Dust Bowl Revisited - Earth Policy Institute

On October 18, 2012, the Associated Press reported that “a massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate…forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions.”

Dust Storm Shrouds Phoenix

Farmers in the region had recently plowed fields to plant winter wheat. The bare soil—desiccated by the relentless drought that smothered nearly two-thirds of the continental United States during the summer and still persists over the Great Plains—was easily lifted by the passing strong winds, darkening skies from southern Nebraska, through Kansas, and into Oklahoma.

Observers could not help but harken back to the 1930s Dust Bowl that ultimately covered 100 million acres in western Kansas, the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, northeastern New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado. Yet when asked if that was the direction the region was headed, Oklahoma’s Secretary of Agriculture Jim Reese was unequivocal: “That will never happen again.”

In the early decades of the twentieth century, earnest settlers of the semi-arid Plains, along with opportunistic “suitcase farmers” out to make a quick dollar, plowed under millions of acres of native prairie grass. Assured that “rain follows the plow,” and lured by government incentives, railroad promises, and hopes of carving out a place for their families, these farmers embraced the newly available tractors, powerful plows, and mechanized harvesters to turn over the sod that had long sustained Native American tribes and millions of bison.

The plowing began during years of rain, and early harvests were good. High wheat prices, buoyed by demand and government guarantees during the First World War, encouraged ever more land to be turned over. But then the Great Depression hit. The price of wheat collapsed and fields were abandoned. When the drought arrived in the early 1930s, the soils blew, their fertility stolen by the relentless wind. Stripped of its living carpet, freed from the intricate matrix of perennial prairie grass roots, the earth took flight.

Clouds as tall as mountains and black as night rolled over the land. Regular dust storms pummeled the homesteaders; the big ones drew notice when they clouded the sun in New York City and Washington, DC, even sullying ships hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. Dunes formed and spread, burying railroad tracks, fences, and cars. “Dust pneumonia” claimed lives, often those of children. People fled the land in droves.

In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan describes the topsoil loss, how a “rich cover that had taken several thousand years to develop was disappearing day by day.” The sodbusters had quickly illuminated the dangerous hubris in the 1909 Bureau of Soils proclamation: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” The rechristened Great Plains looked like it would revert back to its original name: the Great American Desert. More

Don't miss Ken Burns's two-part documentary The Dust Bowl, premiering this Sunday and Monday, November 18 and 19, on PBS. Check your local listings.

*Photo credits: Arthur Rothstein, Library of Congress, Dan L. Perlman, Eco Library

 

The November 2012 IAEA Report on Iran and Its Implications

The new quarterly report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program, which is now in circulation, finds that Tehran has continued to install more centrifuges for uranium enrichment at its underground complex at Fordow.

IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, left,
with Iran’s Ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh,
in May 2012 (photo credit: Adel Pazzyar/IRNA/AP)

The November 16 IAEA report says that Iran has installed an additional 644 centrifuges at Fordow and 991 at Natanz, both of which are regularly inspected by the Agency.

However, the total number of operating centrifuges at Fordow (696) has not yet increased, according to the Agency. The IAEA report also notes that while Iran continues to experiment with advanced and more efficient types of centrifuges, it is not yet using them for production-scale operations.

The IAEA also reports that Iran has continued enriching uranium to the 20% level at the previously reported rate and that its stockpile of 20% material has increased moderately—by 43 kg. According to the IAEA’s November report, Iran has produced 232 kg of 20% material, of which 96 kg was converted or slated for conversion to uranium oxide powder, ostensibly for the production of fuel plates for its Tehran Research Reactor. This leaves a stockpile of 134.9 kg of 20% enriched uranium in hexafluoride form. In August, the IAEA reported that Iran had produced 189.4 kg of 20% enriched uranium, of which 91 kg was stockpiled as hexafluoride.

Iran would need to produce approximately 220-250kg of 20% material and enrich it further to 90% U-235, to have enough bomb-grade material for one nuclear bomb. More

 

Are They Mad? Village Destruction? US Guilty of War Crimes

Broadwell Defended Petraeus’ Village Destruction Policy

Petraeus

WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2012 (IPS) - Paula Broadwell, whose affair with Gen. David Petraeus brought his career to a sudden end last week, had sought to help defend his decision in 2010 to allow village destruction in Afghanistan that not only violated his own previous guidance but the international laws of war.


