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À chaque période de vacances, tandis que le risque d'accidents de la route s'accroît, le thème de la sécurité au volant revient dans l'actualité. Le gouvernement multiplie alors les consignes de bon sens. En se focalisant sur le comportement individuel des conducteurs, ces préconisations négligent les (...) / France, Automobile, Inégalités, Sécurité, Protection sociale, Santé, Société, Transports, Violence - 2016/08

MSNBC's Commander-in-Chief Forum on Wednesday night was revealing, more so than the subsequent commentary seems to acknowledge.

The best stories from around the world.

More than ever before, navigating the Hajj by smartphone is a real option.

Gerald Knaus came up with the plan that stopped the flood of refugees from Turkey into Europe. Now it’s teetering on the brink of failure -- and he’s launched a one-man effort to save it.

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The isolated regime conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test on Friday just months after the U.N. imposed new economic penalties. Are sanctions good for anything?

The social media site just keeps deleting an iconic Vietnam War photo.

This is now a serious nuclear arsenal that threatens the region and, soon, the continental United States.

The White House has pledged to veto the bill if it passes in the House.

Stanford has undertaken an important effort: envisioning the implications of artificial intelligence over a 100-year span.

Le nouveau numéro de Politique étrangère, n° 3/2016, est désormais disponible en version ePub !

Achetez dès maintenant la version numérique sur Immatériel.fr.

“I’ve been, in one capacity or another, in the intel business for fifty-two years and I don’t remember a time when we had been beset by more crises and challenges around the world, and a diversity of these crises and challenges than we have today.” –Remarks by James Clapper, March 2nd 2015.

“…unpredictable instability has become the “new normal,” and this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.” -Remarks  by  James Clapper Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Feb 9th 2016

I’ve opened with the two above quotes, not because I’ve turned into the mythological Chicken Little running around wrongly screaming that the “sky is falling”, but because I genuinely believe we are at a major cross road in national security policy. I agree with DNI Clapper. I’ve seen a lot in my life but never have I seen a time with greater threats to our national security. I’ve blogged about it before, but I believe we are currently involved in two world wide wars: an undeclared Cyber War and a global war against terrorism. The mainstream media mostly focuses on terrorists attacks in Europe and here in the U.S. Speaking before the Senate this year, Clapper reported “Violent extremists are operationally active in about 40 countries”. The 2015 Global Terrorism Index declared Boko Haram, which operates primarily in Nigeria and has pledged its allegiance to ISIS, the most dangerous terrorist group in the world.

In addition to terrorism and cyber, Russia is playing Pacman in Eastern Europe, China is now claiming much of the East and South China Seas and building “artificial islands” to back up those claims, North Korea keeps conducting provocative missile tests to include successfully firing a missile from a submerged submarine, and the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan continues. During his aforementioned testimony before the Senate this year, DNI Clapper addressed some other potential problem areas with national security ramifications stating:

“Seven countries are experiencing a collapse of central government authority, and 14 others face regime-threatening, or violent, instability or both. Another 59 countries face a significant risk of instability through 2016. The record level of migrants, more than one million arriving in Europe, is likely to grow further this year. Migration and displacement will strain countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. There are now some 60 million people who are considered displaced globally. Extreme weather, climate change, environmental degradation, rising demand for food and water, poor policy decisions and inadequate infrastructure will magnify this instability.”

In November we as voters must decide who the next President and Commander-in-Chief of our military forces will be. Call me old fashioned or a Geek but I believe we are doing ourselves and our nation a disservice if we don’t make an effort to educate ourselves on the key issues. In this era of “if it bleeds it leads” and/or covering major issues with controversial “sound bites” journalism, it is up to the individual to research issues in order to be better informed. Thanks to the wonders of technology, there has never been a better and easier time to do this. In my opinion, events like the Aspen Security Forum provide an invaluable service. Not only do they bring together national security leaders and policy makers in one venue but if you can’t attend they live stream these events on the web. One of my favorite moments from this year’s event and one that got the biggest laugh of the week was when Cyril Sartor, a senior CIA official, remarked: “it feels a little weird as well for a CIA officer to be live streaming on YouTube”. If you don’t have time to watch the videos they also have transcripts of the sessions on the Aspen Security Forum web sites.

I’ve already written two blogs on this year’s forum. For this last one I thought I’d share more of what jumped out at me from speakers focusing on Russia and China.

