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Sunday, December 7, 2008

Nuclear 'football'

The Chicago Tribune, 12/5/08, Section 1, Page 47. Title: "Nuclear ‘football’ carries global arms woes".

The article describes how the idea and responsibility for ‘the football’ has been difficult for previous presidents to absorb. (The briefcase that carries the codes for our nuclear weapons is called ‘the football’.)

I have been reading the news since the early 1970’s. I don’t ever recall any article even remotely connected to this subject being published prior to ANY president taking office. I find it very interesting that this article comes only a few days after the report that indicates that ‘time is not on our side’ and that a WMD attack is likely to occur by 2013. In other words, near or just after the end of President-elect Obama’s first term.

One primary reason that we went to war in Iraq was to prevent the war from reaching us. This was successful. Even though many disagree, the fact remains that we have NOT been hit since 9/11. This is a period of more than 7 years. We had been hit 5 times in the 8 years prior to 9/11. Taking the offensive may not have been popular, but it has been effective. Well, President-elect Obama has promised change.

If President-elect Obama follows through on what he has said, he will be placing the U.S. on the defensive. These articles appear to me to reflect the appropriate rise in the risk of not just being attacked again, but with the possibility of WMD used against us also at a higher level. What I have been telling others is that if you live in New York City, Washington D.C., L.A., or Chicago on January 20, 2009, you will then be in the front line. Our enemy may have many more targets than these cities, but you can bet that these are a high priority. Of course, the police may be able to stop them.

To have a good defense against terrorism we only need to look at Israel. Here we have a country that cannot permanently defeat its enemies through military means. Israel is simply not big enough. Israel has adopted a strategic defensive posture because it cannot end the war by defeating its enemies. Israel is permanently under siege. I have never been there, but I know enough that I would not like to have our police walking around with automatic rifles. Our police today would not last 5 minutes in a terrorist attack such as Israel has had to endure on a regular basis. A six shooter up against automatic weapons? And surprise is NOT on your side? A death sentence. No wonder we are seeing articles in the paper about how the threat of WMD attacks upon the U.S. are closer at hand and why the ‘football’ is even being brought up.

9 comments:

  1. Hey Joe,

    A major component of a long term solution, to the islamist threat from the middle east, will be settling the palestinian issue. Hopefully Obama will have more success than previous Presidents.

    This combined with a concerted effort to end theocratic rule in Iran and the slow process of encouraging secular democracy, human rights, education and equality in the region are the great opportunities on offer to the new president.

    He can't do any worse than Carter!

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  2. We have been attacked many times since 9/11. Off the top of the head: London, July 2005; Madrid, March 2004; Bali, October 2002; the Anthrax attacks on Congress, October 2001.

    If this is indeed supposed to be a global war on terror, we must consider attacks on our allies as attacks on our own. We need to stop exploiting national security for partisan gain. (And let us not forget that when President Clinton tried to take out bin Ladin, those efforts were routinely criticized and dismissed by Republican leaders and conservative pundits as "wag the dog" attempts to dodge impeachment; while the threat of terror networks was certainly not a priority for the then-incoming Bush-Cheney administration, as well documented by the likes of Richard Clarke and Sandy Berger.)

    Meanwhile, President-elect Obama has already displayed his prioritization of the proliferation issue, writing and sponsoring legislation with Senator Lugar to tighten security over "loose nukes."

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  3. Israel is indeed under permanent threat, but we learned to live with it because we learned to face the threat. It is about time that the western world also learn to face the threat instead of looking and running away from it.

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  4. I believe that President-elect Obama CAN do worse that President Carter. The war that could have occurred between Iran and the U.S. in 1979 could easily occur today.

    Clincher: I agree to a limted degree. One problem is that the U.S. public does not. It takes attacks upon U.S. targets to get our attention. It took Pearl Harbor to get the U.S. into a war that we desperately needed to be in. The population of the U.S. does not typically react much to attacks outside of our area. Take the recent attack in India. If that is not a good excuse to launch an offensive war, I don't know what is.

