NZ Centre for Political Research

Iran ups the ante
29 November 2009

The news that Iran is apparently building a second enrichment plant close to the holy city of Qom must surely remove all doubts about Iranian intentions and the need to deal effectively with them as a matter of urgency. As I argued in an earlier column, Iran does not need enrichment capability to service its civilian nuclear programme. Fuel for its one small power reactor is already on hand and the supplier (Russia) has already contracted to supply more. In the extremely unlikely event that they refused, there are many other potential suppliers in Europe, Asia and North and South America. Until such time as Iran has many more civilian power reactors (if this comes to pass) the already-operating Nantaz facility makes no economic or industrial sense. To add a second plant, only underlines the abundantly-evident fact that this activity is for another purpose: viz weapons-grade fissile material production.

It should be noted that this analysis is not altered by the recent acceptance of a visit by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or, indeed, if Iran were to come into compliance with all IAEA requirements: protocols and additional protocols (unlikely though that is). There could still be no legitimate purpose for what it is doing. Equally, the challenge to the Iranians to prove that their activities are peaceful, issued by US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (echoing similar remarks from Russia), is depressingly naïve. Apart from the logical difficulty in presently ‘proving’ future intentions (or even establishing securely what present intentions might be) the brute fact remains that if Iran persists on its present course it will be in a position to make nuclear weapons very quickly and all the inspectors in the world will not prevent it. At some point, Iran would do what North Korean did a few years ago, expel the inspectors and do it anyway.

There is another dimension to all this and that is the particular suitability of enriched uranium (as opposed to plutonium) for the fabrication of a nuclear explosive device. The essential process in contriving a nuclear explosion is the bringing together of ‘sub-critical masses’ of highly-enriched uranium or ‘weapons-grade’ plutonium to instantly produce a sufficient quantity (a critical mass) of fissile material to sustain the essential chain reaction that produces all the energy. In the case of plutonium this requires a very rapid assembly of the sub-critical masses to avoid ‘pre-ignition’ and a very much reduced yield (a ‘fizzle’). The rate of assembly is less crucial for highly-enriched uranium devices and yields of the Hiroshima size may be obtained from a relatively simple ‘gun-barrel’ assembly arrangement, such as was used at Hiroshima. It is even suggested that, in the case of HEU a nuclear explosion could be obtained by simply dropping one subcritical mass onto the other from a height of six feet or so.

Once mastered, the technology of rapid assembly of weapons-grade plutonium leads on to more sophisticated nuclear weapons, which may be delivered by a ballistic missile, and also to enhanced yield weapons, such as hydrogen bombs. This is one risk and it must surely be recognised by the neighbouring states. By contrast the (relatively) simple uranium bomb can be assembled by non-state actors if they are given, or otherwise come to acquire, sufficient appropriate material. For the uranium bomb this is the hard part. As noted in my 3 September piece, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, has already uttered words to suggest that he might allow this to happen. From a ‘Western’ point of view, waiting to see whether or not he was bluffing does not seem like a sound strategy.

Apart from the continuing passage of time, during which the implicit threat has palpably increased, Iran has now further upped the ante by testing ballistic missiles and by issuing threats about retaliatory destruction. At the same time, there is no certainty that the five permanent members of the Security Council will agree on a more rigorous regime of sanctions. Assuming they don’t, or Iran does not respond, the question will then be, what will Israel do? If it does nothing, it leaves itself vulnerable to the recently-reiterated threat from the Iranian leadership to destroy the ‘filthy Zionist entity’.

On the other hand, if Israel does attack Iranian nuclear facilities, what will Iran do? Crucially, will it carry through with its recently expressed threat to attack Israel with missiles (or even aircraft)? If this results in a further counter-attack from Israel and then from Iran, is it possible that ultimately nuclear weapons get used? Perhaps after an attack by Iran on a major Israeli population centre, which causes substantial loss of life? This must surely look like an end-point that we would really wish to avoid. Partly, we might hope to prevent such an outcome by urging Israel not to respond, as was done during the Gulf War. On the whole, though, it might be better to arrest the process at an earlier stage. That ‘earlier stage’ is very clearly before Iran has nuclear weapons and the only measure to achieve this (short of military action) must surely be the immediate application of sanctions that hurt; these must include a total embargo on the supply of refined oil-products to that country.

Questions for the defence review
15 November 2009

Do we envisage ever becoming involved in serious conventional military operations? Australia does. Its latest white paper (2009) makes this plain. Do we agree with them? About a decade ago, Helen Clark notoriously claimed to see a ‘benign’ security environment and, by implication, saw no such possibility. Admittedly, this was during the first flush of optimism that followed the ending of the Cold War, and before 9/11, but the crucial question for our present defence planners is, do we agree with the Clark analysis, which has dominated defence policy in New Zealand to the present day, or do we see contingencies in which we will use military forces in more or less conventional conflict?

