Armament

Af Claus Kold Kampflys opgaver Hvis vi i Danmark står over for en anskaffelse af nye kampfly til omkring 40 milliarder, så må man gå ud fra at forholdet mellem det købte og opgave vejer tungt, og at dette forhold er blevet grundigt undersøgt. Det virker imidlertid ikke sådan. Nok er flyenes teknikker blevet grundigt diskuteret, men hvor er diskussionerne, om kampflyene passer på de opgaver, som fremtidens væbnede konflikter udgør? Krig mellem stater – symmetrisk krig Argumenterne for at anskaffe nye kampfly hviler på en bestemt stats- og samfundsmodel, med nogle tilhørende antagelser/faktorer. Disse faktorer er så at sige bygget ind i flyenes teknik, men de diskuteres som teknik og ikke som antagelser/formål. I denne tekst vil jeg derfor tage udgangspunkt i denne tænknings egen logik, da det samtidig er den, der er herskende i Folketinget, i Forsvaret og i store dele af dansk sikkerhedspolitisk tænkning, og se om...

Af Jan Øberg Det er utilstedeligt at vi endnu ikke har skyggen af en ordentlig, informeret debat om sikkerhedspolitikken og økonomien forud for beslutningen. Årsagen er at der ikke findes nogle for samfundet gode argumenter for dem. Alle partier med undtagelse af Enhedslisten mener at Danmark bør anskaffe nye kampfly – der i bedste fald vil være i funktion om 5 år. Dagens pris – afhængig af antallet fly – er på 30 milliarder kroner – godt 5000 kroner per mand, kvinde og barn i vort land – og mindst 100 milliarder kroner til brugsomkostninger frem til 2045. I dagens tal kostede Storebæltsbroen 37 milliarder. Debatten har hidtil ikke handlet om hvad i alverden vi skal med disse maskiner, kun om valget mellem tre typer. Fakta og problemer holdes helt bevidst i det dunkle og skal skydes ud til efter valget for derpå at træffe beslutningen hurtgit så ingen opdager...

By Gunnar Westberg The 2015 Review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended Friday May 22 in New York without a final document being accepted. Up till the very end it seemed that the conference would produce a non-committal final document. The outcome which a majority of the states desired, a plan for a total ban on nuclear weapons, as there is for chemical and bacteriological weapons, was unacceptable to the nuclear weapon states. Consensus means in the NPT that the nuclear weapon states decide. They wish to keep their capacity to exterminate mankind for generations ahead. The American government had told its allies, the NATO states, Japan and others, not to support a ban on nukes, and the allies obeyed. However, the Friends of Nukes did not have to take the blame for blocking a final document. Instead the blame fell on Israel, a country which is not even...

By Farhang Jahanpour While hailing the so-called “framework agreement” on the nuclear deal with Iran reached in Lausanne on 2 April 2015 as a great political achievement, President Barack Obama also announced that he would invite the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders to Washington and to Camp David to inform them about the deal and allay their fears. Just like the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, some Arab leaders had also expressed their opposition to the deal. Netanyahu has often described Iran as an “existential threat” to Israel and has condemned the tentative deal between Iran and six global powers, the so-called P5+1 (the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and Germany), as “a very bad deal”. While not using Netanyahu’s over-the-top rhetoric, nevertheless, some Arab leaders have expressed the view that Iran’s re-entry into the international community after decades of relative isolation would mean that the West’s...

36 were carried out in the post Cold War 1990s. The number of international conflicts decreased quite significantly. Russia and China and other former socialist countries, despite differences in their political systems, were integrated into one global and financial economic system. Several attempts were made to legally formalize the new balance of power –

Editor’s note This is a grand essay on the dimensions, history, structures of the Middle East/Palestine-Israeli-Western conflict over about 100 years. It is extraordinarily rich – but doesn’t cause the reader to drown in too many details. I highly recommend it to any student – young or old, journalist and politician – whose understanding of the issues may be based on the woefully biased, general account in Western mainstream media. – Jan Oberg Preliminary Observations In this period when the centenary of the genocidal victimization of the Armenian people in 1915 is being so widely observed and discussed, it seems especially appropriate to call attention to the comparable victimization of the Palestinian people. This second story of prolonged collective victimization also received its jump start almost a century ago with the issuance by the British Foreign Office of the Balfour Declaration supporting the Zionist movement project of establishing a Jewish...

