This Week In Threat Mongering - The Existential Threats Version Posted by Michael Cohen

So you ever wonder why it is that Americans are so fearful of the world; so convinced that we as a nation face innumerable threats from foreign bogeyman? This week offered a little bit of cause . . . and a little bit of effect.

First things first: Iran. Unlike most Americans I really miss the Republican presidential primaries; because it really was ground zero for the absolutely, craziest fear-mongering about Iran and its currenty moribound nuclear aspirations. For example, at various points during the GOP primaries Mitt Romney declared that "the greatest threat the world faces is a nuclear Iran"; Rick Santorum said Iran is "ruled by the equivalent of al Qaeda" and Newt Gingrich declared that he wasn't sure the US could "survive" an Iranian nuke. Even the adorable, yet unlikable, Jon Huntsman talked about putting boots on the ground to stop Iran's nuclear aspirations.

But one might have figured that with the primaries done and the need to appease the GOP's right-wing this sort of rhetoric would be packed up and put away and the presumptive Republican nominee would return to just graden-variety saber-rattling. Think again!

Here was Romney this week on Face the Nation:

If I’m President, the Iranians will have no question but that I would be willing to take military action, if necessary, to prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world…I understand that some in the Senate, for instance, have written letters to the President indicating you should know that — that a — a containment strategy is unacceptable. We cannot survive a — a course of action which would include a nuclear Iran, and we must be willing to take any and all action, they must all — all those actions must be on the table.

Think about it: Newt Gingrich could take umbrage at Romney for stealing his crazy over-the-top rhetoric on Iran.

Of course, the notion that the US "cannot survive" an Iranian nuclear bomb is certifiably insane. After all, Mitt Romney was born in 1947, two years before the USSR exploded their first nuclear weapon - and in the 65 years since somehow the US and the world has survived the Soviet Union and now Russia having a nuclear bomb. Indeed, since Romney was born, France, the UK, Israel, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all gotten nuclear bombs. Not only has the US survived, it's prospered! 

And the United States dealt with a rather brutal and ideologically-opposed enemy in the Soviet Union that had thousands of nuclear weapons by "containing" it (and this was a legitimate honest to goodness peer rival). Perhaps a good follow-up question to Romney would be, if the United States could contain the USSR for all those many years of the Cold War; and China in the four decades since they got a bomb; and North Korea in the ten years since they joined the nuke club . . why is little old Iran, surrounded by enemies, rife with political discord and featuring a mlitary that is outdated and under-equipped not "containable." (Funny story: here's the actual follow-up question asked by Bob Schieffer of CBS News: "What have you learned out here on the campaign trail? You say you've been talking to regular folks. What are they telling you?")

Now to be sure Romney isn't the only Republican these days saying crazy things about what an Iranian nuke would portend. Last month, on the floor of the US Senate, Senator Lindsay Graham declared that the US is facing an "existential threat" from a nation "that has been a proxy for evil thoughout the planet." He was referring of course to Iran.

Some might just dismiss this over the top language as the usual sort of alarmist fare of the campaign trail. But, these words have an effect - they convince Americans that the world is a far more dangerous place then it really is. Case in point: this new fascinating survey from Dartmouth University on the foreign policy attitudes of Americans.

When asked if they agree of disagree with the notion that the United States faces greater threats now than it did during the Cold War . . . 63% either strongly or somewhat agree. SIXTY-THREE PERCENT! But even worse than that, only 5% strongly disagree with the statement - even though strongly disagree or perhaps "getoutofhere" is the only appropriate response to such a question. 

Granted the Soviet Union was contained during the Cold War; but they still had thousands of weapons pointed at the United States, a poor command and control infrastructure and as late as the early 1980s officials in Washington and the Kremlin actively debated the idea of whether a nuclear exchange was a winnable proposition (there was also the Cuban Missile Crisis). Compare that to today when there is not a single serious security threat to the American people and the US homeland.  More Americans die every year from lightning, drowning in bathtubs and furniture falling on top of them then terrorism and yet a strong majority of Americans think we are in greater danger now then when thousands of nuclear weapons were pointed directly at the United States.

Fear industrial complex . . . take a bow.

 

Iran Issue Pops Up at G-20 Summit Posted by David Shorr

If you read today's communique from the G-20's Los Cabos summit veerrry closely, you'll notice a pair of oblique references to Iran's controversial nuclear program. The subject is pretty off-topic for a forum devoted to the global economy, but the sanctions-related issues noted in Los Cabos signal the intense and widespread international concern about Iran. The summit took place against the backdrop of significantly tightened sanctions due to take effect at the end of June and beginning of July. (Big hat tip to John Kirton of the University of Toronto Munk School's G-8/20 Research Group.)

The more explicit of the two Iran-related passages of the communique concerns international efforts to clamp down on illicit financial flows. The G-20 leaders are expected to say:

We support renewal of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) mandate, thereby sustaining global efforts to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. 

The passage will represent the first-ever mention of WMD in a G-20 communique. It's no coincidence that the reference comes just as banking and oil export sanctions are notching up and could help spur diplomacy with Iran. 

The other connection to Iran has to do with energy prices. For some time volatility of food commodity prices -- and the derivatives markets based on those prices -- have been prominent on the G-20 agenda. The cost of staple grains have a big impact on household budgets, especially for low-income families around the world. In earlier G-20 communiques, though, the references to energy have focused on reducing subsidies and clean energy technologies. According to a draft of the Los Cabos statement, it will say:

We recognize that excessive price volatility in energy commodities is also an important source of economic instability.

Translation: a big spike in the price of oil could seriously undermine the world's fragile economoic recovery. And you don't have to be an oil futures trader to know the biggest driver of energy price volatility: fears about a war with Iran and reduced purchases of Iranian oil associated with sanctions (European nations are about to implement a total embargo). 

Photo: Gobierno Federal de Mexico

Blogging the G-20 Summit in Los Cabos - Reflections at the Outset Posted by David Shorr

This week the protracted Eurozone crisis rolls into sunny Los Cabos for the G-20 summit, where it will be Topic A just as it was for the Cannes G-20 meeting seven months ago. For many, the crisis has prompted them to watch financial markets with a sense of dread. In a sense, then, the Los Cabos summit is a political / diplomatic market in which governmental leaders give market signals regarding their respective stances and policies. 

Even before the meeting started, Presidents Herman Van Rompuy of the European Union and Jose Manuel Barroso of the European Commission used a press conference to talk up Europe's stock. Van Rompuy boasted that the OECD gives Europe high marks for structural reform. At the same time, he acknowledged the flaws in Europe's monetary union and spoke forthrightly about the work that will be needed to make the union "solid, secure, and safe."

It is interesting to trace some of the hot topics here at Los Cabos back to earlier G-20 summits. Just over two years ago, the Toronto summit exposed deep divisions over austerity that have hampered G-20 action ever since then to strengthen the fragile recovery from the Great Recession. Now the question is whether weak economic performance and recent elections in Europe have re-tilted the debate.

The Van Rompuy-Barroso press conference was an interesting mix of defiance, recrimination, and flexibility, and it made for some interesting euphemisms. My favorites: Van Rompuy's "investment and differentiated fiscal consolidation" and Barroso's "mutualization of public debt." In the category of defiance, Van Rompuy said Europe "will not spend our way out of the crisis." And Barroso wanted everyone to remember "this crisis was originated in North America." Got that?

At the November 2010 meeting in Seoul, the leaders emphasized the importance of putting a global financial safety net in place to mitigate any future crisis. In Los Cabos the G-20 leaders are marshaling an infusion of resources to boost capitalization of the IMF.

It is a sign of the times that the safety net might be needed sooner rather than later. Which reminds me of one of the common depictions of the G-20 and its evolution. The group is often portrayed as shifting roles from the crisis response function it played in 2008-09 toward serving as a steering group for the global economy. But many observers have wondered whether the crisis has really been put behind us or, rather, has continued on for the last several years.

No (Iran) War for Zero Enrichment! Posted by David Shorr

In the run-up to next week's scheduled P5+1 talks with Iran in Moscow, there are a lot of big issues at play. What effect do US and Israeli domestic politics have? Do sanctions need to be eased? Do the major gaps between the positions of Iran and the others portend a drift toward war? 

Let's start with the good news / bad news from the US presidential campaign trail. The Romney camp is finally clarifying their candidate's Iran position. Contrary to the appearances they themselves fostered, Gov. Romney has not given up on diplomacy and decided war is the only course. Ali Gharib over at ThinkProgress reviews recent statements from Romney advisers, including Barbara Slavin of Al-Monitor's interview with Rich Williamson, and concludes that Romney's Iran position is nearly identical to what President Obama is already doing.

...with one notable exception. Williamson reiterated that a Romney Administration's bottom line with Iran would hew to right wing demands by factions in US and Israeli insisting that Iran be halted from enriching uranium even to low levels. So even after their attempts to clarify, the Romney campaign is still faced with an important question: how can you claim to favor a diplomatic solution when your proposed outcome is completely unworkable?

NO NUCLEAR WEAPON, OR NUCLEAR ACTIVITIES?

We need to be clear what's at stake here. The Obama administration has painstakingly built an impressive international coalition and the toughest-ever set of sanctions all with the aim of inducing Iran to negotiate seriously rather than just stalling for time. All of which to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. In other words, all with the aim of avoiding a war. 

Our friends on the right are using different goalposts, however. Beyond stopping Iran from getting the bomb, they want to stop Iran from having any civilian nuclear program either. There is no debate over the fact that Iran has the burden of proving the civilian purpose of its activities. Their record of deception is the heart of the dispute; it's why the stringent sanctions have been imposed. But the point of the negotiations is for Iran to meet that burden of proof. We need to look at the optimistic scenario of diplomatic progress -- not because signs are hopeful or the path is clear, but to ask how war can be avoided.

