Obsidian Wings

by Eric Martin

I'm off to begin celebrating my brother's wedding in New Orleans tomorrow in the AM (wedding ceremony tentatively set for Saturday, pending continued aliveness of said brother). 

I've heard rumours about good food and music to be had, but I remain skeptical.  See you all next week, I hope.

by Eric Martin

Republican Congressman Ron Paul is definitely off-message:

"The question has been raised about whether or not our president is a socialist," Paul said. "I am sure there are some people here who believe it. But in the technical sense, in the economic definition of a what a socialist is, no, he's not a socialist."

"He's a corporatist," Paul continued. "And unfortunately we have corporatists inside the Republican party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country."

Paul said examples of President Obama's "corporatism" were evident in the heath care reform bill he signed into law last month. He said the mandate in the bill put the power over health care in the hands of corporations rather than private citizens. But he said the bill wasn't the only place where corporatism is creeping into Washington.

"We see it in the financial institutions, we see it in the military-industrial complex," he said. "And now we see it in the medical-industrial complex."

Kind of hard to argue with most of that - possibly a quibble at downplaying the prevalence of corporatists in the GOP, but otherwise pretty on the mark.  Next thing you know he's going to break it to the GOP faithful that Obama is also neither the AntiChrist, nor from Kenya, and that Ronald Reagan himself pursued nuclear arms reductions.  He should remember to put on his protective goggles first, though, as head explosions can be kind of messy.

by Cheryl Rofer

So far we've had the New START Treaty completed by the negotiators and signed by the presidents of the United States and Russia. It lowers the numbers of nuclear weapons and lists the ways each side can track the other's. To come: ratification by the US Senate and Russian Duma. Treaty, Protocol, and videos of the signing here. The treaty is in three parts: the treaty itself, a protocol (how it is to be implemented) and annexes that give all the implementation details. State Department fact sheets here.

Then there was the Nuclear Posture Review from the United States, its statement of policy on use and maintenance of its nuclear arsenal. No first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. No new nuclear weapons to be designed and built in the United States. And other things I hope to write about.

This week: The Nuclear Security Summit in Washington (WaPo, Guardian). The focus will be on world's unsecured stocks of weapons-grade nuclear materials. That means, for most countries, research reactors that use highly enriched uranium as their fuel. Many have already been converted to low-enriched uranium fuel. I am wondering if they also will address the plutonium that has been recovered from civilian reactors. A number of countries, including France and Japan, have large stocks, and more exists in the spent fuel stored in the United States. Forty-six countries will attend. There will be some emphasis on how to proceed with international understandings and treaties. More here (pdf).

Coming in May: The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. A conference on progress and problems with the NPT is held every five years. In 1995, the signatories to the NPT agreed to continue the treaty in perpetuity. But there have been problems: non-nuclear-weapon states feel that the nuclear weapon states haven't been doing enough to fulfill their promise to move toward nuclear disarmament. Three nuclear weapon states (India, Israel, and Pakistan) remain outside the treaty and therefore outside the safeguards it provides. North Korea has withdrawn from the treaty and tested a nuclear device. Iran is barely complying with its obligations as a non-nuclear-weapon state. What to do about states that don't comply or withdraw?

All of these events overlap and interact. The New START Treaty decreases the numbers of nuclear weapons, which the two countries party to it will argue is part of their commitment to nuclear disarmament. The NPR's qualified "no first use" policy is a way to provide a disincentive to proliferating nuclear weapons among states that have signed the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states. The additional treaties and agreements that may come out of the Nuclear Security Summit will bolster the International Atomic Energy Agency's ability to police the provisions of the NPT.

Cheryl Rofer currently blogs at Phronesisaical, after a career that included research and practical experience in the nuclear fuel cycle, fossil fuel, lasers and environmental cleanup, including collaborations in Estonia and Kazakhstan.

by Eric Martin

Brian Katulis highlights a telling aspect of the controversey surrounding WikiLeaks' release of video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter gunning down civilians, including a van arriving on the scene to evacuate the wounded: the story barely made a ripple in Iraq.  That's not necessarily a good thing:

GWEN IFILL: Rod, there — on a related subject, there has been some discussion here, some controversy here about the release, the leak of a video of an Apache attack helicopter killing, among other people, some Reuters employees in 2007 in Iraq. Has that video been circulated widely there, and has there been reaction at all on the ground?

