I Will Drone You

... reportedly used as a threat by young men in the tribal areas of Pakistan who frequently hear the buzz of U.S. hunter killer drones overhead.

About a decade ago there was a great deal of talk about a revolution in military affairs, the emergence of the electronic battlefield, the transformation of G.I. Joe into Buck Rogers, and a wide range of gee-whiz innovations, constrained only by the writer’s imagination.  While we’re still waiting for much of what was promised (along with the flying cars, robot housekeepers and free electricity that the fearless forecasters of the 60s assured us would be here long before now), some aspects of modern warfare has been transformed by technology.

A particularly notable example is the mushrooming use of drones.  The consensus estimate is the U.S. has about 7,500 drones -- unmanned aircraft -- deployed today.  They range from the relatively small like the 18 inch Wasp III with a 3 mile radius, to the forty-four and half foot Global Hawk that can fly as high as 65,000 feet and say in the air as long as 36 hours.  The large majority carry cameras and radars of varying types for data gathering and mapping.  Some, like the Predator and Reaper, are used for killing. 

Drones are not cheap; you can fly the little WASP III off the lot for $49,000 but a Predator will set you back over $13 million and the Global Hawk goes for around $15 million.  (All drones include GPS systems and electronics far more advanced than your car; but your car does have a better sound system and more cupholders.)

Most drones are purchased and controlled by the military; some are loaned to other branches of government, from the CIA to the Border Patrol to NASA.  The CIA’s use of drones to attack and kill suspected Taliban in Pakistan and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen has raised some of the most serious questions surrounding their use.

Under the Obama administration the use of drones for all purposes has mushroomed including the use of Reaper or Predator drones for attacks.  Hard data is elusive but it has been estimated that there have been around 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia over the past decade, with at least 118 confirmed strikes in Pakistan in 2010 alone. 

Responsibility for using drones is divided between the Department of Defense and the CIA.  The military operates the drones in Afghanistan and until the first of this year, in Iraq.  (At least there have no public reports of U.S. drone attacks in Iraq since the ostensible withdrawal of U.S. forces.)  Operations in Pakistan are under the CIA and operations in Yemen are divided, with the military making some drone attacks and the CIA others. 

This division of responsibility matters because it affects who gets targeted for drone attacks and who oversees the operations.  There are, according to some sources, three separate “kill lists” -- the National Security Council compiles one, the CIA another, and the miliary’s Joint Special Operations Command a third.  Who decides, using what criteria, to put someone’s name on a list is not clear.  Nor do we know who decides that there is enough intelligence to launch a specific mission targeting an individual.  In addition, the CIA uses “signature” strikes.  Instead of confirming that a particular individual whose name is on a kill list is in fact in the sights of the drone operator, there is a set of behavioral indicators that support the conclusion that the people being observed are engaged in harmful or threatening activities and should be targets of a missile. 

Civilian, specifically Congressional, oversight of both the military and the CIA is central to our conception of American government.  The military use of drones in Afghanistan is overseen by the House and Senate Armed Services committees, while the House and Senate Intelligence committees oversee the CIA operations.  It is not surprising then that the rules of engagement are apparently different for military as opposed to CIA drone attacks. 

I think the use of hunter killer drones like Predator and Reaper raise several issues that you and I as American citizens ought to be thinking about. 

●    who is monitoring the broad policy implications of drone attacks outside formal combat zones, particularly the attacks in Pakistan

●    are targeted assassinations comparable to, or different from, shooting enemy solders during a fire fight

●    who, using what criteria, puts someone’s name on a kill list

●    can the government of the United States execute an American citizen without a trial?

The question of broader policy implications is raised directly by the CIA operations in Pakistan.  CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan have complicated an already difficult relationship.  From an American perspective the key issues are internal stability, deep concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the use of Pakistani territory by Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, and the potential for a violent confrontation with India. 

The drone strikes seriously complicate U.S. efforts to slow down the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and to support political development because they:

Are wildly unpopular with Pakistan public opinion.  It may well be true that they have gotten far more discriminating and the number of innocent bystanders killed has been drastically reduced, as proponents of the strikes contend.  But they are widely perceived in Pakistan as an arrogant assault on Pakistan’s territory and sovereignty that have killed hundreds of innocent bystanders.  This makes it harder for the government to appear to cooperate with the U.S.   

Divide the Pakistani military.  The popular democratic movement that replaced the military dictatorship with a civilian government did not change the fundamentals of Pakistani politics: the military is the single most important factor.  The military is deeply ambivalent about the Taliban operating in northwest Pakistan’s tribal areas. For some military leaders, especially the Intelligence agency (ISI), the Taliban is a tool they created in the 1980s to help expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and to prevent India from gaining a foothold in the area.  [for a brief overview of the Taliban and its relation to the ISI, see Who are Those Guys?] In 2012 India is the major threat and replacing the weak and corrupt Karzai government with a reliably anti-Indian, pro-Pakistan regime would be a good thing.  Drone strikes kill good guys and are very bad thing. For other military leaders, the Taliban has become a threat to internal stability and urban middle and upper middle classes.  Drone strikes kill bad guys and are a good thing, even if the government must make periodic public protests for the sake of public opinion.

The weightiest issue, I think, is not the drone strikes themselves but who decides that the positive impact of the strikes on the war in Afghanistan outweighs the negative impacts on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy.  It is not clear that anyone is seriously evaluating the larger strategic consequences of the tactical use of drones.

The use of drones to target particular individuals who have been identified as Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders raises a serious issue.  U.S. law prohibits assassination attempts on foreign heads of state.  International law and norms try to maintain a distinction between combat on a battlefield and other kinds of killing.  Drones are used in Pakistan and Yemen (and perhaps elsewhere) to kill specific individual who are believed to be plotting against the United States.  I don’t think this can be justified in the same way that one can justify killing someone in an enemy uniform or someone who is shooting at you.  I can make an argument that it can be justified and I can make the counter argument.  The point is, I think, is that no one has been challenged to make the argument, there has been no demand that the CIA or the Defense Department justify the use of drones as weapons in this fashion. 

Closely related to the question of targeted killings by drones the existence of “kill lists.”  Perhaps because it is so easy to see the targets of the drone attacks as “bad guys who need to be killed” very few people seem to be concerned about the criteria used and the decision process that puts a person’s name on the list.  The arguments for and against capital punishment are well known and the debate has raged for decades and the conditions under which the State can take a person’s life are tightly circumscribed by law.  But a person can be executed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone under secret guidelines with no trial.  This seems to be a serious enough action that we ought to be thinking about it.

