Defence and Human Security

Warnings of the disaster that would come of an American attack on Iran are plentiful, increasingly urgent, and persuasive[i] – but it is not at all clear that they are working on the one vote that matters. The NewsHour on PBS television ran a short feature on the growing irrelevance of George Bush, but on security matters he’s still very much in charge, and when it comes to Iran he still likes to say that all options remain on the table.

Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding, Pentagon planners and presidential advisors seem to have an inexplicable capacity to infuse their attack scenarios with an irrepressible optimism. In their computerized simulations, otherwise intractable problems, like Iran’s nuclear programs, are swept aside like so much hi tech chaff once the missiles start flying. The Christian Science Monitor recently observed that “perhaps the most egregious error policy planners make is their assumption that once wars are started, their outcome is predictable.”[ii]

It is true that some outcomes are predictable enough. No one could have doubted that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Nor could anyone doubt that if the United States attacked Iran it could manage to destroy, at least for a time, its nuclear programs, set its economic infrastructure back a generation, or overthrow its government. Regime destruction can be accomplished with dispatch – but after that all bets are off.

Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford has offered a careful and cautious account[iii] of the consequences of a concentrated air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and defence infrastructure. He rules out a ground offensive and a regime overthrow by the United states as unfeasible given American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He says “an air attack would involve the systematic destruction of research, development, support and training centres for nuclear and missile programmes and the killing of as many technically competent people as possible.” In addition, the attack would “involve comprehensive destruction of Iranian air defence capabilities and attacks designed to pre-empt Iranian retaliation. This would require destruction of Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities close to Iraq and of regular or irregular naval forces that could disrupt Gulf oil transit routes.”

Civilian and military casualties would be difficult to monitor, but would be in the many thousands, given that much of the technical infrastructure in support of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs is located in urban areas.

After the attack, he says, “Iran would have many methods of responding in the months and years that followed.” He includes disruption of Gulf oil supplies and support for insurgents and anti-Israel forces in the region. Rather than end Iranian nuclear programs, an attack would ignite Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions. Iran would emerge united and determined to build a bomb and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That would presumably occasion further attacks and propel long-term and widening confrontation in the region.

After that come the unpredictable consequences, including the environmental impact of exploding nuclear facilities – at this point with limited quantities of nuclear materials present – and various political fallout possibilities. President Bush and his army of upbeat advisors and analysts obviously did not anticipate that their 2003 attack on Iraq would be a major boon to Iran. But, says the former Ambassador and current Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control, Peter W. Galbraith, “of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching.”[iv] Similar unintended consequences would also ensue from an attack on Iran.

Mr. Bush seems rather more aware of folly when the issue is the military action of others. It is almost touching to hear his kindly reprimand of Turkey for having the temerity to threaten attacks on northern Iraq in an effort to deny rebel Turkish Kurds sanctuary there. “There is a lot of dialogue going on,” he explained to reporters at the White House, “and that is positive.”[v]

To measure his own actions he uses a different calculus. There may, after all, be a lot of dialogue going on with Iran as well, but in this case he finds nothing positive in it. Talking to Iran, whether it is the Russians or the International Atomic Energy Agency, only emboldens it in its wicked ways.

Left to his own devices, and bolstered by the authors of triumphalist attack scenarios, President Bush is eminently capable of crowning his disastrous presidency with another military misadventure – this time in Iran. In other words, he shouldn’t be left to his own devices.

The Parliament of Canada would perform a worthy service in support of international stability through a unanimous and two-fold call: for the United States to unequivocally reject military action against Iran and for Iran to unambiguously resolve all outstanding issues with the IAEA and provide it ongoing and unencumbered access to all Iranian nuclear facilities and programs.

As an emergency statement onIranby a group of concerned Canadians puts it, “an aerial assault on Iran would be an environmental and human catastrophe that our already damaged world cannot afford.”[vi]

[i] Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher, “Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East,” The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, September 2007 (http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/IranStudy082807a.pdf).

Barnett Rubin, “Thesis on Policy toward Iran,” Informed Comment: Global Affairs, September 5, 2007 (http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/09/theses-on-policy-toward-iran.html).

Seymour M. Hersh, “The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?” The New Yorker, April 17, 2007 (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/17/060417fa_fact).

