Category: National Security

Categories
National Security Politics The Opinionsphere War on Drugs

Former Drug Czars Against the War on Drugs (cont.)

Postscript to this post: A minute or so later, General McCaffrey went on to explain that marijuana possession is effectively a “non-prosecutable offense” today:

This statement seems at odds with the more than 6.2 million arrests since 1990 for simple marijuana possession that a 2006 study analyzed [pdf]. According to that report, arrests for possession of marijuana have actually risen – as the War on Drugs was transformed from a war primarily against heroin and cocaine to one against marijuana. The main reason for this discussed by the report is that marijuana arrests pad arrests statistics, although other studies have measured a discernable increase in violent crimes as a result of every police resource wasted on combating marijuana.

Perhaps what General McCaffrey was referring to was of the enormous number of those arrested for marijuana possession, only a very small number of those arrested, booked, and otherwise put through the system are convicted of or even charged with any crime.

Categories
Barack Obama National Security War on Drugs

Former Drug Czars Against the War on Drugs

[digg-reddit-me]

Updated.

When I reported this a few weeks ago, I think I was the first to see significance in what former Drug Czar Brigadier General Barry McCaffrey said – and to be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up more. (The full video of the Council on Foreign Relations event on US-Mexico relations is here.) One of our more aggressive drug czars who vehemently attacked those politicians who suggested even allowances for medicinal marijuana and under whom arrests for mere marijuana possession went way up [pdf] now says this:

QUESTIONER: …[W]hy not just legalize drugs?

Former Drug Czar, General BARRY MCCAFFREY (retired): …[S]ince I’m not in public life, [I can say] I actually don’t care.  I care about 6th graders through 12th graders.  If you’re 40 years old, and you’re living in Oregon, and you have 12 giant pot plants in the back of your log cabin, knock yourself out.

(Laughter.)

(For those watching the video, the first questioner who did not identify himself sounded like Ted Sorenson, the venerable former Kennedy speechwriter who is a frequent guest at Council on Foreign Relations events. )

McCaffrey is not the first drug czar to reveal more nuanced views after his tenure was over. Matthea Falco, a drug czar in the 1970s, has become a strong proponent of the harm reduction over the prohibition approach. When asked why by PBS, she responded:

It’s very hard not to change your vision if you stay in the field long enough…

If you look over the sweep of time, what changed for me from 1980 until about 1990, and continuing today, is that the price of drugs has just plummeted in this country…So that’s got to be a failure [of the War on Drugs]…

It’s also a flawed strategy. Many people argue that it just hasn’t been implemented enough, that, “If you just put ten times as much money into it, it would change everything.” But, in fact, it’s a flawed strategy at its very core. [my emphasis]

Yet another former Drug Czar Peter Bourne commented on the evolution of the War on Drugs into the war on marijuana – beginning here with the claims that marijuana had significantly bad health effects:

It was policymakers trying to hide behind the skirts of science, trying to say that marijuana poses a threat to the health of young people.

Taking any drugs is probably not a good idea. But [marijuana] certainly posed no significant public health problem. In many ways, it’s somewhat reminiscent of 50 years ago when moralists argued that masturbation was morally wrong. They couldn’t just argue that it was morally wrong, so they argued that it made you insane. They were able to get enough physicians to say, “Yes, masturbation makes you insane,” and people argued that this was causing insanity. Therefore, you were justified in condemning masturbation. I see the same sort of process with the use of marijuana, which is a trivial health problem. 

These are the men and women who were in charge of the War on Drugs – and in running this war, they have come to see it’s madness.  As Matthea Falco said, “It’s very hard not to change your vision if you stay in the field long enough.” Those who are engaged with these issues begin to see the obvious:

The War on Drugs is a war on our citizenry which has led us to imprison a higher percentage of our population than any other country on earth. It is destabilizing our neighbors and other countries essential to our national security with the Pentagon going to far as to claim that Mexico is at risk of a complete collapse due to the effects of the Drug War. Domestically, it competes with police resources leading to a measurable rise in non-drug related serious crimes [pdf] as police attention is diverted. It competes with counterterrorism measures and resources. The War on Drugs is actively making us less safe – and it has failed to stop or even reduce the availability or price of drugs. As one wise senator said in 2004:

The war on drugs is an utter failure.

