Whoever thought, before the U.S. invaded, that bringing peace and tranquility to Iraq would be a simple task was wildly wrong. But is it an impossible task?

More than 60 years ago, during World War II, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t think that his similar, even more daunting, mission was impossible. By the time he had completed his crusade in Europe and thanked his staff for a job well done at a farewell ceremony in Frankfurt in July 1945, the German army, or Wehrmacht, no longer existed, Hitler was dead, the Nazi Party had been dissolved, war criminals were behind bars awaiting trial and retribution, de-Nazification had begun, and western Germany — the part not occupied by the Soviet army — was on its way to becoming one of the most successful liberal democracies of the Western world.

So writes David Stafford in Sunday’s Washington Post. Stafford is the author of Endgame 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II. He finds in Iraq “poignant echoes of the post-WWII experience” and wonders if we could have avoided major mistakes by paying more attention to that historical episode. But he also finds “some small crumb of comfort for optimists” and notes that it

is too soon to declare that the mission has failed. Sen. John McCain’s 100-year horizon for a U.S. presence in Iraq may be stretching things. But let’s not forget that the postwar occupation of Germany lasted for a full decade.

Iraq, as Stafford notes, is vastly different from the conquered Germany of 1945. But still, the parallel is compelling.

Rebuilding a nation is possible. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes effort, time, patience and pragmatism. As 1945 confirms, liberation from a dictator in itself offers no easy path to peace or democracy. Battlefield victory is the easy bit. Building peace is a constant struggle — and it’s a matter of years, not weeks.

Stafford’s reminder of the difficulties we as a nation faced in the past is vitally important. The question of the day: will the U.S. stay in Iraq for the years needed to finish the job?

If Iran continues with its nuclear-weapons program, and Israel takes the decision to strike before the ayatollahs acquire an actual bomb, what would be the likely timing of an Israeli action?

We have asked that question here before, and noted that Iran was acquiring long-range, highly advanced surface-to-air missiles, the Russian SA-20, that would greatly complicate an aerial assault. Since the missiles will start becoming operational this fall, Israel would be under pressure to act before or around that time.

An additional factor in the Israeli calculation might well be the U.S. elections. The Israelis would have good reason to believe that the U.S. under George W. Bush would be more supportive of their action than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom might have serious reservations about the use of force.

John McCain, who has said that the only thing worse than a U.S. strike on Iran would be an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons, would obviously be more sympathetic to Israel’s position. But the Israelis can hardly count on his victory in the presidential contest. Waiting until after the U.S. elections would seem to add risk to risk.

Which brings us to the news that Israel’s security cabinet yesterday authorized the distribution of gas masks to its entire population. The last such distribution came just before the U.S. attack on Iraq four years ago.

What does the decision mean?

The FBI has stepped up counterintelligence investigations of Chinese espionage in the U.S., reports the Washington Post this morning.

The paper reprises several recent cases, including, that of Chi Mak, convicted of stealing sensitive naval technology plans from a U.S defense contractor; Dongfan Chung, a Boeing engineer arrested in February, accused of funneling classified space shuttle and rocket documents to Chinese officials; Noshir Gowadia, indicted last fall for providing cruise-missile data to Chinese officials; and Gregg W. Bergersen, a Pentagon official who pleaded guilty this week to charges that he gave classified information on U.S. weapons sales to China.

What does this flurry of cases mean? A couple of non-mutually exclusive possibilities suggest themselves. One is that the Chinese are stepping up their collection efforts in the U.S. Another is that the FBI, in stepping up its counterintelligence and its work is bearing fruit. A third — a combination of the first and second — is that Chinese intelligence is not ten-feet tall.

That last possibility is suggested by some of the amateurish spycraft displayed by the Chinese in the Bergersen case. In one sense, the operation was fairly sophisticated. Bergersen was induced to take part in a false-flag operation, that is, an operation in which he believed he was selling secrets to a U.S. ally, Taiwan, when in fact the “businessman” he was dealing with, Tai Shen Kuo, was actually a spy from the mainland.