[ii] Walter Rodgers, “The folly of war with Iran,” The Christian Science Monitor,” October 16, 2007 ()

[iii] Paul Rogers, Iran: Consequences of a War, Briefing Paper, Oxford Research Group, February 2006 (http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/IranConsequences.pdf), 16 pp.

[iv]Peter W. Galbraith, “The Victor?,” The New York Review of Books, October 11, 2007 Volume 54, Number 15 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20651).

[v]By Paula Wolfson, “Bush Urges Turkey to Refrain From Cross-Border Operations in Iraq,” Voice of America, October 17, 2007 (http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-10-17-voa49.cfm).

[vi] From an “emergency statement” of concerned Canadians. The statement remains open for signature through Jillian Skeet of Vancouver who can be reached at jillianskeet@telus.net.

Political correctness aside, Pearson’s point has not lost any of its trenchant relevance. He made the comment in his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and it was followed by three decades of the kind of Goliathon war preparations that are, and we hope will remain, unmatched in human history.

Indeed, the legacy of those precocious giants continues to exact an annual toll of hundreds of thousands of lives as well as billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on preparations for peace. The 600 million-plus small arms that flood the planet continue to kill at least 250,000 people annually, many in war and many more in homicides, suicides, and law enforcement killings in societies not at war.[i]

The worlds 27,000 nuclear weapons, a figure well down from Cold War highs, continue to threaten annihilation and continue to cost the world billions of dollars each year, either to maintain or dismantle them, to clean up the environmental contamination caused in their production, and to carry out the inspections needed to prevent their spread.

In 2005 global military spending reached $1.2 trillion.[ii]Some of that is spent to keep the peace, but keeping the peace, research and experience of the past decade in particular have been telling us, is rather more complex than suggested by the ancient Latin bromide: “if you want peace prepare for war.”

It should be both fundamental and obvious that preparations for peace, for the security and safety of people, should respond to the ways they experience insecurity. And the most immediate threats to human security derive from unmet basic needs, political exclusion, denied rights, social and political disintegration, and the criminal and political violence that invariably accompany these conditions of insecurity.

The primary threats to the safety and welfare of people, in most cases, are not external military forces bent on attacking the territorial integrity or sovereignty of their state It should follow, therefore, that the build-up of military prowess is not the primary means of pursuing the security of people. Clearly, it is favorable social, political, and economic conditions – that is, economic development, basic rights and political participation, control over the instruments of violence, and skill in the peaceful settlement of disputes – that are essential to advancing human security.

For the most part, these approaches to international peace and human security are funded out of aid budgets (official development assistance ODA). Governments also spend separately on diplomacy and disarmament, of course, but it is still instructive to compare the ODA to Military Expenditures of states[iii] to get a sense of how Lester Pearson’s giants and pygmies are doing.

Some states put a high premium on ODA. In Norway and the Netherlands the ratio is 1:1.7 and 1:1.9 respectively – that is, even though military forces are extremely expensive to maintain, in Norway and the Netherlands military spending is less than double that of their development assistance.

Other states have different priorities. In the United States the ratio is 1:25.1 – that is, Washington spends 25 times more on military preparations than on development assistance. The global average is much better than the US example, but a long way from the model of Norway and Netherlands. Among OECD countries, the ODA to Military Expenditures ratio is 1:7.5.

And Canada? Here the ratio is 1:3.5 – much, much better than the worst cases, but there is still some work to do to match the Norwegian model. Canada would reach the Norwegian and Netherlands achievements if we but implemented our declared policy. If Canadian development assistance was actually raised to the declared objective of .7% of our gross national income, and if defence spending continued as currently projected, the ODA to Military ratio in Canada would reach about 1:2.

On this International Day of Peace it is an objective worth rediscovering.

[i] The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs calls small arms “weapons of mass destruction” and offers background and figures (http://www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx?IndepthId=8&ReportId=58952), and the International Action Network on Small Arms provides additional evidence (http://www.iansa.org/media/wmd.htm).

[ii] The Military Balance 2007, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2007)

[iii] All figures are drawn from the IISS (see note 2), the OECD, and Canadian public accounts and are for 2005.

