Interventions Past: Getting the Record Straight

The jumbled accounting of the 1999 events in Kosovo that respected Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery musters in support of the current Libya bombing campaign illustrates just how far the fog of war may extend.  In reviewing the recent history of what he considers humanitarian interventions, including NATO’s in Kosovo, Avnery writes:

Slobodan Milosevic was committing an act of genocide – driving out a whole people, committing barbarities along the way.

Leaving aside the question of the appropriateness of the word “genocide,” Avnery describes things accurately enough.  In his book, Kosovo: War and Revenge, journalist Tim Judah wrote:

In the end almost 850,000 were either deported or fled Kosovo and hundreds of thousands were displaced inside.

The problem is that Judah here describes events that actually happened after the start of the NATO bombing campaign that Avnery thinks was aimed at stopping them.

I know from personal experience that Avnery is not the only one with an inverted time line of the period.  A couple of years ago, a friend of mine described an article he was planning to write accusing Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein of dogmatism.  While I was in no way sympathetic to his point of view and ultimately thought that it was his article rather than its targets that was dogmatic, I nonetheless thought I’d save him from a bit of embarrassment by pointing out that the Kosovo bombing campaign he considered the “right thing” to do (while Chomsky hadn’t) had preceded the displacement campaign his memory told him had come first.

It’s not the case that these folks are recovering these memories out of thin air, though. There were Kosovars displaced before that. Judah again:

By the 3 August (1998) the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was estimating that 200,000 Kosovars had been displaced by the fighting.

But the chronology is not the only aspect of the Kosovo War that has been distorted – there were two sides to it and neither covered itself with glory. Slobodan Milosevic, leader of what was then still officially Yugoslavia, is accurately remembered as a war criminal.  But less well remembered is the fact that earlier that year, the U.S. State Department had branded the principle force fighting Milosevic’s government, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a “terrorist organization.” (While I personally do not place great stock in State Department “terrorist lists,” I had thought that the State Department did.)  At one point the organization threatened death to any ethnic-Albanian Kosovar leaders who might sign onto a pact for autonomy within Yugoslavia. The late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke thought the KLA was “taking very provocative steps in order to draw the west into the crisis.”

None of this is meant to whitewash either Milosevic, the disproportionate force employed by his government, or the fear at the time that something like the massacre of 8,000-10,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces four years before could be repeated in Kosovo.  But neither should we forget that Yugoslavia had allowed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to station 2,000 monitors in the province in the midst of the fighting.  The monitors were removed when NATO began its bombing – against the wishes of Yugoslavia.

Only after the start of that 78-day campaign (which included the use both of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions and the bombing of a Belgrade television station that killed eighteen) did Yugoslav forces drive Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population out.

(BBC’s official timeline of the conflict: 1999 March – Internationally-brokered peace talks fail. Nato launches air strikes against Yugoslavia lasting 78 days before Belgrade yields. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees pour into neighbouring countries, telling of massacres and forced expulsions which followed the start of the Nato campaign.)

But in his column on the Gush Shalom website Avnery writes:

When there was a worldwide outcry, President Bill Clinton decided to bomb installations in Serbia in order to induce Milosevic to desist. Nominally, it was a NATO action. It achieved its goal, the Kosovars returned to their homeland, and today we have the independent republic of Kosovo.

Judah, in fact, considered Yugoslavia’s responding to the bombing by driving the Albanian Kosovars out to be what ultimately undid it.  Absent that, the story the outside world saw was all about the bombing of Serbia.  “If this situation had continued for much longer,” he thought, “there is little doubt that uproar would have ensued.  The question would have been asked, ‘How can we bomb a small country – whatever we think of its government – because it refuses to sign an agreement about the future of part of its own territory?’”

In retrospect, one of the more significant aspects of NATO’s Yugoslavia bombing campaign has proved to be that it was the point at which many liberals “got over” Vietnam and came to like war again.  Avnery continues:

At the time, I applauded publicly, to the dismay of many of my leftist friends at home and all over the world. They insisted that the bombing campaign was a crime, particularly since it was conducted by NATO, which for them is an instrument of the devil.  My answer was that in order to prevent genocide, I am ready to make a pact even with the devil.

Or at least to lose his memory, apparently.

Some who do remember the chronology correctly still maintain that an effect of the bombing campaign was somehow actually its cause. As Noam Chomsky commented:

The logic, widely accepted, is intriguing. Uncontroversially, the vast crimes took place after the bombing began: they were not a cause but a consequence. It requires considerable audacity, therefore, to take the crimes to provide retrospective justification for the actions that contributed to inciting them.

We will surely not all agree on the future military interventions the U.S. will undoubtedly enter into, but if we could at least agree on the facts of the interventions of the past, we might have a firmer basis for discussing them.

The Arrogance of Power

“These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale … They were terrorists.”

So went the American response to Pakistan’s complaint that our drone-launched missiles killed mostly “peaceful citizens, including elders of the area” in an attack last week. Now, a decade of explanations that civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan were a regrettable (but inevitable) part of our War on Terror have pretty well inured me to government mendacity. But somehow, this one – well you know, it took the cake. “A bake sale” – No, they probably weren’t there for a bake sale. Bake sales are what they hold here in America to run the schools we don’t have enough money for. Making new enemies for this country is pretty expensive you know.

The story this time is that the missiles apparently killed 26 of 32 participants in a “jirga” called to settle a local dispute between two tribes in North Waziristan over the operation of the chromium mine. Their target was the local Taliban officials expected there to mediate in their role as the de facto local government. Pakistan’s Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani called the attack “carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life,” reporting that there were, in fact, 13 Taliban present, but 15 of those killed were not Taliban. Some locals claimed a death toll as high as 40. And the U.S. response was anonymous because officially we have never launched a missile into Pakistan. We’re not at war there, so that would be illegal. And the CIA would never do anything illegal.

If the military hasn’t yet created a decoration for arrogance, they should. Otherwise, a lot of lot of spectacular efforts – such as this one – will go unrewarded. Could we ever imagine another country killing American civilians because they were in proximity to government or military figures, and then telling the world, “Those people were criminals. That was no cattle show, you know”? Of course not – no country is capable of such an action, so why bother even imagining such a thing?

There may be no better measure of just how far this country has gone down the road of trying to bomb its way to peace and friendship in the Muslim and Arab worlds than our current decision to bomb another Muslim and Arab country. The proposition that Libya could do better than Muammar Gaddafi will get no argument here, nor will I try to predict the future. But consider the arrogance that it takes for us to decide that this latest attack constitutes a sensible American response to the situation.

