Pretty much everyone hates Congress these days. Congress’s approval ratings have been below freezing for years. And as Palin’s speech demonstrates, Americans hate Congress in large part because they see it as beholden to lobbyists and special interests.

Indeed, lobbying is a major Washington industry. According to the Center for Responsible Politics, over 13,000 registered lobbyists spent $3.5 billion last year. They represented every type of organization you can think of, from General Electric, to the Girl Scouts, to Galena, Alaska, pop. 470—many local governments hire “hometown helpers” to help them secure federal dollars. And if history is any guide, the continuing budget debate will see these lobbyists vying hard to make sure their clients’ interests are protected from the effects of impending cuts.

Lobbying Hard

In the heat of the perennially popular pastime of lobbyist-bashing, it is easy to forget that lobbying is essentially an exercise of the First Amendment right to petition the government. At best, lobbying and advocacy is just another way for people to come to the government and seek redress. Lobbyists are highly knowledgeable advocates for different groups of Americans, and so provide invaluable information to lawmakers and government regulators by educating them on the industries and the individuals they will affect.

From the largest corporation to the smallest municipal government, everyone wants an opportunity to “seek redress” in various ways—often, to get a slice of that delicious pork. Michael Beckel of the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) told ARUSA that, “Historically, one of the areas that lobbyists very much have thrived in is securing federal money for their clients. Earmark lobbyists have been a thriving part of the lobbying community for decades.”

Craig Holman of Public Citizen is even harsher in his portrayal of lobbyist control over federal expenditures. Maintaining good relationships with powerful lobbyists, says Holman, becomes indispensible for career politicians. “To say no to a K Street lobbyist risks a $200,000 to $400,000 campaign expenditure against you in the upcoming election,” he says. This makes lobbyists, especially those representing the deep-pocketed Wall Street and the healthcare industries, “kingmakers” on Capitol Hill. Those industries, Holman believes, “dominate the appropriations and the budget debates.”

Those concerned about money in politics have become more alarmed since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This 2010 Supreme Court decision held that political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, thus striking down a provision of the McCain–Feingold Act that prohibited corporations and unions from broadcasting “electioneering communications.” As a result, corporations and unions, while still banned from contributing directly to campaigns, may spend unlimited sums of money to run ads supporting or denouncing candidates. Citizens United “opened the floodgates,” Holman says. He calculated a 427% increase in corporate spending in the 2010 elections.

The stage is set for scores of lobbyists to play a crucial role in the budget debates to come. Anytime big federal money is at stake, you can count on lobbying efforts to intensify.

For example, during the rise in defense spending that occurred in the decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, defense industry lobbying has nearly tripled. In 1998, calculates the CRP, the defense industry spent about $55 million on lobbying activities. In 2008, it spent $152 million.

And during the debate about the Recovery Act of 2009, jockeying for stimulus money became “the biggest game in town,” Michael Beckel at the CRP explains: “Nearly 20% of all clients—all companies, organizations, labor unions, lobbying firms—anyone that was paying anyone to lobby, was actively lobbying on the stimulus. That’s an astronomical number.”

Now there is even more federal money up for grabs. The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (or “Super Committee”), a bi-partisan 12-member panel, has been charged with finding an additional $1.5 trillion in debt savings over the next decade. It should be of no surprise when the Super Comittee becomes, in the words of the CRP, “the target of a lobbying bonanza, as special interest groups work to keep their pet projects off the chopping block.”

As the battle for the budget begins, CRP’s online tool will allow you to search lobbying activities by industry and by politician. Note who is financing the re-election campaigns of committee members, and how that lines up with votes.  Almost no politician will go unsolicited.

“These industries really are controlling the budget process in Congress,” says Holman. “Something fundamental has to change on Capitol Hill.”

Design by Melissa Wong

The bill proposed to slash the $159 billion of “supplementary spending” in the defense budget that pays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mandating that the Pentagon instead pay for the wars out of its $549 billion base budget. Grayson’s bill did not call for ending the war(s) per se, but sought to draw attention to their enormous price tag by calling for a cut identical in size to their annual costs.

But the title of Grayson’s bill, if not the substance, was misleading. The cost of fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—while undoubtedly enormous—is only a fraction of a defense budget that sustains America’s ambitious goals of global security. If the war is making you poor, it is doing so as merely a fraction of total defense spending.

