Paul Pillar
A Revived Radicalism
A public discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations last week was concerned with identifying particular trouble spots and troublesome issues around the world that are apt to demand policy attention during 2013. One of the speakers, David Gordon of the Eurasia Group, mentioned in passing that an issue he was not worried about this year was radicalism in developed countries. He did not specify what variety of radicalism; probably most in the room simply assumed he was referring to the Islamist variety. That variety, after all, as it manifests itself both at home and abroad, has now been for some time almost the sole preoccupation in the United States as far as violent radicalism is concerned. When Peter King, as chairman in the previous Congress of the House Committee on Homeland Security, conducted a series of hearings on terrorist threats in the United States, the subject was all Islamist, all the time.
One hazard of such a narrow focus on one type of radicalism is to reduce the likelihood we will notice the rise of other types. Different types of radicalism, and the subsets of it that involve terrorist violence, come and go in waves, as they have over the past several decades. The rise of any one wave is generally related to the broader political environment in two somewhat antipodal ways. The radicalism usually is embedded in a larger mood, movement or ethos. But it also usually is a reaction against some political trend or development.
While keeping these patterns in mind, it would be useful to look again at a report that was prepared four years ago in the Department of Homeland Security. The report was titled Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment. Its release led to an uproar among those on the Right who were uncomfortable with any government report acknowledging that there is American extremism on the Right. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, evidently anxious to reduce her vulnerability to charges of politically-inspired analysis, responded by withdrawing the report, saying it had not been properly vetted within the department. DHS's analytical work on right-wing extremism has reportedly been reduced to a single employee.
The report, which nonetheless made it into the hands of news agencies, may be one of the more worthwhile reads among government documents having such a short official shelf life. The report stated that although there were at the time no known plans among right-wing extremists to commit specific acts of terrorism, such extremists “may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues.” One of those bits of grist for the fear-mongering was “the election of the first African-American president.” Another was the prospect of gun control:
Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans likely would attract new members into the ranks of right-wing extremist groups, as well as potentially spur some of them to begin planning and training for violence against the government. The high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by right-wing extremists in anticipation of restrictions and bans in some parts of the country continue to be a primary concern to law enforcement.
The report-writers likened what they were seeing to what was happening with this extremist fringe in the 1990s. Although we have not witnessed in the subsequent four years anything like a repetition of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, other indications suggest the report was on to something. Charles Blow in the New York Times alludes to some of this when he notes, using data compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, that the anti-government “Patriot” movement has burgeoned since 2008, having grown to more than 1,200 groups nationwide by 2011. More than a fourth of these are militias that perform paramilitary training.
Now in 2013, we are about to have the second inauguration of that same African-American president, the one with the foreign-sounding name. Gun control is also again prominently on the national agenda, owing mainly to more mass shootings in schools. And some of the rhetoric that melds resistance to gun control with a broader anti-government agenda is nothing short of frightening. Here's what Fox News commentator and—believe it or not—former judge Andrew Napolitano (no relation to Janet) wrote last week:
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.
If shooting, or bombing, growing out of this type of attitude starts, we should already have a fairly good idea of what the perpetrators are opposed to. We ought to reflect as well on the other part of how a wave of extremism fits into the larger political environment—i.e., how it is the extreme tail of some more broadly shared way of thinking. The roots of current anti-government sentiments are diverse, of course. And as for the gun control part of this, we know that the lobby opposing controls is as rich and potent as ever. We also should acknowledge the growth of a form of political intolerance in which some people believe that having their particular preferences prevail is so important that it is worth inflicting, or threatening, harm to the country. It looks as though we are about to see a non-kinetic form of this again in Congress in a few weeks. We should not be surprised if extremists use the kinetic form.
Iran and the Fallacy of Saber-Rattling
Among several broadly held misconceptions about Iran is that to get Iranians to make concessions we want them to make at the negotiating table the United States must credibly threaten to inflict dire harm on them—specifically, with military force—if they do not make the concessions. Some in the United States (and some in Israel) who are especially keen on promoting this notion would welcome a war. If war preparations and brinksmanship used to communicate such a threat lead the two nations to stumble into an accidental war—and there is a real danger they might—so much the better from their point of view. But the belief in saber-rattling as an aid to gaining an agreement in the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program extends to many who actually want an agreement and are not seeking a war. We have heard more about this lately in connection with Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of defense. People ask whether this nominee, who has evinced an appreciation of the huge downsides of a war with Iran, would be able to rattle the saber as convincingly as the same people think a secretary of defense ought to rattle it.