The U.S. still maintains an occupying force of 50,000 troops in Iraq as a result of a war launched on grounds now generally conceded to have been fraudulent. A military force of over 100,000 is currently deployed in Afghanistan, even as the Secretary of Defense says that anyone who’d recommend an operation like that should “have his head examined.” As mentioned above, we are also waging undeclared war in Pakistan – and in Yemen, too, in similar fashion.

In the current political upheavals in the Middle East, American allies in the governments of Yemen and Bahrain have killed unarmed civilians – in the case of Bahrain with the aid of another ally – Saudi Arabia – none of which has moved our government to action. But when France and the United Kingdom, the former colonial powers in the oil-rich area, declare the need to aid a military uprising in Libya – obviously not an ally – why, the U.S. is right there.

Unfortunately, one of the most accurate reactions to recent events was probably that of the unnamed Pakistani resident who said of the missile attack on his region:

It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, they might want to get to minting those Presidential Medals of Arrogance.

Why Are We In Afghanistan – Still?

You have to wonder what it might take to get the man in the White House to acknowledge just how absurd the current U.S. military effort in Afghanistan has become. Would the president of Afghanistan himself telling us to start getting our troops out do it?  Nah.  How about the leader of the last country to send its army there telling us “Victory is impossible in Afghanistan”?  Nope.  Finding out that some of the guards who protect NATO bases were Taliban – but the top Taliban guy we’d been negotiating with actually wasn’t?  Neither.  A Hollywood agent might push this story as farce.  But it’s real life and that qualifies it as tragedy.

Given that candidate Obama was so widely seen as a man of “new thinking,” one to deliver the country from tired old debates and morasses, one hoped President Obama would listen hard to what Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about the damage that a fruitless nine-years-plus war in Afghanistan can do to a country.  But if so, no evidence yet.

It probably didn’t help that the former President of the former Soviet Union was also impolitic enough to add that “We had hoped America would abide by the agreement that we reached that Afghanistan should be a neutral, democratic country, that would have good relations with its neighbors and with both the US and the USSR.  The Americans always said they supported this, but at the same time they were training militants – the same ones who today are terrorizing Afghanistan and more and more of Pakistan.”

Well, you know how policymakers in Washington hate being lectured on history — when you’re in the White House, you don’t read history, you make it.  Besides, by now we’ve been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were anyhow – so why should we listen to them?

So far as Hamid Karzai’s statement goes, the most remarkable aspect might not be the Afghan President actually telling the U.S. “the time has come to reduce military operations,” but just how little attention his remarks drew.  This is, after all, a man who owes his very political existence to the U.S. invasion.  At the very least it seems fair to say that the American news media would have given a lot more play to remarks like his had they come from the head of the Afghan “puppet” regime back in the days when the Soviet Union was the occupying power.  Of course, you could argue they are being nothing but realistic in giving Karzai short shrift since everybody knows the president of Afghanistan does not call the shots (literally) in his own country.

Karzai’s problem might be that he’s taking American intelligence reports too seriously: When CIA director Leon Panetta was asked earlier this year to assess Al Qaeda’s strength in Afghanistan – the prime justification for sending 97,000 U.S. and 48,800 other foreign troops there – he put it at “maybe 50 to 100, maybe less.”  You can see then how Karzai might get to saying that the U.S. was still in his country because “they like to conduct this thing that they call the war on terror, which we don’t call that anymore in Afghanistan. Because in my opinion and in the opinion of the absolute majority of the Afghan people, the war on terror cannot be conducted in Afghanistan because that isn’t here. It is somewhere else. We are only reaping the consequences of it here.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

And then besides the troops, there’s the additional 26,000 private security employees there, 90 percent of whom work for the U.S., directly or indirectly.  Some of them even provide security for the U.S. military.  And some of them also appear to work directly or indirectly for the Taliban as well.

By now we’re mostly past the initial surprise of learning that someone else besides the American military would be providing its security – it used to be considered pretty much what they did, after all.  So the nation appeared to pretty much take it in stride when it learned that in one case our leaner, meaner, partly privatized military had contracted with two Afghans it knew only as Mr. White and Mr. Pink – monikers taken from characters in the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs – to provide security for an American military base.

The real life Mr. White and Mr. Pink had a falling out, though, and Mr. Pink killed Mr. White, at which point he lined up with the Taliban for protection against Mr. White’s outraged relatives.  The U.S. military decided to keep him on, however, notwithstanding his new alliance with the principal force fighting the U.S. and its allies.

But while Mr. Pink unfortunately turned out to have Taliban connections, Mullah Mansour unfortunately did not – or at least the guy who said he was Mullah Mansour didn’t have quite the connections our side thought he did.
Talks involving the U.S., the Karzai government and the Taliban were officially secret, although U.S. General David Petraeus had actually publicly proclaimed their existence as evidence of the pressure the Taliban was feeling due to his forces’ recent increased military success.  After all, the talks were going particularly well in that the three-man Taliban delegation was demanding neither withdrawal of foreign forces nor a share of government power – things the Taliban had always insisted on in the past.  The White House even prevailed upon the New York Times to withhold the identity of the man leading the delegation – Mansour, widely assumed to be the Taliban’s number two man –  so as not to jeopardize them – until it was discovered that it wasn’t actually Mansour in the negotiations.

To be fair, we don’t actually know that the individual who led the talks on the Taliban side doesn’t have connections with the organization.  After the fraud was revealed, all one anonymous diplomat seemed to know for sure was “It’s not him.  And we gave him a lot of money.”   Call him Mr. Blue, maybe.  Names out of Reservoir Dogs; plot out of Clueless.

AND WE’RE THERE , WHY?

At this point, it seems hard to resist the conclusion that we are in Afghanistan simply because we have been there.  If it made sense to be there last year, or nine years ago, then it must still make sense to be there now, since we obviously still haven’t won.

The good news, however, is that there is a straightforward solution – withdraw outside troops, as Karzai and Gorbachev suggest, and deal with what emerges.  Yes, the results may not be to our liking.  But is there anything else we could possibly do that would enhance the Taliban’s popularity more that providing them the leading role in resisting yet another outside invasion of Afghanistan – as we are currently doing?  Besides, the powers in Washington have already acknowledged that this is precisely the outcome they anticipate.  In the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.”

So why not just get on with it?  So far as Congress goes, the House of Representatives already has legislation in place to bring the war to a prompt end: H. R. 6045, filed by Barbara Lee (D – CA), would restrict the use of “funds for operations of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan” to “purposes of providing for the safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan of all members of the Armed Forces and Department of Defense contractor personnel.”  The Senate still needs someone to step forward to file a parallel bill, but when it comes to the White House, the route to ending the war is simplest of all – the President can just stop it.