If the answer to this latter question is, ‘yes’, then we have a serious problem since none of the three services is capable of discharging fundamental requirements in this respect. The army, on which most money has been spent in recent times, cannot sustain even a company-sized deployment for any length of time. The Provincial Reconstruction Team is bolstered by civilians and by personnel from the other services, who are given minimal weapon’s training prior to departure. Of course, there are proper military forces in the same theatre, which would come to our aid in the event of serious threat but we really should not deploy for this kind of operation other than properly trained and equipped infantry forces. Their main task may be reconstruction but a crucial requirement (condition for deployment) for any unit sent to a war zone is a high capability for at least self-defence. It is also the case that these kinds of deployments are reinforcing bad habits: augmenting specialist forces with ‘ring-ins’ from other parts of the armed services and beyond. The other crucial requirement for an infantry unit is an effective offensive capability. That is what they are generally maintained for and, historically, we have used them for this purpose in a variety of causes that we have judged just and important. Do we have some reason for thinking this could not happen again?

Similar considerations apply to our navy and air force. As is well known, we no longer have any capability for fixed wing air-strike. We could not support our troops on the ground with suppressing fire or interdict adversary aircraft that were attacking them. Equally, we could not oppose hostile shipping. Since 1999, the answer to this has been that we would never be alone and that partners would supply the necessary capability. Are we sure about this? There are still a few people in New Zealand who know what it is like to be on the ground with the air above dominated by adversary aircraft and there are plenty of accounts for those who haven’t had the experience. There is also the matter of training and the acquisition of the appropriate skills for coordinating with air support and minimising the associated risk of ‘friendly-fire’. Without your own capability, however modest, opportunities for this essential practice are inevitably limited

A noteworthy feature of the wider security environment is the increasing inventory of submarines. Can we envisage circumstances in which these could become a threat to New Zealand naval forces, or to the ships that carry our cargoes around the world? Our naval and air forces used to be capable of detecting submarines and attacking them, once detected. This is no longer the case. Our Orion aircraft can no longer find submarines (we have allowed the capability that we used to have to atrophy) and the anti-submarine torpedoes that we might have used against them are now obsolete. Again, if submarines became a threat to our interests (in trade, or otherwise) we should have to hope that somebody else would do the job. In this sort of context, it is not necessary to specify precisely when, where and how a contingency of this sort will arise. Indeed, in the nature of things, this is impossible. But we can identify the appearance of the ‘capability’ (in this case, submarines) and ask ourselves what we would want to be able to do if it were to be used against us. What we cannot do is wait until the capability is married with an intention. At that point it is usually too late to do anything about it, except to hope that some ally will have exercised more foresight.

We have the fourth largest exclusive economic zone in the world, with a wealth of fish in it and (probably) a wealth of minerals below it but we have scarcely any capacity to police it. With only two frigates and the possibility that one could be in distant waters on international duties (as has been the case in the recent past), and with the other refitting, we could find that we had no capability of that kind at all. As was pointed out in an expert review some years ago, two frigates simply do not constitute a ‘critical mass’. It is a capability we say we need but when we want it, it might not be available. This is not to forget NMNZS Canterbury but it is to remember that ship’s very considerable limitations. It is basically not a warship and if it were deployed to any theatre of operations where the parties were shooting at each other it would be a liability to our partners, since they would have to defend it. Serious operational limitations also attach to the smaller vessels of the ‘Project Protector’ fleet.

The stark fact is that over twenty years we have allowed our defence capabilities to atrophy and decay and we now cannot provide basic security against a wide range of possible threats. The 2010 review provides an opportunity to start to change that situation. Will we take it? Or will we continue a lamentable twenty-year trend towards progressive incapacity?

The Chamberlain of the Twenty-first Century?
1 November 2009

Is Barak Obama destined to be the Neville Chamberlain of the Twenty-first century? On his performance in his first eight months in office, this seems a real possibility. President Obama’s fine oratory continues to be admired but his gestures of conciliation and compromise seem increasingly to be perceived as signs of weakness and lack of resolve by those to whom they have been addressed. And now the extraordinary decision of the Nobel Committee to award him the prize for Peace has the potential to make him look ridiculous after half a year in which he has really only made speeches. Actually the situation is worse than that, since acceptance of the Prize is only likely to increase the temptation to appeasement and make it more difficult to take the action demanded by the serious security challenges with which he is faced.

It needs to be remembered that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain acted from the best of motives. He wished to avoid a repeat of the awful bloodshed of the First World War by resolving a new conflict through negotiation and compromise, rather than through military action. It should also be noted that Chamberlain was feted in his time. When he returned from Munich he drove through cheering crowds to have lunch with the King and was praised from pulpit and platform. But the consensus of history is clear. By his actions, Chamberlain brought on the calamity he sought to avoid and his government’s failure to recognise the coming threat only made it worse when it came and, at the time, his high-minded idealism merely reinforced a picture of irresolution and infirmity of purpose.

