Category Archives: National Security

Steve Clemons dines out with the Great and the Powerful and reports back Nightmare Confirmed: Things Are Soooo Bad. . .:

some of America’s and Europe’s leading current and former political personalities were there — 60 people only — and among them a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense. The attendance list was extraordinary.

And the conversations — on the whole — were about the crappy condition of America’s national security position.

It seems that none of the people in charge have a clue how to improve what they consider to be the US’s dismal national security situation. Which I take to mean Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the mid-East, the whole ball of wax.

But nothing. Absolutely nothing. People were depressed and dismayed about current conditions. One very, very senior Bush administration official when asked by me what ideas he had to stabilize Iraq and stop our slow bleed situation said he had exhausted what he felt was possible.

Another top tier official when another guest pushed him to move the President into some rational deal-making that might trigger a more fruitful trend, ominously said “don’t hold your breath.”

Maybe if they would just all quit in disgust we might get in a fresh team with an idea or two?

Or at least if there were enough resignations, Bush might get the message?

This seems like rather a big deal: not only did the CIA admit the it has foreign prisons, but that there is a Presidential Order re: Foreign Detention Facilities which involves,

outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees, and a Justice Department legal analysis specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al-Qaeda members.

This will get interesting when Congress decides to resume its oversight duties.

Remember the “Axis of evil“? That was what this administration called Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Then it invaded one of them — the one without atomic weapons. The other two, who while they may be crazed in other ways reacted quite rationally to the obvious implicit threat of invasion, put their nuclear programs into higher gear.

Now it seems as if the North Koreans have exploded a nuclear weapon. While this may lead to some strict sanctions, it seems fairly clear that possession of a nuclear weapon also reduces to nearly zero the chance of foreign invasion. The chance of that was already quite small in the case of the North Koreans, but one can understand why they may not have wished to risk being wrong about that.

The North Korean government is one of the less rational ones on earth, so one can’t say with confidence that a sensible policy on the US side would have guaranteed success at keeping them from going nuclear. One can say, however, that the current administration’s abandonment of the Clinton policy of multilateralism and engagement ensured this dire outcome.

Chalk up one more disaster for this administration’s failures to focus on what matters, and its general incompetence.

In today’s online column Washington Post military affairs blogger William Arkin writes about “Vigilant Shield” which is the latest military exercise being run by the Pentagon. He calls it “particularly childish, a massive waste of money and an insult to the country” because it focuses on nuclear war with Russia — not exactly one of our main threats today — rather than any of the very real problems we are more likely to face:

One might think that NORTHCOM would be focused like a laser on preparing for another Sept. 11 or another Katrina, working through the details of just dealing with the obvious. Alas, some bomb going off somewhere, some natural disaster, doesn’t justify missile defenses or other big ticket items like submarines, nor satellites and “early warning,” nor the new tricks of cyber-warfare.

Want to know why the armed forces are hurting for soldiers and Marines? The few on the front lines defend the freedom of the extravagant in the Pentagon, the consulting world and defense industry to make billions.