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No sign Iran seeks nuclear arms: new IAEA head

By Steve Hynd

Promising to be neither a "soft" Director-General or a "tough" Director-General," the next IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, has already rained all over the neocon parade. (H/t Kat)

VIENNA (Reuters) - The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms.

"I don't see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this," Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran's atomic program since his election, when asked whether he believed Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capability.

That's a bit of a blow to folks like John "bomb them" Bolton and the Weekly Standard's Peter Berkowitz, who have busily been claiming that - despite and indeed because of Iranian election protests and the following clampdown - "the central question for Middle East politics" namely, "what to do about Iran's illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons," is best answered by an immediate Israeli attack because "relying on prayer for Mousavi and the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs is no option at all, at least not for the state of Israel, the front line in Islamic radicalism's war against the West."

They go on to claim, beyond all credibility, that Israel could attack with relative impunity as far as Iranian blowback is concerned - using as part of their data for this wargames conducted by the neocon Heritage Foundation back in 2007 (which of course found the result the participants most wished to find) and for the rest wishful thinking.

So, this statement by the next atom watchdog head severely undermines their narrative, as it removes that first premise beloved of neocons and Clintonistas alike: that Iran is in "illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons." Expect the warmongers to ignore Amano as much as possible, just as they always ignore contrary expert advice and evidence. The point is to justify an attack by someone on Iran, not prevent a war.

And these warmongering, lying, cherry-picking Wormtongues are why I want to urge caution on the likes of Fareed Zakaria and Trita Parsi. I respect Trita immensely but he's forgotten the wolves in the wings when he says that the important criterion for American policy right now has to be to reject Ahmadinejad’s attempts at portraying his victory as final and that the best way to do that is by holding no negotiations for now. Steve Clemons points to pieces by Robert Dreyfuss and former UK ambassador to Iran Richard Dalton today and writes " I very much agree with Dreyfuss' kicker on engaging Iran and ignoring the John Bolton types who want to launch a new war." Ignore as in sideline, not hand them ammunition by derailing negotiation attempts.

I'd like to ask Trita - would he rather Obama talked or Israel bombed? Because I think those are going to be his choices. The meme that the election protests humanized Iranians and made an attack harder to justify - as repeated by Zakaria - didn't play at all in Tel Aviv or in US rightwing circles. White House opposition to an attack may also not be a meaningful deterrent factor if Obama himself has already implied, by disengagement, that the current Iranian government cannot be talked to. As long as Netan-yahoo, his Likudniks and their American neocon co-conspirators think US opinion is usefully split on an attack and that the waters of international opinion can be thus muddied, they will be highly tempted to tell themselves there will be no repercussions in the U.S. or internationally.

When Did The Af/Pak Policy Change?

By Steve Hynd

One of these things is not like the other.

Back in March, President Obama set out the broad outlines of his Af/Pak policy. One of the bright lines was supposedly that US forces in Afghanistan were not there to engage in long-term nation building. The US most definitely wasn't in Afghanistan so that in a decade or more at a cost of over a trillion dollars that nation could be bootstrapped up to the level of, say, Chad. Instead, the mission was twofold: to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban's hardcore militants, disrupting safe havens and killing leaders, while giving Afghans the bare beginnings of providing for their own governance and security.

In his March speech, Obama was plain that a long-term COIN operation wasn't to be on the cards and that the US "surge" was to take the fight to the Taliban.

We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists.

So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

...I have already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops that had been requested by General McKiernan for many months. These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border. This push will also help provide security in advance of the important presidential election in August.

At the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan Security Forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That is how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home.

Sometime over the last few months, that mission has changed. Without informing the American people and wthout any real debate, the COINdinista interventionists have taken over and redirected Obama's policy. From the WaPo today:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan…

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

Counter-insurgency "clear, hold and build" has entirely taken over from counter-terrorism "hunt, kill and disupt". That might be the right thing to do - although I have my doubts - but the point is that it wasn't what Obama said would happen and government policy has radically shifted in favor of an interventionist, long-war, nation-building policy straight from the military and the folks at CNAS without any official announcement or very much public debate. In fact, it's almost as if Obama himself hasn't been told.