Russia

Elissa Slotkin, Acting Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs made the following key points:

– Putin is disgruntled with how the Cold War ended and is looking for ways to be a global peer competitor of the U.S. He is pushing where he thinks there’s weakness; he’s pushing to see how far he can get.
– He is using cyber as a tool of statecraft.
– U.S./NATO approach is strong and balanced. The strong means the U.S. and NATO have to have the capabilities they need in the right places to deter Russia and we have to support partners, not our allies but our partners, in building their resilience in response to Russia Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, that’s the strong.
– On the balance side, it’s absolutely holding open the idea that there are things of mutual interests that we should negotiate with and work with Russia on Iran deal, Syria, if we could possibly do it, and holding the door open for them to rejoin the family of nations in international standing, good international standing. We don’t want to be adversarial with the Russians […] we can’t stand aside while they push and illegally annex places and sow dissent in places and destabilize places.
– Pentagon looks at capabilities and intentions. In capabilities, they’ve seen significant modernization of the Russian military and seen them create a doctrine of conducting unpredictable snap exercises where they suddenly build up divisions of troops on their borders and then sometimes, as in Crimea, use that as a cover for an invasion of another country.
– They use “hybrid” techniques like cyber, their use of space, their use of propaganda and other asymmetric tools that are deniable, hard to see, and hard to identify as indications and warning the way we have in the past seen as a buildup before an invasion.
– Intent […] With Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, it was clear…going in to back up Assad, […] without any forewarning, […] sets a certain tone and it opens up certain questions about their intent. Their activities in terms of engaging in an extremely close proximity with U.S. forces, almost taunting U.S. forces, it just leaves open these fundamental questions about intent. So when you put those two together, capabilities and intent, it leads you down a road to an assessment that Putin has decided to take on a decidedly more aggressive foreign policy. And that deeply concerns us.
– Hope we have learned from Cold War not to overestimate the competitor. We were at fault for thinking that the Soviet Union was this amazing, uncrackable empire and there were many places, particularly in the U.S. government that just fundamentally did not predict the fall of the Soviets.
– We should be taking those lessons […] and applying them to Putin’s Russia today. They’re not unbeatable. They are not operating from a position of strength.

Heather Conley, a Senior Vice President, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) made the following additional points:
– […] the piece that we are really missing […] Russia’s growing anti-access/area denial capabilities […] they are increasingly able to deny NATO and U.S. access to areas should we want to get in there. And we don’t have an answer for that right now.
– The other component that’s not quite there yet is the maritime component. We’re starting to get our hands around the increase in Russian submarine activity; anti-submarine warfare has to come back.

I disagree with Secretary Slotkin’s point about the Cold War. There seems to be this revisionist train of thought that the intelligence community over estimated the military capabilities of the Soviet Union and did not predict the fall of the Soviet Union. I spent most of my career in intelligence focused on not just the military capabilities of the Soviet Union but also trying to determine their intentions and when and under what circumstances they would flex their military muscles. I didn’t track the internal issues unless it had to do with their military spending. That did not mean that other members of the intelligence community weren’t watching what was happening in the internally in the Soviet Union.

I remember vividly the first person in the intelligence community to tell me the Soviet Union was going to fall because of their dire economic situation. This happened in the mid ‘80’s. I remember this not because of the analysis itself but because of the personality and character of the person who told me. He was the most dishonorable, back stabbing individual I ever ran into while working in the military but he was also one of the most brilliant. He had lived in the Soviet Union for a number of years so he had first hand knowledge of what he was talking about.

I don’t know if Ms. Slotkin was also implying that the intelligence community over estimated the Soviet Union’s military capabilities but I can say that intelligence estimates on capabilities were based on “close” observation of their military forces. In their book The Admiral’s Advantage , Christopher Ford and David Rosenberg remark:

“the Navy continually operated inside and among our opponent’s forces, maneuvering against real Soviet Units on a daily basis in an everyday life of war without the shooting on, above, and below the sea’s surface.”

Sometimes things got more personal. For example, in 1984, the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk ran over a Soviet Submarine in the Sea of Japan.

