Recent bellicose remarks by French officials underline that one of the more likely future wars for France (and most other Western military powers) is war with Iran.
It remains to be seen, however, whether there are any viable military options for those attempting to block a nuclear path by Iran.
With Fidel Castro seriously ill, it is worth considering the diverse scenarios that could unfold for a post-Castro Cuba.
SCENARIOS
FIDELISMO WITHOUT FIDEL
Cuba’s current communist system persists.
Probability – Medium
Trajectory – Without Castro, would tend to transition toward the China Option or Normal Cuba scenarios.
Drivers:
Counterforces:
THE CHINA OPTION
The Communist Party takes the China route: abandoning socialism but maintaining authoritarian rule.
Probability – Medium-low
Trajectory – Would tend to transition to Normal Cuba scenario.
Drivers:
Counterforces:
NORMAL CUBA
Cuba becomes a normal Latin American democracy. The Communist Party transitions to one among many parties, and retains a substantial following.
Probability – Medium
Trajectory – Likely to persist, with slight danger of slipping into the Neo-Batista right-wing authoritarianism scenario or one of the left-wing authoritarian scenarios.
Drivers:
Counterforces:
NEO-BATISTA
Cuban-Americans achieve power and impose a right-wing dictatorship.
Probability – Very low
Trajectory – Would likely evolve toward a Normal Cuba scenario, but could revert via revolt to a Fidelismo scenario.
Drivers:
Counterforces:
COLLAPSE
Contending forces tear the government apart and prevent an organized transition, creating chaos and violence.
Probability – Low
Trajectory – Would gradually coalesce into Normal Cuba or one of the authoritarian scenarios.
Drivers:
Counterforces:
BAY OF PIGS II
The US launches a military invasion to hasten a transition of its liking. It is met with substantial resistance.
Probability – Low
Trajectory – Would likely result in an eventual compromise that evolved toward a Normal Cuba scenario. Less likely would be such sharp resistance that the US loses heart and retreated, leaving Cuba to the Fidelismo outcome.
Drivers:
Counterforces:
[Cuba’s future / Cuban scenarios / Cuba scenarios / future of Cuba]
Writing in The Telegraph, historian Niall Ferguson attempts to make the case for immediate military action against Iran via a future scenario perspective.
His scenario includes these ideas:
Analysis
Ferguson’s assumptions are weak:
Ferguson exaggerates the pace of change:
He may be accelerating the plausible timetables of his scenario in order to heighten the apparent urgency.
Given that he is a historian, Ferguson’s strangest omission is that he fails to address the possible medium- and long-term consequences of the course he advocates. These include:
John Robb at Global Guerrillas argues that a US attack on Iran could have far-reaching consequences, in three waves:
Analysis
Amidst real costs and fantasies of defeat (and some fantasies of victory), a movement is growing among American liberals to “redeploy” American troops out of Iraq.
There are a number of reasons that the idea is worth considering:
However, setting a fixed, short-term timetable for leaving Iraq would appear to make a number of outcomes more likely:
Juan Cole advocates reducing and reconfiguring US forces for genuine anti-terrorism and counterterrorism, but that is rather different than simply leaving.
Colin Powell opposed the Iraq war (while facilitating it) partly because of the “you break it, you own it” principle. By this reasoning, the US broke Iraq, it now owns the situation, and redeploying quietly out of the store doesn’t change this.
A reader asks:
I’m wondering if perhaps the key to a turnaround in the Middle East would be for some sort of massive joint action — like a Saudi/Egypt/U.S./Iraq anti-Iranian ground war or something? I’m certainly not recommending this, but if Iran does become only a military option…?
In anything like the present situation, no one but the US would join military action, particularly a ground invasion. That should deter us, which would be a very good thing: a ground invasion would end in defeat for the US.
Iran could not destroy any American unit, and we could occupy any chosen square mile of the country, but we would not have the stomach to outlast the virtually united resistance of the 70-million strong Iranian nation. Consider the fact that the Sunnis of Iraq are straining US military capabilities, and basically fighting us to a draw, despite essentially being a nation of only 5 million. Iran has 24 million males of military age.