But there was also some remarkably sloppy behavior by the Chinese in this case. An elementary task of spying is maintaining covert communications. Kuo was eager to do so and he acquired PGP Desktop Home 9.5 for Windows, a commercially available program for encrypting emails. That was smart. It was not smart, on the other hand, to discuss this encryption software on an open phone line with his taskmaster in China. The FBI was listening in on the call.

The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint against Bergersen contains many other arresting details. One high point occurs when Bergersen returns from a trip to Bulgaria and his wife finds a wad of espionage cash in his wallet. Bergersen told her it was gambling winnings. Her reaction: she insisted on taking half of it “as her share.” Bergersen related this to Kuo who offered to make up the amount that he had lost to his spouse. This generous offer was declined.

We’ve frequently criticized the performance of the intelligence community in this space. Criticism is easy, especially when things as bad they are. But criticism of something so vital to our security can only take one so far. At some point, one has to turn and look for solutions. That’s where I run into trouble.

When thinking about institutions so complicated, so secretive, so self-protective, so entangled with Congress, so impervious to genuine reform, it becomes difficult to conceive of a plan that would be radical enough and also politically feasible.

Presumably, one approach would be build some new and highly functional institutions from scratch to accomplish narrowly tailored purposes — like fighting terrorists.

My friend Max Boot has been giving the matter some serious thought and that is the direction he has proposed.  In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, he presented the bold idea of resurrecting the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)  ”that was created in 1942 to gather and analyze intelligence as well as to conduct low-intensity warfare behind enemy lines in occupied Europe and Asia.”

OSS was disbanded after World War II; both the Green Berets and the CIA trace their lineage to this august ancestor. My proposal is to re-create OSS by bringing together under one roof not only Army Special Forces, civil-affairs, and psy-ops but also the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division, which has always been a bit of a bureaucratic orphan at Langley (and which is staffed largely by Special Operations veterans). This could be a joint civil-military agency under the combined oversight of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence, like the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency. It would bring together in one place all of the key skill sets needed to wage the softer side of the war on terror. Like SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command], it would have access to military personnel and assets; but like the CIA’s Special Activities Division, its operations would contain a higher degree of “covertness,” flexibility, and “deniability” than those carried out by the uniformed military.

Max is not only a super-smart guy, he’s also an influential one: lately, he’s been whispering into the ear of one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States.

This if from a speech by that candidate:

I would also set up a new civil-military agency patterned after the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. A modern-day OSS could draw together unconventional warfare, civil-affairs, paramilitary and psychological-warfare specialists from the military together with covert-action operators from our intelligence agencies and experts in anthropology, advertising, foreign cultures, and numerous other disciplines from inside and outside government. In the spirit of the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization that would fight terrorist subversion across the world and in cyberspace. It could take risks that our bureaucracies today are afraid to take – risks such as infiltrating agents who lack diplomatic cover into terrorist organizations. It could even lead in the front-line efforts to rebuild failed states. A cadre of such undercover operatives would allow us to gain the intelligence on terrorist activities that we don’t get today from our high-tech surveillance systems and from a CIA clandestine service that works almost entirely out of our embassies abroad.

Does this sound familiar?

The question of the day is: which candidate has embraced Max Boot’s proposal: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John McCain?

The second question of the day: will meaningful intelligence reform ever come about or will it take a second September 11 to get rid of the clowns?

On Sunday, CIA director Michael Hayden warned on Meet the Press that a reconstituting al Qaeda was preparing operatives in Afghanistan who would draw no attention while passing through U.S. airport checkpoints.

Exactly how vulnerable are we right now to a significant terrorist attack? No one can answer that question with any certainty. What we can say with assurance is that even as George W. Bush has overseen the single most far-reaching reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community (IC) since the CIA was created in 1947, his single greatest failure as a president might well be that American intelligence remains mired in bureaucratic mediocrity.

That bureaucratic mediocrity has already exacted a high price. A major installment came due when the CIA and FBI missed the Sept. 11 plot. A second came a year later with the CIA’s “slam-dunk” assessment that Saddam Hussein was acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In 2004, Congress radically reshuffled U.S. intelligence, creating a new intelligence “czar” — the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — whose office, the ODNI, would assume many of the coordinating functions that had formerly been in the hands of the CIA.

