1AC

Advantage 1: Middle East

Middle East instability is the highest it’s ever been -- impact defense is dated- Obama
hands off doctrine key to contain instability –United States re-intervention into Iraq is
the only way to escalation
Gordon ’15 (Philip Gordon, Senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC. From
2013-15 he was Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East
North Africa and the Gulf Region. As the most senior White House official focused on the greater middle
east, his responsibilities included the Iranian nuclear program, Middle East peace negotiations, the
conflicts in Syria and Iraq, US relations with the Gulf States, Democratic transitions in North Africa and
bilateral relations with Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, Politico, “The Middle East Is Falling Apart”,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/america-not-to-blame-for-middle-east-falling-apart-
118611.html#.Varc9_lViko, June 4, 2015)

As news out of the Middle East goes from bad to worse—the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, Libya’s
disintegration, the fall of Ramadi to ISIL, take your pick—the inevitable American tendency, especially in
the political season, is to attribute all these developments to U.S. policy choices. Former Defense Secretary Robert
Gates said in May the United States has “no Middle East Strategy at all,” the Washington Post editorial page explains the fall of Ramadi not as the result of an Iraqi
dynamic but as a consequence of U.S. strategy and Republican
candidates are of course tripping over each other to
attribute the region’s unraveling to the “weakness ” and lack of resolve of the Obama administration.
Negative outcomes certainly require critical examination of policy choices, and no one in their right mind
would suggest the outcomes in the Middle East today are anything but negative. That said, what most
of the current critiques have in common are an assumption that U.S. policy is the most relevant
variable in explaining what is going on—it’s not—and an utter failure to present an alternative
approach that would work. The harsh reality is that the Middle East today is going through a period of
tectonic and destructive change. If I took away anything from two years as the White House’s
coordinator for Middle East policy, it’s that U.S. policy is not the main source of this change and the
U.S. has no good options for dealing with it. Some of the proposed remedies for the region’s woes,
such as U.S. military intervention in an effort to “transform” or “remake” the region or simply to
impress our foes, would likely make things worse . This should be clear from the U.S. effort to do so in
Iraq just over a decade ago. The lessons of that war seem to have been bizarrely forgotten by many
today (though almost all the Republican presidential candidates seem to want to disown the results of
the Iraq war while embracing the policy approach that produced it). Whereas in other fields of human endeavor—take
medicine, for example—we seem to accept that there are certain problems and challenges that we did not
create and cannot entirely resolve (and that trying to do so sometimes makes things worse), the U.S.
policy debate about the Middle East suffers from the fallacy that there is an external, American
solution to every problem—even when decades of experience, including recent experience, suggest
that this is not the case. Accepting that the United States is not to blame for, and cannot resolve,
every problem in the Middle East is not a prescription for inaction or resignation . The United States
remains the world’s most important power and has unique capabilities that give it an unmatched ability
and responsibility to play a key role in a region where critical US interests are at stake. Unfortunately, we
cannot master the historical forces that probably mean the region will be plagued by instability for years
or even decades to come. But we can and should manage this instability as best we can and protect
our core interests, which include defending our allies, preventing regional war, keeping sea lanes
open, avoiding nuclear proliferation and preventing a terrorist safe haven from which the United
States or its allies could be attacked. Such an approach might not sound like a path to presidential glory
and it does not make for much of a campaign bumper sticker. But it’s both the least and the most we
can do. We should know by now that trying to do much more would likely come at great human and
financial cost, produce unintended consequences and fail to work. The Great Unraveling What explains the historic disorder
we’re seeing in the Middle East today? Four interrelated trends are most relevant. What we should understand is that the United

States is not primarily responsible for any of them and can do little to reverse their course. The collapse of state
authority and erosion of borders. For nearly 100 years, the modern Middle East has been organized around a state system put in place by the Western powers after
the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The borders of new states like Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon made little sense, but they were internationally recognized, and—for
all the new states’ internal tensions—for many decades they remained intact. These states were relatively stable; they had agreed upon territories (save for some
border disputes), flags, anthems, and authoritarian leaders, some of whom (Mubarak, Assad, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Ben Ali, Saleh, etc.) stayed around for a very
long time. That post-Ottoman order is now falling apart—largely due to the consequences of the Arab Spring, when Arab publics finally rose up in protest against
this artificial division. The United States embraced the Arab Spring, but it certainly did not create it, and it had little to do with the democratic trends, rise in political
awareness or frustration with the failed governance that led to the revolt. In that sense I always found it strange when some critics complained about our “throwing
Mubarak under the bus,” as if the United States just one day decided to change Egypt’s leadership, or could have prevented it when the Egyptian public decided to
do so. In any case, the result of this revolution has not been the increased freedoms many hoped to see but rather the collapse of state authority and the unraveling
of national borders. The state called “Syria” no longer corresponds to its official borders and likely never will again. A real map of Syria today—like the ones
produced on a regular basis for policymakers—would show something more like “Assadistan,” “ISISstan,” “Nusrahstan,” “Kurdistan,” etc., but not a political entity
called “Syria.” The state of Iraq has also essentially broken apart, and Baghdad has little sway in the Kurdish region or in the Sunni-majority Anbar or Ninewa
provinces. The state structures of Libya and Yemen no longer exist and may not ever be put back together again. This particular trend is captured well in an only
slightly exaggerated recent headline in The Onion: “Everyone in Middle East Given Own Country in 317,000,000-state solution.” We’re not there yet. But as much as
we can and should try to avoid it, it’s now more likely that other states will collapse than it is that the now-broken states will be put back together again. The Sunni-
Shia split. The Sunni-Shia split is hardly a new trend—it’s been going on since the 7th century, when the Prophet Mohammad’s followers failed to agree on his
rightful successor. Nor it is necessarily worse than ever—the tensions today still fall short of periods like the late 18th century, when Wahhabi tribes from the
Arabian Peninsula were sacking Shia cities like Kerbala and Najaf in today’s Iraq. But there is no question that this historic phenomenon that has risen and fallen in
intensity over the years has entered a new and particularly dangerous phase. The latest escalation started with the 1979 revolution in Iran and the subsequent Iran-
Iraq war, but it was given its real near-term emphasis by the 2003 Iraq war, which put the majority Shia back in charge in Baghdad and thus tipped the sectarian
balance in the region. (Ironically, this was one of the few major trends we did have a major role in producing.) By doing so, it both spurred and allowed the
development of extremist Sunni groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successor ISIL, whose attacks on Shia only reinforce this literally vicious circle. The Arab Spring in
2011, and the collapse in state authority it produced, further exacerbated sectarianism: As insecurity rose in the post-authoritarian chaos, people have gravitated to
their kin—producing the horrible sectarian violence we now see in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The growing Sunni-Shia divide—and the growing Sunni fear of Shia Iran—
is summed up by the narrative heard by any traveler to parts of the Sunni world that Iran and the Shia now control “four Arab capitals”—Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut
and Sana’a—and are looking to control more. The narrative is exaggerated (The Sunnis have not called the shots in Damascus and Beirut for a long time) but reflects
a genuine fear of Iranian (Shia) hegemony, that the Sunnis are determined to resist—as we see in the Sunni coalitions now at war directly or indirectly in Syria, Iraq
and Yemen. The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen—supported by all the Sunni states in the region—is best seen not as a plan to bring peace to Yemen but simply to
put down a marker to Iran. The Sunni world will not tolerate further Shia encroachment in the region. The Sunni-Sunni Split. Most of the focus in the region has
understandably been on the real divide between Sunni and Shia, but the Sunni-Sunni split may be just as important. Al Qaeda, after all, and now ISIL, are Sunni
groups who target the Sunni regimes they believe are beholden to the West and not true to Islam. The Sunni regimes are thus fighting back, including by bombing
ISIL in Syria and Libya. In Sunni countries that do not have large Shia populations, such as Egypt and Jordan, it’s not the “Shia threat” but the Sunni-Sunni split that
has leaders and populations worried. An even more significant Sunni-Sunni split is a growing ideological battle between the region’s Sunni regimes and the Sunni
version of political Islam. The al-Sisi regime in Egypt, for example, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, views the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood as a
mortal enemy—one it is determined to crush at all costs. Other Sunni states, however—Turkey and Qatar—are sympathetic to the Brotherhood, and thus entirely at
odds with their Sunni brethren in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. They opposed Sisi’s takeover in Egypt (a takeover Turkey still refuses to recognize) and support rival
Islamist groups in Libya and Tunisia that the Saudis and Emiratis see as adversaries. The resulting sets of alliances across the region is thus hugely complicated, but if
you’re following this at home: In places divided among Sunni and Shia (like Syria, Iraq or Yemen) the Sunni states (including Turkey and Qatar) all line up in a
coalition against the Shia. But where there are no or few Shia, like in Egypt or Libya, the Sunni harmony breaks down, and the Sunnis are deeply divided amongst
themselves. Because of this, Qatar and Turkey are fighting a sort of cold war with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE. In March 2014, those three Gulf countries
withdrew their ambassadors from Doha to protest what they considered to be Qatar’s support for threatening Islamist movements, including through Doha’s
hosting of the Al Jazeera broadcast network and its support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The ambassadors have since returned, but deep tensions remain,
as do the violent proxy conflicts in Libya and Egypt. Such conflicts are hard enough to manage when there is unity among outside powers or at most an external
sectarian divide—they become almost impossible when the Sunni states themselves are divided. The Collapsing Prospects for Middle East Peace. A fourth trend,
different from the others, deserves to be mentioned in any assessment of the current or future Middle East disorder: the fading prospect of peace between Israelis
and Palestinians. For two decades, the goal of both the United States and the parties was a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the 1993
Oslo accords. The parties were within reach of an agreement in 2000, close again in 2008, and Secretary of State John Kerry made Herculean efforts last year to try
again, but he was unable to close big gaps on all the key issues. The prospect of a negotiated solution now seems exceedingly remote. There are now over 350,000
Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and they are dispersed in such a way as to make a contiguous Palestinian state virtually impossible—even setting aside the
even more complicated question of East Jerusalem, where Israelis continue to build. Israel has just elected the most right-wing government in its history, made up
of parties committed to further settlement growth and in several cases opposed to the very concept of a two-state solution. Even putting aside the pre-election
controversy of his remarks appearing to rule out a two-state solution, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he does not believe there is a chance to
negotiate one anytime soon. On the other side, President Mahmoud Abbas has largely given up on the prospect of a negotiated peace. With his legitimacy in
question—for failing to deliver peace, halt Israeli settlement growth or hold a long overdue election—he would be unable to impose an agreement on his people
even if he could negotiate one (which he knows he can’t). Eighty-years-old and with little to lose, Abbas has already begun to pursue international recognition—
through membership in the United Nations General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, and other international bodies—as an alternative to pursuing peace
negotiations with Israel. And this is to say nothing about Gaza, where last summer’s brutal war—which killed over 2,000 Palestinians and saw indiscriminate rocket
and tunnel attacks against Israeli cities—foreshadowed what could still be to come. The collapse of the Palestinian Authority and a full reoccupation of the West
Bank—which is where things seem to be headed—would not only threaten Israel’s future but fuel Arab extremism and further destabilize a region already in free
fall. What We Can Do and What We Cannot A large number of Americans look at these trends and want to give up . They
conclude the region is just too complicated and too dysfunctional, and we should just get out. These feelings came home to me most clearly in the summer of 2013,
when the Obama administration proposed using force to respond to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. For all the talk of the need for bold action or leadership in
The
Congress and among other critics, the overwhelming public—and Congressional—response was an absolute refusal to support even limited strikes.

arguments we heard—and the percentages of people opposed to intervention, as indicated by public

polling and reported calls to Congressional offices—were reminiscent of the isolationism of the 1930s . The
mindset was that we tried intervention before, the region is not worth it and we should just stay out. While the public mood has since shifted somewhat in response
to concerns about the threat from ISIL, there is still a strong feeling that any involvement in the Middle East is too much. I
understand this view, but
it goes too far. Other Americans take the opposite approach—increasingly so as memories of the 2003
Iraq war recede and the perceived threat from ISIL rises . These increasingly vocal critics argue that U.S.
restraint is part of the problem and call for a more interventionist approach that would include more
troops in Iraq, air strikes or even ground forces against Assad in Syria, and potentially the use of force to
destroy the Iranian nuclear program. Just listen to the next forum for Republican presidential candidates—let alone even more hawkish voices
like Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham or the neoconservatives who supported the war in Iraq—and you’ll hear a vigorous appeal for a more “muscular” and
interventionist approach. Given the stakes, the
desire to “do something” is understandable but th is approach is
potentially even more dangerous than walking away. Only recently, we saw that U.S. interventions in
the region (Iraq) can be enormously costly ($1 trillion, 5,000 U.S. lives, half-a-million Iraqi lives and the
United States’ global reputation) and only bring unintended consequences —like the exacerbation of
the Sunni-Shia divide and the creation of ISIL. Using force to get rid of Assad is a noble goal and no doubt would remove one real
problem—but it would surely create many others, including potentially even more instability and sectarianism in Syria, as well as creating genuine U.S. ownership of
the problem. The notion that limited airstrikes would lead Assad to abandon power—and turn leadership over to moderates—would be a particularly egregious
case of placing hope over experience. When
implying the United States can “fix” Middle Eastern problems if only it
“gets it right” it is worth considering this: In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a
costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In
Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster. This record is worth
keeping in mind as we contemplate proposed solutions going forward. So what to do? There is no simple
answer. There are historic, tectonic changes going on that will take a generation or generations to play
out. But this does not mean we can or should give up, either. I would propose that the United States identify its core interests in
the region and focus on goals it (and often only it) can reasonably accomplish. My list, not in any particular order, would include the following: 1. Deterring regional
war and protecting our allies. We cannot stop civil wars, but we can still prevent inter-state war—and have largely done so successfully for decades. Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait was the exception that proved the rule—and the decisive U.S. response reinforced deterrence since. Pulling out our 36,000 troops and major air bases in
the region would diminish our ability to do this and make the region safe for major war—which would dwarf in intensity even the current disorder. At the recent
Camp David summit with Gulf leaders, President Obama was right to commit to use all elements of our power to protect our partners against external aggression.
And this commitment obviously applies to Israel as well; whatever our differences over Iran and the peace process, the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and
“qualitative military edge” helps to prevent intra-state conflict. 2. Keep sea lanes open. We must also maintain our military presence in the region and commitment
to preserve commercial freedom. More than 20 percent of the world’s oil supply (and more than 30 percent of oil shipped by sea) passes through the Strait of
Hormuz, which without American military power would be under constant threat. Even with growing U.S. energy independence, the fungibility of global energy
markets means a closure of Middle East sea-lanes would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy. Only the United States has the power to do this, and it
should do so out of self-interest and collective interest as well. 3. Preventing nuclear proliferation. As bad as things are in the region, they would be unimaginably
worse if multiple countries, or even one (Iran) had nuclear weapons. If Iran got a nuclear weapon others in the region would likely eventually move in that direction
as well, increasing the possibility of an actual nuclear war. Even an Iranian nuclear weapon alone would be a threat, not because Tehran is likely crazy enough to
actually use it, but because our ability to contain and deter Iranian aggression in the region would be severely limited if Iran had a nuclear deterrent. The best way
to achieve this goal—as I have written previously in POLITICO—is the sort of long-term, verifiable agreement blocking all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb. 4. Preventing
a terrorist safe haven. We cannot kill or capture every terrorist in the Middle East. But we can and must prevent the creation of a terrorist safe haven from which
terrorists could plot and execute mass-destruction attacks against the United States and its allies. That is why the United States is right to be leading a coalition and
conducting airstrikes (which it has an unparalleled ability to do) against ISIL in both Syria and Iraq, while also working to cut off the group’s finances, discredit its
ideology, stop foreign fighters and bolster the Iraqi government. Critics are right to say our ability to destroy ISIL is limited by the lack of U.S. or other ground forces,
but they don’t explain how the presence of such forces would work out any better than they did when we went into Iraq. We also need to bolster regional partners
—Jordan, Tunisia, the Gulf States—that are at risk from ISIL and can be more effective partners in the fight against it. If the breeding ground for terrorism is fertile
due to ineffective, unresponsive and corrupt governance, all the military force in the world will not contain it. 5. Avoiding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United
States has an interest in a stable and secure Israel and a stable and secure Palestinian state. While we can do little immediately to bring about a two-state solution,
we should at least try to preserve its prospects for when conditions might be ripe. That might mean supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution with balanced and
fair parameters for a diplomatic solution. It certainly means trying to preserve the viability of a Palestinian entity that eschews violence, recognizes Israel and
respects past agreements, as well as trying to persuade Israel—its public, if the current government is out of reach—that there is no way it can remain a secure
Jewish and democratic state—at peace with its neighbors—if it tries to govern the millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This may not seem like an
ambitious or particularly glorious list. It is not a “silver bullet” and will never sound as compelling a promise to “transform” or “remake” the Middle East. But, for all
of the reasons explained above, the Middle East disorder is likely to persist for years and decades to come. We can’t
make that reality go away, but we can preserve our core interests, try to contain and limit the
damage, avoid missteps that would lead to unintended consequences and harbor our precious
human, military and financial resources for strength at home and other great challenges abroad . A
focus on core U.S. interests is not a perfect solution for the Middle East—but it is better than all the
alternatives.

Large scale re-intervention will escalate to nuclear war- experts agree

Roberts ’15 (Paul Craig Roberts, held numerous academic appointments, including the William E.
Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research
Fellow, Hoover Institution Stanford University, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President
Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was awarded the Legion of
Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand, http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article50063.html,
March 30, 2015)

A Middle East Nuclear Holocaust Nuclear weapons are no longer restrained by the Cold War MAD
doctrine. Washington has released them into pre-emptive first strike form. The targets of these pre-emptive strikes–
Russia and China–know it, because Washington proudly proclaims its immorality in public documents describing its war doctrine. The result is to maximize the
chance of nuclear war. If you were Russia and China, and you knew that Washington had a war doctrine that permits a surprise nuclear attack, would you sit there
waiting while Washington cranks up its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda machine, demonizing both countries as a threat to “freedom and democracy”?
The fools in Washington are playing with nuclear fire. Noam Chomsky points out that in a less dangerous time than currently exists, we came very close to nuclear
war. https://philosophynow.org/issues/107/Noam_Chomsky_on_Institutional_Stupidity Harold Pinter, one of the last Western intellects, understood the danger in
Western arrogance. He denounced the West’s crimes and called for the crimes to be subject to established law before it is too late for humanity. “We have brought
torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and
democracy to the Middle East’. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred
thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.”Harold
Pinter, 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. “An Iraqi Holocaust” by Gideon Polya http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230315.htm and “Genocide In Iraq”
http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150315.htm provide abundant evidence for convicting Bush and Blair. Dr. Gideon Polya is a professor of science in one of
Australia’s leading universities. He has a moral conscience, something increasingly rare in the Western world. His articles are based largely on the just published by
Clarity Press two volume heavily documented Genocide in Iraq by Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani is a British-educated lawyer with a Ph.D. in
International Law and a Ph.D. in electronics engineering. Tarik Al-Ani, is an architect, translator, and researcher. Currently I am reading the two-volume work and
intended to review it. But Professor Polya’s articles suffice as an introduction to Genocide in Iraq. Washington has committed a terrible crime in our name.
Washington not only murdered Iraq, Washington has murdered the Middle East. Washington and its
despicable vassals–”the Coalition of the Willing”–are responsible for a Middle East Holocaust. For
people in the Anglo-American world who have a moral conscience, the facts are soul-wrenching. The
populations of the countries whose governments comprised “the Coalition of the Willing” are
contaminated with war crimes committed by their governments in the Iraq Genocide. A progressive
modern state was obliterated, and 2.7 million Iraqi people were murdered. The crime was covered up with propaganda
that demonized Saddam Hussein and created fear of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi genocide was based on a lie, and both Bush and Blair knew
it. The two satanic leaders simply decided to destroy a people who they first demonized and marginalized. Cheney and the neocons continue to justify the genocide
and the illegal torture regime that they created in order to produce fake “terrorists” as a justification for their war crimes. The Western media, especially the New
York Times, is also complicit in the Iraqi Genocide as are the insouciant Western peoples themselves who stood by cheering while millions of people were destroyed
on the basis of a blatant and transparent lie. What does the West represent? Greed? Lies? War? Torture? War Crimes? Selfishness, Intolerance? Destruction of life
on earth? The “Christian” West is a master at propaganda and self-deception. Look at the evangelical churches. They support a criminal, inhumane regime while
professing to be followers of Christ. Look at American “conservatives.” They support the militarized police state. They support the routine police murders of dark-
skinned American citizens. They support every war Washington dreams up and even more. Indeed, there are not enough wars for the satisfaction of Congressional
Republicans who now want war with Russia and with Iran. Look at the Republicans in Congress and in state governments. They hate the environment. They love
polluters. They worship Israel and Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians and the ongoing theft of the Palestinians’ country, a 60-year old activity. Just look at the
map of shrinking Palestine. More is stolen each day. Washington has supported this theft of an entire country. Yet, Washington is able to masquerade as a great
defender of human rights. Whose rights? Washington’s and Israel’s. No one else’s rights count. How does the world survive the American-Israeli aggression?
Probably it will not. The evil is now directed at Iran, Russia, and China. These countries cannot be bombed year after year after year with no consequences to the
bombers. Iran
is limited in its destructive ability. But Iran could destroy Saudi Arabia and Israel. Russia and
China can destroy the US and all of Washington’s vassal states. The intensity of Washington’s
propaganda war is driving the world to destruction . How can it be stopped when Putin himself says over and over that Washington
continually ignores every thing that the Russian government says. Putin is the peacemaker. Every peace proposal he brings is ignored by Washington whose
response is to beat the drums of war louder. Unless European governments recognize the danger in Washington’s aggression and dissolve NATO, planet earth hasn’t
long to live. The American public needs to understand the consequences of Washington’s illegality and
criminality. On the one hand it means that those subject to Washington’s aggression have to endure war
crimes, but on the other hand it means a growing hatred for America. As Washington’s easy targets are
used up, Washington engages countries that can reply to force with force. Unless the neoconservatives
are ejected from the Obama regime and banned from inclusion in any future American government, mushroom clouds will go up over
Washington, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis,
Cleveland, Chicago. The American mid-west, which hosts the ICBM silos, will become uninhabitable
except by cockroaches. Americans, and the populations of the American puppet states, desperately need to understand that Washington is incapable
of speaking the truth about anything. Washington is an evil force. Washington is Sauron. Washington is Satan. Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan.

Look at Libya. Look at Syria. Look at Somalia. Look at Ukraine. Nothing but destruction comes from
Washington. Will life on earth be Washington’s next victim?

Obama’s doctrine prioritizes diplomacy and limited engagement over military

presence- but re-intervention into Iraq risk undoing his balancing
Rohde ’14 (David Rohde, Columnist and reporter for Reuters, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize,
and a former reporter for The New York Times, The Atlantic, “Gates, Obama, and Ducking Difficult
Choices in the Middle East”, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/gates-obama-
and-ducking-difficult-choices-in-the-middle-east/282941/, January 9, 2014)
The talk about former Defense Secretary Bob Gates’s blistering new memoir, Duty, has focused on the description of President Barack Obama’s
tense 2011 Situation Room meeting with his top military advisers. A frustrated Obama expresses doubts about General David Petraeus, then
U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and questions whether the administration can do business with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “As I sat
there,” Gates wrote, “I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t
consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Republicans
quickly seized on these criticisms as proof
Obama was a dithering commander in chief. Democrats, in turn, hailed Obama for standing up to the
Pentagon brass. Yet the book—and the reactions to it—represents something far larger: a fundamental,
post-Iraq and Afghanistan change in how Americans view the use of military force. Gates, joining
Obama, liberal Democrats, and libertarian Republicans, is arguing that Washington relies on military
intervention far too often. The book represents something far larger: a fundamental, post-Iraq and Afghanistan change in how
Americans view the use of military force. “Today, too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather
than a last resort,” Gates wrote in a short excerpt that ran in The Wall Street Journal. “On the left, we
hear about the ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians to justify military intervention in Libya, Syria, Sudan
and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication of U.S.
leadership.” “There are limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can do,” he
added, “and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military
response.” For all the talk about stepping back from the region, however, the administration’s Middle East priorities still match those of
Republican and Democratic administrations for the last 50 years. Consider Obama’s landmark U.N. speech in September, when he laid out his
second-term aspirations. He stated that the United States would “use all elements of our power, including military force,” to secure four “core
interests” in the region. He vowed to “confront external aggression” against our allies, “ensure the free flow of energy,” dismantle terrorist
networks that “threaten our people” and “not tolerate the development or use of weapons of mass destruction.” Yet Sunday, when militants
affiliated with al-Qaeda seized control of parts of the Iraqi cities Ramadi and Fallujah, the White House offered a different scenario. “ It’s not
in America’s interests to have troops in the middle of every conflict in the Middle East,” Benjamin
Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said in an email to The New York Times. “Or to be
permanently involved in open-ended wars in the Middle East.” James Jeffrey, who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq
from 2010 to 2012, told me Tuesday that the real problem is that the White House tries to have it both ways politically—seeking to protect
American economic interests even as it talks of withdrawal. “They want everything,” Jeffrey said. During a telephone interview, Jeffrey stated
that if
Obama wants to achieve the four Mideast goals that he laid out in his U.N. speech, he must
maintain the credible threat of military force. This means air strikes and other limited efforts, not Iraq-
style invasions. Jeffrey specifically criticized the administration for repeatedly suggesting that any U.S.
force would lead to another Iraq. “ The sin of this administration is conflating any use of military force
with that, ” Jeffrey said, referring to Iraq. The real problem is that the White House tries to have it both ways politically—seeking
to protect American economic interests even as it talks of withdrawal. In an email exchange with me Tuesday, Rhodes flatly rejected
that criticism and insisted the administration has used “many different ways to advance U.S. interests.”
Rhodes noted that the United States uses force in the region, citing drone strikes against militants in Yemen.
Washington provides military aid to Iraq, he said, as well as to other governments battling militants.
And he said the administration uses diplomacy—referring to current efforts to reach a nuclear
agreement with Iran. “It is dangerous and costly to simply revert, time and again, to the use of military
force as the only way to advance our interests,” Rhodes added, “ it has to be seen as one tool among
many .” Rhodes’ points about the administration’s actual policies are correct. But the White House rhetoric is inconsistent and contradictory.
The administration sounds a pacifist tone in the United States but has carried out covert drone strikes that have killed more than 2,000 people
around the world. It talks of upholding international norms but raises the specter of “another Iraq” when it comes to using conventional
military force. The administration’s messaging on Syria has been particularly erratic. Obama first demanded President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster
and later threatened air strikes if the “red line” of weapons of mass destruction was crossed. He then backed down on both. Forbetter or
worse, the world—and America’s—economy remain deeply entangled with the Middle East. Even if
the United States becomes energy independent, oil from the region fuels China’s production of cheap
consumer goods to Americans. It also supports European growth, which boosts U.S. companies’ profits.
If the Middle East descends into chaos and oil prices soar, the world—and America’s—economy would
stall. Obama’s U.N. speech was one of his best. He should stand by those four core American interests
and, if needed, use limited force as a last resort to defend them. Yes, the United States should mount fewer military
interventions in the region. But that does not absolve Obama—and all of us—from facing difficult choices in the Middle East. Americans
do benefit from a world economic order based on cheap, reliable Middle Eastern oil. Pretending we
don’t is a fantasy.