So let's say Iran indeed gets serious about the negotiations, cooperates more fully with inspectors, and allows its stocks of enriched uranium to be removed from the country. Imagine an agreement whereby the civilian character of Iran's nuclear program is verified through stricter measures than for any of the many countries with similar programs (easier said than done, no question). The position of right wingers in Congress, the Israeli government, and apparently candidate Romney is to go to war rather than take that deal. The best deal we would ever get from the Iranians because a negotiated agreement with zero Iranian enrichment is a fantasy.

There is a lot of tea leaf-reading of the Obama administration's position on enrichment, which has its own ambiguities. But I think there's less ambiguity than meets the eye. Just think of the many statements, including around Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit for the AIPAC conference, on the goal of preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon. Every time that word is used -- as opposed to the conservatives' favorite, capability -- it isn't very hard to read between the lines.

SLIP-SLIDING INTO WAR

Of course the negotiations do not yet have momentum toward a deal; in fact they are quite fragile. This leaves some analysts worried about a breakdown in diplomacy and inexorable drift toward war. Robert Wright of the Atlantic believes President Obama may not have left himself any way out. There's a real quandary here: is either side ready to give the kind of significant concessions that would prompt the other side to reciprocate. This is a bargaining process, after all. 

For Wright, this is all about election-year politics, Jewish voters, and the pro-Israel lobby. I'd offer another explanation; it might be about Iran's nuclear program. Not to be too flip, but let's not forget that Iran has shown a marked pattern of dealing in bad faith. Again, that's why we have the sanctions. Bob indeed gives the outlines of an attractive potential deal, but there's a key point that shouldn't be elided: sanctions can only be eased in exchange for pretty major moves by Iran. Here's how former senior Obama administration official Colin Kahl explained it to Al-Monitor's Laura Rozen:

Big sanctions have been put in place to hold Iran accountable. With UN Security Council resolutions, it’s difficult to scale them back for minor actions.

This dilemma may be the reason behind the idea, reported by Rozen, of trying to "go big" and enlarge the talks' scope. 

THE CAMPAIGN RHETORIC DISCOUNT

The other big topic of speculation (especially on Twitter with @robertwrighter and @TonyKaron) is the question of whether a President Romney would actually be so trigger-happy toward Iran. What are we to make of all the tough election-year posturing from the Republicans? Is it really an indication of how they'd govern? 

I'd just like to say that it matters what candidates and advisers say on the campaign trail even if it's different from what they'd do in office.  Sure, let's stipulate that cooler heads prevail in a Romney administration.  This would bring predictable headaches from the Republican base (would Bolton be in or out of the admin?), but that's really none of my business.  

My real concern is about the level of foreign policy discourse in our political system and culture. What argument really is there for shrugging off campaign rhetoric, rather than scrutinizing it as a platform for governing?  Should we be comfortable with a big gap between what politicians tell voters and the limited options of the real world? It's particularly strange to hear people discount rhetoric at a moment when the media has been doing a better and better job in closing that gap.  I was struck the other day, for instance, to hear Chuck Todd press a Republican on the question of what results will be achieved by being more confrontational with Russia. 

Unilateral Sanctions on Iran -- Less Unilateral Than You Might Think Posted by David Shorr

As this Mark Landler NYTimes piece reminds us, the backdrop for upcoming talks on Iran's nuclear program in Moscow are new sanctions measures that will further clamp down on Iran's energy exports. First there is the European Union's embargo against any import of Iranian oil starting on July 1. For the rest of the world, US law will soon require many foreign banks to stop doing business with Iran or be banned from operating in the United States. (Here's an explainer I wrote recently for G8 Research Group/Newsdesk.)

For all intents and purposes, American banks are the guts of the global financial system. This gives the United States a privileged position in global commerce and a source of leverage in international politics and diplomacy. Through secondary sanctions, the US can force other nations to make an us-or-them choice regarding commercial ties with Iran.

With such an advantage, Americans might be tempted to see ourselves as holding the hammer, free to wield unilateral sanctions at will. And that is the temptation (aka hubris) that ensnares those among our conservative friends who've never met a sanction they didn't love. If the common blind spot of right-wing foreign policy is its denial of the military dictum that "the enemy gets a vote" -- that we can't count on the targets of our actions responding in just the way we'd like -- the problem is even worse for secondary sanctions. Don't forget, secondary sanctions put pressure on the target country through others; they threaten to punish not just Iran, but also Japan and South Korea. 

Note that the Landler piece focuses on exemptions from the Iran banking / fuel sanctions. The sanctions law exempts banks from any country that significantly reduces their dependence on Iranian oil imports. Key US allies like Japan and Korea get much of their energy from Iran and would find it very difficult to follow Europe's example of a total embargo. Now compare to one of the steadiest refrains of Republicans this campaign season: the need to be more supportive of America's friends and harsh with our adversaries. Okay, what does this platitude mean for the new sanctions, where a rigid get-tough approach would hurt our allies? 

The short answer is that you provide exemptions and work with countries that import Iranian oil, just as the Obama administration has done. And given the need to bring other nations along with us in ratcheting up pressure on Iran, unilateral sanctions don't look quite so unilateral. 

The point is a crucial one because of the added light it sheds on the political debate over President Obama's Iran policy. If each round of toughened sanctions depends on diplomacy and coalition building -- rather than just snapping our fingers -- then conservative demands to impose the toughest imaginable sanctions ASAP are unrealistic to say the least. The importance of gaining international cooperation and support also explains President Obama's success in imposing more stringent sanctions than President Bush ever did. 

We Can't Leave Until We Kill All the People that Want Us to Leave: Yemen Edition Posted by Eric Martin

Gregory Johnsen chronicles the disturbing "drift" with respect to the Obama administration's targeting criteria in Yemen, and the potential for an exceedingly costly, yet unproductive, escalation within that theater. What were once a narrowly defined set of targeting requirements - focused, sharply, on operatives of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) - have now become a broader, if circular, rubric:

...[A]s this piece from Greg Miller has it, some "elasticity" has been introduced into the targeting. [...]

...officials said the campaign is now also aimed at wiping out a layer of lower-ranking operatives through strikes that can be justified because of threats they pose to the mix of U.S. Embassy workers, military trainers, intelligence operatives and contractors scattered across Yemen."

In other words, the US has inserted, trainers, operatives and contractors into Yemen in an effort to erode the threat presented by AQAP, but those trainers, operatives and contractors attract attacks from Yemenis who are upset with a foreign military presence (no matter how small) on their land. And then when these trainers, operatives and contractors come under attack as they have recently in Aden and Hudaydah the US feels the need to respond and so it widens the target list even further - which then drives even more people into the arms of AQAP.

As suggested by Johnsen, the mission is drifting toward a circle of self-perpetuating, self-justifying futility.  This pattern is not new, however. The same rationale has been used to justify the prolonged engagement in the Af/Pak region.  

Accompanying any discussion of a pull-back of US forces from the Af-Pak region are warnings that the withdrawal of our troops will destabilize Pakistan, and that we must continue to press the military campaign in order to contain the militant groups operating in that locale. Missing from that analysis - as with the analysis of the Yemen campaign and, in large part, the Iraq war before it - is an acknowledgement that our presence alone, and the use of military strikes in connection therewith, is itself a radicalizing, militarizing and motivating factor.  For example, Pakistan has been destabilized, not made more secure, by our Afghan campaign, so it is dubious to conclude that our continued presence in its current form will serve to ameliorate a problem that it has only exacerbated to date. 

Johnsen's conclusion is worth heeding:

I have argued for several years now that the US needs to draw as narrow of a circle as possible when it comes to targeting AQAP in Yemen. I worried then as I do now, that any expansion of targeting in Yemen would find the US in a war that it could never kill its way out of. And indeed that, I fear, is what is taking place right now. In an effort to destroy the threat coming out of Yemen, the US is getting sucked further into the quicksand of a conflict it doesn't understand and one in which its very presence tilts the tables against the US.

 Perhaps a surge instead?

Does Nation Building Have a Future? Posted by The Editors

This post by Johanna Mendelson Forman, a Scholar-in-Residence at the American University, School of International Service, and a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The opinions expressed in this note are those of the author and not of her organizations.

With the signing of the Afghanistan Strategic Partnership in April 2012 our government has started the process of hand-off in what has been a difficult and often unsustainable project in nation-building.  In spite of massive inputs of civilian and military aid, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq are capable states that can provide for security and economic well-being of their citizens.  Whether U.S. investments will pay off in the long-run is still unclear.  Metrics for success are not very informative.  They tend to measure what we have contributed to a specific country.  They do not take in what citizens on the ground actually expend in terms of their own local needs.

While knowledge about how we do nation-building abounds, a decade after two wars we are still learning about what it takes to create sustainable security on the ground.  No matter what the level of investment, nation-building imposed from the outside is unlikely to create the social capital on the ground to sustain stable institutions.  Time and again what we find is that local leadership, coupled with citizen engagement is the only way to ensure that our investments are catalytic in jump-starting good governance.  Even though we know that providing citizens with adequate security is essential, it is also clear that training security forces does not guarantee that such training will be used appropriately.  Just note the recent attacks on U.S. outposts by soldiers from the Afghan Security Forces who we had trained. 

A recent review of some of the post-conflict frameworks that were created to help ensure that our “whole of government” programs worked revealed that in spite of our deep knowledge about what it takes to rebuild war-torn societies, we have not yet succeeded in actually putting all the pieces in place.   We have all the pieces to do the job: government programs, a better inter-agency process, and a larger generation of trained professionals, civilian and military.  What we lack is an assembly manual for state building.  It is still a work in progress.  We have come to recognize, however, that prevention of violence is an important part of our work with fragile states.   We have come full circle in appreciating the value of diplomacy, conflict mediation, and the use of tools other than force to achieve what we need short of war.