The immediate response to the Obama outreach programme has been less than overwhelming. The Cairo speech played well in much of the Western media and got polite applause from the political leadership in some Arab capitals but it only provoked fresh distain from fundamentalist Islam. Again, offers of open-ended dialogue with Iran have produced a truculent reaffirmation of the still-developing nuclear weapons programme and, of course, they have been attended by fresh revelations of covert activity. Iranian spokesmen have also recently reiterated threats to destroy the state of Israel and continued with the virulent anti-Semitism that has marked the regime for many years. In the election campaign candidate Obama seemed to be saying that a nuclear-armed Iran was ‘unacceptable’. The crucial question now is what will President Obama do?

And then there is Afghanistan. General McChrystal has asked for another 40,000 troops to conduct a counter-insurgency ‘surge’. Candidate Obama seems to have been clear that this was the important theatre for the ‘war on terror’ but President Obama does not seem to be able to make a decision on the matter. Whatever is resolved for Afghanistan, it cannot surely be to reward those who kill innocents in the streets of Kabul with a place in the Government, as has been mooted in some quarters.

But there is one crucial difference between Neville Chamberlain and Barak Obama and that is, that for Obama it is not too late. He can commit himself unequivocally to the defence of the Afghan state (notwithstanding its manifest defects) by giving General McChrystal his support and the soldiers he needs. To allow Afghanistan to fall back into the hands of the Taliban is only to recreate the terrorist haven that was there before 9/11. Islamic terrorism is a threat and it will be such for some time to come. Appeasement here will only increase the threat and make it more difficult to deal with in the years ahead. There seems to have been a recent firming of purpose with regard to al Qaeda on the part of the government of Pakistan and a new possibility for cooperation with it in regard to operations on either side of the border with Afghanistan. This is an opportunity that needs to be grasped.

Similarly, US policy with regard to Iran needs to stay firm. Even if (as now seems likely) the Russians do not completely carry through with their apparent commitment to support sanctions in the Security Council (bought at the expense of relations with Poland and the Czech Republic) America must not allow a drift that increasingly encourages a deadly adversary. It must apply sanctions of its own, with the support of such allies as it can muster, and these must hurt. As argued in a previous column, these must now include a quarantine regime which blocks the supply of refined petroleum to the Iranian state.

The crucial mistake that Neville Chamberlain made was to ignore the fact that there are times when vital interests cannot be defended without fighting for them however we might wish that things were otherwise. Barak Obama faces the same challenge, with the additional handicap of the Nobel Prize for Peace. We should wish him luck. Whatever may apply to the generality of politicians and activists around the world, the President of the United States cannot be self-indulgent with the vital interests of the Western World.

The Breaker Morant Syndrome
3 October 2009

As all those who saw the eponymous Australian film will know, Breaker Morant was an Australian Army officer during the Boer War who was convicted (with two others) of the war crime of shooting prisoners and was summarily executed. Viewers of the film and readers of the book on which it was based (‘Scapegoats of the Empire’) will also know that the reason why Lt Morant (and his co-accused) was prosecuted was not particularly that a crime had been committed (although, it had) but because the trial and conviction was convenient for the British authorities. The war was dragging on and an inducement was needed to bring the Boer side to the negotiating table, and this was it.

In the century since these events took place nothing has changed in the matter of political expediency. Accusations about ‘war crimes’, actual or potential, are still as much the stuff of politics as they are of justice, as the controversial release of the ‘Lockerbie bomber’ has recently shown. This is also the context in which to see the recent New Zealand Green party initiative to make ‘aggression’ a crime under New Zealand law, which was more an attempt to circumvent the political process than to advance any concept of international justice. Under the proposed legislation, a New Zealand Prime Minister would have been required to apply to a special court for legal permission (or risk indictment for war crimes by such a court) before deciding whether or not to deploy (say) SAS forces to Afghanistan. Whether such a body, had it been in existence, would have determined that Mr Key has committed the war crime of aggression by sending the SAS, may be moot but there is no doubt that that is the view of the Green Party sponsor of the proposed legislation (Dr Kennedy Graham).

In its small way, this local issue points to the problem that the International Criminal Court has had in defining the war crime of ‘Aggression’ in the ten years since the statute of the court was adopted. Aggression was listed as one of four war crimes (the others are genocide, crimes against humanity and breaches of the laws of war) with the proviso that no prosecutions would take place until the concept had an acceptable definition and conditions for the exercise of jurisdiction had been determined. To date this has not been done and this is, at least in part, because the envisaged crime of aggression goes beyond the way violent means are being used to the purposes for which it is being used. In this it conflates the traditional just war distinction between just cause (jus ad bellum) and just means (jus in bello), which Geneva Law wisely never did. As far as the Geneva Conventions are concerned, why the parties are fighting is irrelevant. Given that they are fighting, Geneva provides the rules and breaches of the rules constitute war crimes.