ISIS risk drawing the United States back into Iraq through private contractors- would
send a signal of re-commitment
Strobel and Stewart ’15 (Warren Strobel and Phil Stewart, Reuters, “The U.S. Is About To Send
More Private Contractors To Iraq”, http://www.your-poc.com/u-s-send-private-contractors-iraq/, May
19, 2015)

WASHINGTON — TheU.S. government is preparing to boost the number of private contractors in Iraq as part
of President Barack Obama's growing effort to beat back Islamic State militants threatening the Baghdad
government, a senior U.S. official said. How many contractors will deploy to Iraq - beyond the roughly 1,800 now working there for the U.S.
State Department - will depend in part, the official said, on how widely dispersed U.S. troops advising Iraqi security forces are, and how far they are from U.S.

the preparations to increase the number of contractors - who can be responsible for
diplomatic facilities. Still,

everything from security to vehicle repair and food service - underscores Obama's growing
commitment in Iraq . When U.S. troops and diplomats venture into war zones, contractors tend to follow, doing jobs once handled by the military itself.
"It is certain that there will have to be some number of contractors brought in for additional support," said the senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of
anonymity. After Islamic State seized large swaths of Iraqi territory and the major city of Mosul in June, Obama ordered U.S. troops back to Iraq. Last month, he
authorized roughly doubling the number of troops, who will be in non-combat roles, to 3,100, but is keen not to let the troop commitment grow too much. There
The U.S. military’s
are now about 1,750 U.S. troops in Iraq, and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last week ordered deployment of an additional 1,300.

reliance on civilians was on display during Hagel's trip to Baghdad this month, when he and his
delegation were flown over the Iraqi capital in helicopters operated by State Department contractors. The
problem, the senior U.S. official said, is that as U.S. troops continue flowing into Iraq, the State Department's contractor ranks will no longer be able to support the
needs of both diplomats and troops. After declining since late 2011, State Department contractor numbers in Iraq have risen slightly, by less than 5 percent, since
June, a State Department spokesman said. For example, in July, the State Department boosted from 39 to 57 the number of personnel protecting the U.S. consulate
in Erbil that came under threat from Islamic State forces during its June offensive. That team is provided by Triple Canopy, part of the Constellis Group
conglomerate, which is the State Department's largest security contractor. Constellis did not respond to a phone call seeking comment. CONTROVERSIAL PRESENCE
The presence of contractors in Iraq, particularly private security firms, has been controversial since a
series of violent incidents during the U.S. occupation , culminating in the September 2007 killing of 14
unarmed Iraqis by guards from the Blackwater security firm. Three former guards were convicted in October of voluntary
manslaughter charges and a fourth of murder in the case, which prompted reforms in U.S. government oversight of contractors. U.S. troops in Iraq are not using
private contractors to provide them additional security, a second U.S. official said. Virtually all the U.S. government contractors now in Iraq work for the State
Department. The withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq in 2011 left it little choice but to hire a small army of contractors to help protect diplomatic facilities,
and provide other services like food and logistics. The number of Pentagon contractors, which in late 2008 reached over 163,000 - rivaling the number of U.S. troops
on the ground at the time - has fallen sharply with reduced U.S. military presence. Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said there is only a handful left now and they
report to the State Department. In late 2013, the Pentagon still had 6,000 contractors in Iraq, mostly supporting U.S. weapon sales to the Baghdad government,
Wright said. But there are signs that trend will be reversed. The Pentagon in August issued a public notice
that it was seeking help from private firms to advise Iraq's Ministry of Defense and its Counter Terrorism
Service. The notice appeared intended as preparation, in case military commanders need to surge contractors into Iraq. The announcement did not specify the
size or cost of the proposed effort. The Pentagon also said in a quarterly census in October that it would resume

reporting on contractors supporting it operations in Iraq in its next update due in January.

This re-intervention risk repeating all the failures of Bush- destabilizes Iraq and flips
Obama doctrine
Tétreault ’14 (Mary Ann Tétreault, Cox distinguished professor of international affairs emerita at
Trinity University in San Antonio. She frequently writes on the Arab Gulf and U.S. foreign policy, Foreign
Policy in Focus, “Behind Door Number Three in Iraq”, http://fpif.org/behind-door-number-three-iraq/,
July 28, 2014)

Obama has few good options in Iraq, but the worst choice would be emulating George W. Bush. Evaluating
Obama’s options in Iraq requires a careful look at what did–and more importantly, what didn’t–work about the Bush administration’s 2007 “troop surge” in the
country. (Photo: Expert Infantry / Flickr) Governments
around the world—and their expensive yet oddly clueless
intelligence agencies—are watching in shock and horror as militant Sunni radicals sweep from Syria into
Iraq. Yet today’s crisis was both predictable and predicted ever since President George W. Bush made it
clear that he and whomever he could persuade to join him were going to invade Iraq. That decision was
the first in a long train of bad decisions hurtling toward the situation we find ourselves in today. Indeed,
the reality of this post-Saddam world can be traced all the way back to the first plans for a post-Saddam
Iraq bruited about by U.S. policymakers—in early 2001. The conduct of foreign policy is similar to a perpetual broadcast of “Let’s
Make a Deal,” whose trademark device is for contestants to choose one of three doors, each concealing a prize to be exchanged for something already in-hand.
Once the contestant chooses a door, she is committed to the exchange. She cannot reject the revealed prize and try again, although if she gets a truly horrible prize,
a “zonk,” she can exchange it for $100 after the show is over. Foreign policy makers and actors also have resources to trade or spend. The doors they confront have
labels—“rescue Kuwait,” “invade Iraq.” What is unknown is the outcome of the course of action lying behind the chosen door. Unlike the TV show, however, the
foreign policy game doesn’t end, and there’s no token cash prize to console contestants who make poor choices (although they may earn large fees by regaling
sympathetic audiences with revisionist histories after leaving the studio). While they remain in the game, policy actors are repeatedly confronted by new sets of
doors stemming from the decisions they’ve already made. Each offers a narrower range of choices and exacts more in exchange for them. This game resembles
moving down a funnel that continually narrows until the decider falls out the bottom or, even worse, gets stuck. Bush’s doors led to choices that were substantially
free, including: “invade Iraq with a coalition of the ‘willing,’” “finish up in Afghanistan and do not invade Iraq,” and “get the United Nations to endorse an invasion of
Iraq and help pay for it and carry it out.” The last was the door chosen by his father when he intervened against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush the son—with his
sidekick, British Prime Minister Tony Blair—chose door number one. The next set of doors led to post-war reconstruction and reconciliation. U.S. government
agencies did their best to provide not only choices, but also predictions of what would happen if various courses of action were pursued or not. Bush chose to let
the Iraqis work things out for themselves. The other doors were not free. All of them would have required a long and substantial troop deployment that both would
have diverted money from favored contractors to military members and would have constituted an admission that General Edward Shinseki, who had testified
before Congress that the Bush administration had badly underestimated the number of troops it would require to stabilize Iraq, had been right. The Doors after
Saddam The next doors led to who would preside over Iraq. Door number one opened on Paul Bremer, a protégé of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who
opened the door to disband the Iraqi army. Reconstruction of Iraq proceeded without proper planning and supervision, leaving the country in far worse shape than
it had been under Saddam. Meanwhile, the doors facing disgruntled Baathists and desperate Iraqi Sunnis left unemployed thanks to Bremer’s choices led to
insurgency, exile, or immiseration. Different actors chose different doors, although the existence of the doors, what lay behind them, and who and how many had
chosen door number one to insurgency were furiously denied by the Bush administration. 2006 was not a good year for Iraq or for President Bush. Elements of the
Iraqi insurgency reportedly joined forces with al-Qaeda in Iraq, turning a fraudulent rationale for the Iraqi invasion into a post-war reality. U.S. war deaths remained
high, and Bush’s approval rating hit a personal low in early May. The 2006 midterm elections substituted Democratic for Republican majorities in both houses of
Congress. It was time for new choices in Iraq. With the insurgency degenerating into sectarian warfare, and in the face of opposition from the House of
Representatives and his own generals, Bush chose a door he had gone through twice before: increasing troop levels in Iraq. This time he announced a “surge” of
30,000 additional troops. In the end, they amounted to about 20,000 Army forces augmented by 10,000 National Guard troops because the Army could not spare
the full number. Bush was criticized both for proposing a surge in the first place and for sending too few troops to make it work. As it proceeded on the ground, he
was criticized for the rise in U.S. casualties it produced. When General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker reported to Congress about the progress of the
surge in September 2007, Democrats disputed their optimistic testimony even as it quieted other critics. By the time that officials announced the first withdrawal of
surge troops in November 2007, the surge appeared to have succeeded. But did it? To Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in January 2007, the door with the offer
to send more U.S. troops to protect Baghdad was not the deal he wanted. He was hoping for a “donut” deployment that would put US troops outside Baghdad,
allowing his militia-run ethnic-cleansing project inside the city to proceed. As Sunni Iraqis were driven out of the city entirely, or ghettoized in areas surrounded by
concrete barriers courtesy of the U.S. military, Shiite Iraqis were moved in, many by Muqtada al-Sadr’s feared Mahdi Army. The ethnic cleansing campaign was
responsible for many of the bodies littering Baghdad’s streets. As it achieved its objective, the violence in Baghdad decreased. Al-Sadr’s militia was highly criticized
for the brutality of its operations, which led him to a new set of doors, some offering possible career changes. Al-Sadr announced a “freeze” on militia operations in
August 2007. Originally for six months, the freeze was repeatedly extended. Meanwhile, al-Sadr went to Iran, reportedly to study, although U.S. observers believed
he had left to avoid capture. The departure of al-Sadr and his militia from the scene removed a major contributor to the violence in Baghdad. The third contribution
to reduced sectarian violence in Iraq was the political maneuvering employed by U.S. Marines serving in Anbar province. Sunni tribal leaders offered to change sides
if the Marines would help them fight off al-Qaeda. The tribes’ alliance with al-Qaeda had lost its charm despite continuing economic hardship. Al-Qaeda had found
that the militant anti-Sunni policies of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had opened doors to the takeover of Sunni communities in Anbar and elsewhere. Some of
them found openings to cut in on the tribal leaders’ local smuggling businesses, which was particularly resented. The “Sunni Awakening” was intended to slam the
doors, leaving al-Qaeda on the outside. The Marines were happy to work with the tribal leaders. When their successes came to the attention of General Petraeus,
he made it into “a national project,” according to the New Yorker. “Ultimately, during 2007 and 2008, the United States Army hired about a hundred thousand
militiamen, known as Sons of Iraq, at three hundred dollars per month, to serve as neighborhood guards; the Army eventually expanded the program to include Shia
militiamen.” Sunni-initiated violence also decreased. Iraq appeared to be moving closer to reconciliation, allowing President Bush to open the door to an end of U.S.
involvement in the fighting and, if not another victory speech, a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) providing for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the
end of 2011. After Bush The story of what Iraq and the United States found on the other side of that door is a long and contested one. Among its puzzling aspects is
President Obama’s decision to apply a surge strategy in Afghanistan which, in the absence of the underlying factors that made the surge in Iraq look successful, was
mostly ineffective, with the exception of increasing U.S. casualties. In Iraq, Obama tried to persuade al-Maliki to permit a small deployment of U.S. forces to remain
in Iraq after the end of 2011, but he was not successful. Obama, who had opposed the Iraq war from the start, had promised to end it. Keeping U.S. forces in Iraq
without protection from Iraqi jurisprudence beyond the time specified in Bush’s SOFA was not a door he wanted to open. Al-Maliki wanted to show himself as fully
in charge in Iraq, a situation that he feared would not last if the Americans’ preference to include his political rival, Ayad Allawi, in the government were part of the
deal. The Kurds also avoided being drawn into a power-sharing agreement, and the attempt to recreate a post-occupation of Iraq failed. Al-Maliki rejected the last-
minute appeals, and U.S. forces departed on time. Decisions by Sunnis throughout northern and north-central Iraq not to oppose—indeed, often to join—ISIS, the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (now IS, the Islamic State), might look puzzling. But these decisions derive from the earlier policies of al-Maliki when he continued
excluding Sunni citizens from power and repressing them. It’s no surprise that al-Maliki, an Iran protégé, prefers to rely on Iran and Hezbollah, along with Bashar al-

Assad, to defend what is left of Iraq. The real mystery is why Obama, if not surging back into Iraq, has opened the
door to trickling in. Bullied by the veterans of Team Bush, eager to whitewash the storming of door
number one that brought the United States into Iraq in 2003, surprised by the collapse of al-Maliki’s
army in the Sunni areas he had consigned to their pre-awakening status quo of abuse and isolation
behind door number two, he seems to be cracking open door number three and another U.S. attempt
to halt the march of ISIS—and al-Qaeda—across Iraq. But as a younger Obama could have predicted , it
is not going to work. In the absence of Marines handing out monthly salaries to Sunni Iraqis and without the newly self-declared caliph of IS, Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, taking off for religious instruction in Saudi Arabia, the best Obama might find behind the doors facing him now

would be an effective pro-Maliki uprising by the Shi’a in Baghdad and successes on the ground
pushing IS out of its current bridgeheads elsewhere in Iraq. Indeed, this is a door he does not even
have to open. Compared to the inadequacy of Bush’s 30,000 military forces in 2007, Obama’s tiny commitment of 300 Special Forces is nowhere near
enough to train and equip an army or even begin to end the corruption that has hollowed out Iraqi political and military forces, already shown to be impervious to
years of efforts by hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, contractors, and diplomats. His decision to send them is more than enough, however, to tar Obama with
al-Maliki’s—and Bashar al-Assad’s and Hezbollah’s—brush. So, which door will Obama now choose? The
problem with surges is that
policymakers find it easier to get in than to get out of them . If Obama continues through door number
one—following a pattern going back to the Vietnam War and committing more and more U.S.
resources to an incompetent and ineffective regime—he is likely to get stuck in the funnel . Door number two
might open onto an international effort to halt the violence and come to some sort of negotiated deal. Door number three opens on to a room where the violent
politics that lay on the other side of Maliki’s doors are played out. The
president has said on more than one occasion that the
use of military force should not be the first recourse of policymakers. If he goes through door number
one, the Obama doctrine will find its end in the sands of Iraq . But in this narrow part of the funnel, every door leads to a prize
he is likely to be reluctant to claim.
And- empirics prove - intervention would only escalate the situation- strategic
withdrawal is the only way to open space for sustainable reform
Eland ’15 (Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent
Institute, “Turmoil in the Middle East Seems Constant, and U.S. Military Intervention Only Makes It
Worse”, The World Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/turmoil-in-the-middle-
eas_b_7637314.html, June 22, 2015)

Recently, the U.S. government has been dealt setbacks in five of the seven developing, Islamic countries in
which its military recently has attacked or invaded since 9/11 -- Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and
Yemen. In the other two countries, Pakistan and Somalia, the situation remains extremely unstable. In
Syria and Iraq, the brutal ISIS group, which is mainly a threat to the nearby Middle East region, captured
the cities of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. In Afghanistan, the Taliban attacked the parliament
building in Kabul, the capital, overran two northern districts, and threatened the major city of Kunduz.
Such Taliban gains in the north are unusual, because their traditional strength in Afghanistan has been in
Pashtun tribal areas in the south and east. In Libya, the U.S.-led overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, using
air attacks, has resulted in a split country with war between tribal factions using Gaddafi's plentiful arms
stockpiles, radical jihadist bases being set up, and ISIS taking over the coastal city of Sirte. In Yemen,
despite U.S. airstrikes and drone attacks over the years, and Saudi Arabian air strikes more recently, the
Iran-friendly Shi'ite Houthi rebels have overran much of the country and put the U.S. and Saudi-backed
Hadi regime into exile. Also Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of the main group, has taken
advantage of the anarchy in Yemen to expand its territory. The American media report on all of this turmoil with great
hype, as if most of these faraway conflicts impinge greatly on U.S. security. Most of them don't. Of course, t his nationalist media
coverage always makes it seem natural that the U.S military should be intervening in all of these
countries to "do something" about their problems to prevent jihadist groups from arising or expanding.
Yet the evidence seems to show that U.S. military interventions create more jihadists ( for example, as
documented by journalists in Yemen) or new and worse groups (the U.S. invasion created al Qaeda in
Iraq, which morphed into ISIS). Yet radical Islamists existed for decades before 9/11, posing little or no
threat to the distant United States . In fact, during the Cold War, the United States fueled Islamist
jihadism to battle communism -- for example, aiding the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, which would morph into the original
al Qaeda group. Since the United States rarely leaves completely anywhere its military has been -- for example,
Europe, Japan, Korea, and now Afghanistan and Iraq -- it is hard for the public to avoid the fear of the resulting
consequences that the bipartisan foreign policy elite has instilled about such an "unthinkable" policy
option. Yet one such example exists that might prove instructive -- Ronald Reagan's ignominious
withdrawal from Lebanon after the Iran-supported Hezbollah group blew up a Marine barracks, killing
241 U.S. military personnel. Of course, Reagan's first mistake was sending "peacekeeping" troops to
Lebanon to help Israel -- whose leaders had lied to the United States about the expansiveness of its war
aims--stabilize the country after the Israeli invasion force withdrew in 1983. U.S. forces ended up getting
enmeshed in a civil war, fighting Muslim factions on behalf of an Israeli-supported Christian minority
government. The bombing by Hezbollah of the Marine barracks was in retaliation for that one-sided U.S.
intervention. The instructive point here, however, is what happened after Reagan withdrew U.S. forces
from Lebanon -- Hezbollah gradually attenuated its attacks on U.S. targets. Groups -- even radical or
brutal ones such as Hezbollah, al Qaeda, or ISIS -- rarely attack for no reason. Most Americans believe they are
either "crazies" or are attacking U.S. targets because they are jealous of the United States being the best country in the world -- or as George W.
Bush put it more subtly after 9/11, they are attacking the United States because of its "freedoms." When Bush told the American people this
whopper, it infuriated Osama bin Laden so much that he again stated why he was attacking the United States -- essentially U.S. meddling in
Muslim lands. Americans also think that if you try too hard to explain the motives of such groups then you are taking their side, not playing on
the "American team," or are condoning their unacceptably brutal tactics. Yet any general of any competence knows that you need to
understand your enemy and what drives his attacks. In fact, it is dangerous to be oblivious to the enemy's motives, as most Americans still are
more than a decade after 9/11. Clearly,
Muslims do not like non-Muslims attacking, invading, or intervening in
Islamic lands. They were sick of it in the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s when the colonial empires
did it and they continued to be sick of it when the United States took over policing the Middle East for
these declining empires after World War II. Yet what Americans perceive as an increasingly violent and
chaotic Islamic world is not all America's fault. Even before U.S. post-World War II interventions, such
regions were often in turmoil. However, since World War II, U.S. interventions have made often things
worse through unintended consequences and have put a bull's eye on American targets for retaliatory
attacks. If the United States would tone down its policy in the Middle East and the broader Islamic
world, radical Islamists would not go away -- they have always been there -- but they would be far less
likely to attack U.S. targets -- as the example of Lebanon indicates.

The plan is reverse causal at creating stability-

Reducing military presence in Iraq sends a signal that the United States is not going to
re-invade which is sufficient and necessary to open up space for indigenous
movements to resolve instability- ISIS thrives off of US war
Lazare ’15 (Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for Common Dreams and an independent journalist whose
work has been featured in The Nation, Al Jazeera, TomDispatch, Yes! Magazine, Foreign Policy in Focus,
“How to Get Serious About Ending the ISIS War”, http://fpif.org/get-serious-ending-isis-war/, February
4, 2015)

A long-term alternative to war can only be built by popular movements in Iraq and Syria. These
movements still matter, and they deserve our solidarity — not our bombs. The expanding U.S.-led war on the so-called
Islamic State, or ISIS, has largely fallen off the radar of U.S. social movements. Many (but not all) who were active in anti-war organizing over the past decade have
turned away from this conflict. The dearth of public debate is conspicuous, even as the U.S. government sinks the country deeper into yet another open-ended and
ill-defined military operation. The refrain “it will take years” has become such a common utterance by the Obama administration that it slips by barely noticed.
There are many reasons for the relative silence in the face of this latest military escalation. I would venture that one of them is the sheer complexity of the situation
on the ground in Iraq and Syria — as well as the real humanitarian crisis posed by the rise of ISIS, the many-layered power struggles across the wider Middle East,
and the difficulty of building connections with grassroots movements in countries bearing the brunt of the violence. But
the answer to complexity
is not to do nothing. In fact, great crimes and historic blunders — from Palestine to South Africa to Afghanistan — have been tacitly enabled by people
who chose not to take action, perhaps because the situation seemed too complex to engage. When millions of lives are on the line, inaction is unacceptable. The

task is to figure out what to do. The most important question to ask is this: Do we really think that the
U.S. military operation against ISIS will bring about a good outcome for the people of Iraq and Syria , or
for U.S. society? Is there any evidence from the more than 13 years of the so-called “War on Terror” that

U.S. military intervention in the Middle East brings anything but death, displacement, destabilization,
and poverty to the people whose homes have been transformed into battlefields? The answer to
these questions must be a resounding “No.” But there are also many things to say “Yes” to. A better path forward can only be forged by
peoples’ movements on the ground in Iraq and Syria — movements that still exist, still matter, and continue to organize for workers’ rights, gender justice, war
reparations, and people power, even amid the death and displacement that has swallowed up all the headlines. Now
is a critical time to seek to
understand and build solidarity with Iraqi and Syrian civil societies. Heeding their call, we should
strengthen awareness here at home of the tremendous political and ethical debt the United States
owes all people harmed by the now-discredited war on Iraq and the crises it set in motion. “U.S.
Military Action Leads to Chaos” “A rational observer of United States intervention in the swath of land
that runs from Libya to Afghanistan would come to a simple conclusion: U.S. military action leads to
chaos,” wrote scholar and activist Vijay Prashad a month after the bombings began. More than 13 years
on, there is no evidence that the “War on Terror” has accomplished its stated, if amorphous, goal: to
weed out terrorism (defined to exclude atrocities committed by the U.S. and allied states, of course). According to the Global
Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace, global terrorist incidents have
climbed dramatically since the onset of the War on Terror. In 2000, there were 1,500 terrorist incidents.
By 2013, this number had climbed to 10,000. People in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria
suffer the most, the index notes. The so-called “good war” in Afghanistan, which is now entering its 14th year and has not ended, illustrates this
failed policy (President Obama’s recent claim that the combat mission is “over” notwithstanding). In contradiction of the Obama

administration’s “mission accomplished” spin, Afghanistan is suffering a spike in civilian deaths,

displacement, poverty, and starvation, with 2014 proving an especially deadly year for Afghan non-
combatants. The Taliban, furthermore, appears to be growing in strength, as the U.S. forces Afghanistan
into long-term political and military dependency with the Bilateral Security Agreement signed last
September by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. The Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan is one of numerous civil society
groups in Afghanistan that have no illusions about the U.S. track record so far. “In the past thirteen years, the U.S. and its allies have wasted tens of billions of
[dollars], and turned this country into the center of global surveillance and mafia gangs; and left it poor, corrupt, insecure, hungry, and crippled with tribal, linguistic,
and sectarian divisions,” the organization declared in a statement released last October. The
current crisis in Iraq and Syria is another
piece of this puzzle. It is now well-documented that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 played a critical
role in fueling al-Qaeda in Iraq, which would eventually become ISIS. Emerging as part of the insurgency
against the United States — and now thriving off opposition to the sectarian Shiite government propped
up by Washington — ISIS did not even exist before the United States invaded Iraq. Its ranks were initially
filled with Sunnis who were spat out by the brutal, U.S.-imposed de-Baathification process, and later by
those disaffected by a decade of negligence and repression from Shiite authorities in Baghdad. In neighboring
Syria, the United States and Saudi Arabia backed anti-Assad fighters that were, as journalist Patrick Cockburn put it, “ideologically close to al-Qaeda” yet “relabeled
as moderate.” It was in Syria that ISIS developed the power to push back into Iraq after being driven out in 2007. Ordinary
people across the
region are paying a staggering price for these policies. 2014 was the deadliest year for civilians in Iraq
since the height of the U.S. war in 2006 and 2007, according to Iraq Body Count. The watchdog found
that 17,049 civilians were recorded killed in Iraq last year alone — approximately double the number
recorded killed in 2013, which in turn was roughly double the tally from 2012. And more than 76,000 people — over
3,500 of them children — died last year in Syria, according to figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner

for Refugees, recently warned, “ The

Syria and Iraq mega-crises, the multiplication of new crises, and the old crises
that seem never to die have created the worst displacement situation in the world since World War
II,” with at least 13.6 million people displaced from both countries. But instead of reckoning with these
legacies, the U.S. government has taken a giant leap backward — towards another open-ended, ill-
defined military operation in Iraq and now Syria. President Obama vowed in his recent State of the Union address to double down in the
fight against ISIS, declaring yet again, “this effort will take time.” His remarks came just days after the United States and Britain announced a renewed joint military
effort, and the Pentagon deployed 1,000 troops to Middle Eastern states to train “moderate” Syrian fighters. That comes in addition to the 3,000 soldiers ordered to
deploy to Iraq, with more likely to follow. Meanwhile, the rise of Islamophobia in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks is feeding war fervor abroad and at home.
And so the Obama administration — which falls into the political realist camp and has, at times, pressed for a moderate retrenchment of U.S. war in the Middle East
(in part to enable a disastrous pivot to Asia) — is now leading a military response to a crisis that the president himself has acknowledged cannot be solved by the
U.S. military. To do so, Obama has repeatedly sidestepped congressional debate by claiming authority from the post-9/11 war authorization against the
perpetrators of the attacks — the same legislation he once denounced for “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.” (He vowed in his State of the Union
address to seek out explicit authorization from Congress for the war on ISIS, but has claimed in the past not to need it.) “As If Further Militarization Ever Brought
Peace to Iraq” As the U.S. government makes unverified claims that U.S. lives are under threat from ISIS, it is Muslims, Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, and Christians in the
Middle East who are being killed, raped, and displaced. “The occupation of the city of Mosul started a new chapter of women’s suffering in Iraq,” wrote the
Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq in a statement published last December. “Daesh (ISIS) reawakened the ancient tribal habits of claiming women as spoils
of war.” Meanwhile, Kurds are fighting and dying to beat back ISIS in both Iraq and Syria but are not even offered a seat at the international table. This was
highlighted in the recent exclusion of Kurdish groups from an anti-ISIS conference in London of representatives from 21 nations. At this conference, U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry claimed that the coalition had “halted the momentum” of ISIS fighters, while other U.S. officials insisted that half of the “top command” of ISIS had
been killed. While global media outlets ran with this “news,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel publicly expressed serious doubt about such claims, describing the body
count as “unverified.” Furthermore,
the ability of the U.S. military — the most powerful in the world — to blow
up and kill is not in question. But in a complex geopolitical arena, that’s simply not a valid measure of
“success.” The histories of the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars are tragic examples of the vast
difference between killing a lot of people and “winning” a war. Over five months in, U.S. military
operations in Iraq and Syria are neither alleviating the humanitarian crisis nor meeting any of the
shifting goals of U.S. officials (containing ISIS, destroying them, etc.). The perception that ISIS is primarily at war with
the United States is, in fact, critical to their growth. The CIA estimated in September — just a month
after U.S.-led bombings began — that ISIS had tripled its ranks, from 10,000 to over 30,000 . As Patrick
Cockburn reported in early January, “The territories [ISIS] conquered in a series of lightning campaigns last summer

remain almost entirely under its control, even though it has lost some towns to the Kurds and Shia
militias in recent weeks.” So while the expansion of ISIS’ frontiers may have slowed, the intervention has
failed to prevent the group from consolidating its control in Iraq and Syria . “Extremism thrives during
foreign interventions and military actions,” said Raed Jarrar of the American Friends Service
Committee in an interview for this article . “Bombing different groups who live in the same areas as ISIS
has helped unite ISIS with more moderate groups, more reasonable groups, who could have been
persuaded to rejoin the political process. In Syria, bombing ISIS and other extremist groups, including al-
Qaeda, has helped them unite, although they have been killing each other for the past two years.” In
addition to the crimes perpetrated by ISIS, U.S.-backed and armed Iraqi forces, sectarian Iraqi militias,
and “moderate rebels” in Syria are also committing brutal war crimes. In July, for example, Human Rights Watch
condemned the Iraqi government for repeatedly bombing densely populated residential neighborhoods, including numerous strikes on Fallujah’s main hospital with
mortars and other munitions. And
in October, Amnesty International warned that Iraqi Shiite militias, many of
them funded and armed by the Iraqi government, are committing war crimes that include abductions,
executions, and disappearances of Sunni civilians . In Iraq, Patrick Cockburn writes, “The war has become a sectarian
bloodbath. Where Iraqi army, Shia militia, or Kurdish peshmerga have driven ISIS fighters out of Sunni
villages and towns from which civilians have not already fled, any remaining Sunni have been
expelled, killed, or detained.” In other words, U.S. military intervention is not advancing the side with
a clear moral high-ground, but militarizing what Raed Jarrar calls a “bloody civil conflict with criminal
forces on all sides.” And now, of course, Iraqis must contend with the return of a far more powerful
fighting force guilty of numerous atrocities and war crimes across the globe, including torture,
massacres, use of chemical weapons, and cluster bombing of civilians in Iraq: the U.S. military. In a
recent statement, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq slammed the U.S.-led military
campaign for, in the midst of this humanitarian crisis, “providing further military arms and bombing
only, as if further militarization ever brought peace to Iraq.” Neither the international coalition nor the Iraqi government, the
statement continues, is concerned “with the enslavement of more than five thousand women who are being bought and sold in broad day-light in Mosul, Raqqa,
and other ‘Islamic State’ cities.” None of this is to overstate the coherence of the U.S. strategy in Iraq and Syria, nor to even confirm the existence of one. Since

the bombings began in August, the U.S. has waffled and balked, going from support for “moderate
rebels” in Syria to the announcement that it would create its own proxy force. The United States initially hesitated to
militarily back Kurdish forces holding out against ISIS in the Syrian town of Kobani, and many people bearing the brunt of ISIS’ repression on the ground seem to
doubt that the U.S. is seriously trying to stem the group’s advance. The
U.S. government has trumpeted its broad military
coalition, yet seemingly turns a blind eye as its allies go on directly and indirectly supporting ISIS. In truth, the
U.S. and global publics are kept in the dark about what the U.S.-led military coalition is doing, how long this war will last, where its boundaries lie, and what
“victory” means. Obama and Kerry have both indicated that the war on ISIS will take years, but Pentagon officials repeatedly refuse to reveal basic information, like
what specific duties troops on the ground in Iraq are tasked with and who is dying under U.S. bombs in Iraq and Syria. Just last December, a U.S. coalition bomb
struck an ISIS-operated jail in the town of al-Bab, Syria, killing at least 50 civilians detained inside, according to multiple witnesses. Yet while the Pentagon has
demurred that civilians “may have died” during its operations, it’s refused to actually acknowledge a single civilian death under its bombs. Women’s rights activists
in Baghdad (PBS News Hour / Flickr) Alternatives to U.S.-Led War Some people in the United States have thrown their support behind the military operations, or at
least not opposed them, out of a genuine concern for the well being of people in Iraq and Syria. However
good these intentions, though, all
evidence available suggests that military intervention won’t make anyone safer. “ The first level is
stopping the U.S. from causing more harm,” Jarrar told me. “That is really essential.” According to
Jarrar, a U.S. push to stop the bombings is solidaristic in itself. In fact, he said, we can’t talk about solidarity,
reparations, or redress for all the harm the U.S. has done in the now-discredited 2003 war “while we are
bombing Iraq and Syria. It doesn’t make any sense to reach out to people, ask them to attend conferences for reconciliation, while we are bombing
their neighborhood.”

