Arms and influence

The metaphor of disaster

Before I continue with the "Mr. Vietnam" series, I have just one word to say:

TSAR?!?!?

This penchant for appointing "tsars" goes back to the "drug tsar" idea from the 1980s, when the US government famously declared war on drugs. Who's winning? You decide.

The weird part of this story, of course, is the choice of the term "tsar." Why on earth would you choose a term connoting the following:

• The failure of European monarchy in general.
• The autocratic Romanov dynasty in particular.
• The authoritarian government that preceded the longest-lived totalitarian regime.
• The royal family that ended ignominiously, shot, burned, and covered in acid.

In no way, if I were President, would I want to call my new top-level official in charge of Iraq and Afghanistan a "tsar". From where does this penchant for applying the term "tsar" to important new officials come? It's largely a by-product of American business culture, where people are attracted to the muscular-sounding language behind terms like "tsar," with no awareness or interest in the sort of historical disasters they connote.

For example, I worked at a company, which shall remain nameless, that called an important marketing campaign "Rolling Thunder." Since I have a congenital defect that prevents me from keeping my big yap shut, I had to point out that Rolling Thunder not only implied the Vietnam War, but one of the least effective campaigns in that conflict. It was too late for anyone to change the name, however, since senior managers at this unnamed company already fell in love with the basso profundo sound of Rolling Thunder.

At the same company, a new project somehow got the codename Tsunami. Several people questioned the wisdom of naming something after a national disaster, but the moniker, once again, had already gathered momentum. However, in this case, the very real tsunami of 2004 forced an abrupt re-titling of this project. Ahem.

At least some people, such as Sean Penn, have the good sense to know when a metaphor doesn't work.

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.

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.

You say uranium, I say plutonium...

Today, a lot of the national security-related news and commentary is dominated by a small but important detail about the Bush Administration's confrontation with North Korea. Here's the short version:

In 1994, the Clinton Administration very nearly took the United States to war over North Korea's nuclear weapons program, based on plutonium enrichment. Thankfully, the DPRK backed down. American and North Korean officials encapsulated their understanding in the Agreed Framework. The DPRK agreed to end its plutonium enrichment program and allow international inspectors to monitor their compliance; the United States agreed to some economic assistance (assistance with single-use nuclear power and fuel shipments). Of course, the United States didn't have to make clear the threat of future military action, if the DPRK tried to cheat on this arrangement.

In 2002, the Bush Administration was convinced that the North Koreans were cheating. Specifically, US officials accused the DPRK of carrying out a clandestine uranium enrichment program. (Note the difference--uranium, not plutonium.) How North Korean officials responded is still under dispute. The US official who delivered the accusation, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, says that his North Korean counterpart confessed to the uranium enrichment program. The North Korean official, First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, says that he only admitted to the DPRK's right to develop nuclear weapons, and muddied the waters further by claiming a "neither  confirm nor deny" stance about any nuclear program.

Whatever anyone said or meant to say doesn't change the outcome, the Bush Administration's public confrontation with North Korea over the uranium enrichment program. Until the agreement a few days ago, the United States had effectively broken off all but a few minor channels of communications with the DPRK, and the North Koreans threw out the international inspectors.

With the new agreement now announced, US officials are obliged to give Congress some account of what's been happening. During one such briefing, another Assistant Secretary of State, Christopher Hill, admitted that, in hindsight, there was very little evidence that the DPRK had a uranium program at all. Certainly, the North Koreans still had the knowledge to build plutonium-enriched warheads, which is what they were doing during the time that the international inspectors were gone.

The North Korean nuclear test may have been one of North Korea's biggest miscalculations. China, which in other circumstances has defended the DPRK, turned on Kim Jong Il. While the DPRK can survive near-total isolation, it can't suffer total isolation. At the same time, the North Koreans still have a big bargaining chip, the dismantlement of their small nuclear arsenal and production facilities, that probably would not have existed, if the events of 2002 had gone differently.

Who's to blame? The North Koreans certainly share some culpability. Their diplomatic finesse is not what it should be, for the kind of brinksmanship they like to play. In fact, the DPRK seems incapable of anything but brinksmanship, threatening to build nuclear weapons, threatening to fire missiles at Japan, threatening to flatten Seoul... However, the Bush Administration certainly bears some responsibility, too. American culpability goes beyond the sneering at international arms control regimes that was all too fashionable in 2002 and 2003.