As to the larger situation, if “turnaround” refers to reducing terrorism and instability, an effective course should diminish the forces that stoke those things.
Invading Iran would drive up both, creating far more of their basic ingredient: angry people who believe that the West is cruel and violent and thus deserves violence.
The death of Zarqawi could have mixed results for al-Qaeda, the WP reports.
His ruthless targeting of civilians was opposed by the global al-Qaeda leadership, as it alienated both Arab public opinion and the larger Iraqi insurgency; Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq was becoming increasingly isolated.
Analysts argue that Zarqawi’s death could undercut his group’s recruitment of foreign fighters, and other foreign jihadis might turn away from al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They also argue that the Zarqawi group is less militarily important than several other foreign insurgent units, including some led by Egyptians, Saudis, and Algerians.
Al-Qaeda has a chance to assert greater control over its Iraqi franchise, but faces problems if that franchise loses too much “market share” of the insurgency. According to a German counterterrorism expert, “By losing Zarqawi, they run the danger of losing Iraq as a battlefield to the nationalist insurgents and others who aren’t interested in bin Laden or the global jihad.”
This presents broader problems for al-Qaeda:
If al-Qaeda fails to maintain a high-profile stake in the conflict with U.S. forces in the region, the analysts said, its relevance in the jihadist movement will quickly diminish. …. Others said Zarqawi’s death is likely to widen the factional splits that have been developing for years within the global movement. More and more, Islamic radical groups are becoming splintered and are only loosely affiliated. While they may be united in a broader struggle against the United States and the West, they often have different aims and tactics.
Terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq yesterday by a US airstrike.
Forecasters were cautious about the significance of the event.
On NPR, former DIA Middle East chief Jeffrey White said Zarqawi’s death could help dampen the extreme wing of the Iraqi insurgency. However, reduced extremism could actually help unify the insurgency, he said, as Zarqawi’s tactics were controversial within the resistance forces.
Zarqawi’s group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, deliberately targeted civilians, which most Iraqis disapproved of.
Juan Cole suggests that Zarqawi was not as important as some might think:
There is no evidence of operational links between his Salafi Jihadis in Iraq and the real al-Qaeda; it was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US. Official US spokesmen have all along over-estimated his importance. … But Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don’t expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.
The NYT acknowledged that his program of igniting sectarian conflict was already well underway:
“Zarqawi may be gone, but the conflagration that he set alight continues to burn,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist expert at the Rand Corporation in Washington. “That is the reality. He has already set in motion powerful forces that won’t necessarily stop just because he is dead.”
Al Qaeda in Iraq is loosely organized, the NYT states, and only a small part of the overall insurgency.
It should also be kept in mind that Zarqawi only rose to prominence as a result of the US invasion of Iraq; while his death is very positive in itself, it only partially undoes the progress jihadists have made in the country in the environment the US effectively created.
After a number of months trending downwards, American casualities have jumped again, likely indicating that the Oct. ‘05 to March ‘06 pattern was not significant, and there has not been any clear change on the ground.
PBS has been airing “Fire and Ice,” a history of the 1939-1940 Winter War, which began when Stalin’s Soviet Union attacked its tiny neighbor Finland. Heroic Finnish resistance held off massive Soviet offensives for months, until the weight of men and materiel became too great for the Finns.
Stalin was practicing preventive war: the Finnish border was quite near Russia’s second-most important city, Leningrad, and Stalin seems to have felt that that this could constitute a future threat. And he proved correct, when Finland allied with the Germans in the Second World War. (That Stalin probably brought about the threat he imagined is not really germane; states of all kinds do that frequently.)
Stalin’s actions appear to be permissible under the Bush administration’s preventive war doctrine, which ultimately uses a nation’s sense of being threatened as the criteria for whether it can engage in war.
Most advocates of preventive war doctrine would reject that idea, so it is worth considering whether there are rules for preventive war that would define the idea more palatably. Candidate rules:
Ultimately, it appears difficult to write plausible rules for preventive war that Americans could actually live with, given that others may invoke the same rules. That in itself signals the potential perils of the concept.