Now that senator is president of the United States of America – and though he offers better policies and a softening of the hardest edges of the Drug War (which includes refraining from calling it a war), he does not offer the bold action that we need to make us safer. The Obama administration seems content to maintain the prohibitionist policies “firmly rooted in prejudices, fears and ideological visions” that have failed decisively (in the words of the major report on the Drug War by the former presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia.) But the War on Drugs and the prohibition it is based on endanger both our liberty and our security. Both must end.

Continue reading “Former Drug Czars Against the War on Drugs”
Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Jack Bauer Archetype

Timothy P. Carney at the National Review:

24 is a true American drama and Jack Bauer is an American hero. When I was in Germany a few years ago, a Cabinet official said that Europe was once half-full of free-thinkers and independent spirits, but then they all got up and moved to America. The American hero is the cowboy: He is Maverick, he is Han Solo, he is Batman (though, when Batman is in trouble, he turns on the Jack Bauer signal), he is the rag-tag minuteman fighting the well-trained Lobsterbacks…

What Carney gets wrong is his identification of Jack Bauer’s character as a cowboy archetype. Bauer belongs to a different but related tradition of American heroes. 

The Westerns – in which the cowboy is the hero – often had characters that, like Bauer, were vigilantes imposing their own justice on a chaotic world. Living in a land beyond civilization, they were only constrained by their own character. Without society and order, the characters of villians and heroes were more obvious. Without the law to protect the weak, it was up to the conscience of the strong to do so. The heroes not only refused to take advantage of the weak, but took it upon themselves to protect them against other strong men. But the story of the West – and the background to the Westerns – is the advance of civilization, law, and society to this chaotic world. The irony of this story of the West is that while the fortitude and heroism of strong men made the settlement of the West possible, it also made them obsolete. See especially The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance but also the more recent HBO Western, Deadwood. 

By the 1930s, as society and the rule of law had extended to virtually every corner of America, there was no longer a place for vigilantes and strong men imposing their own rough justice. Our problems were now external as great forces abroad threatened us – and gangsters undermined society at home – and so the superhero was created. The superhero fought with the police and military to defeat the enemies of civilization. 

But the 1970s saw a change in this dynamic. People felt vulnerable and threatened within their own society – and the rules of society seemed to be protecting those attacking it. The superhero became a persecuted figure – restored again to the place the cowboy had occupied in the final days of the Wild West. Dirty Harry and Batman represent this – both violent vigilantes who break the law in order to protect it.

Jack Bauer belongs to this tradition, that of the condemned superhero – condemned by society yet needed by it.

Carney concludes his piece with this nonsense:

If we believe 24, we don’t think Bill Buchanan or President Palmer will keep us safe. We believe Jack Bauer will keep us safe (if everyone on the show listened to Jack Bauer, the show would be called 12), but we also believe we are Jack Bauer.

The Capitol Dome stands today because of a handful of regular Americans—not soldiers, not bureaucrats, and not even “first-responders,” but American guys who got on a plane on a September morning…

 The lesson of the show is not that Big Brother will keep us safe. The lesson is that we need ruthless bravery from Everyman to keep us safe.

This precisely is not the lesson of 24. Jack Bauer is not “everyman” but superman. He stops cars by standing in front of them; he dies several times in a single hour, but keeps running; he has super-human determination; he gives up his family and friends to stop attacks; he can do seemingly anything. He is considered in the show to be unique – not an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances. 

The lesson of the saviors of the Capitol Dome is a very different one than that of 24. It did not involve superheroes – but ordinary people armed with information about a threat taking action. In the world of 24 – and in the Bush administration policies justified by 24 – secrecy is paramount; torture is required; breaking the law is always necessary; great latitude must be given to the executive branch, and especially the president. The lessons of Flight 93 are that local and spontaneous action by citizens armed with information is the best defense.

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security Politics The War on Terrorism

Colin Gray on China, Terrorism, and Proliferation

Colin Gray, a professor at the U. S. Army War College writes in Parameters (H/t Tom Ricks) gives lays out one of his expectations for solid national security planning:

Expect to be surprised. To win as a defense planner is not to avoid surprise. To win is to have planned in such a manner that the effects of surprise do not inflict lethal damage.

