FRANK J. GAFFNEY, JR.
In the past month, Americans have been led to believe that
President Obama has achieved diplomatic breakthroughs with Syria and
Iran, thereby avoiding looming conflicts with those two rogue states.
If the result being promised is not exactly "peace in our time," the
White House certainly is encouraging the notion that its robust threats
of military action against these allied enemies brought them to the
negotiating table.
Regrettably, this proposition does not stand up to scrutiny. Far
from a Reaganesque policy of "peace through strength" and the practice
of what historian Henry Nau calls "armed diplomacy" that it has made
successful in the past, Team Obama is engaged in disarmed diplomacy.
The results will, predictably, be disappointing and probably quite
dangerous.
For example, with help from his Russian protectors, Syrian
dictator Bashir Assad has now bought himself protection against any
strike the United States might still be capable of mounting by promising
to eliminate his chemical stockpiles. No amount of officially professed
U.S. "skepticism" or watered-down UN resolutions can obscure an unhappy
fact: Assad's regime is not owning up to all of its arsenal of weapons
of mass destruction - which includes not only more chemical weapons than
it has declared, but untold quantities of deadly biological weapons, as
well.
Meanwhile, as international inspectors - not a few of whom
will be Russians who can be expected to run interference for their
client - prepare for the hazardous, if not impossible, job of finding
and eliminating all of what the Syrians have squirreled away, Assad will
have a free hand to fight his Islamist and other enemies at home with
conventional means. Obama's arming of Assad's foes, and ours, inside
Syria will probably simply ensure that civil war goes murderously on for
quite some time.
The prospects for a happy outcome for Obama's disarmed diplomacy
are no better with respect to Iran. Smooth-talking Iranian leaders
brought their selective charm offensive to New York last week. In short
order, they demonstrated contempt for the President by stiffing his
offer of some sort of publicized encounter.
Worse, they established his desperation for a new pretext for staving
off pressure from Israel and Congress for action on Iran's incipient
nuclear weapons capability. Mr. Obama paid dearly for it: offering to
begin to unravel American and multilateral sanctions in exchange for
nothing more than new negotiations - albeit ones that will, we're
assured, be less protracted and more productive than each of the
previous ones with this and other Iranian interlocutors.
The truth is that our adversaries, whether they be in Damascus,
Tehran, Moscow, Beijing or elsewhere have not simply taken the measure
this wholly inadequate American president. They are responding to all
he is doing to emasculate what has been the principal obstacle to their
ambitions: our military, long the world's finest.
It takes nothing
away from the men and women who are faithfully serving their country in
uniform to point out that they are not being given the wherewithal -
notably the funding for training, maintenance and modernization - needed
to keep the peace.
To get a proper perspective on what is being done to
"fundamentally transform" our armed forces, however, one must also look
beyond the condition of the military itself. A leading indicator of
future incapacity to perform its mission by, among other things, making
the alternative to diplomacy unappealing to our foes, can be found in
the simultaneous evisceration of the nation's defense industrial base.
To cite but one illustrative example: Boeing announced recently
that it would have to shut down the production line for the C-17, the
Free World's only modern, wide-bodied airlifter. A
sequestration-induced lack of orders from the U.S. military and
uncertainty about the prospects for foreign sales would effectively
foreclose future purchases of the aircraft that will be, for the
foreseeable future, the backbone of our prompt power-projection
capabilities.
Take no comfort from suggestions that we can always
reopen the line when (not if) more C-17s are needed. The harsh reality
is that, even if the machine tools and other specialized equipment
associated with manufacturing such a sophisticated airplane are not sold
off, say, to China (as was done with the B-1 bomber's production line),
the workforce and highly perishable second- and third-tier suppliers
are unlikely to be reassembled and certified - certainly not anytime
soon. Therefore, we must not let the C-17 line be closed.
Similar problems are to be expected with the contraction of the
industrial base needed to supply tanks and other armored fighting
vehicles, fighter aircraft and combatant ships. Perhaps not right away
but in due course, bad guys all over the planet will know that we lack
the means to mount an effective, or at least a sustained, impediment to
their aggressive designs. That is a formula for more conflict, not
peace.
The Lexington Institute's splendid Dan Goure has warned, the U.S.
military is already "unready." So have the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who
have told Congress that if sequestration persists, they will not be able
to fight even one war to assured victory.
What we have seen in the last month, and will surely witness more
of in the days and years to come, is how ready our adversaries are to
take advantage - diplomatically and otherwise - of our self-inflicted
and unilateral disarmament.
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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