Category: Foreign Policy

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Foreign Policy Politics The War on Terrorism

Did our foreign policy cause 9/11?

[digg-reddit-me]The frequent reddit commentator amstrdamordeath posed this question:

I’ve often wondered that myself. All of the people who don’t think that American foreign policy caused 9/11. What do you think?

As this issue has been used in the public discourse, there are only two main alternatives (as illustrated in the Republican debate where Ron Paul and Rudy exchanged harsh words over the issue): either our foreign policy caused 9/11 or it is outrageous to say that our foreign policy caused 9/11 – we didn’t deserve to be attacked. Both positions are idiotic. From my response on reddit:

Our foreign policy is what made us a target, but is not what caused 9/11.

Olivier Roy, a French social scientist who has been studying Islam in western societies for the past few decades, believes that the current islamist movement is based on generational factors – as younger Muslims grow up, they are rejecting the hypocrisy of their parents passive response to the power of the West and the comparative decline of Islamic societies. Roy compares this generational phenomenon to the sixties radical movements.

The root cause of 9/11 and the growing support for islamism is not our foreign policy, but the relative economic, technological, and cultural stagnation of Islamic, and specifically, Arab society over the past few centuries. These societies are undergoing a period not dissimilar to Europe’s Dark Ages. At the same time, the power of the West and in the past fifty years, of the Far East has grown exponentially. The knowledge that they lack significant power in the world drives the islamist movement and is the root cause of 9/11.

How does this lead to 9/11? Because many of the leaders of Islamic societies, especially in the Mideast, have been stoking hatred against the West as a distraction from their own illegitimate rule, even as they are being propped up by Western support; because our foreign policy of supporting the status quo in the Mideast (until the Bush administration) was seen as an impediment to a resurgence of Islam; because the relative success of our foreign policy demonstrates our tremendous power over the governments and societies in the region; because we are the dominant world power: these are the reasons why we were targeted on 9/11.

Our foreign policy did not cause 9/11, but caused these strong forces to be directed towards us.

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Foreign Policy Obama Politics

Tom Friedman, Car Salesman

I like Tom Friedman. Reading his column for the past seven or so years, I have come to believe that he’s a good guy and his column regularly provides genuine insight in a simplified format. Several years ago though, The New Republic perfectly spotted his weakness in a throwaway comment in a larger article* calling Friedman a salesman instead of analyst. It is true that his columns, while providing insights, are weak on analysis. Friedman’s strength is that he will start with a truly interesting concept that reveals something about the situation he is commenting on – but his weakness is that his analysis of that concept is poor, and often diluted by the kind of “pox-on-both-of-their-houses” journalism that in attempting to be objective, ends up creating a false middle ground.

This is precisely the problem with Friedman’s latest column which suggests that Barack Obama should keep Dick Cheney as Vice President. A weird concept which Friedman explains thus:

When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

Friedman explains that a President Obama could say something like this to the Iranian regime if Cheney was his Vice President:

“Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”

It’s not a mind-boggling insight – that there are ways to leverage an unhinged and powerful Vice President in diplomatic talks – but it is a solid insight, and one that is often overlooked- not least it seems by the current administration. Where I see Friedman go off the rails is in his attempt to portray Obama’s Iran policy. He cites Obama’s “inner Jimmy Carter” as part of the reason for making this statement: “Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work.” I can see someone plausibly making this argument – but not without trying to square it with Obama’s comments about being willing to launch attacks against high-value targets in Pakistan, with or without authorization from the Pakistani government. I consider this a distinctly un-Carteresque policy.

Friedman does not want to let the nuanced and balanced approach to foreign policy that Obama has explicitly and repeatedly put forth get in the way of Friedman’s bumper sticker approach to political commentary. Friedman sees a hawkish hawk and a Jimmy-Carter-ish dove when in fact Cheney is a hawk in the most extreme and unhinged sense and Obama is a pragmatist. The superficial case Friedman is trying to make – that we need both Cheneys and Obamas to make progress might be correct. But his subtext – that Cheney represents the hardline position and that Obama represents its opposite is incorrect. In Friedman’s own account, Cheney does not represent so much the hardline position as the specter of an irrational man with his hand on the trigger. Obama, as indicated by his many statements on foreign policy, does not represent the extension of Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy – but of precisely the balanced approach that Friedman seems to be advocating.