The new Petraeus policy guidance allowed the destruction of villages in three districts of Kandahar province if the population did not tell U.S. forces where homemade bombs were hidden.But her efforts had the opposite effect.

In early January 2010, Broadwell went to visit the Combined Task Force I-320th in Kandahar to write a story justifying the decision to destroy the village of Tarok Kaloche and much of three other villages in its area of operations.

Ironically, it was Broadwell who introduced the complete razing of the village of Tarok Kalache in in Kandahar’s Arghandab Valley in October 2010 to the blogosphere. Dramatic photographs of the village before and after it was razed, which she had obtained from U.S. military sources, were published with her article in the military blog Best Defense Jan. 13, 2011.

The pictures and her article brought a highly critical response from blogger Joshua Foust, who is a specialist on Afghanistan.

Tarok Kalache was only one of many villages destroyed or nearly destroyed in an October 2010 offensive by U.S. forces in three districts of Kandahar Province, because the heavy concentrations of IEDs had made clearing the village by conventional forces too costly.

In the late summer and early fall, commanders in those districts had been ordered to clear the villages of Taliban presence, but they had taken heavy casualties from IEDs planted in and around the villages.

As commander of Combined Task Force I-320th, Lt. Col. David Flynn was responsible for several villages in the Arghandab valley, including Tarok Kalache.

Flynn told Spencer Ackerman of the Danger Room blog in early February 2011 that, once he felt he had the necessary intelligence on IEDs in Tarok Kalache, he had adopted a plan to destroy the village, first with mine clearing charges, which destroyed everything within a swath 100 yards long and wide enough for a tank, then with aerial bombing. More

 

The Paradox of Nonlethal Weapons by Fritz Allhof

Not all weapons are designed to kill; some are just meant to cause injury. Yet under the rules of war—a somewhat haphazard collection of ethical and legal directives—we are sometimes allowed to use lethal weapons even when certain nonlethal weapons are disallowed.




In short, the lethal weapons are more permissible on the battlefield. As Donald Rumsfeld once complained “in many instances, our forces are allowed to shoot somebody and kill them, but they’re not allowed to use a nonlethal riot-control agent.” This is the paradox of nonlethal weapons, and it has been around for some time. Yet as military technology becomes increasingly capable of halting an enemy without killing him, it is a situation that international law must reconsider. Isn’t less deadly better?

Restrictions on weapons come from a range of sources. The most basic, though, stems from Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (§35), which holds, “Parties to a conflict and members of their armed forces do not have an unlimited choice of methods and means of warfare.” There are two general reasons for this, each of which tracks a different school of moral thought.




The first is that we must avoid, in the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “means and methods of warfare which … cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering” (Rule 70). The thinking here is largely consequentialist: Superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering are inherently wasteful. The stock examples are things like serrated bayonets or exploding bullets. Conventional bayonets and bullets are enough to remove opponents from the battlefield. Their more destructive complements cause substantial internal damage, leading to complicated surgeries, higher mortality, and so on. Since they arguably serve no legitimate military objective, they are prohibited. More


 

 

General David Petraeus's fatal flaw: not the affair, but his Afghanistan surge

More than three years ago, I sat in an overflow room in Washington, DC's Willard Hotel listening to General David Petraeus explain (pdf) how the only solution for the failing war in Afghanistan was a "comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy", modeled after the one that had allegedly achieved so much success in Iraq.

Petraeus handing over to Allen

Petraeus's speech came at the annual meeting of the Center for New American Security, a DC-based thinktank that had become a locus of COIN thinking in DC. And Petraeus was at the peak of his power and acclaim – heralded by both Democrats and Republicans as the man responsible for saving the Iraq war.

The four-star general's in-depth powerpoint presentation (pdf), with its discussion of securing and serving the population, "understanding local circumstances" separating irreconcilables from reconcilables and living "among the people" was the apogee of COIN thinking, which dominated national security debates in Washington in 2008 and 2009. But, like Petraeus's career, COIN and its usefulness as a tool for US militaryplanners now lies in tatters.

With last week's revelations that Petraeus was having an affair as director of the CIA with his biographer Paula Broadwell, this tawdry story is likely to become the most glaring black mark on Petraeus's career. But while his behavior was reckless, arrogant and, frankly, just plain stupid, it's ironic that Petraeus is likely to be remembered more for that one personal act rather than his most grave professional mistake – namely, that same counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan for which he was one of Washington's most influential proponents.

