Bernd Debusmann

The killing of a black teenager by a self-appointed vigilante in Florida has trained a spotlight on gun laws reminiscent of the Wild West in 24 U.S. states. Despite widespread outrage over the Florida case, gun-friendly senators in Washington want to make it easier to extend those laws to most of the country.

That would set the United States, where there are more firearms in private hands than in any other country, even farther apart from the rest of the industrialized world as far as guns are concerned. And it would mark yet another success for the National Rifle Association (NRA) in its long campaign against gun controls.

Before getting into the details of the planned legislation, a brief recapitulation of what happened in the Orlandosuburb of Sanford on February 26: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student, walked to a family member’s home at night when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” spotted him, deemed the teenager suspicious, pursued him and shot him dead with a 9 mm pistol after what he told police was an altercation that made him fear for his life.

Police questioned Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, accepted his account of the incident, and let him go, following the letter or a 2005 Florida state law that allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” they face harm. Unlike previous such cases, the teenager’s killing caught national attention, largely because social media served as a vehicle to carry charges of racism and unequal justice to a huge audience.

On March 8, Martin’s parents posted a “petition to prosecute the killer of our son” on the website change.org.

By March 23, after thousands of demonstrators in New York, Miami and Sanford demanded Zimmerman’s arrest, the parents’ petition had gathered close to 1.5 million signatures. Sanford’s police chief, Bill Lee, stepped down “temporarily” to let tempers cool, as he put it. In Washington, the Congressional Black Caucus, an informal group of African-American legislators, termed the teenager’s death a “hate crime.”

One might be tempted to think that the wave of indignation, steadily gathering momentum since February 26, might have tempered the enthusiasm of gun-loving Washington legislators for expanding controversial laws. But one would be wrong. And one would underestimate the clout of the NRA, considered one of the three most influential lobbies in the United States.

On March 13, less than two weeks after Trayvon Martin’s death, a Democratic senator from gun-friendly Alaska, Mark Begich, introduced the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2012.” Just another week later, SenatorJohn Thune from South Dakota introduced a bill “to allow reciprocity for the carrying of certain concealed firearms.” The differences between the two are minor and due to an arcane dispute between the NRA and the smaller and more radical Gun Owners of America. The NRA has asked its members to contact their senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Begich bill.

HAVE GUN, CAN TRAVEL

Both bills would force all states that issue permits to carry concealed weapons to recognize permits obtained elsewhere. States such as California and New York that have stringent regulations on who can carry a gun would be obliged to allow people with permits obtained from states with lax gun laws, such as Florida. Gun control advocates say that it is laws allowing citizens to carry loaded handguns in public that form the basis of additional legislation, Such as the Florida Stand Your Ground law that barred police from arresting Zimmerman.

As Alcee Hastings, a Democratic congressman from Florida put it: “This misguided law does not make our streets safer, rather it turns our streets into a showdown at the OK Corral. But this is not the Wild West. We are supposed to be a civilized society. Let Trayvon’s death not be for naught. Let us honor his life by righting this wrong.” Hastings, who is African American, called for a repeal of the law.

That is not likely to happen, and less so in an election year. President Barack Obama has stayed out of the debate on gun laws, which flares every time there is a headline-making shooting, and with few exceptions, lawmakers seek the gun lobby’s favor and the resulting votes. This is the chief reason why advocates of tighter gun regulations have had little success over the past two decades.

Another reason, according to Kristen Rand of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, is that most Americans are unaware of the number of people killed in incidents similar to the shooting of Trayvor Martin. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) does not compile statistics on such cases and most of them are never known outside the place where they happened.

“The average person has no idea of the scale of the problem,” said Rand. “If they had, things might be different.”

PHOTO: Demonstrators gather to call for justice in the murder of Trayvon Martin at Leimert Park in Los Angeles, March 22, 2012. Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force on Thursday to investigate the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin as calls grew for charges to be filed against the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him. Also, the state prosecutor who had been handling the investigation will step aside from the probe, Scott said in a statement.  REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn

The prospect of President Barack Obama winning another four-year term in November is swelling the ranks of anti-Muslim activists and groups on the extremist fringe of American society. Their growth has accelerated every year since Obama took office in 2009.

So says a new report by a civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, that has tracked extremist groups for the past three decades and found that last year alone, the number of anti-Muslim groups tripled, from 10 to 30.

Between 2008 and the end of 2011, according to the center, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of militias and “patriot” groups whose members inhabit a parallel universe where the federal government wants to rob them of their guns and their freedom.