Signature attacks seem even more problematic.  The criteria are secret  -- some people find it troubling that you can be killed far from a battlefield for doing something that someone sitting in a darkened room at Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas or another installation in the U.S. finds suspicious.  There is no way for you or I to know how useful the behavioral criteria are at clearly distinguishing hostile behavior or how often they yield a false positive by misinterpreting behavior.  There are unconfirmed allegations, for example, that people running to help victims of a drone attack have in their turn been attacked.

For many people, the fact that  American citizens have been executed in targeted drone attacks is particularly troubling.  Anwar al-Awlaki was killed last September in Yemen.  His 16 year old son was killed in another drone strike two weeks later. When word leaked that President Obama had approved adding al-Awlaki to a kill list in the fall of 2010 there was a flurry of protests by civil liberties groups but legal challenges failed and the alleged crimes of al-Awlaki were so serious and he was so public in his hopes to do harm to Americans that most of us paid little attention.  And we paid equally little attention a couple months ago when Attorney General Holder offered a long awaited justification of killing al-Awlaki by citing a secret Justice Department memo.  But some people do remain troubled by the argument that the President has the authority to execute an American citizen without a trial or any judicial process but you and I cannot see the legal rationale.

In some ways the issues raised by drone strikes are some of the familiar issues raised by the “war on terror” which in many ways continues just as it began under the Bush administration, even if the term itself has been stricken from the official vocabulary.  In other ways these issues flow from the use of a new technology whose implications are only now beginning to emerge but that promises to become more and more prominent in our every day lives as well as on battlefields far removed.

Who Are Those Guys: Quick Overview of the Taliban

Hunter killer drone strikes in Pakistan are directly linked to the war in Afghanistan but I suspect that most Americans have little understanding of who is fighting there and why.  Many of us could identify “The Taliban” as the enemy (especially if it was a multiple choice question) but would find it very hard to explain who they are and why our government has felt it necessary to fight them for the past 10 years.

The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a excellent example of a colonial border that is little more than a line drawn on a map arbitrarily dividing members of an existing society.  The border does exist, there are check points along the roads and soldiers who will question you if you want to go visit friends and family and who have to be avoided or bribed if your business is taking untaxed or illegal merchandise from one side to the other, but it is more of  an inconvenient fiction than a true division.  People think of themselves as members of their extended families, their village societies, and the broader clans and groups that make up the community of Pashtu speaking traditional people and not as citizens of Pakistan or Afghanistan.  The idea that I am Pakistani and my mother’s brother’s son who lives in the next valley over is a citizen of Afghanistan and therefore a foreigner is nonsensical.

Much of the Pakistani army is stationed in this northeastern section of the country to maintain order.  But the central government in Islamabad is far away and leaves everyday governance and economic life to traditional leaders in the villages. On the Afghan side the central government is even further away and even more irrelevant.

The outside world intruded heavily in Pashtun life in the 1980s when the Soviet Union sent its military into Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime.  Resistance to foreign forces was fierce across Afghanistan and refugees flooded into northeast Pakistan.

The United States framed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as part of the Cold War and sought proxies to fight the Red Army.  Anti-communist, anti-Russian Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, framed the invasion as atheists assaulting Islam.  Pakistan framed the invasion as India’s ally, the USSR, threatening Pakistan’s security.  The result was the emergence of the Taliban as the largest and most well supported opposition force.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency became the primary conduit for money and weapons from the U.S. and Persian Gulf states to anti-Soviet fighters.  The ISI is a highly secretive, quite autonomous branch of the military that combines many of the functions of the CIA, special operations forces, and the FBI.  The ISI recruited young men from refugee camps, from villages along the border with Afghanistan and incorporated a wave of volunteers from the Middle East  to create a very effective guerrilla force that could launch operations in Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan.  Saudi Arabia also supplied a number of religious leaders who set up schools in refugee camps and worked with potential fighters to promulgate a particularly austere and conservative version of Islam.

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan,

• the foreign fighters left, some to become Al Qaeda;
• the Taliban triumphed in the chaotic melee among different ethnic groups contending for power in Afghanistan and the dominant faction, influenced by the Saudi version of Islam,  instituted a government mirroring life in the most rural and reactionary villages;
• the Taliban regime provided a refuge for its erstwhile allies in Al Qaeda who had been chased out of their camps in Sudan;
• the ISI retained its close ties to its proteges

Very few people outside the ISI shed any tears when the United States attacked the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after 9/11 to remove Al Qaeda’s major ally.  The regime was notorious for oppression, mindless assaults on its own cultural heritage, and defiance of the international community and was beset by a powerful insurgency which was motivated largely by traditional rivalries and resentment of Pashtun dominance.  The U.S. and NATO forces tipped the balance and presided over the installation of a new Afghan regime which had to struggle from the beginning for both legitimacy and effective control. 

It is a question for another day, a classic “woulda coulda shoulda” question, to decide how different Afghanistan would have been if the U.S. had not almost immediately launched the war in Iraq, if there had been a strong and consistent focus on the civilian side of national development and building effective governance institutions, if we could have avoided becoming perceived as yet another band of foreigners trying to impose a corrupt and intrusive regime.  The fact is that is how the situation came to be defined. 

It is convenient to lump all the groups fighting against us under the rubric “Taliban” and to perceive all of Afghanistan as a single combat zone.  American strategy is more complicated than that and we do, at least at times, recognize that there are divisions and factions within the coalition that is opposing us.  The most important groups are Pashtun, motivated as much by xenophobe as religious or social values and their ability to rest and regroup in Pakistan’s tribal areas is critical.  And the most important groups have some kind of relationship with Pakistan’s ISI.

There are two optimistic scenarios for the end of American direct combat in Afghanistan.  One is that the investment in training the Afghan army and national police pays off and the Karzai government can survive.  The other is that the U.S. and the Karzai regime can split their opponents and negotiate a power sharing agreement with enough factions within the Taliban to block the most extreme leaders and the groups most under the sway of the ISI from returning to power.  The drone attacks are seen by the Obama administration as supporting either of those happy outcomes.

U.S. - North Korea Cut New Deal

The news that North Korea is suspending some of the most critical elements of its nuclear weapons program and the United States is shipping food to the regime in return is a very positive development in the roughly twenty year campaign to prevent North Korea from joining the nuclear weapons club.