Even the usually thoughtful David Ignatius has adopted this line of thought. In his latest column he makes a comparison with nuclear deterrence in the time of Dwight Eisenhower. Under the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, a “bluff” of “frightening the Soviets with the danger of Armageddon” was used to dissuade them from overrunning Western Europe. “Obama,” says Ignatius, “has a similar challenge with Iran.”
No, he doesn't. One situation was deterrence of what would have been one of the most epic acts of aggression in history. The other is an effort to compel a far lesser country to curtail or give up an avowedly peaceful program, and to do so by threatening what itself would be an act of aggression. Thomas Schelling has taught us that deterrence and what he called compellence have significant differences, with the latter generally being harder to accomplish than the former. And this is in addition to all the other vast differences in scale, subject matter and morality between nuclear deterrence during the early Cold War and the current standoff with Iran.
These and other differences get to one of the problems with the common notion about threatening military attack in response to Iran not crying uncle at the conference table: a difficulty in making such a threat credible no matter how energetic a saber-rattler the secretary of defense might be. This is related also to the question Mr. Obama posed during the election campaign, about whether his opponent wanted a new war in the Middle East. At the level of public sentiment, most Americans do not want to become engaged in a new war in the Middle East. At the more sophisticated level of policy analysis—if that analysis is done thoroughly and objectively—such a war would be seen to have enormous costs and disadvantages. One of those disadvantages would be—as members of the opposition in Iran have repeatedly warned—to strengthen politically Iranian hardliners whose position is based partly on implacable hostility from the United States and who would benefit from a rallying around the flag in response to foreign attack. Another disadvantage would be the directly counterproductive one of leading the Iranians to make the decision they probably have not yet made, which is to build a nuclear weapon.
That last consideration is in turn related to another problem with the notion about threatening military attack, which concerns the reasons Iranians have for being interested in nuclear weapons. The chief reason almost certainly involves the presumed value of such weapons as a deterrent against major, regime-crushing foreign attack. The more that the brandishing of the threat of military attack makes such an attack seem likely, the greater will be the Iranian interest in developing nuclear weapons and the less inclined they will be to make concessions that would preclude that possibility.
As if all of this were not enough to discard the notion about the efficacy of saber-rattling, there are the central realities of the nuclear negotiations themselves and how Tehran perceives them. Inducing the Iranians to concede is not just a matter of hurting them more. They already are hurting a lot, from the economic consequences of international sanctions. What is missing from the negotiations is any reason for them to believe that the hurt will be eased if they make concessions. The P5+1 have yet to place on the table any proposal that includes any significant relief from sanctions. Without such an incentive, there is no reason for the Iranians to cry uncle or even to make lesser concessions, no matter how much more they are made to hurt.
The Iranians have good reason to be suspicious of ultimate U.S. and Western motivations, and threats of military force figure into that in an unhelpful way too. The Iranians do not have to look far to see ample evidence in favor of the proposition that the primary U.S. goal regarding Iran is regime change. And they do not have to look far into the past to see a recent U.S. use of military force—participation in the intervention in Libya—that overthrew a Middle Eastern regime after it had reached an agreement with the United States to give up all its nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs. What reason would Iranian leaders have to make any concessions if they believe the same thing is likely to happen to them? This is already a problem; rattling the saber only makes it worse.
Image: Flickr/Sam Town. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Lasting Effects of the Hagel Nomination Saga
Chuck Hagel's chances to become secretary of defense seem to be on the rise, with the biggest reason being the White House finally changing his status from prospective nominee to nominee, and as such getting fully behind him rather than holding him up as a balloon to be shot at. Just as the implications of the entire saga surrounding this nomination include far more than who will head the Department of Defense, so too will the broader enduring effects be shaped by more than the outcome of the vote on the nomination in the Senate. They will be shaped by what come to be the common-knowledge perceptions of what has happened in this saga, which in turn will depend a lot on what is said and written about it over the next few weeks.
