The biggest news is that President Obama will be announcing our new Afghanistan strategy and force structure. Based on what I am hearing is it looking like the plan is for between 32 and 35k troops to go, and probably with a mandate for more police training and less Counter Insurgency (COIN) operations. Honestly, given the track record of politicians dictating strategy during a war, and the abysmal relationship between Ambassador Eikenberry and General McChrystal, I have very little confidence at the moment that we will have a coherent and feasible strategy. Too many cooks spoil the soup, and everyone in the White House situation room had their own agenda. It looks as though bits and pieces of everyone’s ideas got tossed in there. In COIN, unity of effort and message is everything.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/23/obama-lock-afghanistan-decision/
Here’s the weirdest part of the whole affair, though. President Obama has super majorities in both houses of congress, yet congress is actively working at undercutting public support for the war. The “War Tax” they are trying to pass is deliberately designed to cut into public support for staying in Afghanistan, even though that will affect President Obama’s popularity. President Obama has rejected the idea of a War Tax, but congress holds the purse strings.
Given how little congress seems to care about driving up the deficit with other kinds of spending (stimulus bill, cash for clunkers, the health care bill, bailouts for banks and automakers, etc…) the purpose of this proposed tax is pretty clear: the controlling party in congress wants to get out of Afghanistan, and the quickest way to do it is to is to kill public support for the war among independents (notice that the bill targets only those who already pay taxes, so that excludes much of the democratic base).
From a serviceman’s perspective, my worst fear is that the public, when taking a hit in the pocketbook, will direct its anger towards the military and the servicemen who they perceive as costing them thousands of extra dollars per year in taxes.
On to military recruiting…where it was recently announced that 75% of all people between the ages of 17-24 are unfit for military service.
http://www.post-trib.com/news/1867978,unfit1106.article
The numbers seem to be in the ballpark. Makes you wonder how people can criticize the military as the place people go when they fail at school or life in general… statistically it seems to be the other way around.
Andfinally my favorite: Iran. The SC5 + 1 talks were and abject failure. Iran came out of them having made no concessions, and having wrung another 4 months of inaction out of the west. Today, they are absolutely convinced the U.S. and Israel have no leverage over them:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,576505,00.html?test=latestnews
With the Iranians, you have to always ask whom the message is for. Domestic audience? International? Loyalist base? Given where and when President Ahmadinejad made these statements, I believe it was both domestic and international. Iranians love the role of bully. They love hyperbole and overheated rhetoric. It’s just their political style. On the other hand, the opportunity to taunt your enemies on an international stage serves to highlight the perceived weakness of the U.S. and Israel.
However… President Ahmadinejad has probably read the situation wrongly in one regard. He is likely correct that President Obama would never order an attack on Iran without extreme provocation (Pearl Harbor II type scenario). The Iranians aren’t crazy enough to try that. They feel that as long as they don’t do anything completely outrageous, they’re in the catbird seat. What President Ahmadinejad is completely wrong about is Israel.
The Israeli government is waiting for the New Years deadline to come and go before they move. They have waited it out in the past because George W. Bush was regarded as a friend of Israel, there was still time to wait out the negotiations, and the former President had enough clout to tell them no and make it stick. Additionally, in the past the Israeli government was a center-left coalition. After this year’s elections it is a solidly right wing government led by the very hawkish former special forces member Benjamin Netanyahu. The reason Netanyahu’s government has not made a move so far this year has to do with timing and avoiding exposure on the international political stage. They had to wait for the Iranian election issues to be worked out, and they need to wait for negotiations to fail and sanctions to either be blocked, or weakened by China. They are only waiting on the end of the year to have no new sanctions in place, given that the SC5 + 1 gave a New Years deadline.
One other item tips the scales towards Israel making a unilateral move: President Obama holds no sway with them. This comes from one of Obama’s own advisors:
Obama's new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry. For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama's call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians. "We thought we had some leverage," says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. "But that proved to be an illusion."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662822,00.html
Israel may not be able to get their nuclear facilities in a traditional manner, but President Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council seem to find it inconceivable that the Israelis would either attempt to collapse the Iranian government by destroying their oil infrastructure (trust me on this one… Khatami and Ahmadinejad think the world needs their oil too much to let Israel get away with taking it off the market), or by knocking out the entire Iranian power grid. Both of these are extreme, but they’re both militarily low risk for the Israelis, very feasible, and would probably derail the Iranian nuclear program even more effectively than targeting the actual nuclear facilities.
Israel has options that the Iranians can’t even fathom because they’re so far outside their paradigm. Israel is just waiting for the timing to line up to minimize how much political fallout they have to deal with.
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