At the same time it raises some serious and tantalizing questions for both policy makers in Washington, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo, and for folks like you and me, all of us trying to make sense out of events.

By the way, the difference between the world as someone in the President’s or Secretary of State’s position sees it and interested observers like us is not as great as one might imagine.  There’s the popular, quasi fantasy scenario: the decision maker reviewing true facts uncovered by daring spies, high tech surveillance and skilled analysts and making the hard choices, often in situations that ordinary folks don’t even know exist.  Not only is this version of reality depicted in countless books, movies, TV shows, web series and video games, but by policy makers themselves.  After all, if I can get you to believe that “I have examined all the classified information, reflected on the American National Interest and made the only possible choice” then I’m home free.  An historical example ... when Lyndon Johnson was presiding over the Vietnam war he would invite favored journalists into the Oval Office to talk about how the war was going.  He’d often start the conversation with papers marked TOP SECRET spread out on his desk.  The papers would be optimistic assessments of progress in Vietnam.  Suddenly, the President would realize that these highly classified documents were there and sweep them into a drawer, knowing that any half competent journalist would have read the documents, even upside down, and was now privy to inside secrets that showed the administration’s policy was right.

The reality is less glamorous.  The information available to a decision maker is refined and filtered through multiple layers of the national security bureaucracy.  The trite notion of “connecting the dots” is misleading as a metaphor for intelligence analysis.  Before you can ask how the dots are connected, you have to decide that this factoid is a dot and not a smudge, that this dot is related to some of those other dots but not others, and that you have enough dots to connect.  The intelligence briefings Presidents receive every day, as well as the longer term national security assessments are consensual documents, negotiated across departments and agencies.  Depending on the President they contain more or fewer references to points on which the various analysts and agencies disagree. 

Not only does the President get filtered and selected information about the world, but at every step of the way the raw data is interpreted in light of someone’s theory about how the world works and how the system works in other countries.  The President’s own theories and beliefs are deeply involved in the process, from start to finish, as are the beliefs and preferences of other top officials. 

You and I, on the other hand, rely on journalists using primarily open sources of information, along with the occasional strategic leak, for our raw data about what is going on.  One of the side effects of the Wikileaks episode was being able to see the close correspondence between the information and analysis being reported in secret diplomatic cables to the information and analysis being reported by journalists.  And then you and I, like all human beings, interpret and assess information in light of how we think about the world and what we already believe.

I don’t mean to suggest that we are all like the blind men in the fable who are trying to figure out the elephant (including the seventh and eighth blind men who can’t even find the elephant).  But it does mean that access to secret information and the inside dope is far less important than the quality of our concepts and theories and the opportunities we have had to reflect upon the times in the past when we have been right and when we have been wrong. 

This admittedly overly simplified version of both how the intelligence system works and how decisions are made is meant to suggest that what I think are the questions that the North Korean agreement raises are perhaps not so different from the puzzles keeping analysts in a number of governments busy.

■    What did Pyongyang and Washington really agree to? 

■    What does this tell us about the regime in North Korea?

■    Why was the deal struck now and not earlier or later?

■    What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?

The agreement.  Mark Manyin from the Congressional Research Service has an excellent synopsis of the terms agreed to by both sides at http://www.cfr.org/north-korea/wary-steps-forward-north-korea/p27526?cid=rss-analysisbriefbackgroundersexp-wary_steps_forward_with_north_-030112 

In a nutshell, North Korea agreed to suspend operations at its major production facility for nuclear materials, to open its nuclear program facilities to inspectors from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and to forgo further testing of long range missiles.  The United States agreed to resume shipping food aid to North Korea.

It seems to me the biggest question is whether North Korea really agreed to do what it seems to have promised in terms of inspections and changes in its program or whether, some six months or a year from now, it will be clear that North Korea’s agreement did not include the full range of  details, from logistics to access to facilities, that would make inspections fully effective.

Almost as important is the difference Manyin points out in the public statements by the two governments that were released simultaneously in Washington and P’yongyang.  The Korean statement explicitly mentions resumption of the Six Party Talks; the Washington statement does not.  This could be a comparatively minor difference perhaps based on nuances of language (hypothetical example: one side says “this could (meaning “it’s not beyond the realm of the possible”) lead to resumption...” the other side hears that as “this could (meaning “it makes it possible”) lead to resumption ...”) or it could represent a substantive divergence in understanding that could lead to some serious friction later on.

A much smaller question and one where in fact government insiders do know the answer is how this deal was reached.  There are no formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang so the normal channels are not there.  It would be interesting to know to what extent diplomats from other countries, such as China, were used as intermediaries and to what extent -- if any  -- this was the result of quasi-secret, informal talks between U.S. and North Korean official, perhaps at the UN.

What does this tell us about the regime in North Korea?  I think it tells us very little, if anything.

There is ample evidence that there have been massive and pervasive food shortages in North Korea for at least the last three years.  This is NOT likely to directly threaten the regime with demonstrations or a defiant opposition movement; starving people do not rebel.  But the nightmare that haunts North Korea’s neighbors is that the routine functions of government, which in North Korea include production and distribution of everything people need to survive, will grind to a halt because the state cannot pay the salaries of the bureaucrats and workers who operate the system and they will have to spend their time scrounging for survival.  If that happens, China will be flooded with millions of grindingly poor and starving people, the world will see scores, maybe hundreds or even thousands of desperate people dying in the mine fields that separate South Korea from the north and the international community will have to mount and sustain a humanitarian relief operation like nothing we’ve seen since the end of World War II.

There are three hypothesis I can think of to describe the current state of politics in Pyongyang.

I.      The transition from Kim Jong Il to his young son has gone far more rapidly and smoothly than most people expected.  Kim Jong Un is now picking up where his father left off (note that the deal announced in February was largely agreed before Kim Jong Il’s death.)

II.    Kim Jong Un is a figurehead, a shadow puppet whose strings are being pulled by a coalition of his older relatives, senior military officers and heads of the state apparatus all of whom are ready agree to a momentarily halt in the nuclear program in exchange for vital food aid.

III.    There is no transition as such but a pitched battle between various factions: the Kim family, state bureaucrats, party functionaries and the military.  At the moment a faction willing to suspend the nuclear program for the time being or even contemplate ending it is riding high; next month or year all will change.

What we’ve seen so far fits any of those hypotheses.  The deal tells us nothing.