Update: In comments over at VetVoice, commenter Ben says that one data point does not a trend make. Ben's critique correctly notes that there was going to be some COIN even in Obama's mainly CT-aimed original plan and so he asks how do might tell the difference from meagre evidence. But of course there isn't just one data point. There's been a continual stream of officers, wonks and policy officials - from Gates and McChrystal on down - saying that it's about civilian protection and nation building, not killing bad guys and getting out. The genesis of the change is easy to see too. CNAS' David Kilcullen has estimated another 10-15 years. Back in March, Eric Martin noted a CNAS report written by four of the leading COIN scholars arguing why a 5-10 year military/diplomatic commitment in Afghanistan was necessary.

Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal sees the same mission creep as I do.

And a new piece at The American Conservative details the alliance between Petraeus' COIN team and CNAS that has quietly changed Obama's Af/Pak policy.

Competing Strategies, Blind Faith In Af/Pak

By Steve Hynd

Bob Woodward's piece for the WaPo, in which he recounts national security advisor Jim Jones telling military leaders that any further calls for more troops in Afghanistan would occasion a "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment" from Obama, has both COINdinistas and contraCOINers discussing prioritization of the (still benchmarkless) strategy's confusing components in Afghanistan.

Marine general Lawrence Nicholson is quoted by Woodward as having a mission of “Protect the populace by, with and through the ANSF,” where “killing the enemy is secondary.” By contrast, Obama back in his March Af/Pak stratergy speech said that "These soldiers and Marines will take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east, and give us a greater capacity to partner with Afghan Security Forces and to go after insurgents along the border." Pretty much everyone agrees that there aren't enough troops on the ground - whether they be U.S., allied or local Afghan forces - to cover all the bases; to both secure population centers in a COIN "clear, hold and build" operation and to go after the insurgency in its own rural and border territory. Something has to give - and it looks like it will be the latter.

No matter what Obama may have said in March, the military and the CNAS-propelled Obama administration foreign policy team have set the strategy as a COIN-based one. That means a loooong war, at a cost of upwards of a trillion, as the US pursues a chimerical dream whereby Afghanistan one day (no one will guess when) emerges as a nation where economic development and reconstruction defeat the Taliban, albeit with a heavy occupation presence of foreign troops. But will that presence be heavy enough? At the CNAS blog, "Ibn Muqawama" writes in a post entitled "Repeating Mistakes?" that insufficient force was what hampered Iraq all those years and that:

if we are committed to our current strategy in Afghanistan, it seems pretty darn important that we're confident we have the force levels necessary to establish that minimum level of security.  Otherwise our "civilian surge" and reconstruction initiatives seem likely to be DOA.  That's not a call for the administration to reflexively throw in more troops without a rigorous analysis of strategic costs and benefits, but it does suggest that it needs to double-check to ensure that its ends, ways, and means in Afghanistan are are all aligned.

Hang on, the "mistake" wasn't to try to make an invasion based on lies and a years-long occupation turn out a "victory" for US interests in the first place? Apparently not - for CNAS is neoliberal interventionism at its very worst. "Can we invade it? Yes we can!"  All of which leaves contraCOIN writer Michael Cohen very frustrated:

If I had my druthers the President would conduct ... a cost benefit analysis and come to the right conclusion that the currently stated mission in Afghanistan is worth neither the blood nor treasure that are needed for it to be successfully achieved. Instead he has chosen a muddled course that pretty much guarantees the US won't achieve his goals for Afghanistan. Personally, I think fighting a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is the modern equivalent of fighting a land war in Asia, but if that's the mission you decide upon then you have to give the military the resources to actually do it.

The President can't have it both ways. Either you fight the war in Afghanistan to achieve the mission you've laid out, or you don't. There isn't really a middle ground here. History provides a pretty good road map for how that usually works out.