This shift was intensely controversial. One of the most frequent criticisms was that grafting a new bureaucracy on top of an already dysfunctional system would only compound existing problems. Four years later, how is the ODNI faring?

I offer a partial answer to that question in The Real Bush Intelligence Failure in today’s Wall Street Journal.

How are we going to win the long war against Islamic radicalism? The first and most essential step is to understand what we are up against. Part of that effort involves keeping track of the whereabouts and activities of extremist movements and grouplets. But beyond that, it is vitally important to understand how our adversaries think.

Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a journal published by the Hudson Institute, has already emerged as indispensable source for both purposes. The current issue has a series of extraordinary–and extremely alarming — essays on the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States.

One of them is by Rod Dreher, an editor at the Dallas Morning News, which recounts in close detail developments in his own community.  It focuses especially on the efforts of various Brotherhood-linked organizations like the Islamic Society of North American and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to use the charge of “Islamophobia” to intimidate the local press into silence about their own linkages to terrorists and terrorist theoreticians.

“I cannot say how typical the Dallas experience is of the broader American experience,” writes Dreher. That question remains to be answered. But what can be said with assurance is that the U.S. government’s response to these groups is not in synch with the danger they present.

In the same issue of Current Trends, Zeyno Baran, a senior fellow at Hudson, takes note of our government’s continuing attempts to conduct a dialog with the domestic radicals:  

When the US government engages with Islamist organizations in conferences or government outreach programs, it lends legitimacy to an ideology that does not represent — at least not yet — the views of the majority of American Muslims. American policymakers who advocate pursuing such a strategy are actually facilitating Islamism by endorsing it as a mainstream ideology. Both at home and abroad, this policy is leading to disaster. Liberal and non-Islamist Muslims — having already been denounced by Islamists as apostates — are now being told by Western governments that they do not represent “real” Islam.

We are still in the early stages of our battle with radical Islam. As in the cold war, it’s going to take time, and serious setbacks, before we settle on policies that are effective in combating a domestic danger that poses a unique challenge to our constitutional order.

Should Congress enact a “shield law” for journalists, exempting them from the obligation to disclose their confidential sources to grand juries investigating crimes and in court cases?

I have explored some of the implications of such a law for our national security. But there is a civil-court dimension to the problem as well. In The News Media vs. the Innocent, Steve Chapman gets to the essence of it in today’s Chicago Tribune.

Years ago, Ray Donovan, Ronald Reagan’s labor secretary, was prosecuted for corruption, only to be acquitted. After the verdict, Donovan asked plaintively, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

Steven Hatfill knows where to go to get his reputation back. But upon arriving there, he finds the door blocked by someone who says her privileges are more important than his good name. That someone, of course, is a journalist. And, not surprisingly, she enjoys the broad support of other journalists, who have proved to be slow learners about the obligations they share with their fellow citizens.

Hatfill was a casualty of the anthrax scare of 2001. Just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, someone mailed letters containing anthrax spores to several news organizations and a pair of U.S. senators. Some 22 people were infected, and five died.

In the aftermath, the Justice Department labeled Hatfill, who had done research on biological warfare for the Army, a “person of interest.” Secret information leaked to the press suggested he was the terrorist behind the attacks.

But the suspicions were wrong. Hatfill asserted his innocence, and he was never charged in the case. He sued the government, the New York Times and others for damages. Federal Judge Reggie Walton concluded that the claims have “destroyed his life” even though “there’s not a scintilla of evidence to suggest Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with” the anthrax attacks.

To read the rest of Chapman’s column, click here.

Jonathan Demme is the prize-winning director of one of the most terrifying horror movies of all time. Although it has been getting virtually no attention, Demme has a new film out that, if anything, is even more frightening, and more appalling, than Silence of the Lambs.

