If you're ever in the DC area, I strongly recommend visiting the International Spy Museum. Don't worry about the hokey "You're a spy now" introduction. There's a lot of more substantive stuff to come.
Be sure to look through the book section of the gift shop. I dare you to walk away without buying a book you didn't know existed and now need to have.
Patrick Radden Keefe's article in The New Yorker, "State Secrets," is a must-read. Even if the case of Pete Seda and the Al Haramein charity were not representative of federal prosecutions of people with "links" to terrorist groups, their story raises some important points:
It's worth chewing on that second question a bit more. Federal prosecutors are pursuing the same maximalist strategy as other members of the executive branch. (And for many of the same reasons, which have as much to do with ass-covering as genuine fear of terrorist attack.) The natural result is the aggressive suspicion of "links":
In designating Al Haramain Oregon, Treasury Department officials cited
“direct links” with Al Qaeda, but have never revealed the precise
nature of those links. Stinebower, the former Treasury lawyer, said she
was unaware of any internal definition of “direct links.” She wouldn’t
discuss the particulars of the Al Haramain designation, but did say,
“It wouldn’t have been sufficient that A picks up a phone and calls B,
and B picks up a phone and talks to C, therefore A knows C. There would
have to be more of a connection than that.”
There's another way of looking at these links: If federal prosecutors seize the assets and indefinitely imprisons A because B knows C, then there's a risk, however small, that A will actually look at C more sympathetically.
According to the Administration's own 1% logic, that's a risk that the nation should not bear.
This morning on CNN, Senator Joseph Lieberman asserted that, if the US were to withdraw from Iraq, "Iran and Al Qaeda win." Finally someone willing to stop hinting about dire consequences, and instead give voice to the real problem for the United States in Iraq: the willingness to admit defeat.
Lieberman, of course, expected that to be the final word on America's Iraq policy. It's not.
Losing here, winning there
For sake of argument, let's agree with Lieberman. We leave, and Iran and Al Qaeda "win." (That's not necessarily true, especially for Al Qaeda, but let's not get off track.) By implication, the United States loses. But what did we lose?
One of the reasons I started this blog is point out, whenever necessary, the importance of separating the different levels of strategy. Grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical levels are very different. Success at one level does not necessarily bring success at all the others.
Just as importantly for the iraq question, failure at one does not trigger failure at the others. If the United States were to lose one part of its theater strategy for the Middle East, it does not portend a cataclysm for the United States in that region, or for the most recently added priority in American grand strategy, counterterrorism.
The United states may have to contain the consequences of occupation and withdrawal, but there are several outcomes that may be eminently tolerable for the United States. The Iraqi factions are likely to remain focused on each other, not the United States. Iran may gain power and influence within Iraq, but exactly how does this automatically translate into a catastrophic loss for the United States? Freed from the Iraq trap, the United States might be able to do more in the Middle East overall, instead of pouring more blood and treasure into a single country. Americans might live in less danger of terrorist attack, if the American occupation no longer inspires outrage against the United states.
Don't look for a scoreboard
It's hard for Americans to avoid conflating Iraq with the Middle East, and with US national security overall, in part because Americans hate to lose. It's the reason, for example, why military recruitment rates are lower than desired, but reenlistment rates are higher than many expected. American soldiers who have served in Iraq have faced a tough challenge. They feel responsible for the Iraqis who live in mortal danger. Therefore, they don't want to leave a job undone.
While America's allergy to losing might be a good thing for the teams playing the Super Bowl, it's a bad thing for US foreign policy. For the United States to remain a superpower, Americans have to be mature enough to accept defeat at one level of strategy, if it does not endanger American successes at the other levels of strategy. There are no military equivalents of Hail Mary passes or on-side kicks. War and diplomacy are not games with simple ways to measure winning and losing--something for which we should all be grateful.
What the hell happened during the production of the HBO series John Adams? The series started strong, with Adams' dramatic defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. By the last episode, the show seemed to have lost interest in Adams the public man.