In the end, this whole situation reminds me of another old military expression: FUBAR

But the "civilian surge" is already in trouble too. As my friend and COINdinista-with-misgivings Spencer Ackerman notes:

The so-called “civilian surge” into Afghanistan isn’t happening. Proposals earlier this year for hundreds of new U.S. civilian officials to deploy to Afghanistan have given way to “triage” attempts at getting smaller amounts of key civilian personnel into advisory capacities to bolster Afghan governance.

Even if the "civilian surge" was sorted out, though, the whole "population-centric" strategy is based on the idea that economic improvement, reconstruction and reconcilliation would mean that the Taliban would lose their foothold in Afghanistan and be unable to regain it either by bullet or ballot box afteroccupying forces (eventually) leave. There's no particular reason why this should be so and indeed real world evidence suggests that it's simply bulls**t, but it's taken as an article of blind faith by the COIN crowd. Neither Afghanistan or Pakistan are Iraq and the Taliban movement is not foreign in the way Al Qaeda was in Iraq. In fact, this blind faith underpinning of the entire COIN strategy for Af/Pak is most akin to believing, just because, that economic reconstruction and democracy would prevent the Sunni Arabs of Iraq ever again holding any kind of power in that country after US troops leave - a pretty unlikely proposition.

Strategic concerns dominates tactics

By Fester:

Strategic aims dominate tactical aims.  If tactical aims do not aid in the achievement of a strategic goal, than tactical success is irrelevant at best if not seductively counter-productive.  This is basic policy analysis that will be reworded in various domains including the field of Clauswitzian analysis of military policy.  This is just a simple reminder that political outcomes (not defined as day to day partisan advantage and insta-polling) dominate street level outcomes, and by that metric, there is no such thing as success in Iraq against any plausible pre-war US war aims and political objectives; at best, there is a decent outcome.  More likely, it is a decent interval of non-chaos to allow for a significant US withdrawal.   

Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy reiterates this basic point --- the surge failed strategically:

My worry is that I don't see the political situation as being much different than it has in the past. Nothing much has changed from the previous rush to failures. As readers of this blog have seen me say before: the surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically. That is, as planned, it created a breathing space in which a political breakthrough might occur. But Iraqi leaders, for whatever reason, didn't take advantage of that space, and no breakthrough occurred. All the basic issues that faced Iraq before the surge are still hanging out there: How to share oil revenue? What is the power relationship between Shia, Sunni and Kurd? Who holds power inside the Shiite community? What is the role of Iran, the biggest winner in this war so far? And will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what happens when all the refugees outside the country and those displaced inside it, who I think are majority Sunni, try to go back to their old houses, now largely occupied by Shiites and protected by Shiite militias?

If the political questions are either not resolved or resolved by a slightly softer dictatorship backed by the occassional use of US airpower to beat down on domestic foes, then tactical success is irrelevant. 

Bunkering in Mexico

By Fester:

One of the things that has been puzzling me about the narco-insurgencies in Mexico has been the fact that the cartels and smuggling gangs have not been hitting the Mexican oil export structure. The Mexican government relies on oil exports for over 40% of the national budget and it gets pays for delivery of a barrel, and not the production of a barrel.

The cartels can most likely fracture the Mexican state and deprive it of vital revenue streams...

the big source of revenue that is immediately vulnerable is the Mexican oil exporting infrastructure. Right now the Mexican government has a sales agreement to supply oil for $70 per barrel until the end of this fiscal year. That agreement only applies to oil that is delivered. Hammering the fairly limited Mexican export infrastructure would be a significant escalation of violence and strategic threat with the possibility of bringing the United States into Mexican territory and precipitating a massive crisis of legitimacy for the Mexican government.

The oil export infrastructure is a bit more robust than the Iraqi infrastructure that was hammered for four years, but not significantly so. There are only a few major pipelines that feed the export ports or cross into the United States. One of those pipelines goes through the most violent city in Mexico before it crosses the border at El Paso, Texas....

Attacking the oil export infrastructure would be a significant escalation as it would be an explicit strike against the legitimacy of the state.

