If we outsource steel production, silicon chip production, flat panel display production, car production, software development, chip design, energy production (which is more important than the airplane that dispenses the fuel IMO), and thousands of other things and our elites acquiesce to this state of affairs while we run monstrous deficits and go into hock to the world why do our elites expect us to take them seriously when some of them try to draw the line at aerial refueling tankers?
But the hot rhetoric could sound overly nationalistic, and even hypocritical, once the real implications for jobs and national security become clear. Boeing, for example, would have made many of its own tanker parts overseas, and some experts say that claims of job losses to a foreign company seem exaggerated.
For now, though, the pro-Boeing, pro-America talk is showing no signs of letting up.
“We really have to wake up the country,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State, where Boeing is a significant employer. “We are at risk of losing a major part of our aerospace industry to the Europeans forever.”
Representative Todd Tiahrt, Republican of Kansas, said: “It’s outsourcing our national security. An American tanker should be built by an American company with American workers.” Boeing would have done some of its tanker assembly in Kansas.
I'm just asking.
Our elites are willing to fritter away a far larger competitive advantage and source of national security than the ability to do refueling tanker design in the United States (and EADS and Northrup Grumman will do tanker construction in Alabama anyway). We ought to try to hang onto more important advantages like sound finances and a smart populace. We do have one important advantage over East Asia that we ought to try to enhance rather than ruin.
After describing how Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr gets funding from Iran for his ten thousand militiamen of the Mahdi Army Peter W. Galbraith points out that the US presence in Iraq has severely weakened Washington's ability to influence the actions of Iran's government.
For two months, the Coalition and the Mahdi Army fought pitched battles around Shiite Islam's holiest shrines. Iraq's senior Shiite clerics and politicians, all of whom saw al-Sadr as a threat, assured Bremer of their support and did nothing to help him. Iraq's Shiites were the prime beneficiary of Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but America's stock in Iraq had fallen so low that only Iraq's Kurds were prepared to stand with the United States against al-Sadr. By May 2004, al-Sadr's insurgency so disrupted US supply lines in Iraq that Bremer considered ordering food rationing for the thousands of Americans working in Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone. A year after liberating Iraq, the world's only superpower was finding it difficult to feed the Americans in charge of the occupation.
Today, Moqtada al-Sadr controls one of the largest factions within the victorious United Iraq Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 national elections. Nor is he the only member of the Alliance likely to side with Iran if war comes. SCIRI—the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—is Iraq's largest political party. It was founded in Tehran in 1982, and its name gives an accurate idea of its politics. The Iranians also created, trained, and apparently still fund SCIRI's military wing, the Badr Corps, which has over 12,000 troops. Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is the former head of the Badr Corps, whose members he has helped place throughout Iraq's national police. Dawa, the third major element in the UIA, also has close relations with Iran.
With the US Army vastly overextended in Iraq and Iran's friends in power in Baghdad, the Iranians apparently feel confident that the United States will take no action to stop them if they try to make a nuclear weapon. This is only one little-noticed consequence of America's failure in Iraq. We invaded Iraq to protect ourselves against nonexistent WMDs and to promote democracy. Democracy in Iraq brought to power Iran's allies, who are in a position to ignite an uprising against American troops that would make the current problems with the Sunni insurgency seem insignificant. Iran, in effect, holds the US hostage in Iraq, and as a consequence we have no good military or nonmilitary options in dealing with the problem of Iran's nuclear facilities. Unlike the 1979 hostage crisis, we did this to ourselves.
This is the irony of Bush and the Jewish neoconservatives who promoted his Iraq debacle: They made the US much weaker in dealing with Iran and yet Iran poses a much more serious threat to Israel than Saddam did.
Galbraith points out that arrogance is not a substitute for competence and sufficient resources to accomplish a task.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, "Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy." His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush's shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.
These shortcomings have led directly to the current dilemmas of the US both in Iraq and with Iran. Unless the President and his team—abetted by some oversight from Congress— are capable of examining the causes of failure in Iraq, it is hard to believe he will be able to manage the far more serious problem with Iran.
I do not mind arrogance so much when it comes from people who are really good at whatever they are doing. But Bush's major talent is winning elections. His arrogance in foreign policy is completely unjustified. At this point he couldn't even win elections any more. (and see here for more on his approval rating)
Read Galbraith's excellent full article. It is a review of a couple of books about the Iraq war: George Packer's The Assassins' Gate and L. Paul Bremer III's My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. The material relayed by Galbraith from those books provides insights what decisions were made by the Bushies and reveals a very damaging amateurishness on the part of Bremer, Bush, and other decision makers. Again, read the whole article.
Wondered when the national security types might start noticing what a serious pickle the United States is in due to oil and natural gas? Testifying before the US Senate Foreign Relations Comittee on April 5, 2006 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that growing appetites for energy are warping diplomacy around the world.
"We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more, as secretary of state, than the way that the politics of energy. I will use the word 'warping' diplomacy around the world. It has given extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very good ways for the international system, states that would otherwise have very little power," Rice said.
"It is sending some states that are growing very rapidly in an all-out search for energy states like China, states like India that is really sending them into parts of the world where they've not been seen before, and challenging, I think, for our diplomacy."
She said "We are looking to technological solutions for the energy appetite of growing countries. And, of course, being able to cooperate with India on civil nuclear cooperation would help us to pursue that goal. And finally, I'll just note that we also are looking very hard for good partners in the nonproliferation work," she added.
"On the question of the India nuclear weapons programme, first of all, the Indian programme, we believe, just in terms of what India's incentives or disincentives are to grow its nuclear programme, its strategic programme, are more related to the political-military conditions in the region, than to any quantity of available nuclear material," Rice said.
This is all terribly predictable. Of course China is going to spend big money to compete with the United States for influence among the oil producing countries. The bigger the Chinese economy gets the greater the effort the Chinese government will make with foreign aid, military advisors, military equipment sales, diplomatic support in the United Nations, and in still other ways to curry favor with the oil producers. US influence will decline accordingly.
China does not object to bad human rights records when it courts countries.
China's oil industry has wooed countries that the United States has tried to isolate for political reasons -- such as Sudan, Iran and Burma -- potentially undermining the isolation efforts. Three of China's major oil companies have been aggressively pursuing long-term supply arrangements in such places as Venezuela, Nigeria, Gabon and Angola.
Since US influence will decline in oil producing countries the US ought to reduce its dependence on oil.
See my March 2004 post "Luft And Korin On China's Rising Demand For Oil And Saudi Arabia". I make a different argument in my post "Increased Chinese Demand For Oil Is A Net Loss For The USA". In a nutshell: rising demand from China and other countries forces the United States to pay more for oil. This makes us worse off. We have to make and export more stuff to pay for the oil we use.
American and Western dependence on oil creates environmental, economic, and national security problems. I think the most adaptive response to the heightening competition for dwindling oil reserves is to focus on developing replacements for oil rather than get caught up in a geopolitical Machiavellian "great game" for control of the oil that remains. But as energy prices continue on their upward path and growth in world oil production appears to falter the neocons compound our economic problems by draining America's treasury in Iraq while they prepare to extend their war into Iran.
The US trade deficit, worsened by the high price of oil, is eventually going to cause a decline in the value of the dollar. Since oil is priced in dollars that decline in the dollar will lower the cost of oil in other currencies. That, in turn, will increase demand for oil in other countries which will drive up the price of oil in dollars even higher.
Unfortunately, we're investing in war, not in crash projects to develop new energy sources. Maybe there's time to spare. But some events, like true civil war and collapse in Iraq, could change everything in a day. We're running a faith-based energy policy—still addicted to oil. If something goes wrong, it will go wrong big.
The Bush Administration is keen to change everything in a day by launching a strike against Iran. That'd take about 3 million barrels of oil a day off the market. Hello deep recession.
I have very low expectations from Washington DC on energy policy as I do on immigration policy, Middle Eastern policy, and fiscal policy. Hopefully entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and others in the private sector will come up with solutions.
Dimitri Simes, president of The Nixon Center and publisher of The National Interest says a Carter Administration covert operations in Afghanistan helped push the Soviets to invade.