Why was the deal struck now and not earlier or later?  There is some pretty good evidence that there was a tentative deal reached with Korea before Kim Jong Il’s death and some attempts by the Koreans to get the U.S. to sweeten the deal.  It may well be that it is only now, and not a few weeks ago, that it become clear that this deal was as good as it was going to get.  I can think of two, not necessarily mutually exclusive, hypotheses that cold explain why not later.

I.    Korean politics.  The timing is explained by whatever is going on at the highest levels of the North Korean regime.

II.    American politics.  As we’re all well aware, the first chapter of the 2012 Presidential campaign is in full swing.  The North Koreans might be motivated by the calculation that if they wait much longer an agreement could become an issue in the campaign and Obama might wish to bolster himself from an attack by Republicans by either not making an agreement at all or trying to wring more concessions out of them.  They might also be concerned about the possibility that a Republican will sit in the White House next January.  The fact that Mitt Romney’s chief foreign policy advisor is John Bolton – fiery super hawk from the Bush “Axis of Evil” years – and the other candidates have even more militant advisors may have convinced Pyongyang that it was now or never.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?  Actually, quite a bit.

The Six Party talks are very important to Chinese foreign policy for both symbolic and practical reasons.  From the broad symbolic perspective, the Six Party Talks show China as a leading player in regional politics, underlining the centrality of Beijing to peace and stability in Asia.  It is China, not the United Sates who sets the agenda and the timing of negotiations, and China, not the United States, to whom everyone looks for leadership.

From a practical perspective, China cares deeply about both the specter of a horrific human disaster in north Korean and the apocalyptic vision of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.  A much smaller practical consequence would be the opportunity Six Party Talks represents for U.S. and Chinese leaders to cooperate on a major issue to counterbalance the prickly relations of the last few months (and the China bashing that will mark the Presidential campaign.)

Bottom line: you and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and I, observers and analysts from the lowest echelons of the CIA to the highest echelons of the Chinese government, all have to stay tuned for further developments. 

The Arab Spring, Part 2

The first part of this look at the Arab Spring focused on two cases that have gone relatively well.  Neither Tunisia nor Egypt experienced a revolution, in the sense of a fundamental change in the structure of society, but both saw a change in regime and a significant opportunity for the development of more democratic politics.  Other countries in the Middle East have not fared as well. 

Using the same set of variables: structure and cohesion of the old regime, nature of the opposition groups, and role of outsiders, we can take a look at three countries that have had less optimistic outcomes.  In Libya the weakness and disarray of the opposition groups stands out; in Syria the structure and dynamics of the old regime seem most important and in Bahrain outsiders played the decisive role.

The Libyan story is widely known: NATO air strikes played a central role in Qadhafi’s demise.  The distinction between intervening to prevent mass bloodshed and intervening to support rebel military operations was clear enough in Washington and New York; it was meaningless on the ground. 

The base of Qadhafi’s rule of a country created out of three historically distinctive regions was traditional tribal alliances, lubricated by oil wealth and effective control of military force.  When the uprising began in the east anti-regime forces were able to create a large number of small local militias.  As the battles raged on, these militias became more effective even as the air strikes degraded the capability of units loyal to Qadhafi.  (One suspects that the British Special Air Service members who were embarrassingly captured and then released were not the only foreign advisors and trainers in Libya.)

Even when Tripoli fell to rebel forces, the identities and backgrounds of the rebel leaders were obscure.  At best the new leadership is a loose coalition of returned exiles, local notables and Islamists.  Plans for the future are largely irrelevant right now because the new regime has not solidified its hold on the capital.  The streets of Tripoli remain overrun by militiamen whose first loyalty is to their immediate leadership, not some broader Libyan policy.  There has been a certain amount of looting and of settling scores with supporters of the Qadhafi regime. Fire fights between groups are fairly common.  Many of the militia groups are reluctant to disband lest their home towns and villages be assaulted by other militias.  Despite the resumption of oil sales and continued political support from Europe, the future of Libya is very much up in the air.

Why has Syria gone so dreadfully wrong?  First of all, the Syrian military political and economic elite is deeply entangled with the Assad family.  Since 1969 Syria has been dominated by men from the Alawite sect, a small group among Syria’s minority Shi’a community.  The sense of being a minority among a minority that has been historically at the bottom of Syrian society contributes to a great feeling of solidarity among the leadership and resistance to change and reform.  It may well be that much of the Syrian elite fears that if the al-Assads go, so too will everyone else.

The Syrian state has developed a very effective repressive apparatus over the past 40 years and bolstered it with propaganda images of regime opponents as either tools of Western Imperialists hell bent on undermining the leading proponent of Arab nationalism or stalking horses for reactionary Muslim Brothers who would destroy secularism and tolerance. 

The Damascus regime acts as if they are under serge and fighting for their lives.  That may help explain the widespread use of brute military force against civilians, especially in cities like Homs that have long been centers of opposition to Alawite rule.

The Syrian opposition has been hampered by the fact that is it centered in peripheral areas like Homs and Latakia and not at the center of the system, Damascus.  It has developed a military wing from units who have defected from the Syrian military but cannot effectively protect civilians in the areas where it dominates.  The opposition is split between London-based exiles and groups within Syria itself and it is not clear if the agreement signed last month in Cairo will result in more effective cooperation and coordination.

Outsiders have played a public but ineffective role in Syria.  The Arab League continued the pattern it first showed in Libya by criticizing one of its members and then taking the remarkable step of expelling Syria for human rights abuses.  The first stage of the Arab League observer mission in Syria could do nothing but verify that the violent assaults continued.  While the misson has been extended, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and the small countries bordering the Persian Gulf) have withdrawn their personnel and called for more active involvement by the UN Security Council. 

Calls for more robust external intervention seem to me to be cynically manipulative.  Both the United States and the European Union have implemented sanctions against the Assad regime.  But the UN Security Council will not take any action on Syria.  Russia and China have been extremely reluctant to sanction Iran for its nuclear program because of both a general reluctance to interfere in the internal affairs of any country and some more tangible economic and political ties to Teheran.  They are highly unlikely to support a Security Council resolution that would matter in Syria and the members of the GCC know this full well.  Many of the rulers and policy makers in Saudi Arabia and Gulf States are convinced that Iran is the central problem in the region.  Syria is seen as Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world.  I think it is fair to suggest that calls from Gulf States and others for more robust UN involvement in Syria are far more aimed at dealing a blow to Iran than supporting the concept of a Responsibility to Protect that figured so prominently in the justification for Libya.

