Dogs of War

And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge,

With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war

1. No, we’re not gearing up for war (yet)

I don’t really have time to be writing as much as I used to be but I thought I’d just write a post with an assortment of recent issues. Firstly, The Guardian has yet again managed to exaggerate and misrepresent British foreign policy. They start the article of their front page ‘UK military steps up plans for Iran attack amid fresh nuclear fears’ with

The Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.

There are so many things wrong with the story, its hard to know where to start. Firstly, looking at the quotes of the officials, it is no big change in British government policy nor is it as apocalyptic as the Guardian is making it sound. One quote from the officials state

The British government believes that a dual track strategy of pressure and engagement is the best approach to address the threat from Iran's nuclear programme and avoid regional conflict. We want a negotiated solution – but all options should be kept on the table.

But what about the plans!? The Guardian admits ‘there are no hard and fast blueprints.’ But what about other preparations that Guardian mentions?! Well, here’s another quote:

I think that it is fair to say that the MoD is constantly making plans for all manner of international situations. Some areas are of more concern than others.

And just to really drive the point home, a MoD source told The Telegraph ‘We have contingency plans on everything... It doesn’t mean anything will come of it but at least someone is thinking about this sort of thing.’ And lets assume that there were full blown preparations for a military confrontation with Iran – it simply doesn’t mean anything. David Cameron would still have to lobby for support for the war. This isn’t a dictatorship where the UK can simply go into war without any recourse (people made the same misguided argument about Blair).

2. Neither is the U.S

I’m not denying that war with Iran won’t happen in the future, but the current apocalyptic vision seems to be misleading to me. Firstly, it should be kept in mind that the U.S has tried to downplay any suggestion that its seeking a military confrontation with Iran, ‘saying it would rather exercise and exhaust "tough diplomacy" first.’ Secondly according to various reports in American and Israeli media the ‘U.S. is "absolutely" concerned that Israel is preparing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.’ Thirdly, it looks like the U.S is going to use the upcoming IAEA report to ‘further isolate Iran’:

Over the longer term, several senior Obama administration officials said in interviews, they are mulling a ban on financial transactions with Iran’s central bank... Also being considered is an expansion of the ban on the purchase of petroleum products sold by companies controlled by the country’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The recent publicised links between Al Qaeda and Iran are only news to people who haven’t read the 9/11 Commission Report. (This is not to entertain the frankly ridiculous idea that Iran had any foreknowledge of 9/11 – as the commission itself said). So, to repeat, there may be a war but the signals that people are reading into are simply not there.

3. In defence of President Obama

I wanted to talk about this blogpost on a website called ‘British Neo-libertarian.’ I read it a lot and I find myself disagreeing with it all the time. It tries to argue that the U.S withdrawal from Iraq is misguided – and it fails terribly to provide any sound reasoning. The first false assumption is:

In 2006, when troop levels dropped in Iraq, there was an explosion of violence... [Then] President Bush decided to reinforce troops in Iraq to root out al-Qaeda through General Petraeus. It has been a large success (Study the US military troop level, and civilian fatalities). It is a simple fact that more US soldiers works in creating conditions for better results.

This simplistic view of the Surge simply withstand scrutiny. While it certainly played a role, as Douglas Ollivant has written, it was primarily the realisation of defeat for the Sunnis that allowed for a settlement:

By late 2006, it was becoming quickly apparent to the Sunni that they were losing, particularly in Baghdad, as entire sectors of the city, and virtually the entire East side, were systematically cleansed of Sunni residents.. The mounting casualty count fundamentally changed Sunni outlooks and caused them to begin to look for a way to reach a settlement

There are many factors in what led to the drop in violence – form concrete barriers to operations against Al Qaeda. It’s also worth noting that the U.S military found Al Qaeda documents and used them to convince Middle Eastern and North African nations to stop would-be suicide bombing leaving the country. General Petraeus credits this diplomatic initiative as being the primary reason for the 85% drop in suicide bombings. So this simplistic and quite frankly propagandistic account of the Surge quelling violence is wrong.