Set hauntingly in rural Georgia, but with action unfolding across the United States and in the Middle East, The Return of Hannibal Lecter is not its title. Rather it is Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains:

Embarking on a national publicity tour to promote his new book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” former US president Jimmy Carter ignites an international firestorm of controversy when he argues that only Israel’s complete withdrawal from the occupied territories can bring lasting peace to the Middle East. Intimate, informative, and altogether engrossing, Jimmy Carter; Man From Plains is a candid portrait of a Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian and statesman whose compassion and steadfast sense of justice remains undiminished by time.

Silence of the Lambs ended with Hannibal Lecter on a beach in the Bahamas, preparing “to have an old friend for dinner.” Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains has a similarly sinister ending. The villain lives on to continue pursuing his peculiar passions.

One of my most productive confidential sources in Washington keeps what he tells me is an expanding file on his desk labeled “reasons to commit suicide.”  He occasionally sends me items that he’s added to it.

Here’s the latest, a conference starting tomorrow at Columbia University: “Fear of Flying”: Can a Feminist Classic Be an American Classic?

Thirty-five years ago, Erica Jong’s first novel, the international bestseller Fear of Flying, electrified readers around the world and sparked fierce debate. Breaking from conventional expectations of fiction by and about women, Fear of Flying freed other women writers to write intelligently and openly about sex and to debate intimate issues of importance to women. Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired a large collection of Erica Jong’s archival material in 2007. Jong’s papers have become an important asset as the Columbia Libraries continue to document the history of women and feminism in contemporary American society. In an outgrowth of this interest and intent, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library will join the Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College in gathering a group of distinguished writers and critics for a half-day conference, “Fear of Flying: Can a Feminist Classic be a Classic?” on Friday, March 28, 2008.

Speakers will revisit Jong’s novel and will assess the status of women’s writing and of feminism in today’s literary scene and the possibilities of subversion open to contemporary young women writers.

Here is the question of the day. What would be more painful to endure: watching Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reap the dividends of being ineffectually insulted by the president of Columbia, or attending this conference?

One of the most important functions carried out by U.S. intelligence is analysis of the vast quantities of data collected by the sixteen agencies of the intelligence community (IC). To do this job, the IC needs a lot of analysts. Who and where are they?

That has long proved to be a remarkably difficult question for senior officials to answer.

Ten years ago, one such official came up with the seemingly simple idea of creating a database that would record the names, locations, and specialties of all the analysts working in the IC.  The computers were duly programmed, but the data were never entered. What went wrong?

Thomas Fingar, the director of national intelligence for analysis, and the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, has offered a fascinating explanation in a recent talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. The database, he explained, had been

billed as a “This is where we’ll go if we need to build a task force. We needed a Serbo-Croat speaker to send out to East Armpit.” And people didn’t put that data in. Others — managers —  saw it as a free-agent list. “If I advertise what talent I’ve got, somebody . . . will try and steal it.”

The lesson here is that, try as one might to persuade people working in large organizations to cooperate for the common good, nitty-gritty career incentives will always and forever trump everything else.

Now, in the aftermath of 9/11 and other intelligence fiascos, the intelligence community is once again trying to create a telephone book. Fingar, who is running the initiative, has put out the word that being in the telephone directory is important: “If you’re not in it, it means one of two things: You don’t know anything, or your boss thinks you don’t know anything.” On top of that, a more draconian signal was sent out: “If you’re not in Fingar’s database, you’re not in a funded position.”

The results have been nothing short of astonishing. Reports Fingar:

I suddenly discovered I had 1,200 more analysts than I knew I had, even by estimating. But we can now reproduce phone book, e-mail directories. If you need to find an expert on economics in the Andean region, you can find out where they are, how to contact them. And people are using it.

Hearty congratulations are due the intelligence community. After ten years, it now has a telephone book. But where in the world is Osama bin Laden?

If there is a political law of gravity, sooner or later the totalitarian regime in North Korea is going to come to an end. A socio-economic system so mired in failure, a political system so contrary to the basic human aspiration for freedom, cannot stay aloft forever.

That, at least, is the optimistic assumption of Andrew Scobell, a professor of international affairs at Texas A & M, who has engaged in the fascinating exercise of forecasting exactly how it will collapse.