I mentioned to Secretary Slotkin, that during the Cold War, President Reagan established a policy that before a proposed war plan became operational it had to be war gamed. During the games, intelligence analysts simulated command of the opposition forces. One of the main purposes of these games was to ensure the U.S. warfighters were familiar with how the Soviets would use their various war platforms in a conflict. I asked if they had conducted war games against simulated hybrid threats like those posed by Russia. She replied:

“We love our wargaming at the Department of Defense, rest assured you cannot imagine. You might even be concerned by the amount of wargaming we’ve done on these scenarios because, as the last questioner mentioned, it’s just so different for us. So we have done—this is what I’m talking about when I say contingency planning. Our contingency planning is based on a number of wargaming scenarios that showed us what we think the most likely invasion scenarios are and they’re not traditional. So, absolutely. If you’re interested in playing Team Red, we are happy to sign you up, but we have done significant wargaming on different scenarios.”

I agree with Heather Conley’s comments on the maritime component. In June of this year in an issue of U.S. Navy Proceedings magazine Vice Adm. James Foggo III outlined a new era in U.S. and Russian submarine warfare he dubs “The Fourth Battle of the Atlantic.” You can read the whole article here but one of the key points is:

“In the early 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and commentary such as Francis Fukuyama’s landmark essay “The End of History?” led us to believe that our strategic rivalry with Russia and our need to stay one step ahead of Russian capabilities had faded. It has not. Once again, an effective, skilled, and technologically advanced Russian submarine force is challenging us. Russian submarines are prowling the Atlantic, testing our defenses, confronting our command of the seas, and preparing the complex underwater battlespace to give them an edge in any future conflict. Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, Royal Navy, the head of NATO’s maritime forces, noted recently that his forces report “more activity from Russian submarines than we’ve seen since the days of the Cold War.” 2 Some analysts believe that even our underwater infrastructure—such as oil rigs and telecommunications cables—may be under threat by these new and advanced forces. Russian focus, investment, and activity in the undersea domain are now so unmistakable that even the head of the Russian Navy, Viktor Chirkov, has admitted that Russian submarine patrols have grown 50 percent since 2013.”

Next week I’ll conclude with some thoughts on China. As always my views are my own.

The post GailForce: Aspen Security Forum—Final Thoughts appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Chart: Sunni provinces of Iraq and Syria in Turkish and Egyptian occupation zones. Click to enlarge.

Much debate has taken place on the topic how the Islamic State should be militarily defeated, including various combinations of US, Russian, European, Turkish, Iranian and Arab powers. However, too little is being said on the political solution after the military campaign. Maintaining united Syria and Iraq may be favored by Iran wanting to extend Shi’a rule over the Middle East or by Turkey wanting to prevent emergence of an independent Kurdish state on its southern border. Experience with the post-occupation Iraq (2013-16) clearly shows how national unity governments fail to achieve political stability in countries with progressing ethnic emancipation. In this article, I would like to describe the political solution for the Sunni Arab portions of Iraq and Syria after the defeat of the Islamic State: a temporary Turkish and Egyptian occupation.

As I argued in my previous article “Partition of Syria and Iraq: Lessons from Europe”, Iraq and Syria after the Arab Spring are different places than they used to be before. Arab Spring was mostly a Sunni Arab national revolution and the Sunni-Shi’a strife became much more about ethnic identity than religious dogmas. I argued that leaving Syria and Iraq united countries would lead to further tragedies. I showed examples of failed federations in the Third World and described why existence of united Iraq and Syria are obstacles in introduction of democracy as well as further Arab integration. Therefore, there is an urgent need for partitioning Syria and Iraq along ethno-religious lines.

In another article “Sunni Areas Post-ISIS: Occupation by Sunni Powers?”, I argued that Sunni Arab populations of Iraq and Syria are unable to govern themselves in the next few years while their ruling by the Shi’a regime in Iraq and Alawi regime in Syria lead to popularity of the cancer of Islamic State among the Sunni Arabs in the recent past. I argued that global powers like the US or Russia lost their popularity in the Middle East with their military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively. Therefore, they cannot be occupation powers in Iraq and Syria any more. I also argued why small and middle-sized countries cannot do this job after bad experience with international adventurism of their rulers like Qaddafi or Saddam. And I also mentioned why active role of Saudi Arabia and Israel are unacceptable.

Military occupation is a task that must be assigned to countries with a status of regional powers and with relatively stable political regimes and operational armies. After ruling out Saudi Arabia, the only two Sunni powers that are suitable to become occupation powers are Turkey and Egypt.