Charles, Adams' son, drinks himself to death. We all suffer through long, long scene of a doctor removing Nabby's breast, without anesthesia. Urk.
Screen time spent on these events is time subtracted from public affairs--including, startlingly, the collapse of the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. There's no mention of Jefferson's hiring of James Callender to execute a smear campaign against Adams in the 1800 election, which backfired horribly. Therefore, in the HBO series, their famous reconciliation through correspondence is mysterious: why did they need to be reconciled in the first place?
And what was up with all the tilted camera angles? I felt as though I was in the Joker's hideout on the old Batman TV series.
Yes, I'm annoyed. The series hooked me in, then somewhere in the middle, took a disappointing turn.
The next President of the United States needs to earn some international goodwill fast. It's going to take a while to clean up the messes from the current Administration.
The latest example is the medical treatment--or lack thereof--of detainees in the custody of the Division of Internee Health Services (DIHS), a branch of the lobotomized giant, the Department of Homeland Security. According to today's Washington Post, prisoners jammed into a variety of prison facilities scattered across the United States are, surprise surprise, don't get adequate medical care. Some prisoners have died for want of simple, inexpensive treatment.
Secrecy can be just a veil disguising incompetence, corruption, and failure. (Immigrants from the former Soviet Union can tell you a thing or two about this topic.) In this case, the increased strictures for detainees--more limited access to lawyers, or anyone on the outside--has helped hide the lack of medical care for people we casually keep in indefinite custody. And, of course, we're not talking about people who are major threats to US national security:
But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somalian without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.
As with all longer news articles, you have to read far beyond the first paragraph to find the important details. For example, it's worth doing a quick calculation of how much per capita this part of DHS is spending on these prisoners' medical care, and then compare it to how much US prisons spend on their prisoners:
Unfortunately for American prestige, people in other countries can do the math, too.
And, of course, there's the tragically familiar story of an under-qualified person in charge of a government agency with life-and-death responsibilities.
The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought
with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of
Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising
detention and pretrial services. An audit found that Flanagan had
signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee entertainment and other
ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that the District of
Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position. If those details don't worry you, click here for an article critical of Flanagan's handling of Baltimore prisons. It won't be easy to fix the DIHS. The US government could save a lot of money, simply by releasing prisoners...But, of course, there are the inevitable political repercussions. The federal officials might try to bring up the level of funding and staffing for the DIHS, but where will they find the money? And where will they find a better-qualified person willing to take on the thankless job of heading the DIHS?
Mister or Madame President-To-Come, godspeed to you.
Being in Washington, DC has certainly helped me get blogging again. New York may be grand; San Francisco, vibrant; Savannah, welcoming; or Chicago, muscular. No city in the United States can match Washington for its power to inspire.
Visiting the Newseum, the new museum of journalism, was an unexpected pleasure. I was braced for a lot of superficial, self-congratulatory pap. Sure, that did appear in the occasional nook or cranny (or multi-screen, Jumbotron-delivered montage), but by and large, the real theme of the Newseum is the Bill of Rights.
You get to see every point on the continuum of liberty, from old copies of the Catholic Index to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, the extremely helpful guides suggest that you start at the bottom of the multi-story Newseum, which includes sections of the Berlin Wall and, more disturbingly, one of the guard towers that used to keep East Berliners from escaping to West Berlin.
Of course, the entire landscape of Washington, DC, is its own memorial to liberty. Not just the monuments, but the office buildings themselves, suggest important moments in American history, and the daily work to keep the American republic going. Here is the place where Martin Luther King gave his most famous (but not necessarily his best) speech. Here is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
As difficult as the last several years have been, it's moments like these that remind me how much I love America. At its best moments, the United States has encouraged the conviction that everyone in this country is part of the same family, and that people abroad are just our distant cousins. All of them deserve the best treatment we can give.
Love of America is tricky. You can't govern the American family by imposing sentiment, as if our public moments were like an uncomfortable holiday gathering. Everyone must say the right things. Everyone must sit in their proper place. Don't mention any uncomfortable truths, for fear that these moments of manufactured amity will shatter.
