Arms and influence

It's Pehechaan time!

Some people might unwind after a long day with a glass of wine, some relaxing music, and an engrossing novel. But how can that possibly compete with the Indian doppelgänger of John Waters, enticing young men and women to shake their heads until they suffer permanent neck damage? Seriously, there's no competition.

Bolton, come home

I don't know about you, but if John Bolton were my employee, I'd get him off the air, pronto. His appearance on The Daily Show, in which he lacked the good sense to stop snarling and snapping, was bad enough. On British television, where the gloves really come off, Bolton did even worse.

He stuck his foot in his mouth during a one-on-one interview. (Some choice quotes: "I would have given the Iraqis a copy of The Federalist Papers and wished them luck." "We never said that Iraq was an imminent threat.") On a different program, he looked like a cranky, distant representative of a cranky, distant government during a panel discussion.

The British media are far better at posing hard questions to public figures than their American counterparts. They can also smell a "Colonel Blimp" from a mile away.

A hostage here, a hostage there...

This analysis of Iran's strategy in holding British soldiers hostage is a bit misconceived:

What should truly worry Washington is that if this plan is successful, US soldiers are likely to be next in line for capture by Iran – and a manipulation of American public opinion just before the 2008 elections which would damage a Republican candidate supporting Bush’s stance would be perfect timing.

This is a plan that is already becoming more popular inside Iranian military circles, especially those belonging to the ultra-conservative Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). After the capture of four of the group’s operatives by US forces in northern Iraq, many IRGC members are eagerly waiting to settle scores with the US.

It is all too possible that the capture of the British soldiers can be seen as a trial run.

[You can practically here the creepy incidental music: Dunh-dunh-daaaaaaaah!]

We don't know exactly what happened in this incident, so it's a bit early to jump to conclusions. Iran's  normal MO is to encourage its allies, such as Hezbollah, to take Western hostages, rather than engage in that dirty business directly. The capture of the British troops is a notable break in that pattern, which makes one wonder about what's really happening here.

There are a lot of possible scenarios, many involving chance more than calculation. If factions in the Iranian regime do have a devious plan, I suspect it has more to do with convincing the chief American ally in the Iraq war, Great Britain, to withdraw earlier rather than later.

Security? Just say no.

The US attorney imbroglio wouldn't normally be a topic for a blog about national security. However, at least one revelation in the last few days does have a serious national security dimension.

To avoid discovery, in the legal sense of the term, White House officials, including Karl Rove, have been using outside e-mail accounts, on mail servers maintained by the Republican National Committee. While that statement sinks in, here's a quote from a White House employee:

"We just got a bit lazy," said one aide. "We knew E-mails could be subpoenaed. We saw that with the Clintons but I don't think anybody saw that we were doing anything wrong."

Actually, I think they had the Iran-Contra scandal in mind, more than the Clintons. Remember when Oliver North et al. thought they had deleted messages from the internal mail system, only to discover that archived copies of them still existed?

Legal matters aside
There may be good legal reasons why people in the White House should never, never use outside e-mail to conduct government business. Some observers have cited the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which in a post-Watergate world, clearly intended to preserve even the most embarrassing content. If content is maintained outside US government systems, the risk of losing this information to posterity runs pretty high.

Unfortunately, there's a bit of wiggle room in the Act, which has exemptions for "personal records," which include "materials relating to private political associations, and having no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President" and "materials relating exclusively to the President's own election to the office of the Presidency; and materials directly relating to the election of a particular individual or individuals to Federal, State, or local office, which have no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President." It seems doubtful that these exemptions were intended to cover 95% of the communications from the President's Political Advisor, however, which fairly describes how often Karl Rove used these RNC e-mail accounts.

While there are other laws that the Administration may have broken here, the legal issues aren't necessarily the biggest problem with outside e-mail use. National security could be easily and severely compromised.

Communications insecurity
You don't have to be someone like me, working on the software business, to know the potential security risks with e-mail. Instead of getting into technical details, I'll tell you how information technology (IT) departments treat situations like this one. I've worked with hundreds of IT professionals who are very concerned that people in their organizations are using outside e-mail like Yahoo! and Gmail, outside file storage on services like XDrive, outside chat systems like AOL Instant Messaging, and outside web conferencing services like WebEx. (Here's a decent summary of the e-mail security problems, if you're interested.)

Without saying how secure these services are, they are definitely not designed for a high-security environment. There's also the problem of security "along the wire." An outside e-mail service might be very secure, but the connection between your PC or Blackberry might not be. (That statement definitely applies to text messages, which White House staffers were also using to communicate.)

Companies worry that trade secrets might be exposed, or they might be violating regulations about the confidentiality of financial information (see the SEC restrictions on what companies can communicate during quiet periods). HR departments, insurance companies, and health care providers can face serious legal penalties if they accidentally expose private medical information.