ACCORDING TO former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, now one of the most acerbic critics of President Bush's handling of both Iraq and radical Islam, the Carter Administration authorized a covert CIA operation, notwithstanding an expectation that it would provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski said that clandestine U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began months before the Soviet invasion; in fact, he added, he wrote a note to President Carter predicting that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." As Brzezinski put it, "we didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." And even in hindsight, Brzezinski thought "that secret operation was an excellent idea", because "it had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap" and exploited "the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War."
Of course, this is not what the Carter Administration told Congress or the American people at the time.
In view of Soviet expansionism elsewhere, the United States had little choice but to fight the invasion of Afghanistan once it occurred. But supporting resistance to a Soviet occupation is very different from intentionally "increasing the probability" of a Soviet invasion.
More recently, Brzezinski has acknowledged that one of his motives in entangling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was promoting the liberation of Central Europe by diverting Soviet attention from responding more forcefully to Solidarity's challenge. Yet, desirable as this end might have been, one may question whether it justified using means that would provoke an almost decade-long war in Afghanistan that both devastated the country and jump-started a global Islamic jihad against America.
The US use of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to funnel support to Afghan rebels helped push the rebellion in a more Islamic direction and helped to radicalize many Saudis. Plus, Pakistani ISI agents developed lots of relationships with radical jihadists. This helped the Taliban come to power and stay in power. Suppose the CIA had put more effort into directly supporting the insurgency against the Soviets rather than use Muslim intermediaries. The CIA might have been able to favor relatively less religious insurgents. Though it would have taken a fair amount of foresight for the CIA to appreciate how big a problem the Muslims were going to become.
Simes also says the US could have prevented the rise of the Taliban by compromising with the Soviets to keep a coalition government in power on Soviet withdrawal. He also says the Clinton Administration rejected Russian proposals for joint action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Simes points out that in some cases where the US government claims to take a position based on principle it supports outcomes which have important implications for many other border disputes and legitimacy questions.
What if Russia takes the predictable position that what is good for Kosovo should be good for other unrecognized but de facto independent states such as Nagorno-Karabakh or the Transdniester Republic? What of separatist regions like South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which share borders with Russia and where local populations overwhelmingly do not want to be a part of Georgia? In the latter case, the United States would face a series of unpleasant choices. Would the United States, in the name of principle, compel a pro-American Georgian regime to abandon its desire to restore the country's territorial integrity? Or would Washington side with Tbilisi, especially if it decides to use force to recapture these regions? If the latter, the United States could find itself embroiled in a major dispute with Russia that could effectively end cooperation on other matters of vital importance to the United States. And how would the United States force a resolution granting independence to Kosovo through the UN Security Council over probable Chinese objections, without offering guarantees that Taiwan will never become a separate, independent state? Or argue that Kosovo deserves full independence without setting a dangerous precedent that the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey may seek to emulate? The potential for trouble seems serious and real.
One thing I find annoying about Bush Jr Administration rhetoric on foreign policy is the seeming sincerity with which Bush and his underlings claim they are taking principled positions. The many inconsistencies in the Administration's positions make the claims of principle really hard to believe. When Bush Senior claimed we were fighting Saddam over Kuwait due to considerations of high principle I was gratified to know that he didn't really believe this (James Baker off-the-record to the NY Times: “We are talking about oil. Got it? Oil, vital American interests.”). Bush was just trying to prevent Saddam from becoming too powerful and to send a message to other governments (especially governments eyeing oil properties) not to go on wars of conquest. But Bush Jr. often seems too intellectually lazy to bother thinking out the many ramifications of his decisions. Simple moral principles can not replace the need for understanding the rest of the world. Clinton also made mistakes (many outlined by Simes) though not so much due to intellectual laziness as due to beliefs in myths.
Simes thinks in a calculus considerably more nuanced than what we hear from the Bushies or many ex-Clinton Administration foreign policy makers. It seems fitting that Simes runs The Nixon Center. Nixon would have understood these calculations and he would probably have made better decisions than Clinton or Bush II on events in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Russia, and other foreign lands.
Read the full Simes essay. It reminds me of just how ignorant not just US presidents but many US foreign policy makers tend to be about just how different foreign lands are from the US. The belief in the universalism of US or Western values continually trips up US policy makers who seem unable to grasp just how different other ethnicities, cultures, societies, and religions really are.
The internal report stated that China is adopting a "string of pearls" strategy of bases and diplomatic ties stretching from the Middle East to southern China that includes a new naval base under construction at the Pakistani port of Gwadar.
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China is building naval bases in Burma and has electronic intelligence gathering facilities on islands in the Bay of Bengal and near the Strait of Malacca. Beijing also supplied Burma with "billions of dollars in military assistance to support a de facto military alliance," the report said.
The report projects world oil demand growing from 75 million barrels per day currently to 120 million barrels per day by 2025 with 80% of that increase going to Asian customers. Suppose that is correct. It suggests that approximately 80% of all economic growth in the next 20 years will be in Asia. Though possibly the existing Western nations will experience economic growth that provides a higher ratio of increased output to increased energy use. As it stands now China's ratio of economic output to energy use is lower than America's (sorry no cite for this which is from memory). But I would expect their efficiency of energy use to increase with time.
But I have a more basic problem with a projection of such a large increase in oil production. For too many countries oil field production is declining. Between now and 2025 more countries will reach their peak oil production and their production will begin to decline. So the remaining countries (chiefly in the Middle East) will have to massively expand their production. A production increase of 45 million barrels per day is more than 4 times total current Saudi production. So how is such an increase in the cards? I'm skeptical.
Oil is China's Achilles Heel from the standpoint of military strategy. Even if they use their massive economic growth rate to build a much larger blue water navy (and I expect they will do exactly that) it is far easier to deny the use of the oceans to some nation than to protect the sea lanes. On the other hand, even if the US and China clash over Taiwan the US would have a difficult time denying oil to China while still allowing oil to get through to other nations in East Asia. Though conceivably the US could allow tankers with carefully selected crews of known loyalties to go around New Guinea headed toward Japan and South Korea.
Vikram Sood, recently retired head of India's foreign intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has written an interesting piece on ways that both Osama Bin Laden and the United States have damaged their positions each after first making substantial gains.
Masoud was the last obstacle to establishing Taliban rule in Afghanistan and making that country truly Islamic. He had to go. Months of planning and two assassins eventually succeeded in murdering Ahmed Shah Masoud on September 9, 2001 (see Masoud: From warrior to statesman, September 12, 2001). The country was up for grabs now, with the Taliban as the only real viable force in Afghanistan. They had the backing of Pakistan and the support of al-Qaeda. Strategic depth was a reality for the Pakistanis for a short period on September 9.
From Afghanistan, the Islamists could fan out into the resource rich Central Asian republics from Kazakhstan to Turkmenistan. Why stop there? There was Chechnya beckoning, and the green flag of Islam would fly from Morocco to Pakistan and throughout parts of Europe.
Sood is arguing that absent the 9/11 attack the United States and the rest of the Western nations would have awakened too late to stop a spread of Islamist rule throughout Central Asia. This sounds at least partially plausible. I say "partially" because my guess is that some of the governments of the "stans" in Central Asia likely would have succeeded in holding off an Islamic insurgency even without US help. He also says (and I agree) that the US role in Iraq has cost the US a lot of the gains in terms of goodwill that came from 9/11. The US invasion has been a great propaganda coup for Bin Laden and the Jihadists. Worse still, that miscalculation continues to cost the US and looks to do so for years to come.
The answer to the question of whether Bin Laden made a mistake with the 9/11 attack depends on Bin Laden's primary goal. To Bin Laden the "stans" of Central Asia are a side show. His primary interest is Arab countries (since they speak a version of the language of the prophet) and Saudi Arabia in particular. However, radical Islamist regimes in Central Asia would have been assets to his primary cause. Also, the power of the Islamists in the Pakistani government could have been strengthened if the US didn't decide to focus attention and pressure on Pakistan. Also, time spent waiting to make a really big attack on the US would have been time to train terrorists and build up bigger networks of sleeper agents. So I'm inclined to agree with Sood that the 9/11 attack was a mistake.
On the other hand, the 9/11 attack created the conditions that made the US invasion of Iraq possible. That invasion has hurt the US strategically in a number of ways. I therefore find it difficult to conclude at this point that Bin Laden's attack was a strategy miscalculation.