A UN special committee spent seven years defining ‘aggression’ (1967-74) and an ICC working group subsequently spent a further ten years at the task but really the fundamental problems remain. There is no agreement on what would or would not constitute a justifying cause for the use of violent means. The special committee report (as adopted in UN General Assembly Resolution 3314) talks of ‘aggression’ as the use of armed force against the sovereignty of a state but it exempts a struggle for self-determination and may, elsewhere, recognise a right to be protected from (say) genocide. The result of this is a stream of grandstanding denouncements of mainly Western leaders for interventions in the Balkans and, closer to home, in the former East Timor. The NATO intervention in response to genocide in Kosovo is a particularly interesting case since it was prima-facie an assault on Serbian sovereignty and it was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It was also the subject of criminal proceedings in a Belgrade court, as a result of which Messrs Clinton, Chirac, Blair and others were sentenced (in absentia, of course) to twenty years imprisonment on the charge of ‘Aggression’.

But the major issue for the International Criminal Court and for the prospect of bringing war criminals to justice is not the impossibility of defining aggression but, rather, it is the political impediments to bringing charges at all. The ICC has legal proceedings ongoing in relation to four ‘situations’ (as they call them), all of them in Africa. In two of these cases (Uganda and Darfur) the named defendants are for the most part not in custody (they are ‘fugitives’). The other two ‘situations’ (Central African Republic and Congo) have defendants that have been handed over by their own government, largely because they were on the wrong side of a civil war.

A crucial problem is that major defendants may never be in custody. Sudan has made it plain that it will not hand over any of those indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity and, particularly it will not hand over its President, Omar al Bashir. It is supported in this stance by Organisation of African Unity and the Association of Islamic States and member states in each organisation have threatened to leave the ICC if their wishes (that prosecutions be dropped) are not met. The situation in Uganda is different. In this case there are on-going discussions between the government of that state and the indicted leadership of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (responsible for large-scale atrocity in the north of the country over many years). A plausible outcome to these talks is the dropping of charges against the defendants in exchange for a peace agreement and cultural reparations (the ‘truth and reconciliation’ process). Such an outcome may be in the interests Uganda but it would leave the only remaining defendants in The Hague as the only defendants without a political card to play. The crimes with which the Congo and CAR defendants are charged are certainly serious; much more serious than the crimes of Morant et al but they have in common with the latter that their prosecution has more than a whiff of politics about it but they do share more than a whiff of political expediency.

All this is not a reason for not attempting to do anything about the most egregious of war crimes but it is a reason for understanding the limitations on what can be done and the extent to which accusations (fabrications, even) are frequently more a political tactic than a call for justice. What happens over the next couple of years may tell us which is going dominate (politics or justice) in the processes of the International Criminal Court.

Iran and Nuclear Weapons: What to do?
19 September 2009  

As indicated in my previous column, there is abundant evidence that Iran is engaged in an extensive programme to acquire nuclear weapons. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to do some of the things it is doing (including the development of technologies that have application to both civilian and military purposes) but it must account for all materials and allow unfettered inspection (including ‘no-notice’ inspections) of all nuclear sites. This, it is patently not doing and is thus in breach of its obligations under that treaty (and this applies notwithstanding its acceptance of a recent visit by IAEA inspectors). Iranian non-compliance with the non-proliferation protocols is the reason why the United Nations Security Council, on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency, imposed trade sanctions on Iran in the matter of sensitive nuclear technologies, in December 2006. These sanctions were confirmed in March 2007 (Resolution 1747) and extended in March 2008, to include a request to UN members to inspect any suspect cargoes that may come their way. To date sanctions have not brought compliance with IAEA Protocols and they haven’t caused Iran to cease its activities.

Is there potential for wider sanctions which might put more pressure on Iran? One obvious area that has been much discussed is the obstruction of Iranian fuel supplies.  Despite its being a major supplier of oil, Iran cannot supply its own domestic market for motor fuel and must, therefore, depend on foreign supplies to keep transportation and industry going. There is little doubt, then, that a fuel embargo would be extremely damaging, both economically and socially. Such a measure has been discussed in the United States Congress (the Kirk Act) and is said to have majority support but it is equally clear that Russia and China are unlikely to support it in the Security Council and, thus, such an embargo is unlikely to be adopted by that body. It is also relevant here to ask, what would Iran do, if such a sanction were applied? Actually, they have told us. Through various spokesmen they have said that they would retaliate by stopping oil exports to the West and by blockading the straits of Hormuz (and thereby preventing oil exportation from the whole of the Persian Gulf) and possibly by striking at ‘western’ targets in the region.  How reliable these various statements are, as an indicator of likely action, may be the subject of conjecture but policy formers would need to bear these possibilities in mind.  