When the Bush team took office in 2001, they largely felt that the Clinton Administration had given the DPRK too much in the Agreed Framework. The economic assistance seemed unwarranted, particularly since "rogue states" like North Korea and Iran were, in the new President's worldview, the chief cause of national and international insecurities.

Aside from having a definite perspective on world events, the Bush team also had a clearly preferred approach. The United States needed to rattle its saber more often. Force was necessary to end Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait; force (or the threat of it) was the only thing that the DPRK would understand. Economic assistance was equivalent to being conned by the trickster in charge in Pyongyang.

Clearly, the Administration measured its own success in dealing with the North Koreans by how effectively they "stood firm" against granting any concessions. With nothing to offer other than another day without an American attack on the DPRK, the two countries stood in deadlock. Meanwhile, the DPRK saw how consumed the United States was with the Iraq mess, and calculated that it would experience little or no backlash if it were to announce it had nuclear weapons.

The Bush Administration has also left itself open to criticism that, yet again, it was seeing WMD programs that weren't really there. In a sense, the US was conned twice about nuclear weapons: once, by Saddam Hussein's ambiguous statements about having them at all; and again, by the DPRK's vague statements about its uranium enrichment program.

You definitely can't say that the Administration was completely bamboozled by US intelligence agencies, who had not given a clear verdict that the DPRK was in the uranium enrichment program. At best, there was only circumstantial evidence of this program. Much of the case depended on centrifuge purchases and contacts with the A.Q. Khan "Nukes R Us" network. Doubts were big enough that, two years ago, this Foreign Affairs article argued that the North Koreans in 2002 may not have cheated on the Agreed Framework.

It's still too early to declare the final verdict on what really happened here. However, the information available today seems to point to an unfortunate conclusion: senior US officials confused means (confronting a rogue state) with ends (preventing the North Koreans from developing nuclear weapons).

Complete freedom of action

IN THE NEWS
The following sentence from a Washington Post op-ed piece (many thanks to Armchair Generalist for the link) got me thinking:

The Air Force's new doctrine and the Bush administration's refusal to discuss, let alone negotiate, anything that could limit U.S. freedom of action in space -- along with the traditional secrecy surrounding military space programs -- has gotten China's attention.

How much of US grand strategy depends on having enormous freedom of action? To date, there has been no serious threat to American access to space. The US government worries very little about free navigation of the high seas, or of choke points like the Persian Gulf and the Panama Canal. With the collapse of the USSR, Americans can travel directly to practically anywhere in the world, with a few minor exceptions. Where Americans can't travel, they still enjoy relatively easy and instantaneous communication. How many nations, including the most powerful empires in history, ever had this degree of latitude?

Freedom of action has become so ingrained in the American worldview, that a minor event such as the Chinese "painting" of US spy satellites with lasers makes Americans extremely edgy. However, it's not the Chinese that are the most salient threat to American freedom of action. The bigger problem is closer to home.

Freedom of communications depends on having phone lines and satellite communications connect to international locations. Freedom of the seas depends not only on alliance politics in places like the Persian Gulf, but also on the availability of port facilities for the US Navy. Freedom of travel depends on how readily countries welcome American travelers.

American relations with other countries have not sunk to a low where the Panamanians wont' let us through the Canal, or the German government is imposing high fees for making calls to German phone numbers. Still, the freedom of action that Americans enjoy is largely built on the good will that Americans have built up, piece by piece, since World War II.

The US government has not always been successful at convincing the governments and citizens of other countries of its good will. Fortunately, an even broader international audience has been willing to trust Americans while not necessarily extending trust to the American government.

That situation has eroded since 2001, when the United States started acting as though (a) no one else had ever been a victim of terrorism before, and (b) other countries had better just get the hell out of the United States' way. If Americans are worried about maintaining their unprecedented freedom of action in the world, they might look at the escalating struggle between Congress and the White House over foreign policy as a good thing. If Americans, not just the American government, seem OK with US foreign policy over the last few years, the United States will lose even more good will.

When it comes time to pressure the Chinese government to stop menacing American satellites, the United States should be able to call on other countries to help. The response should be, "We share a common interest in keeping space open, and we trust you, even though you're the world's only superpower."

