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Terrorism/Security Archives
Looking on the bright side #1: SECDEF Gates
Issues have come and gone over this last month, and they'll have to enter history without my imprimatur. But I will try in the next while to work back through a few of them, using the "if you can't say something nice..." standard*. I intend to mention a few technological, political, and other developments that deserve more attention or praise than they seem to have received.
As a start: the two speeches early this week by the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, about what he thinks is wrong with the culture of the professional military.
Gates starts out miles ahead simply by not being the man he replaced at the Pentagon, the odious Donald Rumsfeld. And even though Gates has implemented essentially the same Administration policy and administered the same gigantic budget that Rumsfeld left him, he has defended and explained his policies in ways suggesting that he has noticed, thought about, and attempted to address opposing views. This is in contrast to the haughty sneering-away of opposition so familiar from the Rumsfeld days.
In back-to-back speeches this Monday to the Air Force leadership at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and then to the Army leadership at West Point, Gates revived what had always been the best part of Rumsfeld's approach in the Pentagon. This was a willingness to challenge the cautious, yes-man aspects of today's professional military culture. Rumsfeld gave all such questioning a bad name by his contemptuous disregard for professional military judgment in the runup to the Iraq war. But Gates still had a point -- and he made it in a surprising way.
Continue reading "Looking on the bright side #1: SECDEF Gates" »
'Declaring Victory'
Mark Danner's new article assessing the Bush-era "War on Terror" is very much worth reading. (A sample after the jump.) It is one of a rapidly-increasing number of good essays, speeches, and policy proposals looking at how the U.S. went wrong after 9/11 -- and not just in Iraq -- and how the next administration can start correcting the long string of previous mistakes.
This discussion needs to become more widespread, intense, and practical. John McCain is a vastly more admirable person than George W. Bush, but his strategy for Iraq and national security in general is an extension of Bush-Cheney. If and when the Democratic party moves past its current fratricide, it needs to make a big push here, not just for election purposes but so it can do something in 2009 if given the chance.
As the discussion continues, I immodestly offer this link to "Declaring Victory," the Atlantic story I wrote a year and a half ago on ways out of the War on Terror trap. As we near the end of the intellectual paralysis and policy rigidity of the Bush-Cheney years, some of the ideas people described to me back then seem, at least to me, all the more relevant.
Continue reading "'Declaring Victory'" »
One more view of Chinese soldiers
From reader Dan Hobby, a group of soldiers at the Summer Palace in Beijing last year. The soldiers are turning around to look at the little daughter (not visible in picture) accompanying Hobby's in-laws, who are wearing blue jeans and jackets and seen from the back. The girl, age four, had been adopted in China three years earlier. It's worth clicking on the photo to see the enlargement, which shows the expressions on the soldiers' faces.
Cultural notes: 1) Chinese-looking daughters with Western-looking parents are a common sight in a few parts of China. In many other parts, they attract universal stares -- and these soldiers could have been country people, who had not seen such a thing before. 2) The frequent encounters with very casual-looking representatives of the People's Liberation Army do not, again, settle any arguments about China's military ambitions, its "asymmetric war" abilities, etc etc etc. But they are frequent.
My new homeland security hero: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (MT)
Listen to this item from Friday evening's All Things Considered and realize, in amazement, how long it has been since we have heard a public figure talk plain common sense about the "theater of security" and 'fraidy-cat authoritarianism of TSA-era America.
The speaker is Brian Schweitzer, elected governor of Montana in 2004. (A Democrat.) Good for him.
Point for later discussion: Right now I'd say that the biggest single difference between life as an American in China in the 2000s, versus my family's life as Americans in Japan and Malaysia for four years in the 1980s, is internet streaming audio. It's still a big nuisance to see U.S. television broadcasts in anything like real time -- or at all, given that the slowness of the Chinese internet makes streaming video difficult. But to listen to the NPR morning and evening shows live, with time zones reversed -- Morning Edition live at our dinner time, All Things Considered in the morning -- that is an enormous difference in connected-ness. We had email even back in those old days! Not Skype, of course, which rivals streaming audio in importance (and obviously is a variant of the same technology.) For now, glad that this phenomenon brought me the Schweitzer interview.