Scobell posits five possible scenarios, each of which correspond to the demise or transformation of other Communist regimes:

Suspended animation — Albania

Soft landing — China

Crash landing — Romania

Soft landing/crash landing hybrid — the USSR

Suspended animation/soft landing hybrid — Cuba

Scobell explains each possibility at length and tries to see which one best fits the North Korean future. He finds, tentatively, that “the closest to the reality of the North Korea’s current situation is a Cuban mix of ad hoc reforms and regime holding pattern.”

Scobell may or may not be wrong about that. But after watching North Korea for years, traveling there in the early 1990’s, and, most recently, reading The Reluctant Communist, the horrifying tale of an American soldier kept there in captivity for forty years, I would much prefer to see a Romanian-style crash landing.

Scobell thinks it likely that if the regime abruptly disintegrates

this could mean not just extreme disorganization of power but a civil war or a collapse situation with significant pockets of organized armed resistance. In the latter situation, while elements of the coercive apparatus would surrender or disband and flee, others might vigorously resist. Some hardcore elements might engage in insurgency operations for months or even years.

Obviously, this could a very dangerous scenario, costly in human life, and one that might spill across international borders with unpredictable consequences. But am I being irresponsible in stating that for a regime so profoundly evil, the day of violent reckoning cannot come too soon? If there was ever a case where the tree of liberty was in need of some refreshment from the blood of tyrants, this would appear to be it.

Unfortunately, all of this may be idle speculation. Scobell also notes that

the deathwatch for the Pyongyang regime has lasted more than 15 years. Those who predicted or anticipated its imminent demise have had to eat their words or do a lot of explaining. Pyongyang is far from dead, and there is evidence that the regime may be regrouping.

I hope he’s wrong.

Was the uprising in Tibet predictable? The Times reports today that the Chinese authorities appear to have been caught by surprise. That itself is a surprise, given Beijing’s acute sensitivities about anything that might disrupt the Olympic games scheduled for August.

Arch Puddington, writing in COMMENTARY this past November, surveyed previous Olympics held in unfree countries. The conclusion of his China Games is even more arresting today than it was five months ago:

If the past is any guide, it is the most sinister and shocking features of a dictatorship that are the likeliest to emerge when it hosts the Olympics.

For Germany in 1936 at the Berlin games, it was militarism and anti-Semitism that reared their hideous heads. For the USSR in 1980, it was imperial aggression, with Afghanistan the Kremlin’s most recent victim.

Puddington did not offer any specific predictions about what China might face in 2008. But he speculated that “the Chinese authorities themselves might well be in the dark about what the Olympics finally portend.” This, too, as their handling of the Tibet uprising turns into a fiasco, was a prescient observation.

If the Chinese authorities want to stay abreast of events in their own country, perhaps they should be reading COMMENTARY. Oh, they can’t. It’s locked up behind their Great Firewall.

What are the five best chess books? The Wall Street Journal solicited my opinion, and I offered it in today’s paper right here. For those of you don’t subscribe to the paper, I’ve pasted in a copy below. Just click on: Read the rest of this entry »

Norman Podhoretz has been courageously making the case for a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear-weapon’s program for some time now. He also has — or had — been predicting that President Bush would carry out such a strike before the end of his presidency. As time grows short, that seems increasingly unlikely.

But let’s not rule it out entirely.We have already pointed to the fact that as Iran acquires sophisticated Russian air-defenses, which it may deploy as early as this fall, the execution of a U.S. strike will be greatly complicated and the risks associated with it will rise. It would be easier for the U.S. to the job before the SA-20s are pointing toward the skies.

There is another factor as well that pushes in the same direction: growing pressure from an insecure but highly influential ally in the region — and, no, it is not Israel.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has taken a look at Saudi Arabian attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear program:

senior and mid-level Saudi officials express an apparently unambiguous belief among the upper-echelon of the Saudi Government that the Iranian nuclear program does not solely exist for peaceful purposes. One senior Saudi official told staff confidently, “Iran is determined to get a nuclear weapon.”. . . One senior long-serving U.S. diplomat in Riyadh said he had “never met anyone from the King on down who didn’t think it was a nuclear weapons program.”