“What groups on the radical right have in common is the belief that Obama wants to destroy America,” Mark Potok, author of the report, said in an interview. “Fears that he will win again are now driving the expansion.”

How many Americans are on the right-wing fringe is not known. The Southern Poverty Law Center gives no estimate and neither does the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also monitors such groups. But it issued a report last September on a sub-set of the far-right scene, “sovereign citizens” who believe that federal, state and local governments operate illegally and therefore have no right to collect taxes. The FBI called them domestic terrorists and “a growing threat.”

Some of the beliefs held by those on the fringe are too outlandish to influence the political discourse – the government is running secret concentration camps, Mexico plans to recapture the American southwest, there are plans for the United Nations to take over America – but others are not.

The notion that Obama is intent on turning the United States into a socialist country is regularly echoed in speeches by Republican presidential hopefuls.

And the myth that Obama is a Muslim lives on. A public opinion poll of Republicans taken a day before the March 13 primary elections in Alabama and Mississippi showed that 45 percent and 51 percent, respectively, thought he was a Muslim. The methodology of the survey, by a polling institute affiliated with the Democratic party, has been questioned. But even if you cut the percentages in half, they are remarkable and show how stubbornly Obama detractors cling to mistaken beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Those who think the president is a Muslim tend to harbor deeper suspicions. In September 2010, at the height of a shrill debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque in Manhattan, a poll commissioned by Newsweek found that 52 percent of Republicans surveyed thought it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that Obama sympathized with the goal of fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world. Thirty percent thought he favored the interests of Muslim Americans over those of other Americans.

ZEALOTRY GOES MAINSTREAM

The Southern Poverty Law Center traced the rapid growth of anti-Muslim groups to the dispute over the planned Islamic cultural center and mosque, not far from the site of September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Since that controversy, anti-Islam arguments previously confined to little-known web sites run by anti-Muslim zealots have gone mainstream.

The most prominent proponent of the radicals’ theory of “stealth jihad” is Newt Gingrich, one of the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. He has termed Islamic law (Sharia) “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world.” How so? Radical Muslims use political, societal, religious and intellectual tools to sweep away Western civilization and replace it with Sharia law.

The idea that Muslim Americans, who account for less than one percent of the U.S. population, could succeed in replacing federal and state law with Islamic law, strikes many legal scholars as absurd. But that has not prevented conservative legislators in a string of states from introducing bills to ban the use of Islamic law.

Such efforts look like a search for legislative solutions to a non-existent problem and have begun running out of steam, slowed by common sense and the efforts of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In the first half of March, five states withdrew anti-Sharia bills or let them expire.

That doesn’t mean the debate is over, nor is it the end of the right’s portrayal of Obama as a socialist foreign-born Muslim enemy of America as we know it. How persuasive that is to mainstream Americans will be clear on election day, November 6.

The world is becoming ever more dangerous. Threats to the United States are multiple and complex. Just think of terrorists, rogue states, dangers arising from Middle East revolutions, cyber attacks, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the rising power of China. The list goes on.

It makes for a world “more unpredictable, more volatile and more dangerous,” as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has put it. According to polls, most of America’s foreign policy elite thinks the world is as dangerous, or more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.

This belief, write the foreign policy analysts Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen, shapes debates on U.S. foreign policy and frames the public’s understanding of international affairs.

“There is just one problem,” they write in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “it is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts than at virtually any other point in history.”

They add: “The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world’s most powerful.” And though there are a variety of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens, say the two scholars.

Take terrorism: Of the 13,816 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2010, only 15 (or 0.1 percent were U.S. citizens, according to the two scholars. Between 2006 and 2010, terrorist attacks world-wide declined by almost 20 percent and the number of deaths by 35 percent.

Zenko and Cohen argue that there is a disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering that America’s political and policy elites are unwilling to recognize and even more unwilling to integrate into national security decision-making.

Why? Hyping threats serves the interests of both political parties, and more so in an election year. Republicans turn up the volume of warnings to better attack Democrats’ alleged weakness in dealing with threats. Democrats exaggerate threats as a protection against Republican attacks.

The chronic exaggeration of threats, argue Zenko and Cohen, also serves as a justification for huge budgets for the military and America’s intelligence agencies.

Result: the militarization of foreign policy, a skewed allocation of funds and not enough emphasis on non-military national security tools.

Challenging what has become conventional wisdom, the two write that “American foreign policy needs fewer people who can jump out of airplanes and more who can convene round-table discussions and lead negotiations.”