I hope I am wrong, but I do not see anything good happening in Syria in the near future.  The situation increasingly resembles a civil war.  It could drag on for months, even years.  The regime may survive, ruling a sullen and resentful population ground down by both physical repression and increasingly difficult economic times. 

Outside intervention has been decisive in Bahrain.

Bahrain was briefly part of the Arab Spring, when protests erupted against the reluctance of the monarchy to make modest democratic reforms.  The regime in Bahrain is a traditional, patriarchal monarchy, in which citizens are expected to forgo political involvement in return for lavish subsidies of everything from gasoline to education.  One important reality of Bahrain is that the ruling family and allied members of the elite are Sunni Muslim and the majority of the Bahraini citizens are Shi’a.  This has been a source of discontent and agitation for greater democracy for the past two decades and in the 1990s there were some attempts to increase public involvement in consultations without undermining royal supremacy. 

When protesters shut down traffic and commerce in Manama, Bahrain’s capital and home to over 10% of the population, both Bahrain’s rulers and their neighbors in Saudi Arabia framed it as a Shi’a assault on Sunni power, fomented by Iran.  Saudi Arabia responded to a request form the king of Bahrain for help by sending military units across the 15 mile long causeway that connects the island of Bahrain to mainland Saudi Arabia.  After “restoring order” the Saudi units have remained in Manama and effectively suppressed further demonstrations. 

If we broaden our perspective from the dramatic events of the past year in the Middle East and take into account developments in the rest of the world in the last three decades we may gain some insight.  Beginning in the 1980s what scholars dubbed “The Third Wave of Democracy” spread over Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.  Long standing authoritarian regimes gave way to multi-party liberal democratic and stagnant command economies were replaced by market systems. 

Some of those dramatic regime changes have stuck and former dictatorships have become functioning relatively democratic systems.  Others have stagnated or even (e.g. Russia) drifted back toward authoritarian rule.

An important variable in explaining success and failure of nascent democracies has been economic development.  Regimes that succeed in meeting basic needs and expanding opportunities for everyday people have tended to maintain their democratic gains.  Those that have either not been able to meet basic physical needs or have seen rapidly widening gulfs between a wealthy few and a less affluent many have been more likely to back slide. 

The second thing a broader perspective reveals is the reminder that politics is a process, a series of events and underlying dynamics, not an overnight stand.  We’re back to Yogi, and it ain’t over until its over.

The "Arab Spring" a year later

It is roughly the one year anniversary of the protests in Tunisia that led to the demise of the Zine Ben-Ali government, the opening act of the Arab Spring.   Yogi Berra was right, “it ain’t over until its over.”  The dynamics unleashed over the past year have not yet played themselves out anywhere and it is far too soon to reach any definitive conclusions.  But it is not totally foolish to take stock in the middle of historical movements and get some sense of direction.

Two observation are safe to make.  First,  neither the most naive hopes nor most paranoid fears have been realized.  Old authoritarian regimes have not been replaced with perfect democracies, with economic justice and unicorns dancing in the streets.  But neither have Islamist bogeymen or sinister Iranian agents seized power, forcing burka-clad women back into the kitchen, banning music and laughter, and making great strides toward a restored Caliphate that stretches from the Middle East to China. 

Second, the “gee whiz, hip technology has changed everything” notion has been discredited.  Flying fingers Twittering, posting to Facebook, and texting were not the cause of success in Egypt nor somehow to blame for the nightmare in Syria.  Technology makes it easier to do some things but in the end it is old school politics that matters: real people, face to face in real time protesting, organizing and refusing to play by the old rules. 

The cliche that all politics is local has a couple of grains of truth and the events of the past year have varied greatly from country to country, but three basic dimensions can be seen.  The structure and cohesion of the old regime, the nature of opposition groups, and the role of outsiders.

 I will split this topic into two.  The first section, which you reading now, will focus on two countries, Tunisia and Egypt,  who have significant success in moving toward democracy.  The second installment will discuss three countries with far less promising outcomes: Syria, Libya and Bahrain.

Tunisia, where it all arguably started, has probably made more progress than anywhere else.  Elections for a Constituent Assembly last Fall showed significant support for moderate Islamist parties and secular leftists.  The parties have so far shown an ability to cooperate in an interim government and draft a new constitution. 

The problems with the old regime in Tunisia were symbolized by Zine Ben-Ali, his immediate family and their cronies.  Lack of jobs and opportunity, an unresponsive and repressive state apparatus and economic inequality were, and remain, major problems but there is much less resentment of a larger corrupt and illegitimate elite than elsewhere in the Middle East.  Thus the challenge of  building new institutions is not complicated by the need to simultaneously purge a large proportion of senior officials and business people.  An important  fact of life in Tunisia is the relatively small size of the miliary and the relatively small role it has played in politics throughout the country’s history.  The military is a far less important interest group than in many other countries and less inclined (and able) to impose its preferences on civilian leadership.

The nature and dynamics of the opposition has been profoundly affected by the facts that Tunisia is small country (under 11 million), relatively urban, with comparatively low unemployment and very little abject poverty.  That has made cooperation across ideological and social boundaries easier and fostered a climate of trust.  Regime opponents and the parties that have emerged to contest elections show the familiar bipolar pattern: political Islam attracts a plurality of the voters but secular democratic liberals also have strong support.  And the most prominent Islamist party has repeatedly stressed its commitment to democracy.

Outsiders played no significant role in Tunisia.  Tunisia’s neighbors did not fear that anti-regime sentiment would spill over the border (Algeria was right; Libya wrong), neither the U.S. nor Europe felt they had a much interest in the outcome and the regime did not resort to large scale violence or brutal repression that provoked a humanitarian crisis.


Egypt presents a more complicated picture. The ruling elite was far more than Mubarak and his immediate cronies.  The liberalization of the Egyptian economy in the 1980s created a relatively large group of newly wealthy people who owed their success to political connections and favoritism.  The Egyptian military has been a significant political actor ever since 1952 and the upper ranks of the officer corps were (and are) closely tied to the upper stratum of Egyptian society and politics. Power passed from Mubarak to the senior army officers without disturbing the structures of power and privilege in Egyptian society.  The continued demonstrations in Tahir Square and protracted struggle over rules for parliamentary and presidential elections reflect a deep unease among Egyptians that the new boss will, unfortunately, turn out to be same as the old boss. The struggle to change policies and priorities to address economic stagnation, unemployment, and lack of social mobility is just beginning.