And the chances of that happening?  Well, obviously neither the current White House nor Pentagon leadership wants to admit that not only can’t the U.S. win this war, but at this point it’s hard to realistically imagine what “winning” a war in Afghanistan would even look like.  What they do know is that facing reality would surely mean being denounced as defeatists.  So lives will continue to be lost, amazing amounts of money squandered (it costs about a million dollars to maintain an American soldier for a year in Afghanistan), but face must be saved.

Back when he was running, Barack Obama used to say “We are the change we have been waiting for.”  Unfortunately, when it comes to Afghanistan, he does not count as one of the “we,” so the “we” who remain can expect no help from that quarter. Since it appears that the president is moved neither by the advice of foreign leaders, the logic of the situation, nor the feelings of his own base (Democrats oppose his Afghanistan policy by a 62-33 margin according to a November Quinnipiac poll), the only possibility for changing course lies in altering the domestic political equation, that is to say turning the status quo into a negative and making support for immediate withdrawal a positive.  And in the case of a sitting first term president, the most direct– and perhaps only way to do that seems to be a 2012 primary challenge.

Our Foreign Policy Minsky Moment

If there can be any kind of silver lining to our ongoing “Great Recession” it might be that it has elevated the level of economic discussion, at least slightly. For instance, when’s the last time you heard anyone talking about the “magic of the marketplace?”  On the contrary, a fair number of writers and economists seem to have experienced recovered memories of things the country once used to know – like that a capitalist economy is cyclical and inherently prone to crises such as the current one.  In this, the ninth year of our Afghanistan War, the discussion of our foreign policy cries out for similar flashes of enlightenment.

The most interesting economic concept to emerge from recent obscurity is the “Minsky Moment,” Hyman Minsky having been an economist who described a type of social amnesia that occurs as people will themselves into believing that business cycles are things of the past as they engage in riskier and riskier financial activity.  Admirers of Minsky, who died in 1997, named the point when the dream comes crashing down into the nightmare of the next financial crisis after him.  Minsky saw several stages to the process, as gradual societal memory loss of past depressions and recessions leads to something of a state of euphoria when we may hear arguments, such as heard only a few years ago, that transformative innovations like computerization and the Internet have created a “new economy” of permanent prosperity.

Looking at the course of American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the current day, it is hard to miss a similar dream cycle playing out there.  After Vietnam, a new sense of modesty came over American foreign policy.  Yes, our military could unleash destruction upon southeast Asia that was in some respects unmatched in world history.  And, yes, we might be able to keep it up indefinitely – we would not be “defeated” in the conventional sense.  But the ultimate message of that war was No: No matter what our military might, we could not impose our will on a country that did not wish to have its system dictated by foreign armies from halfway around the world.

Not every one approved of this national dose of humility, of course.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” was roundly denounced in interventionist circles, as the new reticence toward foreign military intervention steered policymakers toward subversion rather than invasion.  Nicaragua can probably thank the Vietnam Syndrome for the fact that Ronald Reagan merely funded its government’s  political and military opposition rather than engaging in full scale invasion.

But slowly the memories faded and were replaced with new ones.  The first George Bush’s Gulf War did not turn into a quagmire. And Bill Clinton’s bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia sort of returned the country to its old habits. The euphoria stage surely arrived with the second George Bush when a senior adviser to the President could inform a reporter that he was merely ”in what we call the reality-based community” who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” while the White House recognized that ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

We have left that stage, clearly. A statement like the above now seems as unimaginable as it did in the first decades after the Vietnam War.  Yet the turnaround is obviously far from completed; the country has not really shed the omnipotence illusion.  For, while the rationale for the Iraq War may now be widely understood as farcical, the Afghanistan War remains on the upswing.

Every war is different, to be sure, and at one point the Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars appeared to have little more in common than the fact that they were on the same continent.  After all, who could be further apart than the communist Viet Cong and the fundamentalist Taliban?  But as time has passed an overwhelming resemblance has come to the fore: Both wars are attempts to “create our own reality” in countries that have many times demonstrated that they will not allow this to happen.

Our foreign policy Minsky Moment, if there is to be one, will certainly not originate in the White House or the Pentagon, though. The White House would be too afraid of the political consequences of facing the facts and the Pentagon would be too embarrassed to do so. We will have to figure out how some other way to wake the country from its dreams.

Nuclear Posture Review: Oops! We Missed One!

In one of the more remarkable public course changes Washington has yet seen, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has added Israel’s name to the previously released short list of exceptions to the general policies articulated in the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review. Originally released on April 6, the Review, which stands as the highest expression of the nation’s nuclear strategy, stated that nonnuclear nations abiding by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would generally not be threatened with nuclear retaliation for non-nuclear attacks.

The policy did note the exception of “outliers” which were identical to the “rogue states” referred to by the Bush administration. At the time of the document’s release, Gates told a press conference, “There is a message for Iran and North Korea here…if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.” North Korea is known to have nuclear weapons and Iran is widely thought to be in active pursuit of a nuclear capability.

Now Gates has amended that list, noting that “upon careful consideration we have decided that a realistic appraisal of the situation requires that we acknowledge the existence of another nation widely believed not to be in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty – Israel.” President Obama himself immediately asserted that what he called a “simple policy clarification” implied no change in United States policy toward its closest Middle East ally, saying this “in no way alters America’s commitment to the existence and security of Israel.” The addition, he said, “should not lead anyone to believe that hostilities with our great friend are even remotely anticipated.” He described it rather as a “signal” that his Administration considered it “important to convey to all parties in the region that we see the situation as it really is, not as we might wish to see it.”

Although the President steered clear of further detail, this first American acknowledgment that Israel, a non-signer of the Nonproliferation Treaty, has amassed a nuclear weapons arsenal is seen by many Middle East analysts as representing a potentially tectonic shift in world politics. Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been an open secret for decades. Former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu served 18 years in prison for telling the British press details of the nuclear weapons program in 1986. At the time, London’s Sunday Times estimated its production to be in excess of 100 weapons.

Israel’s first warhead is thought to have been produced in the late 1960’s. The country is also believed by many to have collaborated with South Africa in that country’s development of nuclear arms, before its force was dismantled in 1989 on the eve of the nation’s transition to majority rule. Current estimates put Israel’s warhead numbers at anywhere from 75 to 400; the high figure would likely make the country the world’s third largest nuclear power – after the United States and Russia. Israel’s official policy is to offer no comment on the matter.

Observers attributed this astounding “policy clarification” to delayed effects of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s surprising decision to name the President as the award’s recipient during his first year in office. One White House insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “As you know, the President in no way sought the Prize. In fact, a lot of people around him urged him to decline, thinking that it would place too high a burden of expectation around his future policies. But you see, the thing is the award seems to have gotten under his skin – to the point where he appears to have decided that if he’s ever going to play any kind of role in bringing peace to the Middle East, both sides have got to see him as being reality-based.”

