Some of the many interactive geography quizzes on the web ask visitors to identify the countries and capitals of the Middle East. We assume MESH readers have no problem there, so we’ve collected links to more challenging quizzes. There’s no end to learning.

• Iraq. The United States has been at war in Iraq for five years, but only one in three young Americans can even find it on the map. You can find it, but can you identify all of Iraq’s governates and their capital cities? There are two good versions of the governates quiz, here and here. And once you’ve aced that, move on to the capitals quiz.

• Iran. This weblog has devoted much attention to Iran, the rising power. An Iranian who purports to know something about the United States can probably identify the great State of Texas on a map. So can you identify the great province of Fars? Try your hand at this quiz.

And there is also much talk about how Iran’s ethnic groups might be turned against the Islamic regime. Take this quiz and see whether you can find them.

• Afghanistan and Yemen. U.S. forces have been in Afghanistan even longer than they have been in Iraq, and the President-elect wants to send more. Take the same rigorous test for provinces of Afghanistan, in two versions, here and here. And for the truly expert (or for Yemenis), see if you can navigate another hot spot in the GWOT, by identifying the governates of Yemen, here.

• More fun/frustration. Forget about those simple interactive quizzes that ask you to identify leaders or flags, and try these instead. Here are ten Middle Eastern countries; order them by population size. And here are another ten; order them by total military expenditure. (The answers are supposedly based on the CIA World Factbook.)

Be sure to read the speech given on Monday by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Association of American Universities in Washington.

Since 9/11, the U.S. and its allies have been involved in two prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are low-tech conflicts in which anthropological skills and language training are often more important than high-tech weapons systems.

But as David Ucko pointed out in the most recent Orbis, a quick study of defense spending priorities reveals that large, expensive weapons systems better suited for a future conventional war with China continue to soak up more funds than training and equipment tailored for the counter-insurgency fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. Department of Defense anthropologist Montgomery McFate is fond of pointing out that the amount of money spent by the Pentagon on social science research annually is equal to just two and a half F-22 fighter-interceptors—a weapons system Gates complains has yet to fly a single mission in Iraq or Afghanistan, while soldiers on the ground remain in dire need of better language skills and cultural training to help navigate the population-centric battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gates also understands the Department of Defense needs the help of America’s academy to develop these language skills, regional expertise, and cultural knowledge. As such, he went before the Association of American Universities on Monday prepared to be humble, self-depreciating, and charming in his effort to woo an academic community whose members often have an uneasy relationship with the uniformed military services.

Inevitably, the speech turned to the Human Terrain Teams in use in Iraq and Afghanistan which have provoked a furious reaction from an anthropological community still scarred by Project Camelot and other Cold War misadventures. McFate herself has been relentlessly targeted by the self-appointed mandarins of the anthropological community who have threatened to blacklist any anthropologist who dares work for the Pentagon. Gates addressed the subject with typical good humor:

At times, the lexicon we come up with for new programs appears almost designed to induce maximum paranoia. In that vein, “Human Terrain Teams” follows in the proud tradition of initiatives like:
• The Office of Special Plans;
• TALON Reporting System; and
• Total Information Awareness.
In reality, there is a long history of cooperation—as well as controversy—between the U.S. government and anthropology. Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.

It is hard to imagine Donald Rumsfeld giving such a speech, but perhaps that is unfair. Gates, as the former president of Texas A&M University, is uniquely prepared to address the grievances and grudges of academia while at the same time making it clear that America needs the help of its regional studies experts and language scholars to help it carry out operations abroad in a way that best protects the lives and welfare of the innocents. He was right to extend an “olive branch” (as one headline put it) to academia. It remains to be seen whether or not he and the nation’s uniformed services gain a reciprocal response.

From Ofira Seliktar

The genesis of my book The Politics of Intelligence and American Wars with Iraq is rooted in my experience teaching a class on the Middle East at Texas A&M University during the revolution in Iran in 1979. Most of my students were ROTC cadets who hoped to serve in intelligence, yet had difficulty understanding how a country could opt for what they defined as a regressive revolution. After having researched a book on the Carter administration’s failure to predict the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, I realized that such problems transcended my classroom, as they represent a more general difficulty in comprehending foreign societies and, especially, the Middle East.

Some of these problems relate to the pervasive influence of realist theory in international relations; countries are considered to be rational unitary actors which are said to share our view of what a nation’s interest is. Naturally, realist theory does not accommodate non-state actors like Al Qaeda or rogue regimes (like Syria and Iran) which have collaborated with terrorist organizations to destabilize the region and, in the process, incurred the high cost of international isolation and sanctions.