The broader effects to which I am referring are not just specific foreign policy directions during the second Obama term, although we can hope for, as Jacob Heilbrunn suggests, more engagement of the diplomatic type and less of the military variety. Hagel will be a voice for reason and realism in policy discussions in the White House Situation Room, but as many others have pointed out, the secretary of defense is not the primary person responsible for making foreign policy.
Perhaps we should be encouraged at least as much about what the nomination says in general about Barack Obama as about having Chuck Hagel as one of his senior advisers. One might even say the nomination is one of the gutsier things Obama has done. Maybe he chose Hagel mainly for the straightforward reasons that the president feels comfortable with him and their overall policy views seem compatible, with the nomination having nothing to do with an in-your-face approach to Congressional Republicans or payback to Bibi Netanyahu. But still.
The effects I have in mind extend to favorable changes in political discourse and methods of operation in Washington that can last far beyond Obama's second term. At least three aspects of what is said in the coming weeks will determine whether such effects prevail.
The first is largely up to the nominee, especially in what he says at his confirmation hearing. He needs to stay out of an apologetic or defensive mode. He should establish that most of the points of criticism against him are not mischaracterizations of what he said or did but instead are mistaken evaluations because what he said or did was right. For everything he says about how he really is tough on Iran, he needs to say something about how stupid is mindless and endless pressure on Iran without a genuine effort to engage it and put the pressure to some use. For everything he says about how he really is a friend of Israel, he needs not only to say something about how being a friend of Israel is much different from what the most self-avowed friends of Israel do and say, but also point out that U.S. and Israeli interests sometimes differ and the U.S. should always put U.S. interests first. And so forth.
A second aspect is up to the commentariat and involves what becomes the accepted story of the political struggle that has been taking place over this nomination. Chapter One of the story was the initial floating of Hagel's name. Chapter Two consisted of the Israel lobby, and especially the part of it that overlaps with hardcore neoconservatism, coming out hatchets in hand, trying to get Hagel's scalp. Chapter Three was unusually strong push-back from elements who were disgusted by what the protagonists in Chapter Two were doing and also admired Hagel. Chapter Four has been a retreat by central parts of the Israel lobby and especially AIPAC, who evidently realized that they might actually lose a fight against Hagel. Faced with this prospect, it was to their advantage to say they “don't take positions on nominations” or some such and thus to try to avoid looking like losers. They should not be allowed to write the story that way. If Hagel is confirmed, then let it be shouted from all the high places from Capitol Hill to K Street rooftops and beyond: the lobby lost. The purpose would not be crowing but instead a lessening of the prospects for future intimidation, given how demonstrated success empowers intimidators and failure weakens them. A recognized failure might at least marginally reduce the lobby's destructive power the next time it tries to kill a nomination or enforce omerta or something else.
A third aspect I have addressed earlier: the need to shame, repeatedly and consistently, those who have used smear tactics—another prominent example of which arose just this week.
It remains to be seen how good a secretary of defense Chuck Hagel will be, although he has the makings of a very good one. But other enduring aspects of the struggle over his nomination may prove to be at least as important as his performance in office.
More Fences
If it is possible to invest in companies that supply fencing material to the Israel government, they should be rated a “buy”. Likewise with any companies that make the components of the barriers that Israel sometimes calls fences but are actually more like walls. We're familiar with the fence/wall that Israel has constructed in the Palestinian-inhabited West Bank and that the Israelis have periodically extended and enhanced. Recently Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu inspected a new fence his government has constructed along the border with Egypt. Now he has announced his intention to construct an enhanced barrier in the Syrian Golan Heights.
The more recent construction is understandable in terms of security incidents that have originated in Egypt or Syria during the past couple of years and have touched Israel. A nation has to protect its borders. And the line between Israel and the Egyptian Sinai actually is an international border. But the fenced line in Syria is not. It is only a cease-fire line left over from previous Israeli-Syrian warfare. Notwithstanding any immediate, tactical security needs that Israel speaks about, the barrier there threatens to become, like the barrier in the West Bank, a steel and concrete monument to indefinite occupation of territory conquered by force of arms.