Rest in peace, President Ford

IN THE NEWS
It seems that, as difficult it was to describe Gerald Ford's role in modern American history while he was alive, the obituary writers seem to be having an easier time. From the very brief to the more comprehensive, most describe him fairly as a luckless custodian President for a few difficult years, who (among other things) kept US foreign policy during the post-Vietnam phase of the Cold War on track.

However, I haven't seen much mention of what he did after he left office. Ford's post-presidential life may not have had the scope and energy of Jimmy Carter's, but he definitely did more in the public eye than his fellow Republican ex-presidents. That's not damning with faint praise. That one more thing was, in hindsight, a nobler effort than it may have seemed at the time.

Several years ago (I'm still trying to find the exact dates), former Presidents Ford and Carter went on a joint speaking tour. Their goal was to emphasize that, while Republicans and Democrats had much legitimate disagreement, public debate was devolving into an ugly shouting match. This symbolic but important statement occurred long before the awful recent years of rhetorical wilding.

Ford's disagreements with the Bush Administration over the Iraq War are, perhaps, less important in hindsight than his efforts to maintain decency and balance in American politics. How the scales of historical judgment swing--the man who pardoned Nixon, or the man who helped the country shake off Nixonism--I couldn't say. 

What now? (2)

[For the first part of this discussion, click here.]

IN THE NEWS
Now that the midterm elections have placed US foreign policy in flux for the first time since the 9/11 attacks, it's time for a long-overdue reconsideration of priorities. Mental inertia has propelled American actions abroad for several years, to the point where the basic questions--what is important, and why?--almost never get asked.

Before getting anywhere near the Iraq mess, let's start with the fundamentals. Is counterterrorism the number one US national security priority? One could argue that, with the fragmentation of Al Qaeda, the main terrorist threat is effectively contained. Not only have there not been any follow-up attacks since 2001, but there is no evidence of serious plots against targets within the United States.

Unfortunately, the terrorist threat always had more than one dimension. Americans traveling abroad, US allies who might be intimidated by terrorists, terrorists working in league with criminal syndicates--even before 9/11, there were always more things to worry about than a direct attack on American soil. Terrorists also had many faces, from the Egyptian Salafist to the paranoid from Idaho. However, as soon as you subtracted attacks on the scale of 9/11 or Oklahoma City, you were left with a disparate set of minor threats, nothing worth promoting to the top of the list of US national security concerns.

With no evidence of militant Islamist groups organizing within the United States, the risk of another 9/11 seems low. It is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it seems distant. Al Qaeda no longer organizes and executes operations directly; instead, it provides support to local terrorist organizations within countries of interest. The American equivalent of the Islamist cells in Europe, Asia, and Africa do not seem to exist, and Al Qaeda is far less equipped to support them if a serious home-grown threat did emerge. Therefore, it's important to be vigilant, but not hysterical, about foreign-backed terrorist attacks within the United States.

Unfortunately, the other dimensions of the foreign terrorist threat have increased. An increasing number of places are dangerous for American citizens to visit. Native terrorist cells--from the second generation Middle Eastern immigrants in Europe, to the alienated Islamic populations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Philippines--are quite real, and as recent history shows, eager to carry out attacks whenever possible. The breeding grounds of terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia, such as Iraq and Pakistan, have complicated American relations with governments in these regions. This important facet of counterterrorism has grown more challenging, in part because it is more indirect.

Once again, there is an urgent need to speak clearly, honestly, and compellingly to the American public about the terrorist threat. Pretending that it does not exist would be just as counterproductive as the vague, unsubstantiated warnings from the Department of Homeland Security that have symbolized the last five years of US foreign policy. The Bush Administration and the Congressional Republicans worked hard to create an atmosphere of free-floating anxiety that, in November 2006, clearly backfired on them. However, battle fatigue might easily carry the American public too far in the opposite direction, ignoring the terrorist threats that still merit attention.

The best approach might be to abandon our sense of American exceptionalism--and certainly our sense that the 9/11 attacks created a unique national agony that the rest of the world can never understand. European countries, such as Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, have had their own raft of direct terrorist attacks on their citizens, and indirect terrorist threats to their interests. Counterterrorism is, for Europeans, very serious business--but not something wholly out of proportion to other national priorities.