Another fact about nation-building after a decade of U.S. investment is that the American people are still unclear about we actually do when we say we are stabilizing and rebuilding a state.  We send troops to foreign lands to run city councils, to rebuild infrastructure, and to support elections.  We have yet to get the American public to fully understand how foreign aid is used to promote our national interest.  Congress remains unconvinced about the value of reconstruction work, despite having appropriated billions of dollars toward helping states create professional police, hold democratic elections, rebuild infrastructure, or jump-start businesses.  And the appetite to do more after ten years of war is waning.  With budget deficits growing and no bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy it is unlikely that any new champions of nation-building will emerge in the years to come.

We often speak of burden sharing as an important component of stabilization and reconstruction efforts. Many European states are struggling through the worst economic crisis since the post-War period.  Relying on them to help us when the next crisis arises is somewhat risky.  And you can be sure that there will be another crisis of state failure that requires some form of intervention in the next five years.  Whether new actors from emerging global powers can be counted on to help is still untested.  Turkey, Brazil, China and India are still developing their own mechanisms to assist weak states and prevent conflict.

And what about the role of the United Nations will play in the future?   Peacekeeping operations are already strapped for funds, even though the number of peacekeepers has grown to over 100,000 soldiers in the last decade.  While the U.S. was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the UN remained operational in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Liberia and Somalia.  The UN became the default, the “go-to” institution for those cases of state failure in places that are not as high a priority to our national interests, it is impossible to think that the international community will be capable of sustaining this level of support for the long term.    

What does this mean for U.S. policy in the future?  If nation-building on the scale of Iraq and Afghanistan were anomalies in terms of size and duration, these types of civilian-military operations will not end any time soon.  In this time of reflection about nation-building in a more resource constrained world, we cannot ignore the risks we still face from the threats posed by weak and fragile states.  U.S. leadership will be required time and again in the years to come, hopefully with friends and allies, and with new emerging donor countries, to help maintain the peace.  What will best help to rationalize scarce resources will be a larger investment in conflict prevention, and even more crucial, creation of new tools that allow our diplomats, our aid workers, and our military to work together to protect our nation in the future.

Why Conservatives Keep Beefing with the Military Posted by Heather Hurlburt

The rift between the U.S. military and the leadership of American conservatism has now become so broad that one issue area alone doesn't contain it. Today you had the spectacle of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs telling a U.S. Senator that claims other Senators had made about the alleged ill-effects of ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty were without merit. But that's just the latest.  Let me give you a list:

Law of the Sea. The ratification of this treaty -- which gives legal footing to US navigation, exploration and commercial exploitation at sea -- is supported by all the current Pentagon brass, six former Secretaries of Defense and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, five former Commandants of the Coast Guard, eight former Chiefs of Naval Operations. Today, the Pentagon sent Secretary Panetta and CJCS Dempsey to the Senate with Secretary Clinton to make their case -- and got a number of U.S. senators going out of their way to oppose the treaty -- or just assert that "there are a lot of other issues we should be addressing," Pentagon urgency notwithstanding.

Alternative Energy. The Pentagon is the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels; it has been estimated that every gallon of gas sent to troops in Afghanistan takes seven gallons to deliver, and neocon/former CIA Director James Woolsey, not someone easily tarred with the crazy enviro label, estimates the real cost of gas for operations in Iraq to have been about $100/gallon.  The Pentagon has in recent years sponsored ag reat deal of innovative research on efficiency and alternative fuels. Over at Grist, Dave Roberts has put together a list of ways House Republicans are trying to cut and block these programs.

Who Jails Terror Suspects? Career miltiary folks will tell you quickly that they are warriors, not jailors; that's why Panetta, Petraeus, and twenty-six retired military leaders opposed conservative efforts in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to require that anyone arrested on terror charges in the U.S. be handed over to the military for confinement and/or trial. After the Administration issued implementing regulations that effectively told the Pentagon "stay out" and the FBI, DHS and law enforcement, "keep up the good (and Constitutional) work, Congress fired back, both complaining that the Administration was not doing its will and acting to make sure that amendments to this year's NDAA that would have secured constitutional civil protections for anyone arrested in the U.S. failed.

Iran. The head of Central Command, General James Mattis, has cautioned the Senate that a military strike would "just delay" Iran's nuclear program; the LA Times' Doyle McManus has written, "It’s hard to find a high-ranking U.S. military officer who thinks war with Iran is a good idea." But today's talks between Iran and the P5+1 powers had barely opened before influential Senators were demanding that the U.S. show no flexibility and insteadi mpose further sanctions; during the GOP primary, candidates competed to implicitly or explicitly question military leaders' judgement on Iran.

Pentagon budget. Sure, we're used to the idea that Members of Congress might question Pentagon officials' judgement on whether this or that weapons system is really necessary, or working as well as the glowing press releases say. But in the last month -- the same month, mind you, that some Air Force pilots have refused to fly F-22s out of safety concerns --we've watched House Republicans reinsert into the 2013 authorization drones that the Pentagon wanted to retire and an East Coast missile defense system that the Pentagon doesn't want. They've also questioned whether the commanders are sincere in saying they can live within the Adminsitration's proposed 2013 budget.

What's going on? Roberts points to strictly financial motives for the fossil-fuel-related shenanigans, and there are certainly defense-industry dollars sloshing through Congress's budget debates as well. But this isn't only about money; it's about ideology. The military-industrial complex is small-c conservative -- and I'm using both those terms in a completely value-neutral, descriptive way. It looks for fights it can win, not fights -- like a land war in Iran, or endless, bank-breaking fuel bills -- that might fatally weaken it. It looks to consolidate.  It is a status quo power seeking to preserve the status quo. And these days, preserving the status quo involves fuel made from seaweed, talks with Iranians, and getting out of the prison business.

Whatever the conservative movement in America is at the moment -- conflicted, in a battle for its soul, looking to get its groove back -- it isn't a status quo power. That is producing the fascinating dissonance of conservatives who ritually stand up in front of the public and say they want to "listen to the commanders" ignore the commanders on issue after issue. That just may also have something to do with the percentage of military campaign contributions reported to be going to either President Obama... or ron Paul.

 

This Week In Threat-Mongering - The NATO Version Posted by Michael Cohen

This weekend as the 28 NATO countries gathered in Chicago the focus has largely been on the future of the alliance's presence in Afghanistan. But there is of course a larger specter haunting the NATO summit, how does the alliance weather a growing era of budget austerity (on both sides of the Atlantic)? How can the burden of funding NATO military operations be shared by all 28 NATO countries?

Mitt Romney it appears has no interest in confronting these issues. Rather his campaign issued a statement that unsurprisingly featured an attack on President Obama for letting NATO down: "NATO's success requires strong American leadership," said Romney  "It also requires its member states to carry their own weight. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has taken actions that will only undermine the alliance. The U.S. military is facing nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. And President Obama has sent the message—intentionally or not—that the worth of NATO has diminished in America’s eyes. At this moment of both opportunities and perils, the NATO alliance must retain the capacity to act."

There are a couple of problems here. The first and most glaring is to blame the President for the fact that the Pentagon faces $1 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. This of course was agreed to as part of the debt limit deal from last summer - a crisis almost completely manufactured by House Republicans. If Romney wants to cast blame for the Pentagon and in turn NATO having to do more with less . . . he should talk to the leaders of his own party.

But the real issue is that accusing the United States of not carrying its weight in NATO is, well, ludicrous.  As it is, only 5 of the 28 countries in NATO exceed the agreed upon benchmark of 2% of GDP on defense spending - the US of course spends closer to 5%. The US currently provides between 20-25% of NATO funding; and during the recent Libya War without US military largesse the war would have simply been impossible to wage. Quite simply, Libya provided compelling evidence that without the US, NATO could not exist as a functioning military institution. On missile defense, which is intended to protect NATO allies from missile attack the US is underwriting close to 85% of the funding.

In other words, the biggest problem with NATO funding (and this has been true for quite some time) is not that President Obama is undermining the alliance with defense cuts here at home, but rather that America's NATO allies refuse to fully pony up their share of NATO's defense budget. And why they should they? Indeed, as long as NATO funding is used as a political football then the United States will continue to be played for a sucker by the Europeans who know that for all our complaining about their lack of financial support for the military alliance . . . we're never going to pull the plug.

At some point, it's worth asking whether this makes any sense at all. Why should the US be responsible for underwriting European security (and in turn the European welfare state), especially when European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being? Moreover, it Europeans don't think it's important enough to spend their own money on their own security why should America? Now granted, the Europeans are a little short on cash these days, but then so is the United States. But of course as the House of Representatives reminded us recently - as they eviscerated key social safety net programs to restore cuts made to the defense budget -- you can't put a price tag on a huge American military that does little to keep America safe and underwrites the security of other countries.

In Romney's statement he noted "NATO is a testament to the fact that the price of weakness is always far greater than the price of strength." If anything it's increasingly becoming a testament to how divorced from reality our own national security debate has become. The new American weakness is apparently when you don't let key European allies take enough advantage of you.

Dear Gov. Romney, John Bolton Is Not Serving / Will Not Serve You Well Posted by David Shorr

The arrival in New York today of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng and his family got me thinking about accountability in the foreign policy world, the subject of an interesting recent Stephen Walt post. Walt was scratching his head over the continued high profile of people associated with George W. Bush's foreign policy disasters. In a nutshell, why do these guys still have any credibility? 

Thanks to the Romney camp's exploitation  hyperventilation statements about US handling of Mr. Chen, we don't have to look all the way back to the Iraq War or detainee torture. We can have real-time accountability. What's more, we can point the spotlight at one of the most notorious far-right foreign policy figures of all: Ambassador John Bolton. And Mr. Bolton made it easy for us by publishing an op-ed on Chen Guangcheng in the Washington Times on May 7. 