The rebutting of this assumption goes some way in showing how the remaining presence of U.S soldiers will not necessarily make things better or worse. Iraq’s security woes wont be fixed overnight – but as Ollivant wrote in Foreign Policy, ‘these technical gaps can easily be filled, and the market will respond quickly to Iraqi petrodollars.’ Surely someone with libertarian in their blog name will see the utility in this argument? The argument that Iran’s position should determine U.S presence is similarly misguided.

It’s based on the false notion that Iraq is or is going to be a Iranian client state. This is just nonsense; Iran’s staunchest ally won only 20 seats out of over 300 in the last election. Indeed, this was lower than they achieved in 2008 and Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi credits this to the fact that the party was seen as an Iranian client. And, as the New York Times reported in July 2011, ‘Iraqi security forces have unleashed a sweeping crackdown on Iranian-backed Shiite militants responsible for most of the lethal attacks.’ American withdrawal wont stop these operations and wont change Iraqi reluctance toward Iran. If anything, withdrawal will take the rug out from under Iran.

It just seems hard to deny: Iraq is not a puppet state of Iran or the United State. The very fact that a sovereign Iraq has stood by its guns and refused to support even a mild presence also shows, yet again, that this isn’t some pansy puppet government. The security situation may get worse, there may be a series of bombs going off as has happened in the last two months, but they do no justify U.S presence any longer. 

Persian Programmes

The evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapons programme is strong; one of the many peices of evidence against this proposition is the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which said that Iran had stopped its weapons programme. The estimate given in 2007 was talking about Iran’s programme in 2003. Iran did stop its programme in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war – as I’ve previously written about Libya doing the same thing. The Iraq War did change the “regional logic on WMD” as anticipated by MI6.

But this did not last, the mismanagement of the Iraq war and the rise of an insurgency meant that Iran did not feel as threatened. The NIE have since be classified however there are reports which show what the American intelligence community states in the estimates. According to the Washington Post, the 2011 NIE “a significant, if subtle, shift from the main conclusion of a controversial 2007 estimate that Iran had halted its weaponization work” and finds that Iran is conducting “early-stage R&D work on aspects of the manufacturing process for a nuclear weapon.” This was also the assessment of the CIA in 2010.

In any event, the U.S does not have a monopoly on intelligence and assessment. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has stated that it is “increasingly concerned” that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons programme.  According to Haaretz, the IAEA has also seen evidence that “seem to point to the existence” of possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program. Yukiya Amano, the director of the IAEA also makes clear that Iran is not cooperating satisfactorily with the UN watchdog (nor was that the first time, in 2009 Iran deceived the IAEA about an enrichment facility in Qom which led them to say Iran was not being “transparent” with them).

The Sunday Times wrote about a 2011 report compiled for the United Nations Security Council which found that Tehran “sidestepped international sanctions in its programme to build intercontinental ballistic missiles and develop a nuclear weapon.”

Quite damning is the fact that Iranian documents acquired by The Times show that 2007 NIE estimate was now “worthless” because the documents show “Iran’s work in this field has no possible civilian application. It makes sense only for a programme to develop a nuclear weapon.”

In the documents obtained by The Times, Iranian military scientists suggest a way around the problem: by running surrogate tests that substitute titanium deuteride for the uranium compound. They suggest “continuing the work of replacement materials such as TiD2 [titanium deuteride] in order to avoid U [Uranium] pollution in the production of UD3”

UD3, according to The Times, “has only one application — to be the metaphorical match that lights a nuclear bomb.” In 2009, the Wall Street Journal also reported that the German intelligence agency, the BND, "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003." This is also the conclusion of French intelligence and British assessments.

According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Iran’s ambition to produce a nuclear weapon is “beyond reasonable doubt.” This of course does not make Iran gaining weapons inevitable, as the IISS says: “If it does decide to build nuclear weapons, this would likely be detected before it assembled a single weapon, much less the small arsenal that would be needed to make the risk worthwhile.”