Independently- Collapse of the Obama doctrine risk undermining international

multilateralism- ensures a laundry list of impacts are magnified
Good ‘9 (CHRIS GOOD is a political reporter for ABC News. He was previously an associate editor at The
Atlantic and a reporter for The Hill, The Atlantic, “The Obama Doctrine: Multilateralism With Teeth”,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/12/the-obama-doctrine-multilateralism-with-
teeth/31655/, December 10, 2009)

President Obama
gave a stirring speech this morning in Oslo, one laced with exhortations of international
bodies like NATO, the U.N., and the League of Nations, devoted to collectively upholding right,
preventing conflict, and sometimes, ultimately, fighting just wars. And much of Obama's speech was a discourse on war--how
it can be used to uphold peace, and how it is horrible and inglorious but, at times, necessary. "I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to
the American people," Obama said. "For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations
cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism--it is a recognition of history, the
imperfections of man and the limits of reason." In other words, make no mistake: our president is not a nonviolent pacifist. The
term being thrown
around today to describe Obama's perspective on war and international security is "realism," or as Ben
Smith put it, "realism with a heart." Realism is always a precarious term, as it implies a shared
understanding of just what the realities of foreign policy are--and those realities, often, are disputed.
But it's an accurate description of Obama's approach: "I face the world as it is" was perhaps the most
significant line of his speech--and what term other than "realism" can describe that. But the central thesis of
Obama's speech was a rejection of the dichotomy between realism and idealism, outlined thusly: In some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused
by the false suggestion that these are Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development. And within America, there has long been a
tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists - a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless
campaign to impose our values. I reject this choice. I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please;
choose their own leaders or assemble without fear. Pent up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know
that the opposite is true. Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are
governments that protect the rights of their citizens. No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests - nor the world's -are served by the denial of
human aspirations. If there is an Obama doctrine of foreign policy, up until this point it has been engagement. Today
in Oslo, Obama fleshed out
that doctrine to mean engagement with teeth, coupled with a strong international commitment . At
the beginning of his speech, Obama praised the Marshall Plan, the U.N., and "mechanisms to govern the
waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, and restrict the most dangerous
weapons." Multilateralism was a theme. As was engagement: "I know that engagement with repressive
regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach--and
condemnation without discussion--can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can
move down a path unless it has the choice of an open door." Read: talking to Iran. And, on the effective
sternness of that multilateralism: "...if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international
community must mean something. those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable.
Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure--and such
pressure only exists when the world stands together as one." This speech, in many ways, was a justification of America's military
activity in Afghanistan and its role in peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans and in Somalia. Obama did not say the word "Iraq" once. It was also a reaction against the
Bush doctrine--of preemptive war--but it was not that doctrine's opposite: if the Clinton era saw the U.S. engage in nation-building efforts, and the Bush era saw the
U.S. adopt an aggressively retributive--and ultimately a preemptive--posture toward enemies, Obama's speech marked a return to the former, with an emphasis on
internationalism and human rights. It contained in it the seed of George H.W. Bush's post-Cold War foreign policy vision, outlined by Bush thusly in his speech to
Congress declaring victory in the First Gulf War: Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world
order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a world order in which "the principles of justice and fair play protect the weak against the strong. . . ." A world where the
United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a
home among all nations. The Gulf war put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that test. The Cold War long behind us, Obama's
speech signifies an update to that vision in a further globalized world: of multilateralism with teeth, acknowledging the realities of aggression and oppression.
Significantly, Obama sought to move past the liberal sentiment that Americans felt as a backlash to the
Iraq War: the idea that America was engaged in an imperialist enterprise, militarily and culturally. His
answer: we do not seek to impose our will, but we will stand for global security and rights. Here's how the
president summed up his point: Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights.

Investments in development. All of these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that
President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, or the staying
power, to complete this work without something more - and that is the continued expansion of our
moral imagination; an insistence that there is something irreducible that we all share.

Those scenarios escalate to extinction

Masciulli ’11 (Joseph Masciulli, St. Thomas political science professor, “The Governance Challenge for
Global Political and Technoscientific Leaders in an Era of Globalization and Globalizing Technologies”,
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, February, ebsco, 2011)

What is most to be feared is enhanced global disorder resulting from the combination of weak global
regulations; the unforeseen destructive consequences of converging technologies and economic
globalization; military competition among the great powers; and the prevalent biases of short-term
thinking held by most leaders and elites. But no practical person would wish that such a disorder scenario come true, given all the weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs) available now or which will surely become available in the foreseeable future. As converging technologies united by IT, cognitive science,

nanotechnology, and robotics advance synergistically in monitored and unmonitored laboratories, we may be blindsided by these future

developments brought about by technoscientists with a variety of good or destructive or mercenary

motives. The current laudable but problematic openness about publishing scientific results on the Internet would contribute greatly to such negative outcomes.
To be sure, if the global disorder-emergency scenario occurred because of postmodern terrorism or
rogue states using biological, chemical, or nuclear WMDs, or a regional war with nuclear weapons in the
Middle East or South Asia, there might well be a positive result for global governance. Such a global emergency
might unite the global great and major powers in the conviction that a global concert was necessary for their survival and planetary survival as well. In such a global
great power concert, basic rules of economic, security, and legal order would be uncompromisingly enforced both globally and in the particular regions where they
held hegemonic status. That concert scenario, however, is flawed by the limited legitimacy of its structure based on the members having the greatest hard and soft
power on planet Earth. At
the base of our concerns, I would argue, are human proclivities for narrow, short-term
thinking tied to individual self-interest or corporate and national interests in decision makin g. For globalization,
though propelled by technologies of various kinds, “remains an essentially human phenomenon . . . and the main drivers for the establishment and uses of
disseminative systems are hardy perennials: profit, convenience, greed, relative advantage, curiosity, demonstrations of prowess, ideological fervor, malign
destructiveness.” These human drives and capacities will not disappear. Their “manifestations now extend considerably beyond more familiarly empowered
governmental, technoscientific and corporate actors to include even individuals: terrorists, computer hackers and rogue market traders” (Whitman, 2005, p. 104).
In this dangerous world, if people are to have their human dignity recognized and enjoy their human
rights, above all, to life, security, a healthy environment, and freedom, we need new forms of
comprehensive global regulation and control. Such effective global leadership and governance with
robust enforcement powers alone can adequately respond to destructive current global problems, and
prevent new ones. However, successful human adaptation and innovation to our current complex environment through the social construction of
effective global governance will be a daunting collective task for global political and technoscientific leaders and citizens. For our global society is caught in “the
We need to
whirlpool of an accelerating process of modernization” that has for the most part “been left to its own devices” (Habermas, 2001, p. 112).

progress in human adaptation to and innovation for our complex and problematical global social and
natural planetary environments through global governance . I suggest we need to begin by ending the prevalent biases of short-
termism in thinking and acting and the false values attached to the narrow self-interest of individuals, corporations, and states. I agree with Stephen Hawking that
the long-term future of the human race must be in space. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next
thousand, or million. . . . There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was
one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully. But I’m an
optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space. . . . But
we are entering an
increasingly dangerous period of our history . Our population and our use of the finite resources of
planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for
good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival
advantage in the past. . . . Our only chance of long term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. We have
made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.” (Hawking, 2010)
Nonetheless, to reinvent humanity pluralistically in outer space and beyond will require securing our one and
only global society and planet Earth through effective global governance in the foreseeable future. And our
dilemma is that the enforcement powers of multilateral institutions are not likely to be strengthened because of the competition for greater (relative, not absolute)
hard and soft power by the great and major powers. They seek their national or alliance superiority, or at least, parity, for the sake of their state’s survival and
security now. Unless the global disorder-emergency scenario was to occur soon—God forbid—the great powers will most likely, recklessly and tragically, leave
global survival and security to their longer term agendas.
 Advantage 2: PMC Proliferation
Global trends towards unaccountable private contractor companies risk creating
international instability- creating hotspots of instability
Linehan, Citing Sean McFate, professor of U.S. national security policy at Georgetown
University’s School of Foreign Service, ’15 (Adam Linehan, Journalist @ Maxim, Maxim, “Why
U.S. Reliance on Military Contractors in Iraq May Have Created a Monster”,
http://www.maxim.com/maxim-man/strategy/article/why-us-reliance-military-contractors-iraq-may-
have-created-monster, June 18, 2015)

It's impossible to have an honest discussion about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without acknowledging the roles
private military contractors, or security firms, like Blackwater, KBR and Triple Canopy, played—and continue to play—in those
conflicts. As a former soldier, I’ve reaped the benefits of their work. They did our laundry, prepared our meals, guarded our chow halls, and
pulled security for civilian supply convoys. They also did their fair share of bloodletting. “Mercenaries
have always existed, but
were driven underground in the 19th and 20th centuries,” says Sean McFate, author of The Modern
Mercenary. McFate is a professor of U.S. national security policy at Georgetown University’s School of
Foreign Service, but he’s not your typical academic. An ex-U.S. Army paratrooper, McFate spent several years in Africa
"raising small armies for U.S. interests" as an employee of DynCorp International, “a company that provides international security services." In
other words, McFate was a mercenary. “After the Cold War ended, there were some exceptional mercenary companies, like Executive
Outcomes and Sandline International. But the U.S.’s demand for private military service in Iraq and Afghanistan
took it from a million to a billion dollar industry.” Which raises a big question: as the U.S. military
footprint in the Middle East dwindles, however slowly, where will these companies go? As McFate
points out, “billion dollar industries don’t just evaporate overnight.” How did the United States come
to rely so heavily on private military contractors / security firms during the Iraq and Afghan wars? The
driver of the U.S.’s use of the industry is its desire for bloodless wars, at least American blood. Using contractors allows the U.S. to
remain a global power without having too much skin in the game, literally. No one cares about dead
contractors, many of whom aren’t even American. With the U.S. military presence in the Middle East
decreasing what happens to these companies? So, Americans think of Blackwater and Nisour Square in 2007 and they think
the U.S. is out of Iraq and thus this industry has somehow gone away. What really happened is that America stopped getting involved, and the
industry started looking for new clients. So the industry in the last couple of years has really proliferated and globalized, and we’re seeing
mercenaries popping up in strange places. Like where? Nigeria
recently hired a bunch of mercenaries to go defeat
Boko Haram, which they did. Six years and the Nigerian army couldn’t do it, but a couple of weeks of
mercenaries from South Africa and, yes, they’re gone or they’ve moved into Chad. Putin is allegedly
using Chechen mercenaries in the Ukraine. We’re seeing all sorts of ex-Special Forces soldiers from
Latin America showing up in the Gulf States. We’re also seeing oil companies use the firms, as well as
shipping companies. The industry is definitely proliferating; it’s just that people are not seeing it.
There are a lot of contractors in Erbil, Iraq guarding oil infrastructure. We don’t know who they are, and they’re
from all over the world. Some of them are local Iraqis, but they’re not like cool Americans who stayed behind. They’re from somewhere else.

PMC usage has opened up a Pandora’s Box- risk international chaos- reform efforts fail
to send a legitimate signal- a true reduction is key to send a signal of credibility
Vlahos ’15 (Kelley Vlahos, Kelley Vlahos has spent over a decade as a political reporter in Washington
DC. Currently, she is a Washington correspondent for the DC-based homeland security magazine,
Homeland Security Today, and a long-time political writer and weekly columnist for Antiwar.com, “A
Blackwater World Order”, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-blackwater-world-
order/, February 6, 2015)
After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that
it set the world order back to the Middle Ages. While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean
McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for Dyncorp International and is
now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s
dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a
multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global
market for conflict. “Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,”
McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private
warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.” It is a menacing
thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global
dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes
with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s),
regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New
access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly
on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era. McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-
centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will
not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the order
that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies. In
this period, before the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ended decades of war and established for the first time territorially defined sovereign
states, political authority in Europe was split among competing power brokers that rendered the monarchs equal players, if not weaker ones.
The Holy Roman Emperor, the papacy, bishoprics, city-states, dukedoms, principalities, chivalric orders–all fought for their piece with hired free
companies, or mercenary enterprises of knights-turned profiteers. As progenitors of today’s private military companies (PMCs), free companies
were “organized as legal corporations, selling their services to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit,” McFate writes. Their ranks
“swelled with men from every corner of Europe” and beyond, going where the fighting was until it wasn’t clear whether these private armies
were simply meeting the demand or creating it. In
an interview with TAC, McFate said the parallels between that
period in history and today’s global proliferation of PMCs cannot be ignored . He traces their modern origins to the
post-Cold War embrace of privatization in both Washington and London, both pioneers in military outsourcing, which began in earnest in the
1980s. By the time the U.S. decided to invade Iraq and stay there in 2003, its smaller peacetime military force structure could not withstand the
burden. The Pentagon increasingly relied on contractors to support and wage the war. “Policy makers, when they started the war in Iraq, they
didn’t think it would last beyond a few weeks. They had three terrible choices – they could withdraw prematurely, they could institute a
Vietnam-era draft … or they could contract out. So they chose to contract it out,” McFate said. “That is why you have it now and why it is not
regulated.” The U.S. used contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan more than it had in any war in its history: in 2010 there were more contractors
deployed to war zones (207,000) than U.S. servicemembers (175,000). In World War II, contractors only made up 10 percent of the military
workforce, according to McFate. From 1999 to 2008, at the peak of the wars, Pentagon spending on outsourcing alone increased from $165
billion to $466 billion a year. Attempts
at oversight have been pathetic, as documented by the government’s
own inspectors general time and again. Success at regulating or imposing codes of conduct on
contractors has proven elusive, too. The industry remains as opaque as it has been unassailable
where it really counts—the pocketbook . “The industry is here to stay; it’s not going anywhere,” said McFate a former
employee of Dyncorp, which cut its teeth in Bosnia. Dyncorp thrived as one of Washington’s primary contractors for both security and
reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq despite intermittent accusations of overbilling and underperformance on the job. Perhaps the most
infamous of all contractors was Blackwater, which deflected charges of fraud, violence against civilians and murder for years before it was
forced to “rebrand.” Four of its former guards were convicted of murder in October, however, in connection with the massacre of 17 Iraqis in
Nisour Square in 2007. Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince has dipped and dodged his way through several incarnations of his company (no longer
“Blackwater,” it was renamed “Xe” and is now “Academi”), and has been successful at running a number of other so-called shell companies and
international security operations inside and outside of the U.S. government trough, including anti-piracy enterprises in North Africa. In his post-
American days (Prince left the U.S. for Abu Dhabi in 2010 amid a series of federal charges and lawsuits dogging Blackwater), Prince perched
himself “at the top of the management chain” at Saracen International, a security group made up of hard-core mercenary veterans hired in
2009 to train indigenous forces in Puntland, Somalia, and to serve as a security detail for the embattled president of the fragile central
government in Mogadishu. Saracen was officially kicked out of Somalia in 2011 after accusations were made that it was violating the country’s
arms embargo. According to Jeremy Scahill’s seminal “Dirty Wars”, however, by 2013 it was not clear that Saracen had ever left, and it was
likely still operating in Somalia at the time with a handful of other international PMCs, including Dyncorp. This is the world that Prince has both
made and has thrived in. According to McFate, “‘irregular’ warfare is more regular than the ‘regular’ warfare,” as the number of internal
conflicts have tripled while interstate wars have dwindled in number since a peak in 1965. As a result, PMCs have been used increasingly over
the last 15 years by countries, NGOs, and corporations alike to protect ships on the high seas and oil fields in the deserts, to secure
humanitarian missions, to raise armies against insurgencies, and to serve as security details at embassies, military bases, and palaces across the
Middle East and beyond. On the darker side, many of the multinationals once on the U.S. dole as PMCs in places like Iraq have since started
their own enterprises and taken their skills to clients no matter the mission. They are hard to track, and impossible to rein in. For example,
before Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi was killed, he hired mercenaries from across Africa, “to brutally suppress the popular revolt against
him,” McFate points out. Likewise, papers reported in 2011 that one of Prince’s companies, Reflex Responses, was hired to raise a force of
several hundred guards for the emir of Abu Dhabi, to “assist the UAE government with intelligence gathering, security, counterterrorism and
suppression of any revolts.” By no means has the U.S. stopped using PMCs—they are protecting diplomats in Afghanistan and Iraq, training
foreign militaries, and conducting intelligence. At this point they are more agile and better equipped to do this work overseas than even their
military paymasters, McFate argues, and their use prevents the public angst—and scrutiny—that accompanies putting American soldiers into
harms way. “The argument about private militaries being here to stay – that is the truth or unfortunate truth depending on your position,” said
Peter Singer, senior fellow for the Future War project at the New America Foundation and author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the
Privatized Military Industry. “For those who thought this would all be over with the end of Iraq 2.0 or Obama’s presidential victory, the facts
just don’t bear that out,” he told TAC in an interview. Singer agrees with McFate’s assessments in Modern Mercenary, which he said “mixes the
analytic and academic side with his own personal experiences working for one of the firms; that combination is rare in this space.” McFate
details for the first time in public how he was hired by Dyncorp on behalf of a secret U.S. contract to help prevent a group of Hutu rebels, the
Forces Nationales de Liberation (FNL), from sparking another genocide of the Tutsis during the ongoing civil war in Burundi. McFate was tasked
at one point with guarding the president of Burundi from impending assassination. The president remained safe, and the civil war was brought
to an end by 2005. McFate said he wrote about this, and Dyncorp’s training of the Liberian army in 2011, to show in part that PMCs can be used
to positive ends. But he is not naïve. He
is clear about where they can fail, invite mission creep, or seize power for
clients through violence. By their very nature, PMCs profit from conflict and are always at risk of
creating and expanding it for their own benefit. McFate cites numerous examples throughout history in
which mercenaries have played both sides, only to come out with full pockets. In addition, private armies
live by no rules of war or international conventions ; here, Erik Prince is the best example. PMCs can hide in
countries with the lowest standards and norms. They have access to a global arms trade and the
latest military technology, including drones . They are a risk to civilian populations, and their operations
are never transparent. “You can FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) the CIA, you can’t FOIA this
industry,” said McFate.

The impact is war- increase in PMC usage risk undermining international stability by
rewriting norms concerning sovereignty and deterrence
Stranger ’15 (Allison Stranger, Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at
Middlebury College and the author of One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power
and the Future of Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, “Hired Guns How Private Military Contractors
Undermine World Order”, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2015-06-16/hired-
guns, June 16, 2015)
In 2008, the actress and activist Mia Farrow approached the private security company Blackwater and some human rights organizations with a
proposition: Might it be possible to hire private military contractors to end the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan? Sean McFate, who had
just finished working as a military contractor at DynCorp International, was asked to weigh in. “The plan was simple,” he writes in The Modern
Mercenary, his thought-provoking book on the rise of private armies. “Blackwater
would stage an armed intervention in
Darfur and establish so-called islands of humanity, refugee camps protected by PMC [private military
company] firepower for civilians fleeing the deadly janjaweed.” The scheme was soon scrapped—it was
just too unprecedented and risky—but the very fact that it got so far was a testament to how
widespread the use of private military contractors had become. The idea would have been unthinkable
just a decade earlier. What made the notion plausible, of course, were the game-changing wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. They marked the first time that the United States had contracted out so much of
its fighting, with private employees outnumbering uniformed personnel in theater at times in both
campaign s . At the height of the Vietnam War, by contrast, contractors represented less than 20 percent of the U.S. presence on the
ground. In Afghanistan and Iraq, contractors allowed the U.S. government to scale up its military footprint
quickly and cheaply. But they also led to a spate of scandals —most infamously in 2007, when Blackwater contractors
killed 17 civilians in Nisour Square, in Baghdad. In April 2015, almost eight years after the event, a federal judge in Washington sentenced four
former Blackwater guards to long prison terms. McFate,
however, trains his eye on a bigger-picture problem posed
by private military contractors: the havoc they are wreaking on world order . For the moment, he writes, the
market for force “is a monopsony, where there is a predominant buyer—the United States—and
many sellers.” But that will no doubt change, especially because the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan
and Iraq has only increased the importance of security contractors in those countries. And as other
countries, including China and Russia, get into the private-contracting game , the world will start to see
a freer market for force.

These hotspots cause great power wars - power vacuums and competing interests
make draw in inevitable
Grygiel ‘9 (Jakub, Associate Professor of IR @ Johns Hopkins, “Vacuum Wars: The Coming Competition
Over Failed States,” American Interest, July/August, http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?
piece=622)
Mention “failed states” in an academic seminar or a policy meeting and you will hear a laundry list of tragic problems: poverty, disease, famine,
refugees flowing across borders and more. If it is a really gloomy day, you will hear that failed states are associated with terrorism, ethnic
cleansing and genocide. This is the conventional wisdom that has developed over the past two decades, and rightly so given the scale of the
human tragedies in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, just to mention the most egregious cases of the 1990s. This prevailing view of failed states,
however, though true, is also incomplete. Failed states are not only a source of domestic calamities; they are
also potentially a source
of great power competition that in the past has often led to confrontation, crisis and war. The failure of
a state creates a vacuum that, especially in strategically important regions, draws in competitive great-
power intervention. This more traditional view of state failure is less prevalent these days, for only recently has the prospect of great
power competition over failed “vacuum” states returned. But, clearly, recent events in Georgia—as well as possible future scenarios in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as southeastern Europe, Asia and parts of Africa—suggest that it might be a good time to adjust, really to
expand, the way we think about “failed states” and the kinds of problems they can cause. The difference between the prevailing and the
traditional view on state failure is not merely one of accent or nuance; it has important policy implications. Intense
great power
conflict over the spoils of a failed state will demand a fundamentally different set of strategies and skills
from the United States. Whereas the response to the humanitarian disasters following state failure
tends to consist of peacekeeping and state-building missions, large-scale military operations and swift
unilateral action are the most likely strategies great powers will adopt when competing over a power
vacuum. On the political level, multilateral cooperation, often within the setting of international
institutions, is feasible as well as desirable in case of humanitarian disasters. But it is considerably more
difficult, perhaps impossible, when a failed state becomes an arena of great power competition. The
prevailing view of failed states is an obvious product of the past two decades—a period in which an entirely new generation of scholars and
policymakers has entered their respective professions. A combination of events—the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the prostration of states such as Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia, and most importantly the terrorist attacks of September 11—created two
interlocked impressions concerning the sources of state failure that are today largely accepted uncritically. The first of these is that weak states
have unraveled because of the great powers’ disinterest in them, which has allowed serious domestic problems, ranging from poverty to ethnic
and social strife, to degenerate into chaos and systemic governance failure.1 The basic idea here is that the Cold War had a stabilizing effect in
several strategic regions where either the United States or the Soviet Union supported recently fashioned states with little domestic legitimacy
and cohesion for fear that, if they did not, the rival superpower might gain advantage. Some fortunate Third World neutrals even managed a
kind of foreign aid arbitrage, attracting help from both sides. When support from the superpowers ended, many of these states, such as
Somalia and Yugoslavia, were torn apart by internal factionalism. The state lacked the money to bribe compliance or to generate a larger
economic pie, degenerating rapidly into corruption and violence. The key conclusion: The most egregious and tragic examples of failed states in
the 1990s occurred because of great power neglect rather than meddling. The related second impression that post-Cold War events have
created is that the main threat posed by failed states starts from within them and subsequently spills over to others. Failed states export
threats ranging from crime to drugs to refugees to, most dramatically, global terrorism.2 The lawlessness and violence of such states often spills
across borders in the form of waves of refugees, the creation of asylums for criminals and more besides. As the number and severity of failed
state cases rose, Western powers reacted much of the time by hoping that the problems arising from the failure of states, even those
geographically close to the United States or Europe like Haiti and Bosnia, would remain essentially limited so that internal chaos could simply be
waited out. Interventions such as in Somalia, Bosnia or Haiti were driven by a Western public shocked by vivid images of suffering and slaughter
rather than by a sense that these collapsed states directly threatened U.S. national security. The 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States
changed the perception that failed states could be safely ignored. The Hobbesian world of a failed state could be distant, but it was also a
breeding ground for terrorist networks that could train their foot soldiers, establish logistical bases and plan attacks against distant countries.
Failed states suddenly were not only humanitarian disasters but security threats. As Francis Fukuyama observed in 2004, “radical Islamist
terrorism combined with the availability of weapons of mass destruction added a major security dimension to the burden of problems created
by weak governance.”3 However, 9/11 did not alter the conviction that the main threat posed by failed states stems from endogenous
problems and not from a great power competition to fill the vacuum created by their demise. At least in the immediate aftermath of the
terrorist attacks, there was a naive feeling that the Islamist threat festering in failed or weak states such as Afghanistan was a menace to the
international community writ large, and certainly to great powers like Russia and China, as well as the United States. It was therefore assumed
that the great powers would cooperate to combat terrorism and not compete with each other for control over failing or failed states. As
Stephen David pointed out in these pages, “Instead of living in a world of international anarchy and domestic order, we have international
order and domestic anarchy.”4 The solution stemming from such a view of failed states falls under the broad category of “nation-building.” If
the main challenge of failed states is internally generated and caused by a collapse of domestic order, then the solution must be to rebuild state
institutions and restore authority and order, preferably under some sort of multilateral arrangement that would enhance the legitimacy of what
is necessarily an intrusive endeavor. Great powers are expected to cooperate, not compete, to fix failed states. U.S. foreign policy continues to
reflect this prevailing view. Then-Director of the Policy Planning staff, Stephen Krasner, and Carlos Pascual, then-Coordinator for Reconstruction
and Stabilization at the State Department, wrote in 2005 that, “when chaos prevails, terrorism, narcotics trade, weapons proliferation, and
other forms of organized crime can flourish.” Moreover, “modern conflicts are far more likely to be internal, civil matters than to be clashes
between opposing countries.”5 The prevailing view of failed states is, to repeat, not wrong, just incomplete—for it ignores the competitive
nature of great power interactions. The traditional understanding of power vacuums is still very relevant. Sudan, Central Asia, Indonesia, parts
of Latin America and many other areas are characterized by weak and often collapsing states that are increasingly arenas for great power
competition. The
interest of these great powers is not to rebuild the state or to engage in “nation-building”
for humanitarian purposes but to establish a foothold in the region, to obtain favorable economic deals,
especially in the energy sector, and to weaken the presence of other great powers. Let’s look at just three
possible future scenarios. In the first, imagine that parts of Indonesia become increasingly difficult to govern and are wracked by riots. Chinese
minorities are attacked, while pirates prowl sealanes in ever greater numbers. Bejing, pressured by domestic opinion to help the Chinese
diaspora, as well as by fears that its seaborne commerce will be interrupted, intervenes in the region. China’s action is then perceived as a
threat by Japan, which projects its own power into the region. The United States, India and others then intervene to protect their interests, as
well. In the second scenario, imagine that Uzbekistan collapses after years of chronic mismanagement and continued Islamist agitation.
Uzbekistan’s natural resources and its strategic value as a route to the Caspian or Middle East are suddenly up for grabs, and Russia and China
begin to compete for control over it, possibly followed by other states like Iran and Turkey. In a third scenario, imagine that the repressive
government of Sudan loses the ability to maintain control over the state, and that chaos spreads from Darfur outward to Chad and other
neighbors. Powers distant and nearby decide to extend their control over the threatened oil fields. China, though still at least a decade away
from having serious power projection capabilities, already has men on the ground in Sudan protecting some of the fields and uses them to
These scenarios are not at all outlandish, as recent events have shown .
control the country’s natural resources.
Kosovo, which formally declared independence on February 17, 2008, continues to strain relationships
between the United States and Europe, on the one hand, and Serbia and Russia, on the other. The
resulting tension may degenerate into violence as Serbian nationalists and perhaps even the Serbian
army intervene in Kosovo. It is conceivable then that Russia would support Belgrade, leading to a serious
confrontation with the European Union and the United States. A similar conflict, pitting Russia against
NATO or the United States alone, or some other alliance of European states, could develop in several
post-Soviet regions, from Georgia to the Baltics. Last summer’s war in Georgia, for instance, showed incipient signs of a great
power confrontation between Russia and the United States over the fate of a weak state, further destabilized by a rash local leadership and
aggressive meddling by Moscow. The future of Ukraine may follow a parallel pattern: Russian citizens (or, to be precise, ethnic Russians who are
given passports by Moscow) may claim to be harassed by Ukrainian authorities, who are weak and divided. A refugee problem could then arise,
giving Moscow a ready justification to intervene militarily. The question would then be whether NATO, or the United States, or some alliance of
Poland and other states would feel the need and have the ability to prevent Ukraine from falling under Russian control. Another example could
arise in Iraq. If the United States fails to stabilize the situation and withdraws, or even merely scales down its military presence too quickly, one
outcome could be the collapse of the central government in Baghdad. The resulting vacuum would be filled by militias and other groups, who
would engage in violent conflict for oil, political control and sectarian revenge. This tragic situation would be compounded if Iran and Saudi
Arabia, the two regional powers with the most direct interests in the outcome, entered the fray more directly than they have so far. In sum,
there are many more plausible scenarios in which a failed state could become a playground of both
regional and great power rivalry, which is why we urgently need to dust off the traditional view of failed
states and consider its main features as well as its array of consequences. The traditional view starts from a widely
shared assumption that, as nature abhors vacuums, so does the international system. As Richard Nixon once said to Mao Zedong, “In
international relations there are no good choices. One thing is sure—we can leave no vacuums, because they can be filled.”6 The power
vacuums created by failed states attract the interests of great powers because they are an easy way to expand their spheres of influence while
weakening their opponents or forestalling their intervention. A state that decides not to fill a power vacuum is effectively inviting other states
to do so, thereby potentially decreasing its own relative power. This simple, inescapable logic is based on the view that international relations
are essentially a zero-sum game: My gain is your loss. A failed state creates a dramatic opportunity to gain something, whether natural
resources, territory or a strategically pivotal location. The power that controls it first necessarily increases its own standing relative to other
states. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1915, the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of weak states; . . . the modern nations have
lived in armed peace and collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America there are rich
territories in which weakness invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great
that the competition for them is to the knife.7 The threat posed by failed states, therefore, need not emanate mainly from within. After all, by
definition a failed state is no longer an actor capable of conducting a foreign policy. It is a politically inert geographic area whose fate is
dependent on the actions of others. The main menace to international security stems from competition between these “others.” As Arnold
Wolfers put it in 1951, because of the competitive nature of international relations, “expansion would be sure to take place wherever a power
vacuum existed.”8 The challenge is that the incentive to extend control over a vacuum or a failed state is similar for many states. In fact, even if
one state has a stronger desire to control a power vacuum because of its geographic proximity, natural resources or strategic location, this very
interest spurs other states to seek command over the same territory simply because doing so weakens that state. The ability to deprive a state
of something that will give it a substantial advantage is itself a source of power. Hence a failed state suddenly becomes a strategic prize,
because it either adds to one’s own power or subtracts from another’s. The prevailing and traditional views of failed states reflect two separate
realities. Therefore, we should not restrict ourselves to one view or the other when studying our options. The difference is not just academic; it
has very practical consequences. First and foremost, if we take the traditional view, failed
states may pose an even greater
danger to international security than policymakers and academics currently predict . Humanitarian
disasters are certainly tragedies that deserve serious attention; yet they do not pose the worst threats
to U.S. security or world stability. That honor still belongs to the possibility of a great power
confrontation. While the past decade or so has allowed us to ignore great power rivalries as the main
feature of international relations, there is no guarantee that this happy circumstance will continue long
into the future.