In 2000, well after the cease-fire line was established, Israel and Syria came tantalizingly close to a peace agreement that would have included return of the Golan Heights to Syria. The negotiations came down to the disposition of a few meters of dirt going back from the water's edge along the northeastern shore of Lake Tiberias. But then Ehud Barak added back a few hundred meters worth of demands that would have negated the principle of respecting the lines that existed before the 1967 war, and the talks collapsed. After that, Israelis settled back into the comfort of the status quo, while the Assads kept the cease-fire line remarkably quiet and the growing dominance of the Right in Israeli politics reduced official Israeli thinking about any return of territory. Reportedly there was another tentative stab at negotiations a couple of years ago before the Arab Spring got under way, but it is questionable whether Netanyahu was ever seriously thinking about returning the Golan.
The Arab Spring has reduced the Israeli comfort level. The turmoil in Syria has been the most intense and bloody manifestation of the region-wide political fervor and change that have given the Israelis several reasons to worry. Whatever new regime emerges from the current civil war will be less predictable than the devils-we-know that the Assads have been, and the new Syrian political order almost certainly will be, like new political orders in other Arab countries, less restrained than the old orders in voicing and acting upon the grievances that all Arabs have with Israel. Then there is the specifically Syrian grievance, which is the continued occupation of the Golan Heights. No Syrian regime can ignore it, and no new Syrian regime is likely to fall into the Assad regime's groove of what amounted to de facto acceptance of the status quo.
So the walking back from those last few meters along the lake, along with later unwillingness to part with the Golan, appears to preclude Israel being able to achieve peace with the last of its immediate neighbors. (There are peace treaties already, of course, with Egypt and Jordan, and relations with Lebanon are likely to follow the lead of relations with Syria.) Fences may be able to keep out infiltrators, but they do not bring peace.
Declaring Victory on Iran
Another round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 is in the offing, as one can tell by an increase in commentary on the subject. This includes the helpful kind of comments and the nay-saying, unhelpful kind. The outlines of an eminently reachable agreement have been clear for some time. They would include terms along the lines of what Reza Marashi has outlined and I have earlier addressed. An encouraging sign is that some opinion-makers who still can sound pretty bombastic about the Iranian nuclear program, such as the Washington Post editorial board, nonetheless recognize the need for sanctions relief to be part of any deal.
It would be nice if this entire matter could be handled in a low-key, straightforward way: just make the necessary trades and complete an agreement. Unfortunately that does not look as if it is possible. The sanctions have played a role in the United States that goes far beyond the manipulation of Iranian incentives in a way that involves American politics and American psychology. In particular, sanctions have been a means for members of Congress to demonstrate their anti-Iranian bona fides by voting again and again in favor of new ways to harm Iran. And as Trita Parsi argues, sanctions have been part of a hoped-for story of Americans being able to claim a triumph over a foreign adversary.
What is very easy to forget in antagonistic bilateral relationships like this is that the other side has similar political and emotional needs. The Iranians certainly have such needs, although they are less triumphalist and more a matter of simple respect than the corresponding American needs. One of the most insightful commentators on the entire saga of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, the former Iranian official who is now at Princeton, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, addresses this aspect in a new op ed. Mousavian explains why it is essential, if any agreement is to be reached, for Iran to be able to preserve what he and his co-author refer to as aberu, or saving of face. Citing past history, he also explains how this will not be the case if Iran is once again called on to make significant concessions in return for the mere promise or hope of getting what it wants in return.
So one side feels a need to crow about a victory, while the other side needs to feel that it has not been kicked in the face. To square that emotional circle, American politicians will have to get most of their triumphalist fix from what has happened already—from getting a negotiation with Iran about curtailing its nuclear program under way at all. Members of Congress can proclaim today (and when they next run for re-election) that all those votes they cast in favor of all of those sanctions were an important part of getting Iran to the negotiating table. After saying that, they should pipe down, get out of the way, and let the negotiators strike a deal.
It's the Policy, Not the Salesmanship
An Israeli think tank, the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, has just issued a report that examines Israel's efforts at public diplomacy. Selection of this topic as one of the first to be studied by the center, which was established only a year ago, reflects hand-wringing in Israel over why the country seems to be, to put it bluntly but mildly, so darned unpopular around the world. Is there something fundamentally wrong, Israelis have asked, with how the country conducts public diplomacy and presents its case to audiences around the globe?
