined the wall behind them.
One analyst on aajTak said that iraq PM is ex-CIA agent! <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:cool--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/specool.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='specool.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Annan Selects U.N. Ambassador to Iraq - Ashraf Jehangir Qazi (current Pakistan's ambassador to Washington) <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo-->
I guess Indian troops to Iraq is not on table any more.
Main purpose is to project Pakistan as "Leader of Islamic Nations". Long term effects are very dangerous for India. Pakistan pursuit to bring back Mughal glory will be a nuisance to watch.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/artic...778030.cms
A UN Security Council resolution adopted last month calls for a special force, estimated to number 4,000 soldiers, to protect UN personnel and facilities in Iraq.
Among the countries identified by diplomats as possible participants in the force are Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Nepal and Ukraine.
"With the appointment of senior Pakistani diplomat Ashraf Jehangir Qazi as the Secretary General's new representative for Iraq, Islamabad now has a direct interest in protecting the UN mission," Dawn said, quoting the sources.
Okabe said Musharraf had agreed to release Qazi from his ambassadorial duties in Washington within two weeks.
Heard on NPR this morning that Natwar Singh's appeal is being broadcast on Al-Jazeera across all arab nations. Good to see GoI putting interests of Indian citizens ahead of everything else. I guess troops to Iraq will again take backseat for now.
Now that three Indians have been kidnapped in Iraq, what should the GOI and the Indian people do?
1) DO nothing, leave them to their fate and let them die, if need be (after all, the GOI has been crying itself hoarse beseeching Indians NOT to go to Iraq. Recall an interview with an ex-army officer who ridiculed the GOI and boasted that given the money he would serve in Iraq). Why should the GOI now spend even a single paisa trying to 'save' these private Indians?
2) The External Affairs Minister fly to Iraq and trade three Islamic terrorists held in India for the three Indians.
3) Pay monetary ransom, tell the Iraqis India will NEVER interfere in Iraq, and get the boys home!
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Heard on NPR this morning that Natwar Singh's appeal is being broadcast on Al-Jazeera across all arab nations. Good to see GoI putting interests of Indian citizens ahead of everything else. I guess troops to Iraq will again take backseat for now.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Viren, going back to my question. Why should the GOI spend even ONE paise trying to rescue these Indians? Natwar Singh has other more important things to take care of, for instance, trying to scuttle the apparent Swedish military hardware sales to Pakistan, or minimizing threats of ULFA terrorists operating from Bangaldesh.
For crying out loud, what he doesnt need is another free trip to the Middle East.
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