Old impact defense doesn’t apply- domestic administrative law is vital to preventing
private contractor proliferation from causing wars through increasing accountability
and corruption
Dickinson ‘5 (Laura Dickinson, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law, William &
Mary Law Review, “Government For Hire: Privatizing Foreign Affairs and the Problem of Accountability
Under International Law”, http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1221&context=wmlr, 2005)

The past two decades have seen a quiet revolution in the way the United States and other countries act
abroad. Privatization, long a fixture of the domestic American scene, has gone global. International law
scholars must take up the challenge of privatization by studying it as a distinct phenomenon, with its
own particular obstacles and opportunities . Merely arguing that formal international law instruments
should be expanded to apply to private contractors is not enough. Given the weak enforcement
mechanisms of international law, such a strategy, though necessary, is likely to have only limited
impact. This Article has therefore proposed a different approach. Drawing on the extensive domestic administrative law literature on
privatization, this Article has sought to identify an array of accountability mechanisms that might provide additional strategies for retaining
crucial public values in an era of private contracting. First, with regard to legal accountability, despite the state-centered focus of international
law, private contractors may still be sued under the Alien Tort Claims Act (with its more relaxed conception of state action), prosecuted in
domestic courts for violating ordinary criminal law statutes, and subjected to municipal contract or tort remedies. Second,
mechanisms
to ensure some measure of democratic accountability--conceived broadly to include accountability to
those most affected by the governmental acts-could be built into the contracts that are the engine of
privatization. Third, a wide variety of contractual terms-from specific benchmarks, to training and other
procedural requirements, to compliance regimes-can be included in government contracts and then
enforced by a combination of government oversight, independent monitoring, and new industry
standards. Fourth, the internal institutional culture of bureaucratic, corporate, and organizational entities can
be harnessed and shaped to encourage compliance with public norms . Finally, each of these
approaches can be used to reinforce the others. None of these mechanisms is perfect, however. The legal avenues remain
regrettably meager, democratic participation requirements (even limited ones) may be unwieldy and normatively unpalatable, contract
compliance and oversight are expensive and often unsuccessful, and internal institutional accountability may or may not have a substantial
disciplining effect. And of course, any attempt to build mechanisms of public accountability into a privatization regime threatens to wipe out
the purported efficiency gains of privatization altogether. Yet,
for international law scholars who must grapple daily
with the limited enforcement power of international legal institutions, privatization actually provides
an important opportunity because the moment of contracting is always a moment when oversight is
possible. Scholars could conceive of the contract relationship as the creation of a trust, in which the trustee contractor is accountable to
both the government that authorizes the trust and the beneficiaries who are most affected. Such creative use of private law principles may
even provide greater avenues of accountability than the application of public international law norms to state actors. Most
important,
both administrative law and international law scholars must enter into a creative dialogue with each
other. They must recognize that the privatization of foreign affairs is now an entrenched trend around
the world. Together they must develop possible approaches for holding private contractors accountable
for their actions. Only through a systematic understanding of privatiza- tion in the international sphere
can public norms and values be maintained in a world of government for hire.

The United States is key- it sets the standard for international norm and has a norm
cascade
Krahmann ’13 (Elke Krahmann is Professor of Security Studies at Brunel University. She has published
widely on non-state actors and the commodification of security, with recent articles including ‘Security:
Collective Good or Commodity’ in European Journal of International Relations, and ‘Beck and Beyond:
Selling Security in the World Risk Society’ in Review of International Studies. She has received numerous
research grants and awards for her research, including the Ernst-Otto Czempiel Prize for her monograph
States, Citizens and the Privatization of Security (Cambridge University Press, 2010). A new collaborative
ESRC-funded project with Anna Leander will examine the use of private security contractors by
international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union in military
interventions, “The United States, PMSCs and the state monopoly on violence: Leading the way towards
norm change”, http://iissonline.net/the-united-states-pmscs-and-the-state-monopoly-on-violence-
leading-the-way-towards-norm-change/, SECURITY DIALOGUE Volume: 44 Issue: 1 Pages: 53-71,
February 2013)

The norm of the state monopoly on the legitimate use of armed force remains a key reference point
within national and international law as well as political discourses. However, the understanding of this
norm is currently undergoing significant change. During the 20th century, the norm was widely interpreted as prohibiting
the use of armed force by non-state actors in the international arena. Today , a growing number of governments consider the
norm to be limited to offensive combat operations. The belief that states are able to control the
international use of force by private contractors through contracts or national regulations has
contributed to the reinterpretation of the norm of the state monopoly on violence . The emerging
contemporary understanding of the norm thus resembles its meaning between 1600 and 1800, when
governments and rulers sought to manage the private use of armed force through governmental
authorizations. The international extension and strength of this revised understanding of the norm are more difficult to determine. In
terms of the stages of norm evolution, it seems that the transformation of the norm has already
surpassed its ‘norm emergence’ stage, in which the USA acted, intentionally or otherwise, as a norm
entrepreneur by setting important precedents for the use of armed PMSCs in international
interventions and by adopting new laws and regulations that have promulgated its new
understanding of the norm as limited to offensive action . Significant evidence for a ‘norm cascade’ can
be identified among many of the USA’s allies , such as the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy,
Spain and Norway, who have started to permit the international use of force by PMSCs even when hired
by private actors, for example to provide protection against pirate attacks. For a norm cascade speaks
also the observation that the international community has not regarded the use of armed force
PMSCs in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan as mercenary activity, but that even international
organizations such as NATO, the EU and the UN are deploying PMSCs for military and civilian force
protection. The failure of the international community to agree on a global regulation of PMSCs puts
into question whether the evolution of the norm towards an inclusion of state-sanctioned or regulated
private armed force has already reached the phase of international ‘norm internalization’. However, the
international negotiations leading up to the Montreux Document illustrate that the development of the norm of the state monopoly on
violence has arrived at a pivotal juncture that, if existing trends continue, may set the legal conditions for a return of private armed forces in
international affairs.

Specifically- Domestic legislation restricting private contractors sends an international

signal that provides strength to the IIOC regulating international PMC use- the
affirmative restores US and international credibility checking PMC proliferation
through market force
Yale Law Journal ’14 (Reema Shah, Yale Law Journal, “Beating Blackwater: Using Domestic
Legislation to Enforce the International Code of Conduct for Private Military Companies”,
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/comment/beating-blackwater-using-domestic-legislation-to-enforce-
the-international-code-of-conduct-for-private-military-companies, May 2014)

Beating Blackwater: Using Domestic Legislation to Enforce the International Code of Conduct for Private Military Companies Reema Shah In
the past
decade, state use of private military companies (PMCs) has greatly expanded, sparked in large part by
U.S. reliance on contractors in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But several of the most horrific human
rights abuses of the wars exposed the absence of a regulatory regime governing the conduct of PMCs ,
prompting an international movement to establish some kind of legal framework to promote
accountability. After years of diplomatic negotiations, this resulted in 2010 in the creation of the
International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), which delineates the
obligations of private companies.1 The ICoC Association (ICoCA) was subsequently launched in September 2013 to certify that companies are
meeting the Code’s standards. But while the development of a monitoring body is encouraging, ICoCA suffers from

a critical shortcoming: it lacks any kind of serious enforcement mechanism. Because most commentary
has focused on the Code’s importance in codifying a new area of international law,2 few have
recognized that ICoCA’s actual effectiveness hinges on the willingness of states to enact
corresponding domestic legislation that can provide a system of enforcement. This Comment
highlights this issue and argues that discrete domestic legal reforms modeled on the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act (FCPA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) would enable the United States
to galvanize compliance with the ICoC and ensure that the Association is able to serve its function. Part I
surveys the growth of private military companies and recent international efforts to regulate the industry. Part II argues that the ICoC suffers from the absence of a
viable method of enforcement, and ICoCA, as it currently stands, provides an insufficient oversight mechanism. It shows how the alternative methods of
enforcement that have been proposed thus far are either infeasible or of limited efficacy .
Part III explores how the United States could
bolster ICoCA through domestic legislation that draws from the approaches of the FCPA and ITAR. It also
discusses how this could, in the long run, trigger changes in behavior on a global level. I. THE NEED FOR AN
INTERNATIONAL APPROACH TO REGULATION After years of being maligned as mercenaries, private military contractors reemerged following the end of the Cold
War. Weak states with few military capabilities turned to PMCs for help,3 and even the United States hired private firms to supplement its military operations in the
1990s in order to lower costs.4 This trend accelerated dramatically following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Over the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq
wars, the involvement of PMCs ballooned. Their role expanded from support activity to essential military functions, including combat,5 and by the later years of the
wars, half of total U.S. personnel deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan were private contractors.6 However, this extensive involvement by private forces gave rise to
some of the most heinous human rights abuses of the wars, including the 2007 Nisour Square shooting7 and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.8 Upon coming to light,
these incidents provoked domestic and international outrage and highlighted the legally ambiguous space in which contractors operated. In response, the United
States enacted several reforms to ensure that contractors were held accountable for their actions.9 The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), originally
passed in 2000, was expanded in 2004 to allow contractors supporting Defense Department missions abroad to be prosecuted for crimes that would result in more
than one year of imprisonment if they were committed within the United States.10 And in 2007, Congress amended the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) to
subject private contractors to the system of courts-martial should they engage in misconduct.11 Few individuals have been prosecuted under the new provisions,
but the reforms went some way toward bringing U.S. military contractors under U.S. law.12 The issue, however, has grown well beyond the activities of contractors
employed by the United States. The U.S. wars have changed the landscape elsewhere by giving rise to massive multinational PMCs and also legitimating their use.
This global industry is now estimated to have gross revenue of over $100 billion per year,13 and these companies are not closing shop just because the U.S. wars are
ending. Instead, these sophisticated enterprises have shifted their focus to other lucrative regions.14 For this reason, the absence of a clear legal framework to
govern the conduct of multinational PMCs is highly problematic.15 Domestic legal reforms, such as those enacted by the United States, have helped to hold private
contractors participating in U.S. military operations accountable, but they do little to regulate the global PMC industry for two reasons. First, MEJA and the UCMJ
can only be used to prosecute individuals. When companies providing military services act illegally, no clear statutory basis exists to hold the whole company
liable.16 Additionally, these laws fail to address the industry’s increasingly global presence. The United States is no longer the only, or even the primary, consumer
for private security providers. Consequently, laws that impose liability only for misdeeds occurring alongside Department of Defense missions do not adequately
constrain the conduct of PMCs abroad. Accordingly, since the mid-2000s, the international community has sought to fill the void by constructing a global regime
that can better monitor these companies, ensure compliance with human rights norms and international humanitarian law, and hold violators accountable. The first
such effort was led by the Swiss government and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which resulted in the completion of the Montreux Document in
2008.17 The document provides a list of best practices that states should implement to manage PMCs.18 Forty-nine countries have become signatories to date.19
Yet Montreux’s efficacy has been limited both because it does not create any binding commitments and because it is directed at PMC behavior in armed conflicts,
which constitutes only a fraction of PMC activities.20 Montreux was followed by a more ambitious multi-stakeholder initiative, which led to the creation of the
International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers. The ICoC outlines the obligations of private security companies under international law and
specifies rules that ought to govern the use of force and vetting procedures for subcontractors.21 Unlike earlier initiatives, the ICoC has been signed by over 708
companies worldwide and has garnered significant support from states and nongovernmental organizations.22 The creation of the Code is a promising step in the
effort to ensure that private military companies respect human rights and comply with international law. Nonetheless, its current effectiveness is limited because it
lacks a viable enforcement mechanism. II. THE INADEQUACY OF ICOCA If the ICoC is to fulfill its goal of constructing a global governance system to regulate private
military companies, it must be meaningfully enforced. The ICoC Association was launched in September 2013 in order to provide an oversight mechanism for the
Code. States and human rights organizations lauded the formation of ICoCA as a groundbreaking step in regulating the industry. The State Department even
announced that it “anticipates incorporating membership in the ICoC Association as a requirement in the bidding process” for all future diplomatic security
contracts.23 Membership is open to all companies, civil society groups, and states that agree to adhere to the Code. The Association is led by a Board of Directors
empowered to monitor and certify the compliance of signatory companies.24 The Board is chosen by the vote of all members and consists of twelve individuals,
with four members coming from PMCs, four from civil society organizations, and four from states.25 ICoCA’s charter calls for in-field assessments of company
practices and consultation between the Board and companies whose practices are found to violate the Code.26 It also establishes a complaint procedure through
which allegations of misconduct can be reported.27 While these are surely positive developments, it is difficult to see how they will be able to engender compliance
with the Code’s strict requirements without any punitive mechanisms. The absence of a judicial body or forum where PMCs can be held accountable if they persist
in violating norms makes adherence to the Code largely voluntary. Various options have been proposed as alternative mechanisms to enforce the ICoC. The first of
these is the adoption of a binding multilateral treaty that would require signatories to provide for domestic enforcement of the ICoC provisions.28 While such a
treaty would likely be the most rigorous method of bolstering the ICoC, it is not a viable option for the near future. The international consensus that is required to
achieve such a comprehensive treaty simply does not exist at this point, as demonstrated by the limitations of the Montreux effort. Another option that has been
floated is to leverage profits from government contracting to induce compliance with the Code’s provisions. Because the United States, United Kingdom, and United
Nations have all made government contract awards contingent on company membership in ICoCA, some argue that the potential loss of business opportunities will
deter companies from disregarding the Code’s obligations.29 While this is a significant incentive, it is insufficient for two reasons. Firstly, because of the shrinking
defense budgets in the United States and Western Europe,30 the ability of the United States and its allies to sway the behavior of PMCs is limited. Many of the most
lucrative business opportunities are likely to be found elsewhere,31 making the costs of losing U.S. and U.K. agency contracts minimal compared to opportunities
available in other regions. Given that many of the countries increasing military spending have checkered histories with respect to human rights,32 this is particularly
worrisome. It is unlikely that these states will follow the United States’s lead in requiring ICoCA membership for government contracts, especially if it results in
higher prices. Consequently, many companies will simply opt to forgo the constraints of the ICoC. While the United States should continue to use its market power
to leverage as much compliance as possible, this approach is therefore at best only a limited means of enforcement. Secondly, relying solely on the market could
allow PMCs to essentially self-regulate while using ICoCA to legitimize their activities, akin to what has previously occurred. Over the past decade, private military
companies formed several industry associations to deflect criticism and improve standards.33 These associations put forth codes of conduct and were supposed to
accredit member firms based on adherence to the codes. But in practice, their ability to regulate PMC behavior generally fell short of expectations. They maintained
close ties to the executives running the companies,34 whose desire to increase profits for their companies conflicted with their ability to serve as effective market
monitors.35 In the absence of any independent punitive power, many associations were essentially used to legitimize the industry and allow governments to bypass
more rigorous checks, while leaving companies free to police themselves.36 ICoCA is better placed than these industry groups were to serve as an effective
overseer, but without a stronger method of holding companies accountable for non-compliance, it risks a similar fate. Companies embraced the ICoC largely
because their representatives were intimately involved in the drafting and discussion process.37 While the inclusion of these parties has been key to ICoCA’s success
thus far, the dominance of PMCs in the Association risks sacrificing its independence. The overwhelming majority of the Association’s members are companies.
Because all members vote to elect the Board of Directors responsible for overseeing the companies,38 the industry can exert significant influence over decisions
regarding certification. With no potential for legal accountability, ICoCA could turn into another iteration of earlier industry associations. The prospect of regulatory
capture makes relying on the market insufficient to truly enforce the Code. For governments that have little interest in seriously regulating PMCs, which includes
many of the countries increasing military spending discussed earlier, mandating ICoCA certification could allow them to claim compliance with international
standards while forgoing meaningful checks on company behavior. And even for governments that have shown a genuine desire to prevent PMC misconduct, such
as the United States and the United Kingdom, regulatory capture makes using market mechanisms illusory. If ICoCA membership is no longer a clear proxy for full
adherence to the Code’s rigorous provisions, governments will still be forced to conduct individualized assessments before making contracting decisions. These
kinds of case-by-case comparisons can suffer from inconsistency and inattention, and obviate the advantages of an institution such as ICoCA. Thus, relying on the
market, while appealing, is inadequate to enforce the ICoC. III. DOMESTIC ENFORCEMENT TO SPUR COMPLIANCE WITH THE ICOC This
Comment
therefore proposes a third approach, which aims to be more rigorous than market mechanisms of
limited efficacy but more feasible than concluding a multilateral treaty . By strengthening the domestic
legal framework governing the conduct of private military companies, the United States can assist
international enforcement efforts and bolster the credibility of ICoCA . More specifically, legislation modeled after the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) can be used, respectively, to directly regulate U.S.-based PMCs hired by
foreign governments and to indirectly regulate many foreign PMCs. While some foreign companies would still be able to avoid
U.S. laws, establishing such a framework would both force many of the industry’s biggest companies
to comply with the international norms and human rights standards outlined by the ICoC and lay the
groundwork for the development of a more effective global regime.39 In the coming years, many PMCs based in the
United States are likely to be hired by foreign governments.40 In order to hold them accountable for their actions on behalf of

these governments, U.S. laws mandating adherence to ICoC standards41 must clearly apply to their
conduct abroad. The FCPA demonstrates how this can be accomplished through an effective extraterritoriality provision—one that reaches all U.S. citizens,
nationals, and residents, all U.S. companies, and all foreign companies that trade securities in the United States, regardless of the location of the illegal act.42 The
FCPA criminalizes bribery of foreign officials and requires companies to keep detailed records of their transactions.43 It is rigorously enforced by the Department of
Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission; violations of the law can trigger penalties of up to $5 million and twenty years’ imprisonment for individuals and
$25 million for corporations.44 In recent years, the DOJ and SEC have also forced companies to disgorge profits earned through illegal transactions. This has resulted
in record-setting penalties, including fines directed at Siemens for $800 million and Halliburton for $579 million.45 The DOJ and SEC have been able to impose these
penalties because both U.S. companies and foreign companies that trade securities in the United States have assets in the United States that can be readily fined. A
similar approach could be used to hold U.S.-based PMCs liable for misconduct abroad. Authority could be given to the DOJ to pursue civil and criminal actions
against companies that depart from ICoC standards and commit an offense. Litigation would be conducted under the purview of Article III judges, who would be
responsible for determining whether a transgression had occurred. By
making any legislation clearly applicable to both foreign
and domestic activities of U.S. companies, lawmakers could counter the presumption against
extraterritoriality.46 Because many of these companies have assets in the United States, coupling this
extraterritorial scope with significant penalties for violations, as the FCPA did, would enable robust
enforcement. This would ensure that companies that violate the Code are not only rebuked by ICoCA,
but also held legally accountable. U.S. companies contracting with foreign governments would thereby
be compelled to adhere to ICoC standards. Regulating foreign PMCs with no financial presence in the United States poses greater
difficulty.47 The FCPA model is not useful where entirely foreign PMCs contract with foreign governments. Because these companies are unlikely to hold assets in
the United States, enforcing penalties for misconduct becomes challenging.48 Given this, a more effective approach is to indirectly regulate foreign PMCs, by using
their reliance on the expertise of former U.S. military officers to induce them to abide by U.S. laws. ITAR offers a helpful framework for how to do so. The regulations
implement the Arms Export Control Act49 and govern the import and export of defense-related products and services, including sensitive technology and
munitions; violating the regulations can trigger hefty fines and imprisonment.50 One of ITAR’s key provisions prohibits Americans from training foreign militaries
without State Department approval. Most PMC services, including non-combat and advisory functions, qualify as training foreign military forces and require State
Department authorization.51 Yet this restriction on the activities of U.S. citizens is rarely enforced, because the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, which is
responsible for monitoring, is understaffed and overwhelmed with managing arms exports.52 The United States could shape the overseas conduct of some foreign
PMCs by making State Department approval of U.S. citizens’ participation in PMC activity contingent on company compliance with ICoC standards. This could
essentially be accomplished through agency action if greater resources were devoted to enforcement. U.S. persons seeking to provide defense services abroad
already must obtain a State Department license to do so.53 The Department could establish a policy of only granting licenses to U.S. citizens who are working for
PMCs that adhere to the ICoC and are accredited by ICoCA. To ease the administrative burden of this approval system, the State Department could maintain a list of
compliant companies, which citizens could then rely upon in making employment decisions. Coupling this licensing system with the possibility of civil and criminal
prosecution if individuals are caught evading restrictions could effectively prevent Americans from offering their military know-how to foreign companies that fail to
meet international standards.54 Of
course, this approach would not force foreign PMCs contracting with foreign
governments to obey U.S. laws or hold them liable for failure to do so. Nonetheless, many foreign
companies are heavily reliant on the unparalleled expertise of American former military officers.55 In
fact, for most companies, their employment of highly trained former U.S. officers is their most
compelling sales pitch for obtaining business.56 Consequently, while it is possible that some PMCs
would choose to circumvent any restrictions by limiting their reliance on American personnel, this is
unlikely to be the case across the industry. Many of the companies would likely opt to comply with
ICoC standards in order to be able to continue hiring critical U.S. personnel . Passing legislation
modeled after the FCPA and ITAR would likely lead to changed practices in other countries as well. The
FCPA helped bring about a dramatic change in attitudes toward corruption. Bribery has gone from being
accepted as the cost of doing business in certain countries to being treated almost universally as
unethical, illegitimate, and counterproductive for economic growth.57 This evolution in norms resulted
in the passage of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in 1999, which has since been ratified by forty
countries.58 The Convention requires signatories to enact domestic legislation criminalizing bribery of
foreign officials and monitors each country’s subsequent execution. Furthermore, the FCPA has
prompted U.S. companies to pressure other countries to pass analogous legislation so as to level the
playing field for their own businesses.59 Together, these two developments have prompted widespread
reforms abroad.60 While there are important differences between building a global anti-corruption regime and a PMC regulatory regime, the
progress the FCPA has made illustrates how rigorous U.S. enforcement of ICoC standards could
eventually galvanize greater enforcement abroad. By engendering greater compliance with the Code’s
provisions, domestic legislation could solidify norms of behavior among PMCs. And by penalizing U.S.-
based PMCs for violations, it could create a profit incentive for these companies to urge other countries
to pass similar reforms. In conjunction, these changes could help bring about more effective global
regulation of PMCs. Although ITAR has had a more limited impact on the development of international norms because the regulations only apply to U.S.
exporters, they have changed the behavior of many defense-related companies in a way that has had ripple effects throughout the industry. Because the regulations
impose a duty on companies to come forward and disclose breaches of ITAR to the government,61 and impose significant penalties for failing to do so, many
munitions manufacturers have implemented internal checks to more rigorously monitor compliance.62 Greater scrutiny of the activities of companies that train
foreign militaries would likely spur similar norms of internal corporate policing among PMCs as well. By
using the FCPA and ITAR as models,
the United States could provide for the first truly meaningful enforcement of the ICoC, and thereby hold
PMCs accountable for a much wider range of activities than those covered by MEJA and the UCMJ.
While current congressional gridlock makes passing this kind of legislation difficult, there are reasons to
be optimistic that this proposal can nonetheless be implemented in large part. The FCPA was similarly
ambitious and encountered significant opposition, but still managed to pass.63 And the alterations to
ITAR could be enacted through executive orders instead of legislation, thereby circumventing the need
for congressional involvement. In conjunction, these changes could in the long term trigger substantial
changes in behavior globally. CONCLUSION The establishment of ICoCA is an important development in building a legal framework to govern the
global conduct of PMCs. Yet it suffers from the same weakness that has hampered earlier efforts to regulate PMCs on a multinational scale: the absence of a viable
enforcement mechanism. Through stronger domestic legislation that borrows from the approaches of the FCPA and ITAR, the United States could ensure greater
compliance with the Code and bolster the credibility of ICoCA as it seeks to establish a global governance regime for PMCs.
 Solvency
The United States should significantly reduce its private military contracting presence
in Iraq.