Since Grayson introduced his bill, calls for cutting defense have grown louder on both sides of the aisle, continued GOP discomfort with defense cuts notwithstanding. Something of a consensus is emerging that the Pentagon will have to share in the nation’s collective belt-tightening—President Obama has asked the Pentagon to come up with $400 billion in savings in the next decade. What this will look like is far from clear. As budget hawks look for savings in the Pentagon’s budget, they cannot count on merely reaping a “peace dividend” from the drawdown of the wars. Nor will trimming waste here and there lead to meaningful cuts. Sorely missing, and urgently needed, is meaningful debate about the risks and rewards of reducing our global footprint.

The Constitution charges the federal government with providing for the common defense. Since World War II, Democrat and Republican-controlled governments alike have interpreted this task to require not merely deterring attack on the homeland, but projecting power in every corner of the globe from a worldwide network of bases and fleets. This is an expensive undertaking, one for which the United States budgeted approximately half of all discretionary spending.

A lot, but not all, of this enormous spending is due to the wars. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) estimates that half of the growth in defense spending over the last ten years came not from war spending, but from the Pentagon’s base budget—or “peacetime” spending that would occur irrespective of the wars. In Fiscal Year 2011, the Obama Administration requested $159 billion in war spending, and $549 billion for the base budget—even greater than the previous peak of $517 billion under Reagan. Todd Harrison of the CSBA calculates that if we add defense-related spending in other departments—$19 billion of atomic weaponry spending in the Department of Energy, $122 billion for veterans, and $8 billion in other agencies including foreign military aid distributed through the State Department, the total defense budget for FY 2011 was $861 billion. The $159 billion in war spending Rep. Grayson was talking about cutting, then, makes up less than a fifth of total defense spending.

Where the Money Goes

Defense spending is a fuzzy notion for most voters. When Americans debate domestic spending, we can talk about health insurance and Social Security, programs that many Americans use in our day-to-day lives. But when we hear pundits and politicians debate defense, we hear more hazy terms like “vital interests” and “global posture.” The mission of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean is much more abstract and removed from the everyday experience of Americans than the purpose of a Social Security check. That less than 10% of Americans have military experience, and less than 1% have a family member currently serving on active duty, does not help.

Defense spending reaches far beyond conventional wars and the defense of the U.S. from bombing, invasion, or blockade. Right now, an attack on the U.S. by another nation is inconceivable, despite what the popular Modern Warfare video game series would have you believe. Terrorism is the biggest threat to the American homeland. In the literal sense of “defense,” then, defense spending might actually be the budget of the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, and the like.

The Department of Defense, however, has long operated under a much broader notion of what the defense of the U.S. requires. Dr. Sam Perlo-Freedman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told ARUSA, “The US perceives its security in far more expansive terms than deterring an attack on its homeland or on its allies. The US sees its security as requiring it to be able, potentially, to intervene virtually anywhere in the world, to make events happen in the way that the US wants them to happen.” He continued, “That’s a level of ambition that’s not shared by any other country in the world.”

Such global military ambitions require vast manpower. The US fields an all-volunteer professional military without peer: approximately 1.4 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines equipped with the world’s best weapons. The simplest way to break down the complex tangle of expenditures needed to maintain such a force, explains Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, is the Pentagon’s own division of accounts. The Department of Defense’s four different major accounts are Personnel; Operations and Maintenance; Procurement; and Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation (RDT&E, often simply R&D).

In our all-volunteer military, personnel makes up a large share of the budget: paying the salaries, health benefits, retirement accrual pay, and housing allowances for service members. These personnel expenses make up about $125 billion of the FY2011 base budget of $550 billion, O’Hanlon explained. The Operations and Maintenance budget is close to $200 billion a year. Idiosyncratically, though, half of the O&M budget is more akin to Personnel—it pays the seven hundred thousand full-time civilian employees of the Department of Defense, as well as the contractors who render their services, security and otherwise, in theaters of war.

All those people need equipment. The other half of Operations and Maintenance money goes to maintaining equipment: spare parts, fuel, repairs. Procurement goes towards buying, and R&D towards inventing and testing, new weapons for the “arsenal of democracy:” from firearms, bullets, and radios, to aircraft carriers, jets, and satellite weapons.

Two points become apparent from a closer look at the Pentagon’s budget. First, the US spends an enormous amount on defense even apart from the wars we are currently fighting. Second, despite the unarguably high amount of waste associated with many Pentagon programs, there is no line item in the defense budget that reads, “WASTE – cut here for deficit reduction.” Cutting defense means more than winding down the wars and cutting waste. It will involve hard choices about how and where to reduce our military capabilities—choices that are consistently obscured by all sides of the budget fights.