Other sources noted that Gates was considered the right choice to be the messenger of such a bold policy alteration since he has altered it in the past – it is less than two years since the Defense Secretary declared that the U.S. would not forswear first use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for chemical or biological attacks upon the US or its allies, a policy that the new Review repudiates. At the time of his earlier statement, Gates was serving in his current position in George W. Bush’s Cabinet. One CIA source thought it would take several days for world opinion “to sort itself out over this shocking outbreak of candor.”

Okay, so Gates and Obama didn’t actually say anything about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the way it might make the highly touted new Nuclear Posture Review seem hypocritical. But since the new policy was unveiled in early April, we could hardly wait until next April Fool’s Day to satirize it, now could we? The point of this little thought experiment in candor is not to suggest that any of the actual nuclear policy changes Obama is currently making or proposing are in any way wrong or useless. It is rather to illustrate just how much further the U.S. would need to go in order to actually be seen as “reality-based” in many parts of the world.
Domestically, the current administration is widely viewed as relatively “dovish” on matters relating to nuclear weaponry – at least in comparison to its predecessor. Likewise, the idea of dissuading Iran from joining the world’s nuclear powers is hardly a controversial one here at home. But the presumption that our government therefore enjoys worldwide credibility in these matters runs up against some harsh perceptions: For much of the world, the global campaign to prevent Iran from getting what Israel already has seems to indicate only that the one nation to have ever used nuclear weapons has no immediate plans to change its policies in any serious way.

American Foreign Policy Scripted by Dead German Writers?

A recent headline, “Snuff out militant Islam’s lethal spark – kill bin Laden,” brought to mind a friend’s story about a graduate student he’d once had. This student had felt himself seriously wronged somewhere in the academic process and appeared obsessed with vindication. My friend’s prescription was that he should read “Michael Kohlhaas,” a novella by German writer Heinrich von Kleist.  Since the student’s field was modern American history, the main concern was not the study of literature but the story’s theme – the potential self destructiveness of the drive for revenge, even if a person is actually in the right. Joel Brinkley, the author of the article with the inflamed headline, looked like he might benefit from the same medicine.  And, unfortunately, he’s far from the only one.

When the legal system fails to provide Kleist’s protagonist (based on a real life figure of 250 years earlier) with proper redress after he is wronged by a minor noble, Kohlhaas decides to take matters into his own hands. Eventually he will burn the noble’s house down and raise a private army to repeatedly attack the city of Wittenberg in his attempt to capture the man. His wife will die of injuries sustained in the pursuit of his goal and Martin Luther and the Kaiser in Vienna will become personally involved in the matter. At the very end, he does find that some measure of justice has been done. Unfortunately, that realization comes as he is being led to his beheading.

There was a point when Brinkley, a former New York Times writer now teaching journalism at Stanford, would have raised few eyebrows in writing, “Right now, the most effective thing the United States could do to turn the tide in the so-called war on terror is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the terrorists’ shining symbol.” But that point was eight years, two wars, ten of thousands of casualties, and a trillion dollars ago. Today, such writing conveys the obsession of a real-life Michael Kohlhaas who wants to go on and on and on in pursuit of his concept of justice. Of bin Laden he writes, “We know where he is, more or less [sic],” but “Pakistan refuses to go after him.” His solution?  “I’m not talking about an invasion. Infiltrate the region with special-operations forces.”

How many countries can there be, I wondered, where a journalist writing that sending armed personnel into another country does not constitute an invasion will not be asked to seek professional help? But at least Brinkley does recognize that the Pakistanis might see things a little differently: “Let them scream,” he writes, “Over almost a decade, we have given Pakistan every chance to do the job. Now it’s time to do it ourselves.”

What seems to bother Brinkley most is that “Today, bin Laden must wake up every morning with a smile on his face for all he has inspired.” This he may well do, but probably not quite for the reasons Brinkley thinks.  Bin Laden’s stated goal, let us remember, it to maneuver the United States into a global war against Islam that will spiral out of control. So he’d have every reason to smile if he read an article like Brinkley’s. Ultimately, it’s not columnists like Brinkley who matter, though, but the Kohlhaasian spirit that seems to drive our foreign policy.  After all, while much of the country once dismissed George W. Bush as a hopeless, misguided warmonger and embraced Barack Obama as a peace candidate, this second post-9/11 President appears at least as committed to globalizing this war as his predecessor, if perhaps in somewhat different directions.  From the point of view of tying the U.S. down in endless war, what’s not to like?

But if the strategy of that war seem like something Kleist might have imagined, the tactics bring to mind a far better remembered German writer – Franz Kafka, the rare author influential enough to have his name turned into an adjective. While there are probably as many different definitions of “Kafkaesque” as there are readers of Kafka – and maybe more – “incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” will probably do as well as any.  But whatever your personal definition of Kafkaesque may be, American military operations in and over Pakistan will probably fit it.

The current centerpiece of that campaign appears to be a program of missile strikes aimed at “terrorist leaders” from unmanned “Predator” drone planes flying above the country. Officially, though, there is no such program and as a spokesperson for the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.”

The New York Times reports the strikes are “carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia.”  The government of Pakistan regularly denounces them as a violation of its sovereignty. Unnamed U.S. officials claim there is an understanding under which the Pakistani government allows the U.S. to carry out the strikes while the U.S. allows the Pakistanis to publicly denounce the attacks. The government of Pakistan denies this.

Unnamed U.S. intelligence officials frequently name figures they claim have been killed in the strikes. A recent target was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, whom, the Washington Post says, “a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” called “one of the worst people on the planet.”  As you might expect, this non-existent program is rather unpopular among the people of the country where its targets live: a Gallup Pakistan poll found it with 9 percent support among the Pakistani population.

The uncertain level of civilian casualties is a growing concern. A United Nations rights investigator complains that “the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” Unnamed sources within the U.S. government privately assure reporters that civilian deaths are lower than reported. One unnamed government official told the New York Times that the drone strikes are “the purest form of self-defense.”  The C.I.A. had no comment on a report that the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater – now Xe Services LLC – was involved in the work of actually placing the bombs on the drones.  An unnamed defense official denied it to The Nation magazine – “on background.”

In response to repeated questions about the unacknowledged drone strike campaign at a press conference in Pakistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would only say that “there is a war going on.” She did not specify to which war she referred. The United States Government acknowledges being at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. Appearing at a memorial service for seven CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan, some of whom were thought to be involved in the planning of the Pakistan drone strikes, President Barack Obama exhorted hundreds of their colleagues “to win this war.”  He also did not specify of which war he was speaking.

