WPR Blog Archive

In a major surprise out of China, President Hu Jintao suffered a stunning electoral reversal and lost 9 votes out of 2,965 cast by China’s parliament members. Hu will remain in office, but with only a 99.7% mandate, doubts were raised about his effectiveness as a lame-duck president. On a more serious note, the election of Xi Jinping as Vice-President as heir apparent seems to be the significant news coming out of this election. He replaces a Jiang Zemin ally, definitively signalling the end of the Jiang era. The election caps a meteoric rise for Xi, who first showed up […]

Lorelei Kelly has a post over at Democracy Arsenal taking aim at the sacred cows of the American defense budget that’s worth a read. I admit to being a missile defense skeptic myself, more for strategic reasons than for technological ones. Maybe I’m just a prisoner of a Cold War childhood, but the ABM Treaty always struck me as an island of reason in a MAD world. In passing, Kelly also takes a shot at growing the military by 90,000 troops, which seems to have passed from proposal to foregone conclusion. She wonders what we’re going to do with them. […]

Yesterday I mentioned an Executive Order issued by President Bush a few weeks ago that essentially gutted the Intelligence Oversight Board but seemed to be flying under the radar. Today, via Kevin Drum, comes a Boston Globe article on the measure that suggests it just might have reached radar-tripping altitude.

There’s been a lot of discussion of stabilization operations as part of the Army’s counterinsurgency posture lately, and of course the model around which consensus seems to be converging is that of the Provincial Reconstrution Teams. President Bush thinks they’re just swell, and in a video conference call with some teams operating in Afghanistan and Iraq today suggested that he wishes they’d been around when he was younger so he could have played hooky from a PRT instead of from the Texas Air Guard where he rode out the Vietnam War. (Okay, cheap shot, I know, but I couldn’t resist.) […]

By an odd coincidence, yesterday when I was clearing out some bookmarks, I ran across this Army War College monograph on the ethics of military dissent that caught my eye back in February. The author, Don Snider, was writing in response to the Revolt of the Generals in 2006, when six retired generals publicly voiced their criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq War. But his argument seems applicable to Admiral William Fallon’s resignation as well (on which Thomas Barnett, the author of the Esquire profile, offers some final thoughts). Snider argues that the military’s strategic leaders must balance their […]

In a move that seems to have flown under the radar, President Bush issued an Executive Order on Friday, February 29, that transformed the Clinton-era President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board into the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. The White House maintained that the board maintains its independence under the new order, but as a general rule, it’s a safe bet to be skeptical of Executive Orders issued on a Friday. Most of the changes made to the board’s function remove the teeth from the board’s oversight capacity, thereby consolidating the White House’s control over intelligence oversight. One example is this clause, […]

I haven’t been able to find English-language coverage of this, so all I’ve got is this Le Monde article. But it’s worth mentioning because it looks to me like a potential sea change waiting to happen. Two days ago, Russia’s Foreign and Defense Ministers came to Paris for annual bi-lateral talks. The meeting resulted in a solid agreement from Russia to contribute 6-8 helicopters to the EUFOR Chad mission, as well as a potential accord with NATO to lift restrictions on logistical shipments bound for Afghanistan through Russian territory, which had been limited to non-military supplies. Here’s French Minister of […]

I meant to mention this when I spotted it in the Turkish press, but this NY Times article is even more informative. In conjunction with Turkey’s ongoing military response to the PKK, PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has just announced a $12 billion initiative aimed at addressing some of the socio-economic grievances of Turkey’s domestic Kurdish population. The move makes obvious political sense, and is part of a well-conceived diplomatic-military campaign against what Turkey perceives as a national security threat. I’ve thought for a while that America could draw some lessons from the way Turkey maneuvered its way towards achieving its […]

On the heels of the release of the Pentagon’s definitive study demonstrating that there was no pre-Iraq War link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, comes this WPR feature from Bernard Finel arguing that recent progress in Iraq should not be confused with progress against the global terrorist threat: We are slowly digging ourselves out of the hole of the Iraq war. Al-Qaida has increasingly been marginalized in Iraq, and the success of American counterinsurgency efforts has diminished the perception that we can be defeated quickly or easily. And yet, Iraq remains a net negative in the overall struggle. . . […]