Several statistics are frequently abused in budget debates. Hawks like to argue against cutting defense spending by pointing out that it is a mere 4% of the GDP, well below the post-WWII average of 6.4%. While true, this fact is a red herring. No other part of the federal budget is determined or defended simply by its share of GDP—ideally, spending is evaluated according to need. On the other hand, doves point out that spending is at higher levels than during the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or the Reagan arms buildup. This is also true—and irrelevant to the budget debate for the same reason: it does not peg defense to a reasonable assessment of what the U.S. needs to defend itself from attack today.

Another fact: the U.S. and our allies account for 70% of the world’s military spending. Our strategic advantage is even greater when compared to our rivals’ capabilities. The following statements and figures, offered by then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2010, remain the most striking examples of our dominance:

• The US operates 11 large [aircraft] carriers, all nuclear powered. In terms of size and striking power, no other country has even one comparable ship.
• The US Navy has 10 large-deck amphibious ships that can operate as sea bases for helicopters and vertical-takeoff jets. No other navy has more than three. Our Navy can carry twice as many aircraft at sea as all the rest of the world combined.
• The US has 57 nuclear-powered attack and cruise missile submarines—again, more than the rest of the world combined.
• In terms of total missile firepower, the US arguably outmatches the next 20 largest navies.
• All told, the displacement of the US battle fleet—a proxy for overall fleet capabilities—exceeds, by one recent estimate, at least the next 13 navies combined, of which 11 are our allies or partners.
• And, at 202,000 strong, the Marine Corps is the largest military force of its kind in the world and exceeds the size of most world armies.

The U.S.’s current overmatch of any potential rivals should decisively discredit warnings of a “hollow force.” But those who favor a more robust defense budget point out that our spending relative to other countries does not guarantee that we can meet our goals.  Max Boot wrote this January in the Weekly Standard, “U.S. defense spending remains far higher than China’s and our defense capabilities remain far greater than China’s or anyone else’s. But our commitments are also much greater. We have to worry about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, Yemen, Somalia, al Qaeda, and myriad other current or potential threats, whereas China can devote all of its might to the western Pacific.”

Boot’s line of reasoning demonstrates that the US can justify theoretically limitless defense spending if it assumes that its security requires the ability to intervene anywhere in the world. Any real debate about defense will require the tough choices about where, and how, we should scale back these capabilities.

As the budget fights continue, any real debate about defense must extend beyond the wars and waste. It must soberly assess what goals the U.S. should pursue in the world and how much is needed to meet such goals. Such clear-eyed debate is hard, thought not impossible, to come by—and ever more important as budget woes and global instability usher in the second decade after 9/11.

Design by Melissa Wong

I’m only quasi-weighing in on this discussion, since I’ll be addressing the above segment of Kalmus’ post rather than the main thrust of the discussion. The question is, should environmentalists stick to facts of climate science in making their case?

I say no—in addition to the “race with China” theme, there is great merit to looking at climate change as a national security issue more broadly. Invoking “national security” is likely to stir listeners in a way that climate science just can’t.

Currently, there are two main themes in shift to considering environmental action a national security priority. One is that as global warming continues, it will lead to growing resource wars, massive displacement of refugees, and an exacerbation of extremism-breeding poverty. This view received a huge amount of media attention following the release a 2005 study from the Center for Naval Analyses, and if you browse around the main national security and general policy think tanks (a common activity for HPR writers), you can find reports from most all of them considering the strategic and security implications of climate change. It’s a sexy topic.

More immediately, talking heads decry our dependence on foreign oil as an immediate threat to our security, a trend that originated in the 1973 oil crisis, and received new urgency in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It’s now a well-worn talking point from right and left alike:

McCain on the campaign trail: Clean energy is “a national security issue when we’re dependent on more than $400 billion a year in imported oil from countries that don’t like us very much … some of that money is helping terrorist organizations.”

Al Gore on the NYT op-ed page: Even if man-made global warming were not actually occurring,

We would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil.

Barack Obama in the BP speech: (he also uses the “China race” theme)

Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil….I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

And so on. My purpose here is not to re-make the case for clean energy—enough ink has been spilled on that already. But in considering why making the case from a national security perspective can appeal to more voters, consider Dan Gilbert’s fantastic speech at Harvard Thinks Big. Because of the way our brains evolved, argues Gilbert, humans respond much more quickly and ferociously to threats that are intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous, than those are not. In a memorable line, he declares that “If climate change were some kind of nefarious plot by bad, bad men with worse mustaches, right now we would be fighting a war on warming.”

That’s why it may help to rally people around clean energy by showing them pictures of Ahmadinejad instead of charts of atmospheric temperatures.