In regard to the acknowledged war in Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.” He did not say at exactly which point this recognition occurred; the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government eight years ago and has been at war with the organization ever since. Gates went on to say that “The question is whether they are prepared to play a legitimate role in the political fabric of Afghanistan going forward, meaning participating in elections, meaning not assassinating local officials and killing families.” He did not say whether a simple denial of involvement in assassinations and other killings – on or off the record – would suffice in place of an actual cessation of such activities. Nor did he speak to the question as to when various Taliban officials might be removed from the United Nations “terrorist blacklist” that currently prohibits the Afghanistan government from negotiating with them.

I have to think Kleist and Kafka would have loved this material.

What’s at Stake in Cairo: A Conversation with Former Presidential Speechwriter, Troy Senik

On June 4, a very popular President Obama will deliver a much-anticipated speech to the Arab world in one of Islam’s most culturally and historically rich epicenters — Cairo — a location that is at the same time symbolic and strategic. Symbolic in that, despite its less than perfect record on human rights protection, Egypt has long been seen by American diplomats as a potential bellwether reform state in the Middle East. Whether through Anwar El Sadat’s bold overtures toward peace with Israel in the 1980s (that led to his brutal assassination) or Hosni Mubarak’s early 21st century assurances of democratization — however hollow — Egypt has expressed at least passing interest in leading the Arab world into modernity. This fact has not been lost on those who believe a lasting Middle Eastern peace will only result from a systemic and attitudinal sea change that is sparked by open-minded Arab leaders. Strategically, setting the stage for Obama’s speech in Egypt’s capital city also serves the purpose of inviting the least vitriol from our friends and enemies; though it goes without saying, of course, that the diplomatic anthill of Arab politics would’ve burdened any choice with at least some scrutiny.

As complicated as the mere choice of venue can be for a politically- and emotionally-charged speech, consider also the debate raging on our own soil currently over the administration’s near-total embrace (astutely noted by Charles Krauthammer) of Bush-era detainee and citizen surveillance policies. Despite Obama’s euphoric relationship with large swaths of the American public throughout the campaign and into his first 100 days as Commander-in-Chief, the cold, hard facts of a post-9/11 security reality have put the administration at odds with the very people who regarded the man as saint and savior less than six months ago. Throw in a growing concern with our Israeli allies over the Likud party’s unwillingness to move toward a two-state solution and one can undoubtedly bet that our domestic and diplomatic tensions are being taken in and poured over with deliberant intent by the Arab audience Obama means to engage, and influence, in early June.

With so much at stake for the administration and U.S. foreign policy, generally, the task of penning the Cairo speech is most certainly a daunting one. And, though no one doubts the speech will be given with the president’s usual degree of bold eloquence, the process of defining the message and the words that will carry it is often one that involves an incalculable mixture of research, meditation and sheer epiphany.

Troy Senik, former presidential speechwriter for George W. Bush and current contributor to Real Clear Politics and the Center for Individual Freedom, knows this dynamic very well. Following is a conversation between Mr. Senik and myself, where he discusses presidential speechwriting, what’s at stake in Cairo, and how – while most of us were sliding comfortably into bed for the evening, during his tenure in the Bush administration – he was just hitting his stride, pouring himself another steaming cup of coffee as he walked the hallowed halls of the White House with a legal pad.

RB: Ben Rhodes, foreign policy speechwriter for President Obama, has outlined the upcoming speech in Cairo as a next step in the process of building positive relationships and dialogue with the Muslim World. He has referred to Obama’s overture to Iran in January as the start of that process. However, many of Obama’s critics are wary of missing an opportunity not to meet the frequent human rights missteps and looming security threats of most Arab governments head-on. Do you see his upcoming speech as a chance to facilitate more engagement with the Arab world, or to deliver a tough message on nuclear non-proliferation and human rights protection?

TS: It will probably be a little bit of both. One of the dangers of White House speechwriting is that every speech goes through what’s called the “staffing process.” That means that all of the relevant folks in the Executive Office of the President and the bureaucracy get their hands on the speech and try to insert their own points of view and their own policy agendas. I’m sure there will be talk about non-proliferation, but it will probably be just that: talk. President Obama has waved his finger at regimes like North Korea and Iran already, and they’ve cheerfully ignored him because they’re confident that there’s no penalty for ignoring him.

As for human rights and democracy promotion, it will be interesting to see if he takes that message abroad. Those were both big parts of the Bush Administration: the “Freedom Agenda” and the Bush Doctrine, respectively. But, Obama has basically kept quiet on both of those issues thus far in his presidency.

I think the upshot is that the Administration desperately wants to convey the message that America is not at war with the entire Arab world. That’s a noble goal, but it’s also something that we’ve been trying since 9/11. I don’t think it necessarily makes the president look weak, but I think it does make him look like he doesn’t have much of an idea of how to deal with the Arab street beyond giving a speech.

RB: The choice of Cairo has been panned by some in the West because of Mubarak’s backsliding on human rights protection in recent years, and by the Arab world, due to Cairo’s pseudo-alliance with Israel, in which Egyptian police have safeguarded the tunnels into Gaza, among other reasons. How important is choosing the location in giving a speech of this magnitude?

TS: It’s important. Egypt may not be an ideal choice, but it’s the Obama Administration’s least worst option. Obama promised a speech in the Muslim world. He can’t do Saudi Arabia, because it’s a cradle of radicalism, a state that we support primarily because of our need for its petroleum, and a totally atavistic society. He could go to Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, but it looks incoherent to give a speech in Southeast Asia when everyone knows your real audience is the Middle East. Jordan is not an option because their relationship with the U.S. has historically been close enough that it would look like Obama was looking for a sycophantic venue. Turkey has been too politically aligned with Israel and would lead to the speech being rejected out of hand by Arabs. So, Egypt certainly has stains, but if you’re looking to reach out to the Arab world, all of your options are states with pretty pockmarked records.

RB:And, obviously, Israel would have been a security nightmare, in addition to presenting a situation closely paralleling the Jordanian dynamic you mentioned.

TS: Right. And going to Israel to talk about the Islamic world would be suicidal. It would be the best possible way for Obama to simultaneously alienate the world’s Jewish and Muslim populations.

RB: Which brings up the issue of how far Obama is willing to go to obtain the first fruits of a peace accord with the Muslim world. The build-up to Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington was primed with shots across the bow from Obama and the Israeli PM, both seemingly frustrated with the other’s perceived next steps in the realm of Arab diplomacy. Obama, and Bush before him, in addition to countless scholars and former diplomats, have advocated a two-state solution. Does Obama have enough political leverage, at home and abroad, to alienate (even if slightly) Israel to achieve better relationships in the Arab world?

TS: Well, that question really gets to the heart of one of the biggest fallacies in the world of diplomacy, which I know for a fact is embraced by a huge swath of the people working in the State Department. The idea is that you make the Arab world like us more by sticking it to Israel. And I think that’s absolutely untrue.