Saudi officials believe Iran wants a nuclear weapon in order to become a regional superpower, to alleviate a sense of marginalization, to serve as a deterrent, and to be a more dominant force in the Gulf. While senior Saudi officials describe a nuclear-armed Iran as “an existential threat,” most Saudi officials do not believe Iran would actually use nuclear weapons against Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia worries that Iranian nuclear weapons would encourage and enable the Iranians to pursue a more aggressive, hegemonic foreign policy in the region. However, it would be inaccurate to completely characterize SAG [Saudia Arabian government] anxiety regarding Iranian nuclear weapons as a purely “balance of power concern.” Based largely on Iran’s subversive activities directed against the Saudi regime in the 1980’s, some senior Saudi leaders find a nuclear-armed Iran especially disconcerting. Such past Iranian subversion efforts has imbued the senior Saudi leadership with an intense distrust of Tehran.

What do the Saudis think should be done about the mounting danger?

When presented with a hypothetical choice between a nuclear-armed Iran and a U.S. [preventive] attack, a significant number of Saudi officials interviewed explicitly or implicitly preferred a U.S. attack. A correlation seems to exist between the seniority of Saudi officials and views on Iranian nuclear weapons. More senior Saudi officials tended to be more “hawkish” in their viewpoint toward Iran. Some key Saudi officials believe a U.S. attack could set the Iranian nuclear program back over a decade. More cautious members of the senior inner circle express concern that a military attack would affect “everything and will not be easy to pull off,” and doubt whether a U.S. attack could destroy all key components of the Iranian nuclear program. Based on U.S. actions in Iraq, some key Saudi officials feared a “nightmare” scenario in which the U.S. attacks Iran but fails to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The Saudis have a lot of oil, a lot of money, and a lot of influence in Washington. If the U.S. does take action, and if it is successful, they will surely reap some of the credit. And if it goes badly, we will surely hear from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that the “Israel Lobby” is to blame.

Congress’s reshuffling of the intelligence community in the wake of 9/11 was intended to enhance cooperation among the 16 agencies that serve as our country’s eyes and ears. Is it working? It is hard to tell. But there’s continued sniping among the spy agencies. Why else would a high-ranking official at one of the agencies send me an article entitled How Intelligent is the Director of National Intelligence?, the implied — and lighthearted — conclusion of which is: not very.

Meanwhile, there is serious business to be done. Among the open questions of more than passing interest is: who poisoned the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 using polonium-21 and why? Was the Russian government behind this action? The consequences that would (or should) flow from such a conclusion are dire.

Edward Jay Epstein has long been one of the most interesting writers on intelligence matters, and also one of the most diligent researchers. He hasn’t solved the riddle, but he reports his findings in today’s New York Sun.  

After considering all the evidence, my hypothesis is that Litvinenko came in contact with a polonium-210 smuggling operation and was, either wittingly or unwittingly, exposed to it. Litvinenko had been a person of interest to the intelligence services of many countries, including Britain’s MI-6, Russia’s FSB, America’s CIA (which rejected his offer to defect in 2000), and Italy’s SISMI, which was monitoring his phone conversations. His murky operations, whatever their purpose, involved his seeking contacts in one of the most lawless areas in the former Soviet Union, the Pankisi Gorge, which had become a center for arms smuggling. He had also dealt with people accused of everything from money laundering to trafficking in nuclear components. These activities may have brought him, or his associates, in contact with a sample of polonium-210, which then, either by accident or by design, contaminated and killed him.

Should the United States build new and more reliable nuclear warheads? In the face of the aging and deterioration of weapons in the existing arsenal, the Bush administration is pushing ahead with a plan to do just that. And the New York Times, among other liberal outlets, has been pushing back.

The paper’s argument is that the nuclear modernization program

is a public-relations disaster in the making overseas. Suspicions that the United States is actually trying to build up its nuclear capabilities are undercutting Washington’s arguments for restraining the nuclear appetites of Iran and North Korea.

