AFF

1AC

Plan

Plan: The United States limit its military presence in the Arab States of the Persian Gulf to a brigade-minus in Kuwait, naval mine counter-measures, and Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and support aircraft.

Advantage 1: We solve instability

US presence in the Gulf is overwhelming now, causes blowback and war

Vine 14 (David, Assistant professor of Anthropology at American University, “America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?,” Mother Jones,

In the Persian Gulf alone, the US has major bases in every country save Iran. There is an increasingly important, increasingly large base in Djibouti, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula. There are bases in Pakistan on one end of the region and in the Balkans on the other, as well as on the strategically located Indian Ocean islands of Diego Garcia and the Seychelles. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there were once as many as 800 and 505 bases, respectively. Recently, the Obama administration inked an agreement with new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to maintain around 10,000 troops and at least nine major bases in his country beyond the official end of combat operations later this year. US forces, which never fully departed Iraq after 2011, are now returning to a growing number of bases there in ever larger numbers. In short, there is almost no way to overemphasize how thoroughly the US military now covers the region with bases and troops. This infrastructure of war has been in place for so long and is so taken for granted that Americans rarely think about it and journalists almost never report on the subject. Members of Congress spend billions of dollars on base construction and maintenance every year in the region, but ask few questions about where the money is going, why there are so many bases, and what role they really serve. By one estimate, the United States has spent $10 trillion protecting Persian Gulf oil supplies over the past four decades. Approaching its 35th anniversary, the strategy of maintaining such a structure of garrisons, troops, planes, and ships in the Middle East has been one of the great disasters in the history of American foreign policy.The rapid disappearance of debate about our newest, possibly illegal war should remind us of just how easy this huge infrastructure of bases has made it for anyone in the Oval Office to launch a war that seems guaranteed, like its predecessors, to set off new cycles of blowback and yet more war. On their own, the existence of these bases has helped generate radicalism and anti-American sentiment. As was famously the case with Osama bin Laden and US troops in Saudi Arabia, bases have fueled militancy, as well as attacks on the United States and its citizens. They have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, even though they are not, in fact, necessary to ensure the free flow of oil globally. They have diverted tax dollars from the possible development of alternative energy sources and meeting other critical domestic needs. And they have supported dictators and repressive, undemocratic regimes, helping to block the spread of democracy in a region long controlled by colonial rulers and autocrats. After 35 years of base-building in the region, it's long past time to look carefully at the effects Washington's garrisoning of the Greater Middle East has had on the region, the US, and the world.

Bases in the Gulf fuel US interventionism and instability, smaller footprint solves

Vine 14 [David, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, America Still Has Hundreds of Military Bases Worldwide. Have They Made Us Any Safer?, Mother Jones, November 14,

The Carter Doctrine's bases and military buildup strategy and its belief that "the skillful application of US military might" can secure oil supplies and solve the region's problems was, he adds, "flawed from the outset." Rather than providing security, the infrastructure of bases in the Greater Middle East has made it ever easier to go to war far from home. It has enabled wars of choice and an interventionist foreign policy that has resulted in repeated disasters for the region, the United States, and the world. Since 2001 alone, US-led wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen have minimally caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and possibly more than one million deaths in Iraq alone. The sad irony is that any legitimate desire to maintain the free flow of regional oil to the global economy could be sustained through other far less expensive and deadly means. Maintaining scores of bases costing billions of dollars a year is unnecessary to protect oil supplies and ensure regional peace—especially in an era in which the United States gets only around 10% of its net oil and natural gas from the region. In addition to the direct damage our military spending has caused, it has diverted money and attention from developing the kinds of alternative energy sources that could free the United States and the world from a dependence on Middle Eastern oil—and from the cycle of war that our military bases have fed.

Continued heavy military presence emboldens militarism in our allies – regional instability inevitable

Rovner and Talmadge 14 [Joshua Rovner is the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security at Southern Methodist University, where he also serves Director of Studies at the Tower Center for Political Studies. Caitlin Talmadge is assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 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, The Washington Quarterly, November 1,

A light military presence also will send the right signal to U.S. allies in the region. Some modest assistance may help local actors fend off militant groups such as ISIS, but the outcome ultimately depends on these local actors’ willingness to fight, and the return of a large U.S. force may turn out to be counterproductive if it convinces them that they can offload their security requirements to the United States—or if it appears to give unconditional U.S. endorsement to repressive and exclusionary regimes. Indeed, there is little evidence that a large U.S. military presence can ameliorate the underlying political conditions that give rise to groups such as ISIS or other forms of regional instability, and it might exacerbate them. There are already troubling reports that some Iraqis are using U.S. support to settle scores against their ethnic and sectarian rivals.12 This problem will intensify the more deeply the United States involves itself in the current conflict. To avoid inspiring irresponsible and reckless behavior, U.S. leaders must resist the temptation to return large forces to Iraq and throw the full weight of U.S. military power against ISIS.