More observations of the Chinese military
After the jump, excerpts from two email messages I received from Westerners who have recently lived in or visited China.
Obviously they would not say, nor would I, that the casual/ragtag aspect of Chinese soldiers as encountered in normal urban life is representative of the whole Chinese military, indicates that China does not have advanced weapons or a growing navy, puts to rest all questions about China's ambitions, or so on. But this anecdotal exposure has an effect -- it's pretty much the opposite of the impression one gets from brief exposure to the US military -- and I bet that most foreign residents of China would say that these reports ring true. Certainly they do to me.
Continue reading "More observations of the Chinese military" »
Shorter version of "right wing bloggers and China" point
As discussed previously here:
The same people -- same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites - that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling in for a longer term confrontation with China.
These people need to be judged on their track record. And compared with a confrontation with Iraq or Iran, a military showdown with China would be 10 times as unnecessary and 100 times as stupid.
Jeez louise department (China and right-wing bloggers)
Late last night China time, joining in via Skype on an institution I had not been aware of before: a "Bloggers Roundtable" phone call from the Pentagon, discussing the newly released report on Chinese military power. I don't know who else is on the phone call, except for two officials who were supposed to be identified as "a Defense official." OK.
About the report, nothing to say until I have looked at it more closely. About other questions from other people, not my place to characterize them -- tempting as it is to give verbatim the tendentious line of argument / "questioning" from one right wing blogger in particular. But since this same guy (whose boss I have repeatedly mocked) has made it his business to mischaracterize what I said, let me take the unwise step of trying to set a blog record straight.
Continue reading "Jeez louise department (China and right-wing bloggers)" »
Nagl, Russert, and crises of institutional culture
Two very important articles:
1) Tom Ricks's story in the Washington Post revealing that Lt.Col John Nagl is leaving the Army to join a new DC think tank.
I am partial to Nagl, whom I know somewhat and like very much, and whom I interviewed, along with Lewis Sorley and Conrad Crane, two years ago on the Charlie Rose show. Indeed many reporters know and like him, and he has been a kind of media darling: subject of a (very good) cover-story profile by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine four years ago; author of a well-received book about the timeliest of military topics, counter-insurgency strategy; and one of the driving forces behind the new Army/Marine Corps "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," the same document whose existence is so often cited as one of general David Petraeus's great accomplishments. (Petraeus and Marine Corps general James Mattis sponsored the overall effort.) Nagl had been a Rhodes scholar and, like Petraeus (Princeton PhD) before him, has been a very prominent example of the media-savvy scholar-warrior.
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Further on JK Glassman and public diplomacy
This hasn't happened in a while, but after taking a few hours to to think it over, I've changed my mind and regret something I posted very recently. This is the glory and the curse of real-time reactions via the internet. The curse is saying something in "public" I would have simply eliminated as an early draft in "real" writing. The corrective (rather than glory) is being able to say quickly: I didn't quite mean that, "that" being this post about Jim Glassman as a successor to Karen Hughes as leader of America's "public diplomacy" efforts.
In four years of reporting on Iraq-war policy and anti-terrorism efforts in general, followed now by a year and a half of living overseas, I have grown increasingly exasperated about the way America's story has been mishandled and debased by those in charge of telling it. The idea of America, in its authentic version, should be attractive and inspiring to people around the world. No, this doesn't mean they will all want to be Americans. It does mean that they can respect us for what we're trying to do. The Atlantic just devoted a whole issue to this very topic.
If the world doesn't feel that way right now, it's largely though not entirely our own fault. Partly it's because of choices we've made. For instance: the process of getting into America legally, as a graduate student or a tourist, has become so insulting and off-putting that fewer people bother to try. But partly the U.S. has suffered because of the way it has tried -- really, hasn't tried -- to understand and address world concerns.