Then there is the much discussed possibility of direct action: military strikes against the offending nuclear installations. There are, of course, precedents for this. Nearly thirty years ago Israeli aircraft destroyed Iraq’s Osirik reactor and last year aircraft from the same state hit a Syrian nuclear site near the Turkish border. Of course, the Iranian situation is altogether more complicated. There are many more sites and major potential targets are deep underground and/or in urban areas. Complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear activity may not be possible (there also may be some activities that have not yet been securely identified), so that, If nothing else changes, the programme may well be revived. That is what happened in Iraq after the 1981 attack. Ten years later, following the Gulf War, IAEA inspectors were surprised to find how close Iraq was to a nuclear weapon (six months). In an operation of this kind there would probably also be a need to take out key defensive installations, to protect the strike forces. And, again, there would be the question, what would Iran do? The precedents are probably no guide here. Neither Iraq nor Syria attempted to strike back.

But if nothing is done, the West will face the prospect of a nuclear capable and an even more intractable Iran, supporting terrorism in the region and beyond, as well as providing a fresh impetus to nuclear proliferation. For the United States and Israel the problem is more acute. Both have said that a nuclear Iran is ‘unacceptable’ and the threat in each case is clear. During a recent visit to Moscow the Israeli President, Shimon Perez put the matter very starkly, ‘a nuclear bomb in the hands of Iran … is a flying death camp’.

These things said, there may be reasons to wait a year or so before taking actions of the sort envisaged above. Popular response in Iran following the recent, crudely-rigged, Presidential election suggests that liberal forces may be on the move. A large proportion of the population are young (under 30) and sophisticated and disinclined to continue with the present repressive regime. There are also apparent splits in the brotherhood of the Grand Ayatollahs that dominate the Council of Guardians. How this struggle will play out we cannot know but it may be worth allowing the possibility for a regime to emerge that sees value for Iran in cooperating with the rest of the world.

On the other hand, the West should not wait too long. It may that we face a  1938-style ‘Munich moment’ and that a failure to act decisively in response to the growing threat will be greatly regretted in the years that follow.

Iran and Nuclear Weapons: The Problem
6 September 2009

The Iranian nuclear programme has been a source of continuing concern to the international community, and it ought to be of serious concern to us here in New Zealand. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, it is clear that what Iran is doing, at more than twenty sites throughout that country, represents a clear danger to the security of the Middle East and the wider world, and, incidentally, to any prospect of holding the line on nuclear proliferation. It is, in fact, engaged in a comprehensive programme to obtain nuclear weapons and very little of this activity has any other plausible explanation.

The only exception to this generalisation is the Russian-built light-water reactor at Bushehr, on the Persian-Gulf coast. In so far as it represents, on Iran’s part, a genuine desire for civilian nuclear power, it is unobjectionable and of minimal proliferation significance. If it is run in the way originally envisaged, on the basis that Russia supplies fresh fuel, takes away spent fuel and holds or reprocesses it, it should not be seen as a threat. Even for an oil-rich country, it makes sense to replace oil-burning power generation by nuclear generation. It is kinder to the environment and it conserves a valuable but diminishing resource.

The problem is all the other things that Iran is doing. At various sites around the country it is operating ore purification and uranium enrichment facilities and building up the capability to produce weapons-grade plutonium in a dedicated reactor. In connection with the latter, the Iranian authorities are also constructing a reprocessing plant, through which it would be able to extract plutonium and make it available for weapons fabrication. According to exile groups, Iran also has at least one weapons research facility, concealed underground, on the edge of the Caspian Sea.

Some of these technologies are ‘dual-use’: that is to say they also have a legitimate use in the civilian nuclear fuel cycle. This applies particularly to uranium enrichment (with its thousands of spinning centrifuges), which is the basis of fuel fabrication for the most common type of civilian reactor. It also applies to reprocessing, which, in many places in the world, is used to extract further energy from civilian spent fuel. It should be noted here that the plutonium content of civilian spent fuel from the common kind of commercial ‘light water’ reactor is very different from that produced in a dedicated military production reactor. In the latter case, the plutonium in the spent fuel will typically contain more than 90% of the fissile isotope, plutonium-239, making it ‘weapons-grade’. By contrast civilian spent fuel will usually contain 60% or less of plutonium-239, making it practically unsuitable for weapon fabrication.

Enrichment and reprocessing make no economic sense in relation to Iran’s embryonic civilian nuclear power programme. As noted, Russia has undertaken to supply fresh fuel (in fact, the first lot has already been delivered) and any need for reprocessing is decades down the track (in any case Russia has promised to do this, too). In both cases, there are alternative suppliers of both services and in all cases the cost would be a fraction of what it would cost Iran to do it itself. It is as if your neighbour announced that he was expecting delivery of a new car and, in anticipation of that event, was already building a fully staffed workshop to service it. One could only think that there must be another reason for such pointless expense. To continue the analogy, it is not as if the neighbour was already the operator of a fleet of vehicles that would provide immediate work for the proposed facility. Iran has just one, relatively small reactor

In the case of Iranian nuclear activity, it is obvious what that other reason is. Iran is engaged in a covert nuclear weapons programme. The only question is, when is it likely to have sufficient fissile material (presumably, highly enriched uranium) to make a bomb, or bombs? Estimates vary on this, in part because there is some doubt that the IAEA and the various intelligence agencies are fully aware of what Iran is doing. Earlier this year, US intelligence reports suggested that this situation might be reached by 2013 but other sources talk of earlier dates.