John Robb is passing along a potential reason why the infrastructure has not been attacked. The cartels are bunkering and being parasites upon the infrastructure. Smuggling expertise is being transferred across domains from drugs and people to oil shipments to create new revenue streams for smugglers and other associated actors. Keeping the infrastructure up and operational at near normal levels allows for 'mild' parasitism to occur without drawing a strong response.

I'm still surprised that the pipelines and pumping stations have not been attacked in a systemic manner yet, but the bunkering/smuggling profit angle makes some sense as a counter-incentive.

"Out, America out!"

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has a piece on the Iraqi celebrations I mentioned yesterday which are happening in advance of the formal pullout of US troops from their cities which is on schedule to conclude today.

"Out, America, out!" a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

Across town, the virtual absence of American troops and helicopters, the cheerfulness of Iraqis in military uniform, and the cries of joy gave this scarred, bunkered capital a rare carnival-like atmosphere. Iraqi police and army cars were decked with ribbons, balloons, plastic flowers and new flags. A few Baghdadis drove under the sweltering midday sun honking horns as passengers hung out the windows waving flags and yelling euphorically.

In Basra, the sentiment was inscribed on walls with spray paint: "No No Americans." Another graffiti artist instructed: "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty."

Yet, despite the celebrations, as Spencer Ackerman points out, this is a withdrawal in name only.

Milestones don't always mark what they should. Tomorrow all these things are true: there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; procedures and circumstances and contingencies pertain whereby urban security will still be a U.S. mission; there is a U.S. combat mission, by binding diplomatic accord, for an additional 13 months; another year will pass after that before U.S. troops depart; there is ever-present danger in Iraq, if not necessarily strategic peril; and the scope and contour of a U.S.-Iraqi relationship on January 1, 2012 remains to be determined, and may feature a small U.S. military advisory presence.

What these Iraqis are celebrating isn't this shadow of withdrawal, it's the idea of returned sovereignty, the concept of withdrawal. If I were Tom Friedman I'd probably write they were celebrating the platonic ideal of an end to their occupation.

Let's not forget that it is an accidental and mismanaged occupation -  one never planned for - which the whole world knows was born from outrageous lies. And that even so, as US officials and officers talked about helping Iraq find its feet again these past six years, they've continually betrayed those promises by looking out for often petty and mean U.S. national interests instead of Iraqis. Neither should we forget that there have been only minor convictions for all the brutality, torture and abuse, and mostly minor sentences even then.

But if Iraqis are celebrating the first flavor of an end to that occupation, they're not celebrating reconstruction or reconcilliation. They're not celebrating peace. Tom Ricks and others are correct that there will be a spiral of upward violence as the U.S. stiffener departs the Iraqi central government's backbone. (Although Ricks is a special case as he pleads that Petraeus and Odierno are geniuses for the Surge even while he argues the Surge didn't work.) There will be some level of civil war in Iraq yet, whether it's between Shia and Sunni, Kurd and Arab, Shia money-grabbers in the oil-rich South or a combination of all three.

That's not an argument for extending the occupation, though. It was always an argument for shortening it. Imagine if the U.S. and it's allies had never invaded but an act of God or Alien Space Bats had destroyed Iraq's Saddam-era leadership, devastated the nation's infrastructure, killed thousands and displaced millions anyway. Of course there would have been a multi-sided civil war. Without Saddam's repression keeping a lid on and with those other stresses to society, the fractures and imbalances in Iraq would have split wide open exactly as they did - the only difference being no U.S. occupation to focus a goodly portion of those stresses upon, to magnify and perpetuate them. The same conditions will obtain after the US leaves, whenever that is, and would have obtained at any time in the last six years.

The point, blindingly obvious to jubilant Iraqis celebrating some meagre sovereignty today, is that all of that is their problem, never ours. The Pottery Barn Rule was never "you broke it, you own it". It was always meant to be "you broke it, pay for it, and get the f**k out of our store before you make things worse!"