The problem is that either (1) Friedman does not know this; or (2) Friedman does not want to appear partisan. Either way, it has turned a potentially interesting column into a distorted bumper sticker view of foreign policy.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Politics The War on Terrorism

And I am Caesar.

[digg-reddit-me]Thanks to Tony for the link.

Update: Thanks to amstrdamordeath for pointing out that this piece was not found in the public record until 2001, and that there are no records of either Caesar or Shakespeare writing or saying it.

Still, it kind of hits you…

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Law Morality Politics The War on Terrorism

Vince Flynn & The Preemptive Surrender of American Values

The Constitution

To demonstrate my previous point that:

“[T]he Republican position is this: the terrorists have won. The terrorists’ ideas and actions make America’s liberal democracy irrelevant. We must take what steps are necessary to protect the public safety; civil liberties are only for those who deserve them. Although the President took an oath to defend the Constitution, he now must defend American lives at the expense of this old document.”

Vince Flynn has written a novel he has ironically titled Protect and Defend. (See footnote if you miss the irony.) Apparently, it is now the top fiction bestseller on The New York Times, and the author is going on a promotional tour. Glenn Beck has said that Mitt Rapp, the hero of Flynn’s thriller, makes “Jack Bauer look like a puss”. Here a taste of what the novel is like from an exchange towards the end of chapter 45 during which the President of the United States, the Attorney General, and the hero Mitch Rapp are on a conference call in a crisis situation that perfectly illustrates my point:

“Mitch, [Attorney General] Pete Weber here. We all know you and [CIA Director] Irene are close but you really need to take a few steps back and remember that you took an oath, an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. We all took that oath and that means that none of us is above the law, including you.”

There was a long pause and then in a voice filled with frustration Rapp said, “You have got to be kidding me!”

Rapp’s stark response caused everyone in the room to take a quick look at each other.

“Excuse me?” the attorney general asked defensively.

“The Director of the CIA was just kidnapped and her entire security detail was wiped out and you want to lecture me about an oath and a two hundred year old piece of paper?”

“Our entire country is based on that piece of paper,” Weber responded defensively.

“You may have been thinking about defending a piece of paper when you took your oath but I was thinking about protecting and defending American citizens from the type of shit that just happened. I apologize for my language, Mr. President, but this is ridiculous.” [my italics]

There are so many things to find wrong with this: the fact that Rapp misrepresents entirely the oath of office and mocks the rule of law; the fact that he deems the legal document that is supposed to be a check on his actions irrelevant; or the fact that Dick Cheney and President Bush have been reputed to have made similar statements about the Constitution and about the rule of law.

A contempt for the rule of law

The overwhelming feeling you get from the book is one of complete disregard for law and morality. Throughout the novel – which I have read – no American character ever objects to torture or law-breaking or murder on moral grounds. The only character who in some way thinks about morality is the Iranian intelligence chief who eventually works with the Americans because he knows that what his country is doing is wrong. But as the novel’s hero cuts off a prisoner’s testicles, mutilates dead bodies, and kills a Democratic Party strategist, there is explicitly no remorse. Flynn actually makes a point of saying that Rapp has no remorse or twinges of conscience over these actions. (It is also suggested the hero, acting with the CIA, killed the Vice President in a previous book: the rationale for the murder of the Democratic strategist and Vice President is that they orchestrated a terrorist attack in order to win an election. As Flynn says in the book and interview: too often politicians put their own party’s interest ahead of national security.)

