Iraqis Turn to PlayStation
Reportedly Sony PlayStation 2s were in short supply during she U.S. Christmas season partly because so many were going to Iraq. The Defense Intelligence Agency reported in mid-December that as many as 4,000 had been bought in the United States and shipped to Iraq over the previous two to three months. They were not intended as toys. The Iraqis apparently saw the video toys as an exception to the current ban on receiving computers. Although a PlayStation is not nominally a computer, and hence does not attract customs or embargo attention, it is built around a very powerful 128-bit processor with considerable graphics capability, reportedly five times that of a typical graphics workstation. What makes a PlayStation a toy is its software; with different software it is a powerful general-purpose computer. As if to emphasize this point, Sony is about to sell a plug-in hard drive and an interface to the Internet.
This is not to say that, having bought numerous PlayStations, the Iraqis now have the sort of supercomputer capacity which will expedite their nuclear program or control weapon systems. The barrier they face is not so much computer hardware as software. The U.N. embargo apparently successfully blocks Iraqi acquisition of more conventional computers in any numbers. The PlayStation uses a proprietary Sony chip (thus avoiding any U.S. government restrictions on exports), and presumably any Iraqi software would have to be written specifically for it. That would particularly apply to any scheme to net several PlayStations together to form a sort of supercomputer for nuclear calculations, for example. Since software is often the worst bottleneck in Western weapon systems, this is not a trivial point.
In a larger sense, the PlayStation story suggests that it is inherently difficult to control dual-use technology. The U.S. government tries to limit the export of computers powerful enough to help in weapons programs it tries to stop, such as the development of long-range missiles and of nuclear warheads. Unfortunately, computer processors are developing very rapidly. No supercomputer can last very long. For example, one of the running jokes within the computer industry during 2000 was that the high-end Macintosh computer was, by the State Department's definition, a supercomputer which could not be exported without a license—yet anyone could buy it for his desk.
Euro-Army may replace NATO
NATO gradually may be disintegrating under French pressure. For years the French have pushed for a more integrated European Union, with its own foreign and defense policy-and with its own integrated European armed force. That is not a new idea. In the early 1960s, Charles de Gaulle pressed the Germans to abandon NATO and instead to integrate their defense with that of France. One motive then, as now, has been to eject the United States from Europe. The French presumably imagine that they will dominate the resulting European Union, perhaps because French civil servants seem to dominate the bureaucracy which actually runs the Union. The Germans have begun to demand more votes within the European councils, reflecting their greater size and economic weight, but that may not really matter. In many European governments, as in the European Union, elected officials have little real day-to-day power compared to the bureaucracy.
The European Union has a rotating presidency, and in recent years presidents have managed to impose considerable changes in the Union's structure. For example, a Dutch president was responsible for the Maastrict Treaty proposal to adopt a single currency, which drastically reduced national economic autonomy. Now that Jacques Chirac, the French president, is also European president, he is demanding a more powerful European armed force, formally independent of NATO. Initially Tony Blair, the British prime minister, was more than willing to agree with the French that there should be greater defense integration within Europe. At the time he saw such verbiage as no more than proof that he was a better "European" than his Conservative predecessor, John Major. Then the French began to demand action to back up the declaration, and Blair found himself pledging 12,500 troops (as well as up to 18 warships and 72 combat aircraft) to a new European rapid-reaction force.
U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned that if Europe created a force independent of NATO the Alliance would begin to collapse. The close connection between the United States and Europe would wither. Later it was noted that one of the warmest proponents of the Euro-force was Russian President Vladimir Putin, who often characterizes NATO as aggressive and objectionable. On the other hand, in the past the U.S. government has often complained that the Europeans are unwilling or unable to settle problems within Europe, such as those posed by the former Yugoslavia. It was clearly in the U.S. interest not to allow a disaster in Kosovo to escalate into a general southern European war, but it would have been even better had the Europeans themselves handled the problem.
