Bernd Debusmann

In mid-December, the U.S. State Department’s point man on Syria, Frederic Hof, described the government of President Bashar al-Assad as ‘the equivalent of a dead man walking.” On February 6, President Barack Obama followed up by saying the fall of the regime was not a matter of if but of when.

He gave no timeline, unlike Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak who predicted months ago that the Assad regime would fall “within weeks.” Since that wishful thought, hundreds have died in ruthless government crackdowns on dissidents and the death toll in the 11-month uprising climbed past 5,000, according to the United Nations. Politicians now shy away from the risky business of predicting dates for an end to the widening conflict.

Not all bets are off, though. There are punters wagering money on the fall of the house of Assad on Intrade.com, a Dublin-based online exchange that allows traders to bet on politics and other current events. Like other markets, the exchange’s odds are based on the collective opinion of traders. On February 9, Intrade gave a 31% chance to Assad being out of office by the end of June and a 58% chance that he would be out by December 31, 2012.

Before you scoff on prediction markets, it’s worth noting that the Intrade market favorites, according to the company, won the electoral vote in all states in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections and market participants correctly anticipated the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003. That year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced plans to set up an online market where investors would have traded futures in Middle East developments including coups, assassinations and terrorist attacks. Congressional opposition sank the idea.

Some experts on Syria expressed deep pessimism over an early end to the Syrian bloodshed even before the Chinese and Russian vetoes of a United Nations Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to hand over power to a deputy, withdraw troops from towns, stop the killing of dissidents and begin a transition to democracy.

Joshua Landis, a Middle East scholar at the University of Oklahoma who runs the blog Syria Comment, wrote a week before the  February 4 Security Council vote that the Assad government was likely to last well into 2013. He argued that there was no sign that the Syrian army, most of whose officers belong to Assad’s Alawi sect, was turning against the president. The regime had a good chance of surviving as long as the Syrian military leadership remained united, the opposition fragmented, and foreign powers stayed on the sidelines.

Assad clearly saw the Russian and Chinese vetoes as a green light for ever bloodier crackdowns. Syrian government forces swiftly stepped up artillery barrages of the city of Homs, an opposition stronghold. Bashar follows in the footsteps of his late father, Hafez, who ordered the centre of the city of Hama flattened 30 years ago this month to crush a revolt against Alawi minority rule. Estimates of the number of people who died in tank and artillery bombardments range from 10,000 to 40,000.

GILDED EXILE?

Hafez’s brother Rifaat, who oversaw the massacre and earned the nickname “butcher of Hama,”  lives in comfortable retirement in London. In the unlikely case that Bashar would agree to step down, the prospect of him following his uncle into gilded exile is very remote. Who would take him?

While there has been a chorus of condemnation of the Syrian government’s replay of history, the United States and its Western and Arab allies have ruled out military intervention and some of the options now being discussed sound like prescriptions for the kind of long and bloody civil war that wrecked Lebanon in 16 years of fighting between factions armed and financed by outside sponsors.

As Uzi Rabi, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s Middle East department, put it during a recent visit to Washington: “Syria is going through a process of ‘Lebanization.’”

The Assad government is backed by Iran and armed by Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov,  in a splendid display of hypocrisy, has complained that weapons from NATO countries were being smuggled to anti-Assad forces across the borders with Turkey and Iraq. In Lavrov’s version of events, the weapons go to “armed extremists who are using peaceful demonstrations to provoke Syrian government violence.”

The government vastly outnumbers and outguns the motley band of army defectors and civilians-turned-insurgents known as the Free Syrian Army. Judging from reports of its hit-and-run raids and attacks on military checkpoints, it lacks coordination and is no serious threat to the Syrian armed forces. But the armed dissidents give Assad a pretext to hang tough.

Which brings us back to online future contracts. Intrade offers one on Assad being out of power “by midnight ET, June 30.”  The other is by midnight Dec. 31.  Perhaps it’s time to bet on December 2014.

PHOTO: Demonstrators gather during a protest against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, in Hula, near Homs, in this handout picture received February 13, 2012. Syrian forces resumed their bombardment of the city of Homs on Monday after Arab countries called for U.N. peacekeepers and pledged their firm support for the opposition battling President Bashar al-Assad.  REUTERS/Handout

Sometime in the next three decades, the U.S. military will be able to field robots that can make life-and-death decisions, operating without human supervision thanks to software and superfast computers.

But the technology to get to that point is running far ahead of considerations of the ethics of robotic warfare.