The odd thing about this rejection of laws and constitutions and any traditional sense of morality is that while Flynn portrays his character’s actions as rational, they are clearly driven by visceral feelings more than pragmatism. Again and again, the “liberal” characters suggest that the hero is too emotionally caught up to think straight and do his job rationally – and Rapp admits it. Yet, knowing this, the President of the United States gives Rapp “carte blanche“. Flynn makes it clear that Rapp would do all of these things while not emotionally involved, but, perhaps to keep the audience sympathetic, keeps mentioning how emotional Rapp is. Any time any limit on Rapp’s actions and power is suggested, he reacts viscerally, with one example shown above. The strongest feeling in the novel is a contempt for law and ethics and the rule of law and conscience are considered “niceties” that are only practical in times of peace. If you doubt the current administration shares these feelings, I suggest reading Charlie Savage’s new book Takeover. The fact is that these visceral feelings are informing Republican policy – both in Vince Flynn’s imaginary world and in our own.

This contempt for the rule of law and for conscience, and the policies and actions stemming from this feeling, represent nothing less than the preemptive surrender of American values in order to try to preserve American lives. What ever happened to “Live free or die” or “Give me liberty or give me death!”? Benjamin Franklin warned, “Those who would surrender precious liberty in exchange for a bit of temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Now we have a president, a number of presidential candidates, and a few literary characters who believe liberty is only worth the paper it is protected by, who believe the rule of law does not apply in times of war, and who believe that we are in a war that will be fought for “generations”. If these men and women are right, we have reached the end of the American experiment. If the president is not constrained by the rule of law; if the balance of power between the branches of government is not respected; if the Constitution is merely an “old parchment” (to use Dick Cheney’s dismissive phrase); if the government has the right to torture and imprison and spy on American citizens in violation of Congressionally sanctioned law; if the president assumes tyrannical powers, even if he exercises them judiciously and is allowed to do so, what is left of our nation “conceived in liberty”?

I believe an Obama presidency would take the first steps to restore American values to our government. But no matter who you support, you must realize this election is of historic importance. Yet despite this, many Americans, especially, those of my generation, the post 9/11 generation are disengaged from power. We cannot afford this disengagement, ironic or otherwise, any longer.

A prescription for change

Vote and vote in large numbers and vote even if it doesn’t seem like it makes a difference. Sign up to vote today if you haven’t already. Vote for change. Vote to tackle the issues that matter. Campaign, volunteer, and throw your support behind the candidate you think is the best. Even more, and in addition, we must work in our local communities, on the web, and through our entrepreneurial efforts to start changing our society.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

We must engage with power. We must try to revive this corrupt system. We cannot wait until 2012 for real change. Our moment is now. We cannot let this election slip by. Sometimes, in the midst of trying times, all we have is the audacity of hope and our seemingly insignificant powers as individuals. We cannot decide what obstacles we will face. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

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Domestic issues Foreign Policy The War on Terrorism

Eschewing politics

From the New York Times a few weeks ago by Anthony Lewis reviewing Dead Certain and The Terror Presidency, a comment which better defines the Bush administration’s actions and failures than most else:

In an interesting comparison with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sweeping power in World War II, Goldsmith says Roosevelt relied on persuasion, bargaining, compromise. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

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Foreign Policy The War on Terrorism

Islamist Terrorism as “a generational phenomenon”

Iranian youthOlivier Roy, a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations last week. Roy has written a number of works about Islam and secular Western societies and the inherent conflicts between the two.

In his presentation last week entitled “The Future of Radical Islam in Europe”, he made a few comments about Islam that presented the issue in a way I had not thought of it before. Regarding terrorism and islamism, he said:

…for me it’s a generational phenomenon. It’s a youth phenomenon. It’s not the expression of a traditional society. And it’s why — for example, I compare this with the wave of [student unrest] in the West during the ’60s and ’70s.

I am surprised that I never thought of islamism his way before. It certainly makes sense though. It does not make terrorist attacks any less dangerous, but it has profound consequences for dealing with islamism oth tactically and strategically. It also is worth noting that Roy is basing his statements on the French student unrest which was far more destructive and radical than the American equivalent. But in both cases, the young rebelled against their parents’ hypocrisy, some in violent and radical ways. In America though, as well as in other countries, an opposing and slightly younger movement emerged from the same generation opposed to the hypocrisies of both their fellow youth and of their parents. If Roy is correct, we should look out for this counter-movement.