Can Obama put some sunlight between himself and Israel? Sure. But will the Arab states like us as a result? No. They’ll be happy that they’ll have marginally less difficulty in trying to eradicate Israel, but they won’t be carrying American flags through the street anytime soon — at least not unlit ones. The reality is that all the Arab governments really want from us is to keep buying their oil, stop defending Israel, and stay out of their part of the world. So, the only way you can make them happy is by being a supplicant for their cartel, turning your back on the only long-standing democracy in the region, and pretending that Islamic extremism, terrorism, and their routine violations of human rights aren’t a problem. And by any rational standard, that is way too high of a price to pay.

RB: Does the debate over Guantanamo, in which Obama swears to reengage American detainee policy with jurisprudence and constitutional reverence, contribute to how Obama’s speech will be received in Cairo?

TS: Probably more on the domestic side than the international side. The foreign audience might be mindful of the fact that he’s ending up much closer to the Bush Administration’s policies on some war measures than was initially expected, but they know that Obama is a different kind of guy at his core than President Bush was.

On the domestic side, however, it may actually be a problem. With Guantanamo, the interrogation memos, the Pentagon photos, etc., Obama has reached his first real impasse with the public. This week, people started realizing that the administration has no plan for how to close Guantanamo and what to do with the people being detained there. And when you talk about putting these people on American soil, and you learn that 1 out of every 7 we’ve released in the past have gone back on the battlefield, you realize that this isn’t the law school hypothetical that everyone’s been treating it as for the past few years. So I think the public’s had their first widespread dose of skepticism towards Obama, and if he goes to Egypt and gives a speech that looks overly deferential to people who don’t like us, it’s going to compound that concern, especially since that’s starting to look like a pattern for him.

RB: Right. And, this comes at a time when he’s enjoying 64% approval ratings on national security – an undoubtedly pleasing fact to Democrats who’ve struggled against Republicans in this area for years, though just as likely a campaign-resilient and unsustainable number.

Your point also brings to mind a recent piece by Jacob Weisburg at Slate, “What we’ve learned so far about President Obama,” in which the author “continues to suspect him of harboring deeper convictions.” He references reversals on torture and “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.” In light of this possibility, that Obama hasn’t quite found his footing in the Oval Office with regards to where political philosophy and the real-world meet, is this speech pre-mature, or is it absolutely necessary given Iran and North Korea’s recent belligerency, in addition to the constant tension elsewhere in the Arab World with Western ideals?

TS: I suspect that in the long view it’s simply irrelevant. Obama is fond of talking about “game changers.” This isn’t one. He’ll go and give the speech and capture the media cycle for a day or two, but that will be it. Unless he has some unanticipated “Let them come to Berlin” or “tear down this wall” moment, it will probably be forgettable. And I see no indication that there’s anything that bold brewing in the White House. So in the end, this probably gets him nowhere.

RB: Referencing his overture to the Iranian people, again, who were celebrating Nowruz — the Persian New Year — during his address in January (a fact he used to link our shared humanity with the Iranian people), would the impact of the Cairo speech be any more or less significant by speaking to the citizens of Arab nations versus the leaders?

TS: It would be much more significant if Obama chose to speak to the Arab people instead of their governments. There is a long tradition of American presidents speaking directly to the populations of nations with whom we have strong disagreements because the American view has traditionally — and rightly — been that we oppose governments, not peoples. That being said, I don’t think Obama will do that for two reasons. One, something that dramatic would indicate that we think of the entire Arab world as essentially hostile dictatorships. Two, you have to be very careful about stirring up the populations in those countries, because in some cases, mass movements would actually yield even worse regimes than the current one (that’s certainly the case with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt).

Also, an important note about the New Year message to the Iranians. While it was addressed directly to the people, it made clear reference to the “Islamic Republic of Iran.” That is Obama’s way of legitimizing the current government there and telegraphing that the U.S. is not seeking regime change. And that’s about as dispiriting a sign as you can get if you’re an Iranian citizen who hopes to live in a freer society.

RB: Do you think he missed an opportunity in the January address?

TS: Yes, but that error was fathered by the policy. The mistake was saying you’re going to basically endorse a dictatorship. Sometimes, reasonable constraints may force you to tolerate a dictatorship, but you never endorse one.

RB: Earlier, you mentioned the complex nature of vetting a presidential speech, especially when it comes to speeches of this magnitude – the “staffing process.” Before a speech gets to this point, though, what were the first steps you took when preparing a speech for President Bush?

TS: You would get a description of the speech and the goals a few weeks in advance, then have the research team gather background material. Depending on the magnitude of the speech, you’d then usually get some guidance from senior staff or the president himself. From there, you’d try to hammer out an outline and/or a rough draft, which for me often consisted of walking the halls of the White House at 11 PM with a cup of coffee and a legal pad. In the Bush White House, the writers would then edit the first draft and send it into the staffing process.

RB: Was Bush the kind of president that poured over every word and turn of phrase, or was he concerned less with specifics and more that his central thesis be present?

TS: President Bush was relentlessly focused on the logic of his remarks. Sometimes that would translate into a focus on minutiae, sometimes it wouldn’t. But often times how much he dove into the details of a speech would be determined by how passionate he was about the topic. The most important thing was that he could see a coherent structure and feel like every point logically flowed into the next one. Like his father, I think he was a little distrustful of high-flying rhetoric. He certainly wouldn’t have attempted a lot of the fireworks that Obama does.

RB: It isn’t surprising that Bush differs in this respect from Obama. David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, was quoted in a recent Politico piece as saying, “Everyone here sort of lives with the reality that the president is the best speechwriter in the group,” a sentiment also captured in Weisburg’s piece, noting Obama’s penchant for wanting to run the business of the Oval with a high degree of personal oversight.

TS: Yes, and that has to be intimidating. Given Obama’s talents as a writer and a speaker, I’m sure he’s much more intimately involved with the process than most presidents.

RB: What’s the most that Obama, and his speechwriting team, should expect out of a speech to the Muslim world that comes while the U.S. wages two wars in the Middle East? What would you like to see him say?

TS: They are probably expecting some softening in the Arab world’s attitude towards the U.S., but I’m deeply skeptical of that. Speeches can change the hearts of the people, but they almost never change the interests of governments.

I’d like to see him come out strong in favor of universal values instead of doing a multicultural soft-shoe. I’d like to hear him say that peaceful and benevolent religion is an incalculable gift in every corner of the world that it inhabits, just as radicalism is a scourge that must be defeated no matter where and why it takes root. If the nations of the Middle East really crave the international legitimacy they always talk about, they have to be willing to play by the rules of civilized nations and stop using their past and their real and imagined grievances as excuses for violence and tyranny.

