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Letters to the
Editor
Dear Editor:
Baran's well written and argued article in last week’s
In The National Interest suffers from several
shortcomings that must be pointed out. Some of the
points she raised have already been disproven by events
south of the Caucasus
in Iraq.
Still others smack of anti-Russian bias and reflect not
having learned the meaning of the events of 9/11.
While her call for democratically-elected presidents is
welcome, her expectation of unilateral Armenian
concessions on Artsakh (Karabakh) reflects Baran's deep
bias on this issue. The only way left to solve the
dispute is partition along the lines advocated by your
journal in Kosovo. No Armenian president, no matter how
popular, can deliver the bill Baran asks for. She would
do well to read Keesing's record of events for 1988, to
better understand why her demands are impossible.
Turkey, a
country Baran holds in heroic esteem, has shown itself
to be an independent, non-Western actor in the region.
Its interests in the area are directly contradictory to
those of the United States. It made a lot of money by
smuggling Saddam's oil and is now trying to use its
influence in the US to crush Iraq's Kurds - who are the
only true allies America has in the country.
Encouraging a Turkish Empire in the
Caucasus
is not in the national interest of the United States,
because it will set the country free from its dependence
on American mediation and influence with Europe.
It is also foolhardy with regard to the expansion of
Islamist ideology.
Turkey's current
government reflects moderate Islamist preferences, but
will it remain so? Given the expansion of Islamist
influence in Turkey, moderation is highly unlikely in
the future. Furthermore, if a moderate Islamist
government was willing to double cross the United States
in Iraq, why trust it in the Caucasus?
And what risks to
United States
interests will be posed by an immoderate government?
The real lesson of 9/11 is that the Russians are not
ideological, religious or cultural enemies of the Untied
States; radical Islamists are. So why does Baran
continue to advocate a foreign policy premised on
containing Russia?
Perhaps the national interest she is keen on promoting
is that of Turkey and not the United States.
Sincerely,
Jack Kalpakian, Ph.D.
Morocco
Dear Editor:
In the September 10 issue of In The National Interest,
I wrote about the troubling problems associated with
relying on arms control agreements, such as the Non
Proliferation Treaty, in protecting the United States
and its allies from rogue state nuclear weapons
programs, such as in North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Austin
Carson, in last week’s issue of ITNI, replies
that arms control approaches are better than I believe
and more useful. In particular, he believes my criticism
of the IAEA is wide of the mark, especially regarding
Pyongyang.
Carson oversimplifies and misses most of my argument. It
is not a question of arms control vs. other strategies,
such as defense, deterrence or dissuasion. It is that,
if an arms control approach lacks effective enforcement,
which the NPT does, it cannot be relied upon to provide
for our security.
The IAEA repeatedly gave Iraq a clean bill of health, as
Dr. Hamza’s book “Saddam’s Bomb Maker” makes clear. The
IAEA was completely bamboozled by the Iraq campaign of
deception. In part, the IAEA was incompetent. This is
not entirely due to the lack of leadership of Hans Blix,
but much can be placed on his desk due to his bumbling
and stumbling, not the least of which is due to his view
that global warming is more of a problem than the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The real problem is the world community often pretends
that the IAEA and the NPT can deal with these
serious issues, but it cannot. The arms control
community is so wedded to what Senator Kyl calls “peace
through paper” that it has resisted committing itself to
the enforcement side of the equation, involving as it
does troubling questions of sovereignty.
So we adopt what I term “pretend” arms control
agreements that give the appearance of providing
security, but, in the final analysis, depend
significantly on the host countries own policies and
intents. Politicians, particularly liberals and those
with a distaste for the US military and contempt for our
armed services, are most wedded to this approach, most
often to the total exclusion of almost everything else.
Yes, arms control can involve legally recognized
inspections. But as we have seen with respect to Iran,
Iraq and North Korea, those inspections can lead to the
inspectors being fooled, (Iraq),
jerked around, (Iran),
or frustrated, (North Korea). Between 1985 and 1993, the
IAEA said nothing about Pyongyang’s clandestine program.
After the Clinton administration adopted the Jimmy
Carter “Pyongyang is nice” policy line, we signed up to
an agreement that kicked everything down the road,
leaving Pyongyang able to adopt a second route toward
weapons production, right under the nose of the IAEA and
the Clinton administration. IAEA blessed the Clinton-Kim
deal. At the end of the Clinton administration,
Congressman Allen claimed a final deal with North Korea
was done, but the incoming Bush administration ruined
everything by refusing to follow through because it
wanted a North Korean threat to justify the deployment
of a ballistic missile defenses. A former high level
Clinton administration official involved in the
negotiations with Pyongyang described the “supposed”
deal as one in which, the US would pretend North Korea
did not have nuclear weapons, and they, the North
Koreans, would pretend they did not either.
To claim, as Carson does, that states build nuclear
weapons because of U.S. threats turns upside down all of
post-World War II history and the successful conclusion
of the Cold War. Our adversaries build weapons of mass
destruction because they are usually mass murderers and
thugs. While it is true that U.S. doctrine did not
precipitate the nuclear programs in India and Pakistan,
which Carson acknowledges, it is wrong to assert the
contrary with respect to other nations. Our nuclear
umbrella over the Republic of
Korea,
not the NPT, allowed the ROK to forgo nuclear weapons.
Its principle adversary,
North Korea, did not
join the NPT until some 30 years after the end of the
Korean War. Without the threat to
Seoul,
there would have been no need for the U.S. deterrent
threat to begin with. Great help the NPT was!
Carson concludes that the arms control network,
including the IAEA, is “what the U.S. makes of it”. What
is needed is “enthusiasm”, he says, and this then will
translate into “legitimacy”, which will generate the
international support for “proactive proliferation
prevention”. However, whatever the merits of arms
control, they cannot be considered apart from the
willingness to enforce them as tools of international
diplomacy. I have conducted roughly 750 seminars on
Capitol Hill over the past quarter century on arms
control issues. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the
INF, CFE and START treaties, because the US had the
technical capability to “count the beans” in question,
to paraphrase the late Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin.
However, we were also willing to acknowledge, in the
words of former Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, “that
diplomacy without military power is prayer”. Effective
arms control can be very helpful, but we have to keep
our eye on the ball—it is our adversaries weapons we
need to control, not ours.
Fred Iklé wrote over 40 years ago a seminal article on
what “the good guys” should do once we find a violation
of arms control commitments. “Then what?” Iklé asked,
because few had given thought to the very difficult
question of how one compels state compliance—let alone
non-state terrorist groups—to abide by internationally
agreed upon norms which they have every intention of
ignoring if they can get away with it. Remember the
North Korean moratorium on missile tests? How the arms
control community assured everyone that this was “proof”
of Pyongyang’s intent to live up to its part of the 1995
bargain with the
United States,
Japan and the Republic of
Korea?
And then, like in the Wizard of Oz, someone pulled the
curtain away and informed us the North Koreans are busy
shipping their rockets to
Iran for testing.
Yale Professor Paul Bracken notes that the old
counter-proliferation regime ran out of steam and
pretended to be more successful than it was. It led us
to avoid the tough choices that the Bush Administration
has had to face. Combining deterrence, strategic
defense, homeland security, military options and arms
control, that takes into account the new realities of
what he calls the second nuclear age, is the way to
proceed.
Sincerely,
Peter Huessy,
President
GeoStrategic Analysis
Washington,
DC
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