Each faction in a struggle makes miscalculations. The Islamists in Europe are also notable for their miscalculations. Rather than avoiding political assassinations and attacks until their fraction of the populations of various countries gets much bigger they just couldn't help themselves a small group of them responded to the message coming from the radical Islamic community in Holland and had to go assassinating Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh while threatening to kill many others. This is the problem with a militant religious movement that has no central authority and no disciplined chains of command. Freelancers will eventually heed the call of the propagandists and go hunting. More such attacks by Islamists acting independently of Al Qaeda in France, Germany, and other European likely will shift public opinion against Muslims and lead to changes in immigration policy that will reduce future Muslim immigration to Europe.
Al Qaeda and other Islamists may manage kill a lot more Europeans. Attacks with lethality similar to the Madrid train bombings may be repeated. Such attacks are going to shift public opinion in non-Muslim countries but likely will do nothing to recover US losses in public opinion in such important Muslim countries as Indonesia. Still, gains for the US are possible as a result of Jihadist attacks in other countries.
According to some reports Al Qaeda even seems inclined to pursue operations in Europe in order to attack countries (notably Italy and Britain) that have troops on the ground in Iraq fighting alongside American troops. What I find difficult to guess is whether success in carrying out such attacks will do more to build resentment in Europe toward Al Qaeda or toward the US for invading Iraq. But successful Jihadists attacks in Europe will drive European public opinion in an increasinly anti-Muslim direction regardless of what the attacks do to European opinion of America.
The Hudson Institute and pollster Frank Luntz report that the American people want greater efforts to be made to create alternatives to Middle Eastern oil.
The key findings of the poll indicate that:
- By an almost 3 to 1 margin, Americans prioritize "reducing our reliance on foreign oil" over "cheaper prices for oil and gas."
- 91% of Americans agreed (74% strongly agree) that "when it comes to energy, we need an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation - not the Saudi royal family."
- 83% of Americans agree that "reducing our dependence on foreign oil must be a top priority for the next administration."
- 57% of Americans say that the U.S. government should allow energy companies to explore for oil in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as well as in many areas off the U.S. coast.
Since September 11th, Americans have become increasingly aware of the link between oil, politics, and terrorism, and they now fear that buying oil from the Middle East means financing terrorism. For this reason, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. In fact, by an almost 3:1 margin Americans believe that "reducing our reliance on foreign oil and gas" was more important to them than "cheaper prices for oil and gas."
The Bush Administration would not have to convince the American public to support a more aggressive energy policy. The public is well ahead of the politicians on seeing the connection between energy and national security.
An energy policy aimed at developing technologies that reduce US and world reliance on Middle Eastern oil would benefit US national security and also make the environment cleaner. Research and development efforts would eventually produce technologies to produce energy at lower costs and technologies for the use of energy in more efficient ways. Both set of technologies would reduce costs and therefore save money in the long run. For more see my posts China Energy Consumption Growth Complicates Anti-Terrorist Efforts and Luft And Korin On China's Rising Demand For Oil And Saudi Arabia.
I do not see that the Iraq invasion can yield the United States a net benefit. At this point the best we can do is to hope to limit the extent of the damage to our interests. With that thought in mind here is an intuitive take on George W. Bush versus John Kerry on Iraq.
First of all, Bush gets points against him for what he's done so far. The Bush Administration made many miscalculations and mistakes in deciding to invade Iraq and in how the occupation has been handled. Defenders of Bush can argue that some of those mistakes were made by non-partisan government agencies and the Bush defenders can shift some of the blame onto the CIA, DIA, and other agencies. One can argue (correctly) that Bush had support from many Democrats for the Iraq invasion. So Bush had no monopoly on bad judgements. Yet he has to be judged by the quality of his own decision making and too many of his decisions made about Iraq were wrong. There were even people who foresaw in advance that many of the official judgements and expectations about Iraq were wrong.
Some may accept that Bush had made some huge mistakes and yet take the optimistic position that Bush has had 4 years in office to learn from his mistakes. Therefore we should expect better quality decisions from him in a second term. This might be true. Surely I hope it is true if he gets reelected (which continues to be my expectation). But one problem with this argument is that Bush tends not to learn from his mistakes. The guy isn't curious enough to learn. I do not see him getting substantially wiser. Sure hope I am wrong on that one.
Some of Bush's mistakes fit a pattern. The erroneous assumptions the Bush Administration made about the moldability of Iraq were liberal assumptions. Bush and the neocons did not make conservative mistakes about human nature. Will events in Iraq eventually shake Bush from his liberal views about the appeal of democracy and freedom?
The biggest difference between Bush and the Democrats on Iraq is that the Democrats tend not to see the unilateral exercise of US power as legitimate at all. So for that reason a President Gore probably would not have invaded Iraq. Yet he would likely have believed (or at least professed to believe) that Iraq could be turned into a liberal democracy.
As for the WMD issue: I think the Bush Administration wanted too hard to find the answer they expected to find. On top of that there are competency problems in the CIA and other parts of the government that were involved in intelligence assessments. But it is the government after all. We should expect a limited level of government competence (at least we should if we are real conservatives).
What I hold against Bush most of all is that he has put us in a position in Iraq where we might lose. This would result in the diminution of our own influence combined with a huge increase in the morale and motivation of the jihadists. That would then put us under increased risk of terrorist attacks.
This danger of boosting Jihadist morale is our greatest strategic danger in the Middle East. We are in a position where either we suffer still more damage to our interests when we withdraw from Iraq or the best case is that we manage to get out in a few years with a regime change that sticks. We should avoid the outcome that we invaded, failed to put down the insurgency, and then left to have the government taken over by Jihadists or at least openly anti-American leaders.
Whether we manage to withdraw with a positive spin on the outcome or not, in either case we suffer the damage of allies who think we are too reckless to ally with again in future operations, even more tens or hundreds of billions of dollars spent, lives lost, and soldiers coming back who will never be normal again. Plus, we have incurred the cost of a large shifting of public opinion in Muslim countries such as Indonesia against the United States. This has to help Al Qaeda recruitment.
It is hard to guess at Bush's or Kerry's real intentions. Kerry especially is an unknown quantity in an executive position. He's spent about the last couple of decades as a Senator. But it is necessary to make a guess about each of them and what they would do about Iraq in the next 4 years if we are going to come to any conclusions at all on which will be worse.
Note that I said "which will be worse" and not the more typical "which will be better". To me "better" connotates the ways Sears catalogs would label products "Good", "Better", "Best" (haven't seen a Sears catalog for a long time and so I don't know if this is still the practice) to imply that they are all useful products worthy of buying. But my take on Bush and Kerry is that neither belongs in a Sears special catalog of Presidential Candidate Products.
My guess is that Kerry has less will and less determination to exit Iraq in a way that will not seem like a retreat and strategic defeat. I doubt that Kerry sees as much at stake there in part because he didn't put US forces there in the first place and in part because he probably doesn't worry as much about how the Jihadists see the United States.
But is there anything that can be said in favor of Kerry? Well, he'd come with a new crew and that crew would be less wedded to existing policies. So Kerry might fix some policies currently in place in Iraq. Maybe Kerry would be willing to ask for more resources by arguing that he didn't make the mess but he has to fix it (though I doubt this since he will want to increase domestic social spending). It is at least possible that Kerry will be better than Bush in how the actual occupation is managed.
But my biggest concern with Kerry is over exit strategy. We should try to avoid being seen doing a withdrawal that makes it seem we are retreating out of Iraq. Kerry is more likely to retreat and let the Arab Muslim Jihadists think they have won a victory. We are better off exiting under conditions that seem like a US victory to the Arabs and especially to the Islamic Jihadists (in other words, Al Qaeda terrorists and their allies) and would-be Jihadists.
However, it is by no means certain that a withdrawal that is not a strategic defeat is an attainable goal. Such a withdrawal requires that we succeed in building up at the minimum a new authoritarian dictatorship in Iraq that simulates the outer form of a democracy well enough (or that at least can keep itself in power) that we can declare victory and leave. But it is by no means clear that we can put a government in power that can stay in control after we withdraw. If that is the case then having Kerry in office might actually be an advantage since he'd be more willing to accept the inevitability of the bigger loss and cut our losses sooner.
As I see it at this point we are screwed. If Kerry gets in he has less will to win than Bush does. But if Bush gets reelected will it be any worse? With Bush reelected we will have the idiot who put us in this risky position in the first place by invading and who then was unwilling or unable to build up enough political support to get the resources needed do a proper large scale occupation from the outset.