Yet, the budgets of the two principal agencies of “soft,” rather than military power, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State, pale in comparison with the Pentagon. Its enormous budget “not only wastes previous resources; it also warps national security thinking and policy-making.”

THE ONE-PERCENT DOCTRINE

Will the two scholars’ thought-provoking arguments prompt policy-makers to rethink? Probably not, but the fact that their piece appears in the house organ of America’s foreign policy establishment will spark debate – and no doubt criticism from defenders of the so-called 1.0-percent doctrine, the notion that no effort must be spared to counter a threat even if there is only a 1.0-percent chance that it will materialise.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, given a daily diet of news on bloodshed from places around the world, Zenko and Cohen are not alone in insisting that the world has become a safer place.

Last year, Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, published an influential book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” that traces the decline of violence over the centuries.

“Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time,” Pinker writes. “And today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” That decline is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, he says.

Pinker admits that his assertion may strike some as “between hallucinatory and obscene”, given that the new century began with more than 3,000 people killed in the attacks on New York and Washington and that wars inIraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur killed thousands more.

But relatively speaking, the beginning of the 21st century and all of the 20th (despite two world wars and the holocaust) featured less bloodletting than earlier eras. In the 17th century, for example, the Thirty Years’ War reduced the population of Germany by a third.

Do such numeral comparisons change perceptions? Not according to Pinker. “Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times,” he writes in the preface to his book, “especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’”

For decade after decade, diplomats at the United Nations have had on-again, off-again talks on how to reform the Security Council, the supreme decision-making panel on international security. The crisis in Syria shows that progress has been minimal and that power politics often trump human rights.

At issue is the composition of a body “frozen in amber since the end of World War II,” in the words of Stewart Patrick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based foreign policy think tank. The biggest difficulty in unfreezing it is the veto power wielded by the five permanent members of the 15-nation council – the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

A veto by one permanent member is enough to sink a resolution. On February 4, two veto-wielders, Russia and China, banded together to vote against a resolution that provided for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, to step aside, halt a ruthless crackdown on dissidents, and begin a transition to democracy. Assad saw the veto as a green light to crack down even harder. A week before the vetoes, the U.N. estimated the death toll at 5,400.

On February 28, it was revised to more than 7,500, the result of a merciless artillery and tank bombardment of the central city of Homs, an opposition stronghold. In the weeks between those body counts, there has been a growing chorus of condemnation of the Assad government, including a United Nations General Assembly vote (by 137 to 12) criticizing “widespread and systematic human rights violations by Syrian authorities.” Russia, China and 10 other countries voted against that resolution. It has no legal force, unlike council resolutions.

More international condemnation came from a “Friends of Syria” meeting that brought together Western and Arab foreign ministers whose calls for ending the violence and allowing access for humanitarian aid fell on deaf ears in Damascus.

Russia and China stayed away from the Tunis gathering and were showered with blistering criticism from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for their “despicable” Security Council vetoes.

Why the make-up of the council and the way it operates has remained unchanged since 1945 is a question that merits more vigorous public debate than there has been in the past. The case for re-thinking the system becomes stronger every time a veto frustrates the will of the majority. Clinton complained that the council had been “neutered” by the vetoes on Syria but the neutering is a logical consequence of the power wielded by the permanent five.

NEVER SAY NEVER

They have the privilege to ignore the rest, push their own interests and protect their allies, as Russia did on Syria and as the United States (the most active veto-wielder in the past four decades) has done often to shield Israel from censure. None of the five have shown eagerness to change the veto system but that doesn’t mean it will never happen.

Ideas on what to change and how to do it have been tossed around since 1993 in the bureaucratic obscurity of the bureaucratically-named “Open ended Working Group to consider all aspects of the question of an increase in the membership of the Security Council and other matters related to the Council.”

An expansion of the top UN decision making body is more likely in the foreseeable future than “other matters”, a phrase that embraces abolishing the veto. In February, the four countries that have lobbied most energetically to become veto-wielding Security Council members (Germany, Japan, India, Brazil) issued a statement urging tangible progress before September, when the current session of the U.N. General Assembly ends.

Japan and Germany are the second and third-biggest financial contributors to the U.N., India is a nuclear power and the world’s second-most populous country, and Brazil is becoming a regional superpower in Latin America. Their inclusion would be a big step towards a Security Council that reflects the world as it is now, not as it was in 1945.

Skeptics tend to argue that expansion of the council would result in a decision-making process even more difficult and time-consuming than it is now. Perhaps. But adding four stable, liberal democracies to the lineup would probably also result in better decisions.