Or, as Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written widely on military robots has put it — technology grows at an exponential pace, human institutions at a linear, if not glacial, pace. That echoes an observation by the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that “science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

The subject merits debate after the January 26 announcement that the Pentagon is planning to trim America’s armed forces by 100,000 while boosting the global fleet of armed drones, America’s most effective tool for the targeted killing of anti-American militants. So far, the drones are remotely operated, by pilots on bases in the United States.

But for a glimpse of how U.S. military thinkers see the future of the drone program, an 82-page report by the Air Force is recommended reading. Entitled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047“, it says that “advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”

Rather than just supporting humans in what the military calls the OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act), drones will be able to “fully participate” in each step of the process. Humans will no longer be “in the loop” but “on the loop” — able to veto decisions taken by the flying robot — if time permits in the split-second environment of combat.

While they make more headlines than other systems, drones are just part of an American inventory that has grown explosively over the past decade and includes ground-based robots whose tasks range from defusing improvised explosives devices and shooting down incoming artillery shells to evacuating wounded soldiers. From virtually zero, the drone fleet grew to more than 7,500 and ground based robots to an estimated 15,000.

“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” the paper states. “Ethical decisions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path.”

In other words, let’s sort out ethics and policies before letting the robotics genie fully out of the bottle. It’s a point made with increasing alarm by a number of civilian scientists, robotics experts and ethicists who fear, among other things, that sending more robots and fewer humans into wars will make starting them easier.

REMOVING BARRIERS TO WAR

“We possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war,” Singer, author of Wired for War, wrote in an essay in the New York Times this month. “The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harms way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.”

This is a view shared by the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), a group formed in 2009 to press for an international debate on the regulation and control of armed military robots. ICRAC believes that the robotics revolution of warfare deserves the kind of debate that led to treaties on the use of poison gas or the ban on landmines.

None of the questions that prompted the formation of the group have been answered. For example: who would be accountable if an autonomous robot killed civilians? The manufacturer? The field commander in whose area the robot operates? The programmers who wrote the software? The procurement officer? The president?

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross has begun looking into the implications of robots in war but those favoring more regulations should not expect support from the administration of Barack Obama, who has presided over a dramatic increase in the number of drone strikes on targets in Pakistan since he took office in 2009.

That campaign, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than the military, killed dozens of al Qaeda fighters and other militants using the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan as a safe haven. The strikes also killed civilians and stoked anti-American hatred in a country of 180 million that is of strategic importance to the United States. There has been similar blow-back in Yemen and Somalia.

This is one of the reasons why some prominent experts on military robots favor slowing the pace of development. In December, philosopher Patrick Lin of the California Polytechnic State University ended a briefing to CIA officials with a line robotic warfare enthusiasts might do well to remember:

“Integrating ethics may be more cautious and less agile than a ‘do first, think later’ (or worse ‘do first, apologize later’) approach but it helps us win the moral high ground – perhaps the most strategic of battlefields.”

PHOTO: U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Zachary Goff (L), and Chris Allen, a student from Ohio State University, operate the control console to run a test flight of a drone at the Micro Air Vehicles lab at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Skip Peterson

Here we go again.

It’s an American election year which means a season to bash France, Europe and China as well as drawing attention to un-American skills by presidential hopefuls. Such as speaking in foreign tongues.

Mastering foreign languages is considered an asset in most parts of the world but clearly not in the United States, a fact highlighted by attack ads in the race for the nomination of a Republican candidate to run against President Barack Obama next November.

One television clip mocked Mitt Romney, the present frontrunner, for speaking French. Another featured Jon Huntsman, who dropped out of the contest this week, and suggested that his fluency in Mandarin meant that he subscribed to Chinese rather than American values.

Attempts to exploit ignorance, prejudice and xenophobia are nothing new in American election campaigns, but even by their standards, the Huntsman ad stood out. Created by supporters of rival candidate Ron Paul, the 72-second ad is entitled The Manchurian Candidate, after a novel (and movie) about the son of a prominent political family who is brainwashed by Communists.

The attack on Romney harked back to the presidential elections of 2004, when Republicans portrayed Democratic contender John Kerry as an out-of-touch elitist who not only spoke French fluently but also looked French. In an oft-repeated description, coined by a Wall Street Journal commentator, Kerry was called “a haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat.”

Romney is a former Massachusetts governor. So far, no-one has accused him of looking French but the ad notes that “just like John Kerry, he speaks French.”

