Recently in Iran Category

Romney on Iran: "They have to understand that we will take military, kinetic action if they continue to pursue a nuclear option." The phrase "kinetic military action" is Obama legal speak for "war we don't want to get permission from congress to prosecute."

Aw, someone told Mittens to use a big-sounding glam-national security catchphrase. And bless his heart, last Friday on the Rick and Bubba Show the failed liberal un-Governator from Massachusetts actually threw caution to the wind, managing to awkwardly salvo the boilerplate that his advisors so painstakingly - probably for hours - maybe days, weeks - labored and toiled with him over blood, sweat, and tears so he would lob it properly at the enemy. And like a Russian nesting doll of foreign policy FAIL, the term itself reveals the tragic ignorance of whoever brandishes it. Indeed, his advisors probably spent hours, days, weeks, even years, learning raptly, uprearing, and canonizing this one precious phrase from the Obama administration (the RINOs' Good Shepherd is always the liberal Democrat, you know) along with countless other focus-group-tested buzzwords and - as Beltway Confidential dubbed them, "ungainly euphemisms":

Near as I can figure, "kinetic action" is redundant - like "wet water."  But Harvard Law professor and former head of the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith thinks there's a reason the Obama administration is at, er, "kinetic military action" with the English language here.

Gene Healy went on to quote Goldsmith as saying it was a means to avoid congressional authorization in Libya and who knows where else next (Romney-endorser John McCain is hovering like Gollum over his list this very moment). You could imagine the monody that rose from the catacombs where Romney's venerated "advisors" dwell. How will we ever again enjoy the bountiful fruit of presidency-by-proxy if these advisors cannot manage to imprint on Willard a single Hogwartsian phrase properly turned to unlock the heart of every blushing American voter. 

But the voter has to wonder, is this what we can expect from Romney: poorly repackaged retreads from the administration his entire campaign is ostensibly predicated on replacing? Romney does deserve some credit for realizing Iran has to be stopped - that's more than we can say for his wingman Ron Paul - but his complete and utterly excruciatingly embarrassing amateur hour with every facet of American National Security policy as a theory and as carried out within the context of even the most recent administration, and the tactical as well as the philosophical foundations that underlie how it is implemented, paint a picture of a man who is not built for president. This is by no means his first inexpert blunder or only crucial foible - and we're just in the talking phase where it's still considered easy. This type of pantomiming is like a knock-off of a poorly-made replica of a designer handbag, with its logo askew and poorly-stitched vinyl already coming apart in the shop. Unseriously dangerous. It reminds America once again that there is only one statesman in the room competent, capable, steady, learned, and set for the task, and that is Speaker Newt Gingrich, Ph.D., who for years has taught strategy and the art of war to our top generals. Given the delicate times into which we're entering, with whom would you rest easier knowing he were in charge of such a crisis? The answer is clearly the former Speaker. And that you should remember when you vote.

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

As you might recall, we wrote a month or so ago about how Mitt Romney is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Communist China. Today, we write about Rick Santorum's Quisling moment. Like Mitt Romney, Santorum started out his career labeling himself a progressive, distancing himself from Ronald Reagan, working closely with unions and pushing other liberal legislation.

In his later years, Santorum referred to liberal fellow Senator Arlen Specter as his mentor and even endorsed him against a conservative primary rival "because it will further the causes in which I believe and because it's in the best interest of my state." Obviously, those would be liberal interests. Specter led the controversial charge for amnesty in 2006 despite a precedent-setting uproar by Americans who made history with the sheer volume of calls to the capital switchboard made to register their abhorrence of the legislation Specter championed. Instead of acquiescing to the will of the people, however, Specter marched up to his lectern on the Senate floor, pounded it with his fist and declared, "The will of the Senate will prevail!" Specter was soon removed from office, but Santorum continued to have nice things to say about him.

Enter Rick Santorum 2012, candidate for Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces, champion of contraceptive bans and backward Taliban-style rules for women - the obvious over-compensation for his liberal past. All of this would be as comical as a goofy sweater-vest were it not for the real damage his voting record as Senator has done, is doing, and will do to our survival national security interests.