The report concludes that no, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, Israel has one of the most sophisticated, well-funded and well-managed public diplomacy programs in the world. The report contrasts the Israeli program with organized efforts to criticize Israel and observes that the latter do not hold a candle to the former. Presentation of the Israeli government's message to the world is far superior in resources, access, organization and most everything else. The unpopularity, the report concludes, has nothing to do with salesmanship in support of Israeli policies and everything to do with the policies themselves.
There are strong parallels here with the United States, where there also has been much hand-wringing over the years about public diplomacy. The United States has its own unpopularity problem, especially in parts of the world where the negative sentiments about Israel are also strongest. Various schools of thought have been advanced from time to time about how the United States could do public diplomacy better. Draw in audiences with a soft approach, say some. Hit them harder with a more value-laden ideological approach, say others. Or do a better job of applying the skills of Madison Avenue. Or devote more resources to the task.
Following the 9/11 terrorist attack there was a surge of interest in the subject, of the “why do they hate us” and “how can we get them to stop hating us” variety. One result was a study prepared by an ad hoc advisory group authorized by Congress and chaired by former ambassador Edward Djerejian that looked at U.S. advocacy efforts in the Arab and Muslim world. The group's report mainly recommended additional resources for public diplomacy. Interest in the subject has waned since then. A year ago a standing body that dated back to the 1940s, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, quietly went out of existence when as a budget-cutting gesture Congress did not renew its funding. It was a rather silly gesture; the commission had one paid staff member, who says the commission's annual budget was $135,000. But maybe there wasn't a lot of advice left to give anyway.
In one sense there wasn't. With the United States just as with Israel, the sources of negative feelings abroad are policies, not the quality of efforts to sell the policies. People feel most strongly not about a government's advertisements and messages but about its actions—specifically, actions that affect directly their lives or the lives of people with whom they identify, or that link the government to other governments that take actions that affect those lives. The actions range from drone strikes to military occupations to the abetting of Israeli policies in occupied territories. If there is no change in such things, don't blame the salesmanship.
Go Away, Tea Party
It is irresponsible to help create a mess and then to walk away and expect someone else to clean it up. That's true whether the mess is a spill in the kitchen or something comparably sticky, smelly or hazardous in deliberations in Congress. Multiple press reports observe that this is what the political tantrum known as the Tea Party has been doing. We haven't heard much from the Tea Partiers recently because they opted out of participation in the fiscal cliff drama as the rest of the country counted down the time remaining until the New Year's, and budgetary, ball drops.
In this latest phase in the tantrum, Tea Partiers unhappy that the political game has not gone entirely their way (with the outcome of the presidential election being, of course, their principal setback) have decided to take their own ball and bat and go home. As a South Carolina Tea Party activist put it, “Why in the world would I want to get involved in the games they [i.e., members of Congress] are playing? I have other things to spend my energy on besides lost causes.” Some of the causes which Tea Partiers evidently do not think are lost and to which they now are devoting energy include “nullification” by states of the Affordable Care Act, exposing corruption in Florida election boards that they believe illicitly handed the state to Obama, and opposition to a United Nations resolution on sustainable development that they contend is a threat to property rights.
Tea Partiers are providing some of their own drama with disarray and dissension within their own movement. The Washington-based Tea Party group FreedomWorks experienced an attempt by its chairman Richard Armey, accompanied by a gun-slinging aide, to purge his opponents within the organization, a few days before Armey himself was ousted in a counter-coup. Meanwhile, polls show public support for the Tea Party has dropped significantly from its heyday around the 2010 election.
This certainly does not mean—unfortunately—that we have heard the last of the Tea Party. But the more that this tantrum subsides or fades out of view, the better off the republic will be. Republicans, and more broadly those who believe in a healthy two-party system, ought to be especially hopeful that it will fade out of view. Tea Party activism during the primary season probably cost Republicans a couple of Senate seats. It also has cost the Republican Party the services in public office of some of its most distinguished thinkers, including Richard Lugar, a victim of one of those primary fights, and Jon Huntsman, who was the most sensible person on the stage in those primary debates but never seemed to have a chance to win his party's nomination.