The other wild card in this analysis is Congress. If Congress undercuts the US occupation in a a year or two then a President's own will may not matter. Will Congress be more willing to cut and run if Kerry or Bush is elected? If Congress does pressure for a withdrawal that allows a collapse of the pro-US regime will US interests be more harmed than if we stay longer to try to ensure a friendlier regime after we leave?
On the issue of Iraq as a way to choose between Bush and Kerry ot is hard for me to see who makes the most sense to choose. So I don't have a final answer for you. I would only argue that what is possible for us to accomplish in Iraq is somewhere between modest and disastrous and that Kerry and Bush are a pretty awful pair to choose between.
Note to people who are visiting ParaPundit for the first time: As you can see from the above this is not the place to visit if you want a partisan Panglossian view of politics. There are plenty of cheerleader blogs for Democrats and for Republicans. I lean right. But I have a pretty dismal view of political leaders and the human condition.
Writing for the Jerusalem Post Barry Rubin examines the active support by Syria and Iran for the insurgency in Iraq, America's inability to halt that support, and the harm to US interests that surely flows from the Iraq invasion.
First, it is overextended in Iraq, spending vast amounts of money and using pretty much all the available military forces.
Second, support for its presence in Iraq is already falling rapidly. There would be no domestic backing or international support for engaging in a wider war.
Third, after having been so criticized for going into Iraq in the first place, the administration would not have much credibility in charging that Iran and Syria are engaged in aggressive activities.
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Arguably, any gain in the "fear factor" brought about by the US overthrow of Saddam is being eroded. Those who argue, in the words of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini two decades ago, that the US cannot do a "damn thing" are having that feeling reinforced today.
The Iraq war's outcome has undermined the credibility of US power no matter how long American forces remain in Iraq. Indeed, one could argue that the longer they remain, the worse the problem will become.
I expect some readers to take issue with Rubin's contentions. But if the Iranians and Syrians feel intimidated by the power of the US military then why are both regimes allowing active recruiting of fighters and passage of fighters through their territories into Iraq? Why are the Mullahs in Iran still busy working to develop nuclear weapons? Where is the sign that the Iranian and Syrian governments have been intimidated into changing their policies in directions more in US interests? Where is the gain?
Having America look weak provides an incentive for angry Muslims to join the ranks of active terrorists or to donate to terrorist organizations. At the same time US involvement in Iraq is also turning Muslim public opinion against America. It is hard to see where there is a net benefit for the United States in US Middle Eastern policy.
Steve Sailer has an excerpt of a James Fallows article interviewing national security professionals about the consequences of the US invasion of Iraq.
But the biggest question about the United States—whether its response to 9/11 has made it safer or more vulnerable—can begin to be answered. Over the past two years I have been talking with a group of people at the working level of America's anti-terrorism efforts. Most are in the military, the intelligence agencies, and the diplomatic service; some are in think tanks and nongovernmental agencies. I have come to trust them, because most of them have no partisan ax to grind with the Administration (in the nature of things, soldiers and spies are mainly Republicans), and because they have so far been proved right. In the year before combat started in Iraq, they warned that occupying the country would be far harder than conquering it. As the occupation began, they pointed out the existence of plans and warnings the Administration seemed determined to ignore.
As a political matter, whether the United States is now safer or more vulnerable is of course ferociously controversial. That the war was necessary—and beneficial—is the Bush Administration's central claim. That it was not is the central claim of its critics. But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the Administration's record, they tend to see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe. I have sat through arguments among soldiers and scholars about whether the invasion of Iraq should be considered the worst strategic error in American history—or only the worst since Vietnam. Some of these people argue that the United States had no choice but to fight, given a pre-war consensus among its intelligence agencies that Iraq actually had WMD supplies. Many say that things in Iraq will eventually look much better than they do now. But about the conduct and effect of the war in Iraq one view prevails: it has increased the threats America faces, and has reduced the military, financial, and diplomatic tools with which we can respond.
"Let me tell you my gut feeling," a senior figure at one of America's military-sponsored think tanks told me recently, after we had talked for twenty minutes about details of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "If I can be blunt, the Administration is full of s---. In my view we are much, much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan position. I voted for these guys. But I think they are incompetent, and I have had a very close perspective on what is happening. Certainly in the long run we have harmed ourselves. We are playing to the enemy's political advantage. Whatever tactical victories we may gain along the way, this will prove to be a strategic blunder."...
Yet in spite of all this Bush is probably going to get reelected. My guess is that most Americans are not paying enough attention to draw a distinction between the war against terrorists and the war in Iraq (though there are small signs of improvement in public understanding). Certanly the rhetoric from speakers at the Republican convention suggests that the Bush reelection strategists believe they can blur that distinction to their advantage. My guess is that they are correct.
There is one upside to Bush's reelection: Bush will have to deal with the consequences of his own decisions. However, that upside of Bush's reelection hardly makes 4 more years of Dubya worth it in my estimation.
China is becoming the biggest trader in Asia.
American military supremacy remains unquestioned, regional officials say. But the United States appears to be on the losing side of trade patterns. China is now South Korea's biggest trade partner, and two years ago Japan's imports from China surpassed those from the United States. Current trends show China is likely to top American trade with Southeast Asia in just a few years.
I'm sure those regional officials all know that American military supremacy is predicated upon American economic supremacy and that the days of America's role as largest economy in the world will likely end by mid 21st century at the latest.
The ability of the US to use economic power is in decline in Asia. China has more than neutralized the effects of US trade sanctions on Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma).
China has in fact capsized Washington's policy with its own trade deals, which far outweigh the value of the American penalties. The State Department estimates that Myanmar lost about $200 million in the first year of the ban on imports to the United States. At the same time, it said, trade between China and Myanmar amounted to about $1 billion in 2003.
The Chinese expect to increase trade with Myanmar to $1.5 billion by 2005. As China's economy continues to grow its trade with many countries is going to become integer multiples of US trade with those same countries. US economic influence is going to decline as a result.
The United States has peaked as a world power. The US economy will continue to grow. But continued more rapid economic growth in East and South Asia is going to cause the US economy to shrink as a fraction of the total world economy. At some point China's economy is probably going to become larger than the US economy. This means that not only will the US continue to become a relatively less important trading partner but China's economy is going to become so large that China will be able to afford to outspend the United States on military equipment.
Barring some major cataclysmic event such as a Chinese civil war or natural disaster there seems no way for Taiwan to maintain its independence unless it develops nuclear weapons. The Taiwanese would be wise to go nuclear now before China can credibly threaten to launch an attack aross the straits.
There are many things that the United States ought to be doing about the rise of China. The essential insight that ought to drive decision making by US policy makers is the knowledge that the US is going to become relatively less powerful in the future. We ought to ask ourselves what we could do now to better position ourselves once the US is not the undisputed strongest military power in the world.
Energy policy is a key area where we ought to be responding to the rise of China to find ways to prevent our national interests from being as deeply harmed by our loss of influence. We are going to become less influential in the Middle East. This is one of many reasons we should seek to develop technologies that obsolesce oil. If oil becomes obsolesced then we will have less at stake in the Middle East and our interests will be less harmed by the growing influence of a competing power. See my previous posts Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, Democracy Promotion, And Energy Policy, China Energy Consumption Growth Complicates Anti-Terrorist Efforts, and Luft And Korin On China's Rising Demand For Oil And Saudi Arabia.
Oil futures prices peaked at over $44 per barrel before retreating.
Oil prices reached record levels for the second day in succession as the price of a barrel of crude in New York broke through the $44 (£24) mark to peak at $44.24.
...
Analysts have forecast that prices are likely to rise further ahead of winter, possibly to a peak of $50 a barrel.
So much for the conspiracy theory that the Saudis were going to cause oil prices to drop in order to help George W. Bush get reelected.
Rising demand from China and the United States combined with fears about supplies have pushed up prices.
The price was fuelled by fears of a terrorist attack in the U.S., concerns about the reliability of oil shipments from Russia - and the realisation that there may not be much that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries can do to stabilize prices.
High energy prices take money from consumers that otherwise would have been spent on other goods. This decreases demand for locally produced goods in oil consuming nations while at the same tine increasing inflation. Higher oil prices may force the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates.