Both in the 2004 campaign and now, Republicans stirred anti-French resentment, though for different reasons. Eight years ago, it was about the French government’s refusal to back the U.S. war on Iraq. Now, both France and Europe have become dirty words in the Republican dictionary because they are portrayed as a socialist threat to the global economy.

Europe-bashing is part of the stump speech of every candidate for the Republican nomination. Romney is the most consistent basher, perhaps to make up for the perceived stain of speaking French and having lived in France as an unsuccessful missionary for the Mormon church. He misses few opportunities for warning that President Obama wants to turn the United States into a “European-style welfare state.” That would, in his words, “poison the very spirit of America.”

Obama, according to Romney, “takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe and has a European social Democratic vision.” Ron Paul takes the idea a step further: he wants to pull out U.S. troops stationed in Germany in order to stop “subsidizing” a “socialist” country. Republican stump speeches combine to a portrait of Europe as a collection of enterprise-stifling losers.

EUROPE SEEN THROUGH A DISTORTED LENS

This is seeing Europe through a severely distorted lens, notwithstanding the European Union’s current sovereign debt crisis and prolonged political problems to solve it.

Europe-bashers fail to mention that Europe is home to more of the world’s largest companies than the United States (179 to 140) and ranks higher on important quality-of-life indexes than the United States, from income inequality and access to health care to life expectancy, infant mortality and poverty levels.

(Last October, the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank, published a study that examined such indicators in 31 of the 34 countries of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It ranked the United States 23rd in providing health care and 20th on access to education.)

Pointing out such data is not fashionable at a time when America’s persistent high unemployment makes it tempting to look for scapegoats, foreign and domestic. But there are exceptions.

Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, wrote from Paris this week that “the basic notion of Europe as a failure is a dangerous misconception.” And in Washington, Elisabeth Jacobs, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a respected think tank, even held out Germany as an example Americans might do well to study and follow.

The global recession, she wrote in a paper on Maintaining Employment in a Difficult Economy, had much less drastic effects on Germany workers than on American workers. A key reason: labor market policies that encourage business to pursue long-term objectives in contrast to the traditional U.S. focus on short-term gains. That may not be a model that best serves the U.S. economy and American workers in competitive global markets, according to Jacobs.

Can such arguments dent the rigid views of Republican standard bearers? Unlikely. The talking points seem fixed. Romney: “I don’t think Europe is working in Europe. I know it won’t work here.”

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

When Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency, he spoke eloquently about America‘s moral obligation to Iraqis working for U.S. forces in their country. “We must keep faith with Iraqis who kept faith with us,” he said in a 2007 campaign speech.

“One tragic outcome of this war is that the Iraqis who stand with America – the interpreters, embassy workers and subcontractors – are being targeted for assassination. Keeping this moral obligation is a key part of how we turn the page in Iraq. Because what’s at stake is bigger than the war – it’s our global leadership.”

The war Obama inherited from George W. Bush officially ended this week when U.S. soldiers rolled up the flag of military forces in Iraq in a low-key ceremony attended by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The remaining U.S. soldiers will be out by Dec. 31. They leave behind thousands of the faithful Iraqis Obama described on the campaign trail.

They are still targets, seen by anti-American militants as traitors or collaborators.

A special program set up in 2008 provided for an annual quota of 5,000 visas for Iraqis at risk. Fewer than a quarter have been allotted so far. Thousands of applications are pending, stuck in a “nightmarish, dysfunctional screening process,” in the words of Bob Carey, a resettlement policy expert with the International Rescue Committee. What’s worse, he said in an interview, there is no contingency plan to protect Iraqis at risk after the last American soldier leaves. “Are they being abandoned, betrayed?”

There is a certain symmetry to the beginning and the end of the war. At the beginning, there was little or no planning for the post-combat phase. At the end, there is no post-withdrawal planning to get U.S.-affiliated Iraqis to safety quickly if the need arises. There are precedents for such operations.

In 1996, the administration of Bill Clinton airlifted 6,600 Kurds who were under attack by Saddam Hussein’s army to the Pacific island of Guam, where they went through the asylum process in less than half the time it usually takes.

Just how much risk is there for the estimated 70,000 who worked for the U.S. military, embassy and American sub-contractors? The List Project, an advocacy group set up by Kirk Johnson, a former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has begun compiling a threat spreadsheet. A typical entry, from November 24: “Iraqi who worked with the U.S. contacts TLP, explaining that he had been threatened outside his home by an Iraqi policeman, who told him that he would be beheaded because he was a disloyal traitor and an American puppet.”