Bonus quote:

My favorite example of “foreign oil” outrage: Bob Dylan in “Slow Train,” the title song from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming—his first album after his born-again conversion to Christianity. His not-so-politically-correct rhymes reflect a nationalist indignation you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere in his work:

All that foreign oil controlling American soil
Look around you, it’s just bound to make you embarrassed
Sheiks walking around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings
Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and to Paris
And there’s slow, slow train coming up around the bend.

Slow train indeed.

Protest of ROTC's policies toward homosexuals (at UW-Madison, 1990)

At Harvard’s Reserve Officer Training Corps commissioning ceremony this Wednesday, Drew Faust urged Harvard’s class of 2010 future officers to:

Help reinforce the long tradition of ties between Harvard and the military, as we share hopes that changing circumstances will soon enable us to further strengthen those bonds.

What does the vague latter half of her sentence mean? By
“changing circumstances,” she presumably means the possible repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. By further strengthening bonds, she presumably means reinstating ROTC on campus, ending a forty-year-old ban that has been in place since Harvard severed its ties with the program in 1969, in the wake of student and faculty protests against the Vietnam War.

Should we take Faust at her (admittedly circumspect) words?

Former military correspondent Tom Ricks told the HPR in an interview that if Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed, he will be surprised if Harvard does not recognize ROTC within five years (note: you can read the interview on our website, but the remarks to which I refer do not appear in the magazine. I will work on linking a full transcript).

In contrast, Brian Bolduc ’10 wrote in the Harvard Crimson earlier this year that such confidence underestimates the University’s deep-seated hostility towards the military.

Even if Congress repeals “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” ROTC will struggle to gain recognition.

Why the skepticism? Because excuses for the University’s policy have multiplied over time. Before 1993, students used ROTC’s exclusion of disabled people, President Ronald Reagan’s budgetary cuts to civilian aid, and the military’s discouragement of “openness and critical inquiry” as grounds to repel ROTC. The Harvard Crimson argued that the program would sully the University’s academic integrity. In 1989, the editorial board insisted, “ROTC should not return ever, under any circumstances.” Should Congress abolish DADT, more excuses will crop up. (emphasis mine)

Which imminent pundit is right, Ricks or Bolduc? Can we take Faust’s intimations seriously, or should we feel Bolduc’s mistrust?

It seems to me that Bolduc’s skepticism is understandable but overblown. The climate is favorable for ROTC’s reinstatement (assuming DADT gets repealed, which is far from inevitable). For conservatives, it might be satisfying to envision a faculty filled with troops-haters, but this is not the 60s. Faust has shown unprecedented support for ROTC—just read the full text of her speech from this Wednesday. The atmosphere at Harvard is mildly pro-military. Bolduc’s skepticism is understandable, but I wonder what “more excuses” could plausibly “crop up.” Since Harvard has centered all of its official criticism of ROTC around DADT, the University should find it difficult, if not impossible, to continue the ban on other grounds if the law is repealed.

Tom Ricks is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Fiasco, a New York Times best seller. His most recent book, The Gamble, explores the effect of the 2007 troop surge on the war in Iraq.

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW: How did your views of the U.S. military change between the time you were writing Fiasco and The Gamble?

THOMAS RICKS: Fiasco, which is a very angry book, an indictment, was driven by my admiration for the military. How could this institution, that I really had come to know pretty well, have screwed up so badly? These were smart, dedicated, hard-working people I knew in the military. How could this have happened? And that’s what stunned me. I mean it really was a mess in the first years in Iraq. So why was the institution so slow to respond? And that’s the question I sort of puzzled through.

The Gamble is actually a story of reclamation, wherein a minority of the military sees a new course and pursues it over the objections of the majority. People forget that the vast majority of the U.S. military leadership vigorously opposed the surge. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the head of the Army, the top American officer in Iraq, and the head of Central Command were all against it. So The Gamble is very much a story of a minority view being promulgated and going around the chain of command and the White House jumping on it. I’m not a Bush fan, but I do think that Bush’s approval of the surge and the speech he gave about it was his finest moment.

HPR: You wrote in The Gamble that the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered have not yet occurred. What will be remembered from 2010?

TR: 2009 was kind of a year of drift. I call it the unraveling in the afterword of The Gamble. But it’s a slow unraveling. The mistake I made was thinking it was a fast unraveling—especially last spring, spring ’09, when you started seeing former Sons of Iraq and awakening groups fighting the Iraqi army in the streets of Baghdad.

But now I think the big events will be in 2010. We’ll have the election, and the formation of government after the election is the crucial period. And American troops will also be leaving during this same period, so that will be important. If you don’t have a government formed by June and you’re withdrawing 10,000 troops a month, you’re going to start taking troops out of areas that are quite unstable. How Iraqi forces then perform without American support and American oversight will be crucial.