Loving America is more like embracing a difficult relative. At times, it will do and say stupid things. The misbehavior might grow to such alarming proportions that you begin to question whether redemption is possible. Still, you persevere, in the hopes that things will get better. The brother who is skipping from one dead end job to another has an epiphany about how much better his life might be. The alcoholic aunt, at long last, checks into the rehab center. The United States decides that fear is not the best guide to domestic or foreign policy.
Love demands faith. In fact, love is faith. Not the type of faith that demands you believe in the unprovable, or the ridiculous, in the fashion of credo quia absurdum. Faith, in this sense, means the compulsion to do good, to persevere even in the face of your own incredulity.
This is the kind of faith shown, in the New Testament, by a Roman soldier who asks Jesus to cure his sick servant, even though he does not believe that Jesus has supernatural powers. Still, he must try any way he can to help his servant, which leads Jesus to comment, "Assuredly, I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!"
Even for the unchurched, such as myself, you can see the secular equivalent of this story.
At first, I was skeptical about Glenn Greenwald's post describing the "general in your pocket" controversy. If you want to get people to feel outraged, focus on Iraq, not Guantanamo Bay. The "independent" retired military commentariat that wasn't so independent was giving its thumbs up to a great deal more destruction in Iraq than Guantanamo Bay. Plus, Americans die in Iraq, but not on the tip of Cuba.
(I really hate having to make these sorts of comparisons at all. Which unjustified, self-destructive policy is worse? Anyway, onwards.)
However, Greenwald's target seems to be the media more than the generals themselves. Therefore, the willingness to swallow what the retired officers were saying about Guantanamo Bay is no worse or better than any of their claims about Iraq or Afghanistan. It's the gullibility and cowardice of the media that's the real topic of Greenwald's post.
I'll add one tiny detail to Greenwald's already detailed analysis: you'll note that, in spite of watching only one interrogation, Shepperd implies that he observed multiple interrogations.
No, I'm not dead. I haven't joined up (though Pentagon standards may be low enough for me to do so). I've just taken an unexpected vacation from writing.
To some degree, my absence from blogging was necessary. I had some big writing projects in my new job that consumed my time. I couldn't justify writing anything else until these were done.
However, I can't blame work completely. I had a bad case of blogging fatigue, which happens when you worry that your effort is largely wasted.
Anyway, I'll try to get back on a regular schedule of posts. I hope someone is still reading.
Thought I'd recommend a couple of movies I've seen in the last few months that fit the theme of this blog...
Children of the Revolution
One sure sign that you've enjoyed a movie: you don't want to give anything away. The premise hooked me immediately: a comedy about an Australian who might or might not be the illegitimate son of Stalin. And that's all I'll say about the plot. Very good performances by Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, and F. Murray Abraham as Stalin.
The Tunnel
One of the most exciting movies I've ever seen. Really. Screw all the childish, violent fantasies of American filmmakers, and give me more East Berliners trying to escape to the West.
Justice League: The New Frontier
The core stories about Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and the Martian Manhunter, told as a parable about America in the 1950s and early 1960s. It felt like what comics might have been like if Le Carre and Greene had written them.
Max
A much-overlooked movie about a young Hitler, failing to be one kind of artist, and becoming another one. One of the best movies in English about the Weimar period, and where the Nazis fit into or clashed with other movements.
The bad news: A security consultant found it absurdly easy to hack into a power company network, gaining enough control to shut down the grid.
Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed, then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company's desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.
The good news: There probably aren't all that many people out there attempting these types of attacks. Plus, it's unlikely that foreign terrorists would have the same social engineering savvy, and other required skills, to pull off this sort of attack. (Domestic terrorists, on the other hand...)
Remember a few years ago, when we were all supposed to be quaking with fear about cyberterrorists bent on trashing our banks, military networks, and, yes, the power grids? Certainly, cyberterrorism does exist, but not at the scale, or perhaps of the type, that many initially feared. For a recent example, see the hacking of web sites supporting the Tibetan protests.