A piece in last Sunday's New York Times by David Sanger exposed tensions among Romney's foreign policy advisers -- and concerns over Bolton's role -- which I'll address further down. (Short version: Bolton's advice is bound to hurt Romney more than help him.) But first, it will be my pleasure to parse for you Amb. Bolton's recent op-ed on China. The piece reads more like a series of Tourette's outbursts than a serious foreign policy critique.

In his lede graf, Bolton hedged his position by noting the possibility that China would indeed to let Chen and his family leave. Yet in the very same sentence, Bolton says "that deal is no more certain than the earlier, failed deal, announced just days before" under which the Chen family would stay. The last sentence in the lede reads:

Many basic facts remain unknown, but the historical tides sweeping across the Pacific will not wait until we have perfect information, if we ever do.

Translation: 'I can't restrain myself from molding this dramatic episode into my favorite narrative about what constitutes American strength and weakness, and talking about historical tides in the Pacific will make it sound gravitas-ey.'

Bolton then extends this big-strategic-thinkers-talk-about-history approach with an 18th Century anecdote about how the symbolic import of certain individuals can set larger geostrategic forces, including wars, in motion. Next comes this:

Washington-Beijing relations are hardly so strained and hopefully will not end so badly. Nonetheless, the skirmish over Mr. Chen reflects poorly on the United States.

Translation: 'Things aren't nearly so bad as that war I just told you about.'

We're only 2-1/2 paragraphs in, and some readers might start complaining about whiplash. But that's not the real problem with Bolton's argument. Major problem #1: the only issue basket of US-China relations mentioned in the entire piece is human rights. No context, no mention of other US interests, no explanation of the stakes, bupkis. Major problem #2: it isn't clear at all from Amb. Bolton's argument whether he wants good relations with China or not.

The middle of the piece tries to make some points about the specifics of how US diplomats handled Chen. Bolton reminds readers of how Chen came to be at the American embassy -- not by showing up at the door but by US diplomats collecting him in an official vehicle and provoking local security officers to make chase. Here's what Bolton says about this:

Our intervention was correct and consistent with prior U.S. practice in difficult refugee cases. Incomprehensibly, however, the State Department apparently failed to realize we were dramatically escalating the Chen matter, raising the political stakes by directly confronting China and also significantly increasing the risks to Mr. Chen, his family and dissident colleagues not under American protection.

Translation: 'American embassy staff somehow thought the Chinese would be cool with all this.'

When you're done choking on that one, I want to raise another question. Was Chen Guangcheng not aware of the stakes for himself and his family?  As Bolton takes his shots at President Obama's State Department, it's Chen's own wishes and decisions that get lost in the mix. Rather ironic in an article intended to affirm human rights and individual freedoms. 

Bolton's next point concerns the deal originally negotiated on Chen's behalf, to relocate from the countryside to a metropolitan area to attend law school. 

But the real issue is why responsible U.S. authorities had any reason to believe the Chinese government, which had imprisoned Mr. Chen and kept him under house arrest the past seven years, would cheerfully assent to freeing him to attend law school in China, thereby inevitably maturing into an even greater threat to Communist Party supremacy. Chinese human rights advocates did not believe Beijing’s assurances; why did our State Department?

Translation: 'Never mind what the human rights advocate in question wanted, nor the advocate / advisers who were working closely with Chen.'

This is the part where I ask what Bolton thinks should have been done. As with so much of the Republican argument these days, the op-ed is long on second-guessing yet the author doesn't have the guts to present an alternative course. Chen wanted to stay in the country and was actively engaged in negotiating the arrangement Bolton disparages. Would Bolton have refused to seek the deal Chen wanted? Should Chen have gone back to the home where he was being persecuted? Did it worsen matters for Chen to obtain an agreement with authorities, witnessed the United States, or did that put Beijing under some pressure to back off? As we know, Chen changed his mind, and the Obama administration kept on the case to reach the solution that was implemented today.

In the last couple grafs, Bolton lands on the same vacuous points he always does:

At a time of potentially enormous upheaval within China, America’s current foreign-policy leaders had no strategy to advance our interests and support those of like mind inside China. Instead, we find ourselves more vulnerable to China and other present and potential adversaries exploiting our weaknesses and inattention.

Translation: 'Weakness something something adversaries.'

Pardon the snark, but these words don't have meaning just because someone puts them in a sentence. Unless we're talking about specifics, alternatives, and likely impact, then it's an affront to serious foreign policy debate.

Which brings me back to the Sanger piece and Team Romney. There's no immutable reason that the Republican foreign policy platform has to be as ridiculous and weak as it's been thus far. I don't think the raw tally of Bush 43 alumni on Romney's foreign policy team does justice to the abilties of many of its members. (There, I just bolstered Walt's theory; but then I'm just an old-fashioned bipartisan kind of guy.)  It's not that there's a much more solid platform waiting to be put on the table; they'd have a lot of work to do. But they do have it in them.

I will say this, though, if Bolton's is one of the most influential voices, we'll keep hearing a lot of shrillness. And God help us if he's ever Secretary of State.

Defending the G8 Summit Against a Harsh Judgment Posted by David Shorr

Given my quote in this Toronto Globe & Mail piece by Kevin Carmichael and David Ignatius' scathing indictment of the just-about-to-begin G-8 summit at Camp David, I wanted to draft a quick rejoinder. Ignatius focuses so much on the symbolism of the summit and the damnable state of recent European leadership that he loses sight of the practicalities. While agreeing with much of his assessment, I want to push back against his bottom-line calculation that the summit is a net negative.

The issue on the table is whether it would be better for the leaders not to meet at all, which is what I understand Ignatius as saying in his lede:

It would be bad enough if the G-8 summit was simply an irrelevant annual excuse for a photo opportunity. But it’s actually worse that that: It’s a symbol of an outmoded world order that actively gets in the way of solving problems.

Stipulating all the substantive failures and frustrations that he catalogues -- particularly noting the ever-gathering storm in the Eurozone -- does it worsen matters to hold this meeting? In other words, I want to apply economic reasoning and consider the alternative scenario of Camp David remaining unoccupied this weekend.

I think the question hinges on whether you believe the G-8 summit heightens pressures for the politicians to do better or alleviates those pressures. I absolutely believe it keeps the heat on the leaders rather than letting them off the hook. If Ignatius hadn't led his piece the way he did, I would've viewed most of the rest as a constructive goad to the summit's participants.  But I just can't argue against the leaders having another high-profile opportunity to hash over the Euro mess and the threat it poses to the global economy. 

As a rising powers guy and staunch G-20 advocate, I should talk about the G8-G20 connection.  If we didn't already have the G-20, the spectacle of the old-school economic powers enjoying a Catoctin retreat would indeed be totally anachronistic. But it makes a big difference that we do have the G-20.  

In fact, I think the main way to look at this week's G8 summit is precisely as a meeting in the run-up to the G-20 in Los Cabos, Mexico June 18-19. In line with my above comment about Camp David reinforcing the right kind of pressures, I think the economic agenda this week is about the Europeans getting their act together ahead of next month's meeting. As I've been thinking about this issue for the last several days, it seems more appropriate to view the two summits as part of a rolling process rather than a competition between rival multilateral bodies.  

Finally an Iran Commentary With Some Substance Posted by David Shorr

The reason I appreciate yesterday's Wall Street 
Journal column from United Against Nuclear Iran isn't that I agree with it. What I like about the piece is that it's solid enough to offer a basis for disagreement. Whereas the Romney camp has given us nothing but faith in the magic of flinty resolve -- no matter how ill-defined or impractical -- and pot shots at a completely fictitious Obama policy, these US, Israeli, and German former senior officials have put a more concrete proposal on the table. It's a sign of the times and our low-quality debate when it is bold for conservatives merely to admit the possibility of a peaceful solution with Iran, but there we are.

Unlike President Obama's political opponents, the authors credit the most recent set of sanctions with having "a tangible impact" and say about the banking sanctions in particular: "the ripple effect has been staggering." (I have an article in the News Desk/G8 Research Group Camp David summit magazine detailing how the sanctions work.) Now, United Against Nuclear Iran does want everyone to know, by the way, that they've advocated such sanctions for a long time. But whenever I hear this question of 'what took Obama so long,' then I want to know why President Bush didn't put banking and energy sanctions in place?

The heart of the authors' proposal is a set of steps to ratchet up to "total sanctions": a cut-off of any flows between Iran and the global financial system, disclosure of all business investments and transactions in Iran, refusal of cargo ships that have carried goods to or from Iran, and sanctions against any insurance underwriting in Iran. Because when it comes to sanctions, too much is never enough. As the article puts it,

History has made clear that the regime will never change course due to half-measures; only serious steps like we've outlined have a chance of success. With Iran finally feeling real impact from international sanctions, now is the time to increase the pressure.

Half-measures? Those bank and energy sanctions you advocated weren't serious steps? What about the staggering ripple effect? More to the point, could you tell us more about how the peaceful outcome with Iran will be reached? 

Tellingly, the authors make no mention of diplomacy or negotiations to reach an agreement with Iran. Their shorthand way of describing a peaceful outcome is simply as a change in Iran's chosen course. In the end, the United Against folks are only marginally more sensible than all the other conservative critics. On the one hand, they consider the Iranian leadership to be rational and influenceable, as opposed to hell-bent on getting the bomb. Yet it's a peculiar notion of rationality that sees no need to reach a bargain with the Iranians or address any of their concerns -- besides avoiding economic devastation, that is.

[BTW, as the article itself implies, the sanctions will actually have to be eased at some point. Now isn't yet the time, but it can't be put off until everything all sewn up either. David Elliot of National Iranian American Council has written an excellent post on this problem over at HuffPo.]

The authors of this piece thus have the same blind spot as the rest of the right wing: a naive belief that problem-governments will cave into demands without getting anything positive in return. As I say, the article at least gives the basis for a more substantive debate on Iran; it helps clarify important contrasts with President Obama's policy. 