More important though: if the bulk of those men (and theoretically women) whose terrorist threaten America are disaffected youth embracing a self-shattering and self-promoting understanding of religion, doesn’t it flatter them to declare war on them? If our enemies are primarily motivated by our foreign policies or domestic policies, by who we are, or by a desire to purify the world of kafir, our options are stark. But if instead, islamists are primarily young people who are disaffected with the world and, in seeking to lash out, use our foreign and domestic policies and other elements as excuses to attack us because they feel they must attack someone, our strategy must be substantially different.

[digg-reddit-me]Know Thy Enemy

Sun Tzu wrote that one must know one’s enemy in order to ensure your victory over him. This is the fundamental flaw in the War on Terrorism: we do not know our enemy; and worse than mere ignorance, we are confused about who our enemy is. If we examine the problem that confronted us on 9/11, we see two distinct issues that combined on that day to devastating effect:

  • the rise of islamism as a major force in the Muslim world;
  • the magnified power of individuals to take advantage of society’s practices and use our technologies against us.

Neo-conservatives have portrayed our opponents as the Islamic world itself. They have declared the conflict civilizational, as a war that will last generations, as a cancer within the religion of Islam that has affected the majority and infected a large minority. They see opponents driven by an Islamic ideology and determined to create an Islamic caliphate spanning the Middle East. But if Roy is right, then the conflict is instead generational and our opponents are the disaffected youth who, not knowing quite where to direct their anger, direct it at us as the predominant power in the world. He sees the roots of the conflict in a rebellion against the compromise that has dominated the Islamic world of their parents.

Certain leaders from the older generation have ridden to power on this discontent, stoking it and guiding it. But in the end, these youth are more confused than ideologically driven. Our best policy is to do what we can to avoid radicalizing them. In this, our policy so far, has been a disaster. By torturing detainees, invading Iraq, occupying Iraq, reducing civil liberties at home, and propping up dictators around the world, we play into the hands of those leaders who seek to radicalize the young.

I do not mean to play down the serious threat that terrorism poses to our society or even to say that islamist terrorism is somehow less significant. Rather, as Sun Tzu said, we must understand our enemy and determine how best to undermine him. So far, our actions have united our enemies and galvanized the islamist movement. Perhaps it is time to consider that there is something flawed in our original reasoning.

If the current batch of radicalized islamists more closely parallel the the Weathermen or the more radical European terrorist groups of the 1960s than the Nazis and Communists, then we need to re-think our strategy.

A better tactic than trying to transform or wage war on a civilization, would be to undermine the leaders who are attempting to radicalize the disaffected youth. This doesn’t solve all of our problems, but it would be a better approach than our current one.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics

The Real Obama

There have been a few profiles in the past few days of Senator Obama, timed perhaps to coincide with the beginning of the sprint for the Democratic nomination.  I already posted some excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s excellent piece and the candidate himself seems to have picked up on the meme himself.  The theme of Sullivan’s piece was that no other candidate had the promise or the potential of Obama and that Obama and Obama alone could truly respond to this unique moment in American history, both culturally within our country and as our representative abroad.  James Traub has a piece that is somewhat more critical in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend.  Traub reports that Obama is supported by most of the Democratic foreign policy elite, aside from a few of President Clinton’s top aides, who support Hillary.  However, among many voters, Traub sees the problem as this:

Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world.

Traub concludes:

Obama concedes that he has a problem. “We have not fully made our case yet,” he admits. “I think the American people know in their gut that we need significant change, and I think they’d like to believe what I’m saying is possible.” But they need, says this former law-school professor, “a permission structure.” They need to know that they’ll be safe with Barack Obama. Or unsafe with Hillary Clinton.

Two months before the presidential primaries begin, it still looks like a hard sell.

From the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett reaches a similar conclusion while analyzing Barack Obama’s charisma and personal appeal.  He explains how he researched Obama’s past trying to find some dirt from his years at Harvard Law, but that oddly enough he could not find anyone who disliked Obama.  Barnett finds this extraordinary – for a top student at a top school who won every honor and excelled, graduating magna cum laude would not have aroused significant jealousies and other petty remembrances.