The biggest damage the Tea Party has inflicted has been the less measurable but still major boost it has given to intolerance and inflexibility, with everything that implies regarding dysfunction in the American political system. It has been poison to any spirit of compromise and to the normal give-and-take of politics in a democracy. In this regard it is remarkable how, among all the attention to the details of the fiscal cliff negotiations such as where to set tax brackets and how to define inflation adjustments, so little has been said about how we got confronted with the cliff in the first place. To refresh our memories: sequestration and the other fiscal changes that define the cliff were devised as a threat to concentrate minds on the Congressional super-committee that was charged with reaching, but failed to achieve, a fiscal and budgetary grand bargain. The super-committee was in turn a device for getting out of the impasse created when one side of the aisle resorted to extortion by threatening to force a default on the national debt if that side did not get its way. The extortion was a marked departure from the normal way of conducting the people's political business, which is to try to enact one's preferred policies by winning support and winning votes for one's point of view, rather than by threatening to inflict harm on the country. Since then, the inflexibility and resistance to compromise have been, as Ezra Klein reminds us in reviewing the bidding of the last couple of years, far more on the side that did the initial extortion than on the other side.
The Tea Party cannot be blamed for all of this, of course. Roots of inflexibility such as no-tax-increase obsessions and related starve-the-beast notions have been around before there even was a Tea Party movement. Nor is it only Tea Partiers who today kvetch endlessly about the deficit but not long ago did not say a peep about it when the unprecedented combination of a very expensive war of choice and simultaneous tax cuts turned—surprise, surprise—what had been a budgetary surplus into a ballooning deficit. But the influence of the Tea Party has unquestionably made this whole sorry story substantially worse than it otherwise would have been. The very irresponsibility that the movement is exhibiting today, in walking away from the mess it did so much to help create, testifies to its character.
However much reasonable men and women may disagree about tax codes or the size of government, what is even more important to the health of a society such as America's are the give-and-take habits and attitudes that are necessary for a liberal representative democracy to function. Those habits and attitudes are ultimately what keep the United States from being an Iraq or a Syria. The Tea Partiers never seem to have understood that. We should all hope that they will consign themselves permanently to a safe-to-ignore lunatic fringe that burns its energy pursuing wacky conspiracy theories about Florida election boards and the like.
They Oughta Do Something
A plebeian plaint one sometimes hears about annoyances in a local community—say, some chronic traffic trouble spot—is that “they” ought to correct the problem. The “they” presumably means someone in a position of governmental authority with the power to take action on the problem in question. Exactly who that someone is does not get specified, even though there might be different levels or branches of government to which that vague description might apply. There also is commonly a failure by those doing the complaining to consider what are the feasible options for doing something, the advantages and disadvantages of those options, and whether the properly empowered authorities have already properly considered the problem and what might be done about it and perhaps have concluded correctly that there isn't anything else that can be done without creating or exacerbating other problems. To complain without considering these other dimensions is a carefree sloughing off of responsibility to someone else—perhaps a someone else about whom one enjoys complaining anyway.
At the national and international level there is, of course, an abundance of problems which one might wish some omnipotent “they” could solve. Many of those problems get discussed here at the National Interest, and some of the best discussions fully consider what alternatives for trying to solve the problem at hand actually exist, and what the costs and benefits of each are. John Allen Gay, for example, appropriately takes to task authors from the self-styled Bipartisan Policy Center for complaining about what they assert would be costs of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon without addressing what the authors themselves pitch as the principal alternative: going to war against Iran. Gay, also appropriately, details many of the costly second- and third-order effects of that alternative.
Actually, Gay treats the BPC task force authors too gently, even if one overlooks the numbers-pulled-from-air quality of their analysis. The argument those authors make centers around the idea that an Iranian nuke would generate regional fears of war, which in turn would cause the price of oil to rise, which in turn would have various other ill economic effects. Think about that for a moment. The reason they say we shouldn't be afraid to go to war with Iran is that an alternative to war is costly because it raises the fear of war. Got that? It's sort of like committing suicide because of fear of death.