Far more than in Tunisia, the old regime succeeded in portraying Islamists in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular as enemies of freedom and a threat to Egyptian life.  This has made relations between the parties and groups with a liberal democratic secular orientation and the more traditionally Islamic parties difficult.  There is a major cultural difference between the relatively well off, relatively well educated, relatively liberal on social issues prototypical twenty something Tahir Square protestor and the Nile villager or urban slum dweller who does not post English language Tweets or trust foreign media like Al Jazeera.  These differences are reflected in the backgrounds and orientations of the leadership of secular and Islamist movements. This has made collaboration among Islamist parries and secular liberals more fraught.

The several self-identified Islamist parties have done very well in the convoluted three stage process of parliamentary elections. The Freedom and Justice Party, linked to the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood leadership, has been the most successful vote getter, achieving a plurality of seats.  Optimists both within and outside Egypt take the party’s stated commitment to democratic values and tolerance seriously; skeptics worry that an alliance between Freedom and Justice and more extreme Islamists would control over two thirds of the parliamentary seats. 

Outsiders played a small role in the downfall of Mubarak.  The United States tried to publicly tiptoe between support for the democracy movement and preservation of the institutional and personal ties between U.S. and Egyptian intelligence and military players.  It is pretty clear that behind the scenes the U.S. encouraged the Egyptian military to throw Mubarak under the bus to preserve the larger status quo.  Relations with outsiders are a much larger issue in Egyptian than Tunisia and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tops the agenda.  Polling data is pretty clear that the majority of Egyptians have not ever been in favor of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel and strongly support greater Egyptian support for Hamas and the Gaza Strip.  But the Egyptian military and political leadership (including Freedom and Justice party leaders) have repeatedly stressed their intention to abide by the treaty.  The more serious threat to Egyptian-Israeli relations, I think, is the Gaza Strip.  The primary locus of economic activity in Gaza is the series of smuggling routes that have been set up to evade the Israeli blockade.  Under Mubarak the issue was defined as weakening Hamas and other Islamists and Cairo was happy to oblige with border closings and tacit approval of the destruction of smuggling tunnels.  But since Mubarak’s departure the emphasis has been shifted from thwarting Islamists to aiding suffering citizens and Egyptian collaboration has dropped dramatically.  Another Israeli military adventure in Gaza along the lines of the ill-fated Operation Cast Lead of December ‘08 and January ‘09 could trigger massive public protest that would make the current cold peace untenable with very negative consequences for the Egyptian economy and role in the world.

Tunisia and Egypt are well past the morning after the night before and well into the long, tedious and sometimes frustrating process of creating a new political order that works.

Dialog on Nukes and Other Intresting Issues

Tony snet me a thoughtful email discussing several things.  Thought it deservfed a more public reponse.

You mention seven nations that have admitted nukes (with Israel's denials and PRNK's claims being suspect) but eight nations as a baseline for the Nth Nation Problem; is the 8th South Africa?  Was it not true that they dismantled one or more working weapons before the fall of Apartheid?  (I am asking that sincerely, not rhetorically).  If so, was it not the case that their program was pursued hand-in-hand with Israel?  I thought that that was factual and that it was inconceivable that Israel would participate and not also produce.

I’m counting Israel as a nuclear weapons state, despite fact that it is undeclared.  South Africa did have an active weapons program almost certainly with Israeli help.  And the weapons and program were dismantled when it became clear that the apartheid regime was doomed.  This is the only example of a state abandoning an active weapons program -- Libya did have some kind of development program but apparently was a long way from success when it dismantled its nuclear facility in cooperation with the U.S. and UK.

And at the risk of pedantry, you aren't including the US on the list of nations that haven't used nukes, are you?  Or does the list only start from when there was a plurality?

The atomic bomb was pursued as a bigger and better bomb for the kind of strategic bombing of cities that was carried out in both Germany and Japan.  Only at the end, especially after the successful test in New Mexico did some of the most prominent nuclear scientists in the project raise serious objections to their use.  The scale of destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a shock that led some people to wonder if these weapons were not different in kind.  Serious thinking about how and when to use nuclear weapons began after the USSR developed an atomic weapon in 1949.   It was not until the early 1950s that deterrence theory emerged as a serious subject and the first wave of civilian defense intellectuals began to use game theory and simulations to elaborate increasingly complex scenarios in which I try to decide what to do to deter my opponent when I know that he knows that I know that he knows ... 

As I look back on worst days of the Cold War and back at the week of lectures I used to give on nuclear weapons, it seems to me it is a mark of real progress that we don’t have to worry about how much death and destruction is enough, that we do not live in a world in which we’d have about 10 minutes between the time a Soviet submarine launched missile was detected emerging from the Pacific and the time the war head hit LA.  I remember being puzzled in the earliest days of the nuclear era, when the threat was lumbering bombers, by the formal evacuation plan for Portland.  The idea was that we’d have several hours notice of Soviet bombers coming over the pole and everyone on the east side would get in their cars and escape the city by driving out of town toward Mt. Hood where the Red Cross or somebody would have tents, cots and donuts waiting.  The plan called for all the east-west streets to become eastbound and people would drive side by side, bumper to bumper and 60 miles an hour.  I could see us driving north on 18th Avenue and stopping at Fremont Street but I couldn’t figure out how we were going to get into the stream of cars on Fremont whizzing away to safety.  Would some polite person stop and let us in?  Or was it like church where you waited until the folks in front of you went by and then got out of the pew?  I think I was also worried that they’d run out of donuts.

I have always been quite confused about the political bodies acting within Iran, and it looks like it isn't clear to others either.  Does Clinton's State Department have an official published stance on how they think it works?

I was not as clear as I should have been.  We (both “we” the U.S. intelligence community and “we” students of the Middle East) know a great deal about the Iranian system, in the same we know a great deal about American politics.  But for both the U.S. and Iran, dissecting specific policies and programs is very difficult.  Perhaps ethanol is a helpful example.  Instead of waste material like sugar cane or weeds, we use corn even though it is an inferior source on every dimension except putting money in the pockets of big corn producers.  Are the members of the House and Senate from corn growing states the key players, or is it the influence of giant corporations like ADM and CONAGRA, or the fact that every president began by trudging through Iowa farms before the caucasuses?  If you wanted to change that set of laws and policies, where would you begin, who would you attempt to influence?

Your point about nukes being a deterrent and not an instrument of compliance reminds me of the Vietnam-era personage (I forget who; was it Scowcroft?) who claimed he wanted to nuke Vietnam and put up a parking lot.  I assumed that that explicit sentiment was bandied about by the left because it was so inflammatory and by the right as a realpolitik trial balloon.