Mr. President, We Do Have a Choice

In explaining his most recent escalation of American troop levels in Afghanistan, President Obama claimed that “the United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan.” The underlying justification for the additional 4,000 “advisors” was the fact that “nearly 3,000 of our people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, for doing nothing more than going about their daily lives.” His second statement is unquestionably true; the first is not. But even more important than the question of whether or not we had a choice in the matter of invading Afghanistan is the fact that we have one today, more than seven years later.

Normally we might say a country had no choice but to wage war if it found itself the target of ongoing sustained attacks from another country. Having been the victim of a highly coordinated and lethal terrorist attack, there was little question that the US – and much of the rest of the world – had to revamp a wide array of security measures, the results of which are evident in any airport. The decision to fight a war in Afghanistan, however, was quite another matter.

From the beginning, a central goal of this war, as announced by the White House, was bringing the apparent perpetrator of the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, to justice. And a week into the war, the Taliban government then in power in Afghanistan made an offer to turn him over — with several substantial provisos. They would do so if provided evidence connecting him to the crimes; they would not give him to the US, but only to another Muslim country; and naturally it would happen only if they could locate him. The offer was rejected out of hand.

Looking back, the matter of evidence would presumably have proven no obstacle. And so far as the stumbling block of the refusal to deliver him directly to the US goes, it now seems highly relevant to note that the Bush Administration then in power would go on to organize an elaborate worldwide campaign to prevent Americans from ever being turned over to the International Criminal Court despite the fact that 108 other countries have opted to recognize its legitimacy. The White House certainly would never have honored a demand such as it made upon Afghanistan.

Finally, there’s the matter of whether the Taliban was acting in good faith or would do so in the future: Did they know where bin Laden was and would they have delivered him if they did? That’s all speculation, of course, but what is not speculation is that seven plus years of war have not produced him either. And as we consider whether this war is worth continuing today, let’s consider the crux of the President’s argument as to why we had no choice but to get into it – the “nearly 3,000 of our people” killed.

In contrast to the facts surrounding September 11, data concerning Afghan civilians killed by American military action is very hard to come by. In what is arguably the most thorough study that was ever done on the question, University of New Hampshire Professor Marc Herold concluded that there were already nearly 3,800 of them by December 7, 2001. His research report listed the number of casualties, location, type of weapon, and source of information, but Herold believed “the figure I came up with is a very, very conservative estimate. I think that a much more realistic figure would be around 5,000.” These Afghanis too were simply “doing nothing more than going about their daily lives.”

The actual number to this day? No one knows. Certainly the casualty rate abated after the war’s first few months, yet few would question that the number is greater than that of the Americans who died as a result of the hijackers’ activities. Which brings us to the current President’s statement. Do the Afghanis therefore now also have no choice but to fight a war with the US? “An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind,” as Gandhi put it?

Whatever one thinks of the logic of getting into this war in the first place, the logic of staying is quite another thing. And actually, it may be a stretch to call it logic. Consider, for instance, the March 28, 2009 New York Times editorial praising Obama for asserting “leadership over the war that matters most to America’s security — the one against Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” while simultaneously complementing “his plans to urge so-called moderate Taliban to abandon their hard-line leaders” and noting that “more than seven years into the fight, the leader of the American intelligence community acknowledged that it knows shockingly little about the Taliban command structure.”

And that’s the current strategy in a nutshell: send in more troops to fight the enemy at the same time you’re trying to negotiate with them and figure out who they actually are. Unfortunately, the level of intransigence of the last administration was such that this approach may strike a lot of people as reasonable by comparison. But even though American casualties may well remain small enough in number and Afghan casualties may seem too remote and obscure to provoke a crisis in confidence back home, the fact remains that these are real people’s lives that the White House is hanging its flimsy strategy on.

Seeking to prevent Al Qaeda from inflicting any further harm on the US is a worthy goal and probably a realistic one. Trying to eliminate everyone who doesn’t like us in Afghanistan – and increasingly in Pakistan as well – is surely a prescription for endless war. We do have a choice

Hillary’s Trip to Asia: A Foreign Policy Reality Check

President Obama ran his election campaign on a slogan we all now know – “Change We Can Believe In.” However,  I have always been skeptical of Obama’s ability or commitment to bring fundamental change in US foreign policy. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s February trip to Asia, as well received and heavily covered as it was, has only confirmed my skepticism. Here’s why.

First, while Clinton’s words in Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and China were a departure from Bush’s simplistic might-makes-right foreign policy, they weren’t too different from the foreign policy followed by her own husband, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan (you get the idea). Obama’s foreign policy “change” appears to be a return to how the US has conducted foreign policy since World War II. That is, we work cooperatively within the UN, NATO, and other alliances; we engage other countries diplomatically; we don’t declare preemptive wars; we promote a certain type of economic model; we support nuclear non-proliferation; etc.  While this is undoubtedly better than George W. Bush’s foreign policy, it doesn’t look like a fundamental foreign policy shift. Nor does it bode well for those optimistic that President Obama will base his foreign policy on human rights, as many had hoped for during the campaign.

Admittedly, I did start out happy with how Clinton was conducting herself during this trip. She discussed relevant issues in the countries she visited and met with officials, students, and  activists. People seemed to be generally impressed with and charmed by her performance.  However, after following her trip for a while, I began to feel like it was just that–a performance. She was saying what she needed to say (and not saying what she needed to not say) depending on where she was, and her priority was selling the US, President Obama, and herself to officials and the public. This was sorely needed after eight years of George Bush, and while she showed her serious professional side as well as a softer personal side, Clinton is a seasoned, hard-nosed politician who surely understands the realities of being the only global superpower’s top diplomat. Realpolitik rules. Mushy sentimental support for human rights does not guide international relations or foreign policy. Clinton did after all vote against a Congressional bill to ban the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas because it would make her look weak on terrorism (her new boss supported the ban). 

The dissonance of her message was most jarring when comparing her speeches in Indonesia to those in China. She wooed and flattered her Indonesian hosts by talking up their democratic government, their thriving and diverse civil society, and the inclusive positive example they show to the Muslim world. China was another matter. Before she even arrived, Clinton emphasized that human rights concerns would not interfere with major issues like the economic crisis and global warming. She curbed her earlier harsh criticism of China’s human rights record in favor of other topics (which, to be fair, were not much easier to confront). While implying human rights are a marginal issue was not music to the ears of human rights advocates, it is consistent with US foreign policy historically. Human rights have had their place when they support US policy, but are always easily swept aside when they don’t. So far, the Obama administration doesn’t seem to offer a change from this realist worldview.