What now? (1)

THE NEWS
Now that Americans have had a moment to take stock after the mid-term election, the obvious question is, What happens now? While it's impossible to divine from the election results any particular strategy that the American electorate wants to see pursued, it is clear that, as a referendum on US national security policy since 9/11, Americans are unhappy with the strategy the US government has been pursuing.

Until November 2004, the White House and Congress refused to open any questions about whether the current strategy was worth pursuing at any cost. Now, the question of which strategy, and what cost is worth paying to pursue it, are completely up for grabs. The cost of victory, however defined, against Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgent groups, and the Taliban might be higher than the US public is willing to pay. The apparently hopeless tangle of problems in Iraq are where Americans are most skeptical about continuing to spend American blood and treasure. The costs may represent investments in the wrong areas. Where many Americans are still skeptical that Iraq is still winnable, there is no indication that Americans have abandoned hope for Afghanstan, or believe that Al Qaeda and its allies are no longer worth our attention. There is still a strong consensus that, in some theaters, a better nvestment is not only still needed, but arguably should be increased. There would be practically no political resistance to increasing the support to the Afghan government, or enhancing port security.

Normally, a large legislative body like the US House of Representatives, or an august chamber of political notables like the US Senate, have a hard time agreeing upon a clear, coherent strategy. Although under the Constitution, the executive and legislative branches are supposed to share warmaking and foreign policy powers, the President has an easier time crafting a coherent policy than even his closest allies in Congress. Certainly, many of the people who are most loudly claiming that the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate now have to deliver a better strategy than the Bush Administration has devised are trying to distract from their own mistakes in crafting and supporting the failed strategy we have. Still, the new Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House, the chairs of the important foreign policy-related committees, and foreign policy notables in the Democratic Party have to seize the opportunity presented.

While it may be impossible to get a consensus on exact troop levels for Iraq, it's vital for the new Democratic leadership to have some agreed-upon, clearly-articulated strategy for Iraq. Once the strategy is in place, the other decisions will follow. By strategy, of course, I'm talking about something that the United States has not had, viz Iraq, since the 2003 invasion. As a theater strategy, the war aims in Iraq need to be clear. The reflex to describe some form of Iraqi regime—democratic or not, united or partitioned—must be resisted. To put it bluntly, from the perspective of US foreign policy, the shape of Iraqi politics is a means, not an end. The US government may try to make Iraq into as stable and democratic a Middle Eastern regime as today's Lebanon or Turkey, or it may merely want to create a cordon sanitaire around an Iraq in the midst of civil war, much like the Lebanon of the 1980s. Either extreme, and any political outcome between them, should be described as the instrument of US foreign policy, not its master. If it proves impossible to create this clear distinction between means and ends, then we have found the strongest argument for withdrawing from Iraq: the United States is incapable of developing any coherent strategy about that unhappy country.

Questions like troop levels, therefore, need to be kept on the shelf until the new Democratic leaders can answer clearly and forcefully the following questions:

• What are US interests in Iraq?
• What is the political outcome we are therefore trying to help create in Iraq?
• Do the governments of Iraq and the United States have the means to create this outcome?
• Will this effort put other US foreign policy priorities at risk?
• When do we know we have won the war, or lost it?

Democratic leaders must be able to provide simple, clear, and compelling answers to these fundamental questions of war and peace. The moment for windy, Kerry-esque circumlocutions is over. Another clear message of the mid-term election is, American voters would rather hear the stark, honest choices than be told to just hang in there. (In fact, Americans were probably capable of hearing the good and the bad—in other words, being treated like adults—from the very beginning.)

The outcome may not be what many expect. In other guerrilla wars—for example, during the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, or the Sendero Luminoso's war against the Peruvian government—the United States has also faced apparently hopeless moments, and still the guerrillas failed. (It's important to remember that victory in counterinsurgency doesn't necessarily mean killing every single guerrilla, but drastically reducing the threat the guerrillas pose to the regime.) Americans may be willing to hear an argument for increasing troop levels in Iraq, to pursue a credible strategy towards attainable ends. Just as surprisingly, Americans may be willing to accept that the chance to create a stable, democratic government in the near future has passed, but US interests may still be protected as long as the Iraqi tragedy is contained.