Another source of misperception stems from the writings of many Middle East experts who have downplayed the impact of the virulent strand of Islam which gave birth to terrorism on the scale practiced by Osama bin Laden. Indeed, my book documents in great detail how—until 9/11—most observers dismissed the possibility of a mega-terrorist attack and argued that bin Laden was a cold war-style bogeyman.

More to the point, The Politics of Intelligence draws attention to the perils of intelligence gathering and analysis in Iraq since 1980, a country notorious for its secretive ways, a byzantine political system and a hard-to-decipher dictator with a penchant for bizarre behavior. The Carter drive to “clean up” the intelligence community, coupled with the equally energetic Clinton era “scrub,” hobbled the few remaining intelligence assets of the CIA with legal limitations that rendered the operational branch highly risk-averse. All this occurred while the specter of WMD in the Middle East made the issue of Islamist terrorists with murky ties to state sponsors more urgent.

When Clinton bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998, he acknowledged this linkage, for the CIA had determined that Iraqi engineers had developed chemical weapons for Al Qaeda at that site. Yet, criticism of the “wag the dog” presidency made the administration reticent either to pursue bin Laden or to target Iraq. Obtaining evidence about Hussein’s nonconventional weapons program was equally difficult given the virtual lack of American intelligence on the ground. After Iraq expelled UNSCOM in 1998, the United States was forced to rely on assorted sources, including allied intelligence services, Arab leaders, defectors and former inspectors. The resulting CIA Iraq estimate contended that Hussein had retained parts of his WMD program and was intent on enlarging its scope.

The 9/11 attack and the anthrax scare added urgency to the issue of Islamist terrorism and rogue states. The CIA, which had failed to predict the attack, was further disgraced when evidence of an Al Qaeda chemical weapons program was uncovered in Afghanistan and northern Iraq where Saddam Hussein sponsored a terrorist group allied with Al Qaeda. The realization grew that—in the murky world of WMD, Islamist terrorists and less than rational rogues like Iraq—there may not be enough “smoking gun”-grade evidence, a standard for action. Thus, the Bush administration embraced preemption and invaded Iraq.

The failure to find WMD and the high cost of the war have generated tremendous criticism, including the allegation that a group of Jewish neoconservatives in the administration, acting on behalf of the state of Israel, manipulated the intelligence in order to trick the United States into an unnecessary war. The backlash has also rehabilitated the realist idea that the Middle East is populated by rational state actors that play by universal rules.

I hope that The Politics of Intelligence and American Wars with Iraq will contribute to the debate about the difficulties of understanding the highly complex nature of the Middle East regimes. The Iraqi estimate revealed numerous problems: verification of nuclear proliferation, questionable rationality of state actors and their terrorist proxies, difficulty of penetrating such networks, murky and inconclusive evidence. These will continue to plague the United States in the years to come.

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The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program set off a storm of controversy and criticism. I critiqued only one part of it in an earlier post. I believed then, as I believe now, that the report was flawed intellectually as it relied an academic assumption that the Iranian leadership behaves as a rational actor that decides through a traditional “cost-benefit” calculus. However, there were other substantive criticisms that touched on its many other problems, not the least of which was what kind of intelligence could have led to a reversal of the intelligence community’s earlier judgment on Iran’s nuclear program.

The 2007 report showed that our intelligence officials judged with “high confidence” that Iran had stopped the military component of its nuclear program in 2003 and with “moderate confidence” that it had yet to restart that component by mid-2007. The thrust of the report, however, rocked the administration’s policy towards Iran’s nuclear weapons program and helped stifle its efforts towards containing or reversing the Iranian program.

This past week, however, we’ve seen two new developments that challenge this view, though they may not improve the administration’s ability to stop the Iranian program. The first development occurred in Israel. The director of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, reported to Israel’s foreign affairs and defense committee that it judged Iran will develop a nuclear weapon within three years.

The second development occurred in the United States. In his Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell recast the report in a slightly modified form. He acknowledges that the most difficult challenge of nuclear production, uranium enrichment, continues under the Iranian regime. In addition, whereas the 2007 report glosses over whether Iran could have restarted its covert weapons program as of mid-2007, McConnell’s report changes the tone significantly. He says: “We assess with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted these activities as of mid-2007, but since they comprised an unannounced secret effort which Iran attempted to hide, we do not know if these activities have been restarted.”

This last admission is interesting in light of the fact that Israel earlier had agreed that Iran halted its covert military program in 2003, but restarted it elsewhere soon after.