A STABLE IRAQ?

A police officer threatening a fellow Iraqi with beheading does not quite fit into the post-U.S. Iraq that Obama described in a speech to troops at Fort Hood to mark the end of the war. The United States, he said, was leaving behind a stable country. How stable it will be remains to be seen. Doubts go beyond refugee advocacy groups and human rights organizations.

In one of the last press briefings by a senior U.S. military officer, Lieutenant General Frank Helmick, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, listed a string of difficulties – Iranian-backed militias, violent extremists, tensions between Sunnis and Shias and between Arabs and Kurds.

One gauge of how stable Iraqis will see their country after the last U.S. soldier leaves will be the rate of return of an estimated 1.6 million who sought refuge in neighboring countries from the sectarian violence uncorked by the U.S. invasion in 2003. Even though violence has subsided substantially from its peak in 2007, there has been no rush of returnees. Neither has there been much change, according to refugee organizations, in the number of internal refugees – people driven from their homes by successive waves of ethnic cleansing in mixed neighborhoods.

Taken together, this makes for more than 3 million people – the largest population displacement in modern Middle East history. It is a consequence of the war barely noticed in the United States. That, too, goes for the number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion. Estimates vary but the lowest figure given by the Iraq Body Count is 104,080 – more than 23 times the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq who are mentioned in virtually every U.S. news story on the war.

Once the last U.S. soldier is out and Iraq fades from the media spotlight, humanitarian workers fear that the already steep uphill battle to focus Western minds on the plight of Iraqi victims of the war will become even more difficult.

As Maxwell Quqa, who runs the Sponsor Iraqi Children Foundation, an organization that helps Iraqi orphans and street children, puts it: “What we face is compassion fatigue.”

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

After the high-profile failure of a Congressional “supercommittee” to trim America‘s budget deficit, one could be forgiven to conclude that there’s nothing the divided House of Representatives can agree on. But that would be wrong.

Among the few topics on which Democrats and Republicans in the Republican-dominated House see eye-to-eye: the official motto of the United States is “In God We Trust”. That has been the case since 1956 but as the supercommittee wrangled with the thorny deficit problem, lawmakers found time to vote on a resolution reaffirming the motto. Why that reaffirmation was deemed necessary speaks volumes about congressional priorities and Washington‘s peculiar political climate.

According to two polls taken before the supercommittee failed to find a compromise, the American public’s faith in Congress stands at historic lows – a 9-percent approval rating according to a CBS/New York Times poll and 13 percent according to Gallup. In October, Gallup forecast that disenchantment with the people’s representatives would further deepen in the absence of agreement.

Not to harp on the negative, let’s revisit the resolution on America‘s motto, passed 396 to 9 on November 1, with two legislators voting “present” and 26 not voting. Randy Forbes, the Republican who sponsored the measure explained it had been necessary because “a number of public officials … forget what the national motto is.” He named President Barack Obama as one of the forgetful officials, referring to a speech in which he cited E Pluribus Unum as America‘s motto. (Latin for “out of many, one”, those words are emblazoned on the official seal of the United States and engraved, along with “In God We Trust”, on 25-cent coins. E pluribus unum served as the country’s de facto motto until 1956, when Congress passed a law making In God We Trust the official motto).

In the floor debate on the matter, one legislator, Arizona Republican Trent Franks, portrayed failure to reaffirm the motto in apocalyptic terms. “If … man is God, then an atheist state is as brutal as the thesis it rests upon and there is no reason for us to gather here in this place,” he told his fellow members. “We should just let anarchy prevail because after all we are just worm food.”

There are no polls showing how many Americans live in fear of atheist anarchy, or of the perils arising from people confusing one motto with the other. But such remarks leave no doubt about the extraordinary tone-deafness of some legislators at a time when unemployment and inequality dominate the national conversation.

If the oddly-timed resolution was meant by Republicans to cast doubt over Obama’s belief in God, it appears to have had little or no effect. Why Democratic lawmakers (all but eight of whom voted for the resolution) thought it was an urgent necessity and a good use of Congressional time remains a puzzle.

MORE SUPPORT FOR COMMUNISM THAN CONGRESS?

There are, it should be noted, some legislators who are worried about the apparent disconnect between ordinary Americans and their representatives and leaders inside the beltway that surrounds Washington. One of those worried is Michael Bennet, a Democratic Senator who voiced his concerns on the floor of the Senate in mid-November, carrying a number of astonishing charts illustrating the precipitous decline of Congress in the eyes of Americans.