The results surprised me. Regardless of his classmates’ politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate…

The people that Obama so thoroughly charmed generally weren’t the charm-prone types. I say the following as a well known Republican partisan–the fact that his classmates so universally held him in the highest regard suggests that Barack Obama may truly be a special person.

Working for the Weekly Standard however, Barnett is forced to conclude:

There’s still time for the man that I’ve heard is the real Obama to emerge. If he does, he’ll be formidable. But time is growing short.

Both Barnett and Traub reach similar conclusions: they both believe that Obama has greater potential than any of the other Democratic candidates; that he is “special”, and extremely intelligent; and that he’s not quite ready.

You might recall I concluded the same thing after hearing him speak at Washington Square Park this September:

What he is missing is something that everyone around him can sense–his audiences, his aides, himself. Perhaps it is a certain resolve to take on the responsibility; perhaps it is a sense of certainty that he will be able to perform the job. What is missing is both obvious and amorphous.

He is missing just this thing. He is not yet ready. But come January, I believe and hope he will be.

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Foreign Policy History Morality

John Laughland, loon

In his column over at the Guardian, Laughland has taken a very interesting concept for an article – as demonstrated by his subtitle: “It is no accident that those who advocate war for humanitarian reasons end up justifying torture” – and neglected to explore the subject.  Laughland instead has chosen to muddy the moral issues at stake.  Described by Wikipedia as a “a British eurosceptic conservative journalist, academic and author”, he manages to take moral relativism to Chomskian levels.  Right here is a glimmer of the article he might have written:

It is therefore no coincidence that the US administration that justifies its wars in the name of claims about humanity and its right to liberty also advocates the use of torture to protect these.

He then goes on to implicitly question the genocides of the post-World War II era and to mock the fact that people think someone should have intervened.  Apparently, Laughland, whom the Guardian called the “PR man for Europe’s nastiest regimes” – and then apparently gave him a column – took some lessons from World War II that few others did.  Neither Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Munich nor the Holocaust seems to have made much impression on Laughland; apparently the lesson he has taken is that we must avoid war at any price.  This is a position Gandhi took as well – in the midst of Hitler’s crimes – and I can certainly imagine someone making a strong case for it.

Laughland is not that person: he seems to understand the weakness of his position, and rather than forthrightly stating that we should allow genocide because state sovereignty is the most important virtue, he tries to deny that these crimes take place.  He says that he is opposed to humanitarian interventions, and then explains that the interventions were not all that humanitarian.  These are two distinct points.  The problem is that he declares his opinion if Position A and tries to justify it by citing a support of Position B.

Laughland concludes his article using a familiar phrase from the pre-World War II period:

We need instead to renew the deep conviction that seized the collective conscience of mankind in 1945 that the international system, and the ideas that underpin it, should be structured so as to ensure peace at any price. [my italics]

Unfortunately, I think those currently promoting this most recent article are realizing what Laughland is saying.  Laughland believes the only principle that should be used to organize international affairs is state sovereignty.  I don’t know many liberals who would support that.  And I personally believe there are greater principles that are often at stake.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Giuliani Obama Politics

Obama v. Giuliani

Giuliani decided to echo Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama last Friday, saying that Obama’s decision to engage in aggressive diplomacy with Iran was “naive” and “irresponsible”. The Obama camp responded thus:

While Rudy Giuliani may embrace Hillary Clinton’s policy of not talking and saber rattling towards Iran, Barack Obama knows that policy is not working. It’s time for tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, not lectures from a Mayor who skipped out on the Iraq Study Group to give paid speeches, and who was naive and irresponsible enough to recommend someone with ties to convicted felons for Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is what I like to see, and the statement is on par with the Obama camp’s response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign when they started to attack Hillary defector David Geffen.

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Foreign Policy Pakistan

“I cannot allow this country to commit suicide.”

Musharraf imposed emergency rule on Pakistan today. Obviously, this is disturbing news – either an indication that the situation in Pakistan is so bad that these steps must be taken; or more disturbingly, that Musharraf is willing to do anything to maintain power. I’m not sure what to make of this yet.

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