Probably thinking of Curtis LeMay who wanted to bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age.

My issue with a PRNK, Pakistan, or Iran with nukes is primarily maintenance.  I assume that with a great enough percentage of GDP any nation can get a nuke; fortunately, the higher the percentage the greater reluctance to part with the actual device and all that it entails.  And so the prize would sit, propping up some regional middle-weight on the international heavy-weight stage.  But as it sits it decays and leaks and is a constant health and security threat; how much GDP is set aside and prioritized year-after-year, decade-after-decade, in a turbulent kleptocracy for nuclear arsenal maintenance and safeguards?  Which might be part of the charm; it's one thing to push around Khadaffi and not care too much about who winds up with the keys put fomenting and abetting civil war in a nuclear Iran seems altogether different.

You are right ... and the same is true for Pakistan ... and a lot scarier because a lot more likely.

Lastly, it seemed to me that in Gulf War I, Saudi Arabia relied on the US to local problems like Iraq and by extension Iran.  Now with US exhaustion and withdrawal, we see the Saudi armed forces acting abroad (I have no idea how novel or significant that is but it's the first time I had even heard of Saudi security forces).  Has the baton been tacitly handed to the Saudi's to up their direct involvement in local areas of their immediate interest?  Is the US interested in letting Iran be a Saudi problem?

No.  Saudi military has been a major purchaser of U.S. and European weapons for some time.  The military is very well equipped and well trained, but small compared to Saddam’s Iraq or Iran.  Saudi Arabia could not defend itself against a concerted attack from Iran.  The recent operation in Bahrain to support the government was the first operation outside the country. It was meant to support a friendly monarch against a democracy movement that included significant numbers of the Shi’a minority. 

We will have finished withdrawing combat forces from Iraq by the end of the year and are going to begin winding down Afghanistan next year.  But I don’t think that’s the same thing as withdrawing from the Middle East or abandoning our role as protector in the Persian Gulf. 

How Big a Problem is Iran?

The recent International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran’s nuclear program has put Tehran back at the top of the list with China as the foreign countries that are seen as the biggest threats to the U.S.  That was certainly an important theme the Republican candidates’ debates on foreign policy. 

How much of a threat is Iran and what should be done about it?

Figuring out how much a threat Iran really poses is complicated by three factors.  One is common to all international threat assessment; the second is associated with closed societies; and the third is unique to Iran.

What is known as the Realist paradigm is one of the major approaches in the academic study of international politics; it is the implicit world view of most journalists, opinion piece authors, and more less casual observers (including many political candidates.)   In brief, the Realist looks at the world and sees an endless struggle for power in an anarchic world where armed might is the ultimate guarantor of security.  “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.”  The Realist warns us to always be alert to threats and ready to respond forcefully.  “If you want peace,” advises the Realist, “prepare for war.”

The Realist answer to the question of who is a threat and what is the nature of that threat is succinct: capabilities imply intentions.  We cannot know the what other countries are really planning on.  They go to great lengths to hide their real intentions.  But we can observe their actions and assess what they might be capable of.  And the prudent observer (remembering that one person’s “prudent” observer is another person’s nervous Nellie) assumes that “they” deliberately developed those capabilities because they mean to use them.

The result is a systematic bias toward overestimating threats and a conflating of what could be possible in a few years with what is being planned or even what is possible now. 

The problem of figuring out what those guys are up to is complicated when those guys operate within an opaque political system.  In the case of Iran, the relationship between President Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Khamenei, the governmental ministries, the armed forces, and the Revolutionary Guards are extremely murky.  If you can’t even figure out which of those guys is making the decision and whether all those guys are on the same page -- or even reading out of the same book -- it gets that much harder.

The recent allegations by Attorney General Holder that the U.S. has foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador is a case in point.  The evidence that the men who were arrested were up to something seems to many observers pretty convincing.  But the evidence of links between the conspirators and anyone in Iran is far more tenuous  and no one can say with certainty which, if any,  elements of the Iranian system were involved or at what level the plot was hatched.

The third source of difficulty in assessing Iran’s dangers to the United States is the heightened sensitivity of our closest allies in the Middle East.  Many Israelis take Ahmadinejad’s holocaust denial and inflammatory rhetoric denying Israel’s right to exist very seriously.  They regard the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran as a direct threat to their lives.  Saudi Arabia is extremely sensitive to threats posed by its Shi’a minority and the relatively impoverished Shi’a majorities in Bahrain and other Gulf States, and sees them as a potential fifth column that Iran can manipulate.  Both countries have publicly and privately (see some of the cables in wikileaks) urged the U.S. to take an even harder stand.  Israel and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia share intelligence with the U.S.; their deep suspicions color U.S. intelligence estimates.

I am not going to try to develop a “real” assessment of Iran.  I am going to try to describe elements of Iranian behavior that work against U.S. interests and what some of our options may be.

Nuclear Weapons.  This is at the top of everyone’s list of problems and is not just an American preoccupation.  Western Europe has been as strongly opposed to Iran’s behavior as the United States. While Russia and China have typically opposed calls for stronger sanctions against Iran, they have made it clear that they oppose any attempt to develop weapons. 

Iran has long had a nuclear program which it claims is strictly for peaceful use and hence legitimate under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.   The program is immensely popular in Iran, where it is seen as a matter of national pride, demonstrating the scientific and technological sophistication of Iranians.  However, in addition to clearly civilian activities, for the past ten years Iran has also pursued technologies that are potentially directly related to weapons.  The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports that have led to the attempts to both persuade Iran to stop and to punish them with sanctions have largely involved dual-use technologies.  That is, technologies that could be used for legitimate civilian projects or for the development of nuclear weapons ... and capabilities imply intent, do they not?  The most recent IAEA report goes further.  The November 8 report documents persistent foot dragging and refusal to cooperate in some aspects of the inspections by Iranian officials and discusses aspects of the Iranian nuclear research program that are directly linked to the development of weapons. 

So what?  After all, seven countries (U.S., UK, France, China, Russia, India, and Pakistan) have confirmed their possession of nuclear weapons and no one believes Israel’s official insistence that it does not have nukes.  (If Israel is believed to have them despite their denials, North Korea is the mirror image: their claims to already have them are widely regarded as dubious.)