According to one of the charts based on polls taken in different years, more people support the United States going Communist (11 percent) than approve the job Congress is doing. Congress‘s approval rating among Americans ties with that of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president and anti-American firebrand.

Compared with Congress, the Internal Revenue Service (40 percent approval) is a darling of the people.

Bennet ascribed the “catastrophic” decline in support over the past decade to “our inability to address problems the way people in their local community are doing it. There is not a mayor in Colorado (his home state) who would threaten the credit-rating of their community for politics. Not one.”

The United States lost its top-tier credit rating last August, for the first time in its history, when the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded it from AAA to AA. One of the reasons for the agency’s downgrade: the inability of the Democratic and Republican parties to govern effectively and to compromise on diametrically opposed positions on how to deal with the country’s deficit.

As the supercommittee’s failure to come to a compromise has shown, those positions are unchanged from August, when a fierce political battle over the national debt pushed the country to the brink of default. Agreement between the 12 committee members – six Democrats, six Republicans, from both houses of Congress – proved as elusive as agreement among all 535 members.

With the campaign for the 2012 elections in full swing, prospects of action that would break the gridlock and regain some of the lost public trust look remote. Resolutions on the model of “In God we Trust” won’t do it. But perhaps the lawmakers can take comfort in the fact that they do not rank last on Bennet’s chart.

Congress is still more popular, by four points, than Fidel Castro.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

By Bernd Debusmann

The views expressed are his own.

Better late than never. After years of debate, there is growing consensus among governments, major shipping companies and maritime organizations that armed private security guards are a potent deterrent to high-seas pirates. That view is certain to crimp a criminal business already showing signs of decline.

Numbers tell part of the story: In the first nine months of the year, Somali pirates attacked 199 ships, a hefty increase over 126 attacks in the corresponding period in 2010. But the number of ships they hijacked dropped from 35 in 2010 to 24 this year. Expressed differently, their success rate declined from 28 percent to 12 percent. Not a single vessel carrying armed guards was taken.

Which is why the United States and Britain changed policies on hired guns a few days apart in October. In the United States, the change was so quiet it almost escaped notice. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron said in a television interview his government was reversing opposition to armed guards on British-flagged vessels because “the fact that a bunch of pirates in Somalia are managing to hold to ransom the rest of the world … is a complete insult.”

That’s also a tacit admission that the naval flotillas on counter-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean for the past few years face a problem without solution — too much water, too few warships. The pirates have launched attacks up to 1,000 miles from the Somali coast.

As Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, put it to an advisory panel on November 9, “with so much water to patrol, it is difficult for international naval forces in the region to protect every commercial vessel.” Therefore, he explained, the United States had established a national policy encouraging countries to allow commercial ships to have armed security teams on board.

The policy was set out in a memo by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, once a determined foe of private security contractors, to U.S. embassies asking them to suggest to their host governments and shipping industry representatives there to use armed guards aboard vessels traveling through high-risk waters off the Horn of Africa.

The memo was leaked to the Somalia Report, an English-language website of news and analyses from Somalia published by Robert Young Pelton, an author and documentary film maker specialized on conflict zones. “It’s ironic that this came from the desk of the woman who sponsored legislation, when she ran for president, that would have banned the use of security contractors altogether,” Pelton said in an interview.

U.S. and British support for armed guards is akin to legalizing Band-Aids without curing the wounds that require them, he thinks, the wounds being conditions in Somalia that allow pirates to operate with relative impunity.

1,000 SOMALIS BEHIND BARS

On the high seas, they no longer can take impunity for granted. Just three years ago, the vice admiral then commanding the U.S. Fifth Fleet, William Gortney, said in exasperation that “there is no reason not to be a pirate. The vessel I’m trying to pirate, they won’t shoot at me. I’m going to get my money. They won’t arrest me because there’s no place to try me.”

That’s no longer true. According to United Nations figures, more than 1,000 Somalis are behind bars in 20 countries around the world, either awaiting trial for piracy or serving prison sentences. The latest to face justice were six Somalis who went on trial in Paris this week for hijacking a yacht and taking a French couple hostage in 2008. In October, a court in Norfolk handed out life sentences to Somalis convicted of hijacking an American yacht and murdering four Americans.