For one thing, the president and United Against have different immediate aims for the sanctions. The article basically argues for sanctions to be ratcheted up until the Iranians capitulate. The proximate objective for the Obama administration is to bring Iran to the table for serious talks -- with a recent P5+1 meeting in Istanbul and another soon in Baghdad, things are looking up. The operative word of course is serious, and the current sanctions trace back to the breakdown of talks in 2009-10 and the administration's assessment that the Iranians were just dragging out the process. (Obama's shift to the "pressure track" has itself prompted a debate; see articles by Trita Parsi and myself.) Bottom line: the critics are waiting for capitulation, President Obama realizes there has to be a negotiation.

The Obama administration has used pressure and negotiations in tandem. Now that Iran is back at the table, we gauge their seriousness about proving the civilian character of the nuclear program. It's a moment for, as the saying goes, giving the sanctions a chance to work. From reading the WSJ piece, the critics seem to say the time's always right for more sanctions. On the broader question of when to negotiate versus apply pressure, Shadow Government's Will Inboden and I exchanged blog posts (quite congenialy) 18 months ago. Just to summarize my view, the United States shouldn't let ourselves be played for a chump, but nor should we stay so aloof that we forget our own interests in reaching a solution. All well and good to note Iran's interest in adjusting to the international community's concerns, but this isn't going to be a one-way street.

As a general matter, the right wing is seriously tone-deaf when it comes to perceptions of the US in the rest of the world. As far as they're concerned, it's impossible to go overboard with toughness. They're oblivious to the reality that pushing too hard and making ourselves look unreasonable only creates sympathy for the other guy and erodes our international support. In fact, rallying support behind our efforts in Iran and elsewhere has been one of the signal achievements of Obama foreign policy, and one of its main objectives.

This Week In Threat-Mongering Posted by Michael Cohen

Those who toil in the bowels of the threat industrial complex (trademark pending) have several tools at their disposal for hyping threats and spreading fear. There is the look at the "shiny thing in my hand method," there is the exclusive interview/leak with policymaker that suggests serious threats are being ignored; there is the bogus legislative proposal aimed to combat threats that don't actually exist and the list goes on.

But one of the tried and true methods of the professional threat monger is the "tossing lots of nasty countries into a scary word salad and sprinkle it with nuclear weapons and potential terrorism." Exhibit A: Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation writing today in the New York Post. In a piece delightfully titled, "Disarming US As Wolves Lie In Wait" Brookes offers some rather tasty nuggets of fear.

For example: "The Iranian threat is hardly diminishing. Few would dispute that Tehran will not only have nukes in a few years, but an intercontinental-ballistic missile to carry them."

Actually you know who would dispute that . . . the US government and the International Atomic Energy Agency both of which have concluded that Iran is not actively pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.  Moreover, few analysts believe Iran is anywhere close to building a workable ICBM. And so what if they did? Are they going to fire it against a country that has 2,000 nuclear weapons and thus risk national suicide? Over the past several months there has been significant evidence that sanctions against Iran are causing Iran's oil production to decrease - and notable was the positive nature of recent talks in Istanbul over Iran's nuclear program. Does this sound like a country that is becoming more aggressive or more dangerous to the United States.

Then there is this: "The Assad regime’s survival will certainly find Damascus committed to revenge — and even more wedded to its drive for the bomb."

Where to begin? 1) This assumes that the Assad regime will survive and that 2) after the difficult chore of putting down a domestic insurgency Syria will then look around the region (even the United States) for countries to take revenge upon and 3) it will continue to develop its presently non-existent nuclear program even under the likely specter of international sanctions. Nothing about this sentence has any relationship to reality . . . but it is scary!

Or what about our #1 geopolitical foe - Russia: "You have to wonder whether perceptions of US decline made the Russian chief of the general staff think it was OK recently to threaten to pre-emptively strike American missile defenses in Europe."

So to prevent Russian military offices from saying really dumb things in public that they can't and won't possibly back up with tangible actions the US must . . . not cut defense spending?This is always an element to the the threat industrial complex (trademark pending) that is so confusing - shouldn't the US have the ability to differentiate between words and actions; between threats and capabilities? Does every stray statement by a foreigner that even mildly threatens the US preclude any sort of reasonable cut in defense spending? It's reminiscent of the Bush line during the Iraq War that OBL and AQ sought to create a global caliphate in the Middle East. So what? It was about as likely to occur as me playing shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. 

When Khrushchev warned during the Cold War that the USSR would "bury" the United States that was a scary notion, because, well the USSR had actual nuclear weapons (although at the time the threat was far less severe then many realized). Today, the Russian chief of staff can talk a tough game - but ultimately his country faces a military alliance with several thousand nuclear weapons and more than a million troops. There's not much he can truly do about missile defense sites in Poland. Indeed, the more sober-minded might ask if it's worth developing these missile defense capabilities against a phantom enemy if it ends up fundamentally harming US-Russian relations. That whole #1 geopolitical foe can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Finally, Brookes has this to say about the Obama Administration's pivot to China, "Meanwhile, Team Obama’s strategic shift to Asia will be more of a dainty pirouette than a muscular pivot, absent the forces needed to project US power across the Pacific."

Because a shift to Asia is, like, so totally gay . . .

This Week In Threat-Mongering Posted by Michael Cohen

Not surprisingly this week in threat-mongering begins in a usual place - Leon Panetta's mouth. Here he is last Thursday being interviewed by Judy Woodruff:

MS. WOODRUFF:  The U.S. military budget, I understand, is larger than the next 14 countries’ defense budgets combined.  Why does it need to be so big?  In 30 seconds.

SEC. PANETTA:  Judy, we’re facing a lot of threats.  We talked about a lot of those threats.  We’re facing threats from Iran, facing threats from North Korea, we’re facing threats from terrorism.  We’re still in war in Afghanistan.  We’re continuing to have turmoil in the Middle East.  We’re facing cyber attacks.  We’re facing a number of challenges.  We have to protect this country.  That’s my job.  That’s what I’m paid to do and that, thank God, is what the United States military does.

This is the classic 'here's a bunch of big scary words that are intended to convince you the world is really unsafe, but when you parse out what I've said my comment doesn't actually make any sense.'

On Iran, the most recent IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program suggests that Iran is not currently constructing a bomb, has not clearly decided to build one and even if they did would be years away from being able to deploy no less use it to attack the United States. In fact, here is Leon Panetta saying in February that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear bomb? Here he is in January saying that sanctions against Iran are working. So how exactly is the US facing "threats from Iran"? And might the effective use of international sanctions against Iran suggest that the US military budget doesn't necessarily need to be that big?

How about the threats from North Korea - the same country that saw its recent missile launch end in disaster and was caught displaying fake mobile missile launchers at a recent military parade. How is the United States currently facing a threat from North Korea? For 60 years, North Korea's territorial ambitions on the Korean peninsula have been curtailed. Why is that at risk of changing any time soon?

And while we are still at war in Afghanistan it was Panetta himself who revealed that the US would be ending combat operations in the middle of 2013. He is also the person who said that al Qaeda's demise was within America's reach. And as for cyber attacks . . . well perhaps the less said the better. Panetta is right that the US is facing challenges, but when it comes to actual threats, there's no actual there . . . there.

Even less compelling than the threat mongering of Leon Panetta is the case for building a defense shield to protect the East Coast from incoming missiles. Still that hasn't stopped House Republicans from pushing exactly such a plan:

A new Republican plan to set up a missile defense site on the East Coast has attracted election-year fireworks, with Democrats accusing the GOP of pushing the idea to undercut President Obama’s national-security credentials. 

Democrats say Republicans are playing politics, but GOP members hit back saying the site is necessary to get ahead of the rising threat of Iran’s missile development and to plug a gap in U.S. missile defenses.

Now this appears to be nothing more than election-year politics, which of course is what drives so much of the "threat-mongering industrial complex" (trademark pending). But the Hill article on this plan did feature this precious quote from Cong. Michael Turner:

“You cannot open a newspaper or turn on a TV … without seeing a story of the rising threat from Iran and North Korea to mainland United States,” said Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the Strategic Forces subcommittee that included the East Coast interceptor language.

“With these emerging threats it is inevitable that an East Coast site will be necessary in order to ensure we have the ability to lessen the threats from both Iran and North Korea,” Turner told The Hill.

Here's my public dare to Michael Turner - find me a single newspaper article or TV news report that details the "rising threat" that Iran and North Korea represent not just to the United States . . . but to the East Coast of the United States? If you currently cannot open a paper or turn on the TV without seeing such a story, I have no doubt that I will lose this dare.

Finally, there is word that shockingly, Adm. William H. McRaven, who heads the US special operation command . . . thinks we should be spending more money on US special operations forces. According to McRaven in a draft paper that is circulating at the Pentagon and mysteriously leaked to the LA Times:

"We are in a generational struggle. For the foreseeable future, the United States will have to deal with various manifestations of inflamed violent extremism. In order to conduct sustained operations around the globe, our special operations forces must adapt."

"Non-state actors, such as [Al Qaeda], will increasingly threaten our national security," notes an unsigned staff memo attached to the documents. "They will establish bases in places not under sovereign control. Moving easily across political boundaries and merging with indigenous populations, these non-state actors will seek to exploit our vulnerabilities."

This is so 2006-2007. Indeed this vision of al Qaeda's ability to operate with virtual ease, across borders and practically in perpetuity very much runs counter to what we currently know about al Qaeda's restrained capabilities and shrinking areas of operation. This isn't to suggest that terrorism will disappear completely, but rather the notion that such actors will "increasingly threaten our national security." 

But what is most troubling about McRaven's plan is that it would significantly expand the power of the special operations command and indeed place them outside the normal chain of command.

McRaven's aides insist that the elite teams would remain under the direct day-to-day control of Pentagon regional commanders once deployed. But under his plan, McRaven would have greater authority to move forces and resources instead of merely responding to requests from regional commanders.