The US may be more directly exposed, however, in that the Federal Reserve has not ruled out a rise in interest rates in the case of increased inflation and has slightly lowered its GDP growth forecast for 2004, now between 4.50 per cent and 4.75 per cent, ahead of a more marked slowdown in 2005 of between 3.5 per cent and 4 per cent.
US consumer spending turned down in June.
U.S. consumer spending in June took its biggest plunge since September 2001 as shoppers, sapped by high energy costs, cut back sharply on car purchases, a government report showed on Tuesday.
Consumer spending might have bounced back in July according to some preliminary reports. But rising energy prices are going to put pressure on consumer spending.
The Saudis are denying that they are having problems pumping oil.
But there is little OPEC can do to relieve the pressure: it is already operating within 5% of capacity. There are even rumours that Saudi Arabia’s state oil company is experiencing production difficulties, suggestions the kingdom strenuously denies.
The Saudis claim they have huge oil reserves. But the information which they use to make their reserve estimates is not available for other parties to examine and verify. Some analysts believe that the Saudis are exaggerating the size of their oil reserves (see the update at the bottom of that post). If the more pessimistic assessments of oil reserves are correct then the current high prices of oil may be the beginning of a trend toward still higher oil prices.
Looked at in inflation-adjusted terms the highest peak in oil prices came in 1981 when oil was almost $60 per barrel when measured in 2004 dollars. An attack on Saudi oil fields could put oil prices up to the level reached in 1981 and perhaps even well above that.
A different kind of bad news could cause oil prices to drop. A big terrorist on an oil consuming nation could lead to a reduction in economic activity that results in lower oil demand and lower oil prices.
However, Tony Nunan at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, said that should an attack happen, prices would be more likely to fall.
"After 9/11 people stopped consuming because of the uncertainty... If the target is a consuming nation, you would expect an attack to affect the market to the downside," he said.
We need a better energy policy along with better immigration and border control policies to make it harder for terrorists to get into the United States. Rising oil demand from China means more money for the Wahhabis.
Writing in the New Yorker Seymour Hersh reports that Israel's government decided some time in 2003 the US intervention in Iraq was doomed to failure and Israel has responded to American strategic failure in Iraq by helping the Kurds to run operations into Iran and Syria.
In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several officials depicted Sharon’s decision, which involves a heavy financial commitment, as a potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence as the insurgency in Iraq continues to grow.
Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.
Laura Rozen of the War And Peace blog says she's heard reports consistent wtih Hersh's claim.
For what it's worth, I too have heard reports from former American diplomats consulting in northern Iraq that Israel is behind the creation of a Kurdish central bank in Kurdish northern Iraq, of mysterious Israeli American advisors to Iraqi Kurdish leaders, of Israelis buying property located around southeastern Turkey's GAP dam, and other developments that would seem to give credence to this report.
A Kurdisk central bank? Does anyone know: Have the Kurds introduced their own currency?
Hersh claims Israel was initially motivated to help train the Kurds to be able to find, reach, and kill leaders of Shiite militias that were fighting against the occupation. But Israel has expanded the scale of its involvement to include operations into Iran to install monitoring devices aimed at Iranian nuclear facilities and other activities in Iran.
On the one hand, this move by Israel threatens their de facto alliance with Turkey. On the other hand, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, the rise to power of Islamic politicians, and the weakening of the Turkish military's ability to protect the secular nature of the Turkish state are most likely destined to weaken and perhaps even end that alliance anyhow. Plus, the argument has been made (sorry, no citation, from memory) that the Turkish military's officer corps is gradually becoming more Islamic and therefore the military may not always be firmly committed to a secular state in the future anyhow. Also, Turkey's bid to join the EU threatens Turkey's alliance with Israel. There are obvious reasons for the EU to be pushing Turkey away from Israel. The EU is pretty critical of Israel and is more worried about appeasing its growing Muslim population and building better trade relations with Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East. So even without the Iraq debacle how many years of good relations does Israel have left with Turkey given current trends?
The Israelis may see an indepedent Kurdistan as more valuable than the troubled alliance with Turkey and they may be right. But can the Kurds actually achieve independence? Or will Syria, Turkey, and Iran ally to stop the Kurds? Also, which side will the US come down on should events develop to the point where the Kurdish leaders make a serious attempt to win independence? That depends on all sorts of unpredictable factors (e.g. whether Iraq is in a general civil war at that point). The Bush (or Kerry?) Administration may try to create a confederacy where Kurdistan is officially part of Iraq but de facto independent. That way the US could argue that the neighboring countries do not really have a reason to intervene.
A number of commentators have argued that the neoconservatives in and around the Bush Administration (i.e. the Jewish neocons who have been wielding real power) supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's goverment in large part because they saw his overthrow as beneficial to Israel. For instance, James Bamford, author of a pair of very important books on the National Security Agency The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency and Body of Secrets : Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, has written a new book entitled A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. Because of the criticisms he levels at leading neoconservatives Bamford's book has been attacked by neoconservative ideologues. But a number of less ideologically driven reviewer have given it more positive reviews such as this Amazon reviewer Robert D. Steele.
The book is especially strong on the Rendon Group being used to illegally propagandize American citizens with U.S. taxpayer funds, on the abject failure of George Tenet in revitalizing U.S. clandestine operations, on the failure (treated more kindly) of Mike Hayden to bring the National Security Agency into the 21st Century, and on the very unhealthy merger of the U.S. neoconservatives that captured the White House, and well-funded Zionists in both America and Israel who essentially bought themselves an invasion of Iraq--a remarkable coincidence of interests: Jews paying to invade Iraq, Iranians using Chalabi to feed lies to the neo-cons so they would be deceived into thinking Iraq would be a cake-walk, and Bin Laden never daring to dream the entire U.S. population and all arms of government--including a passive media--would "sleep walk" into what this book suggests is one of the dumbest and most costly strategic errors in the national security history of the USA.
This book is not, despite some of the ideologically-motivated reviews below, an attack of George Bush Junior, as much as it is an appalled and informed review of how a complex government collapsed in the face of 9-11, and a handful of ostensibly patriotic and very myopic individuals were able to abuse their personal power because all of the professional counter-forces: the diplomats, the spies, the military professionals, the Congress, the media--every single one was not sufficiently competent nor sufficiently motivated to mandate a more balanced policy process that could understand the many global threats (terrorism and Iraq are actually two of the lesser ones), devise a comprehensive long-term strategy, and execute that strategy using *all* of the instruments of national power, including strong global alliances that lead all governments to fight all gangs in the most effective fashion possible.
Steve Weinberg praises Bamford's latest book.
James Bamford, one of the most talented but unsung investigative reporters of the past 25 years, has accomplished the difficult. ``A Pretext for War'' not only contains significant new information, but it also combines that information with previously known material to make better sense of Sept. 11, its lead-up and aftermath than any other book I have read.
According to Bamford, the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration.
Described as a kind of "American privy council" to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a "Clean Break" plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let "Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit." Under the "Clean Break" plan, Israel would launch pre-emptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel.
Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises "the most troubling conflict of interest questions," he writes.
The "Clean Break" document is available online and its full list of signatories are Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, Jonathan Torop, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, The document, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, did call for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.
The document fantasizes about restoring Hashemite control of Iraq and fantasizes even further that doing this could work wonders on Shiite attitudes in Lebanon. The level of pure fantasy in this neocon view of the Arab countries is breathtaking in scope. Some of these guys are in high level positions in a Republican Administration. My mind boggles.
King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.
The document even shows signs of the spell that Ahmad Chalabi was weaving in neocon imaginations back in the 1990s.
. As a senior Iraqi opposition leader said recently: "Israel must rejuvenate and revitalize its moral and intellectual leadership. It is an important — if not the most important--element in the history of the Middle East."
Chalabi is obviously very good at telling ideologues what they want to hear.
Note that the "realm" they are keen to secure is Israel. Note that they advocated an Israeli effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein in order to make Israel more secure. Note that one of the signatories (Feith) of that document is now the number 3 civilian official in the US Defense Department and he was a leading advocate of the invasion of Iraq. David Wurmser, leading advocate of US support for Chalabi, is Dick Cheney's assistant for the Middle East.