The reason why this is of general concern stems from what recently re-elected Iranian President Ahmadinejad has being saying about relations with his neighbours (especially Israel) and about relations with the ‘West’ generally. Apart from repeated observations about ‘wiping Israel off the map’, Ahmadinejad has also spoken (in 2007) specifically about how he might use nuclear technology:

“Iran will place its nuclear technology at the service of those determined to confront the US and other Western countries.”

One interpretation of this cryptic comment is that Iran would supply fissile material to terrorists, who might construct a crude nuclear bomb, which they might attempt to smuggle into the US (or, elsewhere) inside a shipping container, as in the Tom Clancy novel. Generally, this is a scenario that has exercised many minds since 9/11 with always the question, where would the terrorists get the nuclear material? Even if the Iranian leadership is taken to be merely bluffing here, a nuclear capable Iran would raise the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and must surely make Iran even more intractable in the matter of its support for terrorism. This is why various parties have declared the prospect of a nuclear capable Iran as quite unacceptable. The crucial question is what will they do about it?

[In my next column, I attempt to answer this question.]

The Role of Military Force
23 August 2009

The Prime Minister’s apparent comment that he was reluctant to send SAS forces back to Afghanistan because he was worried that one of them might be killed, reveals (if true) an astonishing naiveté about military operations in general and SAS operations in particular. To deploy Special Forces to an active combat zone is inevitably to risk that they will be killed and, equally, that they will kill others. To be sure, SAS forces may have other roles, such as intelligence gathering, but their primary training is for combat operations and combat entails killing people (and, of course, the concomitant risk of being killed, themselves).

The implicit judgement behind such deployments is that the loss of life that eventuates will be balanced by the good ends to be achieved by the use of military force. In this case, there are specific ‘good ends’, in terms of improving security for the Afghan people and supporting the upcoming national elections as well as general ‘good ends’, in terms of the international campaign against terrorism. We also need to recognise that amongst those killed in this sort of counter-terrorist operation will be those who are apparently not combatants. Some of these cases will be accidental to the degree that they will be excusable under international law (though, nonetheless regrettable). Others, again, will seem more careless, or even deliberate, and may need investigation and appropriate action. Neither of these possibilities should mean that we do not act at all.

We also need to note that the adversary in this, and many other contemporary cases, does not share our view of humanitarian law. To al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Geneva Conventions are merely another weapon in the war, so that the contrivance of atrocity is of considerable strategic importance. This factor complicates very considerably the making of moral/legal judgements in relation to particular cases.

To will the ends without recognising the essential nature of the means is to misunderstand the whole project and to risk failing overall. To say ‘no body bags’ is to say that there are no values to be preserved that are worth the loss of a single soldier’s life.

It is precisely what the Dutch Government said to its soldiers outside the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995. As a consequence, the Dutch forces fell back and allowed the Bosnian Serb army to occupy the town and subsequently murder some 8,000 Muslim men and boys. Of course, in this case, the Dutch soldiers and, especially, the inhabitants of Srebrenica, were let down by the United Nations, who had designated the town a ‘safe haven’ and then (not for the first time) failed to follow through.

Some people want to contrast, unfavourably, the value of the SAS contribution to Afghanistan with that of the Provincial Reconstruction Team. This is based on a fundamental misconception about the nature of security. There is no ultimate value in building social infrastructure (schools, housing or whatever) unless security can be maintained. The latter is a precondition for the former and it is what only properly equipped and supported military forces can provide.

It also needs to be noted that the New Zealand Provisional Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan (notwithstanding that it is made up of military persons) can only operate because of the constant security provided by other parties in theatre. In fact, it would be in the highest degree irresponsible to put a contingent such as the PRT in place, if this were not so: if there were not, also in the same theatre, available forces with modern ground and air assets. In a sense, the SAS contingent is our contribution to this general security force.

There has also been a suggestion that the SAS ought not to be deployed to Afghanistan because, on an earlier occasion (or occasions), prisoners were handed over to American forces and were subsequently, allegedly, ‘ill-treated’. Of course, we ought to be concerned about how prisoners taken by the NATO force are treated but concerns on this point would not be a reason for not participating, if we have a bigger interest in the successful prosecution of the war on international terrorism. In the matter of security, states cooperate with whom they may, just as Britain, US (and New Zealand) cooperated with the Soviet Union after 1941 against, as they perceived it, the greater evil of Nazism and notwithstanding their knowledge of what Stalin had done to his own people in the years before. As far as the ill-treatment of prisoners in the contemporary world is concerned, we would have precious few allies if we restricted ourselves to those against whom no accusations had ever been laid.