HPR: What is your opinion of the course President Obama took late last year in Afghanistan?

TR: I’m an Obama fan, but I thought the process by which he handled Afghanistan was very worrisome. There was a lot of dithering. If the characteristic flaw of George Bush was macho-bullshit, the characteristic flaw of Obama is professorial dithering—thinking that if we just go around and around one more time we’ll come up with a better answer. Time is important, and that took a lot, a lot of time. Also, it’s still not clear to me quite what they intend to do about the biggest single problem in Afghanistan, which is the Karzai government. The Taliban is a tactical problem, but the Karzai government is the strategic problem. The Taliban we can handle militarily. The Karzai government, through its abuses and corruption, is driving Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. And until they figure out what they are going to do about it, you are not solving the basic problem.

HPR: President Obama announced in his State of the Union that he intends to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” What do you think the effects of a repeal would be?

TR: My guess is there will be some initial turmoil, and ten years from now people will wonder what the fuss was about. We have allies that have openly gay soldiers. The question is not whether you are going to have gay people in the military. You have thousands of gay people in the military. The question is, will they be punished for their sexual orientation? And there will be some initial problems. You’re dealing with 18-year-old psyches, in vulnerable states in boot camp and stuff. But I think the military will handle it with surprising ease. It’s a question whose time has come and gone. It should have been dealt with ten years ago.

Robert Long ’11 is the Books & Arts Editor.

How a failing Yemen threatens international security

One year before the 9/11 attacks, suicide bombers struck the USS Cole while it was anchored off the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors. In response, the United States and Yemen coordinated a fierce counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaida. By 2004, their combined efforts had virtually eradicated al-Qaida within the country.

Today, Yemen teeters on the brink of collapse: the army is battling an insurgency in the north, a southern secessionist movement is gaining momentum, and the economic downturn has exacerbated high levels of unemployment. Al-Qaida has reestablished itself with bomb attacks and assassinations that have targeted Yemeni officials, the Saudi government, and the American embassy in the capital city of Sana’a. As al-Qaida exploits Yemen’s growing lawlessness, it threatens oil-producing Saudi Arabia, vital Red Sea shipping routes, and security around the world.

Fighting in the North, Unrest in the South

The government in Sana’a faces a host of challenges to its authority, which has always been tenuous in a land of rugged terrain and tribal loyalties. The Shiite al-Houthi rebellion, which has raged intermittently since 2004, intensified in August of 2009 when the government launched an all-out offensive to crush the rebels in the northwest Saada province. President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced in October that the military was on its way to victory, but his rhetoric was not accompanied by progress on the ground.

Christopher Boucek, a Yemen specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the HPR that Saleh’s prediction was unrealistic given the backlash caused by the military crackdown. “There is not a military solution to this conflict,” said Boucek, arguing that the government’s indiscriminate tactics are exacerbating a humanitarian crisis.

In the south, meanwhile, a secessionist movement that began in the 1990s is moving toward open rebellion. Since the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990, southerners have resented what they perceive as northern economic and political dominance. Anti-government protests are increasingly violent, and the defection of several prominent government leaders to the movement underscores its growing strength.

Sarah Phillips, a Yemen specialist at the University of Sydney’s Center for International Security Studies, told the HPR that secession is the greatest threat to the Yemeni state. “It’s a widespread popular resistance movement,” she explained. The movement has also disrupted oil production, Phillips noted, as most natural resources are concentrated in the South.

Running Dry

Falling world oil prices and disruptions in oil production have taken a toll on Yemen, which depends on oil for 90 percent of its exports and 70 percent of government revenues. Oil revenues dropped from $2.6 billion to $665 million in the past year and exportable oil is projected to run out by 2015. Phillips told the HPR that the drop in oil production is “the factor that really ties all of the crises together,” noting that the way the government has traditionally dealt with dissent is “by incorporating the leaders driving that dissent into its patronage networks.” As the oil dries up, so does the government’s ability to buy good will.

Yemen is also quickly running out of water. Some wells are falling by as much as 60 feet a year, and Sana’a could become the first world capital to go dry. Poverty drives more and more farmers to cultivate qat, a water-intensive plant that many Yemenis chew for its mild narcotic effects. The major national conflicts make it difficult to curb water shortages, which have in turn sparked many local conflicts.

Al-Qaida Back in Town

These great threats mean that the Yemeni government is largely unable or unwilling to focus on combating al-Qaida. “There are much more immediate priorities for the government than fighting al-Qaida-style terrorism,” Boucek explained. In the past, the Yemeni government has been a key ally in the fight against al-Qaida. Gregory Johnsen, a terrorism analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, noted that the joint campaign against al-Qaida in the wake of the Cole and 9/11 attacks was so effective that “by end of November 2003, the organization as such had really ceased to exist throughout Yemen.”