"Who better to say where special operations forces should be than the commander of Special Operations Command, with years of experience behind him?" asked one aide, defending the plan.

I can think of a few folks. This is a terrible idea; but let's be clear it's an idea born out of an over-inflated view of the actual threat facing the United States. Ones that are hyped up from the Secretary of Defense on down.

Sorry Gov. Romney, the Foreign Policy Bar Has Been Raised Posted by David Shorr

This isn't a statement about how great Obama foreign policy is -- though I happen to think the policy's been awfully good. Instead I want to highlight an important trend trend in the politics of foreign policy. In a welcome development, campaign rhetoric increasingly is being held to a more rigorous standard.

Just taking pot shots no longer counts as a foreign policy platform; a campaign has to put its alternative on the table. As a result, the Romney camp will keep running into variants of the following: "Okay smart guys [and gals], what would you do?"

The old political adage says that parties out of power are free of the responsibilities of governing -- the nitty gritty of trade-offs and consequences. Seems to me, though, that the 2012 foreign policy debate is being brought down to earth. Through hard-won experience, the country has learned that knee-jerk toughness doesn't magically whip others into line, and rash military action can stir up more unintended consequences than intended ones.

That's why the Romney campaign has gained scant credit for its Iran position. The specifics are nitpicks rather than real differences with President Obama's efforts -- on some points the Romney position is actually identical to the administration's. And with only a half-hearted (and one-sided) passing reference to a peaceful solution, it leaves the distinct impression that Romney is poised for war with Iran.

The issue of oil prices is an even better sign that the foreign policy debate is, to quote a favorite source, "back in the garage with our bull**** detector." The flip side of the phony argument tying high gas prices to slack domestic drilling is a real driver of higher oil costs: worry over war in Iran. We've seen more news reports highlighting how fluctuation in the price per barrel tracks with war fears. There has even been news coverage noting that Republicans get a political "two-fer" here -- their saber rattling gives them gas price increases they can blame on the president.

And then there was the drama over Chen Guangcheng this past week. Even Bill Kristol understood better than the Romney campaign the folly of second-guessing the Obama administration's efforts in a fast-moving situation. But to get a really thorough treatment of Romney's craven response, read this Center for American Progress piece from Nina Hachigian and our own Jacob Stokes. 

Photo: US Navy

 

On Chen Affair, Stop Blaming Americans Posted by Jacob Stokes

I have a new piece, written with Nina Hachigian, up on the CAP Action Fund site. In it, we examine Romney's response to the Chen affair. Here's a sample:

This is not a time for partisanship. Turning Chen’s fate into a political issue here at home only distracts from the task of holding Chinese officials responsible for their actions and finding a workable solution. Additionally, the more Chen’s fate becomes about Sino-American relations, the more emboldened hardliners will become in order to avoid the appearance of kowtowing to American demands. Already, Chinese newspapers are suggesting that Chen is a tool of the United States. They are also snickering at the criticism of the Obama administration, saying they harmed themselves by harboring Chen.

Romney has chosen this moment to insert himself into this extremely delicate time in U.S. foreign policy. While the U.S. secretaries of state, treasury, and commerce were on foreign soil, negotiating with the Chinese, Romney was questioning the honesty of America’s representatives in China and their sincerity in wanting to help Chen. Romney called the affair a “day of shame for the Obama administration” if early reports proved true. Yet he offered not a word of condemnation for Chinese leaders for failing to keep their promises.

Read the whole piece here.

Image: CAPAF

This Week In Threat-Mongering Posted by Michael Cohen

This has been a particularly busy week for the threat-mongering industry. It's the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, which puts enormous pressure on threat mongers everywhere to inflate the potential threats from al Qaeda and jihadist terror groups in general.

Last week we saw Seth Jones and Mary Habeck take a stab at claiming al Qaeda is as dangerous as ever; this week David Ignatius went in a different direction, arguing instead that the threat from al Qaeda is materializing in new and insidious ways.

According to Ignatius, "In terms of bin Laden’s broader goal of moving the Islamic world away from Western influence, he has done better than we might like to think."

Huh? Hasn't al Qaeda's uncompromising vision of an Islamic state largely been rejected? Hasn't their unpopularity in the Arab world grown significantly? And outside a few towns in Yemen and some affiliate groups that OBL was unable to control, isn't AQ a fairly weak actor?

Not at all says Ignatius, because instead OBL is making inroads via the democratic process, "Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved."

Let's ignore for a moment that OBL, as actual AQ expert Will McCants notes, "despised party politics/parliaments." But think of the broader argument that Ignatius is making here. AQ is a deeply nihilist Islamist organization focused largely on attacks against the United States and large-scale terrorist attacks. The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist organization that is largely non-violent and has sought to establish power in Egypt via the political process. From this perspective it's not hard to note that al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are two different organizations with different tactical approaches to achieving their goals.

Yet by Ignatius's argument, if you've seen one Islamist you've seen them all. In this worldview, AQ shares common goals with Erdogan in Turkey, even Karzai in Afghanistan or practically any Islamic oriented political group in the Arab world - the key difference being that while many of these movements are non-violent and are seeking power via the ballot box, al Qaeda, as Ignatius notes "couldn’t make the transition from violent jihad to nonviolent Islamist politics." Yes, this is something of a crucial distinction.

There is certainly a discussion to be held about the Islamist groups in the Arab world; linking them to a group that killed 3,000 Americans and describing legitimate Islamist political parties as "electoral bin Ladenism" is unhelpful in this regard. 

But it certainly is scary!

Next we have two separate op-eds - first from Michael Auslin of AEI in the Weekly Standard and next from Rep. Randy Forbes in Politico - arguing that we need an even bigger air force. Now I should say, I'm a big fan of the air force, but within limits. Not so much for Auslin and Forbes, the latter of whom argues, "If we weaken our air superiority, our country’s entire war-fighting strategy will be forced to change. We will no longer be able to operate anywhere on the globe without risk."

Left unanswered is the question of why the US should want or need to operate anywhere on the globe without risk, particularly since Forbes doesn't make much effort to identify actual security threats to the United States that would require sustained aerial bombardment. Auslin argues that advances by the Russians and Chinese will make it harder to operate in these particular environments. Indeed, Auslin notes ruefully that more countries are realizing, "to survive an attack on your homeland or forces, deny the United States control of the air."

Again, unanswered is why the United States would want to attack Russia or China.

In the formulation put forward by Auslin so long as other countries are developing their air forces and air defenses to prevent US attack, the United States must continue to build an even larger air force to counteract those advances just in case there comes a day in the future when the US decides it wants to go to war with said countries. So from this formulation the US can never stop building aircraft; if we do there will be a mine shaft, er, air power gap.

To be sure, there is a compelling argument to be made for maintaining an advanced air force and modernizing the US fleet, but the arguments put forward by Auslin and Forbes lead in only one direction - constant, unceasing air force construction to combat unnamed foreign threats.

Letters from an Occupant: The Abbottabad Documents Posted by Eric Martin

The Obama administration - through West Point's Combating Terror Center (CTC) - has released a handful of the documents that were seized in the raid on the Abbottabad complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding out. The summary provided by the CTC is a useful analysis of source documents that, in some cases, include letters from bin Laden himself (as an aside, Will McCants has put together a handy, chronological list of the aforementioned documents).

 

While the documents that were released represent a very small sample, and broad, sweeping generalizations based on their contents should be avoided, the CTC report does offer this analysis with respect to the controversial notion of an Iran/al-Qaeda relationship:

References to Iran show that the relationship is not one of alliance, but of indirect and unpleasant negotiations over the release of detained jihadis and their families, including members of Bin Ladin’s family. The detention of prominent al-Qa`ida members seems to have sparked a campaign of threats, taking hostages and indirect negotiations between al-Qa`ida and Iran that have been drawn out for years and may still be ongoing.

The report goes on to note:

Al-Qa`ida did not appear to have looked to Iran from the perspective that “the enemy of my (American) enemy is my friend,” but the group might have hoped that “the enemy of my (American) enemy would leave me alone.” [...]

Although the documents make it clear that the relationship between Iran and al-Qa`ida is antagonistic, it is difficult to explain Iran’s rationale for detaining en masse these jihadis for years, without due process. One plausible explanation that has been advanced is that Iran held them “in part as a deterrent against a Qaeda attack on Iranian soil.” Another widely reported explanation is that Iran was holding al-Qa`ida members “as a bargaining chip in its war of nerves with the US, and will only allow their extradition in return for substantial concessions.” Whether Iran was aware of it or not, al-Qa`ida had plans to put the released detainees to “work.”

Something to consider, at least in terms of past Iran/al-Qaeda relations. The rest of the report is highly recommended.

The Problem With Obama's Afghanistan Speech Posted by Michael Cohen

So two days ago, President Obama traveled to Afghanistan to remind people that he killed Osama bin Laden a year earlier . . . and while he was there sign a strategic partnership agreement with the Afghan government. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with the first thing and the second is actually an important step forward for Afghanistan's future. But then the President gave a nationally televised speech about the war . . . and that's where the trouble begins.

First, the President was for lack of a better word, disingenuous, about the state of the US mission in Afghanistan. According to Obama:

We broke the Taliban's momentum. We've built strong Afghan Security Forces. We devastated al-Qaida's leadership, taking out over 20 of their top 30 leaders. And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set - to defeat al-Qaida, and deny it a chance to rebuild - is within reach.

Much of this statement is simply not true or exaggerated. The Taliban's momentum has been slowed, but broken? As long as the groups has support from Pakistan and safe havens across the border the Taliban will continue to be a disruptive force in Afghanistan's future. As for the ANSF, as my friend Micah Zenko noted on twitter the other day, the new Sigar report on Afghanistan indicates that only about 6% of units are able to operate "independent with advisors." While the the ANSF is improving it seems far from clear that they are close to being able to operate on their own and without US guidance.