Iraq contractor withdrawal is key- it is the template for contracting operations and is
being institutionalized into military doctrine
POC ’12 (Professional Overseas Contractors, Contractor Policy Think Tank, “Contracting lessons from
Iraq and Afghanistan”, http://www.your-poc.com/contracting-lessons-from-iraq-and-afghanistan/,
September 20, 2012)

The Pentagon doesn't deny it made major, costly mistakes when it came to service contracting in the
first years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Defense leaders say they also learned valuable
lessons they want to bake into the military's training and doctrine that will guide contingency
operations from now on. The department was grossly unprepared for the extent to which it would need
to rely on service contractors to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , leaders now acknowledge. In part, they
blame the fact that the wars lasted much longer than they were supposed to. But, DoD also says it's clear that the military won't ever

go into a contingency operation again without a big contingent of contractors, so it needs to

institutionalize contracting expertise into the way it plans operations and trains its people. The
Commission on Wartime Contracting reached a similar conclusion last year when it concluded DoD had
wasted at least $31 billion to contracting waste and fraud because of inadequate oversight and
management of contracts. Alan Estevez, DoD's assistant secretary for logistics and materiel readiness, said there's no disputing things were bad.
"Five years ago, we had a gaping wound, self-inflicted as it may be," he told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday. "We staunched the bleeding, we
sutured it up, the scar tissue is healing. But what we haven't succeeded in yet is embedding it into the DNA or the muscle memory. That's what we're striving to do
and that's what we must succeed in doing." DoD wants to manage and train for contingency contracting under a framework dubbed Operational Contract Support
so that contracting is treated as a critical warfighting capability in the future, not merely as an afterthought once troops get where they're going. Importance of
contingency contracting After a years-long series of discussions and memoranda coming from the level of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff aimed at creating a new focus on the importance of contingency contracting to warfighting, the department is beginning to see evidence of a culture
change, Estevez said. "As an example, the first day after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Pacific Command established the Air Force as the lead service for
contracting. That meant that all forces deploying to Japan had a clear understanding of the contracting authority and would not be competing against each other for
scarce resources. That's a critical lesson we learned from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "And the first operations order issued by Pacific
Command in response to that disaster was the order establishing that contracting relationship." DoD
acquisition officials say they're
working to instill the idea throughout the department that contracting is a military commander's
responsibility. Now, Estavez said, contracting guidance for Afghanistan comes straight from Marine
Corps Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force. "That's because it's part of his
effort to win that fight in Afghanistan," he said. "That needs to go into our military education process and our civilian education process. When our junior officers go
through their paces, that has to become part of their process. They need to think, 'When I deploy, contractors are going to be part of the process. They can help me
win the fight or they can impede me. I need to manage them to help me win.' We've been saying this at leadership levels, but we're all transitory. We need to have
that idea inculcated into the workforce for the future." Brig. Gen. Craig Crenshaw, vice director for the Joint Staff's logistics branch (J4), said DoD
is also at
the beginning of a nascent effort to incorporate contracting into specific operational training events .
"We've instituted training on this as we conduct our operational plans," he said. "It's an opportunity to
take it from a strategic level and implement it through an exercise. We create scenarios where our
planners can really zero in on what it takes to include contractors in a particular operational plan . We're
not there yet, but the idea that we've been able to have a discussion and put this on paper really puts us
in a positive direction." Withdrawal from Iraq offers lessons for Afghanistan Contracting lessons from Iraq & Afghanistan
Outside observers like the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office
say DoD is definitely on the right track, but it's too early to tell if the Iraq and Afghanistan lessons will
bear fruit in future operations. Moshe Schwartz, a specialist in defense acquisition at CRS, said one
enduring problem is the relatively short rotations that contract managers and overseers spend overseas
before they're replaced with a fresh face. "It's a learning curve," he said. "Someone gets to theater in a counterinsurgency operation and
eventually says, 'Oh,I get it now.' But by then they're three months from going home and someone else comes in. It has a big impact on continuity. Even if the next
person is someone who's worked for years and years on contracting to build roads, they may be focused on cost, schedule and performance. But they haven't had
to worry before about people stealing the goods in a situation where you take them to court. They also have to think about the impact on the local village, and by
the time they get up to speed, it's time to send them back home." Tom DiNapoli, the director for acquisition and sourcing
management at GAO, said the lessons learned aren't just valuable for future conflicts . He said one near-
term opportunity is for DoD to take the contracting lessons DoD gleaned from the actual withdrawal
of troops from Iraq and apply them to the similar pullout that will happen over the next two years in
Afghanistan, both as DoD uses contracts to manage its exit from the country and closes out contracts
it will no longer need. "When you look at this 27-month period before withdrawal, we were really
unprepared at about this time for our withdrawal from Iraq to think about what our requirements were.
We tasked our contracting people in Iraq to come up with our requirements, and that was the wrong
thing to do," he said. "We should have asked our warfighters, our base commanders, to tell us what
services we need in order to draw down. That's what we need to do as we draw down from
Afghanistan." Crenshaw said that's just what DoD's trying to do. He said U.S. Forces Afghanistan has already established a special cell to manage the
drawdown of contractors from the country. "We're looking very hard at the lessons learned from the Iraq drawdown .

Hopefully, it's going to let us avoid some of the issues we've had before," he said. Still, Estevez said, that thought-out approach to

contingency contracting still isn't embedded into the military's planning, training and doctrine for the
future. That, he said, is the next step.

Contractor usage in Iraq only adds fuel to the fire- US funding to contractors provides
ISIS access to advanced weaponry and recruits
Dykes ’14 (Melissa Dykes, writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of
Truthstream Media, “You Do Realize that the U.S. Funded and Trained ISIS, Right?”,
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/08/22/realize-u-s-funded-trained-isis-right/, August 22, 2014)

Just so we are all clear here. Now that ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is becoming a threat so powerful
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters at the Pentagon that the terrorist group is “beyond
anything we’ve seen,” it’s time to remind everyone of a few little factoids regarding how exactly that
came to be. Hagel’s exact quote was: “They are beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of … military prowess. They are
tremendously well-funded. This is beyond anything we’ve seen.” Well-trained in military prowess. Tremendously well-funded.

Super sophisticated terrorists. Hm. And how do you think they got that way so fast? Super magic terrorist training money tree fairy dust?
Apparently the mainstream establishment media would more likely attempt to have people believe such a thing exists rather than expose the blatant reality that
yes, the U.S. has trained and funded ISIS and without the U.S. government, ISIS would not be the threat it has become. It
came out back in 2012
that the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were jointly running a US CIA and Special Forces command training
base for Syrian rebels out of the Jordanian town of Safawi, but apparently according the Jordanian
officials, that training ‘wasn’t meant to be used in Iraq’ (via WND): Syrian rebels who would later join the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret
base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials. The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time
as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for
any future campaign in Iraq. So future ISIS members were specially trained by the U.S. government, huh? Ya don’t say. But they weren’t supposed to be used for
campaigns in Iraq? Oops. This was, at least superficially, so they could wage war against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and again, they weren’t called ISIS at
the time, they were referred to as the Syrian rebels. But the government won’t even admit what they’ve done here. Instead, they’re just bombing Iraq and hoping
for the best… Meanwhile, our government is still funding the “Syrian rebels” today ! Back at the end of June, Obama was
requesting another $500 million in aid for them, even though the fact that many were now calling themselves ISIS was so blatantly obvious even back then that it
could no longer be disputed. As
Hagel said, ISIS are not just well-funded, but “tremendously well-funded .” Now
you know where ISIS gets a hefty chunk of its tremendous funding.
(--) Multiple issues will spark legislative fights in near future
Sneed 9/29/15 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/boehner-resignation-new-chaos Tierney Sneed is a
reporter for Talking Points Memo. She previously worked for U.S. News and World Report. She grew up
in Florida and attended Georgetown University. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/boehner-resignation-
new-chaos

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) may have sacrificed his speaker's gavel to keep the government open through the week. But the
path that lies ahead for his successor is much trickier. Even if lawmakers, as expected, pass a short-term
spending bill this week, they face a series of other deadlines before the end of the year that could converge into
one giant showdown fueled by freshly emboldened hardliners who see compromise as defeat. “It is setting up a very
major set of hurdles for the next majority leader come the middle of December,” Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who
worked for the U.S. Senate for 25 years, told TPM. “How they make this silk purse out of a sow’s ear is going to be very,

very difficult.” Once lawmakers clear this week’s Wednesday night deadline to pass funding legislation that will last the government until December, they
must pivot to a number of other must-pass issues which lack either bipartisan consensus or, in some cases,
any consensus among Hill Republicans themselves. ADVERTISING From highway funding to raising the debt ceiling to funding
the government in 2016, Congress faces huge unresolved issues that have been roadblocked by
conservative demands to defund Planned Parenthood . With just three months left in the year and the 2016 election calendar
looming, the stage is set for a series of major confrontations unless some sort of global deal is worked out,

which doesn't appear any more likely with Boehner out of the picture. Immediately next on the agenda is
funding the highway trust fund, the deadline for which comes at the end of October. The Congressional Budget Office has signaled that the debt
ceiling will need to be lifted by late November or early December, which remains a particular flashpoint for conservative hardliners who see
a possible credit default as an opportunity to extract spending cuts. “The last thing this country needs is a fight over the debt ceiling right before Christmas,“ said Jim
Dyer, a former appropriations staff director and now a Republican strategist at the Podesta Group. “It’s more about a difficult political position than it as about
anything because the vote is hard for a lot of folks.” Lawmakers will also have a series of “tax extenders” in need of
reauthorization on their hands by the year’s end. And there is also the debate around the reopening of
the Export-Import Bank, which, to the delight of Tea Party politicians, expired over the summer but continues to be supported by business-aligned
Republicans as well as Democrats. All these deadlines bleed into when Congress will have to return to the federal

budget, after the current stopgap legislation being considered runs out on Dec. 11. Before the controversy over Planned Parenthood’s federal funding
prompted shutdown calls, Hill Republicans and the White House were deeply divided on how to deal with the

"sequestration" budget caps put in place in 2011 after the last debt ceiling showdown. Nevertheless, the conservatives who pressed for Boehner’s
departure see that 2011 showdown as a victory because it brought about budget caps, which are opposed not just by Democrats but defense-friendly Republicans

no impact to heg
Benjamin H. Friedman et al 13, research fellow in defense and homeland security studies; Brendan
Rittenhouse Green, the Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science and Leadership Studies at
Williams College; Justin Logan, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute Fall 2013,
“Correspondence: Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy,” International
Security, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 181-199

Brooks et al. argue that the specter of U.S. power eliminates some of the most baleful consequences of anarchy, producing a more
peaceful world. U.S. security guarantees deter aggressors, reassure allies, and dampen security dilemmas (p. 34). “By supplying reassurance, deterrence,
and active management,” Brooks et al. write, primacy “reduces security competition and does so in a way that slows the diffusion of power away from the United

States” (pp. 39–40). There are three reasons to reject this logic : security competition is declining anyway; if
competition increases, primacy will have difficulty stopping it ; and even if competition occurred, it would
pose little threat to the United States.¶ an increasingly peaceful world. An array of research , some of which Brooks et al. cite,
indicates that factors other than U.S. power are diminishing interstate war and security competition .2
These factors combine to make the costs of military aggression very high, and its benefits low.3 ¶ A major reason for peace is that conquest has grown

more costly. Nuclear weapons make it nearly suicidal in some cases.4 Asia, the region where future great power competition is
most likely, has a “geography of peace ”: its maritime and mountainous regions are formidable barriers to conflict.5 ¶ Conquest also yields

lower economic returns than in the past . Post-industrial economies that rely heavily on human capital and information are more difficult to
exploit.6 Communications and transport technologies aid nationalism and other identity politics that make foreigners harder to manage. The lowering of

trade barriers limits the returns from their forcible opening .7¶ Although states are slow learners, they increasingly
appreciate these trends . That should not surprise structural realists. Through two world wars, the international system
"selected against" hyperaggressive states and demonstrated even to victors the costs of major war. Others
adapt to the changed calculus of military aggression through socialization .8¶ managing revisionist states. Brooks et
al. caution against betting on these positive trends. They worry that if states behave the way offensive realism predicts, then security competition
will be fierce even if its costs are high . Or, if nonsecurity preferences such as prestige, status, or glory motivate states, even secure states may
become aggressive (pp. 36-37).9 ¶ These scenarios, however, are a bigger problem for primacy than for restraint .

Offensive realist security paranoia stems from states' uncertainty about intentions; such states see alliances as
temporary expedients of last resort, and U.S. military commitments are unlikely to comfort or deter them .10

Nonsecurity preferences are, by definition, resistant to the security blandishments that the United States can
offer under primacy Brooks et al.'s revisionist actors are unlikely to find additional costs sufficient reason to hold back, or the threat of those costs to be
particularly credible.¶ The literature that Brooks et al. cite in arguing that the United States restrains allies actually suggests that offensive

realist and prestige-oriented states will be the most resistant to the restraining effects of U.S. power . These
studies suggest that it is most difficult for strong states to prevent conflict between weaker allies and their rivals when the restraining state is defending nonvital
interests; when potential adversaries and allies have other alignment options;11 when the stronger state struggles to mobilize power domestically12; when the
stronger state perceives reputational costs for non-involvement;13 and when allies have hawkish interests and the stronger state has only moderately dovish
interests.14¶ In other words, the
cases where it would be most important to restrain U.S. allies are those in which
Washington's efforts at restraint would be least effective . Highly motivated actors, by definition, have strong hawkish interests.
Primacy puts limits on U.S. dovishness, lest its commitments lack the credibility to deter or reassure. Such credibility concerns create perceived reputational costs
for restraining or not bailing out allies. The United States will be defending secondary interests, which will create domestic obstacles to mobilizing power. U.S. allies
have other alliance options, especially in Asia. In short, if
states are insensitive to the factors incentivizing peace, then the
United States' ability to manage global security will be doubtful . Third-party security competition will likely
ensue anyway. ¶ costs for whom? Fortunately, foreign security competition poses little risk to the United States. Its wealth
and geography create natural security. Historically, the only threats to U.S. sovereignty, territorial integrity, safety, or power position have been potential regional
hegemons that could mobilize their resources to project political and military power into the Western Hemisphere. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union arguably
posed such threats. None exist today.¶ Brooks
et al. argue that "China's rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional
hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term" (p. 38). That possibility is remote , even assuming that China sustains its
rapid wealth creation. Regional hegemony requires China to develop the capacity to conquer Asia's other

regional powers. India lies across the Himalayas and has nuclear weapons. Japan is across a sea and has the wealth to
quickly build up its military and develop nuclear weapons. A disengaged United States would have ample warning and
time to form alliances or regenerate forces before China realizes such vast ambitions.

Heg resilient
Michael Beckley 12, research fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and assistant professor of political science at Tufts
University, "China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure," Winter 2011/2012, International
Security, Vol. 36, No. 3, belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Chinas_Century.pdf
To be sure, thecosts of maintaining U.S. military superiority are substantial. By historical standards,
however, they are exceptionally small.41 Past hegemons succumbed to imperial overstretch after fighting
multifront wars against major powers and spending more than 10 percent (and often 100 or 200
percent) of their GDPs on defense.42 The United States, by contrast, spends 4 percent of its GDP on defense and
concentrates its enmity on rogue nations and failed states. Past bids for global mastery were strangled
before hegemony could be fully consolidated. The United States, on the other hand, has the advantage
of being an extant hegemon—it did not overturn an existing international order ; rather, the existing
order collapsed around it. As a result, its dominant position is entrenched to the point that “any effort to
compete directly with the United States is futile, so no one tries.”43¶ The dollar’s global role may handicap
American exports, but it also comes with perks including seigniorage,44 reduced exchange rate risks for U.S. firms involved in
international commerce, competitive advantages for American banks in dollarized financial markets, and the ability to delay and deflect current
account adjustments onto other countries.45 More important, foreign governments that hold dollar reserves depend on
U.S. prosperity for their continued economic growth and are thus “entrapped,” unable to disentangle
their interests from those of the United States .46 Rather than seeking to undermine the American
economy, they invest in its continued expansion .47¶ Finally, given its position at the top of the world trade
regime, the United States can distort international markets in its favor .48 Declinists expect the hegemon to use its
power magnanimously. According to the alternative perspective, however, American foreign economic policy involves the
routine use of diplomatic leverage at the highest levels to create opportunities for U.S. firms .49 U.S. trade
officials, “acting as self-appointed enforcers of the free trade regime, asserted the right with their own national law to single out and punish
countries they judged to be unfair traders.”50 Globalization, therefore, may not be a neutral process that diffuses wealth evenly
throughout the international system, but a political process shaped by the United States in ways that serve its
interests.
 AT: Troop Shift
(--) PMC’s will be cut—not shifted—even Republicans support the idea:
Paul J. Nyden, 1/14/2012 (staff writer, “Manchin Proposes More Cuts to Private Military Contractors,”
https://www.globalpolicy.org/pmscs/51200-manchin-proposes-more-cuts-to-private-military-
contractors.html, Accessed 9/9/2015, rwg)

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., thinks the large sums of money going to private military contractors is "sucking"
the military dry and more needs to be cut to ensure soldiers are not being discriminated against. "To me, nothing is more important than making sure that
our service members have the right equipment and training overseas and the best support here at home -- and that the United States of America will always have
the best military in the world," Manchin said on Saturday in a statement to the Sunday Gazette-Mail .
During Manchin's "Common Sense"
tour in West Virginia he said, "Republicans are talking about [cutting] $50 billion a year [from private
military contractors]. I think more can be cut. " We need to support the military. But contractors out there that have been sucking us
dry.... That is wrong," he said. Private military contractors often get paid three times as much, or more, than American soldiers. "I want to cut a contractor that is
making three times more than a solider who is doing the same thing," Manchin said.

(--) New Pentagon priorities provide few openings for PMC’s—no shift:
Reuters, 10/21/2012 (“As Iraq, Afghan wars end, private security firms adapt,”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/21/us-usa-arms-contractors-idUSBRE89K02B20121021,
Accessed 9/16/2015, rwg)

TIDE GOING OUT? "At the moment, everyone is looking for work that is not OCA-funded ," one industry executive told
Reuters on condition of anonymity, saying he expected an era of mergers and even bankruptcies. "It's going to be like when the tide goes out at
the beach and you suddenly find out who has been naked." New
Pentagon priorities, many believe, will provide fewer
openings for traditional private military contractors. Washington's strategic "pivot" to the Asia-Pacific region
will involve mainly warships or uniformed Marines, with little need for extra hired muscle .
 T
(--) We meet- we remove PMC’s though out Iraq
(--) Counter-interpretation: Significantly means 20%
FY 16 Defense Authorization Bill, June 3, 2015 [http://www.rpc.senate.gov/legislative-
notices/s-1376_fy-16-defense-authorization-bill]
Expresses the sense of the Senate that the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan should be based on security conditions in Afghanistan and
U.S. security interests in the region. It goes on to require the president to certify that any ordered significant reduction in U.S. forces in
Afghanistan will result in an acceptable level of risk to U.S. national security objectives. A
significant reduction is defined as the
lesser of 1,000 or more troops or a 20 percent reduction of troops then deployed in Afghanistan .

(--) We meet the counter-interp: 60% of US military presence in Iraq are contractors.
Miranda Green, 4/17/2015 (staff writer, “No signs U.S. backing off private military contractors in wake
of Blackwater,” http://www.knoxnews.com/decodedc/no-signs-us-backing-off-private-military-
contractors-in-wake-of-blackwater, Accessed 9/9/2015, rwg)

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. use of private security contractors has grown sharply in the past 15 years and despite
well-documented controversies, such as the most recent Blackwater trial, the Pentagon and State Department show no signs of backing off.
There is no better example of a private contractor gone awry than Blackwater. The now defunct contracting company rose to prominence
during the height of the Iraq war and crashed and burned not long after, largely thanks to a 2007 incident in Iraq where employees killed 17
Iraqi civilians and injured 20 more. This week one former employee was sentenced to life in prison and three others received 30 years each for
the mass shooting. Yet the Department of Defense and State Department are showing no signs of curtailing the use of contractors. State
Department spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters Tuesday that the agency has taken numerous steps to heighten accountability for
contractors such as “moving quickly to improve investigative policies and strengthening procedures for use of force and less-than-lethal force
by security contractors.” Beyond that, she would not answer more questions on the topic, and the State Department would not respond to
requests from DecodeDC for comment on the use of contractors going forward. It’s hard to determine the number of PSCs used by the U.S.
military and State Department overseas. Available data isn’t always comprehensive, and the State Department will not disseminate numbers on
the PSCs it currently uses. In December 2008, 69 percent of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan were PSCs and roughly 15 percent of them were
armed. Numbers released by the U.S. Central Command for the DOD in January 2015 showed that about 40,000 PSCs were in Afghanistan. To
compare, there are about 10,000 U.S. troops also stationed there. That means contractors make up about 80 percent of the military presence.
About 4 percent of DOD contractors in Afghanistan currently hold security positions. The majority offer logistics and maintenance support. In
Iraq, where most contractors are controlled by the State Department, numbers are just as skewed. The contractor presence can
be estimated at around 60 percent of the total military presence .

(--) Their interpretation kills aff ground- we would lose to PICs every round if we had
to defend every troop- kills fairness and detracts from topic education
(--) They overlimit- only allow for AFF’s that completely remove presence from a topic
country—skews the debate toward the NEG.
(--) Their interpretation is contrived- the resolution would say eliminate not
significantly reduce.
(--) Even if a percentage based definition is somewhat arbitrary—it is better than one
that goes way too far.
 ptx
(--) Deal to break the budget caps won’t pass now:
Francine Kiefer, 9/29/2015 (staff writer, “What John Boehner can do before he leaves Congress,”
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0929/What-John-Boehner-can-do-before-he-leaves-
Congress, Accessed 10/1/2015, rwg)

A budget deal is particularly tricky because President Obama wants to lift budget caps – known as
sequestration – on both military and nonmilitary spending . Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky has
said that Republicans would "inevitably" negotiate over the caps, but the issue is highly contentious among Republicans.
“Unless Boehner can pull a rabbit out of the hat ... I am very uncomfortable with what we might be
looking at on Dec. 11,” says Hoagland, a budget expert. A new speaker will not be as experienced as Boehner, and
hard-liners who are flush from victory over Boehner will fight even harder against busting the budget
caps.

(--) FIAT takes out the link: Congress won’t backlash against themselves…
(--) Plan bipartisanly popular: Even Republicans support cutting PMC’s:
Paul J. Nyden, 1/14/2012 (staff writer, “Manchin Proposes More Cuts to Private Military Contractors,”
https://www.globalpolicy.org/pmscs/51200-manchin-proposes-more-cuts-to-private-military-
contractors.html, Accessed 9/9/2015, rwg)

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., thinks the large sums of money going to private military contractors is "sucking"
the military dry and more needs to be cut to ensure soldiers are not being discriminated against. "To me, nothing is more important than making sure that
our service members have the right equipment and training overseas and the best support here at home -- and that the United States of America will always have
the best military in the world," Manchin said on Saturday in a statement to the Sunday Gazette-Mail .
During Manchin's "Common Sense"
tour in West Virginia he said, "Republicans are talking about [cutting] $50 billion a year [from private
military contractors]. I think more can be cut. " We need to support the military. But contractors out there that have been sucking us
dry.... That is wrong," he said. Private military contractors often get paid three times as much, or more, than American soldiers. "I want to cut a contractor that is
making three times more than a solider who is doing the same thing," Manchin said.

(--) Non-intrinsic: rational policymaker could do the plan and vote to avoid the
shutdown.
(--) Multiple issues will spark legislative fights in near future
Sneed 9/29/15 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/boehner-resignation-new-chaos Tierney Sneed is a
reporter for Talking Points Memo. She previously worked for U.S. News and World Report. She grew up
in Florida and attended Georgetown University. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/boehner-resignation-
new-chaos

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) may have sacrificed his speaker's gavel to keep the government open through the week. But the
path that lies ahead for his successor is much trickier. Even if lawmakers, as expected, pass a short-term
spending bill this week, they face a series of other deadlines before the end of the year that could converge into
one giant showdown fueled by freshly emboldened hardliners who see compromise as defeat. “It is setting up a very
major set of hurdles for the next majority leader come the middle of December,” Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who
worked for the U.S. Senate for 25 years, told TPM. “How they make this silk purse out of a sow’s ear is going to be very,
very difficult.” Once lawmakers clear this week’s Wednesday night deadline to pass funding legislation that will last the government until December, they
must pivot to a number of other must-pass issues which lack either bipartisan consensus or, in some cases,
any consensus among Hill Republicans themselves. ADVERTISING From highway funding to raising the debt ceiling to funding
the government in 2016, Congress faces huge unresolved issues that have been roadblocked by
conservative demands to defund Planned Parenthood . With just three months left in the year and the 2016 election calendar
looming, the stage is set for a series of major confrontations unless some sort of global deal is worked out,

which doesn't appear any more likely with Boehner out of the picture. Immediately next on the agenda is
funding the highway trust fund, the deadline for which comes at the end of October. The Congressional Budget Office has signaled that the debt
ceiling will need to be lifted by late November or early December, which remains a particular flashpoint for conservative hardliners who see
a possible credit default as an opportunity to extract spending cuts. “The last thing this country needs is a fight over the debt ceiling right before Christmas,“ said Jim
Dyer, a former appropriations staff director and now a Republican strategist at the Podesta Group. “It’s more about a difficult political position than it as about
anything because the vote is hard for a lot of folks.” Lawmakers will also have a series of “tax extenders” in need of
reauthorization on their hands by the year’s end. And there is also the debate around the reopening of
the Export-Import Bank, which, to the delight of Tea Party politicians, expired over the summer but continues to be supported by business-aligned
Republicans as well as Democrats. All these deadlines bleed into when Congress will have to return to the federal

budget, after the current stopgap legislation being considered runs out on Dec. 11. Before the controversy over Planned Parenthood’s federal funding
prompted shutdown calls, Hill Republicans and the White House were deeply divided on how to deal with the

"sequestration" budget caps put in place in 2011 after the last debt ceiling showdown. Nevertheless, the conservatives who pressed for Boehner’s
departure see that 2011 showdown as a victory because it brought about budget caps, which are opposed not just by Democrats but defense-friendly Republicans.

(--) Past failure to extend the budget caps empirically denies the impact.
(--) Political capital doesn’t exist and isn’t key to their DA- more likely winners win
Michael Hirsch, 2013 chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously
served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He was also
Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier
on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror.
He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based
Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-
thing-as-political-capital-20130207

On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt reduction. In

pundits will do what they always do

response, the talk about how this time of year: They will how unrealistic most of the proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of

much political capital Obama possesses to push his program through this talk will have no bearing on
“ ” . Most of

what actually happens Three months ago if someone had talked about
over the next four years. Consider this: , just before the November election, seriously Obama

capital to oversee
having enough political both immigration and gun-control passage of reform legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after winning the election by 4 percentage points

this person would have been called crazy

and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)— In his first term and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.) , in a starkly

Obama
polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for at least two years.

didn’t dare to even bring up gun control And , a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health care law.

yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s political capital personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “ ”—

chances are fair that both will now happen What changed In the case of gun control . ? , of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the

Newtown
20 first-graders who were slaughtered in , Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed
after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was
shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.” As a result, momentum has appeared
to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun

Meanwhile
laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago. , the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit

immigration
of compromise on reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this

turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence —his political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do
with the Hispanic vote
just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, breakdown of the in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29
at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of the
Republican Party’s recent introspection , and the realization by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic
death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for
“mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s
mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But

the idea of political capita

the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side.” The real problem is that l—or mandates, or momentum— is so poorly defined
that presidents and pundits often get it wrong. “Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political capital—some sense of

capital
an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It almost never happens. In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political conveys that
is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It the idea

we know more than we really do about ever-elusive political power the concept of , and it discounts the way unforeseen events can
suddenly change everything . Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to invest, just as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and
the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history. Naturally, any president has practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at present. And unless a surge in
the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any concessions that make
him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth

about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just don’t know what you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “Winning wins.” In theory, and in practice, depending on Obama’s handling of
any issue, even in a polarized time he could still deliver on
particular , a lot of his second-term goals depending on , his skill and

the breaks . Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge disparity in the Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass

political capital is, at best, an empty concept that almost nothing in the academic
legislation and run successful presidencies say that , and

literature successfully quantifies or even defines it. “It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard

Winning on one issue often changes the calculation

Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far more complex than the term suggests.

for the next issue; there is never any known amount of capital . “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he

Ornstein says. “If they think he’s going to win, they may change
wants, and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors”

positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon effect.”¶ ¶ ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ Sometimes, a clever practitioner of power can get more done just because he’s
aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress well. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main reasons for that mandate (in
addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to that election, and his ability to get far more done than anyone thought possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his exhaustive study of LBJ, The
Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late 1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize Southern lawmakers’ support
for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table [said that] the presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of course, was what political capital was
called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson didn’t worry about coinage, and he got the Civil Rights Act enacted, along with much else: Medicare, a tax cut, antipoverty programs. He appeared to understand not just the ways of Congress but
also the way to maximize the momentum he possessed in the lingering mood of national grief and determination by picking the right issues, as Caro records. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” LBJ said. “It is a controllable fact of political life.” Johnson had the skill and wherewithal
to realize that, at that moment of history, he could have unlimited coinage if he handled the politics right. He did. (At least until Vietnam, that is.) And then there are the presidents who get the politics, and the issues, wrong. It was the last president before Obama who was just starting a
second term, George W. Bush, who really revived the claim of political capital, which he was very fond of wielding. Then Bush promptly demonstrated that he didn’t fully understand the concept either. At his first news conference after his 2004 victory, a confident-sounding Bush
declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. That’s my style.” The 43rd president threw all of his political capital at an overriding passion: the partial privatization of Social Security. He mounted a full-bore public-relations campaign that
included town-hall meetings across the country. Bush failed utterly, of course. But the problem was not that he didn’t have enough political capital. Yes, he may have overestimated his standing. Bush’s margin over John Kerry was thin—helped along by a bumbling Kerry campaign that
was almost the mirror image of Romney’s gaffe-filled failure this time—but that was not the real mistake. The problem was that whatever credibility or stature Bush thought he had earned as a newly reelected president did nothing to make Social Security privatization a better idea in
most people’s eyes. Voters didn’t trust the plan, and four years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the stock-market collapse bore out the public’s skepticism. Privatization just didn’t have any momentum behind it, no matter who was pushing it or how much capital Bush spent to sell it. The
mistake that Bush made with Social Security, says John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-followed political blogger, “was that just because he won an election, he thought he had a green light. But there was no sense of any kind
of public urgency on Social Security reform. It’s like he went into the garage where various Republican policy ideas were hanging up and picked one. I don’t think Obama’s going to make that mistake.… Bush decided he wanted to push a rock up a hill. He didn’t understand how steep the