In other words, the United States is in danger of provoking an arms race.

But Iran and North Korea are not the only players in this game. What, one might ask, are Russia and China doing in this realm? And there are some other pertinent facts one might consider that the Times, the Washington Post, and other critics of the Bush “build-up” also never mention.

One such fact is that the Bush ”build-up” is not a build-up at all but a build-down. Last week, two ranking officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration testified before Congress and reported that

we continue to reduce the stockpile to meet the President’s mandate to have the smallest nuclear stockpile consistent with our national-security objectives. As a result, today the stockpile is half of what it was in 2001, and by 2012, the United States will have the smallest stockpile since the 1950’s. Additional reductions in the stockpile are possible, but these reductions will require changes to the weapons complex and the composition of the stockpile. . . .

In 2004, the President directed a 50 percent reduction in the size of the [nuclear] stockpile, and, in December 2007, he ordered an additional 15 percent cut. The result will be a nuclear stockpile one quarter the size it was at the end of the cold war and the smallest since the Eisenhower Administration.

So much for the alarming Bush build-up. What about China and Russia?

The Pentagon has just issued its annual report, Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. China, it states,

is qualitatively and quantitatively improving its strategic forces. These presently consist of: approximately 20 silo-based, liquid-fueled CSS-4 ICBMs (which constitute its primary nuclear means of holding continental U.S. targets at risk); approximately 20 liquid-fueled, limited range CSS-3 ICBMs; between 15-20 liquid-fueled CSS-2 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs); upwards of 50 CSS-5 road mobile, solid-fueled MRBMs (for regional deterrence missions); and, JL-1 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) on the XIA-class SSBN (although the operational status of the XIA is questionable).

By 2010, China’s nuclear forces will likely comprise enhanced CSS-4s; CSS-3s; CSS-5s; solid-fueled, road-mobile DF-31 and DF31A ICBMs, which are being deployed to units of the Second Artillery Corps; and up to five JIN-class SSBNs, each carrying between 10 and 12 JL-2 SLBM. The addition of nuclear-capable forces with greater mobility and survivability, combined with ballistic missile defense countermeasures which China is researching — including maneuvering re-entry vehicles (MaRV), multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV), decoys, chaff, jamming, thermal shielding, and ASAT weapons — will strengthen China’s deterrent and enhance its capabilities for strategic strike. New air- and ground-launched cruise missiles that could perform nuclear missions would similarly improve the survivability, flexibility, and effectiveness of China’s nuclear forces.

Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee late last month about Moscow’s efforts to augment its nuclear forces.

Russia has made a major commitment of almost 5 trillion rubles to its 2007-2015 budget to develop and build new conventional and nuclear weapon systems, with Moscow’s priority on the maintenance and modernization of the latter.

Development and production of advanced strategic weapons such as the SS-27/TOPOL-M ICBM and the Bulava-30 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) continues.  In April, Russia rolled out the first Dolgorukiy-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) designed to carry the Bulava-30 SLBM which continues testing despite several publicized failures. . . .

Russia retains a relatively large stockpile of non-strategic nuclear weapons.

“[W]hen we build, they build; when we cut, they build,” is what Harold Brown once said about the USSR back when he was Secretary of Defense under Jimmy Carter.

The times appear not to have changed all that much since then, and neither, in its consistent effort to blame the ills of the world on the United States, has the New York Times.

Why was Admiral William “Fox” Fallon forced into retirement? Mark Perry, a director of Conflicts Forum, offers his take in Asia Times. He points like others have to Thomas Barnett’s Esquire profile, which he says “has to rank as one of the most embarrassing portraits of an American officer in US military history. Both for Barnett, as well as for Fallon.”

One problem is Barnett’s style. Perry describes it as being in “pseudo Tombstone style — a kind of vague signaling that this is just-between-us tough guys talk - Barnett presents a military commander who is constantly on the go, trailing exhausted aides who never rest (oh, what a man he is!): Fallon doesn’t get angry (he gets ‘pissed off’); he doesn’t have a father (he has an ‘old man’); he doesn’t s