And while the President is certainly correct that the US has devastated AQ's leadership it should be noted that the surge he ordered in 2009 did little to add to that devastation. I get that the President wants to put a positive spin on the war, but Afghanistan is very far from being on the glide path to stability - and indeed, seems likely to continue to be mired in low-level civil war for some time to come.

Part of the reason for this comes in this section of Obama's speech:

In coordination with the Afghan government, my Administration has been in direct discussions with the Taliban. We have made it clear that they can be a part of this future if they break with al Qaeda, renounce violence, and abide by Afghan laws. Many members of the Taliban - from foot soldiers to leaders - have indicated an interest in reconciliation. A path to peace is now set before them. Those who refuse to walk it will face strong Afghan Security Forces, backed by the United States and our allies.

It's a very positive sign that the President is publicly acknowledging talks between the US and the Taliban, but statements like those in italics don't really amount to negotiation - they are basically calling on the Taliban to surrender.  This isn't really a path to reconciliation because it presupposes the outcome. Clearly the Taliban are not going to break with al Qaeda, renounce violence or agree to abide by the Afghanistan Constitution as the first step in a political negotiation - rather all of these steps come at the end. The White House position, which has been the case for quite some time, is not to treat the Taliban as a political actor with legitimate grievances but rather an adversary to be beaten into submission. Not only is this unlikely to occur, but it makes it ever harder to come up with a sustainable political settlement.

Obama's statement is indicative of the lack of seriousness to which the US has approached the subject of political reconciliation. For example, late last month, we saw indications that the Administration was pulling back on plans to release five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay as a good faith measure to jumpstart talks. The reason: fears of a political backlash. That an Administration, which has already endorsed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, is afraid of the political fallout from a confidence building measure with the Taliban because it might lead to a one day story of criticism from Republicans is an indication of how minimal the courage is inside the White House to push for a political solution.

That Obama reiterated on Tuesday his "negotiation by surrender" strategy is further evidence that the White House is disinclined to use any political capital in pursuing the path of reconciliation. The result is that US troops could be in Afghanistan for years to come.

The fact is, the SPA is really just a means to an end - the end being a political deal with the Taliban.  The whole rationale for the SPA is not to keep the US in Afghanistan forever, but to use it as a tool of leverage to push and prod the Taliban to the negotiating table. It's a way of saying to the Taliban, 'we're staying for at least ten years . . . unless you want to have a serious conversation about reconciliation that might get us out sooner.'

But for such a plan to work the White House has to demonstrate a modicum of political courage and take the steps necessary to make a political settlement to the conflict possible. Instead Obama seems more than happy to kick the can down the road - and in the process ensure that Afghanistan has something very far from the rosy future that he talked about on Tuesday night.

International Economic Cooperation Gut-Check Posted by David Shorr

Thought I'd take a break from all the recent FOREIGN POLICY  DEBATE 2012!! fun and shift gears to some relatively apolitical policy issues. Today, a belated response to Dan Drezner's "How are they doing?" question about cooperation among the major economic powers. Dan's post was prompted by the recent Spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank -- particularly the conjunction of an ongoing split over how to ward off a double-dip recession together with a pledge to beef up IMF coffers with an added $400 billion for the proverbial rainy day. For Drezner this good news / bad news serves as a Rorschach Test of optimism or pessimism about economic global governance more broadly, and he identifies a number of experts he considers as falling into the two camps.

It's a perennial and important question for every effort at multilateral cooperation: what is a reasonable measuring stick for success or failure? At the heart of the matter is the inherent tension between the difficulty and political sensitivity of the problems on the agenda -- fiscal discipline and job growth, in this case -- versus the urgent need for resolution and action. 

Dan gives part of the answer in reference to the infusion of $400B into the IMF. When governmental leaders resort to more modest measures, we have to distinguish between steps that do actually help and those that merely fudge the issue. Keeping sight of the essential political / policy dispute is also important. As Dan points out, the major economies' political leaders disagree over how to promote growth -- a split that became clear at the Toronto G-20 summit in June 2010, when President Obama's appeal to go slow on fiscal consolidation was rebuffed by Cameron, Merkel, and Harper. 

There is a similar struggle in this year's election debate. How many times have we heard complaints about Washington dysfunctionality and "they can't get their act together and agree on a solution." That's because -- thank you Paul Krugman for your weekly reminder -- there's a basic disagreement over government's role in promoting economic growth. The same debt-before-jobs austerity caucus has successfully held back any further budgetary stimulus that would help protect the recovery, but there's an interesting question about whether the winds are starting to shift. What we do know is that impatience with Eurozone leaders has been growing louder within G-20 meetings. 

The other useful lens to determine multilateral success or failure is to look for incremental progress on the hard stuff. In other words, can major international challenges be broken down into bite-sized pieces? For my frequent collaborator Alan Alexandroff, whom Drezner puts in the optimists' camp, you can see a lot of this slow and steady slog in the lower-level technical work that takes place between G-20 summits (below the iceberg's tip, as he says). And while Ted Truman of the Peterson Institute gets classified as a pessimist, his recent ForeignPolicy.com column on the lost momentum for IMF governance reform offers a very practical incremental suggestion for how to proceed.

The G-20's signature agenda is its framework "strong, sustainable and balanced growth" (SSBG), a major element of which is to ensure that no economy is too dependent on either exports or consumer demand. The rebalancing of China's export-oriented economy was considered off the table for many years until the SSBG framework was launched in 2009. This involves a major structural shift for China and scores a very high degree of difficulty in terms of tracking G-20 success or failure. From what administration officials tell me, though, what they like most about the G-20 summits is the chance they offer to steadily drag China along in rebalancing their economy and boosting their domestic consumer demand.

The Presidential Election and US-China Relations Posted by Jacob Stokes

I have a new piece up at China-US Focus that looks at how presidential politics will affect the Sino-American relationship. Here's the key paragraph:

Ultimately, the 2012 U.S. presidential election will have a long-term effect on Sino-American relations to the degree that it increases or decreases strategic mistrust between the two countries. The Chinese leadership understands that the rough and tumble of U.S. politics is often more smoke than fire—that most heated rhetoric gets moderated when it runs up against the demands of real-world policy making. 

But a political discussion that frames the relationship between the two countries as an exclusively zero-sum competition, one that mirrors the ideological and strategic dimensions of the Cold War--instead of a process of managing differences and identifying common interests--risks creating an atmosphere of strategic distrust that will do long-lasting damage in relations with China. While it’s essential for the U.S. leaders to stand firmly in support of American interests and values, candidates should be wary of letting political point-scoring damage the world’s most important bilateral relationship.

Read the whole thing here.

Image: http://xijinpinglookingatthings.tumblr.com

 

Romney Foreign Policy and the "Resolve Fairy" Posted by David Shorr

To hear the Romney campaign tell it, via a Rich Williamson column this morning over at ForeignPolicy.com, the recent failed satellite launch by North Korea is evidence of President Obama's Carteresque foreign policy failure. From reading Williamson's dire warnings, I can only conclude that the Romney camp is counting on the rest of us to disconnect all our critical faculties. 

For one thing, in both foreign policy and the economy, it's not like we haven't tried it their way. So when Williamson calls Pyongyang's (failure to) launch a satellite into space a devastating "sucker punch," one has to ask how it compares to North Korea building and testing their first nuclear weapons on the Republicans' watch? 

And let's parse the supposed disaster more closely. The attempted launch nullified the Obama administration's recent deal with North Korea, under which they would suspend any missile or nuclear warhead tests and receive food aid in return. Clearly the North Koreans reneged, so the deal is off. And this is President Obama's failure because...? Because he shouln't have pursued a halt to North Korean tests? 

As I said in a recent post, Republicans' foreign policy arguments come in two flavors: 

First, there are the bald assertions that a Republicans' vague aura of toughness would whip the rest of the world into line ... Second are the genuine policy differences between President Obama and Governor Romney, and those splits involve either starting new wars (Iran) or staying mired in old ones (Iraq, Afghanistan). So there it is, the supposed magical powers of Republican bluster or war.

With that in mind, here's Rich Williamson's indictment of the president's policy toward Iran:

President Obama's lack of resolute action and the absence of demonstrable results make hollow his declaration that a nuclear-armed Iran is "unacceptable." The path he has set us on leads to a nuclear-armed Iran. 

Which again begs the same question about President Bush's record: would you please remind us of your great success in halting Iran's nuclear program (that's IraN with an 'N', not Iraq)?  Because I can't recall any. Nor does Rich's article outline a policy alternative with any substance or specifics. Meanwhile, anyone paying the slightest attention can see that President Obama has managed to subject Iran to harsher sanctions and stronger international pressure than ever before. 

A last thought on that (completely unspecified) "resolute action" and Republicans' magical foreign policy powers. Also an explanation of the lovely trick-or-treater pictured above. With her holy Ayn Rand text and magic wand, she is of course the Confidence Fairy that Paul Krugman writes about regularly. Given the similar magical thinking at work in GOP foreign policy, it's only proper that we identify the Confidence Fairy's twin sister: The Resolve Fairy.

They both work exactly the same way. A business-friendly (read business-dictated) climate will summon the Confidence Fairy of markets and a wonderful world of full employment. Likewise, grand expressions of toughness and moral clarity bring forth the Resolve Fairy and the capitulation of rogue regimes. 

That Center Cannot Hold? Rubio Speaks on foreign policy Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Marco Rubio makes a splashy appeal to what used to be the national security center-right, with a Bob Kagan-heavy speech at Brookings and an LATimes op-ed on Latin America.

The pieces are well structured and make bows to reality -- working with allies and partners, the need for negotiation and engagement, even the appropriateness of using the UN to build coalitions -- that we have grown unused to hearing from conservatives over the primary debates.