The irony of this neocon effort to help Israel is that the neocons' priority in terms of threats to Israel did not match the priorities assigned by Israel's own strategic thinkers. Also, the neocons' attempt to help Israel has clearly backfired. For many years Israel has (correctly, in my view) seen Iran as its chief threat. My guess is that Sharon and his cabinet went along with the US on Iraq because they had to publically support their powerful benefactor's policy and saw at least a potential advantage in Saddam's overthrow. But the ensuing insurgencies and the worldwide political fall-out has strengthened Iran's position and therefore has made Israel's strategic position even worse than it would have been had Saddam remained in power.
Let us be clear on what set of events led the Israelis to this point of so heavily supporting the Kurds that Israel's much vaunted alliance with Turkey is now threatened: Very well placed and mostly Jewish neoconservatives advocated and managed to win support for the overthrow of Saddam. This set in motion a series of events that have created conditions under which the Israelis are in the difficult position of having to choose between their alliance with Turkey and their interest in helping the Kurds against the Iraqi Shia Arab insurgents, Iran, and Syria. At the same time, US forces are so tied down in Iraq and the credibility of the pro-preemption camp is so tarnished that the US is far less able to challenge Iran than it was before the overthrow of Saddam. It seems clear to me that the neoconservatives have caused great harm to both US and Israeli national interests.
Meantime, what does the information in this Ha'aretz story say about the evolution of relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv? What had cemented strong relations between Turkey and Israel was a few shared strategic enemies, particularly Syria and Iran, as well as a shared principal ally: Washington. Particularly, Washington over Europe. All that has shifted, with improved Turkish-Syrian relations, somewhat improved Turkish-Iranian relations, improved Turkish-European relations, and deteriorating Turkish-US relations...as well as the rise of a (moderate) Islamist government in Ankara, and a more hardline Israeli government under Ariel Sharon. Neocons have long cherished the idea of a Washington-Turkey-Israel alliance, even over Washington's long-time alliances with NATO and certainly over Europe. But according to my Turkish sources, no one has done more to alienate Turkey from the US than the neocons, particularly Paul Wolfowitz who manages to alienate Turks with every public statement since the run up to the war. [According to Turkish sources, Wolfowitz had said something along the lines of, if what was keeping Turkey from joining the US-led alliance invading Iraq was Turkish public opinion, that Ankara should just disregard it. Not terribly democratic.]
The facts speak for themselves. Iraq was not cooperating with al Qaeda or its offshoots like Zarqawi in a serious way before the war, certainly not to the degree that members of the Saudi and Pakistani security and intelligence services were. Zarqawi of course was mostly operating in northern Iraq, in terroritory under the control of the US no fly zone - a fact the Bush administration would like us not to remember. By any reading of the news, Iraq today must certainly rank the world HQ for Islamist radical terrorists, and is certainly one of the most insecure places in the world, a misery for its citizenry and foreign occupiers alike.
Bush still hasn't fired a single one of his neocons as a result of events in Iraq. Is it that he doesn't want to publically admit to a huge mistake during an election year? Or, worse yet, does he still believe in these advisors and the strategy they are selling him? That is a scary thought. If that is the case they will probably try to build up support to invade Syria next year while still failing to admit that the biggest source of radical Islam is Saudi Arabia and that world dependence on oil is an urgent problem because it is funding the spread of Wahhabism.
US grand strategy toward Islamic terrorists ought to be centered around recognition that Saudi Arabia is the center of gravity of the enemy, that we need to develop technologies to obsolesce oil, that we need far better immigration and border policy to protect us from terrorists, and that we need to stop conducting our Middle Eastern policy in ways which yield us no benefits and which just anger the Muslims. But first and foremost, American policy should be based on the assumption that there is no magic bullet bold stroke that can solve the problems of the Middle East or of the threat of terrorism.
Noan Millman of Gideon's Blog links to this post and makes a number of useful comments of his own. For instance, Noah thinks Iraq could deterioriate into a civil war patterned after Lebanon.
. Lebanon still looks terribly likely to me. And with Iran playing North Vietnam to Iraq's jihadi Viet Cong, we could be in this for a long while. Vietnamization, remember, only looked like it might work *after* the VC were devastated by their Tet Offensive and *after* Nixon had dropped more ordnance on the North than was used in WWII.
So: do I think folks like Perle and Wolfowitz, etc. have been reading from this script for the past 3 years in the Bush Adminsitration? Sadly, I do.
I am a big advocate of peace through strength. I think Sharon has done a huge amount to shore up Israel's deterrent - Operation Defensive Shield, the ongoing campaign against the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, the building of the security fence, etc. I am nervous about the pullout from Gaza not because I think Israel should keep Gaza - Israel should be desperate to get rid of the place - but because I remember the pullout from South Lebanon and what followed. But Israel has learned - Sharon has learned - that it cannot achieve political objectives by force, only military ones. And its problem with the Palestinians, no less than the American problem with the jihadi ideology and the general political disfunction of the Middle East, is not a military problem solvable with military force. Folks like "Anonymous" who think a scorched earth strategy is the only way to win our war are as wrong as the neo-cons who thought that if someone simply toppled Saddam or Assad or whoever that peaceful, pro-Israel Arab democracies would sprout.
I'm not a pacifist. I do not shrink from advocating the use of the US military to overthrow a government or blow up a terrorist training camp. But I have a serious problem with the extent to which the use of military force has been oversold as the panacea for solving problems with terrorists, with Middle Eastern societies, and assorted other ills. Vietnam and Lebanon ought to serve as useful lessons that struggles have many dimensions and one can do very well in the military dimension while settting one's side up for failure on the level of grand strategy.
The "happy talk" of the Johnson Administration and the US military made the North Vietnamese propaganda victory from the Tet Offensive possible. The "happy talk" of the neocons has gotten us involved in Iraq based on false assumptions, tied down lots of our military, cost us huge bucks, made us completely unprepared for what followed, and has done serious harm to US interests instead of improving our position. Useful policy ideas (e.g. radical immigration policy changes, a massive energy research project) are ignored because the happy talkers claim their policies can handle the threat of terrorism and the problems posed by fundamentalist Islam.
CAIRO – Last week the Saudi Arabian government reversed years of policy when it promised to swiftly dissolve the operations of Al Haramain, a charity with close ties to the Saudi government the US alleges is one of the "principal" backers of Al Qaeda.
Though US officials have complained about the charity since at least 1998, the Saudi government's typical response had been that while some individuals within the sprawling charity might have ties to known terrorists, its operations were overwhelming peaceful and its problems not systemic.
The Saudis have already forced out the charity's leader Aqeel al-Aqeel in November 2003 but they have not prosecuted him for any crimes. This fits a larger pattern where the Saudis do not prosecute their own nationals for supporting terrorism elsewhere.
A report released this week by a high-level task force of the Council on Foreign Relations makes similar conclusions, finding the Saudi government has failed to hold any well-connected individuals accountable for terror-financing activities.
Given the sheer number of Saudis involved in terrorist attacks in other countries this is a very telling revelation.
JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA – The kidnapping and beheading of American Paul Johnson Jr. marks a turning point in Saudi public opinion against his Al Qaeda slayers.
Celebrations broke out at the news Friday night that Abdelaziz al-Miqrin, the man responsible for Johnson's death, had been killed. It was the first time in the kingdom's 13-month fight against terrorism that ordinary citizens expressed spontaneous joy at security forces' success.
But do not expect a major change in the educational system, religious teachings, or popular views in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is a major source of money for terrorism and probably the biggest source of Jihadists and terrorists in the world. The Saudis also openly and aggressively fund the spread of Wahhabi Islam around the world. Saudi Arabia is a national security threat to the United States at the same time that it is a vital supplier of oil for the world economy. Spencer Ackerman. filling in for Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, has a series of posts interviewing and excerpting quotes from an anonymous serving US intelligence agent who has a new book forthcoming entitled Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. Ackerman asks the intelligence agent what should we be asking the Saudi rulers to do and the intelligence agent says we can not expect too much.
TPM: What should we be asking them to do?