Obama may get his way not because of

hill was. I think Obama has more momentum on his side because of the Republican Party’s concerns about the Latino vote and the shooting at Newtown.” also on the debt ceiling,

his reelection, but because Republicans are beginning to doubt whether taking a hard line on fiscal
Sides says, “

policy is a good idea ¶ ¶ ,” as the party suffers in the polls. THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER Presidents are limited in what they can do by time and attention span, of course, just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate. But this,
too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital passing the health care law in his first term. But the real problem was that the plan was unpopular, the economy was bad, and the president didn’t
realize that the national mood (yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party revolt about to burst on the scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout,
aghast at the amount of federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage was simply an intervention too far. So was the idea of another economic stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic fights over the
debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with the country’s mood. Unlike Bush, Obama did ultimately get his idea passed. But the bigger political problem with health care reform was that it distracted the government’s attention from other
issues that people cared about more urgently, such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional staffers told me at the time that their bosses didn’t really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-
reform legislation with loopholes. Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the aides said. Weighing the imponderables of momentum, the often-mystical calculations about when the historic moment is ripe for an issue, will never be a science. It is mainly intuition, and its
best practitioners have a long history in American politics. This is a tale told well in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln attempts a lot of behind-the-scenes vote-buying to win passage of the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, along with eloquent
attempts to move people’s hearts and minds. He appears to be using the political capital of his reelection and the turning of the tide in the Civil War. But it’s clear that a surge of conscience, a sense of the changing times, has as much to do with the final vote as all the backroom horse-
trading. “The reason I think the idea of political capital is kind of distorting is that it implies you have chits you can give out to people. It really oversimplifies why you elect politicians, or why they can do what Lincoln did,” says Tommy Bruce, a former political consultant in Washington.
Consider, as another example, the storied political career of President Franklin Roosevelt. Because the mood was ripe for dramatic change in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was able to push an astonishing array of New Deal programs through a largely compliant Congress,
assuming what some described as near-dictatorial powers. But in his second term, full of confidence because of a landslide victory in 1936 that brought in unprecedented Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt overreached with his infamous Court-packing proposal. All
of a sudden, the political capital that experts thought was limitless disappeared. FDR’s plan to expand the Supreme Court by putting in his judicial allies abruptly created an unanticipated wall of opposition from newly reunited Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. FDR thus
inadvertently handed back to Congress, especially to the Senate, the power and influence he had seized in his first term. Sure, Roosevelt had loads of popularity and momentum in 1937. He seemed to have a bank vault full of political capital. But, once again, a president simply chose to
take on the wrong issue at the wrong time; this time, instead of most of the political interests in the country aligning his way, they opposed him. Roosevelt didn’t fully recover until World War II, despite two more election victories. In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these

if he picks issues
shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But that the country’s

there is no reason to think he can’t win far more victories than

mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control— careful any of the

calculators of political capital believe is possible now , including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction. Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new, more mature Obama seems to be

If he can get some early wins

emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly. that —as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-income tax increase—

will create momentum, and one win may well lead to others. “Winning wins .” Obama himself learned some hard lessons over the past four years about the
falsity of the political-capital concept. Despite his decisive victory over John McCain in 2008, he fumbled the selling of his $787 billion stimulus plan by portraying himself naively as a “post-partisan” president who somehow had been given the electoral mandate to be all things to all
people. So Obama tried to sell his stimulus as a long-term restructuring plan that would “lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.” The president thus fed GOP suspicions that he was just another big-government liberal. Had he understood better that the country was digging
in against yet more government intervention and had sold the stimulus as what it mainly was—a giant shot of adrenalin to an economy with a stopped heart, a pure emergency measure—he might well have escaped the worst of the backlash. But by laying on ambitious programs, and
following up quickly with his health care plan, he only sealed his reputation on the right as a closet socialist. After that, Obama’s public posturing provoked automatic opposition from the GOP, no matter what he said. If the president put his personal imprimatur on any plan—from deficit
reduction, to health care, to immigration reform—Republicans were virtually guaranteed to come out against it. But this year, when he sought to exploit the chastened GOP’s newfound willingness to compromise on immigration, his approach was different. He seemed to understand that
the Republicans needed to reclaim immigration reform as their own issue, and he was willing to let them have some credit. When he mounted his bully pulpit in Nevada, he delivered another new message as well: You Republicans don’t have to listen to what I say anymore. And don’t
worry about who’s got the political capital. Just take a hard look at where I’m saying this: in a state you were supposed to have won but lost because of the rising Hispanic vote. Obama was cleverly pointing the GOP toward conclusions that he knows it is already reaching on its own: If
you, the Republicans, want to have any kind of a future in a vastly changed electoral map, you have no choice but to move. It’s your choice.
(--) No spillover: plan won’t spillover to budget caps.
(--) Deal to break the budget caps won’t pass now:
Francine Kiefer, 9/29/2015 (staff writer, “What John Boehner can do before he leaves Congress,”
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0929/What-John-Boehner-can-do-before-he-leaves-
Congress, Accessed 10/1/2015, rwg)

A budget deal is particularly tricky because President Obama wants to lift budget caps – known as
sequestration – on both military and nonmilitary spending . Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky has
said that Republicans would "inevitably" negotiate over the caps, but the issue is highly contentious among Republicans.
“Unless Boehner can pull a rabbit out of the hat ... I am very uncomfortable with what we might be
looking at on Dec. 11,” says Hoagland, a budget expert. A new speaker will not be as experienced as Boehner, and
hard-liners who are flush from victory over Boehner will fight even harder against busting the budget
caps.

(--) FIAT takes out the link: Congress won’t backlash against themselves…
(--) Plan bipartisanly popular: Even Republicans support cutting PMC’s:
Paul J. Nyden, 1/14/2012 (staff writer, “Manchin Proposes More Cuts to Private Military Contractors,”
https://www.globalpolicy.org/pmscs/51200-manchin-proposes-more-cuts-to-private-military-
contractors.html, Accessed 9/9/2015, rwg)

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., thinks the large sums of money going to private military contractors is "sucking"
the military dry and more needs to be cut to ensure soldiers are not being discriminated against. "To me, nothing is more important than making sure that
our service members have the right equipment and training overseas and the best support here at home -- and that the United States of America will always have
the best military in the world," Manchin said on Saturday in a statement to the Sunday Gazette-Mail .
During Manchin's "Common Sense"
tour in West Virginia he said, "Republicans are talking about [cutting] $50 billion a year [from private
military contractors]. I think more can be cut. " We need to support the military. But contractors out there that have been sucking us
dry.... That is wrong," he said. Private military contractors often get paid three times as much, or more, than American soldiers. "I want to cut a contractor that is
making three times more than a solider who is doing the same thing," Manchin said.

(--) Non-intrinsic: rational policymaker could do the plan and vote to avoid the
shutdown.
(--) Multiple issues will spark legislative fights in near future
Sneed 9/29/15 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/boehner-resignation-new-chaos Tierney Sneed is a
reporter for Talking Points Memo. She previously worked for U.S. News and World Report. She grew up
in Florida and attended Georgetown University. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/boehner-resignation-
new-chaos

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) may have sacrificed his speaker's gavel to keep the government open through the week. But the
path that lies ahead for his successor is much trickier. Even if lawmakers, as expected, pass a short-term
spending bill this week, they face a series of other deadlines before the end of the year that could converge into
one giant showdown fueled by freshly emboldened hardliners who see compromise as defeat. “It is setting up a very
major set of hurdles for the next majority leader come the middle of December,” Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who
worked for the U.S. Senate for 25 years, told TPM. “How they make this silk purse out of a sow’s ear is going to be very,

very difficult.” Once lawmakers clear this week’s Wednesday night deadline to pass funding legislation that will last the government until December, they
must pivot to a number of other must-pass issues which lack either bipartisan consensus or, in some cases,
any consensus among Hill Republicans themselves. ADVERTISING From highway funding to raising the debt ceiling to funding
the government in 2016, Congress faces huge unresolved issues that have been roadblocked by
conservative demands to defund Planned Parenthood . With just three months left in the year and the 2016 election calendar
looming, the stage is set for a series of major confrontations unless some sort of global deal is worked out,

which doesn't appear any more likely with Boehner out of the picture. Immediately next on the agenda is
funding the highway trust fund, the deadline for which comes at the end of October. The Congressional Budget Office has signaled that the debt
ceiling will need to be lifted by late November or early December, which remains a particular flashpoint for conservative hardliners who see
a possible credit default as an opportunity to extract spending cuts. “The last thing this country needs is a fight over the debt ceiling right before Christmas,“ said Jim
Dyer, a former appropriations staff director and now a Republican strategist at the Podesta Group. “It’s more about a difficult political position than it as about
anything because the vote is hard for a lot of folks.” Lawmakers will also have a series of “tax extenders” in need of
reauthorization on their hands by the year’s end. And there is also the debate around the reopening of
the Export-Import Bank, which, to the delight of Tea Party politicians, expired over the summer but continues to be supported by business-aligned
Republicans as well as Democrats. All these deadlines bleed into when Congress will have to return to the federal

budget, after the current stopgap legislation being considered runs out on Dec. 11. Before the controversy over Planned Parenthood’s federal funding
prompted shutdown calls, Hill Republicans and the White House were deeply divided on how to deal with the

"sequestration" budget caps put in place in 2011 after the last debt ceiling showdown. Nevertheless, the conservatives who pressed for Boehner’s
departure see that 2011 showdown as a victory because it brought about budget caps, which are opposed not just by Democrats but defense-friendly Republicans.

(--) Past failure to extend the budget caps empirically denies the impact.
(--) Political capital doesn’t exist and isn’t key to their DA- more likely winners win
Michael Hirsch, 2013 chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously
served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He was also
Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier
on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror.
He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based
Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-
thing-as-political-capital-20130207

On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt reduction. In

pundits will do what they always do

response, the talk about how this time of year: They will how unrealistic most of the proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of

much political capital Obama possesses to push his program through this talk will have no bearing on
“ ” . Most of

what actually happens Three months ago if someone had talked about
over the next four years. Consider this: , just before the November election, seriously Obama

capital to oversee
having enough political both immigration and gun-control passage of reform legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after winning the election by 4 percentage points

this person would have been called crazy

and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)— In his first term and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.) , in a starkly

Obama
polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for at least two years.

didn’t dare to even bring up gun control And , a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health care law.

yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s political capital personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “ ”—

chances are fair that both will now happen What changed In the case of gun control . ? , of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the

Newtown
20 first-graders who were slaughtered in , Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed
after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was
shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.” As a result, momentum has appeared
to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun

Meanwhile
laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago. , the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit

immigration
of compromise on reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this

turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence It has almost entirely to do —his political mandate, as it were.

with the Hispanic vote

just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, breakdown of the in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29

movement on immigration has come out of the

at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the mainly

Republican Party’s introspection recent , and the realization by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic
death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for
“mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s
mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But
 the idea of political capita
the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side.” The real problem is that l—or mandates, or momentum— is so poorly defined
that presidents and pundits often get it wrong. “Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political capital—some sense of

capital
an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It almost never happens. In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political conveys that
is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It the idea

we know more than we really do about ever-elusive political power the concept of , and it discounts the way unforeseen events can
suddenly change everything . Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to invest, just as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and
the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history. Naturally, any president has practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at present. And unless a surge in
the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any concessions that make
him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth

about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just don’t know what you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “Winning wins.” In theory, and in practice, depending on Obama’s handling of
any issue, even in a polarized time he could still deliver on
particular , a lot of his second-term goals depending on , his skill and

the breaks . Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge disparity in the Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass

political capital is, at best, an empty concept that almost nothing in the academic
legislation and run successful presidencies say that , and

literature successfully quantifies or even defines it. “It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard

Winning on one issue often changes the calculation

Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far more complex than the term suggests.

for the next issue; there is never any known amount of capital . “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he

Ornstein says. “If they think he’s going to win, they may change
wants, and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors”

positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon effect.”¶ ¶ ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ Sometimes, a clever practitioner of power can get more done just because he’s
aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress well. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main reasons for that mandate (in
addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to that election, and his ability to get far more done than anyone thought possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his exhaustive study of LBJ, The
Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late 1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize Southern lawmakers’ support
for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table [said that] the presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of course, was what political capital was
called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson didn’t worry about coinage, and he got the Civil Rights Act enacted, along with much else: Medicare, a tax cut, antipoverty programs. He appeared to understand not just the ways of Congress but
also the way to maximize the momentum he possessed in the lingering mood of national grief and determination by picking the right issues, as Caro records. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” LBJ said. “It is a controllable fact of political life.” Johnson had the skill and wherewithal
to realize that, at that moment of history, he could have unlimited coinage if he handled the politics right. He did. (At least until Vietnam, that is.) And then there are the presidents who get the politics, and the issues, wrong. It was the last president before Obama who was just starting a
second term, George W. Bush, who really revived the claim of political capital, which he was very fond of wielding. Then Bush promptly demonstrated that he didn’t fully understand the concept either. At his first news conference after his 2004 victory, a confident-sounding Bush
declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. That’s my style.” The 43rd president threw all of his political capital at an overriding passion: the partial privatization of Social Security. He mounted a full-bore public-relations campaign that
included town-hall meetings across the country. Bush failed utterly, of course. But the problem was not that he didn’t have enough political capital. Yes, he may have overestimated his standing. Bush’s margin over John Kerry was thin—helped along by a bumbling Kerry campaign that
was almost the mirror image of Romney’s gaffe-filled failure this time—but that was not the real mistake. The problem was that whatever credibility or stature Bush thought he had earned as a newly reelected president did nothing to make Social Security privatization a better idea in
most people’s eyes. Voters didn’t trust the plan, and four years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the stock-market collapse bore out the public’s skepticism. Privatization just didn’t have any momentum behind it, no matter who was pushing it or how much capital Bush spent to sell it. The
mistake that Bush made with Social Security, says John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-followed political blogger, “was that just because he won an election, he thought he had a green light. But there was no sense of any kind
of public urgency on Social Security reform. It’s like he went into the garage where various Republican policy ideas were hanging up and picked one. I don’t think Obama’s going to make that mistake.… Bush decided he wanted to push a rock up a hill. He didn’t understand how steep the

Obama may get his way not because of

hill was. I think Obama has more momentum on his side because of the Republican Party’s concerns about the Latino vote and the shooting at Newtown.” also on the debt ceiling,

his reelection, but because Republicans are beginning to doubt whether taking a hard line on fiscal
Sides says, “

policy is a good idea ¶ ¶ ,” as the party suffers in the polls. THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER Presidents are limited in what they can do by time and attention span, of course, just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate. But this,
too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital passing the health care law in his first term. But the real problem was that the plan was unpopular, the economy was bad, and the president didn’t
realize that the national mood (yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party revolt about to burst on the scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout,
aghast at the amount of federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage was simply an intervention too far. So was the idea of another economic stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic fights over the
debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with the country’s mood. Unlike Bush, Obama did ultimately get his idea passed. But the bigger political problem with health care reform was that it distracted the government’s attention from other
issues that people cared about more urgently, such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional staffers told me at the time that their bosses didn’t really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-
reform legislation with loopholes. Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the aides said. Weighing the imponderables of momentum, the often-mystical calculations about when the historic moment is ripe for an issue, will never be a science. It is mainly intuition, and its
best practitioners have a long history in American politics. This is a tale told well in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln attempts a lot of behind-the-scenes vote-buying to win passage of the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, along with eloquent
attempts to move people’s hearts and minds. He appears to be using the political capital of his reelection and the turning of the tide in the Civil War. But it’s clear that a surge of conscience, a sense of the changing times, has as much to do with the final vote as all the backroom horse-
trading. “The reason I think the idea of political capital is kind of distorting is that it implies you have chits you can give out to people. It really oversimplifies why you elect politicians, or why they can do what Lincoln did,” says Tommy Bruce, a former political consultant in Washington.
Consider, as another example, the storied political career of President Franklin Roosevelt. Because the mood was ripe for dramatic change in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was able to push an astonishing array of New Deal programs through a largely compliant Congress,
assuming what some described as near-dictatorial powers. But in his second term, full of confidence because of a landslide victory in 1936 that brought in unprecedented Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt overreached with his infamous Court-packing proposal. All
of a sudden, the political capital that experts thought was limitless disappeared. FDR’s plan to expand the Supreme Court by putting in his judicial allies abruptly created an unanticipated wall of opposition from newly reunited Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. FDR thus
inadvertently handed back to Congress, especially to the Senate, the power and influence he had seized in his first term. Sure, Roosevelt had loads of popularity and momentum in 1937. He seemed to have a bank vault full of political capital. But, once again, a president simply chose to
take on the wrong issue at the wrong time; this time, instead of most of the political interests in the country aligning his way, they opposed him. Roosevelt didn’t fully recover until World War II, despite two more election victories. In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these

if he picks issues
shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But that the country’s

there is no reason to think he can’t win far more victories than

mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control— careful any of the

calculators of political capital believe is possible now , including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction. Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new, more mature Obama seems to be

If he can get some early wins

emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly. that —as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-income tax increase—

will create momentum, and one win may well lead to others. “Winning wins .” Obama himself learned some hard lessons over the past four years about the
falsity of the political-capital concept. Despite his decisive victory over John McCain in 2008, he fumbled the selling of his $787 billion stimulus plan by portraying himself naively as a “post-partisan” president who somehow had been given the electoral mandate to be all things to all
people. So Obama tried to sell his stimulus as a long-term restructuring plan that would “lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.” The president thus fed GOP suspicions that he was just another big-government liberal. Had he understood better that the country was digging
in against yet more government intervention and had sold the stimulus as what it mainly was—a giant shot of adrenalin to an economy with a stopped heart, a pure emergency measure—he might well have escaped the worst of the backlash. But by laying on ambitious programs, and
following up quickly with his health care plan, he only sealed his reputation on the right as a closet socialist. After that, Obama’s public posturing provoked automatic opposition from the GOP, no matter what he said. If the president put his personal imprimatur on any plan—from deficit
reduction, to health care, to immigration reform—Republicans were virtually guaranteed to come out against it. But this year, when he sought to exploit the chastened GOP’s newfound willingness to compromise on immigration, his approach was different. He seemed to understand that
the Republicans needed to reclaim immigration reform as their own issue, and he was willing to let them have some credit. When he mounted his bully pulpit in Nevada, he delivered another new message as well: You Republicans don’t have to listen to what I say anymore. And don’t
worry about who’s got the political capital. Just take a hard look at where I’m saying this: in a state you were supposed to have won but lost because of the rising Hispanic vote. Obama was cleverly pointing the GOP toward conclusions that he knows it is already reaching on its own: If
you, the Republicans, want to have any kind of a future in a vastly changed electoral map, you have no choice but to move. It’s your choice.

(--) No spillover: plan won’t spillover to budget caps.

 Da
Relations are resilient
Boucek 11
[Chrstopher Boucek, associate in the Carnegie Middle East Program, June 21 2011,
http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/06/21/u.s.-saudi-relations-in-shadow-of-arab-spring/1il, accessed
on 7/28/12, Kfo]

Are U.S.-Saudi relations in decline? We have seen the emergence of greater tensions between Washington and Riyadh as a
result of the Arab Spring. This comes in large part because in Saudi Arabia there is a belief that Washington has not
managed this process very well, doesn’t know what it’s doing, and is putting issues of political reform ahead of
security and stability in the region. This is a part of the world where personal relationships, friendship, and loyalty are more important than
anything else and we’ve seen the United States support the removal of former friends, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The
Saudis feel that there is a likelihood that this is not going to stop. Saudi Arabia and Saudi foreign policy generally loathe
instability or uncertainty and that’s exactly what we see right now. Riyadh feels that the United States is more concerned about
being on the right side of history, instead of standing by its friends and working to advance stability in the region—this
is very concerning to the Saudis. Whereas the United States and Saudi Arabia historically differed over domestic Saudi political issues,
the two countries usually agreed on foreign and regional policy issues. But increasingly, this is not the case. Increasingly it seems that
Saudi Arabia looks out into the world and thinks that its foreign policy interests do not overlap with the United
States and Washington’s security interests. Saudi Arabia is now in a position to pursue its own interests. All that said, at the end of the
day, the relationship remains very strong. In the region, there are several special relationships for the United States and
one of them is with Saudi Arabia. Despite all of the difficulty and tensions, the relationship remains strong and it
will remain strong. The two countries need each other and there is no one else who can provide for Saudi Arabia
what the United States does and no one that can provide for the United States what Saudi Arabia does. The two will
be forced to work together. What’s needed is better management of the relationship, especially on the American side. Washington needs
to learn how to engage the Saudis in a productive way to advance mutual interests, not just American interests.

(--) US military credibility is doomed- mismanagement and domestic politics

Barno and Bensahel 2-24-15 [Lt. General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.) is a Distinguished Practitioner in
Residence, and Dr. Nora Bensahel is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, at the School of International
Service at American University, “U.S. LAND FORCES MUST DETER AND DEFEND ABROAD,”
http://warontherocks.com/2015/02/u-s-land-forces-must-deter-and-defend-abroad/]
The United States faces a world characterized by global danger, disorder, and disruption. Within such a world, the U.S. military continues to play two central roles:
to prevent major conflicts and, failing that, to prevail in such conflicts in which it is engaged. In short, the armed forces of the United States exist to deter and to
defend. These long-standing military missions require the U.S. military to be forward deployed and closely engaged
with friends, allies, partners, and even potential adversaries in a volatile world. But U.S. forces today, especially its land forces, are poorly

postured to do so. The United States has dramatically reshaped its global force posture during the last 15 years. The large land wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq (or at least our direct role in them) are receding, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Marines are no longer
conducting combat operations abroad. The U.S. military is returning home . But basing most U.S. forces and capabilities domestically

means that they are too far away from the places where they can deter and defend effectively . This retreat from a long-

standing forward U.S. military posture is a potentially destabilizing trend that must be reversed. This dynamic affects all the U.S. military

services, but it is most problematic for the Army. The Navy and Marines still maintain many forward bases and frequently conduct operational cruises and
deployments throughout the world. The Air Force has shifted most of its forces to bases in the United States, but the risks of longer distances are somewhat
mitigated by the speed and strategic mobility of its squadrons of self-deploying aircraft. The Army has always been the nation’s most powerful marker of an
enduring U.S. commitment. Army units based overseas provide the strongest possible message of U.S. resolve and long-term commitment around the world. Allies
and adversaries alike know that where Army forces stand, the United States stands. Today, however, most Army forces are strategically mis-
positioned by being based in the continental United States . Only two of more than 35 Army brigade combat teams (BCTs) are
permanently stationed overseas. Yet it is not at all clear that these extremely capable (and expensive) ground forces can adequately deter potential enemies and
defend key friends and allies from their American garrisons. Moving a heavy armored division from Georgia or Texas or Colorado to eastern Europe could easily take
many weeks, if not months. Shifting to the Pacific—to Korea or Japan—could take even longer. To best reassure allies and partners around the world, both
deterrence and defense require an enduring forward Army presence in order to be effective. Much of the Army’s positioning woes today stem from the end of the
Cold War. The U.S. military troop strength in Europe has shifted from an average of about 330,000 each year in the 1950s and 1960s (peaking at almost 439,000 in
1957)—a huge force to deter and, if necessary, to defend against the USSR’s massive tank armies—to approximately 67,000 today. Much of this drawdown involved
taking Army forces in Europe from multiple armored and mechanized divisions with thousands of tanks and tracked vehicles in the late 1980s to less than a single
division equivalent today, consisting solely of paratroopers and light wheeled armor. The United States has no tank or heavy armored units stationed in Europe
today. And the two maneuver BCTs are based in northern Italy and southern Germany, far from the eastern border of the NATO alliance. These facts are
undoubtedly well known to Russian president Vladimir Putin. With a smaller force already limited in its reach and with still shrinking capacity, this posture makes no
strategic sense. U.S. forces need to be stationed abroad to execute their deterrence and defense missions most effectively. So why
are most U.S.
forces returning home while global challenges and threats continue to proliferate? The answer is straightforward: Congressional
politics. Members of Congress, desperate to keep bases in their districts open, have led the charge to
close as many bases as possible overseas before even considering domestic base closures. Good politics, but dangerous strategy.

(--) Impact is empirically denied: Clinton cut the military budget with no impact.
(--) PMC’s suck the military dry—hurt operations:
Paul J. Nyden, 1/14/2012 (staff writer, “Manchin Proposes More Cuts to Private Military Contractors,”
https://www.globalpolicy.org/pmscs/51200-manchin-proposes-more-cuts-to-private-military-
contractors.html, Accessed 9/9/2015, rwg)

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., thinks the

large sums of money going to private military contractors is "sucking" the
military dry and more needs to be cut to ensure soldiers are not being discriminated against. "To me, nothing is more
important than making sure that our service members have the right equipment and training overseas
and the best support here at home -- and that the United States of America will always have the best military in the world,"
Manchin said on Saturday in a statement to the Sunday Gazette-Mail. During Manchin's "Common Sense" tour in West Virginia he said,
"Republicans are talking about [cutting] $50 billion a year [from private military contractors]. I think more can be cut. " We
need to
support the military. But contractors out there that have been sucking us dry.... That is wrong, " he said.
Private military contractors often get paid three times as much, or more, than American soldiers. "I
want to cut a contractor that is making three times more than a solider who is doing the same thing,"
Manchin said.

(--) Case impact swamps—they can’t prove another scenario other than the case—
which we solve for.
(--) Turn: PMC’s escalate insurgencies—they make situations worse:
Brian G. LeBon, Jr, 2013 (“RUNNING BEFORE WALKING: THE UNDERLYING COSTS OF PRIVATIZED
VIOLENCE & THE FUTURE OF THE PRIVATIZED INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX,” Loyola Journal of Public Interest
Law, Fall 2013, Accessed 9/9/2015, Lexis/Nexis, rwg)

Prior to the recent controversies surrounding PMFs, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Adams wrote, "The
successful track record of [PMFs] makes them a realistic option for governments that see privatized
military training as an effective way to stretch their military budget." n126 However, today, most active-
duty military see the privatization of warfare as taking one step forward, and three steps back. n127 A
Congressional Research Service report in 2010 found that according to the U.S. Army Field Manual on
counterinsurgency, "one of the fundamental tenets of counterinsurgency operations - such as those
undertaken in Iraq and Afghanistan - is to establish and maintain security while simultaneously winning
the hearts and minds of the local population." n128 The report also states that according to the manual
"abuses by security forces ... can be a major escalating factor in insurgencies." n129 The suffering of
local citizens in areas of Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands PMFs exacerbates U.S. military efforts to
withdraw peacefully, and calls into question the alleged "efficiency" of PMFs. n130 For instance, when
asked about the behavior of PCs abroad, one Iraqi official stated, "Iraqis do not know them as
Blackwater or other [PMFs] but only as Americans." n131

(--) We’re already sending signals of global retrenchment- allies are alienated now
Dueck 4-28-15 [Colin Dueck is a senior fellow of the FPRI and an associate professor in the School of
Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, “The Real Obama Doctrine
Exposed,” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-real-obama-doctrine-exposed-12745?page=show]

Altogether, and in spite of verbal declarations to the contrary, the

reality of spasmodic U.S. retrenchment under President Obama—
together with his persistent search for diplomatic accommodations with Iran, China, and Russia —have
disconcerted numerous American allies in East Asia, the Middle East, and Central-Eastern Europe . The
question on everyone's mind is whether the United States will actually support its allies in crisis situations. To be sure, the president says that it will. But since
these words exist alongside powerful indicators of American retrenchment, together with repeated
presidential statements that the U.S. must focus on domestic priorities, there is frequent confusion
abroad as to whether the United States is coming or going . The consequent feeling in allied capitals is
that America is stepping back from its traditional international role . This may actually encourage violent conflict. In a way, it
already is. In the case of core allies such as NATO, Israel, and Japan, the United States will have to act to defend those allies should it come to that. But if the U.S.
gives the impression of endless ambivalence or disengagement, this could cause serious misunderstandings, whereby competitors believe the U.S. might never act
forcefully, when in fact it eventually will. Domestically, the Obama doctrine has been more effective in achieving several of the president's basic goals. After all, if a
key first-term concern within the White House was to prevent international military entanglements from derailing either Obama's domestic policy agenda or his
2012 re-election campaign, then it must be said: mission accomplished. Of course, congressional Republicans put up staunch opposition—rightly, in my view—to
many of Obama's socioeconomic experiments from the very start. He has not accomplished everything he desired. But by any objective standard, the Obama years
have seen dramatic and sweeping policy changes in a liberal direction on a whole host of issues including healthcare, financial regulation, the environment, and
same-sex marriage, just to name a few—and in no significant case have they been held hostage to diplomatic or military controversies overseas. In that specific
sense, the Obama doctrine achieved its domestic purpose, at least until recently. What's changed during Obama's second term is that his foreign
policy
approach is no longer popular—and this is now creating domestic political problems for him and for his party. Indeed the president's foreign policy
approval ratings today hover around 38 percent or 39 percent, which is roughly where they've been stuck for a year and a half. What the median American voter
once viewed as a special strength of Obama's, they now view as a special weakness. Something has shifted with regard to popular perceptions of U.S. foreign policy,
apart from the usual second-term blues so common to administrations. In
one case after another—Syria, Ukraine, Iraq—
residential responses that the White House trumpeted as calm restraint have only come across as half-hearted, indecisive, and
confused. In a sense Obama's rather disengaged approach toward numerous international dangers has now come back to haunt him. We saw this quite vividly
during the U.S. congressional midterm elections last fall, where many Republicans ran and won on a platform calling for a stronger response to terrorism, ISIS, and
other security challenges. Many liberal Democrats and even the GOP's own non-interventionists seem to be in denial on this point, preferring instead to debate the
2003 Iraq war decision for the remainder of this century. But the rise of ISIS, in particular, has triggered a genuine and justifiable popular revulsion within the United
States, and people are ready to support a significantly more robust American response against this terrible enemy once called upon to do so.