The equivalent to “they” in many complaints in American discourse about international affairs seems to mean whoever is the incumbent U.S. administration. And again, there is too often little or no addressing of the feasible alternatives, the advantages and disadvantages of any such alternatives, and whether alternatives have been considered already. Dov Zakheim offers a litany of things to be unhappy about in the Middle East and South Asia—he's right in identifying some nasty messes—and criticizes the Obama administration for not doing something about them. But what, exactly, is the administration supposed to do?
Zakheim's theme is that we need action, not words. But with two of the four internally turbulent places he mentions, Iraq and Egypt, he doesn't suggest any action at all other than more words. “Washington says not a thing,” he says, about Maliki's consolidation of authoritarian power and the continued potential (left over from a previous U.S. intervention) for more upsurges in violence in Iraq. And in Egypt, he says, “the administration still breathes hardly a word about Morsi's excesses.” We are left to wonder about the action-filled alternatives. Send U.S. troops back to Iraq? Engineer a military coup against Morsi? Just guessing.
On Syria, Zakheim does specify an alternative: provide arms to the opposition. He acknowledges that the purpose of fighting off Assad's army and supporters is something the opposition is accomplishing anyway without U.S.-provided arms, but says that without opening up an arms spigot “Washington can expect little by way of thanks from whoever comes to power in Damascus.” That disregards the substantial record demonstrating that gratitude in civil wars simply hasn't worked that way, as well as not mentioning a host of other questions about what effect opening the spigot would have on the duration and bloodiness of this civil war, the nature of the fractured Syrian opposition, and longer term prospects for stability in Syria. Finally on Afghanistan, there are some recommendations about accelerating U.S. troop withdrawals while negotiating a status of forces agreement to permit the indefinite presence of trainers, but it is hard to see any difference from what the administration is doing now.
Zakheim has on other occasions offered astute observations on many other topics, and we could profit from his analysis of some of these unaddressed questions. Maybe he was just trying to be concise.
Taking careful and complete account of alternative possible courses of action, including all the costs and risks involved, is not only important in understanding and dealing with any one foreign policy challenge. Failure to address those dimensions tends to perpetuate the harmful tendency to think of Washington as a kind of global city hall, where “they” are assumed to have the power to fix any problem without creating even greater problems for the United States in the process.
Have They No Decency?
I was born just early enough to have some faint but direct memories of the stain on American history that became known as McCarthyism. One recollection is of my parents watching on television in 1954 substantial portions of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which was the first Congressional inquiry to be nationally televised. Although I was too young to understand it at the time, those hearings marked the beginning of the end of Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting campaign of slander. Before the end of the year he would be formally censured by the U.S. Senate.
One important factor in stopping McCarthy's reputation-ruining rampage was the working of media in those early days of the television era. Media coverage of the 1954 hearings, which lasted several weeks and in which accusations and counter-accusations were made and confronted in concentrated form within a single hearing room, made it impossible to turn a blind eye to what McCarthyism was about. The gavel-to-gavel television coverage, bringing such a dramatic event into living rooms across the country for the first time, was especially influential.
Another important factor was the willingness of visible figures to call McCarthy to account and to shame him, clearly and directly. A key figure was Joseph Welch, the prominent lawyer who served as chief counsel for the U.S. Army at the hearings. When McCarthy attempted to apply his usual method of innuendo and guilt-by-association to a junior lawyer at Welch's firm, Welch labeled McCarthy's tactics as “reckless cruelty” and spoke the most eloquent and memorable line of the hearings:
You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
The stars do not always align today in a way that encourages a calling to account of latter-day equivalents of McCarthyism. The mass media are far more diffuse, with a million ways to impugn someone via the internet and with talk shows inflicting more of the impact of television and radio than live broadcasts of Congressional hearings.