ANONYMOUS: I think we're focused on what we want them to do. We want to control al-Qaeda within the kingdom. We want them to continue to produce oil. We want them to do any number of police-type, and intelligence-type cooperation, and I'm sure they'll be willing to do that. But what we [really] want them to do, as I wrote in the book, I don't think is going to happen: people argue that we should force them or pressure them to change their curriculum and their education system, and that is very unlikely to happen. The al-Sauds, when they came to power, made a deal with the Islamic establishment: the al-Sauds would take care of the economy and foreign policy, and the religious establishment would take care of education. I'm not sure they're terribly eager to adopt a curriculum of Islamic education as it’s proposed by the United States. …
It's a system that's not prone to reform at a pace that would satisfy us. A pace that would satisfy us would completely destabilize the country. We're going to watch them do as much as they can, and they'll do as much as they can that's consistent with the survival of the state.
I would encourage you all to read the interview in full.
This anonymous intelligence agent is also the author of a book released last year entitled Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America.
Writing for The Guardian Julian Borger reports that this anonymous intelligence agent thinks Al Qaeda is becoming more competent and able.
"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group.
"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much more careful across the board in the way they operate."
As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.
This guy thinks the Bush Administration's strategy is completely wrong, that the invasion of Iraq has been very detrimental to our interests, and that Al Qaeda is probably so satisfied with the Bush Administration that it will launch a terrorist attack in the US near the election to rally the American people around Bush to get him reelected! I find his argument plausible.
Julian Borger has a story in The Guardian that paints the anonymous intelligence professional who penned the forthcoming Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror as animated in no small measure by "contempt for the Bush White House and its policies." That's a bit wide of the mark. Does the book exhibit contempt for the administration's policies? Certainly. It also takes a dim view of the White House's conception of what motivates al-Qaeda and how to fight it. But in the book and in an interview, Anonymous doesn't traffic in Bush-bashing. He has much harsher words to say about the leadership of the intelligence community, whom he faults for bending too far to the predispositions of the policymakers they serve.
Ackerman also takes issue with the anonymous agent's argument that democracy promotion is bound to be counterproductive. However, my own take on democracy promotion is that there are a number of obstacles in the way of democracy promotion in the Middle East that the neoconservatives fail to even acknowledge (see bullet list in the middle of that post). The neoconservative and liberal advocates of democracy promotion appear to be arguing for it in part because they do not like what it says about human nature if there are peoples who simply do not want to become Western style liberal democrats. But this denial of human nature and differences in human beliefs does not change human nature. People do not all universally embrace the same set of values in the same rank order. There are huge differences in the extent of belief in various values. Those differences are quite resistant to change for a number of reasons (again, see my post about the obstacles in the way of democracy in the Middle East).
While I do not see democratization as a panacea I still think it is worth looking at the question of how to spread ideas into the Middle East that might have the efffect of making them less hostile to us. Jon B. Alterman argues for a change in how the United States promotes democracy and liberalism in the Middle East.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we need to recognize that, as a group, such liberals are increasingly aging, increasingly isolated, and diminishing in number. These liberals are losing a battle for the hearts and minds of their countries, and populations are increasingly driven toward younger and more disaffected personalities.
America’s problems do not stop there, however. The United States faces a paradox. Liberal reformers in much of the Arab world are already seen as clients of foreign powers and as collaborators in a Western effort to weaken and dominate the Arab world. Focusing attention and resources on these reformers runs the risk of isolating them still further, driving a deeper wedge between them and the societies we (and they) seek to affect. In such an event, U.S. efforts are not only ineffectual; they are counterproductive.
U.S. efforts to promote political openness and change in the Arab world would be far more effective if they stopped trying to coax the disparate sparks of comfortable liberal thought into a flame and instead concentrated on two targets: regional governments and mass publics. The U.S. also needs to be willing to work multilaterally to promote reform in a way it has been unwilling to do up to now. If the stakes were lower, the U.S. could afford the luxury of taking an easier and less effective approach to political change in the Arab world. In today’s environment, it isn’t nearly sufficient.
Whether the approach Alterman argues for could work in practice a number of his suggestions strike me as more likely to be effective than what is currently being tried. Invasion of Iraq has not been a liberalising influence in Iraq or in the rest of the Middle East. However, even if there is some better set of ideas for spreading democracy in the Middle East that have a chance of working this is at best a long term project. The spreading of democracy is not a short or medium term solution to the threat of terrorism. The anonymous intelligence agent is therefore correct to argue that the Bush Administration's strategy is deeply flawed.
But Anonymous doesn't really consider it possible for the U.S. to answer bin Laden in a battle of ideas throughout the Islamic world: U.S. support for what many Muslims may see as unjust policies has drained us of our credibility, he argues. He combines that critique with a rejection of anything resembling democracy promotion. Woodrow Wilson, to Anonymous, is a "bloody-handed fantasist." Insisting on democratic reform in the Muslim world then becomes naïve futility--even though one of Bin Laden's rallying cries is, as Anonymous puts it, U.S. support for "tyrannical Muslim governments."
Suppose we can't. What's our back-up plan? We need one and we need to start implementing it today. Defense in depth is one element. We ought to make it much harder for unfriendlies to get into the United States. We also need to push hard to develop technologies to obsolesce oil as a way to defund the Wahhabis.
Of course other efforts would require resources. But, as the editors of The New Republic admit, resources are finite.
Resources are finite. To defeat and occupy Iraq, the United States has transferred special operations units from the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Because our military is stretched so thin in Iraq, we cannot threaten military action in Iran or North Korea, which has reduced our diplomatic leverage. The tradeoffs even extend to the nonmilitary sphere. The Bush administration's refusal to adequately fund security for U.S. chemical and nuclear plants, for inspections at our ports, and for the police officers and firemen who would be the first to respond to a terrorist attack is well-documented. Absent its enormous expenditures in Iraq, the administration could have far better addressed these threats--threats more urgent than a tyrant in Baghdad with nuclear dreams, but no nuclear plans.
We could have paid for decades of a very large set of energy research efforts for what it cost us to invade Iraq. We could have gotten far better control of our borders, trained large numbers of multilingual intelligence agents, and put a lot more effort into slowing nuclear proliferation. The continued pursuit of current policy will bring with it still more opportunity costs.
It is gratifying to see the anonymous intelligent agent lists energy policy as one of the elements of a better grand strategy for dealing with the terrorist threat. The United States and the West as a whole ought to play to its strengths. One of those strengths is that we have a lot of scientists and engineers and can afford to engage in massive research and development projects. While energy research is not a short term solution neither is invasion and promotion of democracy. But a better energy policy is an essential element of a better grand strategy in response to the threat of terrorism.
The US should have an energy policy shaped much more strongly by national security considerations. A national security policy for energy should include an additional $10 billion or more per year spent on energy research as part of a recognition that the world's increasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil creates national risks for the United States.
Some of the neoconservatives are more intent on invading Syria. Why? Advocacy of said invasion by David Frum and Richard Perle seems more motivated by their support of Israel than concern for American security. Yet they have no interest in invading Saudi Arabia. It is hard to take seriously their belief that US military force can be used to transform the Middle East into a more liberal and democratic region when they are placing Syria ahead of Saudi Arabia on their list of priorities. They have nothing to offer that has any chance of reforming the Middle Eastern society most in need of reform (Saudi Arabia - as if this even needs stating). How can military attacks and democracy be solutions against such a widely distributed enemy which is most concentrated in the one Middle Eastern country which the Bush Administration is reluctant to even criticise? The neoconservatives pride themselves on a supposedly tougher and more realpolitik view harnessed to the spread of great ideals. Yet their grand strategy is so logically incoherent that I'd be too embarrassed to try to defend it. So I'm going to continue to attack it instead. We deserve to be defended. The neoconservatives are not defending us.
The killing of BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers and non-fatal shooting of BBC technician Frank Gardner happened in spite of their being under the supposed protection of a Saudi government assigned and driver. Well, there is an interesting twist to the story: the minder and driver have both been arrested on suspicion of being in league with the attackers.
Visitors to Saudi Arabia are warned not to move around without government protection, despite fears that some officials are colluding with extremists. The minder and driver who accompanied Gardner and Cumbers were arrested after investigators refused to rule out the theory that they tipped off the attackers.
This fits into a larger pattern in Saudi Arabia where after each attack well informed figures are quoted claiming that Saudi National Guardsmen or police or other security figures were providing information and other assistance to attackers. The support for the attackers may be so high that protection of Westerners in Saudi Arabia may simply be impossible at this point.
One Westerner (quoted uder a pseudonym) says that in spite of all the claims that the radical clerics have been replaced with moderate clerics he can hear cries for Jihad from the mosque next to his living quarters.