But al-Qaida has returned as a potent threat in recent years, precisely because of these myriad internal crises that demand government attention. A turning point in al-Qaida’s resurgence came in January 2006, when 13 al-Qaida inmates escaped from a maximum-security prison in Sana’a. Among the escapees was Nasir al-Wahayshi, a former secretary of Osama bin Laden who fought by his side in Afghanistan. Together with Qasim al-Raym, bin Laden’s right-hand man, al-Wahayshi has reassembled al-Qaida in Yemen as an ambitious fighting force. In September 2008, a coordinated assault on the U.S. embassy in Sana’a left 10 dead. In March, suicide bombers killed four Korean tourists and targeted a convoy of South Korean agents investigating the attack.

The group has also expanded its focus to the broader region. In January 2008, al-Qaida in Yemen announced on its website that the Yemeni and Saudi branches of al-Qaida were merging to form “al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula,” or AQAP. Johnsen explained that AQAP may intend to use Yemen as “a launching pad for attacks throughout the region.” Al-Qaida has targeted the Saudi government and threatened to disrupt crucial oil infrastructure. In April, Saudi agents arrested 11 al-Qaida fighters crossing into Saudi Arabia. Four months later, a suicide bomber nearly killed the assistant interior minister.

The prospect of a new Afghanistan, a safe haven used to plot attacks against the United States and other Western countries, makes the threat to security truly global. Although al-Qaida’s leadership remains concentrated in Pakistan, an expanding al-Qaida presence represents a growing problem for Washington and Riyadh.

Softening the Blow

The West has attempted to deal with the situation by supplying aid to Yemen, but the crisis of legitimacy surrounding the government has limited the effectiveness of aid efforts. Jane Novak, a journalist who was banned from Yemen for her coverage of the al-Houthi rebellion, told the HPR that the government is so de-legitimized, corrupt, and brutal that “supporting the government perpetuates the problem.”

Yet some government may be better than no government at all – as suggested by the case study of Somalia – and foreign support may be the only way to keep the economy afloat. Boucek pointed to foreign assistance in job training programs and health care, efforts to promote conservation and curb corruption, and greater integration with the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional common market with a defense planning council, as specific, necessary remedial steps.

Eight years after the Cole attack, Yemen’s deterioration and potential collapse poses a threat to international security that is increasingly difficult to ignore. The coming year will be a critical period in which countries targeted by al-Qaida in Yemen, particularly Saudi Arabia, will be under mounting pressure to ensure the stability of the government in Sana’a before it is too late.

Image Credit: Ahron de Leeuw (Flickr)

The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright, Little, Brown, and Company, 2009. $25.99, 576 pgs.

When does God command holy war, and when is he a peacemaker? Robert Wright proposes an answer in The Evolution of God, tracing God’s propensity for intolerance and tolerance through a sweeping history of the Abrahamic faiths. Along the way, he looks for a solution to the two most hyped conflicts of the new century-the “clash of civilizations” and the clash between science and religion. As fascinating as Wright’s history is, his solution to the “clash of civilizations” will irritate plenty of believers, and his solution to the conflict between science and religion won’t satisfy many skeptics.

Evolution of an Illusion?

God, of course, does not evolve, but rather “God,” people’s conception of the divine. As Wright tells it, belief reflects human nature, for good and ill. Drawing on the principles of his best-selling world history Nonzero, Wright proposes that religions’ attitudes toward unbelievers depend on whether or not the faithful believe themselves to be interacting with worthless infidels, or potential partners in non-zero-sum games, situations in which both sides benfit. See yourself as locked in mortal combat with rivals, and your theology becomes vengeful; find yourself at peace, and your theology becomes accommodating.

Wright traces this pattern in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For instance, the infamous chapters of the Hebrew Bible that relate the Israelites’ scorched-earth conquest of Canaanite tribes reflect the views of scribes promoting the agenda of King Josiah, who sought to consolidate power by enforcing the exclusive worship of Yahweh. In more conciliatory passages, though, the Israelites respect foreign gods when they need to negotiate peace with the neighboring Ammonites. In Wright’s New Testament, Paul preaches a message of universal love, adapting Jesus’ Jewish nationalist message to the multinational audience of the Roman Empire. And the Koran’s calls for violence against infidels alternate with calls for tolerance, reflecting Mohammed’s varying stints as military leader in Medina or a powerless preacher in Mecca. Throughout, non-zero-sum situations help religion extend moral dignity to more and more people.