Middle East is powder keg, any conflict will spillover

The Age 9/24/2007 “Tempers must remain cool as the Middle East heats up”,

THE torturous road to peace in the Middle East becomes more excruciating every day and the cumulative effect of events in the region over the past week offer little hope for any reduction in what appear to be increasingly flammable tensions. If anything, the talk now is of war. The match that lights the flame may well be last Thursday's assassination of Lebanese MP Antoine Ghanem, a violent murder that pitched his divided nation further into turmoil. His death was the latest in a string of attacks against prominent critics of Lebanon's neighbour and former powerbroker Syria, the most notable being the 2005 killing of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. MrGhanem's death introduces an unwelcome element of instability ahead of tomorrow's crucial presidential elections, especially if an anti-Syrian candidate is elected. More importantly, any instability could fan the flames of civil war in a country that has been a pivotal test-run for democracy in the region since September 11, 2001. The killing has been widely condemned by the international community and the finger pointed, once again, at Syria, and by implication its ally, Iran. Syria has, somewhat ingenuously, denied any involvement, as it has with the other high-profile assassinations of anti-Syrian leaders in Lebanon. Calls have been made for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to launch an international probe into the bombing, and this should be carried out with haste. Talk of war further intensified after the deputy commander of Iran's air force, General Mohammad Alavi, announced that Iran had already prepared a plan to attack Israel if it bombed his country. This war of words was further escalated when a senior commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard chose to outline the capability of his country's ballistic missiles, which he threatened to use on American targets in the Middle East. These threats coincide with growing international pressure on Iran to abandon what is regarded by the West, and particularly by the US, as its clandestine nuclear arms program. The French also added fuel to the fire when Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned the world to "prepare for the worst and the worst is war". The head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, quickly entered the fray and warned against the use of force against Iran, a move UN officials described as an "out of control" drift to war. This pointed admonition coincides with a string of reports emanating from Washington that the Bush Administration is running out of patience with diplomacy and is intensifying its plans for air strikes against Iran. The events in Lebanon and the debate over Iran run parallel with Israel's declaration of the Gaza Strip as "hostile territory" and Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu's confirmation that two weeks ago Israel carried out an air attack deep inside Syria, Iran's only Arab ally, on a site that it believed was being equipped for nuclear development by North Korea. Another suggestion is that the target was Iranian weapons destined for Lebanon's Hezbollah. There has also been speculation that the raid served as a "dry run" for a possible Israeli or US attack on Iran. Meanwhile, US efforts to ensure the success of a Middle East peace conference, planned for November, remain mired in political haggling over what is to be brought to the negotiating table. In the Middle East, every event, every tension, is connected to another, more so since the Iraq war, and it is this very mutuality that can make one act, such as the murder of a Lebanese MP, have dangerous consequences for the region as a whole. The Middle East is now overheated and potentially explosive, and Australia must impress upon its allies that, in a part of the world where every action can easily be met with a disproportionate reaction, there is more mileage in diplomacy than in any military solution.

That goes nuclear

John Steinbach, Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee, March 2002,

Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability."(41) andEzarWeissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum (and the) next war will not be conventional."(42) Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major (if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (43) (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familar pattern(Israel refining its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon - for whatever reason - the deepening Middle East conflict could trigger a world conflagration.

Middle East wars result in Extinction

BahigNassar 2002 (coordinator of Arab coordination Center of NGOs) keynote paper, online: inesglobal.org)

Wars in the Middle East are of a new type. Formerly, the possession of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union had prevented them, under the balance of the nuclear terror, from launching war against each other. In the Middle East, the possession of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction leads to military clashes and wars. Instead of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, the United States and Israel are using military force to prevent others from acquiring them, while they insist on maintaining their own weapons to pose deadly threats to other nations. But the production, proliferation and threat or use of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear chemical and biological) are among the major global problems which could lead, if left unchecked, to the extinction of life on earth. Different from the limited character of former wars, the current wars in the Middle East manipulate global problems and escalate their dangers instead of solving them. Natural resources, mainly oil, are the subject of major wars in the Middle East. But oil is a depleting resource which will soon vanish. This will lead to another global problem since all human civilisations depend mainly on this source of energy.