Need I go on? Let's just say, outside communication and collaboration services are a big source of anxiety in IT departments. Sure, there are companies in the security business who overstate the threats. However, the threats are quite real. If DoD employees can't install software on their own computers, why should White House staffers be using their Blackberries to read e-mail on the RNC's e-mail servers, with God only knows how good security on the server or on the wireless connection to it?

Multiple levels of information security
No one should have to make the argument that the White House needs to be at least as secure in its communications as an electronics retailer or a hospital chain. In fact, it needs to be more secure, in part because of the accidental ways people might divulge important secrets without realizing it. While most people focus on the first-order secrets, the direct documentation of decision-makers' statements or policies, the threat of indirect, second-order disclosure is just as dangerous.

Take, for example, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A number of indirect clues that the Japanese were going to take some kind of aggressive action existed. The negotiations between Japan and the United States had stopped. The bulk of the Japanese navy, most critically its carriers, were not in port. Japanese diplomats were destroying documents. As shown in the Russo-Japanese war and other conflicts, the Japanese pattern was to mobilize, strike, and then declare war. Scholars continue to debate whether the US government should have been better prepared for the attack because the warning signs were certainly there.

Flash forward to the present day, when White House staffers have their daily work perturbed by counterterrorism, the war in Iraq, and any number of other high-security questions. Even if someone eavesdropping on RNC e-mail accounts couldn't find a "smoking gun" document about (speaking hypothetically here) a secret understanding between the US and North Korean governments, someone could infer the existence of such a deal through these kinds of second-order clues. Which top officials were out of the office on particular days? Were White House officials sending lots of messages to anyone used as back channel conduit for discussions with the DPRK? Was anyone asking for a briefing on particular legal or diplomatic issues that might point towards a secret US-DPRK deal?

Of course, it's the height of absurdity and hypocrisy for the Justice Department to be using outside channels of communication. On the one hand, the DOJ is involved in highly secret counterterrorism investigations and prosecutions. On the other hand, some key DOJ officials may have been using text messaging and outside e-mail servers to communicate.

An obvious conclusion
We can spend the next several years tied up in knots over the legal issues involved. It can take less than five minutes of reflection to determine that someone in the White House needs to be fired for jeopardizing national security in this fashion.

Some kryptonite is red

Fellow Cold War buffs might enjoy this history of commie super-villains (in two parts, here and here).

Hanson the not-historian

My blogging colleagues at Lawyers, Guns, and Money have made Victor Davis Hanson a special target of well-deserved criticism. Let me jump ahead of them, for once.

I haven't seen 300. I probably never will. I have read the comic book version, so I feel that I'm not violating my "never comment on a movie you haven't seen" rule too badly.

I have seen many occasions when Hollywood didn't need to mangle history to tell an interesting story. Glory, for example, is a great movie, and it sticks very closely to the facts. (There are some very minor historical quibbles, such as Frederick Douglass' age as depicted in the film, or the direction from which the 54th Massachusetts attacked Fort Wagner.) To every Oliver Stone out there, who wants to play fast and loose with history, I have a simple message: Try harder. You can do it. Others have.

If you're a professional historian, and not a Media Notable, historical inaccuracies should feel like bamboo shoots under the fingernails. Instead, Victor Davis Hanson embraces the people mangling his life's work. He's pretty quick to "correct" us poor rubes, who think that if a movie is about the Battle of Thermopylae, it should depict the Battle of Thermopylae:

Again, purists must remember that 300 seeks to bring a comic book, not Herodotus, to the screen.

Gee, I thought, as an historian, Hanson was by definition a purist. My mistake.

Yet, despite the need to adhere to the conventions of Frank Miller’s graphics and plot — every bit as formalized as the protocols of classical Athenian drama or Japanese Kabuki theater — the main story from our ancient Greek historians is still there...

Wow, the main story is still there. Thank God the Spartans aren't fighting the Comintern, the Klingon Empire, or The Injustice League. Then we'd really have something to complain about.

But most importantly, 300 preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece.

Of course, the real story is far more interesting than this simple-minded caricature. The Spartans weren't exactly democrats themselves. While they certainly didn't want to be clients of Persia, they weren't exactly ashamed about their oppression of the helots, or their intensely oligarchic political system.

The differences among Greek cities--the curse that runs through the next two centuries of Greek history--manifested itself during this first Greco-Persian War. The Athenians fought the Persians at Marathon without Spartan support. (The Spartans claimed that a religious festival kept them out of the fight, but a helot revolt is a more likely explanation.) As the Persian navy and army moved down the Greek peninsula, many Greek cities capitulated, instead of being wiped out by the massive Persian "host."

Once you become a celebrity historian, however, things like facts become less important. Here's a prime example:

If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus — who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others.