    One big argument against offensive warfare is that the world is against it. If we continued, we would find less and less support and fewer allies willing to join us. Seeing that this has been the case since 9/11, why would we consider attacks upon them to be attacks upon us?

    The basic point was a comparison of attacks upon the U.S. between the years 1992 and 2008. If we include the western world, the list would obviously be much larger and the issue much less clear. Besides, since 9/11 the U.S. IS the number one target. We are also the hardest to hit. By limiting the discussion to only the hardest to hit target, we can see a little more clearly the operational and stragetic effectiveness of our enemy. As could be expected, our enemy is not very good at attacking our army. This is why it is so imperative that we continue to wage offensive warfare. President-elect Obama will not only change this, but reverse it to a defensive strategy.

    Time will tell. I expect that we will begin to see results from these changes within 1 to 3 years.
    I am fearful of what I see after that.

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  5. joe six-pack: "This is why it is so imperative that we continue to wage offensive warfare. President-elect Obama will not only change this, but reverse it to a defensive strategy."

    The policy statements coming from the Obama-Biden transition team contradict your assertion. For example,

    Defeat Terrorism Worldwide
    Find, Disrupt, and Destroy Al Qaeda: Responsibly end the war in Iraq and focus on the right battlefield in Afghanistan. Work with other nations to strengthen their capacity to eliminate shared enemies.

    New Capabilities to Aggressively Defeat Terrorists: Improve the American intelligence apparatus by investing in its capacity to collect and analyze information, share information with other agencies and carry out operations to disrupt terrorist networks.


    More here.

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  6. I am referring to the use of our military to wage offensive, conventional warfare against nation-states, like we did against Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Of course President-elect Obama believes and says that he will wage offensive warfare against terrorism. The methods that he will enact will be very narrow and not nearly effective enough.

    This war is much, much larger than he understands. This is why I say that he is in over his head. Time will tell.

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  7. joe six-pack,

    The methods that he will enact will be very narrow and not nearly effective enough.

    This is an opinion that falls well short of supporting your assertions. Assertions that are ultimately contradicted by your conclusion that "time will tell." Of course time will tell. But you are going beyond mere harmless speculation here when you declare broad assertions like, President Obama will adopt a "defensive strategy." What the Obama-Biden transition team outlines in its policy statement is not a reversal of strategy but a recalibration of methodology, including an expansion of the necessary diplomacy that has been so terribly lacking in the Bush-Cheney policy.

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  8. I am referring to the stragetic defensive versus the stragetic offensive. President-elect Obama will NOT maintain any type of stragetic offensive. We attacked an area that our enemy defended. The result was our enemy reacting to our move with his 'army'. He got a bloody nose for his effort.
    We chose the ground the war was being fought on. President-elect Obama will not attack any area outside of the areas already being contested. (He may counterattack, but I find it difficult to believe that he would attempt to hold the ground.) And he will withdraw from at least one front. Our enemy will have the initiative because he will be the one choosing where the war will be fought. That is a defensive stragety no matter what anyone calls it.

    I can be wrong just as easily as anyone else. This is why I say things like 'Time will tell'.

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  9. joe six-pack,

    We attacked an area that our enemy defended. The result was our enemy reacting to our move with his 'army'. He got a bloody nose for his effort. ... Our enemy will have the initiative because he will be the one choosing where the war will be fought. That is a defensive stragety no matter what anyone calls it.


    Applying a conventional standard to an unconventional conflict seems to be grave inconsistency here. Bush's big mistake was precisely in rationalizing al Qaida into the cassus beli for invading Iraq and kicking over the Saddam regime. A mistake compounded by the complete lack of any diplomatic effort to effectively cut the Saudi's and other Gulf states' funding, directly and indirectly, of terror networks.

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