Is the intelligence community backtracking or hedging its bets against the future? I do not know. I do hope, however, that these developments encourage junior intelligence officers to challenge the “mainstream” view of our senior intelligence officials. Far too often we have experienced intelligence failures because the “mainstream” view failed to account for the unpalatable. Many low- to mid-level intelligence officers were deeply disturbed by the Iranian NIE’s “consensus” view, when in fact, their views were not even considered.

(A MESH member who prefers to remain anonymous submits the following comment on the film Charlie Wilson’s War.)

This is a movie made by a highly sophisticated political and artistic mind, someone—the director—who knows all the arguments and charges and nuances of what this important episode has come to mean to various interpreters. I came away feeling that the film is aimed at four different audiences, the last of the four being the most important.

The first and most inconsequential audience is people like us, who know a lot about all of the doings covered in the story and who, like me, will find the movie to be a rather charming bad-boy fairy tale comedy involving some preposterous assertions.

The second audience, I imagine (I’m hardly knowledgable about the cinema “industry”) is the famous 18 to 29 demographic. They will like the sex scenes and proliferation of the F word. They also will delight in the parodies of Washington authority-figures. The battle scenes in Afghanistan will also be attractive to them as almost as good as video games, and about as meaningful. The geopolitics of it all will be utterly lost on them, as they wouldn’t be able to tell you what a “Soviet” was anyway.

The third audience would be those in East Texas and elsewhere across “real” America, where the story will seem to be a delightfully stirring tale of how a Good Ole Boy from Nagadoches took on the effeminate Washington establishment bureaucracy and whupped those Commies.

The fourth audience is the one that really matters to those who produced and directed the movie. That would be people like themselves: well-to-do, highly educated, politically active “Progressives” who proclaimed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that “We (America) brought it on ourselves.” To them, the underlying story is that the U.S. supply of weapons to the Afghan Mujahedin virtually created the movement which would later emerge as the Taliban, would energize Al Qaeda by proving that holy warriors could win a world-historical victory over a powerful industrailized imperial power, and would launch the religiously-driven terrorist war against America.

Finally, as an example of the sophisticated fine touch of the makers of this film, there is the vignette early on when Congressman Wilson in the corridor of the House is told that The Speaker wants to put him on the Ethics Committee looking into the charges against John Murtha. Wilson snaps back, saying that the charges against Murtha are baseless. Only those closely following the 2006 anti-Iraq War movement, in which Congressman Murtha’s calls for the United States to pull the troops out in acceptance of defeat were central, would recognize that the film makers here are trying to refute the re-emerged criticism of Murtha for being involved in the “Abscam” scandal of the time in which the movie is set. In Charlie Wilson’s War every little scene has a meaning all its own.

The controversial National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program raises more questions than it answers. Critics—and criticisms—are aplenty. These have focused on three levels: tactical (the kind of intelligence we have), strategic (understanding Iran’s intentions) and political (the fallout on U.S. and international policies in curbing Iranian nuclear ambitions). Given the recent disastrous failures of intelligence, this reversal of previous estimates also does little to restore public confidence in the intelligence process.

There are other grounds for concern about this NIE, especially the timing of its public release and whether it has inadvertently signaled a “green light” to Iran to restart or continue its nuclear weapons development program. At the very least, it will make it extremely difficult for the U.S. to reverse itself once again and muster a domestic and international consensus for diplomatic or military pressure against the Iranian program, should it be found again to have an active weapons component.

Central to the problem of this NIE is its assessment of the Iranian decision-making process. The NIE reports:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs [emphasis added].

That is to say, the Iranian leadership is a rational actor. Some combination of threats and inducements can and does alter its decision-making process in the development of its nuclear weapons program.

Raymond Ibrahim points out correctly that common sense tells us Iran wants to acquire nuclear weapons and that it is very difficult for leaders in states that have nuclear weapons to understand the intense desire of non-nuclear states to acquire them. Why then this disparity between common sense and “intelligence”?

The problem may be with our understanding of “cost-benefit” analysis. While a rational actor approach may be useful for some theoretical approaches to international politics, it may actually mask or misstate the approach of human policy-makers. In fact, for the real world of decision-makers, a cost-benefit analysis oversimplifies the whole process. When it comes to acquiring nuclear weapons, it is not a simple either/or: either build or avoid building a nuclear weapon. The decisions may include how to build, whether to build on a civilian program, whether to deceive opponents in the process, and how to mask the deception.