Egypt and Turkey: regional powers on the opposite poles of the Arab revolutions

Turkish President Erdogan and Egyptian President al-Sisi stand on two opposite poles of the political spectrum in events related to the Arab Spring. Turkey was the main supporter of the revolutionary forces led by the Muslim Brotherhood while the current Egyptian regime is one of the strongholds of counterrevolution and return of the Ancient Regime. However, both Turkey and Egypt are regional powers and they are able to conduct on a responsible manner as regional powers do. Both powers have or renewed their historically good relations with the great powers—The United States, Russia and China, with another regional powers—Israel and Saudi Arabia, and their status is more or less respected by the Arab public opinion.

That is why after defeat of the Islamic State and after evacuation of Assad’s regime to the Mediterranean coast, Sunni Arab territories of Iraq and Syria should get under occupation authorities of two Sunni Muslim regional powers—Turkey and Egypt.

After July 15-16 coup attempt in Turkey, a presidential dictatorship has been installed that was previously rejected by the voters in the two elections of spring and fall 2015. Selahattin Demirtaş, leader of the pro-Kurdish parliamentary party HDP, was one of the first politicians to reject the coup and to support President Erdogan. Despite that fact, Kurdish voters became a target of oppression as their vote was the main obstacle for installing a presidential rule a year earlier. Also, hunt for sympathizers of Fethullah Gülen became a mission for the new presidential regime.

Nevertheless, the attitude of the political parties to the military coup attempt showed an unprecedented national unity among Turkish Islamists, leftists and nationalists of AKP, CHP and MHP. This unity allows for mid term political stability in Turkey. It is a guarantee for their common political interest in stability of the occupied portions of Iraq and Syria. Refocusing of the Turkish army to a military occupation of parts of Iraq and Syria could relieve Turkish population suffering under the witch-hunt against the Kurd and Gülenists.

In Egypt, the military regime is still preoccupied with eradication and elimination of the Muslim Brotherhood. This witch-hunt is accompanied with an unprecedented wave of terror and hunt for political opponents of the regime. Refocusing of the Egyptian army to a military occupation of parts of Syria and Iraq could relieve Egyptian population suffering under this terror.

Partitioning of Syria and Iraq to occupation zones ruled by regimes from the opposite poles of the spectrum of attitudes to the Arab Spring would guarantee that the Sunni parts of Iraq and Syria would not become dictatorships after withdrawal of the occupiers. Egypt would tolerate development of secular and nationalist political forces including Baathist/Assadist ones in its occupation zone. On the other hand, Turkey would attempt to restore Muslim Brotherhood in its zone. This is a prerequisite for future political pluralism in the new Sunni countries. However, eradication of relics of Islamist extremism and Jihadism would be the main task for the two occupation powers, be it linked to al-Qaeda or Islamic State, or Wahabism and Salafism promoted by Saudi Arabia.

Turkish and Egyptian occupation zones in Syria and Iraq

In Syria, nine governorates can be considered predominantly Sunni Arab: Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor on the east, Aleppo and Idlib on the north, Hama and Homs in the middle and Damascus, Dara and Quneitra on the south. In Iraq, there are four old and one newly established governorates that are Sunni: Niniwe/Mosul on the north, Salahaddin and Diyala on the northeast and Anbar and the newly created Falluja (since January 2014) on the northwest. So there are 14 Sunni Arab governorates in total. They should to be split between the occupation powers—Turkey and Egypt.

Logically, an option with an equal number of governorates ruled by Turkey and Egypt, seven and seven, should be achievable. Further, northern governorates should be logically occupied by Turkey while the southern ones by Egypt. There are two dominant cities in the southern part of the Sunni Arab areas: Damascus, the Syrian capital, and Western Baghdad, a part of the Iraqi capital. Another two dominant cities with an original population of two million are in the northern part of the Sunni Arab areas: Iraqi Mosul and Syrian Aleppo. So the Turkish and Egyptian occupation zones would be equal as for the number of metropolitan areas.

Map: Occupation and Protection zones in Iraq and Syria. Click to enlarge.

The Turkish occupation zone on the north would logically include Iraqi governorates of Mosul/Niniwe, Salahaddin and Diyala and Syrian governorates of Aleppo, Raqqa, Idlib and Hama as well as metropolitan areas of Mosul and Aleppo.

The Egyptian occupation zone on the south would contain remaining two Iraqi governorates of Anbar and Falluja, and five Syrian governorates of Damascus, Dara, Homs, Deir ez-Zor and Quneitra as well as metropolitan areas of Damascus and Western Baghdad.

At the same time, it must be said that those Sunni occupation zones must exclude Kurdish and Christian portions of Diyala, Salahaddin, Niniwe, Hasakah, Raqqa, Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, Homs and Damascus governorates as well as predominantly Shi’a districts of Diyala, Salahaddin and Niniwe governorates.