This is not to say that changes are not likely on the horizon. Obama is certainly charting a different course than George Bush did. His early choices about China, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria indicate a new tack, and he is making a concerted effort to clean up the US image in the world’s eyes. Human rights may be more important to President Obama than many previous US presidents, but Clinton’s stance in China makes it clear that they will not be the guiding principal of his foreign policy. The US participation as a mere observer at the recent UN Human Rights Commission and its boycott of the UN Conference on Racism also show that Obama’s administration is wary of treading new ground in the defense of human rights.

So then what is Obama’s guiding principle for his foreign policy? Not surprisingly, it appears to be essentially the same as every other US president–to protect and promote American interests abroad. This definition clearly leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Obama has pledged deeper and more sustained diplomatic engagement with allies as well as enemies–even Iran! Cuba! Venezuela!–in an effort to forge constructive relationships across the globe. As a caveat to this policy, Obama has explicitly said he will act in such a way only if it is in America’s self-interest.

Fair enough. This is the president’s job, and the reality is that US foreign policy probably will never be guided by any principle other than American self-interest. I understand this, and though it sounds amoral and opportunistic to my ears, I understand the necessity, and benefit, to advance a flexible foreign policy in an effort to engage with as many other countries as possible. And, in reality, should it be any other way? Maybe what Obama is offering is the best we can hope for when it comes to US foreign policy. George Bush’s presidency clearly demonstrated the pitfalls of having a foreign policy that stubbornly brooks no opposition to its moral certainty. Any moral justification can be abused by those in power–even a commitment to human rights or democracy or freedom. (Such a commitment to worldwide democracy is in fact one of the guiding principles of both idealist foreign policy, put in practice historically by those such as Woodrow Wilson, and modern neoconservatism under President Bush.) Promoting and protecting American interests abroad can be abused too, but at least it is an honest selfish justification for how our government behaves overseas. Protecting American interests is perhaps all the president should commit to, and if he (or one day she) is willing to keep as many channels of communication open with friend and foe, this may be the best long-term strategy. To expect anything more just may be naive, unrealistic, and unfair.

Blowback: The Economy or the Military?

During the long years of the Cold War, not many dared to question the US military budget. Since then, however, the budget has continued to expand, often sending troops overseas to situations that were created by previous diplomatic blunders. Some of those blunders have directly created the morasses that we attempt to extricate ourselves from today. As such, let’s take a look at some of the history of what the CIA refers to as blowback for the U.S.

Brief Blowback History

In 1953, Iran, or Persia as it was then called, had a functioning democratic system. A successful coup by the CIA and British Intelligence overthrew the democratically elected government and replaced them with the hereditary Shah of Persia. His abuses and misrule led directly to the Islamic Revolution and the problems we have encountered with their Islamic government ever since. In the early 1980s, Iraq thus was encouraged to invade Iran, by the US in a fit of pique, and was supplied with arms in the resulting war. This assistance helped solidify Saddam Hussein’s military ambitions and indirectly encouraged his invasion of Kuwait in 1991, all of which led to the mess in Iraq today.

Meanwhile during the 1980s, the military assistance given to the tribes opposing the Russian occupation of Afghanistan led to the Taliban taking over the country. These people, who were responsible for 9/11 (despite what the Bush administration’s claims to the contrary), are whom we continue to fight today in Afghanistan. In addition, they also have brought the war on terror to the nuclear-power country of Pakistan.

Bill Clinton didn’t help matters, when he, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky affair, launched Tomahawk missiles against suspected Al Qaeda munitions facilities at a site in Sudan and the Bora Bora site in Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden was thought to be. This was in retaliation after US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had been previously bombed. One of Tomahawks destroyed a human and veterinary manufacturing plant in Sudan, killing at least 20 Sudanese and putting many out of work. The Sudanese government immediately cut off all ties with the U.S. and released an important Al Qaeda suspect they had been about to hand over to the U.S. The Tomahawks in Afghanistan missed Bin Laden totally–he was in Kabul at the time. He in turn sold an unexploded Tomahawk to the Chinese for 10 million dollars. Worse, almost all of Africa, who had been outraged over the Embassy bombings by Al Qaeda, swung against the US policy after the bombings. Sound familiar?

In addition, it is clear to most of the world, though rarely reported in the US, that huge military assistance to Israel keeps them so dominant that they often disdain from entering into meaningful dialogue with the Palestinians or other nations in the region. Without meaningful legitimate political channels, arguably, that may have in turn indirectly led to the cult of the indefensible and grotesque suicide bomber.

Similar situations of blowback have occurred on all continents. It is alleged that the policy of supporting vain, immoral megalomaniacs as leaders in the more unstable areas of the world could be summed up as, “We don’t care if he’s a bastard so long as he’s our bastard”.

In too many situations today, previous meddling in the internal affairs or politics of other countries has led directly or indirectly to these messes that we may now face. If intervention leads to revolution or serious instability in the country involved, it is often inevitable that the beneficiaries of the situation will be the worst possible choices. It takes many generations for the situation to settle down and for the voices of reason make headway over the radicals who are always the initial power base. The French Revolution, The Russian Revolution, and the Persian [Iranian] Revolution are all cases in point

To return to the end of the Cold War, there was at that time, along with a feeling of relief that we were all suddenly safe, a hope that the troops could come home, and be discharged. That of course never happened. Why not?

The Military Industrial Complex

Today the US spends 46% of the total world’s military budget. The next 4 nations, the UK, France, Japan and China spend between 4-5% each. The US military budget has risen from 250 billion dollars in 2001 to over 700 billion in 2008. Thus, the sensible solution to help our failing economy would logically have to be to cut the military budget and bring everyone home. Wouldn’t that give us iron clad security at home? Maybe we could even make our inner cities safe and bring down the horrendous murder rate from the 17,000 yearly victims it is today.

Of course that is about as realistic as overall world peace. But why?

The answer to why that apparently sensible solution is currently a pipe dream was first given by President Eisenhower in 1961. Eisenhower was the first President, as a former General, to recognize the power of the Military Industrial Complex.

That term refers to an over friendly relationship between the government, the military, munitions manufacturers, and defense contractors. All in this relationship benefit financially, and unfortunately peace can get in the way. Eisenhower as a military man saw what could occur when future Presidents without military experience tried to go up against this Complex. They would be easily maneuvered by the military to react where no reaction was necessary, and to keep the US military equipped with constantly updated equipment and every new technology. Today, there is a defense contractor in every State of the Union. If there are cutbacks, you can be sure these workers will be out in force rallying senators and representatives at every level. The President will be lambasted across the nation and the Republicans will make hay. Any President to take on this issue will be lauded by history, but unlikely to win a second term.

Will Barack Obama be able to break this endless cycle to prevent the never ending cycle of blowback? If recent history is a good predictor, it certainly won’t be easy. For the sake of the rest of the world, let’s hope for the best.

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