The conclusion here is that Iran has serious ambitions for a nuclear weapon and that Iran has acted to this end in advancing a programme. The evidence here suggests that Iran is still not close gaining the bomb – but its intentions and scientists are serious enough to suggest its programme is a serious issue which must be countermanded before it does get what it seeks: a weaponised nuclear weapon. The distinction between a programme and a weapons system may seem trivial but its important: Iran does not have the bomb, nor in the assessment of the evidence is its emergence imminent - but its programme exists, is significantly advancing and has a clear goal. The policy recommendation is not military engagement at this point in time. I prefer the method suggested by John Sawers, the current head of MI6. He said in a speech given to the Society of Editors in 2010:

Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The longer international efforts delay Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons technology, the more time we create for a political solution to be found.

I will write another post at some point about why Iran getting nuclear weapons is something to be avoided. But assuming for now that it is something to be avoided, the means by which that is to be done at this moment in time, given the lack of imminence of a programme, is engagement and covert actions. I will provide more meat to these arguments in the aforementioned future post, this is merely just to address the Ron Pauls of the world who believe that 2007 NIE is sacred and there is no evidence for a programme when in fact, British, American, French, German, international and even Iranian evidence exists.

Regimes in Perpetuity

This might seem like a trivial post but a recent run-in with an Iranian regime propagandist made me make the simple case for self-determination. The argument is not one of benefits, utility, fundamental protection of rights but just a simple argument about what self-determination is. (And hence the lack of links). A couple of things need to me made clear: this is not a discussion about whether there is sufficient support for the Iranian regime. The following arguments are made on both the assumption that a regime can have 99% or 1% support. Similarly, they are not about policies but about the systems and processes which give rise to them. Nor is it about getting into the actual credibility of elections. 

The argument that was presented to me was: if people accept an Islamic system, then the system will dictate who is fit to govern and therefore, candidates can be eliminated on the basis of that system (see quotes below). There are several issues with this argument; firstly, allowing people to choose once what system they want and thereby forbid any change in that system thereafter has several effects: (1) not only does it bind the entirety of the people, (2) it silences those who originally or start to disagree with it who are in a minority.

(1) Does one bind oneself in entering, what is in essence, a contract in perpetuity? Yes; by accepting the system – and then having a conversion from Shia Islam to Sunni Islam or to Judaism – while one can in theory change opinions, it will mean that the ability to form a new system is eradicated because this system only allows those who are vetted enter its framework. And it just so happens that it does not allow those who support a new system. Mill put it accurately:

He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer free; but is thenceforth in a position which has no longer the presumption in its favour, that would be afforded by his voluntarily remaining in it. The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom.

(2) A possible response to the argument above is that ‘the majority accept it’ and if they did not, then the legitimacy would be gone. But this misses the point, and indeed, makes for a more worrying picture: the argument above was talking about an individual forfeiting his rights to change a system based on his own assessment. The argument, here, however is that a majority can choose a system in which the minority are bound by (and I strongly emphasise system). This takes away the possibility to have a potential minority have their voices heard in the process. Self-determination is not simply mob-rule and then silencing the minority based on that vote.

It also raises the question: if one is confident that the majority will accept those candidates, why is it even necessary to block those advocating a new system? Why is it necessary to have an a priori system at all? Cut the middle man and have an open, fair, democratic process. This is not to say that the laws passed will be good laws, of course. I am fairly confident that this country is a nation which mostly accepts personal freedom and accepts private property; I have no need to ban socialists. By having an open system, what I support and what the majority support is put into practice without having to deprive potential minorities. 

And thus lies Iran; the unelected Guardian Council vets candidates thereby stalling the system; 2,500 reformists in the 2004 parliamentary elections, 1,700 in 2008 parliamentary elections, 471 in the 2009 presidential elections. And even then, the unelected clown in chief will get his way against even the vetted successful candidates. This is partly why the 2009 elections legitimacy shouldn't be overstated: all of them lack openess and fairness.  

The internal coherency of the propagandistic arguments is close to nothing: while debating, there are various circularities. These are quotes (with fixed punctuation and spelling): 

(a) People decide whether they want an Islamic system or not once they have, then Islam decides everything else. There is no need for a referendum... Islam chooses the best leader for you. Not you. You can choose whether you want Islam or not.
(b) [If] the majority don’t want it, then religiously the govt. becomes illegitimate and it is an obligation for those in charge to step down