The “cost-benefit” approach may also oversimplify nuclear deterrence. In my case study of four small nuclear powers, including Israel, India, Pakistan and the Republic of South Africa, I showed how all pursued nuclear weapons despite international opprobrium and all displayed a nuanced appreciation of the conditions under which they might actually use them (see Figure 1: Nuclear Deterrence/Threat/Use Continuum, below).

There I quoted a Pakistani nuclear strategist who indicated that “mutual suicide” could be a rational choice for Pakistan if other options were closed, further shaking our confidence in the “cost-benefit” calculus of rationality.

There are related problems in a “cost-benefit” approach to analyzing Iranian decision-making in pursuit of a nuclear arsenal: the potential for self-deception as well as strategic deception by Iran.

The self-deception comes from “mirror-imaging” how our adversaries decide policy: that is, interpreting another’s decision-making process in light of our own. Such an approach ignores the intensity of the desire an opponent may have to acquire nuclear weapons and its strategic calculus in doing so. It pays to recall the lesson of the first Gulf War, after which one Indian general concluded: “Never fight the Americans without nuclear weapons.” It is likely that Iranian decision-makers have seen and understood the very different treatment North Korea and Iraq received from the U.S., attributing it to North Korea’s possession of a nuclear arsenal.

Strategic deception is also possible. As in the case of the four small nuclear powers, all masked their weapons programs or hid them behind civilian nuclear energy programs. All of these states actively sought to discourage U.S. and international discovery of their weapons programs. The Soviet Union was famous for its efforts at strategic deception and perceptions management. Even tactically, we can be surprised. Indian scientists bragged at being able to spoof U.S. satellites at Pokhran the day of the first overt nuclear weapons detonations in May 1998.

The NIE has raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. But the approach it takes to understanding the decision-making calculus of Iran may be the most fundamental flaw of the estimate, one that has lead to all the other problems. When professors get it wrong, little or no harm is done. But it is a completely different matter when our best intelligence officials err. Everyone is liable to suffer.

Dilip Hiro, a London-based author who focuses on Iran and Iraq and a frequent commentator in The Nation, addresses the question “Why Iran Didn’t Cross the Nuclear Weapon Road” in a recent essay (YaleGlobal Online, Dec. 11, 2007) he wrote for the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

The bulk of Hiro’s essay rehashes the timeline of Iran’s nuclear program beginning with the Shah and continuing with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s decision to jump start the program during the Iran-Iraq War after the Iraqi military began utilizing chemical weapons and intermediate-range missiles against the Islamic Republic. On this issue, Hiro is on solid ground; he is the author of a short book chronicling the Iran-Iraq War.

But this background section, although comprising the bulk of his essay, is immaterial to the question he poses: if the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is accurate, why did Iran cease work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003? Hiro tackles the question in just four concluding paragraphs. His thesis: It was not President George W. Bush’s willingness to pre-empt perceived WMD threats which led to the Iranian leadership’s reversal, but rather the reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which did not find chemical or biological, let alone nuclear weapons stockpiles in Iraq. (That the Iraq Survey Group could only conduct its research because of Operation Iraqi Freedom is a paradox which Hiro ignores.)

Hiro bases his argument solely on the decision of Hasan Rowhani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in 2003, to suspend temporarily Iran’s uranium enrichment.

To draw such broad conclusions from such scanty evidence is bizarre. Rowhani may have been a negotiator, but he was no decision-maker. That responsibility rests with the Office of the Supreme Leader and with the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who run Iran’s nuclear program. A lower-level’s politician’s assurance to European politicians means little, given the tendency of Iranian officials to say one thing and do another. Add to this the fact that Iran’s commitment to its suspension pledge proved transitory. In retrospect, the temporary suspension was even less than met the eye, given that Iranian officials continued, if not to run centrifuges, then to upgrade their capacity to industrial levels in a facility able to accommodate 50,000 centrifuges.

A number of analysts have already questioned the NIE’s conclusions. Putting aside the politics behind its findings, the NIE falls flat in definitions. What is civilian and what is military when pursuing technology such as uranium enrichment that is decidedly dual-use? Indeed, if both the NIE and International Atomic Energy Agency reports are accurate, then what the Iranian leadership has done is alter the sequence of its program, rather than its content. Indigenous production of weapons-grade nuclear fuel is a more difficult problem than warhead construction. Hiro’s assumption that there has been a radical change in Iran’s nuclear posture is spurious.