State-sponsored cyberterrorism might be a much-bigger threat than Al Qaeda hackers. For example, the Chinese army has been increasing investment in its information warfare units. It's hard to gauge the real size of the threat, or how seriously the PLA contemplates using it. However, it's a lot more plausible than the sort of Islamist cyberterrorism that, thankfully, is confined to bad thrillers like 24.
Still, about those security vulnerabilities in the power industry...Yikes.
In no particular order, some responses to yesterday's hearings:
For years, I've been skeptical about the preponderance of "big ticket items" in the US military budget, such as carriers and main battle tanks. Sure, the United States needs some of them...But how many, really? Especially when they contributed very little to the "little wars" the US was actually fighting? With the end of the Cold War, the justification collapsed even further.
Still, there are limits. William Lind cross the line in this recent post (and thanks to The Strategist for the pointer). In the 1990s, the "peace dividend" sparked a discussion about shrinking the military budget. Now, the catalyst is the ailments of the American economy. Lind's recommends grand strategic adjustments to this new situation:
First, adopt a defensive rather than an offensive grand strategy.
America followed a defensive grand strategy through most of her
history. We only went to war if someone attacked us. That defensive
grand strategy kept defense costs down and allowed our economy to
prosper. We do not have to be party to every quarrel in the world.
Unfortunately, the days of "we'll keep the sword sheathed unless we're attacked" are long over...If they ever existed in the first place. I'll assume for the moment that Lind is describing the United States before Pearl Harbor--before WWII made Americans into energetic internationalists.
The pre-WWII United States was hardly pacific. The embargo on Japan that triggered the Pearl Harbor raid might not have been a military action, but it was hardly isolationist. The US objected to Japanese imperialism in China and Korea--hardly a policy based strictly on direct threats to the United States. In fact, it was a preface of American internationalism to come. The United States was worried about markets and resources in East Asia; the "special relationship" made it easier for the United States to respond to Japanese moves against these markets and resources.
Decades earlier, the United States had sent expeditionary forces to China. During the Boxer Rebellion, the United States fought alongside Europeans and Japanese to maintain their collective grip on China. And China was hardly the only place where the United States was willing to send its armed forces. While Americans might not have been part of the race for Africa, they did defend their great power supremacy in the Western Hemisphere from both external and internal threats. Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Panama...While these might not have been major wars, they were hardly defensive.
Therefore, WWII wasn't the first time that Americans were willing to use force to defend interests outside the territorial United States. American isolationism slowed down the grand strategic logic that led countries like Britain to see their interests threatened in every corner of the world (if we're worried about India, we have to be worried about Afghanistan...). However, the pull persisted, in spite of recessions and depressions.
Second, scrap virtually all the big ticket weapons programs such as new
fighter-bombers, more Aegis ships, and the Army’s Rube Goldbergian
Future Combat System. They are irrelevant to where war is going.
No argument here, as long as there's an actual review, not a stampede. The US still needs to project power in a lot of places, if not everywhere. If some new weapons systems or upgrades to existing ones can help, let's still pursue them.
Third, as we cut, preserve combat units. That means, above all, Army
and Marine Corps infantry battalions. Cut the vast superstructure above
those battalions, but keep the battalions. Infantry battalions are what
we need most for Fourth Generation wars, which we should do our utmost
to avoid but which we will sometimes be drawn into, even with a
defensive grand strategy.
This may be the bitterest pill of all for the services to swallow. The Air Force and Navy would have to accept the primacy of ground forces. The Army would have to reform its structure and culture even further from the centrality of the divisional organization. Giving up a new weapons might be annoying; changing the way the Army operates will be agonizing.
In the Navy, keep the submarines. Submarines are today’s and tomorrow’s
capital ships, and geography dictates we must remain a maritime power.