The Next Neocon Government

By Steve Hynd

British Conservative leader David Cameron is considered a dead certainty to become the next prime minister of the UK by just about everyone. Cameron's talked a lot about caring conservativism, just as Bush did - and according to journalist Neil Clark, like Bush his time in office will be playtime for the neocons.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.

The Society supports the 'maintenance of a strong military' with a 'global reach'; among its international patrons are the serial warmonger Richard 'Prince of Darkness' Perle, a former staffer of Henry Jackson who was considered one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, and Bill Kristol, the influential American journalist, formerly with the New York Times, who called for military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2006.

As for Osborne, Cameron's Shadow Chancellor and right-hand man; he praised the "excellent neoconservative case" for war against Iraq.

There are other strong neocon influences on Cameron. Policy Exchange, which has been described as the Tory leader's 'favourite think-tank', and which will have an open door to Number 10, was set up in 2002 by Michael Gove and fellow hawk Nicholas Boles, a member of the Notting Hill set who the Tories plan to parachute into the safe seat of Grantham and Stamford at the next election. Dean Godson, the group's research director and adviser on security issues, has been described as "one of the best connected neoconservatives in Britain".

All three would have prominent positions in Cameron's cabinet, alongside fellow hawks William Haig, Chris Grayling and Liam Fox. And as for David Cameron himself:

Although he said that Britain should learn from the 'failures' of neoconservatism in a speech in September 2006, and denied that he was a neocon himself, Cameron's public pronouncements on foreign affairs since then certainly give the Tory uber-hawks no grounds for believing that they have backed the wrong man.

Last summer, during the South Ossetia conflict, he called for Russia to be expelled from the G8, for Georgia's Nato membership to be "accelerated" and lambasted the British government for allowing Moscow's "aggression" to go unchecked.

He has consistently called for a tougher stance on Iran, warning that "every week, every month that goes by brings Iran closer to possessing a nuclear weapon." And, while staying largely silent on Israel's military assault on Gaza, he has declared his belief in Israel to be "indestructible" and pledged that he would be an "unswerving friend" to the country if he became Prime Minister.

Neoconservativism isn't dead, nor is it even a spent force. The trans-Atlantic ties between neocon groups are still strong and they look ready to become Wormtongues to yet another major Western leader of a nuclear power in the very near future. That won't lead anywhere good.

Democrats' "radical, pro-war agenda" on anti-war money

By Steve Hynd

My friend Derrick Crowe, who blogs at Return Good For Evil and HuffPo, is pissed. He has a truly righteous rant today over the actions of Dem leaders on the Hill and at the White House, who have, he writes, sought to "wrap themselves in the flag" and jettison "the contrary arguments they employed during the last several cycles" in a shameful copying of past Republican tactics of pandering to the public for support for a pro-war agenda under cover of claiming to "support the troops".

Read the whole thing. Derrick points to the new DCCC ad campaign which mirrors previous GOP camapigns against principled anti-war Dems, and goes on to highlight how the Dems are using a heavy hand to browbeat their own anti-war members, threatening to ostracize and defund them unless the voted to fund Obama's continuation of Bush's wars. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) told the HuffPo that the White House and Dem leadership had threatened Dem freshmen "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," although an administration spokesman denied the charge. There were also rumors of about "Rahm Emanuel cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes" on the funding bill.

Thus, Derrick observes:

funds solicited from donors on the premise that they will be used to elect more Democrats and defeat more Republican incumbents are actually being used to ensure the election and incumbency of House members who will vote to support war funding.

As a prior Democratic donor and highly active volunteer, I am absolutely disgusted. I know I’m not alone.