In fact, Herodotus and Plutarch never depicted the Persian invasion in these starkly black-and-white tones. It took me about 5 minutes to find a quote I had remembered from reading Plutarch years ago. To get the Spartan admiral in charge of the allied fleet to risk battle, the Athenian leader Themistocles has to shame the Spartan:

Eurybiades, on account of the prestige of Sparta, held the chief command of the fleet, but was unwilling to risk a battle, preferring to weigh anchor and sail to the Isthmus where the land army of the Peloponnesians was assembled. This project was opposed by Themistokles; and it was on this occasion that he made use of the following well-known saying: When Eurybiades said to him, "Themistokles, in the public games they whip those who rise before their turn." "True," said Themistokles, "but they do not crown those who lag behind." And when Eurybiades raised his staff as if he would strike him, Themistokles said, "Strike, but hear me."

Another memorable Plutarch quote comes from a century later. Antalcidas, a Spartan diplomat, was dispatched to Persia to recognize the Great King Artaxerxes' claims to Asia Minor. Sparta was willing to give up the Ionian Greeks in exchange for a Persian alliance against Athens.

And therefore Artaxerxes, though always abominating other Spartans, and looking upon them, as Dinon says, to be the most impudent men living, gave wonderful honour to Antalcidas when he came to him into Persia; so much so that one day, taking a garland of flowers and dipping it in the most precious ointment, he sent it to him after supper, a favour which all were amazed at. Indeed he was a person fit to be thus delicately treated, and to have such a crown, who had among the Persians thus made fools of Leonidas and Callicratidas. Agesilaus, it seems, on some one having said, "O the deplorable fate of Greece, now that the Spartans turn Medes!" replied, "Nay, rather it is the Medes who become Spartans." But the subtlety of the repartee did not wipe off the infamy of the action. The Lacedaemonians soon after lost their sovereignty in Greece by their defeat at Leuctra; but they had already lost their honour by this treaty.

Not exactly the Clark Kent-like defenders of freedom, justice, and the Hellenic way.

Maybe Hanson thinks that, because we're more modern than the ancients, we're smarter than they were. On the contrary: writers like Plutarch and Thucydides had a far more mature grasp of Greek history and politics than Hanson does. Still, pity poor Plutarch, who never got invited to the same parties that Hanson probably attends.

Widgets 'R' Us

As a public service, we here at Arms and Influence have made a widget-sized version of this blog. See the column to your right for the button that will help you use it.

The Internet: progressively tinier content since 2007.

The skeptical eye

Just when you thought it was safe to trust National Intelligence Estimates again, ArmsControlWonk dissects the problems with recent NIEs about Iran's nuclear program. Fortunately, the more skeptical view arrives at a happier conclusion:

Recent public statements suggest that a new forthcoming NIE on Iran’s nuclear program will not significantly alter this estimate.  This is not to say that Iran is not making progress toward mastering enrichment, but merely that time remains for diplomacy.

In a similar vein, the Wonkster also takes a second look at the Tarhuna "weapons facility." In the 1990s, US officials warned that it was probably a Libyan chemical weapons facility. Er, um, wrong. There may have been good reasons to be suspicious, but US intelligence professionals seem to have lacked the hard evidence about Tarhuna that they had about its "sister" facility at Rabta.

Saints! Idiots! Nukes!

When you read the headline, "Rain KO'd Interceptors During Korea Missile Tests," what's your first reaction?

1. Idiots! These [defense contractors/pro-SDI politicians/military professionals] are not to be trusted!
2. Saints! They persevere, despite the highly slanted press against them!
3. I don't know!

I strongly suggest that, if your reflex is either #1 or #2, you reconsider your approach to life, technology, and the news. Read the article, including the comments. Here's the picture that develops:

• The fact that the ABM system was under construction, and the level of rainfall was "unprecedented," challenges the "They're all idiots" interpretation.
• However, the contractor that built the silos seems to have done a crappy job.
• Neither of the previous two points invalidates the idea of building an anti-ballistic missile defense.
• On the other hand, there's no way of telling how well the Fort Greely defenses would work, were ICBMs fired in anger.

If there's anything the last several years should have taught us, it's the danger of jumping to conclusions, with limited information, about inherently complicated questions.

Venezuela, land of socialist nostalgia

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's announcement of a land redistribution program is a blast from the past, from a time when you couldn't say "Latin American politics" without adding "land reform" somewhere in the sentence.  I wonder what took Chavez this long to get around to land reform. (Actually, he has been threatening it for a couple of years.) Not only does it play well with his core constituents among the lower classes, but it also gives him another negotiating point with the wealthy elite.

Certainly, foreign investors have worried about Chavez making this move. However, Chavez leaves a fair amount of wiggle room in the program. While large landholdings might make multinationals uncomfortable, unused land is less threatening. However, fear of confiscations have already done serious damage to foreign investment. Actual confiscations may not do much more.

Whatever you think of Chavez and his policies, one point is certainly not worth debating: he's the happy recipient of high oil prices, which gives him a big political cushion. Oil money can help buy off domestic and foreign opposition to his land reform program. If US officials are worried about Chavez, they should be looking harder at what could be done to lower oil prices. Otherwise, the US government has very little leverage over Chavez.