One fundamental issue surrounding any country’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons is the disastrous consequences of their use.  Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction.  They kill people and destroy almost everything for miles.  They are only useful as a deterrent.   People who think seriously about proliferation and nuclear weapons often talk about “the Nth Nation Problem.”  So far eight countries have developed nuclear weapons and been prudent enough to avoid using them.  But somewhere out there is the nth nation in the series of nuclear states whose leaders are irrational or delusional or whose internal safeguards are defective and permit an accidental launch of nuclear tipped missile.  Therefore every nation that does develop weapons brings us one step closer to catastrophe. 

The second fundamental issue surrounding any country’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons is that proliferation breeds proliferation.  If Iran developed nuclear weapons, several of its regional neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Egypt would be subject to some internal; pressure to develop their own weapons to deter Iran.  The diversion of a large amount of intellectual and engineering prowess and the diversion of money from human and economic development would be significant.  And it would bring us all closer to that nightmare Nth nation.

There are two specific immediate consequences of an operational Iranian nuclear warhead that worry people.  The first is the threat to Israel.  The nightmarish “existential threat” is that fanatical Iranian leaders would unleash a new Holocaust by raining warheads on Israel.  This specter leads some elements of the Israeli government to push the United States into attacking Iran by threatening to do it themselves.  This fear is echoed by some of Israel’s supporters in the U.S., especially more conservative and hawkish politicians. 

I think these fears are exaggerated.  Some parts of the Iranian leadership, for example Mahmud Ahmadinejad, are very insular, poorly educated and given to extravagant rhetoric.  But that does not make him insane and undeterred by the threat that a nuclear assault on Israel would be met by a larger nuclear counter blow on Iran.  And the diffusion of authority and existence of multiple centers of power in the Iranian system guarantee that no single person could make such a far reaching decision on their own. 

The second consequence of a nuclear Iran that people fear is bullying.  A nuclear armed Iran, the argument goes, will be able to cow and intimidate its neighbors.  I think this, too, is an exaggeration.  I think the conventional wisdom that nuclear weapons are useful only as a deterrent, not a tool of compellance is right.  I have a very hard time thinking of a plausible scenario.  “All right, King of Bahrain and your lackeys, stop oppressing Shi’a Bahrainis or we’ll blow you up!”  But “you” would include the Shi’a citizens of Bahrain. 

Fulminating about the Iranian nuclear threat and beating the drums for the imaginary military option probably has the perverse effect of strengthening the argument in Iran for developing weapons as the ultimate deterrent.  I think one motive driving Iran’s program is fear of attack from the U.S.  Whether Iranians look at the last 60 years of relations with the U.S. or the fate of Qadhafi, they are likely to conclude that the U.S. is a military threat.  The fierier the rhetoric, the louder the calls for muscular action in the Washington or Tel Aviv, the more nuclear weapons seem like a good idea.

What is to be done?  I think we --meaning the United States, Britain, France and Germany who have played the leading roles in trying to deal with Iran’s nuclear program – are doing pretty much everything that can be done.  The strategy has involved attempts at persuasion through negotiations leading to economic and technical support for peaceful nuclear power and economic benefits from removing existing sanctions interspersed with increasingly stringent multilateral sanctions on trade and investment in Iran aimed at directly impeding the organizations and individuals most involved with the weapons program. It is widely believed that there is also a covert dimension, sponsored by the Western powers and/or Israel.  Over the past few years several Iranian scientists associated with the nuclear program have been assassinated by unknown assailants.  About a year ago, in what is described as an act of cyber sabotage, the Stuxnet worm attacked and seriously harmed computers at a key Iranian nuclear site. 

A frustrating difficulty with designing a strategy to counter an Iranian weapons program is figuring out who in Iran is behind it and what they hope to gain.  That makes it much more difficult to come up with promises and inducements that would give Iran the rewards it hoes to get from the program or to devise threats and punishments that might actually lead the proponents to decide it wasn’t worth it. 

The non-existent military option.  As much as tough guy (and gal) Presidential candidates and self-proclaimed foreign policy experts love to talk about it, I do not believe there is a realistic military option for dealing with Iran.  No one who has thought about it thinks an invasion or massive bombing campaign is remotely possible.  Herman Cain has taken some flack for saying bombing Iran was unfeasible because there are lots of mountains in the country.  Problem is not mountains but dispersed and hardened nuclear facilities, Iran’s air defenses, and the real possibility of retaliation.  Although there is some speculation that the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador was meant to be implemented only as a response to a U.S. or Israeli assault on Iran, the more likely retaliatory moves would come in the Middle East from one or more of the anti-American or anti-Israel groups Iran supports.

Iran as Middle East trouble maker.  When the revolution of 1979 led to the Islamic Republic, the leaders hoped the revolution would sweep the entire Middle East, replacing both traditional monarchs and secular nationalists with devout Muslims inspired by the Shi’a tradition.  The fact that those Sunni doinated regimes were allied with the Great Satan U.S. or the equally satanic atheists in Moscow was a major bonus.  The major tool for exporting the revolution became support for anti-establishment groups.  In some cases this has meant money and arms for groups like Hizballah and Hamas; in others it has been more indirect attempts to support Shi’a minority organizations in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.  The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a double boost for Iran.  Saddam’s regime, secular nationalists who oppressed a Shi’a majority and had launched a war of aggression against Iran, was eliminated and his military machine dismantled.  And the American occupation created a Shi’a dominated political system with many players who had close personal as well as religious and ideological affinities to Iran.  

There are, I think, real reasons to be concerned about stability in the Middle East.  There are also real reasons to support the emergence of more democratic regimes.  Iran does not play a positive role on either dimension.  Iranian influence and support goes to anti-regime actors in Lebanon, Jordan, and the Gulf States.  And many of the forces Iran favors are not committed to democratic political development.  There are good reasons for the United States to use the tools of diplomacy and statecraft to counter Iran. 

But perspective matters. The alarmist fears of a “Shi’a Crescent” running through the Middle East are over blown.  That really scary bogeyman who goes bump in the night is not an Iranian dominated Iraq. Overestimating threats is as dangerous as underestimating them.

 “All politics is local” is a trite but true aphorism.  Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, pro-Iranian factions in Baghdad are supported, not controlled, by Tehran.  They will act in what they think is their own interest.  If that coincides with something Iran desires, well and good.  And if it doesn’t, Iran may make it more difficult, but at the end of the day they will go their own way.

In my view, Iran is a problem, not a looming threat.  And if this understates Iran’s influence or ability to attack our interests, it may at least serve as a counterweight to the strident analyses that err in the opposite direction.