And he concludes:

Incredibly, despite five policy reviews in six months, the President who ran on a platform of finishing the fight in Afghanistan presides over a military campaign now wandering into neighboring countries, adrift in the exhibition of qualities for which he once decried the policies of President Bush: “undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

At moments like this, we desperately need a Congress and a congressional leadership team with the spine to check the listlessness and violence of the executive’s actions overseas. The actions of House leadership and their political campaign operation down the street have revealed that we have no such thing. Rather, what the war funding vote and its aftermath revealed is the further infiltration and dominance of the official structures the Democratic Party by a radical pro-war caucus, perfectly willing to sell out their constituents and their donors in the name of out-of-control militarism and continued, highly profitable mass murder overseas. This radical caucus running the party in the House flexed its muscles just this past week, teaming with Republicans to defeat legislative language to require an exit strategy from Afghanistan, despite the fact that the majority of rank-and-file Democrats supported it and despite its similarity to the exit strategy for which Democrats agitated for Iraq under President Bush. Until we force changes, expect more of the same on future votes.

I encourage every anti-war DCCC donor to close your checkbooks and put your debit cards away until we see a party worth another penny. Right now, the Democratic party isn’t. In fact, I’d like my money back.

Righteous.

Faced with Nuclear Attack, Why Not Surrender and Live to Fight Another Day?

By Russ Wellen

The Deproliferator

Conventional thinking holds that deterrence has kept us safe. If, that is, you don't mind a little brinkmanship like Berlin in 1961 and the Cuban Missile crisis. The history of the Cold War was also sprinkled with accidents such as the 1966 Palomares, Spain crash of a B-52 bearing four hydrogen bombs.

Nor has the Cold War's thaw elicited the same sigh of relief from the disarmament community as from the public at large. One state or another always seems to be looking for an excuse to develop nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, non-state actors, such as al-Qaeda or Chechen rebels, make no bones whatsoever about their nuclear avarice.

Thus does the prospect of Russia's loose nukes falling into the wrong hands and an A.Q. Khan wanna-be replenishing the nuclear black market keep us more or less permanently on edge. Add to that conflicting reports on the security of Pakistan's nukes. Finally, just to make absolutely sure we don't become complacent, plenty of nuclear weapons still remain on hair-trigger alert.

This kind of peace conjures up the old sight gag about nitroglycerin -- one false move and we're blown to kingdom come. No doubt about it: Deterrence is looking a little shop-worn these days. At the same time, thanks in part to President Obama's stated commitment, disarmament is being refurbished to the glossy finish it boasted for a brief spell in the eighties.

Let's not forget, though, that conventional weapons do a pretty good job of mimicking nuclear weapons. Where does that leave us then? Post-nuclear disarmament, we'd still be on the road to total war, just not tailgated by nuclear weapons.

In fact, the net effects are disturbing in their similarities. To the victims of Dresden and Hamburg, on the one hand, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the other, the quantitative and qualitative differences between the two types of bombing ranged from negligible to nonexistent. Those who survived the A-bomb attacks weren't saying to themselves: "I bet I'd be in a lot less pain if my injuries were inflicted by conventional weapons."

The justifications commonly given for total war are either collective guilt or the argument that, because they contribute to the war effort, civilians can be classified as combatants. Total war's unstated assumption, meanwhile, is that a state can suffer no more disastrous fate than invasion and occupation.

It's nice to know that "Give me liberty or give me death" still lives. But, in light of technological developments in warfare, this hoary rallying cry needs an overhaul. How about "Give me liberty or give all of us death"?

Wait, What's Behind Door Number Three?

In the Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition, Lawrence Freedman writes:

The response from those prepared to contemplate use [of nuclear weapons] tended to be based on a choice of values rather than strategic logic. It was considered 'better to be dead than red', to go down fighting rather than to succumb to the horrors that had come to be associated with communist rule. The nuclear pacifist might argue that [for] a particular code of honour to be applied to a whole society was an imposition more absolute and authoritarian than the type of rule it was supposed to avoid.

Freedman then quotes Lieutenant-General Sir John Cowley [writing in 1960]:

The choice of death or dishonor is one which has always faced the professional fighting man [who] chooses death for himself so that his country may survive, or. . . that the principles for which he is fighting may survive. [With nuclear weapons] we are facing a somewhat different situation, when the reply is not to given by individuals but by countries as a whole. Is it right for the government of a country to choose complete destruction of the population rather than some other alternative, however unpleasant that alternative may be?