As Hampton’s previous post demonstrates, a consensus has now emerged that Admiral William Fallon was forced to resign his Centcom command more because of the very public nature of his insubordination than the actual content of it. In other words, the hanging offense wasn’t that the Bush administration wants war with Iran and that Fallon is doing everything in his power to prevent it. It was that Fallon has consistently chosen to publicly frame the situation in those terms. To me that still leaves three unanswered questions. First, is Fallon’s framing true? So far, most of the online murmurings suggest […]

Steve Clemons has good advice for the blogosphere and the press on the subject of Fallon’s firing: “Stop Hyperventilating: Fallon Fired, but Iran War Not Back On.” Indeed, all the evidence, including recent statements of the president himself, indicates that the administration is committed at the moment to use diplomatic and other non-military means to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. All of the Internet speculation that Fallon’s dismissal signals a go on an Iran war strikes me as a sort of depraved wishful thinking by armchair pundits wishing for a good story to chew on. “By numerous accounts,” Clemons says, Bush […]

Wow. That was quick. The question now is, What just happened? More specifically, what game was ‘Fox’ Fallon playing? He ostensibly quit because of the implication of a disconnect between him and the White House on Iran, which created an untenable situation. At the same time, given Fallon’s past comments and known position on Iran (Bob Gates called the ‘resignation’ “. . .a cumulative kind of thing”), there’s a lot of reason to believe that this was inevitable and that the Esquire article just forced the White House’s hand. Fallon immediately distanced himself from the article, but the article’s author, […]

The French-language daily Libération has an interview with Colombian academic and military analyst César Restrepo on the recent tension in the region. Along the way, he touched upon the current crisis within the ranks of the Colombian insurgency, reflected by the recent betrayal of FARC commander Ivan Rios by his own men: The circumstances in which the commander Ivan Rios was just killed — by his bodyguards — confirm what we’ve been hearing for several months now: that the FARC is experiencing a very serious crisis of discipline. The principal cause is drug money. What began as a means of […]

At his new blog, South Jerusalem, Gorshem Gorenberg writes that including Hamas in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations seems to have reached a tipping point in its progression from radical idea to conventional wisdom: The right, and many generals, would like to solve the problem of Gaza with force. The most obvious hole in that plan, as one very nameless source told me, is called “exit strategy.” There are all sorts of reasons to think talking to Hamas, or to a unity government, won’t work. We know how diplomatically paralyzed Israeli unity governments have been. Reliance on tanks and drones alone is working […]

The LA Times has got a fascinating article on the decline of homegrown American terror groups in the post-9/11 era. This paragraph alone is worth the price of admission: John Trochmann, once an omnipresent face of hatred for the government, still has the iron-gray beard and fiery eyes from the days when he helped found the Militia of Montana. Today he drives a 13-year-old black Suburban to gun shows in the Pacific Northwest to hawk anti-government pamphlets or sell log cabins to get by. He still believes, but at 64, he doesn’t act. “9/11,” he said in an interview at […]

The Times of India reports that the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is unlikely to jeopardize its ruling coalition by greenlighting the US-India nuclear energy deal over opposition by India’s Communist party. So it looks less and less likely that India will meet the July timeframe that three visiting American Senators (Biden, Kerry and Hagel) recently pushed for. In other India news, the Center for Defense Information posted a brief piece last week by Todd Fine explaining why offering missile defense technology to a country engaged in a regional arms race (with a recent emphasis on delivery systems) is […]

Something else quietly being changed by the nature of the engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan is the role of women in the military: Army Spc. Monica Lin Brown saved the lives of fellow soldiers after a roadside bomb tore through a convoy of Humvees in the eastern Paktia province in April 2007, the military said. After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said. . . Pentagon policy prohibits women from serving in frontline combat […]