Double standards A coalition led by Saudi-Arabia and supported by Western leaders has been bombing Yemen for about a month; it’s a clearcut international aggression and an extremely a-symmetric conflict. But we’ve heard no calls for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ by NATO or a no-fly zone to prevent the now more than 1500 bombing raids from contining and hitting also civilian targets. It’s not that international law is blatantly violated; sadly that has been seen before. It is the roaring absence of a clear condemnation by the UN, EU/NATO countries – usually calling themselves ‘the international community’ – and by the Western mainstream media. Substance plays a minor role. What is right or wrong depends on who is doing what. This war is OK because the Saudi dictatorship and its coalition members are Western allies and armed by NATO countries. The convenient but wrong narrative Furthermore, the narrative has twisted this...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] What is terrorism? Why do we talk much more about that than other types of deaths? Why is the word misused? What has nuclear weapons – that politicians and media hardly ever talk about – got to do with terror? Why should we all be careful not to exaggerate the phenomenon of terror? 10 x more terrorism than before 9/11 Tell you what: I’ve been critical of the ”war on terror” since September 12, 2001 and particularly since 10/7 when the war on Afghanistan started. If the War on Terror was the answer to 9/11, the U.S. and its friends asked the wrong questions. Because, what has been the result? According to U.S. statistics at the time, in the years up to the horrific crime in New York, about 1,000-1,500 people were hit by terror per year worldwide; 1/3 of whom died, the rest were wounded. Most of it...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Just before former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday made his stunning criticism of the West that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to said the West had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it as it did in Germany after the Second World War). Gorbachev has long been the West’s pet political darling, (although the New York Times didn’t report this speech) – for undoing the straitjacket that enveloped Soviet society, for allowing the reunification of Germany and for being the major contributor to ending the Cold War. So the question is will the West listen to him now? Will it listen to his point that the expansion of NATO has made Russia feel threatened? Will it understand that there is a good reason why he and an overwhelming majority of Russians...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] You have heard that Sweden is hunting a ”submarine” and that it is ”presumed to be Russian”. Here is an example, Financial Times of October 21 – which incidentally also announces that the Swedish Prime Minister vows to increase defence spending. Not the slightest evidence There are only three problems with this: 1) There is not the slightest evidence of there being anything military, neither that it is a submarine nor that, whatever the object might be, it is Russian. 2) Even with CNN, BBC and AlJazeera this is nothing but speculative low-grade yellow press journalism. This is possible in the field of defence, security and peace because much less is required of journalists when they write about these matters than when they write about, say, domestic politics, economics, sports, books or food and wine. In these fields you are expected to have some knowledge and media consumers are...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Lund, Sweden July 31, 2014 Responsibility for wars and killing A number of Western/NATO politicians – Hillary Clinton foremost among them – and media people have recently introduced a new ethical principle in international affairs: When A delivers weapons to B, A is responsible for what B does with these weapons. The former Secretary of State and perhaps future U.S. President presents this new ethical principle here on CNN. This makes a lot of sense to me. Look at it this way: Here is a young confused boy who has little to look forward to – and less to lose – because his country is falling apart in nasty civil war. He’s been told by some commander, or by his President, that he must hate the enemy; he gets paid for killing off as many as he can. And so he does. He believes also in what he’s been...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Both NATO and the EU has just announced that their members will now invest more in the military. It’s indicative of the lack of creativity in both organisations, it is self-defeating and counter-productive. But have you seen it put on top of any agenda and debated? You haven’t, it is so normal – and the argument is that we are threatened. That’s called fearology: Making tax payers pay even more by making them scared. The military sector is a parasite on society The military sector produces much less employment than the civilian per invested dollar. It’s a huge burden on the economy because it swallows creativity, research and development badly needed to solve humankind’s real problems. Weapons don’t belong to a market, there is no competition – the state is the only buyer – and thus tax payers must cover the systematic cost overruns. We are told that there...