New Zealand’s contribution to the ongoing effort in Afghanistan is worth maintaining. We have an interest in global counter-terrorism and we also have an interest in defence cooperation with the NATO partners. Maybe we even have an interest in helping the people of Afghanistan to resist intolerance and oppression and establish a freer and more open society.

Mending Defence

The New Zealand Government is engaging in a formal defence review for the first time in more than ten years. It is an opportunity to put right the consequences of a long period of neglect and mismanagement and to give our armed forces the appropriate equipment and training to enable them to respond to the contingencies they are likely to confront in the years ahead, as effectively and as safely as possible. Will it be taken? That remains to be seen.

New Zealand has an entirely regrettable history of sending to zones of conflict forces that are undertrained and ill-equipped, with (as a consequence) a greater likelihood of loss of life and failure to achieve their mission. This was done in World War I, and, again, in World War II, when the New Zealand expeditionary force, which was almost entirely made up of recent recruits, did not meet up with its major equipment until it arrived in theatre. In the case of the Korean War, New Zealand forces arrived without essential cold weather supplies, and spent the early part of their time there, scrounging (to use the kind word) from other UN contingents. With variations, the pattern continued through Vietnam. Then, in the early 1990s, New Zealand sent an infantry contingent to a conflict zone (Yugoslavia) where there were belligerent parties who had heavy weapons and armour and in some cases air strike capability but where the New Zealand forces were without anti-armour or anti-aircraft weapons, themselves. In this case, our own armoured protection consisted of a few antiquated tracked Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), for which additional protection was borrowed from Israel on the way there and returned on the way home. Fortunately, in this case the small New Zealand force could be placed within a larger British formation, which could generally make up for its deficiencies and offer it protection. Considering that the object of the UN force in the (then) disintegrating Yugoslavia was to protect the local population, this was scarcely an ideal outcome.

This long tradition of defence neglect is the product of two ideologies or mindsets that have seemed to dominate political leadership in New Zealand, as far as defence is concerned. These are naïve pacifism, which springs from an emotional antipathy to violent means, which is not challenged by the recognition that such means may sometimes be the lesser of evils, and simple, short-term parsimony. In both cases there is a refusal (or inability) to consider the full range of contingencies and the capabilities that will be required, if they arise. These factors are illustrated by consideration of the run-up to New Zealand’s deployment to East Timor in 1999. In those years, defence provision continued to be run down (notwithstanding the Yugoslavia experience), with nobody in government seriously challenging this. Then, suddenly, there was a public demand that we contribute to a force to protect the East Timorese from the Indonesian-backed militias. Even those who had publically disparaged defence expenditure (‘waste of money’, ‘toys for the boys’) were now part of the chorus demanding action. Infantry that had not had the opportunity of ‘live-fire’ exercises (to save money) found themselves in situations where people were firing at them, and they did not always respond well. And, of course, we deployed with the same APCs that were inadequate in Bosnia and to a theatre where potential parties to the conflict had aeroplanes and submarines whilst we had no anti-aircraft and no anti-submarine capability. To keep up the strength of our deployment we also rotated our forces more rapidly than was desirable and made infantry-men out of cooks and reservists.

In 2009 very little has changed. To be sure, there has been some re-equipment of the army and the old APCs have been replaced by a large number of Light Armoured Vehicles, most of which are sitting gathering dust and rust in a garage somewhere (an egregious failure of the procurement process). But this has largely been at the expense of the navy and the air force. Parsimony here has produced a situation in which we no longer have any air-strike/combat capacity of our own and in which our naval capacity is bulked-out by buying civilian ships and painting them grey.

There is a crucial decision to be made in 2010. Will we continue this pattern of irresponsibility shown by both major parties and most of the small ones, or will we seriously scrutinise the defence and security contingencies we are likely to face over the next thirty years and put the appropriate amount of money in?

Of course, there is an answer to all this. We could respond by saying that, in regard to future major state conflicts, or UN collective security operations, or humanitarian protection operations (like East Timor), that we simply would not go. Following the spirit of the select committee report of nearly ten years ago (Defence Beyond 2000), we would limit ourselves to a much narrower range of missions (such as ‘provincial reconstruction’). This is (and was) a classic example of the sort of blinkered parsimony described above. The fact is that there would be circumstances in which we would feel obliged to go, just as we are presently ‘obliged’ to be in Afghanistan. And we will go, with the inevitable consequences (if we continue with present policies). Over the thirty years that the defence review anticipates, it is entirely possible that we will face security contingencies that seem less ‘voluntary’ and which seem to require a wider range of capabilities than we are presently retaining. Now is the time to think about this and to set out a plan to equip our forces for a security environment that will continue to be uncertain.