Clash Course

This ability of connectedness to evoke religious tolerance gives Wright hope for our globalized world. But, recognizing the very palpable threat of worldwide catastrophe, he offers us lessons from his history to help forestall crisis.

On a practical level, Wright says, Westerners should recognize that they are in a non-zero-sum relationship with moderate Muslims and seek their cooperation against Islamist radicals. This is not, as he admits, “an especially arcane piece of logic,” but conventional wisdom that has been expressed innumerable times since September 11^th.  More broadly, he maintains that a true international community requires agreement on a basic “moral compass.” More problematically, though, Wright posits that for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to coexist peacefully in a worldwide community, their faiths will need to abandon their claims to special revelation of Truth. The problem is obvious; those people likely to concede their religion’s particularity are not exactly those willing to die for the unique message and teachings of their faith. There are also innumerable believers from Turkey to Texas who cling to the special revelations of an organized religion without causing mayhem.

And when he advances a religious worldview compatible with modern science, Wright is even less compelling. He holds that the underlying theme, that extending moral consideration to more and more people promotes social harmony, and that religions have evolved to get closer to this “moral truth,” may point to an underlying purpose to the universe. At the same time, he insists that his history of religion is materialist and requires no transcendent truth or being, leaving us with nothing but a tentative, unfalsifiable deism. In the end, Wright will only go so far as to say that it is “not crazy” to believe in some sort of Higher Purpose. While Wright’s humility may be refreshing in an age of angry “New Atheists,” it’d be nice to see a bit more boldness in a work of such ambition. But even if you’re not satisfied with where Wright ends up, though, his epic history and eye for telling details makes The Evolution of God is an exhilarating journey.

A recent string of defeats for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America’s oldest, largest, and most dangerous rebel group, signals perhaps the best chance Colombia has had for peace in 44 years of armed struggle. During much of the 1990s, a drug-fueled civil war between left-wing rebels, right-wing paramilitaries, and government troops claimed an average of 35,000 lives each year. But the last seven years have brought remarkable security gains, with a new government offensive that has left the FARC weaker than it has been in decades. As heartening as this turnaround has been for many Colombians, however, it will likely be short-lived unless military gains are complemented by major political and social efforts to improve the rule of law and standard of living in Colombia’s impoverished hinterlands.

Communism and Cocaine

Formed in the mid-1960s as a peasant-based Communist uprising, the FARC became increasingly menacing in the 1980s as it turned to drug production and trafficking to rake in revenue. With the cocaine epidemic in the United States and the decline of the Soviet Union, ideological purity soon took a back seat to turning a profit for much of the organization. “Ideology is a relatively minor element in the Colombian armed conflict today,” said Markus Schultze-Kraft, director of the International Crisis Group’s Latin America program, in an interview with the HPR. “There’s nobody in his right mind who would say that the FARC these days is a clear-cut Marxist-Leninist organization.” But the transformation has not reduced the palpable threat posed by this group. At their peak strength of approximately 20,000 in the late 1990s they controlled nearly half of Colombia, which was teetering on the brink of collapse by the turn of the century.

Learning to Fight Narco-Terrorism

President Alvaro Uribe, elected in 2002 on a platform of reining in guerilla warfare, has overseen an aggressive and largely successful new strategy to strike the FARC in their own territory. His administration quickly modernized and expanded Colombian security forces, taking advantage of substantial aid from U.S. anti-narcotics initiatives. Adam Isacson, Latin America program director at the Center for International Policy, told the HPR that the government’s innovative desertion program has also effectively undermined the FARC’s strength. “The program seems to be working relatively well in that it affords the opportunity for disaffected FARC members … to obtain job training in an effort to return to society as productive members of their community,” said Isacson. Uribe’s hard-nosed approach, combined with efforts to integrate deserters, has cut membership of the group in half.

Hard-liners in a Hard Land

The FARC remains determined to show that it is still a force to be reckoned with. The group, which is attempting to stage a comeback under its “Plan Rebirth,” has already bombed four Colombian cities this year. And analysts warn that the FARC is no paper tiger. “The FARC will not be defeated militarily in the short term,” Schultze-Kraft predicted. “[It] remains a formidable threat to security in Colombia.” But the prospects for a peace settlement are dim, in part because the FARC is hostile to the political process, and in part because Uribe may be too wedded to a policy of military success to consider negotiations seriously. “Uribe might not be the right person to negotiate,” said Isacson, “as he has stated that he would rather defeat the FARC militarily.”