New Sunni Arab states after the withdrawal of the foreign forces

Individual provincial administrations should be under direct military rule of the occupation armies. Early free elections as well as a demand that only Syrians and Iraqis should decide on their own future are unrealistic and they would result in further mass suffering. Central governments of the Sunni parts of Syria and Sunni parts of Iraq (Jezira) should be created only after several years of pacification under Turkish and Egyptian occupation authorities—something similar to post-war Germany in 1945-49 and Austria in 1945-55.

Withdrawal of the Turkish and Egyptian occupation forces could be only possible after stabilizing of the Sunni portions of Iraq and Syria and after creating of the central government of Jezira (Sunni part of Iraq) and the Sunni Syria. On these territories, two Sunni Arab states would be created: the Arab Republic of Syria with Damascus as a capital and the Arab Republic of Jezira with Mosul as its capital.

Sunni Arab refugees from Iraq and Syria to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and the EU would get an opportunity to to return to Turkish or Egyptian occupation zones of Syria or Iraq, as soon as the security situation allows that.

Referendum for the Syrian territories of Mesopotamia

It is true that the Islamic State represents one of the worst political regimes that ever emerged in the Middle East, combining the most conservative attributes of Salafism with delusion and militancy of modern Jihadism and brutality and apostasy of Saddam’s and Qaddafi’s ideological militia, all wrapped in sophisticated mass manipulation techniques used by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and IT skills typical for the 21st century “Big Brother” regimes of Russia and China.

But the same Islamic State was successful in correction of historical injustices caused by the hundred years old Sykes-Picot Agreement and uniting the divided populations of the northern Mesopotamia, also called Jezira. The inhabitants of the Syrian territories of Mesopotamia—Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor—got an opportunity to reunite with their historical kins in northern Iraq under the rule of the Islamic State.

As the defeat of the Islamic State should bring a stable solution for Iraq and Syria, the population of the two provinces of Syrian Mesopotamia must be given an opportunity to decide in a referendum whether they prefer to remain part of Syria or become part of Jezira together with the Sunni territories of the Iraqi Mesopotamia

The post Turkish and Egyptian Occupation in Iraq and Syria appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

In this virtual roundtable of six podcasts hosted by Professor Sarwar Kashmeri, the Foreign Policy Association aims to shed some light and serve as a catalyst for developing awareness, understanding and informed opinions on the key issues that face American policymakers as they seek to peer over the horizon to manage the U.S.-China relations.

In the fifth installment of the virtual roundtable, Stephen Roach—former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm’s chief economist, and senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs—discusses the commercial and financial relations between the two biggest economies in the world.

When asked about the strategic significance of the shift in wealth from the West towards Asia—with China’s GDP overtaking that of the U.S. according to the IMF—Roach replied: “On a per capita basis there is still an enormous disparity, with China still qualifying as a high income developing economy.”

Roach counterbalanced this view, noting that: “Strategically, scale is important—China, because of its aggregate GDP, dominates many flows in finance, in trade, in the commodity markets, oil, natural gas, automobile demand. The strategic significance of China’s scale certainly cannot be minimized in Asia and in the broader global economy.”

On a slowdown of China’s economic growth, Roach explained: “There has already been a disruption: the manufacturing economy is clearly going more slowly in a weak global environment. The external demand for Chinese-made products has slowed dramatically, and the lagged impact of a stronger Chinese currency over the last ten years has taken a toll on Chinese competitiveness as has mounting wage costs of workers in export-intensive industries. That shock is already there.”

http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/S-Roach-WCOPY-081716.mp3

For more analysis on the U.S.-China relations, listen to the other podcasts of the virtual roundtable.

The post Stephen Roach on U.S.-China Economic Relations appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

A former United Nations peacekeeper from Niger has been presented with the inaugural UN Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award for her work in integrating gender perspectives into peacekeeping activities while serving in Mali.

Describing religious intolerance as one of the greatest global threats, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged the world to join together for peaceful coexistence and a life of dignity for all.

Speaking at a gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United Nations today, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the focus of cooperation between the two organizations on a range of sectors, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and gender equality and women’s empowerment.

After attacks on Americans, the State Department envoy to South Sudan faced a tough crowd on Capitol Hill.

The United States, Germany, and other economic powerhouses haven't learned the dire lessons of Japan's lost decades.