What to do about Iran is troubling UK and US

This week we hear that the US has been shipping Patriot anti-missile batteries to four Gulf states and is putting two Aegis class cruisers on permanent guardship duties – all to counteract the growing threat from Iran's new generation of medium-range missiles.

Tehran's missiles have served as a timely excuse for President Obama to flex US muscles against Iran, which now seems to be troubling him more than all the other trouble spots of the region, Afghanistan, Yemen and Waziristan included. The real problem is that despite all pleas to the contrary Iran is pursuing its bid to produce its own nuclear fuel, and very likely to weapons grade.

The dilemma over what to do about Iran strikes at the heart of the defence security debates now fast rising up the political agendas in both the UK and America. Both countries are faced with unaffordable levels of military spending, and both are confused about what they mean by their own individual and collective security and defence now and for the foreseeable future.
 
Barack Obama is faced with an annual defence budget of about three-quarters of a trillion dollars – vastly outstripping the defence budgets of all other governments of the nations on earth taken together.  The new Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR) should spell out what is meant by the two terms, defence and security – and they don't mean the same thing – and what the US and its allies could and should afford.

The same debate should be addressed by the UK's Green Paper on future defence and security priorities, due this week. It is intended to lay out the main areas for discussion and resolution in the future Strategic Defence Review which both Labour and the Conservatives have promised early in the next parliament. The new paper should spell out what is required for the security of the nation, and then separately what it needs and can afford for its own defence.

So far the UK defence and security debate seems a bit of a muddle to put it mildly. This is in part due to the natural reluctance of any of the major parties to put their foot in it on defence matters just before an election.

But the real problem goes much deeper. There is an institutional reluctance by politicians, officials and commanders to stare in the face the realities of where Britain stands in the world today and the identifiable risks and threats it must face.

We got a liberal dose of the old thinking about defence and security priorities in our troubled world at Friday's hearing of the Iraq Inquiry from Tony Blair, our very own postmodern Knight Templar. Tony Blair boasted of his achievements in taking the UK to war on four occasions - Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. The panel was too polite to point out – and besides it wasn't their job – that none of these actions has proved conclusive, and conflict for these countries is far from over.

The Blair and Bush years saw a shift away from the notion that war must be an instrument of last resort, must be decisive and use proportional means – the core of the doctrine of Just War of St Thomas Aquinas. Instead we have war as almost an instrument of first resort. On Friday Blair invited us to consider the same approach to Iran – because it is "a bigger threat than Saddam" — though without specifying the details of what this might involve and what the terrible consequences of war in Iran would be for all of us.
 
The fear is that like Tony Blair's Manichean view of the world, the Green Paper will take a geographical approach to the threats facing Britain. It will discuss whether the Army should be configured primarily for the campaign in Afghanistan, or for fighting somewhere else, or should concentrate on ‘home defence'.  So we focus on Afghanistan - because al-Qaeda may or may not be there - one day and Yemen, Somalia, Algeria, or Waziristan the next.

This is matched by buying equipment that will allow the UK to move its forces across the globe, though we can ill afford much of it. This week we have heard that Gordon Brown doesn't intend to cancel the two aircraft carriers, which the Navy can hardly man let alone afford, and the Joint Strike Fighters to go with them. The Conservatives have said they'll keep the carriers, too. Labour says the British Army will stay at its present strength of 100,000 and may even be expanded to deal with reconstruction, natural disaster, and domestic border defence.

How this can be done on the current budget of about £37 billion remains a mystery. So far there has been little sign of the broad contextual thinking about the implications of the huge shifts and growth in population, the change in the environment, and the yawing and listing of the global economy away from Europe and North America. This is outlined with the continually updated surveys of Global Trends by the National Intelligence Council of the US.

Compared with such clear-eyed realism, most of the thinking and debate about security and defence in the UK – like Tony Blair before the Chilcot Inquiry – seems a wordy exercise of self-delusion. The Green Paper and subsequent review is not likely to be different. ·