A mosque overlooks Mr McDonald's wall in the compound. "I was in the pool last Friday when l heard them shouting about jihad during the prayers. I know things won't be right. They found photographs of the compound inside the mosque last year."
My guess is that the biggest thing protecting the oil producing equipment is the belief of the Jihadists that they can drive out the Westerners and get control of the government without blowing up the oil fields, oil processing facilities, and port facilities. The oil facilities have not been blown up because Al Qaeda doesn't want to blow them up. Suppose the Jihadists change their minds. Then what?
The Saudis can probably gradually replace non-Muslims with Muslims in order to keep the oil fields operating. Suppose the Saudis do that and the princes remain in power. Will Al Qaeda at some point 2 or 3 years down the road decide it is time to interrupt oil production in order to bring down the regime and hurt Western economies? The Saudis can hire many of their own citizens to guard the places. But the insurgents (terrorists, revolutionaries, they are all those labels) can just bribe or intimidate the guards or simply appeal to the religious convictions of the guards or get their own people to apply for jobs doing guard work.
We should not let ourselves be in the position of relying on the strategic calculations of Al Qaeda's leaders to allow enough energy to flow for our economy and those of our trading partners to continue to function. We face both an economic threat and a national security threat from the conditions within Saudi Arabia. Energy strategy is an element of national security strategy and conditions in Saudi Arabia are a threat to our national security.
James Pinkerton, a former Reagan Administration domestic policy wonk, describes how Ronald Reagan really did help accelerate the collapse of the USSR.
But years later, in 1991, Vladimir Lukhin -- once a top diplomat for the USSR, then the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian Duma -- told me how Reagan's SDI speech was received on the other side. In '83, upon hearing of Reagan's SDI speech, then-leader Yuri Andropov ordered two different studies -- one from the Red Army, one from the Soviet academy of sciences -- to analyze the new American initiative. Two years later, in 1985, the reports came back to the Kremlin, both bearing the same basic message: "We don't know if the USA can succeed with this missile-defense plan, but we know that the USSR cannot." This forced the Politburo into an agonizing reassessment: something, Lukhin recalled, had to change. And that change, the Russian gerontocrats hoped, would come in the form of a young new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in 1985. Gorbachev had no intention of unhitching the communist system in Russia, but in the course of trying to compete with the Americans, that's exactly what happened; "Gorby" was an accidental liberator. As Lukhin told me, "Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union by five to ten years" -- which was fine with Lukhin. And if that single step shaved so many years off the lifetime of the evil empire, that's pretty good in my book.
What I learned from Ronald Reagan: A political condition that is widely believed to be permanent can suddenly be changed. Now, that is not true of all political conditions under all circumstances. Conditions have to develop to a point where a big break with past patterns becomes possible. Ronald Reagan as US President in 1960 could not then have catalyzed the break-up of the Soviet Union. But one should not always assume that just because some condition has a feeling of permanence that it really has to be accepted as unchangeable.
The secular ideology underpinning the Soviet regime was based on a view of this physical world. It was disprovable in this physical world and by the 1980s the objective evidence had accumulated to the point where the evidence weighed overwhelmingly against communism. The Soviet Union's own elite protectors of their order such as the KGB and the party elite had spent enough time abroad and knew enough about the rest of the world to know that their system was failing massively. That the Soviet system could then be pushed to a tipping point was something that Reagan, a far more intellectual and learned man than his critics knew or wanted to believe, was able to see quite clearly.
We ought to be asking ourselves what are the status quo policies and systems of belief of today that could be pushed to a tipping point for our advantage. One regime stands out in this regard: North Korea. It is based on an ideology that is disproven in this world. Yet it is incredibly isolated and the North Korean population does not understand the extent of the gap in living standards between North Korea and, say, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The Bush Administration like the Clinton Administration before it is making a serious mistake by not trying much harder to reach the North Korean people with information about the outside world. All manner of books and radios ought to be delivered into North Korea by airborne balloons, sealed plastic containers dropped near their shores, smuggled in from China, and placed aboard North Korean ships docked in foreign ports.
We also ought to be asking ourselves what longer term strategies we should be pursuing to slowly move societies that are host to other hostile ideologies toward tipping points. Of course the most obvious are the Islamic countries. In my view impatience and a Panglossian outlook are causing too many people to view terrorism as a short-term problem that can be solved with short-term tactics. But Islam has been around for a long time and the Islamic societies are not now near tipping points away from the allure of the beliefs found in the base text of Islam.
On the domestic front one subject where there is far too much defeatist thinking is immigration. Lots of people do not like current lax immigration policy that allows in large numbers of unskilled immigrants who are creating a growing lower class and an increasing burden upon the more productive. People who resign themselves to the stupidity of current immigration policy should allow themselves to get more angry and to more loudly proclaim their anger with current policies. Immigration is a solvable problem. We just have to be willing to get mad enough at our politicians to force them to take notice.
Note: Over 10 years ago I read a quote in The Economist by a former socialist Foreign Minister of Italy who relayed a conversation he had with Reagan in the early 1980s. Reagan told this Foreign Minister that he was going to keep upping his competitive push against the Soviets until the whole Soviet system collapsed. The Foreign Minister said that at the time he thought Reagan was crazy and yet he turned out to be right. I've tried Googling for this to no avail. If anyone comes across the quotes for that conversation or similar conversations between Reagan and other political figures in the early 1980s could you post a link in the comments of this post?
Update: Frederick Turner on the importance of Reagan's labelling of our enemies as enemies.
Later I read the Austrian free market economists, and realized two things: one, that they had essentially won the argument with the socialists, both on the theoretical level and on the level of practical results; and two, that Reagan had realized this twenty or thirty years earlier, and it was I, the socialist, who had been the pseudo-intellectual, and not he. Later still, after I had been practicing the martial arts for a few years and had been in enough championship bouts to validate the ancient teachings about clarity of spirit and trained instinctiveness of decision, I came to another realization. The enemy can only be defeated through his own feelings; he can only be defeated if you recognize him as your enemy; and he will only concede when he realizes that you are crazier -- more committed to victory -- than he is.
And there were indeed enemies in this world. As Yitzhak Rabin said, "You make peace with your enemies, not with your friends." Ronald Reagan could well have coined the same words. If we pretend that our enemies are really our friends, and that if we make nice with them they will do what we want, then we will never be able to make peace with them. Why should they make peace -- looking at it from their point of view -- when we do not even respect them enough to recognize them fair and square as our enemy? Christ said "love your enemy," but he did not say "don't have enemies," because that is not in our power. We love our enemies by respecting them, and we are able to make peace with them if we respect them enough to take them seriously, and put them in a position where it is in their interest to make peace with us.
This brings to mind the current "War On Terror" as George W. Bush has labelled the fight against the Muslim Jihadists who use terrorism. This muddled phrase is a far cry from Ronald Reagan's term "Evil Empire" directed at a clearly labelled ideological enemy. "War On Terrorism" would be a slight improvement. A bigger improvement would be "War On Terrorists". But even that falls well short of what is needed. We are not warring against all terrorists throughout the world regardless of their motivations and targets. We are not, for instance, fighting terrorists in Sri Lanka. We are specificially warring against Islamic terrorists.
There is a reluctance in our elites to clearly label the enemies we are fighting. But our enemies see themselves as Muslim warriors. A substantial portion of all Muslims in the world approve of their fight and see them as legitimate fighters for Islam. One reason for this reluctance is that while we wanted to totally defeat fascism and at least some of us wanted to totally defeat communism most people (quite reasonably in my view) do not see the wiping out of the Muslim religion as an achievable or acceptable way to eliminate the Islamic terrorist threat. Yet we need a more clearly labelled enemy. "War On Terror" just doesn't cut it.
In my view as long as Muslims continue to pine for the return of their golden age of enormous empires expanding at the edge of a sword we are going to continue to face threats from them. As long as Muslims believe that the proper relation between Muslims and non-Muslims is that of ruler and very submissive subject they are going to be a threat to the secular Western liberal democracies and to much of the rest of the world. The terrorists are like the tip of the iceberg of a mindset that pervades whole Muslim societies. The root idea that we need to defeat is their mindset holds that there is no separation between government and religion and that Muslims have a right and obligation to rule. The "War On Terror" phrase is a denial of the real body of beliefs that we are fighting.