Retaliating against an aggressor with total war will likely result in the obliteration of not only vast swaths of the population on both sides, but those very qualities with which the state earned our loyalty, such as respect for human rights. In other words, the question fundamental to total war and not often asked is: Just how much is preserving the sanctity of the state worth? The "unpleasant alternative" of which Lt. Gen. Cowley speaks is, of course, submitting to enemy rule.

Perhaps an aggressor can be repelled with another method besides an all-out preemptive attack or retaliation, whether nuclear or conventional. Let's think of a recent example of a state that's invaded another state and met with strong resistance. Oh, that would be us when we invaded Iraq.

Sure, the Iraqi Army's capacity for retaliation was killed on contact. Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the citizens of Iraq have made our lives as occupiers hell. While Iraq has yet to shake us off, at least it's reduced us to the point where we're not getting much of anything out of their country. But what application does this have for the United States were it to be attacked?

Call me whimsical, but instead of trading apocalyptic death and destruction with a state that attacks us, what if we made an end run around mass destruction? In other words, if an attack by intercontinental missiles -- whether the warheads are nuclear or non -- is imminent, why not make it clear that we choose not to retaliate in kind?

Say what? Refusing to fight back is not only un-American, it runs contrary to human nature. Even if we sought to behave otherwise, it wouldn't be long before we were caught in the death spiral of total war.

It's true that the idea there's a time to attack and a time to yield might better be applied to a state other than a superpower. But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend it's the United States that's attacked.

Upon signal, we'd disband our armed forces and they'd morph into a resistance movement with hidden caches of weapons at their disposal. It's not, of course, as un-American as it sounds: Guerilla warfare was employed in the early days of the Revolutionary War and by select forces during the Civil War. If it makes nuclear types feel any better, think of this approach as a second-strike capability, just not nuclear.

Because total war can't be waged on an insurgency -- though Russia came close in Chechnya -- not only is much less life lost, but less infrastructure demolished. Also, aside from retaining the moral upper hand, should an insurgency ultimately prevail, it would generate a national myth which, like the Revolutionary War, could sustain us for 200 years.

This may have seemed like a pointless exercise to some. But is it any more so than a method of waging war that stands to kill millions on both sides, level the landscape, and ravage the environment?

Finally, A Sensible Af/Pak Opium Policy

By Steve Hynd

We've written a fair bit here about what we all believe to be Obama's disasterous non-plan for the Af/Pak region, a plan that is simply Bush-lite without a benchmark for progress in sight and without any kind of exit plan. But credit where it's due, the Obama administration has finally gotten something right.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication -- for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country -- was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

''Eradication is a waste of money,'' Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.

''It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication,'' he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.

Instead, the US is to concentrate on assisting farmers who abandon poppy cultivation, boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops.

While Holbrooke did not provide the AP with a dollar figure for the new U.S. commitment, he told the G-8 ministers that Washington was increasing its funding for agricultural assistance from tens of millions of dollars a year to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, the current G-8 president.

''We're essentially phasing out our support for crop eradication and using the money to work on interdiction, rule of law, alternate crops,'' Holbrooke told the AP.

...The G-8 ministers along with Afghan counterpart Rangin Dadfar Spanta issued a statement at the end of their three-day summit Saturday saying it was urgent to find alternatives for farming communities where ''narco-trafficking and extremism are endemic.''

They said sustainable farming was key to Afghanistan's and Pakistan's future in that it would boost incomes, create jobs, improve rural development and lower regional tensions.

''Food insecurity and chronic poverty are root causes of civil instability and forced migration,'' the statement said.

As Fester noted back in December, US policies of eradication have been a disaster in Columbia too.

Newshoggers alumni Libby Spencer is happy with the policy change: "I could have written that statement. Come to think of it, I did -- too many times to count," but she, I'm sure, is aware that previous, lower key, promises of alternative crop development in Afghanistan have been plagued by a failure to follow through. Hopefully, now that these alternatives are official policy rather than piecemeal experiments, the funding and resourcing will come.