To wit, Santorum voted in 1997 to allow the sale of supercomputers to China, whose military leaders have repeatedly sworn to destroy us, make war on us, and to literally "exterminate" our entire population. Maybe if Santorum had spent less time distancing himself from Reagan and Gingrich in the 1980s, he would have learned something rather important: giving your enemy the technological advantage is suicide. In recent years, China's fastest supercomputers surpassed our own for the first time in history, and by 2010 were an astonishing "47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine". Make no mistake: this alone disqualifies Santorum to be Commander-in-Chief.

Our strategic advantage has long leaned on technology, given our comparatively small force size vis-à-vis China or the former Soviet Union. China's army alone is roughly the size of our entire population. Imagine that force size equipped with modern weaponry that far exceeds our own. That is defeat and the end of America. Rick Santorum voted for that.

Clearly, Santorum has failed to comprehend the strategic consequences of his actions, as the recent outcry over his outspoken opposition to manned space flight and a return to the moon demonstrates.  Former Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney and current national security advisor to Newt Gingrich Stephen Yates rightly eviscerated Santorum's childish, out of touch, and ultimately suicidal space policy:

I am deeply concerned that Senator Santorum so easily relinquishes space development to the Chinese and Russians.

American success in space is not only about being the first to develop a station on the moon. It is just as much about the explosion of math, science, engineering and national security technology that will launch America into a new age of innovation and prosperity.

We owe it to ourselves to set grandiose goals and then achieve them. It is the American way.

As with Romney and Huawei (and many of his other failures), Americans might be more forgiving if there were some serious evidence of enlightenment; however, in the case of both Romney and Santorum such an opening of the mind has not transpired and both candidates continue to represent an indirect but existential threat to American national security.



H/T to @MissLiberty on Twitter for the heads up on Santorum's pro-China voting record and for the China supercomputer tech links.

Related:

China's Supercomputing Goal: From 'Zero To Hero'

Rick Santorum's Voting Record

Middle East Quarterly: Russian and Chinese Support for Tehran

China Plans Manned Moon Mission

China's Challenge at Sea

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

It's hard to believe but there are still some who discount the threat posed by Iran to the West once the regime acquires and readies nuclear weapons. But why is Iran a threat? To answer that question we must ask some others:

• Would Iran like to see the West destroyed? Yes
• Is Iran willing to take action to bring this about? Yes
• Is Iran currently taking action to bring this about? Yes
• Would the end of this course of action legitimately threaten the West? Yes
• How seriously could Iran hurt us? A single nuclear weapon detonated above North America would emit an electromagnetic pulse capable of frying our electrical grid and nearly everything utilizing electronics. This could literally lead to the extermination of 90% of the population within a year.
• Can Iran be deterred? No
• Can the threat be defended against or mitigated? Not yet. The technology exists but it has not been implemented.
  
• What is being done to defend and mitigate? Too little
• How long before Iran's nuclear capability is operational?  Estimates vary from a few months to a couple of years at the optimistic end of the spectrum.
• How long before defense and mitigation techniques are operational? A few years.

As you can see, there is already a frightening gap between when many believe Iran will possess nuclear weapons and when we will be able to defend against them or reduce their impact.

Iran has already promised to "wipe" the US and Israel off the face of the earth. Newt Gingrich makes a very good point on this, as well. If a person believes it is a good idea to blow himself up with a suicide vest in order to kill just a few of his enemies, why wouldn't he want a nuclear bomb and be willing to accept the consequences of retaliation after launching a devastating attack on his enemies? But the threat is even worse than that of a single - or even a few - cities being destroyed by nuclear attacks at ground level. Presently, Iran's nuclear weapons program is being developed in conjunction with missile tests that include delivery systems being detonated at apogee to simulate an EMP attack. A single EMP event over North America could be sufficient to knock out our entire electrical grid, which may take up to a decade to replace.

Within the first year after such an event due to starvation, dehydration, and disease, up to 90% of the US population would be dead. That's from a single EMP from a single, fairly low-yield bomb, and Iran's leadership has talked openly both within political circles and internal military white papers and other documents about the desire to make an EMP strategy their top priority.