At Nice in December, the heads of the European Union governments held a summit conference to determine the ultimate powers and even the ultimate size of the Union. Important issues included the character of the new Euro-army. Prime Minister Blair hoped to use the summit to reassure both Americans and his own public. He helped draft a statement to the effect that the force would be used only when NATO did not want to act, and that there was no such thing as a European army. Chirac had other ideas. He demanded that the Euro-force be independent of NATO command facilities. Later a French official said that the development of an autonomous European force could not be stopped: "the train is already moving. NATO is not on board. It is not the engine... it is still on the platform."
As recent wars have demonstrated, success requires not merely troops and ships and airplanes, but also reconnaissance assets (such as satellites) and command/control infrastructure. The United States provides the bulk of the latter two facilities, and there has been little evidence of European interest in, for example, space-based sensors. Perhaps because of their intense desire for independence, the French, alone within Europe, have built reconnaissance satellites, albeit only for imagery. Their first Helios series supplies images to two junior partners, Spain and Italy. In June 2000, France and Germany agreed to develop a follow-on system, for which Germany would provide an all-weather radar satellite. Reports of successful decoying during the war for Kosovo reportedly have led the French to improve resolution from one meter to ten cm (about four inches) in the new satellite. That may well be naive. In the wake of the Cold War, U.S. satellite imagery had its resolution reduced so that the same number of pixels could cover a wider area of greater tactical significance. Decoys are discovered by observing the same area at different wavelengths and comparing the results. In the French or European cases that seems impossible, because so few satellites are in service.
In the wake of Chirac's statements, many in Britain were surprised to discover that the Euro-army could be deployed almost anywhere: in the Balkans, in North Africa, even deep in Russia. Historically, Britain always has felt a deep tension between Atlantic and European orientation. Before World War I, the classic British strategy was to emphasize the Atlantic or sea-based orientation, and to limit any armed commitment to the Continent. Thinking of the sea as a nurturing highway, the British could survive lengthy Continental wars, such as that against Napoleon. They could not win by themselves; they always needed coalition partners. However, because it was so difficult to invade Britain, no disaster on the Continent could be decisive. British armies always could be withdrawn by sea. If they were destroyed, the country would still survive.
Before 1914, however, the British government decided, probably tacitly, that disaster in France directly would endanger Britain. It followed that the survival of France was a primary British interest. The initial commitment of six divisions to the Continent proved open-ended, ultimately costing about a million British and Empire lives. One reason the interwar British government was so slow to oppose Hitler was that it feared a repeat open-ended commitment to France, without which the French government would not itself resist the Germans. There was a pervasive sense that the World War I strategy had been criminally wrong. World War II showed that Britain could survive the fall of France. Victory did not have to be nearly so costly in human terms (at least for Britain).
In this sense President Chirac is demanding roughly what his pre-1914 predecessors wanted: an open-ended commitment. The current figure, 60,000 men drawn from all of the countries of the European Union, seems quite limited. At present, too, each Union government has a veto. Like NATO, the force is likely to be hamstrung by the need for consensus before it can be deployed. However, before 1914 the British government thought that six divisions would suffice to back up the French. By the end, the British Army was more than ten times that size, and many more than six divisions' worth of Britons were dead in France and Belgium. As the European Union enlarges, the argument will be made more and more that any national veto is impractical and that the Union can and must act as a unified government. Surely the veto of military commitment will not be an exception to that rule.
All of this having been said, the mere existence of a gradually strengthening Union is remarkable. Unification has never really been put to a vote, and there is considerable evidence that it is unpopular. For example, the Germans now increasingly favor sovereignty. European Union economics has not been particularly successful. Unemployment is still quite high, and the single currency, the Euro, lost about a fifth of its value against the dollar. Yet there seems to be no electoral means of demanding changes in policy. At the Nice summit, the heads of state were confronted with demonstrators generally described as anti-globalists comparable to those who tried to wreck the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle or the subsequent meeting in Washington. That probably does them too little justice. The French public tends to be well-disciplined, with powerful riot police who face few restrictions. Public demonstrations suggest either considerable public sympathy or, at the least, very strong motivation. It is disquieting that only right-wing fringe political parties openly oppose union. It would be most unfortunate if a deeply unpopular policy, supported mainly by centrist politicians and bureaucrats, caused a revulsion so powerful that it brought these parties into power. Anyone who reads 20th-century European history can predict what happens next.