If George W. Bush were a different person, he might seize the opportunity to use this opportunity to extricate himself and his Administration from the Iraq mess. Unfortunately, it's more likely that he will continue to insist that he was right all along—"we will win, as long as we don't quit"—and he may turn on anyone in the executive branch who crosses the aisle while he's not willing to do so. Wishful thinking about how the 2006 election chastened President Bush is pointless, and conceivably dangerous. Nothing in what Bush has said indicates a real shift in his policy or approach. If you strip away the formalities of congratulating the newly-elected Congressional leaders, you see a White House ready, for example, to defend, all the way to the Supreme Court, the indefinite detainment of non-citizens.

In other words, there is another reason the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate need to have some kind of positive strategy, and not just a critique of what the Bush Administration and its former Congressional allies have done. For the foreseeable future, US foreign policy will be hostage to a brawl between the executive and legislative branches.

Benefit of accountability

IN THE NEWS
Suppose you have a neighbor whom everyone on your block has good reason to believe is dangerous. He drinks heavily, then gets into nearly-incomprehensible shouting matches with his neighbors over imagined slights. He talks in vague terms about how he's going to get the respect he deserves. You've become a particular target for this person, ever since the day you called the police when you heard him smashing every breakable object in his house. You now get threatening messages pushed into your mailbox, written anonymously, but obviously from him.

The police are supposed to be keeping an eye on your neighbor. Unfortunately, that didn't stop him from trying to shoot you when you were unloading the groceries from your car earlier today. When the police showed up, they shrugged, saying there was little they could have done to prevent the incident. Now, the situation really gets ugly: they can't find the gun he used, and no one else was a witness. The confrontation with you neighbor will have to escalate. You don't exactly feel safe--particularly since, before today, you haven't seen one patrol car go by his house, or one police officer stop by to check up on things.

You call the police department to complain about their lax approach to this threat. If the desk sergeant on the other end of the line were to say, "Gosh, you have to give us the benefit of the doubt on police matters," I can bet what your reaction might be.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the line that Tony Snow, White House press secretary, took during today's questions about North Korea. Snow went even further, claiming that any question of whether the Bush Administration could have done a better job at deterring the North Koreans was "silly."

Let's compare this incident to how another President handled a clear foreign policy failure. John F. Kennedy had to face the music on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Not only did the Cuban army crush the small force of anti-Castro exiles, at a time when Cold War tensions about Communist penetration into the Western hemisphere was at an all-time high, but the public would soon learn that the Kennedy Administration had lied about the US government's backing of this misconceived operation.

Kennedy's first response was a speech to the American Association of Newspaper Editors (click here for the audio, and here for a transcript). Barely three months in office, the new president hardly tucked his tail between his legs. He did, however, admit that the US government could and would endure failures during the Cold War:

We intend to profit from this lesson. We intend to re-examine and reorient our forces of all kinds-cur tactics and our institutions here in this community. We intend to intensify our efforts for a struggle in many ways more difficult than war, where disappointment will often accompany us.

The next day, during a press conference, Kennedy was more forthright into taking responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. "There's an old saying,'" Kennedy said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. . . . I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."

It wasn't a perfect admission of failure, and it was a while before Americans heard the complete, ugly story about the Bay of Pigs. It was, however, a critical moment, when Kennedy took responsibility from that point forward. (Later, some of the top officials behind the secret planning and support for the Bay of Pigs operation, such as CIA Director Allen Dulles, lost their jobs because of this fiasco.)

Rather than lambasting him for his failure, many Americans--including some likely critics--respected Kennedy for taking immediate responsibility. His willingness to be accountable made it easier to give him the benefit of the doubt in future foreign policy crises, such as the Berlin confrontation and the Cuban Missile Crisis. However frightening or uncertain events looked at the moment, someone nominally in charge accepted that he was really in charge.

Kim Jong Il is just as reprehensible as Stalin or Khrushchev. The presidents who oppose him have to be just as willing to be held accountable as their predecessors. As Kennedy showed, American presidents receive the benefit of the doubt after they have appeared to accept the mantle of responsibility.

Thirteen days

IN THE NEWS
It's coming up to the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the North Korean nuclear test, remembering how the Kennedy Administration soberly handled a nuclear crisis is especially timely. I'll have more to say on this topic later this month.