The event at CNAS was the quintessential example of the blinders and hubris that were so pervasive among COIN boosters and, in particular, Petraeus. They were convinced that the surge in Iraq and the use of counterinsurgency tactics there had turned the tide. But as we know now – and should have even been aware then – the reality was far more complicated. More

 

Perkovich On “The Non-Unitary Model And Deterrence Stability In South Asia”

Stimson is releasing today an essay by George Perkovich on "The Non-Unitary Model and Deterrence Stability in South Asia." Perkovich is the Vice President for Studies and Director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Perkovich argues that classical deterrence models derived from the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union are too simplistic to apply to South Asia. Pakistan may not be a unitary rational actor in the traditional sense, because violent, extremist groups on its territory that engage in sub-conventional warfare can provoke crises and armed conflict on the subcontinent. These groups may or may not be an extension of Pakistan's military and intelligence services, which may themselves be riven with factions. Consequently, deterrence stability in South Asia presents unique analytical, political, and diplomatic challenges.

The author assesses the threat of India-Pakistan war as more likely than the threat of nuclear terrorism. Perkovich argues that the United States can most effectively pursue its broader nuclear interests and goals through a framework of deterrence stability. The pursuit of deterrence stability would make India and Pakistan "more inclined to engage in dialogue and Confidence-Building Measures... than they are when the agenda seems to reflect other U.S. priorities, such as countering nuclear terrorism or strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime." Moreover, "highlighting the need to prevent Indo-Pakistan conflict and stabilize deterrence between the two countries acknowledges that Pakistan, like India, possesses a nuclear deterrent, and that the United States is not seeking to eliminate it, but rather to encourage the two states to manage it stably."

Perkovich argues that disunity in the chain of command, whether perceived or actual, "produces dangerous confusion and ambiguity that interfere in the management of deterrence.... Pakistan illustrates the unity problem and its implications for rationality more acutely than any other nuclear-armed state." Consequently, "The risks that subconventional uses of force could escalate to conventional and perhaps nuclear war creates a clear interest for Pakistanis, Indians, and the international community to treat the uncertain quality of Pakistani state sovereignty as a fundamental strategic problem."

Thus far, the people of South Asia have been spared the potential consequences of deterrence instability because Indian leaders have not retaliated violently to terrorist attacks on iconic targets. India's neo-Gandhian forbearance runs counter to prescripts of deterrence and cannot be expected to persist as new leaders emerge in New Delhi. More

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Analysis: Obama faces bumps with Russia policy

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama once assured Russian leaders that he'd have more flexibility to deal with missile defense during a second term in office. But now that he has been re-elected, there's little expectation of progress on that or other contentious issues that divide the two countries.

Tensions between the United States and Russia have been rising. The countries have been at odds over Syria's civil war, Iran's nuclear program and Russia's crackdown on domestic opposition. U.S. officials are uneasy about what they see as a more assertive foreign policy by Vladimir Putin, who returned to the Russian presidency in May.

Gone is the talk of a "reset" — Obama's policy of improving relations with Moscow after they deteriorated during George W. Bush's presidency. In the few areas where Obama is seeking closer ties, such as trade, he's running into opposition from a deeply divided Congress.

Moscow is undoubtedly pleased that Obama defeated Republican Mitt Romney, who had called Russia the No. 1 foe of the United States. A Russian official said Thursday that its government expected Obama to meet his commitment to be more flexible on missile defense.

But it's hard to imagine that happening now.

"Since Putin's return to the presidency, things have become more complicated," said Cliff Kupchan, a Russia analyst with the Eurasia group, who described the current state of relations as functional, but strained.

The reset undoubtedly improved cooperation between Washington and Moscow during the early years of the Obama administration and both sides saw dividends, such as the signing of a nuclear arms control treaty and the U.S. agreeing to Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization.

During that time, tensions over missile defense had receded following Obama's early move to replace a Bush administration plan for missile defense in eastern Europe. Moscow, which had angrily charged that the Bush era plan could undermine its ability to use long-range nuclear missiles to deter attacks initially, welcomed the change. But more recently, the Kremlin has ramped up its criticism, arguing that the later stages of the Obama plan could also threaten its missiles. More