The statement, with some modifications, is a good baseline for any type of long-term planning. What I find most refreshing about Gray is the common-sensical approach he takes – and the lack of regard for what is politically acceptable to say. This of course is necessary to be an effective military planner – as a clear-eyed view of the world forces one to tackle politically fraught issues. I do not agree with all of Gray’s assessments, but unlike the opinions advanced in op-eds, they seem to be the result of a genuine engagement with the issues rather than of domestic political arguments. 

The article as a whole should be read. But here’s a sampling of his assessments:

On China:

Assessed materially, China will not be a credible near-term peer competitor for power and influence; she cannot spend enough to overcome the US lead. But China does not, and will not, accept the position of prominent member of a posse for world order led by the American sheriff. Considerations of guess what?—fear, honor, and interest—will ensure a conflictual relationship between Washington and Beijing. Both sides currently recognize this.

[At the same time] Warfare is quite likely between China and America over Taiwan, though not about Taiwan…

It is possible that the current loose strategic alliance between China and Russia will mature into a full security marriage, but this is uncertain. These nations share a strong dislike for most western values—though they agree that it is healthy to be wealthy—as well as US hegemony, but they do not share much else.

On terrorism:

Terrorists can succeed, however, only if the counterterrorists beat themselves by over-reaction. Principally, counterterrorism is a mission for the afflicted nation’s security services, not for soldiers. Terrorism does not threaten our civilization, but our over-reaction to it could do so. Terrorists do need to be hunted and thereby kept off balance, dealt with as criminals, and sometimes even shot on sight according to the permissive tenets of irregular warfare.

On nuclear proliferation:

[W]e need to recognize that our current conventional superiority obliges our enemies to seek asymmetrical offsets. The more effective are NATO’s conventional arms, the more likely it is that regional great powers would choose to emphasize a nuclear-based deterrent and defense. If you do not believe this, you are in effect claiming that, say, China or Iran would choose to be defeated in conventional war, rather than raise the stakes through nuclear escalation. That would be a heroically optimistic assumption.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Significance of Jack Bauer

[digg-reddit-me]Dahlia Lithwick in Newsweek:

The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer or counterinsurgency expert…the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television’s “24,” Jack Bauer.

Though Lithwick’s statement may sound like an exaggeration, the most common defense of America’s torture policy has been to invoke the character of Jack Bauer on 24. John Yoo, Diane Beaver, Michael Chertoff, Tom Tancredo, and most famously Antonin Scalia have all invoked the TV show 24 in describing and defending national security law under George W. Bush. U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, saw the show’s influence as so pernicious that he he flew to visit the show’s producers to ask them to stop representing torture in such a positive light as it was undermining national security:

[Brigadier General] Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

It sounds as if the gullible students in Finnegan’s class have taken their lead from Justice Scalia who, in defending the extraordinary measures of the Bush administration, asked: 

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?

Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, whose legal memoranda aided the justification torture, claimed that Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas” about how to interrogate prisoners.

One thing that most of these defenders of torture do not mention – and that many opponents of torture fail to bring up – is that torture doesn’t seem to work. This is in many respects a secondary question – as the morality of torture and the “by any means necessary” approach of Jack Bauer as well as the Bush administration is debated. But Matthew Alexander, a pseodonym for a military interrogator who led the team that found Abu al-Zarqawi in Iraq, has been a vocal defender of the view that torture is an inefficient and counterproductive interrogation tool. The FBI has long maintained that their methods are proven and get reliable information from subjects – as opposed to the new torture techniques that do not. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists interrogated their high-value detainees – not because of their respect for human rights, but because they saw what was most effective. The greatest Nazi interrogator was a Hanns-Joachim Schraff who never even raised his voice, let alone tortured his subjects. He was one of the few top Nazis not tried for war crimes. Matthew Alexander – the man who got the intelligence that led to Zarqawi’s death – was one of the few adherents to Schraff’s view of interrogation in Iraq. His interrogation tools, rather than fear, violence, torture, religious persecution, and intimidation were “respect, rapport, hope, cunning, and deception.” 

Ann Applebaum points to the obvious question:

Given the overwhelmingly negative evidence, the really interesting question is not whether torture works but why so many people in our society want to believe that it works.

It may be unfair to blame 24 for this belief in the efficacy of torture. There is something deeper at work here than the propaganda of a television show. But 24 puts forth a persuasive cultural argument in which the extreme circumstances that occur every hour on the show justify extreme actions (such as threatening to harm an infant, mock executions of children; regular torture) are then used to justify American policies.