(--) Ground presence isn’t key to deterrence- strategies are shifting

Mearsheimer ’14 [John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of
Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of
Chicago,“American Grand Strategy and the Future of U.S. Landpower,” December,
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1231.pdf]

We are at what I would call a plastic moment in the history of America’s relations with the wider world. Fundamental changes are taking place in our strategic
environment that are likely to have a profound effect on U.S. grand strategy , and on the Army in particular. To be more specific, three

changes are occurring in America’s strategic calculus that will have a marked effect on the Army’s fortunes. Those changes will interact in ways that make the
Army a less important instrument to policymakers in Washington than it has been in recent memory. First, the United States is pivoting to
Asia to deal with a rising China. The threat environment in the Asia-Pacific region, however, does not require large numbers of American ground
forces. If anything, it is a region in which the geography appears to favor the Air Force and Navy over the Army. Second,
the Iraq war is over, and hopefully America’s combat role in Afghanistan will end soon. All of the Army’s combat units are scheduled to be out of Afghanistan by the end of

2014. Both of these wars are widely—and correctly—regarded as disasters and the United States is not likely to fight another

war like them anytime soon. Occupation, counterinsurgency, and nation-building are likely to remain dirty words for years to come. Indeed, American presidents and
their lieutenants are sure to go to great lengths to avoid fighting another protracted land war in the developing world. That means the mission that has been the

Army’s main force driver over the past decade will probably be of secondary, if not tertiary, importance in the foreseeable future.

Military presence doesn’t solve conflict

Rovner and Talmadge ’14 [Joshua Rovner is the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in
International Politics and National Security at Southern Methodist University, Caitlin Talmadge is
assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, and
has also served as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Less is More: The Future of
the U.S. Military in the Persian Gulf,” http://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/less-more-future-us-military-persian-
gulf]

despite facing a region that often seems unstable and conflict-prone, the United States actually is in
In sum,

a position to take advantage of favorable circumstances in the Gulf , at least when it comes to the question of oil security. For many
years, officials worried that if a single land power was able to dominate the oil-rich Gulf, it would possess extraordinary leverage over the international economy, ultimately putting U.S.
prosperity in doubt. That nightmare scenario is no longer a concern. The major Gulf states have little to no ability to project power, and in any case, they are necessarily focused on internal

old problems of deterring large-scale conventional aggression , and responding to it if it arose, are likely to
problems. Thus, the

prove irrelevant for many years to come. Internal conflict and instability will likely persist, but a large
U.S. military presence is not the right tool for preventing or solving these dangers . After all, the worst period
of sectarian bloodshed in the last decade occurred while the United States had hundreds of thousands
of boots on the ground. Traditional threats to Gulf oil production and shipping will not disappear, but the United States can deal with these
dangers via a much leaner presence. Following the British example, it can provide the benefits of hegemony without paying an exorbitant cost.

No Saudi prolif – not capable, destabilizing, controversial, weakens the kingdom,

commitment to economy, NPT, official opposition
Lippman 11 – senior adjunct scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. His career in
journalism at the Washington Post included four years as the Washington Post’s Middle East bureau
chief, three years as the Post’s oil and energy reporter and a decade as the newspaper’s national
security and diplomatic correspondent, he traveled extensively to Saudi Arabia. He is the author of
“Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East,” “Inside the
Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia,” ” Madeleine Albright and the New American
Diplomacy,” ” Understanding Islam, and Egypt After Nasser”. A writer and journalist specializing in U.S.
foreign policy and Middle Eastern affairs (Thomas W., 08/05, “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Policy,”
http://www.susris.com/2011/08/05/saudi-arabia%E2%80%99s-nuclear-policy-lippman/)

It is highly unlikely, however, that Saudi Arabia would wish to acquire its own nuclear arsenal or that it is
capable of doing so. King Abdullah’s comments should not be taken as a dispositive statement of
considered policy. There are compelling reasons why Saudi Arabia would not undertake an effort to
develop or acquire nuclear weapons, even in the unlikely event that Iran achieves a stockpile and uses
this arsenal to threaten the Kingdom. Money is not an issue — if destitute North Korea can develop
nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia surely has the resources to pursue such a program. With oil prices above
$90 a barrel, Riyadh is flush with cash. But the acquisition or development of nuclear weapons would be
provocative, destabilizing, controversial and extremely difficult for Saudi Arabia, and ultimately would be
more likely to weaken the kingdom than strengthen it. The kingdom has committed itself to an
industrialization and economic development program that depends on open access to global markets
and materials; becoming a nuclear outlaw would be fatal to those plans. Pursuing nuclear weapons
would be a flagrant violation of Saudi Arabia’s commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT), and would surely cause a serious breach with the United States. Saudi Arabia lacks the industrial
and technological base to develop such weapons on its own. An attempt to acquire nuclear weapons by
purchasing them, perhaps from Pakistan, would launch Saudi Arabia on a dangerously inflammatory
trajectory that could destabilize the entire region, which Saudi Arabia’s leaders know would not be in
their country’s best interests. The Saudis always prefer stability to turmoil. Their often-stated official
position is that the entire Middle East should become an internationally supervised region free of all
weapons of mass destruction.

The squo is reverse proliferating- no impact

Kahl et. al 13 (Colin H., Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an associate
professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service, Melissa G. Dalton, Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, Matthew
Irvine, Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security, February, “If Iran Builds the Bomb,
Will Saudi Arabia Be Next?”
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_AtomicKingdom_Kahl.pdf, 2013)

***cites Jacques Hymans, USC Associate Professor of IR***

I I I . LESSONS FRO M HISTOR Y Concerns over “regional proliferation chains,” “falling nuclear dominos”
and “nuclear tipping points” are nothing new; indeed, reactive proliferation fears date back to the dawn
of the nuclear age.14 Warnings of an inevitable deluge of proliferation were commonplace from the
1950s to the 1970s, resurfaced during the discussion of “rogue states” in the 1990s and became even
more ominous after 9/11.15 In 2004, for example, Mitchell Reiss warned that “in ways both fast and
slow, we may very soon be approaching a nuclear ‘tipping point,’ where many countries may decide to
acquire nuclear arsenals on short notice, thereby triggering a proliferation epidemic.” Given the
presumed fragility of the nuclear nonproliferation regime and the ready supply of nuclear expertise,
technology and material, Reiss argued, “a single new entrant into the nuclear club could catalyze similar
responses by others in the region, with the Middle East and Northeast Asia the most likely
candidates.”16 Nevertheless, predictions of inevitable proliferation cascades have historically proven
false (see The Proliferation Cascade Myth text box). In the six decades since atomic weapons were first
developed, nuclear restraint has proven far more common than nuclear proliferation, and cases of
reactive proliferation have been exceedingly rare. Moreover, most countries that have started down the
nuclear path have found the road more difficult than imagined, both technologically and
bureaucratically, leading the majority of nuclear-weapons aspirants to reverse course. Thus, despite
frequent warnings of an unstoppable “nuclear express,”17 William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova
astutely note that the “train to date has been slow to pick up steam, has made fewer stops than
anticipated, and usually has arrived much later than expected.”18 None of this means that additional
proliferation in response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions is inconceivable, but the empirical record does
suggest that regional chain reactions are not inevitable. Instead, only certain countries are candidates
for reactive proliferation. Determining the risk that any given country in the Middle East will proliferate
in response to Iranian nuclearization requires an assessment of the incentives and disincentives for
acquiring a nuclear deterrent, the technical and bureaucratic constraints and the available strategic
alternatives. Incentives and Disincentives to Proliferate Security considerations, status and reputational
concerns and the prospect of sanctions combine to shape the incentives and disincentives for states to
pursue nuclear weapons. Analysts predicting proliferation cascades tend to emphasize the incentives for
reactive proliferation while ignoring or downplaying the disincentives. Yet, as it turns out, instances of
nuclear proliferation (including reactive proliferation) have been so rare because going down this road
often risks insecurity, reputational damage and economic costs that outweigh the potential benefits.19
Security and regime survival are especially important motivations driving state decisions to proliferate.
All else being equal, if a state’s leadership believes that a nuclear deterrent is required to address an
acute security challenge, proliferation is more likely.20 Countries in conflict-prone neighborhoods facing
an “enduring rival”– especially countries with inferior conventional military capabilities vis-à-vis their
opponents or those that face an adversary that possesses or is seeking nuclear weapons – may be
particularly prone to seeking a nuclear deterrent to avert aggression.21 A recent quantitative study by
Philipp Bleek, for example, found that security threats, as measured by the frequency and intensity of
conventional militarized disputes, were highly correlated with decisions to launch nuclear weapons
programs and eventually acquire the bomb.22 The Proliferation Cascade Myth Despite repeated
warnings since the dawn of the nuclear age of an inevitable deluge of nuclear proliferation, such fears
have thus far proven largely unfounded. Historically, nuclear restraint is the rule, not the exception –
and the degree of restraint has actually increased over time. In the first two decades of the nuclear age,
five nuclear-weapons states emerged: the United States (1945), the Soviet Union (1949), the United
Kingdom (1952), France (1960) and China (1964). However, in the nearly 50 years since China developed
nuclear weapons, only four additional countries have entered (and remained in) the nuclear club: Israel
(allegedly in 1967), India (“peaceful” nuclear test in 1974, acquisition in late-1980s, test in 1998),
Pakistan (acquisition in late-1980s, test in 1998) and North Korea (test in 2006).23 This significant
slowdown in the pace of proliferation occurred despite the widespread dissemination of nuclear know-
how and the fact that the number of states with the technical and industrial capability to pursue nuclear
weapons programs has significantly increased over time.24 Moreover, in the past 20 years, several
states have either given up their nuclear weapons (South Africa and the Soviet successor states Belarus,
Kazakhstan and Ukraine) or ended their highly developed nuclear weapons programs (e.g., Argentina,
Brazil and Libya).25 Indeed, by one estimate, 37 countries have pursued nuclear programs with possible
weaponsrelated dimensions since 1945, yet the overwhelming number chose to abandon these
activities before they produced a bomb. Over time, the number of nuclear reversals has grown while
the number of states initiating programs with possible military dimensions has markedly declined.26
Furthermore – especially since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into force in 1970 –
reactive proliferation has been exceedingly rare. The NPT has near-universal membership among the
community of nations; only India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea currently stand outside the treaty.
Yet the actual and suspected acquisition of nuclear weapons by these outliers has not triggered
widespread reactive proliferation in their respective neighborhoods. Pakistan followed India into the
nuclear club, and the two have engaged in a vigorous arms race, but Pakistani nuclearization did not
spark additional South Asian states to acquire nuclear weapons. Similarly, the North Korean bomb did
not lead South Korea, Japan or other regional states to follow suit.27 In the Middle East, no country has
successfully built a nuclear weapon in the four decades since Israel allegedly built its first nuclear
weapons. Egypt took initial steps toward nuclearization in the 1950s and then expanded these efforts in
the late 1960s and 1970s in response to Israel’s presumed capabilities. However, Cairo then ratified the
NPT in 1981 and abandoned its program.28 Libya, Iraq and Iran all pursued nuclear weapons
capabilities, but only Iran’s program persists and none of these states initiated their efforts primarily as a
defensive response to Israel’s presumed arsenal.29 Sometime in the 2000s, Syria also appears to have
initiated nuclear activities with possible military dimensions, including construction of a covert nuclear
reactor near al-Kibar, likely enabled by North Korean assistance.30 (An Israeli airstrike destroyed the
facility in 2007.31) The motivations for Syria’s activities remain murky, but the nearly 40-year lag
between Israel’s alleged development of the bomb and Syria’s actions suggests that reactive
proliferation was not the most likely cause. Finally, even countries that start on the nuclear path have
found it very difficult, and exceedingly time consuming, to reach the end. Of the 10 countries that
launched nuclear weapons projects after 1970, only three (Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa)
succeeded; one (Iran) remains in progress, and the rest failed or were reversed.32 The successful
projects have also generally needed much more time than expected to finish. According to Jacques
Hymans, the average time required to complete a nuclear weapons program has increased from seven
years prior to 1970 to about 17 years after 1970, even as the hardware, knowledge and industrial base
required for proliferation has expanded to more and more countries.33 Yet throughout the nuclear age,
many states with potential security incentives to develop nuclear weapons have nevertheless abstained
from doing so.34 Moreover, contrary to common expectations, recent statistical research shows that
states with an enduring rival that possesses or is pursuing nuclear weapons are not more likely than
other states to launch nuclear weapons programs or go all the way to acquiring the bomb, although they
do seem more likely to explore nuclear weapons options.35 This suggests that a rival’s acquisition of
nuclear weapons does not inevitably drive proliferation decisions. One reason that reactive proliferation
is not an automatic response to a rival’s acquisition of nuclear arms is the fact that security calculations
can cut in both directions. Nuclear weapons might deter outside threats, but leaders have to weigh
these potential gains against the possibility that seeking nuclear weapons would make the country or
regime less secure by triggering a regional arms race or a preventive attack by outside powers. Countries
also have to consider the possibility that pursuing nuclear weapons will produce strains in strategic
relationships with key allies and security patrons. If a state’s leaders conclude that their overall security
would decrease by building a bomb, they are not likely to do so.36 Moreover, although security
considerations are often central, they are rarely sufficient to motivate states to develop nuclear
weapons. Scholars have noted the importance of other factors, most notably the perceived effects of
nuclear weapons on a country’s relative status and influence.37 Empirically, the most highly motivated
states seem to be those with leaders that simultaneously believe a nuclear deterrent is essential to
counter an existential threat and view nuclear weapons as crucial for maintaining or enhancing their
international status and influence. Leaders that see their country as naturally at odds with, and naturally
equal or superior to, a threatening external foe appear to be especially prone to pursuing nuclear
weapons.38 Thus, as Jacques Hymans argues, extreme levels of fear and pride often “combine to
produce a very strong tendency to reach for the bomb.”39 Yet here too, leaders contemplating
acquiring nuclear weapons have to balance the possible increase to their prestige and influence against
the normative and reputational costs associated with violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT). If a country’s leaders fully embrace the principles and norms embodied in the NPT, highly value
positive diplomatic relations with Western countries and see membership in the “community of nations”
as central to their national interests and identity, they are likely to worry that developing nuclear
weapons would damage (rather than bolster) their reputation and influence, and thus they will be less
likely to go for the bomb.40 In contrast, countries with regimes or ruling coalitions that embrace an
ideology that rejects the Western dominated international order and prioritizes national self-reliance
and autonomy from outside interference seem more inclined toward proliferation regardless of whether
they are signatories to the NPT.41 Most countries appear to fall in the former category, whereas only a
small number of “rogue” states fit the latter. According to one count, before the NPT went into effect,
more than 40 percent of states with the economic resources to pursue nuclear programs with potential
military applications did so, and very few renounced those programs. Since the inception of the
nonproliferation norm in 1970, however, only 15 percent of economically capable states have started
such programs, and nearly 70 percent of all states that had engaged in such activities gave them up.42
The prospect of being targeted with economic sanctions by powerful states is also likely to factor into
the decisions of would-be proliferators. Although sanctions alone proved insufficient to dissuade Iraq,
North Korea and (thus far) Iran from violating their nonproliferation obligations under the NPT, this does
not necessarily indicate that sanctions are irrelevant. A potential proliferator’s vulnerability to sanctions
must be considered. All else being equal, the more vulnerable a state’s economy is to external pressure,
the less likely it is to pursue nuclear weapons. A comparison of states in East Asia and the Middle East
that have pursued nuclear weapons with those that have not done so suggests that countries with
economies that are highly integrated into the international economic system – especially those
dominated by ruling coalitions that seek further integration – have historically been less inclined to
pursue nuclear weapons than those with inward-oriented economies and ruling coalitions.43 A state’s
vulnerability to sanctions matters, but so too does the leadership’s assessment regarding the probability
that outside powers would actually be willing to impose sanctions. Some would-be proliferators can be
easily sanctioned because their exclusion from international economic transactions creates few
downsides for sanctioning states. In other instances, however, a state may be so vital to outside powers
– economically or geopolitically – that it is unlikely to be sanctioned regardless of NPT violations.
Technical and Bureaucratic Constraints In addition to motivation to pursue the bomb, a state must have
the technical and bureaucratic wherewithal to do so. This capability is partly a function of wealth. Richer
and more industrialized states can develop nuclear weapons more easily than poorer and less industrial
ones can; although as Pakistan and North Korea demonstrate, cash-strapped states can sometimes
succeed in developing nuclear weapons if they are willing to make enormous sacrifices.44 A country’s
technical know-how and the sophistication of its civilian nuclear program also help determine the ease
and speed with which it can potentially pursue the bomb. The existence of uranium deposits and related
mining activity, civilian nuclear power plants, nuclear research reactors and laboratories and a large
cadre of scientists and engineers trained in relevant areas of chemistry and nuclear physics may give a
country some “latent” capability to eventually produce nuclear weapons. Mastery of the fuel-cycle – the
ability to enrich uranium or produce, separate and reprocess plutonium – is particularly important
because this is the essential pathway whereby states can indigenously produce the fissile material
required to make a nuclear explosive device.45 States must also possess the bureaucratic capacity and
managerial culture to successfully complete a nuclear weapons program. Hymans convincingly argues
that many recent would-be proliferators have weak state institutions that permit, or even encourage,
rulers to take a coercive, authoritarian management approach to their nuclear programs. This approach,
in turn, politicizes and ultimately undermines nuclear projects by gutting the autonomy and
professionalism of the very scientists, experts and organizations needed to successfully build the
bomb.46 Alternative Sources of Nuclear Deterrence Historically, the availability of credible security
guarantees by outside nuclear powers has provided a potential alternative means for acquiring a nuclear
deterrent without many of the risks and costs associated with developing an indigenous nuclear
weapons capability. As Bruno Tertrais argues, nearly all the states that developed nuclear weapons since
1949 either lacked a strong guarantee from a superpower (India, Pakistan and South Africa) or did not
consider the superpower’s protection to be credible (China, France, Israel and North Korea). Many other
countries known to have pursued nuclear weapons programs also lacked security guarantees (e.g.,
Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Switzerland and Yugoslavia) or thought they were
unreliable at the time they embarked on their programs (e.g., Taiwan). In contrast, several potential
proliferation candidates appear to have abstained from developing the bomb at least partly because of
formal or informal extended deterrence guarantees from the United States (e.g., Australia, Germany,
Japan, Norway, South Korea and Sweden).47 All told, a recent quantitative assessment by Bleek finds
that security assurances have empirically significantly reduced proliferation proclivity among recipient
countries.48 Therefore, if a country perceives that a security guarantee by the United States or another
nuclear power is both available and credible, it is less likely to pursue nuclear weapons in reaction to a
rival developing them. This option is likely to be particularly attractive to states that lack the indigenous
capability to develop nuclear weapons, as well as states that are primarily motivated to acquire a
nuclear deterrent by security factors (as opposed to status-related motivations) but are wary of the
negative consequences of proliferation.
Cp
 AT: Reform CP
(--) Counterplan doesn’t solve the Middle East advantage- still triggers an introduction
of troops that breaks the Obama doctrine
(--) Turn- the counterplan is the status quo- multiple regulatory regimes already exist-
the counterplan actually increases corruption- creates a façade of accountability that
only legitimizes corruption
Spink ’15 (Lauren Spink, Research Assistant at World Peace Foundation, International Policy Think
Tank “PMCs and Security Sector Reform: A Mismatch”, World Peace Foundation,
https://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2015/03/16/pmcs-and-security-sector-reform-a-mismatch/,
March 16, 2015)
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union dispersed money across the globe to support and build-up proxy militaries and militias, with little
priority placed on governance of those forces. With the end of the Cold War, the 1990s saw the emergence of a dialogue on security sector reform
(SSR), with an emphasis on governance, oversight, justice, and accountability. In a post 9-11 world, however, security and

counterterrorism concerns threaten to elevate “hard” security agendas above issues of transparency ,
civilian oversight of militaries, rule of law, and democratic governance. By reducing SSR to security
strengthening, the United States risks ignoring the local “political economy of the security sector,”
feeding corruption, creating militaries that serve international purposes but have little value
domestically, and misreading local dynamics in ways that can have dangerous implications. The
problem of siloed investment in security sectors can be deepened by the use of US private military
companies and contractors (PMCs) to train foreign militaries. Private military contractors have been employed for the purpose of
training state militaries in many settings. Sierra Leone hired Executive Outcomes to instruct and augment their military forces in the 1990s during their fight against
the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) while the Bosnian government hired MPRI to advise and train its military in the wake of the Dayton Peace Accords. For its part,
the United States has most notably employed PMCs in Somalia to avoid deploying troops in the country, and to train military and police contingents in Iraq and
Afghanistan. For the United States PMCs are attractive because they allow troop numbers to be quickly supplemented on short-notice, allow staff to be recruited
internationally and with specialized skills, and facilitate the deployment of forces with little political cost or debate in locations where it might be more controversial
to send United States troops (hence, their use in Somalia). However,
the use of PMCs entails substantial costs and risks. PMCs
may be more expensive than regular soldiers. There is a higher risk of corruption and questions of
reliability. Misconduct on the part of contractors risks undermining the credibility and goals of the US
missions. Despite attempts by the United States DoD and Congress to create new bodies for managing
and monitoring PMCs there is a lack of clarity around how the laws of war apply to contractors a nd on
how contractors should be sanctioned for misconduct . Most importantly in the case of employing
contractors to train foreign forces, there is little oversight of contractors in the field , and PMCs are often
poorly integrated into larger military and governance operations . A Congressional Research Service
(CRS) report on the Department of Defense’s Use of Contractors to Support Military Operations
concluded that in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors had been deployed hastily, “without significant
consideration of implications for foreign policy and without putting in place the necessary oversight.” The
Commission on Wartime Contracting determined that, “too often using contractors [was] the default mechanism, driven by considerations other than whether they
provide the best solution, and without consideration for the resources needed to manage them.” As the CRS report states, government officials and analysts may
feel that the military is “unable to effectively execute many operations, particularly those that are large-scale and long-term in nature, without extensive operational
contract support.” However, this does not mean that military contractors are the right partner for the United States to employ on operations to train and reform
security forces.
In Iraq, military training was contracted to Vinnell Corporation, a subdivision of Northrup
Grumman. Training suffered from serious delays and setbacks. After the first year of its contract, over
half of Vinnell Corporation’s first battalion had deserted and the other half could not perform basic
functions required for operations. Training of police forces in Afghanistan was plagued by a multiplicity of poorly coordinated stakeholders.
DynCorp International was tasked with training lower level policy officers, and attempted to do so in a
four to eight week tactical training program that proved largely ineffective, left police units with little
effective oversight, and also resulted in high rates of desertion. Beyond these individual examples of failure, there may
be an inherent mismatch in seeking to instill values of professionalism, civic service, and democratic
control of security sectors through private (and perhaps mercenary) contractors . In countries where SSR is
struggling to confront marketplaces that commodify violence, PMCs represent exactly that—the commoditization of military skills. Iraq and Afghanistan are not the

only examples of failure and mismanagement of SSR programming. In fact, there are relatively few examples of successful SSR
programs . In her analysis of why the Burundi-Netherlands Security Sector Development Programme has fared better than most, Nicole Ball credits the success
of the program to the weight placed on governance, extensive involvement of local actors, careful attention to the politics involved in security reforms, and the
Programme’s emphasis on gradually changing societal expectations of the security sector. The eight year long Programme has been marked by continual
engagement and dialogue between the governments of Burundi and the Netherlands beginning with an eight-month long dialogue to clearly define the
expectations and goals of the partnership. A separate governance pillar was created that institutionalized oversight of the security sector by representatives from
multiple government ministries and civil society organizations. Further, prolonged collaboration between government representatives has built a relationship of
trust between the two governments and their militaries. All
of the elements of the Burundi-Netherlands Security Sector
Development Programme that have contributed to its success are absent in United States programs
where police and military training are sub-contracted to private companies . PMCs pursue a narrow training agenda
focused on technical competency that fails to engage with the wider government and society, build trust between these bodies and the sponsoring foreign
government, or promote democratic governance of security forces. Moreover, such
siloed programs are unsustainable, as
demonstrated by the collapse of Iraqi forces following the departure of US troops, which has
precipitated the need for a new round of training. The short-sighted decision of the United States to
relegate the work of training foreign militaries and police forces to PMCs privileges a “security culture”
over a “rule of law culture” and privileges military security over human security.

Military engagement only magnifies the power of ISIS- creating an sovereign Middle
East is vital to actually creating stability
Alexander ’15 (John B. Alexander, Ph.D., Retired Senior Military Officer and Retired Los Alamos
National Laboratory, “Defeating ISIS Without American Ground Forces”,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-b-alexander-phd/defeating-isis-amercian-forces_b_6739138.html,
February 23, 2015)

While ISIS can, and must, be defeated as soon as possible, it is wrong to suggest that America should
lead the fight. In fact, it must be done without further U.S. ground units as even the threat of
intervention by American troops plays directly into the enemy's strategy . Psychologically attuned and
media savvy, ISIS employs tactics specifically designed to push Western emotional hot-buttons and are
used with the sole purpose to draw us further into the fray. Unfortunately, we continually play their
game thus exacerbating the situation and assisting in their sophisticated recruitment efforts. The first
step is to acknowledge that this is a religious war, albeit predominantly intra-Islamic in nature . It is most
important to note that it is those nations in the region that have the most to lose if ISIS continues its barbaric aggression. Thousands of Muslims
have been ruthlessly slaughtered while only a handful of foreigners have died, albeit in very high profile cases. Therefore, this war
must be fought by the Islamic nations of the Middle East. Strategically, there is both a long and short game, and it may
take intervention by strange and uncomfortable bedfellows to accomplish the mission. To understand the issues, a great description of the
threat is found in Graeme Wood's article "What ISIS Really Wants," published this week in The Atlantic. Two critical issues stand out. First, in
order to establish their caliphate, ISIS must hold territory. The second is their apocalyptic vision; one that anticipates near extermination of
their fighters before final victory. Rather than fearing death, as do most Westerners, ISIS combatants view it as a reward. While acknowledging
you cannot kill an idea, the requirement to hold land is the Achilles heel of ISIS. What can be done is to physically eliminate the ISIS occupation
of all lands they have subjugated. Air power alone is insufficient and waiting to retrain the Iraqi army requires too much time. As an alternative,
a coalition of ground forces from Islamic countries should be established to completely defeat all ISIS elements. Over the past decades the U.S.
and our European allies have spent billions of dollars equipping and training many of the military forces of the region. Egypt has over 460,000
active duty troops and the second largest armored force in the region. Traditionally oriented to the east, they currently are not under threat
from Israel and could send divisions west into Libya to overwhelm and destroy the ISIS threat in Northern Africa. From the south, Jordan has an
active duty force of over 90,000 with 12 tank battalions and 10 mechanized infantry battalions. They have already joined the air campaign and
are plagued by huge numbers of refugees. On the north, Turkey, with at least 43 combat regiments, has sat idly on the sidelines and watched
ISIS come to their borders. They too have been impacted by refugees fleeing ISIS. Iraq must be prepared to accept assistance from old enemies.
Iran, a predominantly Shia nation, has more than half a million troops including nearly 3,000 tanks and armored fighting vehicles that could
provide a formidable force. They have already engaged ISIS with air power and created some interesting and counter-intuitive command,
control and coordination problems. The UAE, while smaller, has contributed air power. They could send some of their armored brigades as well.
Then too there is Saudi Arabia with an armored force of well over 6,000 fighting vehicles. Although Sunni, the Saudi Arabian rulers are viewed
as apostates by ISIS and thus it poses a direct threat to them. Acknowledging the enormity and complexity of the existing geopolitical
circumstances in that volatile area, the ISIS threat is sufficiently grave to each and every participant that accommodations could be worked out.
It is not necessary for all of the nations to participate. However, they are all at risk and have domestic stability issues. Destroying this incipient
nominal caliphate will aid their internal equilibrium. Recognizing there are disaffected elements in most countries in the Middle East, ISIS is only
a real danger as long as they have the perceived legitimacy that comes with holding territory. With that coveted space eliminated, potential
recruits have no place to go and can be dealt with individually which is far less dangerous than engaging a modestly cohesive body that ISIS now
provides. Another important step should be for the U.S., and every other Western country, to terminate the passports of anyone who has
joined ISIS. The idea that we allow citizens to actively engage in terrorism or war with ISIS and then return home is specious. We probably
cannot stop all potential recruits from going, but we can make it a one-way trip. The U.S. should not lead this inevitable
conflict and we must resist the urge to do so. With unparalleled intelligence capabilities we can provide an Islamic coalition
with a vastly enhanced advantage. Additional logistical support can be afforded. Our domestic efforts should be focused on countering ISIS
recruitment and eliminating any residual threats that may have been imported already. The
bottom line is we need to
transition the fight to an Islamic military coalition and have no American combat units on the ground.