Keep the carriers, too, though there is little need to build more of
them. Carriers are big, empty boxes, which can carry many things
besides aircraft. Mothball most of the cruisers and destroyers. Build
lots of small, cheap ships useful for controlling coastal and inland
waters, and create strategically mobile and sustainable “packages” of
such ships. Being able to control waters around and within stateless
regions can be important in 4GW.
Now we're in the outskirts of Cloud Cuckoo-land. Submarines can't handle all the missions that missile-armed surface ships or carrier-based aircraft perform. Sure, we might be fighting more little wars than big ones, but we do need, on occasion, to fight something like Operation DESERT STORM, threaten to use air and missile strikes to achieve foreign policy goals. Plus, a littoral navy that Lind is describing can't deploy across the globe--they're littoral.
I'm all for reducing the overall size of the Navy, but a Navy of submarines and modernized PT boats couldn't handle all the critical missions.
Fighter-bombers are largely useless in Fourth Generation wars, where
their main role is to create collateral damage that benefits our
enemies. Keep the air transport squadrons and the A-10s, and move them
all to the Air National Guard, which flies and maintains aircraft as
well as or better than the regular Air Force at a fraction of the cost.
Reduce the regular Air Force to strategic nuclear forces and a training
base.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to downtown Cloud Cuckoo-Land. Not every war the United States will fight will be a counterinsurgency war. People killed by American bombs in a conventional war might still appear on the evening news, often as a tool of "fourth generation war" used against us. But is this an argument for not fighting conventional wars, in which bombers and fighter-bombers play an important role?
If I have to shoot down enemy fighters, or deliver a "bunker-busting" payload against a highly reinforced enemy HQ, I'd rather not depend on A-10s, thank you. And if we're giving the A-10s to someone, why not the Army, to improve close air support coordination and better protect their budget?
There's a lot of merit in some of Lind's recommendations, and we've had decades of inattention to the real needs of fighting wars that were smaller and wholly unlike the hypothetical NATO/Warsaw Pact clash over Central Europe. However, you can go too far in the other direction.
I just finished Imperial Life In The Emerald City. You can never read enough about Iraq, since the catastrophe is larger than any single book can encompass. I'll have more to say about this book later, but one passage in particular stood out. The author, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, quotes an e-mail written by John Agresto, the person given the thankless task of reviving Iraq's higher education system, with no budget, in a country scarred by war and despotism. The e-mail was Agresto's bitter farewell to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) at the end of his tour in Iraq:
America's been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule--just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free--limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendared elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and above all, the breaking and moderating of factions--all this we forgot about. We act is if the aim is "democracy" simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore...we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them... We, as a country, don't have a clue as to what has made our own country work, and so we spread the gospel of democracy-at-all-costs abroad. Until this country can find a Madison, it would be far better off with just a good ruler.
Agresto's frustation may have gotten the better of him. He overlooked the even larger tragedy: not all Americans would have handled Iraq in this fashion. Unfortunately, those ultimately in charge of the invasion and occupation didn't believe in the principles of "mild and moderate democracy" Agresto describes.
Mr. Agresto, the foreign policy fruit does not fall that far from the political tree. Fortunately, it's not the only tree in the forest. The Iraq war is not an American tragedy, in which a country's fatal flaws lead to destruction. It is the heart-breaking story of a very small, angry, defensive, and inept part of the country that shunned all the rest, but who made all the rest of us (and the Iraqis) pay the terrible price.
According to her bio on Wikipedia, Dana Perrino--who finds military affairs baffling, and didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was--majored in political science and communications at Colorado State University-Pueblo. No information about her GPA is available.
(P.S. A minor semantic point, but the United States does not launch a destroyer into a war zone.)
Shown here are two victims of the destruction of Pompeii. The man appears to be trying--in vain--to protect the woman from the wave of destruction sweeping through the city.
It's one thing to see this picture. It's another to see the real thing, created when archaeologists poured plaster into the hole that Vesuvius' pyroclastic flow left where two human beings once were.
Straight from 2,000 years ago, indescribable pathos. Amazing.
Thanks!