When Prime Minister Harper told the Economic Club of New York (Sept. 20/06)[i] that “Canada intends to be a player” in international peace and security efforts, he quickly turned to what was of more interest to his audience, and of greater concern to his government, namely security arrangements in North America. He noted the recent and indefinite renewal of the Canada-US North American Aerospace Defence Agreement (NORAD), but then went on to the nub of the matter: “Our partnership on all of these issues depends vitally on our maintaining a secure and efficient border.”

After the Cold War and 9-11, military cooperation is not the primary focus of the Canada-US security relationship. But compare the Prime Minister’s focus with that of Prof. J.L. Granatstein’s recent op-ed in the Globe and Mail[ii] which revived an old theme in Canada-US security relations – “defence against help.”[iii] Prof. Granatstein argued that, even with announced increases, Canadian military spending is so abysmally low that, in the mind of Washington, North American security is being imperiled. Furthermore, if we Canadians don’t soon do something about it, the Americans will be forced to take drastic unilateral action help us, whether we like it or not, with untold consequences for Canada. Well, actually, not untold but repeatedly predicted consequences. If the Americans were to assume our military security duties for us it would be “completely destructive to Canadian sovereignty and nationhood.” On the other hand, if Canada were to assume “the full cost of providing its own defence to a standard that does not cause concern in the US,” it would be “ruinously expensive.”

For Canada to mount a military capability “to a standard that does not cause concern in the US” would certainly be a tall order and might well be “ruinously expensive.” Washington’s standards for military spending are well beyond both Canada’s means and political will. It is hardly news that the US finds Canada’s military preparedness to be inadequate – it was always thus and it simply continues to put us in rather common company. Washington generally thinks that any country broadly on “their side” should spend more. The Bush Administration has not hesitated to admonish its NATO partners to increase spending (repeated to the 2006 NATO Defence Ministers’ meetings)[iv] – notwithstanding NATO being the relatively small community of states that collectively accounts for about 60 per cent of planetary military spending. In truth, it is only those countries not in the friends of Washington column that are regarded as spending too much.

But for Canada to mount a military capability that is commensurate with a reasonable assessment of current and foreseeable military threats is eminently affordable. In fact, that is what this country has been doing, without relying on American help. Surveillance of Canadian territory (air, land, and sea) is carried out by Canadian personnel using Canadian assets. Under normal circumstances, the defence of Canadian air, land, and sea space is also carried out by Canadian personnel and assets (aircraft and ships). The main peacetime threats are contraband and now fear of terrorist incursions, and all wayward and undocumented or unaccounted for aircraft and ships entering Canadian territory are intercepted by Canadians, not Americans.

In extraordinary circumstances, Canada, like all countries, looks for help. On rare occasions, the tracking of unauthorized aircraft or ships in border regions can include cross-boundary pursuit if a neighbor’s forces are not immediately available for a handover. In circumstances of a direct attack or military assault on Canadian territory Canada would most certainly depend on its allies – not the United States specifically, but NATO, with NORAD as a regional arrangement within NATO. It is the same NATO that the United States turned to in its extraordinary circumstance on Sept. 11/01and which invoked its Article V to declare that the attack on the US was regarded as an attack on them all.

The appropriateness of such military-centric responses to 9-11 is another matter, but the point is that since 1949 Canada has relied on collective defence – a reliance that is not a compromise of Canadian sovereignty any more than it is a compromise of British or Danish or American sovereignty – and has more or less ignored Washington’s fulminations against Canada’s inadequate defences.

Trying to raise Canadian military spending to a level that mollifies Washington is not an option. In the meantime, Canada does pay for its own defence in accordance with its own assessment of need in the context of other national and international needs and obligations. Canadians will regularly debate whether that is too much or too little, but let’s hope the focus is on the defence of Canada, not defence against help.

[i] Available at: http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=1327.

[ii] “Will the US cut Canada Loose?, Aug. 30/06, Available at: http://www.ccs21.org/articles/granatstein/2006/jlg_washington_aug06.pdf.

[iii] An interpretation of Canada-US defence relations first proffered by Canadian academic Nils Orvik in the 1970s.

[iv]US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld”continued to urge his counterparts to examine the percentage of the gross domestic product that is invested in defense within their respective countries.” Available at http://www.usembassy.org.uk/nato203.html.