ROD NORDLAND: It has circulated widely here, but I think there was actually a somewhat muted response here, even compared to other Arab countries. Sad — sad to say, most Iraqis have a pretty cynical attitude toward the Americans. And incidents of this sort don’t really surprise them as much as maybe it does ourselves.

...[I]t was Rob Nordland’s observation about the Iraqi reaction to this Wikileaks video that I found most interesting – and it seems accurate to me based on some conversations I have had with Iraqi friends and my reading of the Arabic press in Iraq. Earlier this week, I took part in an hour-long news interview program on Iraqiya television, and the host didn’t bring up the story. Iraqi leaders haven’t said much about the Wikileaks video either (though they do have their hands full with negotiating over a new government and dealing with an increase in attacks this week.)

Nordland’s statement that most Iraqis being cynical attitude about Americans and incidents of this sort not really surprising Iraqis is an important observation – it challenges the conventional wisdom among many Americans about the Iraq surge and how Iraqis view American forces. There is a myth perpetuated in narratives peddled by many COIN advocates that ordinary Iraqis view U.S. forces as positive and constructive, and this fundamental misunderstanding leads some analysts like Tom Ricks to make specious arguments about extending the presence of U.S. forces beyond the redeployment deadlines outlined in the U.S.-Iraq security agreement.

A few months before U.S. forces withdrew from urban areas last summer, nearly three quarters of Iraqi citizens (73 percent) said in an early 2009 poll that they did not have confidence in U.S. troops (strong confidence in U.S. forces was mostly found among Kurds, and the United States doesn’t have much of a troop presence in the Kurdish regions of Iraq). And this overall negative view about U.S. troops came at a time after Iraqis had recognized there were substantial gains in security. Incidents like the one depicted in the Wikileaks video have not been uncommon in Iraq, as former U.S. Army soldier Josh Stieber told Glenn Greenwald in this interview.

Watching the killings in Wikileaks video – again it was filmed at the height of the 2007 surge - it makes sense why Iraqis don’t seem to buy the notion that the U.S. military has been operating with an effective “population-centric” strategy in Iraq, even as some Americans seem to so badly need to believe that to be so.

These observations undermine one of the common critiques about journalists endangering U.S. soldiers' lives by reporting on stories of atrocities and civilian deaths, which supposedly enflame the local population.  Although for American audiences at a safe distance half a world away, convinced of the nobility of the mission and the flawless discipline of U.S. soldiers/tactics, reports of war crimes, atrocities and accidental civilian deaths might come as a revelation that would have gone unnoticed but for the perfidy of "treasonous" journalists, the locals aren't actually relying on CNN or the New York Times to inform them of what their everyday lives are like.

That is, many on the ground are directly affected by the ravages of war - even when practiced under euphemized and sanatized COIN veneer.  Beyond the victims themselves, siblings, parents, cousins, tribal relations, neighbors, etc. aren't waiting for the chyron on CNN to inform them of the loss of loved ones due to intentional or accidental acts of U.S. military personnel, or the ongoing operation of a prison where hundreds of thousands were tortured, wrongly imprisoned and/or mistreated, and then released (or not). 

While the war in Iraq might be out of sight, out of mind for the American public, it's a bit harder to ignore in Iraq.  No matter how tightly managed the information flowing to domestic audiences is, no matter how deferential journalists are to the Pentagon's wishes, Iraqis will not be swayed.  The real risk, of course, is not that the Iraqi people will be outraged by a report in the U.S. media about an event that occurred in plainsight of the Iraqi people.  Rather, the danger is that such stories will puncture certain myths about the nature of war and the costs - a taste of reality that could erode the all-important domestic political will to keep fighting.  Can't have that.