It is well understood that we are presently in the grip of a severe financial crisis but the time horizon for the 2010 review is such that it would be possible to envisage a relatively modest immediate commitment with a longer term plan to substantially improve our defence capabilities and the extent of support for the forces that will inevitably be deployed abroad sometime in the years ahead.

Isn't it getting cold!

According to data from our MetService, May was the coldest recorded in many parts of New Zealand and June has very probably gone the same way. Of course we all knew that. People have been talking about unusually cold weather for a couple of months now. Some people even know that average temperatures in New Zealand have fallen around 0.3oC over the last ten years and that satellite measurements of global temperature (which are probably the most reliable indicator of trends) have also shown a decline over about the same period. So the surprise isn’t that people are talking about the onset of cold weather. It is that there are still a lot of people talking about the supposed problem of global warming and how we need to do something about it, urgently.

Actually, we don’t know what is going to happen next. The present cooling phase may end and the general warming trend that has been evident since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early Nineteenth Century may continue, just as it did after the forty-year cooling period between 1940 and 1980. It seems equally possible that the present cold climate pattern will persist for some time. There is some theory that explains why it is happening, although it is far from simple. Unsurprisingly the theory turns on variations in energy output from the sun and its effect on the amount of radiation that falls upon the earth, which is, in turn, mediated by a number of factors, including the influence of ‘green house’ gases in the atmosphere and the reflectivity of clouds. In particular there is a historical correlation between a spot minimum, which we have at present, and a period of relative cold. Again the theoretical connection is complex (having to do with ‘solar wind’, and cosmic rays and atmospheric cloud formation) but it is sufficient to turn correlation into causation.

It is even possible that the period of cold weather that we are now beginning to notice will develop further, and quite rapidly. There are precedents for this as well. The ‘Little Ice Age’ that followed the Medieval Warm Period, some seven hundred years ago, had a rapid onset, and within it, some periods of really intense cold. One of these was wonderfully captured on canvass, for all to see, by the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Whether or not the onset is rapid, there are a number of strong reasons for taking the possibility of a coming cold period very seriously and the foremost of these is that if it does happen it will present humanity, generally and us in New Zealand in particular, with far greater problems than would a steady warming from this point. Again, there is no shortage of examples. A warm period at the time of the Roman Empire and another warm period around the beginning of the second millennium, both ended with a little ice-age that brought on great hardship and enormous civil disturbance. Cooler temperatures and lower precipitation rates produced misery and mass starvation.

What would be the implication for New Zealand of cooler temperatures and (possibly) a lower rainfall? Probably we would not starve. But what would be the effect on our agricultural export trade? Demand might be higher and tariff barriers (perhaps) lower but we would probably be able to produce much less, notwithstanding increasing levels of carbon dioxide (from industrial activity) that would favour plant growth. The key question is, how would we cope with this situation if it arose? Given that the evidence for natural global cooling is rather better than it is for human-induced warming , perhaps we ought to give this matter some study.

Again, how would we keep warm? One very obvious feature of the recent cold spell (at least here in the Waikato) was the number of very frosty, still, anticyclonic days. It is clear that in these conditions we would not get much from wind-power, however many turbines we had. Again, if the cold came with generally reduced precipitation (which it certainly hasn’t this year) we might have less water in our lakes. Perhaps, we should consider the part that nuclear generation might play. It could provide base-load power, with minimal difficulties of fuel supply and free-up some water for irrigation to compensate for lower rainfall (if it eventuated) and for backup hydroelectric power for such wind generation as we have.

Of course, if the present cold does persist for many more years, we will surely all conclude that the thesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide was causing atmospheric warming via the greenhouse effect was grievously mistaken. To many, this is already evident in the fact that carbon dioxide levels are rising, whilst temperatures fall. In this event our fossil fuel phobias must also disappear and we could then look in a different way at New Zealand’s enormous reserves of coal. We could also look at that resource more imaginatively. With natural gas running out (unless new reserves are discovered) we might re-instate the old ‘gas-works’. The technology for coal-gasification has moved on enormously from the days when every town had a gas works but coal remains a potential source of solid fuel (coke), gas (coal-gas) and organic chemicals, with broadly the same manufacturing potential as petrochemical feedstock from oil. At the very least, we could look at the part that modern coal-burning technology (like that at Huntly) could play in the economic and reliable supply of power to our society

These latter observations are very brief and speculative. Perhaps we could free-up some of those many New Zealand scientists who are presently labouring to sustain the thesis of anthropogenic global warming (carbon dioxide induced climate change) to work on the possibility of a period of actual global cooling and, particularly, on the social and economic implications of such a period for New Zealand and our national well-being. Certainly our present lemming-like course towards an international agreement on halting global warming seems quite absurd whilst a period of actual cooling remains a possibility (if not a probability)and whilst the one certainty in all this is that the mitigation measures proposed will be enormously damaging to New Zealand and its people.