PHOTO: Members of the United Nations General Assembly vote to endorse the Arab League’s plan for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York February 16, 2012. The 193-nation U.N. General Assembly on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution endorsing an Arab League plan that urges Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step aside. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

As Syrian government forces bombard Homs and other cities with merciless brutality, day after day, calls for arming the opposition are becoming louder. But there is a powerful case for caution, and for thinking twice before good intentions pave the road to even worse hell in Syria.

Most importantly, potential armourers of the opposition need to find answers to a number of key questions. The following exchange at a hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Armed Services Committee in mid-February helps explain what is at stake.

Question: “What is the nature of the Syrian opposition? Who are they? How much of this is domestic? How much of it is foreign? What is the regional dynamic? Is al Qaeda involved?”

Answer: “The Free Syrian Army … is not unified. There’s an internal feud about who’s going to lead it. Complicating this … are neighborhood dynamics. We believe that al Qaeda in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria.”

The question came from Jim Webb, a Democratic Senator with a military background. The answer was from America’s spy chief, James Clapper, who added that extremists had infiltrated Syria’s motley opposition groups which, in many cases, may not be aware of the infiltration.

Bombings in Damascus and in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, against government security and intelligence buildings bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda, he said.

In other words,  what began as peaceful mass demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad almost a year ago (the Arab Spring came to Syria later than to other countries in the region) has morphed into parallel movements of mass protests and an armed insurgency whose composition is not entirely clear. It’s clear, though, that anti-Assad forces are outgunned and outmanned. To significantly increase their firepower would require arms supplies on a scale that would virtually guarantee some of the weapons falling into the wrong hands.

U.S. hawks arguing for arms aid, such as John McCain, the Republican senator, might do well to remember that sizable quantities of the military hardware America supplied to anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan ended up in the hands of the Taliban. That conflict appears to have faded from the hawks’ memories and American interventionists now feel the urge to “plunge in with no plans, with half-baked plans, with demands to supply arms to rebels they know nothing about,” Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, wrote in a column in The Daily Beast.

“Their good intentions could pave the road to hell to Syrians – preserving lives today, but sacrificing many more later.”

“FRIENDS OF SYRIA”

The number of lives being lost has increased sharply after Russia, the Syrian government’s main arms supplier, and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to step down, hand over power to a deputy, stop killing dissidents and begin a transition to democracy.

The vetoes prompted the formation of a “Friends of Syria” group including the United States, European and Arab countries plus Turkey. They will try to succeed where the Security Council failed – stop Syria from sliding deeper into civil war.

Syria unraveling would not be in the interests of anyone except for al Qaeda, argues Kamran Bokhari, an analyst with the private intelligence company Stratfor, except for.

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri has cheered the anti-Assad opposition and urged Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to join the fight. The violent overthrow of “apostate” regimes is the main plank of al Qaeda’s ideology.

Its lack of appeal for the vast majority of Arabs became obvious in the Arab Spring, when people power rather than martyrdom-seeking jihadis brought down authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. In Libya, where the Gaddafi dictatorship ended in violence, it was thanks to the help of the United States and NATO, not al Qaeda followers.

Such acts as the Damascus and Aleppo bombings, if indeed they were carried out by al Qaeda militants, serve to keep the conflict going and give Assad, who insists that his government is fighting terrorists, an excuse to crack down even harder. In doing so, he emulates his late father, Hafez. Young Bashar was 17 when Hafez deployed tanks and artillery to flatten the center of the city of Hama to crush a revolt by Sunni Muslims against his Alawite minority regime.

That was in February 1982 and it took 27 days to bomb and shell the city into submission. Estimates of the death toll range from 10,000 to 40,000. No-one was ever held accountable. Hafez al-Assad died in bed, age 69, of pulmonary disease.

His son, 30 years later, is trying to bomb the city of Homs into submission. On Feb. 22 alone, two days before the “Friends of Syria” meeting in Tunis, activists inside the beleaguered city reported 80 people killed, including two Western journalists. Grim video clips of hollow-eyed, fear-stricken women and children huddling in shelters touch even the hardest heart.

But whether shipping more arms to the opposition is the best way out of the crisis remains open to debate.

PHOTO: A Syrian opposition member shouts slogans as he holds posters against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and to express solidarity with Syria’s anti-government people in Homs, during a sit-in organized by the March 14 allies in Beirut, February 22, 2012. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GILDED EXILE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMOVING BARRIERS TO WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we go again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EUROPE SEEN THROUGH A DISTORTED LENS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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