ISIS thrives on money from corruption associated with local criminals- eliminating a
large source of funding helps pull the rug out from under ISIS – and ending private
contracting eliminates the middle-men who help keep ISIS financed through other
means
Giovanni et al. ’14 (Janine Di Giovanni (Award-winning author and journalist Janine di Giovanni has
been covering global conflict since the 1980s, and is considered one of Europe's most respected
journalists. Her new book, Ghosts by Daylight, has been called by Sebastian Junger "a profound and
beautiful book about the two great human struggles: Love and War," and "a great and important
achievement" by Elizabeth Gilbert), Leah Mcgrath Goodman (An award-winning investigative journalist,
author and speaker, Leah McGrath Goodman writes about money, politics and institutional cultures of
corruption from New York and London. She has written for CNN/Fortune, Bloomberg, Marie Claire,
Forbes, The Financial Times, Barron's, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, where she was
a special writer, editor and foreign correspondent. Most recently, she was writer-at-large for
Institutional Investor and a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. Goodman is a member of the London Speaker Bureau and Middle East Speakers
Bureau), and Damien Sharkov, “How Does ISIS Fund Its Reign of Terror?”,
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/14/how-does-isis-fund-its-reign-terror-282607.html, November 6,
2014)
The Islamic State’s staggering successes come at a cost. After all, it’s not cheap to wage war and manage territorial conquests whose population
is now roughly the size of Austria’s. So how can ISIS, cut off from the rest of the world by financial and trade sanctions, and under daily aerial
and land bombardment by some of the richest countries in the world, afford to maintain a well-armed military and pay other bills? Interviews
with Iraqi, Kurdish, European, Syrian and American government officials, analysts and intelligence agents sketch a portrait of ISIS’s robust,
sprawling, and efficient financial operation. The terrorist group relies on a relatively complex system to manage its
far-reaching networks. Its currencies of choice—cash, crude oil and contraband—allow it to operate outside of legitimate banking
channels. Turkey’s southern corridor, Iraq’s northwestern corridor and Syria’s northeastern corridor are key weak spots, well away from the
prying eyes of outside investigators. Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week ISIS’s financial needs go beyond underwriting terror. “It’s
a
huge financial package to support 8 million people— which is now the size of the population living in
territories under ISIS control,” says Luay al-Khatteeb, visiting fellow of the Doha Brookings Center and
director of the Iraq Energy Institute in Baghdad . “ISIS is also supporting tens of thousands of militants who have been at war
for months, with new recruits coming in every day. Yet it keeps all these people answerable to them, seems to have incredible cross-border
mobility and shows no signs right now of running out of money or fuel.” On October 23, Washington’s point person in the fight against ISIS—
the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen—acknowledged in a speech at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington that “[ISIS] has amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace
and its revenue sources have a different composition from those of many other terrorist organizations.”
ISIS doesn’t “depend principally on moving money across international borders,” he said, but “ obtains
the vast majority of its revenues from local criminal and terrorist activities.” This presents a formidable obstacle
for the U.S. Treasury, which is accustomed to pursuing its enemies by pressuring established banks to expose their criminal clients. ISIS’s use
of middlemen across the Middle East to smuggle cash in and out of its territory, in addition to
employing decades-old smugglers’ routes, makes the group especially hard to track. The reach of ISIS’s financial
portfolio is broad and lucrative. Highly localized and multiple revenue streams feed the terrorist
organization’s coffers—generating up to $6 million a day , according to Masrour Barzani, head of Kurdish Intelligence and
the Kurdistan Regional Security Council. Suitcases Full of Cash Secret smuggling routes are often passed on by families from generation to
generation, and they were well-secured during the lean years of economic sanctions imposed by the West during Saddam Hussein’s
dictatorship in Iraq. Border guards were in on the baksheesh system entrenched in the culture. They
would turn a blind eye when
cash in suitcases or trucks containing oil or goods passed through their checkpoints. Many smugglers
who traded Saddam’s oil across Iraq’s borders to Kuwait, Iran and Turkey are now working the same
routes between ISIS-held Iraq and the outside world. At its heart, the ISIS money machine runs on the
fear—and greed—of the millions of people it controls . It also manifests itself in a wide range of financial
activities, many of them outsourced via middlemen and driven by hordes of self-interested parties. The
U.S. Treasury has declined to estimate the extent of ISIS’s total assets and revenue streams, but Cohen has called it “the best-funded terrorist
organization” the U.S. has “ever confronted.”

And- Iraq re-intervention only risk creating a larger ISIS- US intervention is on a vicious
cycle that only restraint can solve
Bacevich ’14 (Andrew J. Bacevich, the George McGovern fellow at Columbia University’s School of
International and Public Affairs, is writing a history of U. S. military involvement in the Greater Middle
East, “Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we’ll still lose the bigger war”,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-if-we-defeat-the-islamic-state-well-still-lose-the-
bigger-war/2014/10/03/e8c0585e-4353-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions,
October 3, 2014)

As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extend into Syria, Iraq
War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th
country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed.
And that’s just since 1980. Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq
(1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo
(1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew. With our 14th front barely opened, the Pentagon foresees a campaign
likely to last for years. Yet even at this early date, this much already seems clear: Even
if we win, we lose. Defeating the
Islamic State would only commit the United States more deeply to a decades-old enterprise that has
proved costly and counterproductive. Back in 1980, President Jimmy Carter touched things off when he announced that the
United States would use force to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into the wrong hands. In effect, with the post-Ottoman order created by
European imperialists — chiefly the British — after World War I apparently at risk, the United States made a fateful decision: It shouldered
responsibility for preventing that order from disintegrating further. Britain’s withdrawal from “east of Suez,” along with the revolution in Iran
and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, prompted Washington to insert itself into a region in which it previously avoided serious military
involvement. Advertisement At the time, oil — not freedom, democracy or human rights — defined the principal American interest, and
stability was the goal. Military power offered the means by which the United States hoped to attain that goal. Armed might would keep a lid on
things. The pot might simmer, but it wouldn’t boil over. In
practice, however, whether putting boots on the ground or
relying on missiles from above, subsequent U.S. efforts to promote stability have tended to produce
just the opposite . Part of the problem is that American policymakers have repeatedly given in to the
temptation to unleash a bit of near-term chaos, betting that longer-term order will emerge on the other
end. Back in Vietnam, this was known as burning down the village to save it. In the Greater Middle East, it has meant dismantling a country
with the aim of erecting something more preferable — “regime change” as a prelude to “nation building.” Unfortunately, the United States has
proved considerably more adept at the former than the latter. Mostly, coercive
regime change has produced power
vacuums. Iraq offers a glaring example. Although studiously ignored by Washington, post-Gaddafi Libya
offers a second. And unless the gods are in an exceptionally generous mood, Afghanistan will probably
become a third whenever U.S. and NATO combat troops finally depart. In place of governing arrangements that
Washington judged objectionable, the United States has found itself coping with the absence of any effective governments whatsoever.
Instead of curbing bad behavior, spanking induced all sorts of pathologies. Advertisement By inadvertently
sowing instability, the United States has played directly into the hands of anti-Western radical
Islamists intent on supplanting the European-imposed post-Ottoman order with something more to
their liking. This is the so-called caliphate that Osama bin Laden yearned to create and that now exists in
embryonic form in the portions of Iraq and Syria that Islamic State radicals control. Want to measure what
America’s war for the Middle East has accomplished through its first 13 iterations? The Islamic State has to rank prominently on any list of
achievements. If Iraq possessed minimally effective security forces, Islamic State militants wouldn’t have a chance. But the Iraqi army we
created won’t fight, in considerable measure because the Iraqi government we created doesn’t govern. Kurdish fighters defending Kobane warn
of a likely massacre by Islamic State insurgents, while Turkey says it will do whatever it can to prevent the Syrian border town from falling.
(Reuters) President Obama did not initiate the long and varied sequence of military actions that has produced this situation. Yet he finds himself
caught in a dilemma. To give the Islamic State a free hand is to allow proponents of the caliphate to exploit the instability that U.S. efforts, some
involving Obama himself, have fostered. But to make Syria the latest free-fire zone in America’s never-ending Middle East misadventure will
almost surely prolong and exacerbate the agonies that country is experiencing, with little ability to predict what consequences will ensue. Even
if U.S. and allied forces succeed in routing this militant group, there is little reason to expect that the results for Syrians will be pretty — or that
the prospects of regional harmony will improve. Suppress
the symptoms, and the disease simply manifests itself in
other ways. There is always another Islamic State waiting in the wings. Obama’s bet — the same bet
made by each of his predecessors, going back to Carter — is that the skillful application of U.S. military
might can somehow provide a way out of this dilemma. They were wrong, and so is he. We may be grateful
that Obama has learned from his predecessor that invading and occupying countries in this region of the world just doesn’t work. The lesson he
will bequeath to his successor is that drone strikes and commando raids don’t solve the problem, either. Advertisement We must hope for
victory over the Islamic State. But even if achieved, that victory will not redeem but merely prolong a decades-long military undertaking that
was flawed from the outset. When the 14th campaign runs its course, the 15th will no doubt be waiting, perhaps in Jordan or in a return visit to
some unfinished battleground such as Libya or Somalia or Yemen. Yet even as the United States persists in its determination to pacify the
Greater Middle East, the
final verdict is already in. U.S. military power has never offered an appropriate
response to whatever ails the Islamic world. We’ve committed our troops to a fool’s errand . And worse, the
errand is also proving unnecessary. With abundant North American energy reserves now accessible — all that shale oil and fracked gas — we
don’t need the Persian Gulf oil that ostensibly made our post-1980 military exertions imperative. For whatever reasons, Washington’s national
security elites seem oblivious to the implications these resources have for policy in the Middle East. No
matter how long it lasts,
America’s war for the Greater Middle East will end in failure. And when it does, Americans will discover
that it was also superfluous.

PMC’s destroy separation of powers over warpower- largest internal link into
destroying checks on the executive
Michaels ‘4 – Law Professor @ UCLA and Former Clerk for Judge Calabresi of the US Court of Appeals
2nd Circuit, JD from Yale Law (Jon, “ARTICLE: BEYOND ACCOUNTABILITY: THE CONSTITUTIONAL,
DEMOCRATIC, AND STRATEGIC PROBLEMS WITH PRIVATIZING WAR,” Washington University Law
Quarterly, Fall 2004, 82 Wash. U. L. Q. 1001, lexis)
Vesting warmaking decisions—to authorize war, fund war, and supply and regulate the personnel
involved in war—in Congress advanced, as I have intimated above, the two chief aims of the American
experiment in constitutional democracy. The United States would be a limited government: its
Commander-in-Chief would be constrained by sets of laws, deliberative processes, and by other, equally
ambitious leaders in coordinate branches.170 And the United States would also be a great democracy:
its decisions would reflect the will of the citizenry.171 Hence, Congress as the most direct
representatives of the People, would necessarily be involved in military policy, simultaneously
promoting the virtues of limited government by checking the perceived natural inclinations of the strong
Executive172 and upholding the ideals of democracy by remaining the true servants of the People. Moreover, decisions by the president to
wage war could not be undertaken without first benefiting from the deliberative insights of a legislative assembly and without concomitantly
securing the tacit blessings and consent of the citizenry.173 Military
privatization threatens this framework of coordinate
decisionmaking. The potential to outsource combat roles necessarily carries with it opportunities for the
Executive to wield powers unimaginable were it limited to the use of regular, U.S. troops. By shifting
responsibilities away from America’s armed forces and delegating them to private contractors, the
president can circumvent constitutional obligations to share warmaking authority with Congress.
Privatization, therefore, may destabilize the delicate balance of powersharing built into what Dean Harold Koh
calls the National Security Constitution,174 by weakening a critical check on presidential power—a failure of
constitutional governance—and also by engendering a level of distrust and sense of disenfranchisement
among the population writ large—a failure of democratic legitimacy. In the process, the People lose effective control
over the helm of national security policy; and, institutionally speaking, once lost, such control will take time and considerable effort for
Congress to regain.

That ensures nuclear war

Forrester ‘89 – Professor of Law @ University of California (Ray, The George Washington Law Review
57 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1636 “Presidential Wars in the Nuclear Age: An Unresolved Problem”)

*gender language edited

Abramson, Wherever President Goes, the Nuclear War 'Football' is Beside Him, Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1981, at 10, col. 1 (copyright, 1981, Los Angeles Times.
Reprinted by permission). On the basis of this report, the startling fact is that one
human alone has the ability to start a nuclear war .
A basic theory--if not the basic theory of our Constitution--is that concentration of power in any one
person, or one group, is dangerous to humanity. The Constitution, therefore, contains a strong system of
checks and balances, starting with the separation of powers between the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The
message is that no one of them is safe with unchecked power. Yet, in what is probably the most dangerous governmental power ever possessed, we find the
potential for world destruction lodged in the discretion of one person. As a result of public indignation aroused by the Vietnam disaster, in which tens of thousands
lost their lives in military actions initiated by a succession of Presidents, Congress in 1973 adopted, despite presidential veto, the War Powers Resolution. Congress
finally asserted its checking and balancing duties in relation to the making of presidential wars. Congress declared in section 2(a) that its purpose was to fulfill the
intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the
introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,
and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations. The law also stated in section 3 that [t]he President in every possible instance shall
consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated.
. . . Other limitations not essential to this discussion are also provided. The intent of the law is clear. Congress undertook to check the President, at least by prior
consultation, in any executive action that might lead to hostilities and war. [*1638] President Nixon, who initially vetoed the resolution, claimed that it was an
unconstitutional restriction on his powers as Executive and Commander in Chief of the military. His successors have taken a similar view. Even so, some of them
have at times complied with the law by prior consultation with representatives of Congress, but obedience to the law has been uncertain and a subject of continuing
controversy between Congress and the President. Ordinarily, the issue of the constitutionality of a law would be decided by the Supreme Court. But, despite a
series of cases in which such a decision has been sought, the Supreme Court has refused to settle the controversy. The usual ground for such a refusal is that a
"political question" is involved. The rule is well established that the federal judiciary will decide only "justiciable" controversies. "Political questions" are not
"justiciable." However, the standards established by the Supreme Court in 1962 in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, to determine the distinction between "justiciable
controversies" and "political questions" are far from clear. One writer observed that the term "political question" [a]pplies to all those matters of which the court,
at a given time, will be of the opinion that it is impolitic or inexpedient to take jurisdiction. Sometimes this idea of inexpediency will result from the fear of the
vastness of the consequences that a decision on the merits might entail. Finkelstein, Judicial Self-Limitation, 37 HARV. L. REV. 338, 344 (1924)(footnote omitted). It
is difficult to defend the Court's refusal to assume the responsibility of decisionmaking on this most critical issue. The Court has been fearless in deciding other
issues of "vast consequences" in many historic disputes, some involving executive war power. It is to be hoped that the Justices will finally do their duty here. But in
the meantime the spectre of single-minded power persists, fraught with all of the frailties of human nature that each human possesses, including the President.
World history is filled with tragic examples. Even if the Court assumed its responsibility to tell us whether the Constitution gives Congress the necessary power to
check the President, the War Powers Resolution itself is unclear. Does the Resolution require the President to consult with Congress before launching a nuclear
attack? It has been asserted that "introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities" refers only to military personnel and does not include the launching of
nuclear missiles alone. In support of this interpretation, it has been argued that Congress was concerned about the human losses in Vietnam and in other
presidential wars, rather than about the weaponry. Congress, of course, can amend the Resolution to state explicitly that "the introduction of Armed Forces"
includes missiles as well as personnel. However, the President could continue to act without prior consultation by renewing the claim first made by President
[*1639] Nixon that the Resolution is an unconstitutional invasion of the executive power. Therefore, the real solution, in the absence of a Supreme Court decision,
would appear to be a constitutional amendment. All must obey a clear rule in the Constitution. The adoption of an amendment is very difficult. Wisely, Article V
requires that an amendment may be proposed only by the vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress or by the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the
states, and the proposal must be ratified by the legislatures or conventions of three-fourths of the states. Despite the difficulty, the Constitution has been amended
twenty-six times. Amendment can be done when a problem is so important that it arouses the attention and concern of a preponderant majority of the American
people. But the people must be made aware of the problem. It is hardly necessary to belabor the relative importance of the control of nuclear warfare. A
constitutional amendment may be, indeed, the appropriate method. But the most difficult issue remains. What should the amendment provide? How can the
problem be solved specifically? The Constitution in section 8 of Article I stipulates that "[t]he Congress shall have power . . . To declare War. . . ." The idea seems to
be that only these many representatives of the people, reflecting the public will, should possess the power to commit the lives and the fortunes of the nation to
warfare. This approach makes much more sense in a democratic republic than entrusting the decision to one person, even though he may be designated the
"Commander in Chief" of the military forces. His power is to command the war after the people, through their representatives, have made the basic choice to
There is a recurring relevation of a paranoia of power throughout human
submit themselves and their children to war.

history that has impelled one leader after another to draw their people into wars which, in hindsight,
were foolish, unnecessary, and, in some instances, downright insane. Whatever may be the psychological influences that drive the single
decisionmaker to these irrational commitments of the lives and fortunes of others, the fact remains that the behavior is a predictable one in

any government that does not provide an effective check and balance against uncontrolled power in the
hands of one human. We, naturally, like to think that our leaders are above such irrational behavior.
Eventually, however, human nature, with all its weakness, asserts itself whatever the setting. At least that is the
evidence that experience and history give us, even in our own relatively benign society, where the Executive is subject to the rule of law. [*1640] Vietnam and
other more recent engagements show that it can happen and has happened here. But the "nuclear football"--the ominous "black bag" --remains in the sole
possession of the
President[‘s]. And, most important, his decision to launch a nuclear missile would be , in
fact if not in law, a declaration of nuclear war, one which the nation and, indeed, humanity in general,
probably would be unable to survive.
Case
 CP
(--) The counterplan is the equivalent of the fox guarding the hen house- reform never
fixes the root cause of corruption
Chatterjee ’10 (Pratap, Senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress, “The fog of war spending
Rogue contractors profiteer from US military expenditure with impunity because officials lack the power
to punish miscreants”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/aug/17/defense-
contractors-us-military, August 17, 2010)
Spending on private security contractors like Blackwater is estimated to be worth as much as $10bn since 2001. Photograph: Gervasio
Sanchez/AP US Defence Secretary Robert Gates announced last week that he wants to slash $100bn from the US military budget over the next
five years. One top priority: cutting spending on private contractors. "I'm not satisfied with the progress made to reduce our over-reliance on
One of the biggest problems that Gates faces is that a lot of the oversight of private
contractors," Gates said.
contractors is done by other private contractors – a little like having the fox guard the hen house. Last
April, Gates announced plans to offer 11,000 of these "acquisition professionals" federal jobs, to save
money. One year later, he conceded that approach wasn't sufficient . "The problem with contractors is – and what
we've learned over the past year – you really don't get at contractors by cutting people," Gates said at a press conference. "So the only way,
we've decided, that you get at the contractor base is to cut the dollars." That's not the only way. Another way would be to strengthen the rules
to punish bad contractors who indulge in waste, fraud and abuse. And a good place to start would be to clean up the military and
reconstruction contracting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over $100bn in contracts have been handed out since the events of 11 September 2001.
KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton, has received over $35bn alone to build bases, cook food and haul fuel. The spending on private
security contractors like Blackwater is estimated by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting to be worth as much as $10bn. Agility,
a Kuwaiti company, has received $8.5bn-worth of food supplies to troops in Iraq. Last November, the company was indicted on criminal charges
for hundreds of millions of dollars in alleged mark-ups following a grand jury investigation. Yet, last week, the company won a new six-month
contract valid till December 2010. Why? Because the winning bid to take over the food supply business by Anham, another contractor, has
been blocked by protests from the losing bidders. (Delays of a year or more because of bid protests are commonplace.) In another revelation
last week, a lawsuit filed by Derish M Wolff, the chairman of the Louis Berger Group, a New Jersey company which has received $2bn in
reconstruction contracts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Afghanistan, disclosed that the company had
been under investigation by the US Department of Justice for three years over allegations of fraud. Wolff has sued the government to allow
him to cash in the value of his stock (27% of the company). The agency has blocked any payment in case the fraud allegations are proven and
the company goes bankrupt. The real question is, if the company has been under scrutiny for three years, why does the government continue
to give it contracts? In January 2008, the company was given a $162m contract in Iraq for "Expanding Economic Opportunity". (And whose
economic opportunity might that be?!) In this context, it becomes unsurprising that a roadbuilding project, which Louis Berger estimated at
Contractors know they can hire lawyers to tie up the
$87m in May 2007, had ballooned to $163.8m in April 2009?
government contracting system and get away with charging exorbitant rates because the government
has no other choice in a war zone. The only way to make the contractors accountable is to punish the
bad players by excluding them from winning new contracts. One key problem is that contracting officers
don't have official access to data about a company's previous sins.
DA
 1ar Extensions: Relations Resilient
(--) Extend our Miller evidence: relations with Israel are resilient—we give them
billions in security assistance and have had their back in every conflict—the
relationship won’t go down the drain.
(--) Political support for Israel in Congress will keep ties close:
Aaron David Miller, 5/26/2015 (staff writer, “The U.S.-Israeli Relationship Is Fraying, but Won't Fail,”
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2015/05/26/obama_netanyahu_the_us-
israeli_relationship_is_fraying_111215.html, Accessed 9/20/2015, rwg)

The meltdown in the Middle East - and especially the behavior of actors such as ISIS, al Qaeda, Iran, and even Egypt - will likely
continue to underscore the need for stable partners in the region who share American values. And right
now, only Israel can check both boxes. Political support for Israel in Congress and among the general public will
also serve to keep ties close, though many Democrats will increasingly react negatively to Israeli settlement policy, while Republicans
will not.

(--) Personal relationships, not policy, is the cause for any decline in relations:
Marcus 6-19-15 [Jonathan, diplomatic correspondent for BBC, “Have Israel-US relations reached a new
low?” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-33181782]

These are turbulent times for the relationship between Israel and its closest ally, the US. In part, it is due to the
lack of chemistry between the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US President, Barack Obama. But there are issues of
substance too. Their difficult relationship was hardly improved by Mr Netanyahu's decision, during Israel's recent general election campaign, to accept an invitation
from the Republican Party leadership to give a joint address to Congress. The Israeli prime minister used this as an opportunity to lobby against the nuclear deal that
Mr Obama is seeking to negotiate with Tehran. Then there is also the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Earlier this month, President
Obama gave a revealing interview to Israel's Channel 2 television station. It was an opportunity to speak directly to the Israeli public; to try to convince them of his
fundamental support for the Jewish state. But he injected a warning note too. He argued that if the current "status-quo" between Israel and the Palestinians were
not resolved, then demographics and the frustration of the Palestinians would force Israel into a choice "about the nature of the Israeli state and its character".
There was a risk, he said, of Israel losing its "essential values". And he went further, warning that there
could be more immediate diplomatic
consequences too. If there were no progress towards peace, Mr Obama said, there would be an impact upon "how we approach defending Israel on the
international stage round the Palestinian issue". He then followed up with strong hints that the US might not necessarily obstruct any European effort to bring a
resolution on the Palestinian problem to the UN Security Council. Rift 'created' So how bad have relations between the two allies become? Aaron David Miller, a
former US Middle East negotiator, now at the Wilson Centre in Washington DC, told me that Mr Netanyahu's speech to Congress had "created a rift and opened up
the field for a degree of criticism of Israel that, frankly, I have not witnessed before in 20-plus years of working for half a dozen secretaries of state". He added: "I
have never seen it play out the way it has, and that I think is quite damaging." JJ Goldberg, a senior columnist with the Forward and one of the most astute
commentators on issues relating to Israel and the US Jewish Community, told me: "It is hard to overstate the depth of suspicion toward the Obama administration
within Israeli government circles and among Israel's closest allies in the US. "The suspicion
and hostility have had an impact over time,
leaving the administration and its supporters disappointed, frustrated and insulted at the level of contempt directed at them from
Israel." However, he added: "It doesn't seem to have shaken the underlying feelings of sympathy among governing and leadership circles here toward Israel as a
nation and a symbol." This is what Prof Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, at Brandeis University, calls the "schizophrenia" in US
policy towards Israel, and he explains it this way. He told me: "The continued and significant military support for Israel, despite sharp disagreements between the
two principals, results from the fact that while President Obama's understanding and interpretation of Israel's best interests differs sharply from Netanyahu's, the
president is genuinely committed to Israel security and survival, and, in that, he reflects the broader support for Israel in American public opinion, in key
constituencies, and in the US Congress." Different directions So what went wrong? Mr Goldberg said: "The most important fact is that after eight years of George W
Bush, with his deeply conservative and essentially Manichaean outlook - an outlook that comforts Israelis' sense of isolation - the two countries
simultaneously changed governments in radically different directions .
 T
(--) PMC’s work directly for the US government:
CRS ‘8 (Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status and Other Issues, August 25,
[http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf], p. CRS-4)

Some 20 different PMCs,

employing 10,000 people, are working directly for the U.S. government, primarily
for DOD and the Department of State. These security contractors are providing an array of armed and
unarmed security services, including static security, personal security details, intelligence analysis, and operational coordination. The
United States also has an indirect contractual relationship with many PMCs. For example, reconstruction contractors working for the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) have in turn subcontracted with PMCs to acquire security services.

(--) We meet- Pentagon agrees—contractors are part of the force

Glanz ’9 (James Glanz, Writer for the New York Times, “Contractors Outnumber U.S. Troops in
Afghanistan,” September 2nd 2009)

As of March this year, contractors

made up 57 percent of the Pentagon's force in  Afghanistan, and if the figure
is averaged over the past two years, it is 65 percent, according to the report by the Congressional
Research Service. The contractors -- many of them Afghans -- handle a variety of jobs, including cooking for the troops, serving as
interpreters and even providing security, the report says. The report says the reliance on contractors has grown steadily, with just a small
percentage of contractors serving the Pentagon in World War I, but then growing to nearly a third of the total force in the Korean War and
about half in the Balkans and Iraq. The change, the report says, has gradually forced the American military to adapt to a far less regimented
and, in many ways, less accountable force. The growing dependence on contractors is partly because the military has lost some of its logistics
and support capacity, especially since the end of the cold war, according to the report. Some of the contractors have skills in critical areas like
languages and digital technologies that the military needs.

DOD agrees
Robichaud 7 (Carl, World Politics Review, http://www.centuryfoundation.org/list.asp?
type=NC&pubid=1721, 10/31/2007)

The Defense Department says the U.S. military employs 1,000 security contractors, and the State
Department and the government of Afghanistan also hire PMCs. Estimates on the number of private
security personnel in Afghanistan exceed 10,000 for registered groups alone. This number is small in
absolute terms when compared with the number of PMCs in Iraq, but it comprises a substantial military
presence for Afghanistan. If this figure is accurate, private security personnel outnumber the troop contribution of every nation but
the United States, and are almost a third the size of the Afghan National Army (estimated at around 35,000).

Contractors are agents for the government--

Ausness ‘86 – Professor of Law, University of Kentucky (RICHARD, Fall, “Surrogate Immunity: The
Government Contract Defense and Products Liability.”, 47 Ohio St. L.J. 985, Lexis Law, dheidt)

The United States Supreme Court affirmed the circuit court's ruling. The Court reasoned that the immunity that
protected officers and agents of the federal government acting within the scope of their authority should be extended to private contractors
who also acted on the government's behalf. n71 According to the Court: ". . . [I]t is clear that if this authority to carry out the project was validly
conferred, that is, if what was done was within the constitutional power of Congress, there is no liability on the part of the contractor for
executing its will." n72 The court also observed that the landowner could have sought compensation from the government for his injury in the
court of claims. n73 Apparently, it thought that the plaintiff had attempted to circumvent the accepted statutory procedure by suing the
contractor instead of the government. n74 Over the years, courts have advanced various theories to explain the government contract doctrine.
For example, the Court in Yearsley suggested that the
contractor partakes of the government's immunity because it
has acted as an agent of the government. In fact, some courts have limited the government contract defense to situations
where there is an actual agency relationship between the contractor and the government. n75

Contractors bolster the US presence—this proves we’re topical and they have ground:
Kate Brannen, 8/4/2015 (“Getting Rich off the ISIS War,” http://readersupportednews.org/news-
section2/318-66/31657-getting-rich-off-the-isis-war, Accessed 9/9/2015, rwg)

“Contractors thicken the U.S. presence ,” Helmick said. “If soldiers are sent there to advise and train, they
don’t have to send people to cook their food, wash their clothes or secure themselves. Contractors can
do that. We allow the U.S. or coalition military to focus on their core competency .”