Furthermore, there is no deterrent as there was with the Soviet Union because the official form of Islam propagated and adhered to within the regime believes that they will herald in the era of the 12th Imam (their messiah) once Armageddon begins; furthermore, this is also the same belief system that glorifies the suicide bomber as a martyr for Islam.

The Iranian regime is willing to accept heavy losses by any retaliation and they believe it is their God-given purpose to obliterate the United States, and soon they will have the capability to do so. Furthermore, the US would be so badly weakened - if it exists at all - that retaliation and certainly any sustained conflict with Iran and its axis partners would be impossible from a resource standpoint. The best we could do is drop a few nukes on Iran, which Iran is willing to accept. I would say that is quite a real threat.

We must begin to accept reality on its terms rather than how we wish it to be, and in so doing ensure that no attack from Iran, its axis partners China and Russia, other allies or terrorist groups will be capable of inflicting serious damage.

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

As mentioned in my previous post, former China defense minister Chi Haotian called for the use of WMD to annihilate the US population in an act of ethnic cleaning never before seen in human history.

One such method of WMD attack - and also comparatively low-cost - that is gaining wider attention is the use of EMP (or Electromagnetic Pulse). China could employ this method through a proxy power such as Iran or North Korea or a non-state actor, thereby concealing the return address (or China may decide as it examines its cost-to-benefit ratio that such an attack is worth losses suffered during the response).

Here's how it works: A single nuclear missile is detonated at apogee above the continental United States, Europe, Israel, India, Japan or other target sending out several waves of energy toward everything within line-of-sight. Power grids, unshielded electronics such as your computer, transportation (cars, delivery trucks, ambulances, aircraft, etc.), radios and TVs would all be fried. This would have devastating consequences, as you might well imagine.

I believe this is one of the most crucial issues facing the world from a security standpoint. In fact, an EMP has the potential to kill up to 90% of the affected population within a year after the event due to the natural die-off resulting from infrastructure collapse.* It normally takes about ten years to replace major power transformers - and that's under the most ideal conditions. During that time, there would be no way to get food, water, medicine, and other essentials to market; there would be no means of transporting the sick, no method for regulating the indoor climate in hospitals and nursery homes or disposing of waste. Disease, starvation, and the elements would take their toll. And many of the illnesses and accidents treatable today would also become fatal. Refugees would also swarm the countryside, overwhelming those who believed their isolation and self-sufficiency would sustain them.  

If any regime deserves to be taken seriously in its threat to annihilate an entire population, that regime is surely CCP China, which has murdered over 70 million of its own people and counting, making it the most genocidal regime in human history. This is also a regime that makes no effort to diminish the cruelty of death, as we see from its harvesting of organs from living dissidents and the practice of filleting others alive. The regime has also built a vast network of mysterious and pristine cities across its country, which are completely uninhabited, as well as massive underground bunkers. It seems reasonable to assume these serve a strategic purpose and it is clear that it would be strategically useful for a regime intent on initiating - and winning - a nuclear confrontation with an enemy.

As is widely known, Iran has already tested the idea of detonating a missile at apogee and is presently acquiring both missile and nuclear technology from China, Russia, and others within that axis.

However, even if we were to eliminate all nuclear weapons and other man-made sources of EMP tomorrow, of grave concern also is the threat posed by solar events such as the Carrington event of 1859. Such an event - which occurs about every 100 years - would be global. Without hardened infrastructure from the electrical grid to transportation and communications, we are all literally sitting under the gun. That is why the best first strategy for ameliorating this unthinkable threat is to increase our survivability, as mentioned above. The next solar event is inevitable and is also arguably already overdue, and the reduced benefit of a first strike will also deter potential aggressors who seek to use a man-made event to score a quick win.

Without the will to develop new and more secure technologies, there is very little we can do to mitigate such an event, be it naturally-occurring or as the result of an attack from China directly or one of its proxies. So it is key that we understand that the moment to act is now. Otherwise, the inevitable will come. It will either be man-made or sun-caused, but at the point at which it occurs, civilization will suffer a severe downgrade and millions - possibly billions - of unique human beings with hopes, dreams, and aspirations will slowly and agonizingly vanish from the face of the earth.


*Forstchen, William R. One Second After. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2009.

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009. He hates the Turabian style format.