Building a Lasting Peace

The greatest threat to peace lies in the problems endemic to the rural areas of the country where the FARC operates: extreme poverty, lack of state presence, and an established drug economy. “There will always be drugs, crime, contraband, and warlordism until you actually govern your territory [instead of] just sending patrols periodically,” Isacson warned. As long as demand for cocaine remains high abroad, production and trafficking will remain a dangerous but potentially lucrative route of escape from rural poverty.

A program of establishing rule of law, creating jobs, and building schools is therefore crucial to a sustainable peace. Douglas Farah, a security consultant and former investigative reporter on Colombia, told the HPR that the Colombian government would have to follow through with these efforts to prevent a resurgence. “My fear is that there won’t be the willpower to sustain [these projects],” Farah explained, “and the FARC will get the breathing room they need to survive and re-emerge as a threat. That’s my biggest worry.”

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the relative peace of Iraqi Kurdistan has been a notable, if often overlooked, exception to the violent insurgency, sectarian feuding, and pervasive lawlessness that has racked Iraq. Yet this achievement has also made the area of one of America’s most significant long-term security concerns in the region, as Kurdistan’s success as a semi-autonomous nation has increased regional agitation for the creation of a separate nation for the Kurdish people.

The Kurds, a mostly Sunni Muslim people who share a unique language and whose mountainous territory spans Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, have a long history of oppression, suffering, and fierce armed struggle in these countries. Past Syrian governments have tried to strip Kurds of their Syrian citizenship. Kurds in Iran have faced similar oppression, often regarded with suspicion and hatred as Sunni Muslims in a Shiite state. In Turkey, Kurdish separatist fighters and government efforts to eradicate Kurdish language and culture have claimed untold lives. Saddam Hussein’s genocidal war against the Kurds in Iraq, capped by the infamous 1988 gas attacks that killed thousands of civilians, ranks among the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. This tragic legacy makes the question of Kurdish independence a contentious one. Nonetheless, a sovereign Kurdistan seems extraordinarily unlikely. Since all four host nations are extremely resistant to losing territory, the Kurds would be best off publicly committing themselves to their respective countries, advocating for the protection of minority rights, and perhaps pursuing limited local autonomy.

Kurdish Turks, Iraqi Kurds

In Turkey, Kurdish political activism is already engaged; much hangs in the balance of highly contentious upcoming March elections. Recent polls show that many of Turkey’s Kurds are moving towards the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society Party (DTP). In recent years, growing numbers of Kurds had aligned themselves with the Islam-based, pro-European Union governing party, Ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In the past few months, however, Turkey’s Kurds have responded to the DTP’s pro-Kurdish rhetoric, while the AKP has foundered due to corruption. Dr. Michael Gunter, author of The Kurds Ascending, believes that the mainstream AKP offers the best chance of integrating the Kurds into the Turkish state, as eventual accession into the European Union would raise human rights standards. The DTP’s likely victory at the local polls, Gunter told the HPR, will delay reconciliation between the Kurds and the Turkish authorities.

In Iraq, the Kurds’ relationship with Baghdad is not one of integration. Iraqi Kurdistan, which enjoyed limited autonomy even under Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, became increasingly assertive and independent during the chaos of post-invasion Iraq. Fighting continues between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen for control over oil-rich Kirkuk, with the Kurds pressing for Kirkuk to be administered by a Kurdish province. Many commentators speculate that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, after successfully crushing the Shiite militias and consolidating his political power, will turn his attention to bringing Kurdistan more under Baghdad’s control. Kurdish Prime Minister Massoud Barzani has asked the Obama Administration to resolve the conflict over Kirkuk before withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Small Steps Forward

The controversy over Kirkuk is indicative of why Kurdistan is unlikely to ever become a reality. Convincing government leaders to surrender territory in a region where conflict so often revolves around land and oil is essentially impossible. “How do you get nation-states to give up their interests in favor of justice for minority groups? When it comes to giving up territory, it doesn’t work,” Laura Adams, Harvard professor of sociology, told the HPR. Even if the Kurds were able to secure sovereign land, that territory would be land-locked and in constant danger of invasion. In addition, current political instability in Iraq and Turkey makes the chances of establishing an actual Kurdistan slim at best. “Realistically, given the concerns of various countries (Turkey and Iran in particular) there is little possibility that an independent new nation state named Kurdistan will emerge in the near future,” commented Christopher Houston, author of Kurdistan, Crafting of National Selves, in an interview with the HPR. Given these realities, the best case scenario moving forward would pair increased respect for Kurdish rights from Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey with a halt to Kurdish activities that destabilize those respective regimes. In a region fraught with conflict, however, these may be audacious hopes.