So where does this leave Hiro’s essay? Animosity to U.S. foreign policy is epidemic within U.S. academic circles and among the bulk of Middle East policy commentariat. Evidence may be overwhelming that the Bush administration’s first-term policy coerced states—most notably Libya—to reverse its nuclear posture. And, even if the NIE does not suggest that Tehran altered its program to the degree of Tripoli’s about-face, the NIE does suggest that Iranian policymakers changed their approach.

Honest academics weigh evidence and draw conclusions upon it; politicized authors cherry pick evidence, ignore context, and conduct intellectual somersaults to reach conclusions they wish to draw. In this case, Hiro’s goal appears less to explain honestly Iran’s strategy than to discredit—albeit unconvincingly—any notion that coercion works.

For the most part, the arguments about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran have been and will be a debate, not about intelligence, but about Bush foreign policy. But the NIE also provides an opportunity to assess our own ability to do assessments, by publicly stating what we think the consequences of the NIE will be, and why. We can then periodically check to see how well we did, and what we understood correctly, and if we made mistakes, to see what kind of mistakes we made. Being publicly wrong is not much fun, but this issue is serious, so I will go first.

In my view, the Iran program halted in 2003 because of the massive and initially successful American use of military power in Iraq. The United States offered no “carrots” to Iran, but only wielded an enormous stick. This increased the Iranians’ desire to minimize the risks to themselves, and so they halted programs that could unambiguously be identified as a nuclear weapons program. They were guarding themselves against the exposure of a weapons program by US or Israeli clandestine intelligence collection, and were not trying to signal the United States that they were looking to negotiate. They did not publicly announce this halt because if they did so, they would be perceived as weak within Iran, and within the region. By continuing the enrichment program, they kept the weapon option open.

If this is true, the Iranian government responds to imminent threats of force, not economic sanctions or diplomatic concessions. If that is the case, as the threat of US use of force goes down, the likelihood that Iran restarts its program goes up. Since the threat of US use of force went down in 2007, it is likely that the program restarted in that time frame. The threat of Israeli use of force, however, remained high, and went up after the attack on Syria. The NIE, however, ensured that there would be no US or Israeli use of force for the foreseeable future. So the prediction is that warhead production activity has restarted, and will produce a useable gun-type design quickly. Given observable uranium enrichment activity, enough uranium will be available for one bomb in one year. It does not makes sense for a country to test its first and only weapon when it has none in reserve to deter attacks. So the first test is not likely before two years from now or late 2009.

What will Iranian behavior be after the first test? All countries, with the exception of India, that have developed their own nuclear weapon, have transferred that technology to other countries. The technology, not a weapon, is easy to transfer in a way that can be concealed, has high value, and can be traded for money or other goods. So Iran will transfer technology to its friends. Nuclear weapons can be used to intimidate non-nuclear countries, and new nuclear powers, including the United States, have overestimated the utility of such threats. The goal of Iran is to force the military departure of the US from the Persian Gulf. US military bases in the region are now in small Gulf states and Iraq. The prediction is that the Iranians will use nuclear carrots and sticks to induce Gulf states to ask the United States to withdraw from their current bases, sometime after 2009.

Finally, Iran appears to have a long tradition of manipulating perceptions of itself to make it look stronger than it is, so the prediction is that the test will be accompanied by exaggerated claims of nuclear weapons production.

Conventional wisdom, if one reads the daily papers and the unnamed European officials quoted therein, is that a third UN Security Resolution targeting Iran is now highly unlikely in wake of the release of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities. The assessment opened with the zinger that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. This was indeed startling, especially since it came just two days after officials announced in Paris that China signed on to a third UN resolution and that a text was being negotiated targeting Iranian banks.

But don’t be confused by the ruminations of the fourth estate. In fact, the NIE has not undermined the newfound international consensus that another UN resolution targeting Iran is needed. Indeed, it was also this week that news broke of Chinese banks refusing Iranian clients lines of credit, in line with the recent finding of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) that Iran’s lack of a comprehensive regime to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing “represents a significant vulnerability within the international financial system.” (FATF is an intergovernmental body that works by consensus and includes China and Russia).

To be sure, there is much to discuss and debate about the NIE. But on the issue that serves as the threshold of the UN sanctions quesiton the report is clear: even if it was suspended in 2003, Iran did have a clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has yet to fully disclose. For the parties involved in shaping the next package of political and economic sanctions, that is the key. These diplomats must also be pleased with the estimate’s other—though less publicized—major finding: that the tool most likely to alter Iran’s nuclear calculus is targeted political and economic pressure, not military action.

(Editor: More from Matthew Levitt on Iran sanctions here, here, and here.)