The plan makes US military presence in the Gulf low-profile, provides sufficient presence to deter, and enough intel to hedge against deterrence failure

Rovner and Talmadge 14 [Joshua Rovner is the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security at Southern Methodist University, where he also serves Director of Studies at the Tower Center for Political Studies. Caitlin Talmadge is assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 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, The Washington Quarterly, November 1,

Today, the United States maintains substantial land-based airpower in the Gulf, for example, in part to support ongoing operations in Afghanistan. But many of the strike aircraft used in that war likely will not be necessary for future Gulf missions and can be sent elsewhere. Some assets will remain critical, however, both to provide intelligence and to deter major challenges to the regional status quo. Interestingly, the most valuable aircraft to forward deploy in peacetime are not bombers and fighters, because combat aircraft can always flow rapidly to the theater in a crisis—as, in fact, they have done recently to strike ISIS. Rather, aircraft that provide persistent, high-altitude surveillance are key, because they make it less likely that combat aircraft will ever be needed. Stationing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets in the region reminds potential aggressors that any offensives will be detected quickly, reducing the temptation to try. Keeping a residual force of tankers as well as airborne command and control assets in the region would also be important to hedge against the possibility of deterrence failures. These land-based helpers would greatly extend the range, sortie rate, and survivability of U.S. combat aircraft that could return to the region in the event of a crisis or war. Concentrating on ISR and support craft would limit the Air Force’s regional profile, which is already surprisingly low. Air bases are deliberately located well outside of populated areas. The one exception, Al Udeid, is located on the outskirts of Doha, but it still is not easily visible from the main roads out of the city. Furthermore, the Qataris still own the base, control all access to it, and use it extensively for their own training and operations, so little about it appears American from the outside. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that Al Udeid houses mostly “enabling” aircraft (tankers, reconnaissance, and airborne command- and-control) rather than the potentially more controversial combat platforms (such as drones or fighter-bombers). Predators, Reapers, and the F-22s do not operate out of Al Udeid, only out of the more remote Al Dhafra in the UAE. Similarly, the U.S. naval presence, centered on the 5th Fleet based at Manama, Bahrain, is also already relatively low-profile. Even amidst the domestic political upheaval in Bahrain during the past three years, the United States seems likely to stay and has not paid a significant political price for its continuing presence. U.S. ships are not visible to the region’s publics unless the United States wants them to be. The U.S. naval presence in Bahrain is so long- standing and accepted that the base is located quite centrally in Manama. Unlike in Kuwait or Qatar, where the Army and Air Force have taken pains to remain out of sight, any Bahraini cab driver can drop his passenger right at the front gate of the Navy’s headquarters without needing directions. U.S. personnel live among Bahrainis, shop at their markets, and eat at their homes. Bahrainis know that the real combat power is afloat, so they do not seem allergic to U.S. presence ashore. Likewise, the ruling al-Khalifa family seems more concerned about U.S. attempts to communicate with the opposition than with the presence of warships. Indeed, in the same week that the regime expelled a U.S. diplomat for meeting with the Shi’a opposition, it welcomed two additional U.S. Navy patrol craft to increase the overall size of the 5th Fleet.7 Keeping some naval assets in the region is critical to an effective residual U.S. posture. Continuing the forward deployment of mine-countermeasure ships is especially important in the event that Iran attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz, and given the ships’ slow speed, it makes little sense to station them outside the Gulf. The same is true for other ships whose main mission is intelligence. Rotating in smaller surface vessels—coastal patrol craft, destroyers, cruisers, and frigates—would also be helpful for deterrence. But there is little reason to regularly sail aircraft carriers through Gulf waters when virtually all of their deterrent and combat power would remain intact were they to operate from the Indian Ocean. Carriers are designed for blue waters, not shallow enclosed environments like the Gulf. Despite their immense firepower, carriers have few organic defenses and must rely on the other components of their strike group in order to travel safely through contested areas. Finally, given the regional powers’ inability to project conventional power, the United States can continue to reduce its forward-deployed land forces. The U.S. presence on the ground is least relevant for maintaining oil security, and U.S. land forces in the Gulf are already smaller than they have been at any time in the last 20 years. The Army maintains what is sometimes called a “brigade plus” in the region, which varies from 7,000–13,500 soldiers, stationed mostly in Kuwait. These forces conduct a wide variety of missions for Central Command, which is responsible for territory from Egypt to Pakistan, but many of these missions are irrelevant to Gulf oil security (though they might be relevant to other U.S. objectives such as counterterrorism). The Third Army in Kuwait essentially serves as a “lily pad” for operations throughout the Middle East by maintaining bases, training ranges, and large stocks of pre-positioned supplies. U.S. leaders may want to continue to maintain a ground presence for that reason, but they should not be bound to the idea it is necessary to ensure the flow of affordable oil. That said, the Army’s enduring presence is largely uncontroversial in Kuwait, where the U.S. military still wears the halo of 1991. Many Kuwaitis view the Third Army as a bulwark against the violence and chaos of southern Iraq and a hedge against long-term Iranian coercion. The U.S. presence in Kuwait reassures the Saudis for the same reasons, while conveniently keeping U.S. forces off their soil. In short, U.S. presence in Kuwait may have minimal benefits, but it also has minimal costs, especially given that Kuwait covers basing expenses. For these reasons, it makes sense to keep pre-positioned equipment and something like a “brigade minus” in Kuwait, amounting to a few thousand ground troops, but no more. In total, U.S. forces in the Gulf could hover in the low tens of thousands, well below the 50,000 present there today.