Categories
National Security The War on Terrorism War on Drugs

The Rule of Law

I’m written quite a bit about the Rule of Law on this blog. I’ve come to see it as the cornerstone of my political views – this belief that, as Thomas Paine famously asserted in his Common Sense:

For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

This distinction – between the holder of power and the law – is one of the fundamental insights of our Founding Fathers – and one that the Bush administration treated with contempt – a contempt I am loathe to attribute to conservatives in general, but one which far too many for my comfort seem to share.

Protecting the Rule of Law is what I (along with Philip Bobbitt) propose that the Wars Against Terrorism must focus primarily on.

One of the primary reasons I believe the War on Drugs must end is to protect the Rule of Law.

My criticisms of the Bush administration’s War on Terror arise largely from their abuse of the Rule of Law – from asserting unchecked presidential authority to attempting to evade any laws by creating a prison in Guantanamo to flagrantly committing felonies even after being advised as such by the attorney general and FBI director.

I believe Bush’s War on Terror evolved all too quickly into a war on the Rule of Law itself, as one of the few remaining checks on presidential power. 

It is why I believe that men and women who knowingly attempted to undermine the Rule of Law, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent allowed by the law. 

Perhaps the reason I have been so attracted to this concept as a fundamental principle is that it is not an absolute one – but instead requires a balancing test. Rather than focusing on liberty or equality – both of which are important principles that must be balanced against other principles to avoid becoming the justification for great evils, the concept of the Rule of Law itself is a balancing test between anarchy and authoritarianism, between justice and legality, between what is needed and what can be done.

Categories
Foreign Policy Libertarianism Mexico National Security Politics The Opinionsphere War on Drugs

The Unintended Consequences of a War on Drugs

American libertarian Alan Bock at Antiwar.com:

The most efficacious approach [.pdf] to stemming the violence in Mexico is to recognize that just as what most newspapers blithely call “drug-related crime” is actually drug-law-related crime or even drug-law-caused crime, the wave of violence in Mexico is not caused by the inherent viciousness of the Mexican underclass or the physiological properties of drugs deemed illicit, but by the set of perverse incentives that arise when governments treat adults like children and dictate what they can ingest, attempting to prohibit plants and substances that are easily grown and formulated and for which there is a steady demand. The violence in Mexico is not “drug-related” but “drug-law-related” or even caused directly and indirectly by the laws attempting to prohibit the use of some substances.

While I do not agree with the moral aspects of Bock’s approach – which attribute the moral failings of individuals to government policy – and place the moral blame for these actions on the government – his policy analysis here strikes me as fundamentally sound.

Categories
Foreign Policy Mexico National Security

Funding Both Sides of Mexico’s Drug War

[digg-reddit-me]We’re supplying the weapons and funding to both sides in the civil war between the Mexican drug cartels and the central government.

Republican state senator from Arizona, John Paton, is quoted by Randal C. Archibold in The New York Times summarizing our relationship with Mexico:

They send us drugs and people, and we send them guns and cash.

Though he probably didn’t intend it so, this remark works on several levels, illustrating how some of our current policies are the largest factors contributing to the destabilization of Mexico.

On the one hand, as Rick Perry, Republican governor of Texas, recently acknowledged:

Many of the guns aimed at Mexican law enforcement passed through our state, as did so many of the dollars funding those violent gangs.

It is estimated that $12 – $15  billion dollars is funneled to Mexico through the illegal drug trade and as James C. McKinley, Jr. in the New York Times reported:

A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico come from dealers north of the border.

In addition to weapons from legitimate dealers, some significant number of weapons have apparently been stolen from U.S. military bases and gotten into the hands of the Mexican cartels, which are now more heavily armed than the local police and in some cases, the military. Many members – and indeed, some entire police forces – have been coopted by the cartels through a combination of bribery and violence. Mexico’s former drug czar was arrested for taking bribes from the cartels; the Juarez police chief resigned after the cartels began systematically killing police officers until he resigned; just last week, a top investigative police officer was killed along with 10 members of his family.  More than 6,000 people were killed last year in Mexico’s war. Even allowing for politically expedient exaggeration, the fact that a top Mexican cabinet official would claim that the power of the drug cartels has grown to such a level that “the next president of the republic [could] be a narco-trafficker” demonstrates how serious a force the drug cartels are.