The country with the largest number of suspected Somali pirates in detention is India (120), where the government issued guidelines this summer allowing ships with Indian crews to carry armed guards. The rationale, as in the United States and Britain: Ships with armed security personnel don’t get hijacked.

Even the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the U.N. agency responsible for maritime safety, is cautiously edging away from its long-held opposition to seafarers carrying weapons or ships carrying armed guards. In a circular issued in October, it said IMO members in general and governments in the region of the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden and Red Sea in particular should “facilitate” the passage of armed guards and their equipment.

That followed a change of approach by the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), a trade group representing around 80 percent of the world’s merchant fleet, earlier in the year. Previously opposed to armed guards, it now says they are a matter for individual ship owners to decide. Some estimates say that around one in five vessels sailing though high-risk seas already carry armed guards.

Bad news for pirates, good news for the private security industry.

The German Frigate ‘Hamburg’ (R) patrols after destroying two fishing boats (L) which were discovered floating keel side up in open waters off the coast of Somalia, in this undated handout photo made available to Reuters August 15, 2011. The captain of Frigate ‘Hamburg’ decided to scupper the boats to stop them falling into the hands of pirates. REUTERS/Bundeswehr/Christian Laudan/Handout

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

In the long-running Western debate over what to do about Iran’s nuclear program, fresh language has been as rare as fresh ideas. But here’s a novel phrase worth noting: “Striking Iranian nuclear sites is like mowing the grass.” How so?

The man who coined the simile, Middle East scholar Aaron David Miller, argues that no strike, or series of strikes, could permanently cripple the Iranian capacity to produce and weaponize fissile material. Absent complete success in wiping out Iran’s hardened and widely dispersed nuclear sites, “the grass would only grow back again.” The Iranians would “reseed” the grass “with the kind of legitimacy that can only come from having been attacked by an outside power.”

The presidential hopefuls of America‘s Republican Party could do worse than take note of that assessment. In the first foreign policy debate of the Republican primary race on November 12, all but one of the nine would-be presidents supported an attack — by the United States or Israel — on Iran to stop it from getting the bomb, if sanctions failed, as they have done so far.

Unlike the presidential candidates, Miller is familiar with the subject. Now a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a Washington think tank, he worked for 25 years in senior roles at the State Department as a Middle East negotiator and adviser. He is not alone in arguing that an attack on Iran would only delay, but not end, Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In the United States, a long list of prominent experts on Iran and nuclear proliferation share that view and in Israel, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, the foreign intelligence service, has called bombing Iraq “a stupid idea” and repeatedly warned that an attack would have disastrous consequences for Israel.

The latest round of the “to bomb or not to bomb” debate, a recurring theme for the better part of a decade, was triggered by a November 8 report from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said Tehran appeared to have worked on designing a bomb and may still be conducting secret research to that end.

The qualifying word “may” quickly disappeared from most media reports and from discussions of the issue. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a few days after the IAEA report’s publication that it did not reflect the full extent of Iran’s nuclear program and warned that “Iran is closer to getting a bomb than we thought.”

That is music to the ears of Republican critics of President Barack Obama, whom they accuse of lacking firmness in dealing with the Iranian government and failing to rally international support for sanctions tough enough to convince Tehran that it is time to give up its nuclear ambitions.

Foreign policy is not likely to play much of a role in the 2012 presidential election and Obama has an impressive record of foreign policy successes, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the U.S. role in ending the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. But in a country whose citizens regularly name Iran as the greatest threat to the United States, according to Gallup polls, any perception of weakness towards Tehran could become an issue.

VOTE FOR OBAMA, VOTE FOR THE IRANIAN BOMB?

“If … we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon,” Romney said at the Republican foreign policy debate. “And if … you elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon.”

How would he prevent this? If he were president, he explained in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, he would impose tougher sanctions, regularly send aircraft carriers into the Mediterranean and the Gulf, speak up on behalf of Iranian dissidents and increase military assistance to Israel.

“These actions will send an unequivocal signal to Iran that the United States, in concert with allies, will never permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Only when the ayatollahs no longer have doubts about America‘s resolve will they abandon their nuclear ambitions.”

For sanctions to work, they need to be global and there is no good reason to think that a Republican president would have more success than Obama in convincing China and Russia to agree to additional economic pressure against Iran. Obama’s latest attempt came in meetings with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation this week.

The outlook for the future of this confrontation looks as bleak now as it probably will after the 2012 U.S. elections — learn to live with an Iranian bomb or start yet another war with consequences nobody can predict.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)