Laura Rozen went as far as suggesting Rubio was auditioning for an Obama second-term Secretary of State, with lines like these:

In this new century, more than ever before, America should work with out capable allies in finding solutions to global problems. Not because America has gotten weaker, but because our partners have grown stronger. It’s worth pointing out, that is not a new idea for us. Our greatest successes have always occurred in partnership with other like-minded nations. America has acted unilaterally in the past – and I believe it should continue to do so in the future -- when necessity requires. But our preferred option since the U.S. became a global leader has been to work with others to achieve our goals. So yes, global problems do require international coalitions. On that point this administration is correct.

Preferably, we can succeed through coercive means short of military force. We should be open to negotiations with Iran.

The spread and success of political and economic freedom in the Middle East is in our vital interest. It will certainly present challenges, as newly enfranchised societies elect leaders whose views and purposes oppose and even offend ours. But in the long term, because governments that rule by the consent of the governed must be responsive to the material needs and demands of their people, they are less likely to engage in costly confrontations that harm their economies and deprive their people of the opportunity to improve their circumstances.

It's easier to imagine each of those paragraphs coming out of President Obama's mouth than Mitt Romney's, which presages some interesting questions about Rubio as VP.

I found just three differences on specific policies:  Rubio's call to establish a safe haven across the Turkish border and "potentially" arm the opposition in Syria; his limits on a timeline for negotiations with Iran; and his rejection of the US "reset" with Russia that produced Russian nuclear reductions udner New START, Russian help or abstention on Iran sanctions and Libya, and vital overflight rights for our troops in Afghanistan.

(I'm also confused by the idea that shale oil in Canada gets Eastern Europe to cut its cheap gas deals with Russia, so I'm not counting it here.)

But don't let all the convergence rhetoric fool you. Rubio's rhetoric, and even more the details he sets out in his Los Angeles times op-ed on Latin America today, ultimately lines him up with Romney on the central question around how the US engages in the world.

Rubio, like many, seems to define engagement as only on US terms, and pooh-poohs the idea that other countries can lead effectively. But where would we be without Germany in the European economic crisis, Australia ending atrocities in East Timor, EU peacekeepers in the Balkans? Where do emerging global powers, not just China but Brazil, Turkey, India, fit in his worldview? Why will they be content to be led by the US? He also maintains complete silence about how this definition of US leadership -- all the time, everywhere -- can be paid for, even while bemoaning his party's moves to cut foreign aid and the libertarians to his right's calls to bring home the military.

Rubio raised issues no one else has raised in politics this season, though his speech skipped some big ones (no mention of terrorism, light on Israel and the Arab Spring, nothing on the Koreas or Japan, or our military). And he made a real effort to recapture what used to be the center-right on national security. Ultimately, though, the new right seems likely to reject his views on engagement -- while the American public has already rejected the idea that engagement means universal go-it-alone leadership in favor of a vision in which America leads "with" others, not "for" them. 

 

This Week In Threat Mongering Posted by Michael Cohen

Two of my favorite things to write about these days are threat-mongering and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's unceasing string of misstatements, gaffes and untruths. Today, like peanut butter and chocolate, Ashford and Simpson and Batman and Robin these two forces have come together into a delicious "Panetta-threat mongering" sandwich.

Here's what Panetta had to say early this week about Iran's sponsorship of terrorism:

"We always have a concern about in particular the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and [their] efforts . . .  to expand their influence not only throughout the Middle East but into [South America] as well," Panetta told reporters Monday. "That, in my book, that relates to expanding terrorism. And that's one of the areas that I think all of us are concerned about," he added. 

Hezbollah in Latin America? Honestly? Has Rick Santorum done a John Woo Face Off with Leon Panetta? (Actually that would explain a lot). This notion of Iranian influence in South America has been thoroughly debunked, even by America's own State Department:

The threat of a transnational terrorist attack remained low for most countries in the Western Hemisphere. There were no known operational cells of either al-Qa’ida- or Hizballah-related groups in the hemisphere, although ideological sympathizers in South America and the Caribbean continued to provide financial and moral support to these and other terrorist groups in the Middle East and South Asia. 

The State Department makes no mention of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard operating in the region. (Here's Politifact also taking a 2 x 4 to this silliness). Honestly, for Panetta to be skinny-dipping in the feverish swamps of right-wing hysteria over supposed Iranian inroads to Latin America is enough to make me wish that Obama returned to the long Democratic tradition of appointing Republicans to be Secretary of Defense. 

Next comes the continued effort, waged by various terrorism experts (and national policymakers) to convince Americans that al Qaeda is a serious threat to the United States. Here is Seth Jones making the case in Foreign Policy. Here's Mary Habeck in the same publication arguing that al Qaeda "is in far better condition on a global scale than at any time in its history."

It's a claim that Will McCants destroys here:

I don’t agree that al-Qaeda has “made real progress” toward “the greater ends of overthrowing Muslim rulers, imposing their version of sharia, and controlling territory.” Al-Qaeda Central and its affiliates have overthrown no Muslim rulers. In fact, the Islamists (even the Salafis) in Arab Spring countries are opting for parliamentary democracy, which al-Qaeda hates. It is true that AQAP has tenuous control of a few towns in Yemen but it is at the pleasure of the local tribes. The Shabab certainly controls territory and is imposing its version of sharia but it is unclear how much of the organization is under al-Qaeda’s wing. Moreover, its hold on Somalia is slipping.

This isn't even to mention the fact that al Qaeda central, in so far as it actually still exists, decidedly lacks the capabilities to pull off anything resembling a major attack against the United States. Also unmentioned is that over the past ten years an American is probably more likely to die from falling out of bed, getting crushed by a television or hit by lightning than they are being killed by an al Qaeda terrorist attack. It begs the question: at what point does AQ's consistent lack of success in killing Americans and waging successful terrorist attacks begin to factor into threat assessments of the organization?

Suffice to say I find both Jones and Habeck's argument hard to accept - they appear to both be puffing up worst case scenarios and long-shot potentialities to argue that al Qaeda remains a serious threat. 

But the larger issue is that they arguing against a strawman. Who exactly in the federal government is suggesting that the potential threat of terrorist attack from al Qaeda should be ignored? Granted, US policymakers have said AQ is in decline, but at the same time drones continue to kill suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. The US just signed a long-term partnership agreement with the Afghan government to remain in Afghanistan for many years to come - nominally, one might imagine, to prevent the unlikely scenario of a Taliban takeover and a return of al Qaeda. The organization will continue to remain at best a marginal threat to the US (and certainly not a strategically relevant one) and the United States will continue to work to ensure that things remain that way. 

No one is suggesting that we should simply close up shop in trying to stop AQ's bloody ambitions - but rather that the threat should be assessed in a proper context. Habeck and Jones aren't helping in that regard.

Finally, to finish up our week in threat mongering there is this interview in the Daily Beast with Shawn Henry, the top cybercop at the FBI who believes, wait for it, that cyber crime and cyber threats are "grossly underappreciated." From a bureaucratic standpoint this isn't terribly surprising. One would hardly expect the country's top "cybercop" (even a retiring one) to suggest 'you know what this whole cyber crime thing is pretty meh.' Even less unlikely is that said top "cybercop" would say such a thing as he prepares to join a start-up that, wait for it, specializes in cyber security.

This isn't to say that cyber crime does not represent a challenge - although the assertions by some of cyberwar or a cyber Pearl Harbor are bizarrely overstated. But the larger point here is that someone like Henry has good reason (both personal and professional) to want to protect the cyber "rice bowl" and hype up the potential threats of cybercrime, cyber war etc.

One way to decrease the effectiveness of this sort of threat-mongering is to consider the messenger and take such assertions with a rather sizable grain of salt. 

What Rodriguez' Book Says About Leadership Posted by Heather Hurlburt

The Washington Post's Dana Priest pulled the key insight out of her early reading of former CIA agent Rodriguez's book, arguing that torture post- 9/11 was necessary and productive, destroying tapes of interrogations was "just getting rid of some ugly visuals", and Obama's opposition to torture mistaken. From the Associated Press:

I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled 'torturers' by the president of the United States," Rodriguez writes in his book, "Hard Measures."

The Post's editors, in their wisdom, buried the core problem at the back of the comics pages, at the very end of Priest's piece.  It should be the lead of every item written about Rodriguez, who is the symptom of a deeper human problem that transcends party, country and moment in history.  (Bolding mine.)

"The propaganda damage to the image of America would be immense. But the main concern then, and always, was for the safety of my officers.”

Readers may disagree with much of what Rodriguez writes and with the importance of some of the facts he omits from his book, but the above sentence speaks volumes about why this book is important. In this case, a loyal civil servant — and the decision-makers above him who blessed these programs — were not thinking about the larger, longer-lasting damage to the core values of the United States that disclosure of these secrets might cause. They were thinking about the near term. About efficiency. About the safety of friends and colleagues. In their minds, they were thinking, too, about the safety of the country.

Back when American society valorized all public servants, as we still do those in uniform, we prized their ability to put long-term over short-term, strategy over safety, and country over self. Do we really want to define American leadership as "getting rid of ugly visuals?"

Interestingly, it has been Defense Department and FBI professionals who have written and spoken most movingly about why the alleged short-term benefits of torture (many senior DoD and FBI professionals argue there are none) come at an unacceptable cost.  A couple examples:

• CIA Director David Petraeus: "whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside...   Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables.  They don't go away."
• Major General (ret) Paul Eaton: “When I get in arguments with those who endorse enhanced interrogation techniques, they say, I’ll do anything I need to do to achieve a tactical gain, while dismissing the strategic problem associated with dehumanizing – which is what  happens when we use these EITs [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques]; you’re dehumanizing the subject that you’re detaining.  When we look at WWII and the hundreds of thousands of Germans and Italian prisoners  who gave up to American military power to the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who gave up,  who surrendered during Gulf War I, these are men that we did not have to kill.  They knew that they would be better treated by the American soldier than their own forces would treat prisoners.  So they surrendered.”