At the same time as American dollars and American guns have been powering the cartels, the America government has been funding the Mexican government’s war against the cartels. Most recently, with the Mérida Initiative, American has begun to funnel almost half a billion dollars a year to the Mexican government – most of it in the form of weaponry. A local television station described it as:

a plan to give 1 point four billion dollars in weapons and training to Mexico called the Merida Initiative is still under fire. Critics say arming Mexico could backfire…like it has in the past with other countries. But Kilburn says this plan seems well thought out.

“You are talking about buying heavy equipment, machinery, surveillance helicopters, airplanes and these things are less likely to get in the wrong hands.”

The cartels have taken to smuggling drugs in submarines; they have stolen U.S. army equipement; they often outgun the Mexican police; former Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey described the situation:

The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 [caliber] sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.

But these items we are giving now are “less likely to get in the wrong hands.” I’m relieved.

The violence in Mexico is escalating. The San Francisco Chronicle recently called Mexico:

the latest and most sweeping test of the “too big to fail” imperative as White House policymakers try to steady a shaky world…

Given our current situation – funding and supplying weapons to both sides of this war on our border – it’s hard to see how can prevent Mexico from failing. The gun laws – and enforcement of laws preventing gun smuggling across the border – can be tweaked and made more effective. But this is not enough. We are contributing $400 odd million to combat the cartels and supplying the cartels with tens of billions of dollars at the same time. Yet, we cannot allow these violent gangs to take over Mexico – and we should not countenance their undermining of the rule of law in Mexico. Our prohibitionist approach is failing; our war is failing; what we must do is take a step back and evaluate our Drug War policies from a strategic perspective and see what changes we can make that might help stabilize our neighbor. 

Arizona’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, is careful not to suggest he supports the decriminalization of marijuana, but the facts he offers do suggest a course of action:

Right now, the item that’s fueling the violent cartels, the murders in Mexico, the cartel wars that are going on right now that have resulted in over 1,000 deaths this year, I think we need to take a very aggressive stand on that and marijuana is the number one producer for the cartels. Sixty to 70 percent of their gross profits comes from marijuana. So, I think we need to look very hard at something we haven’t looked at for years.

As the report recently issued by the former presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia stated:

Current drug repression policies are firmly rooted in prejudices, fears and ideological visions. 

The report went on to suggest what is beginning to look like the consensus, common-sense approach: if we can’t win while funding both sides of this war, we should try to dry up the source of funding and decriminalize, perhaps even legalize, marijuana.

Categories
Foreign Policy Iran Iraq National Security The War on Terrorism

Clear-eyed Engagement

Roger Cohen continues to make the case for clear-eyed engagement with Iran: 

Let’s be clear: Iran’s Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux. Nor is it a totalitarian state.

He suggests that Iran may prove to be what George W. Bush and the neoconservatives tried to make Iraq into:  a model for the Middle East of what a country that has come out the other side of extremism looks like, quoting a friend:

“Iran — the supposed enemy — is the one society that has gone through its extremist fervor and is coming out the other end. It is relatively stable and socially dynamic.”

Fareed Zakaria in a Newsweek article seemingly designed to provoke the ire of the right-wing argues that:

We can better pursue our values if we recognize the local and cultural context, and appreciate that people want to find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license. In the end, time is on our side. Bin Ladenism has already lost ground in almost every Muslim country. Radical Islam will follow the same path. Wherever it is tried—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan—people weary of its charms very quickly. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That’s the most powerful weapon of all.

Categories
Barack Obama National Security The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

We Cannot Pass the Buck

David Cole in the New York Times:

As a legal matter, we are compelled to investigate by the Convention Against Torture, a binding treaty, that requires its signatories to investigate and refer for possible prosecution credible evidence of torture under their jurisdiction.

That obligation has been triggered by, among other things, the admissions that C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding on at least three suspects with the express approval of Vice President Dick Cheney and other Cabinet officials, and by the finding of Susan Crawford, head of military prosecutions at Guantanamo, that interrogators there, acting under orders of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani. If we do not investigate such evidence, foreign courts have the right to pursue torture prosecutions of U.S. officials under the principle of “universal jurisdiction.”

In other words, as per our treaty obligations, we must investigate any credible allegations of torture. If we do not, many top Bush administration officials will not be able to leave the country for fear of arrest and the worst of America’s abuses over the past years will be revealed by foreign nations.

We must take responsibility. We cannot pass the buck.