Then there is the matter of the willingness of visible figures to speak up and to call a spade a spade—clearly and explicitly. The Israeli journalist, academic and businessman Bernard Avishai writes about the dearth of such willingness as it relates to the most prominent current instance of McCarthyite-style tactics: the defamation (often under the disguise of what Avishai calls “fake campaigns against defamation”) of those who dare to question Israeli policies or U.S. abetting of those policies. The defamation is practiced by an assortment of protagonists who claim to have Israeli interests at heart but instead are enforcing unquestioning support for policies of the right-wing Israeli government of the day, which is something different. Avishai, who is slightly younger than I am, also begins by noting the similarity of the current phenomenon to the original McCarthyism. Today's defamation includes the dragging up of whatever can be used to sink nominations as well as reputations. This process features, but is not limited to, reckless and unjustified charges of anti-Semitism. And like the original McCarthyism, the process relies not just on the direct defaming of selected targets but also on intimidation of many others who might otherwise question not only the Israeli and U.S. policies involved but also the intimidation process itself. Avishai's piece is an especially earnest and trenchant call for speaking out on this subject; I could quote at length from it but instead will just urge that the piece itself be read.
Avishai's occasion for writing is the tumult over the possible nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense. As I and others have observed, this matter has gotten so much attention that how it is resolved will have a major effect in either boosting the new McCarthyism or setting it back. It is encouraging that many prominent figures have come to Hagel's defense. But the president still has not acted.
Even if the Hagel matter comes out well, that is not enough. There is still the need for prominent people to name and shame, directly and explicitly, the new McCarthyism practiced by groups and people claiming to be lovers of Israel—and to name and shame it not just with respect to any one nominee or any one issue.
When Joseph Welch shamed McCarthy, the gallery in the hearing room burst into applause. I believe many as-yet-passive observers will applaud if the same thing is done to the new McCarthyism.
Image: Flickr/DonkeyHotey.
The Number One Cabinet Position
Time was when the position of secretary of state was regarded as so important in the American political scheme of things that it was the best stepping-stone to the presidency. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth presidents of the United States had all been secretaries of state, with the last three of them moving directly from that job to the White House. When the last one in that series, John Quincy Adams, became president, the job that he gave to the presidential aspirant—Henry Clay—whose eventual support was critical in Adams winning the confusing election of 1824 was that of secretary of state.
Having such high political significance attached to this particular cabinet position was mainly a feature of the early decades of the republic. The only other secretaries of state who would later ascend to the presidency were Martin Van Buren (who besides being secretary of state under Andrew Jackson—the man who would defeat Adams in 1828—was also his political manager, second vice president, and successor) and James Buchanan (who was secretary under James Polk in the 1840s). That pattern ended not so much because the job of secretary of state changed but rather because the process and politics of presidential selection changed. Jackson's defeat of Adams marked the beginning of an era of modern politicking in which simple themes with popular resonance beat out brilliance and accomplishment, especially accomplishment in foreign affairs.
Perhaps the job of secretary of state is nonetheless in the process of regaining a bit of its old political standing. John Kerry, whose confirmation as secretary of state seems highly likely, will never become president but has already been the presidential nominee of one of the two major parties. He has the most national and international political stature of anyone who was seriously considered to succeed Hillary Clinton. Clinton herself came close to being a national presidential nominee and is now one of the first names mentioned in the early betting on the election of 2016. Go back two predecessors before Clinton and you have Colin Powell, who would have made an excellent president and certainly was frequently mentioned as such, although he probably recognized that he did not have the traits of a good presidential candidate—which, unfortunately for us, are not the same as the traits of a good president. Three of the last four secretaries of state being presidential timber may be enough to be called a new pattern.
People who will support Kerry's nomination will have various reasons for doing so, including the Republicans who want to get Scott Brown back in the Senate. And of course there will be widely varying opinions about the policies he will initiate and execute as secretary. But the restoration of some of the political standing of the position of secretary of state has at least three advantages.
One, it tells the rest of the world that the United States considers its relations with the rest of the world to be important.
Two, it tells the American people that relations with the rest of the world are important.
Three, with the person in the highest councils of government having responsibility for foreign relations being someone of political stature and clout, this increases the chance that the foreign implications and repercussions of everything the United States does will be sufficiently taken into account before it does them. There is no guarantee this will happen—we should remember Powell's sad relationship with the White House during the George W. Bush administration—but the chance is greater than it otherwise would be. And this is important because U.S. interests are affected in significant ways by foreign repercussions and reactions to many things the United States does that are not ostensibly part of foreign policy, from homeland security measures to presidential speeches intended for domestic audiences.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Thomas True.