I'm still exasperated at the damage done to my country's reputation and name, and I have very low expectations of what Karen Hughes's successor, whoever it might be, will be able to accomplish. That person will have barely a year to operate; Guantanamo will still be running; there will still be a large U.S. troop presence in Iraq; the current president and vice president will still be in office. But it is possible that the verve, energy, and ingenuity Jim Glassman has shown through his career could be just the traits the person in that situation needs. As I think about him more, and more about the sources of my exasperation, I say: let's see what he can do in this next year.
But I still shouldn't coach the Redskins.
James K. Glassman: face of America
Update: pls see this next post for "on further reflection" thoughts on the topic.
I have known and liked Jim Glassman for a very, very long time, since we were both on the college newspaper together. We've each been through a variety of incarnations since then. One of his was as publisher of the Atlantic for two years in the 1980s. The Atlantic was also the magazine that ran an excerpt from his (and Kevin Hassett's) notorious well-known book Dow 36,000 as a cover story in 1999. He is a lively, funny, and creative guy, and there are lots of jobs for which I would happily sign him up.
But as the head of America's public-diplomacy efforts? What's the right analogy here... Maybe, the Redskins, finally concluding that Joe Gibbs was great in his time but that time has passed, bringing me in as head coach? Or suiting me up as left tackle to strengthen their battered O-line? I myself am a wonderful guy, and I'm interested in football, but...
Karen Hughes was a preposterous, tin-eared choice to begin with, reflecting the narcissistic view that to explain America to the world what you needed was somebody who understood George W. Bush really well, rather than somebody who understood the first thing about the outside world. On all available evidence, she only made worse what people don't like about America at the moment, which can be summarized (and oversimplified) as:
- in much of Asia, the idea that we're living off their hard work and cheap products, meanwhile blaming and lecturing them plus being too lazy to learn very much about them;
- in Europe, that we're too boorish and boosterish -- and, while those two traits have long been part of the European snootiness toward America, it's worse now because of the perceived loss of America's moral standing via Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, et al, plus the sense that Americans are fraidy-cats who will accept just about anything in the name of anti-terrorism;
- in much of the Arab-Islamic world... well, you know this already.
As I've argued in the Atlantic recently, America's idea is still powerful and attractive, and America still has the opportunity to present a compelling and authentic face to the world. Over the years I have met, through reporting, many true-blue patriotic Americans who have spent their careers learning how Asian (or European or Arab-Islamic etc) cultures work and think, and how America could best engage them. Jim Glassman, despite being a great guy, is not one of these. As with Hughes, this seems another choice driven by internal comfort (the assumption that he'd face no confirmation problems) rather than external suitability (demonstrated understanding of the outside world), which means another bad choice.
Unless, of course, things are far enough gone, in terms of this Administration's effect on America's image, and there's so little time left, that who's in the job doesn't matter anyway. In which case I will be sorry to have said anything. *
* (Last three sentences altered since first posting, to make internal/external point.)
Three simple points about Iran/NIE
These don't qualify as news, given no doubt voluminous discussion overnight (my time) in the U.S. Still, for my own personal record:
1) The report is unambiguously good news, of the sort we're not accustomed to receiving in recent years from that part of the world. At least it's good on the merits -- more on the politics below.
The Iran-hawks who have said that an Iranian nuke would threaten the very survival of the West should be relieved to hear that the threat is not at hand. The Iran-doves who have claimed that Iran could be turned away from the nuke path through diplomacy, delay, incentive, threat, etc should be grateful for evidence that something other than a U.S. military strike changed the Iranian leadership's mind. If an Iranian weapon would have been bad for America, for Israel, for Europe, and in the deepest sense for the Iranian people themselves, then all of those parties are now better off.
2) For nearly three years, "yes, they will" / "no, they wouldn't dare" arguments about the Bush Administration's intentions have raged within the press and among analysts. The question was whether the president and vice president might actually go ahead and order a preemptive air or land strike against Iran -- despite the absence of clear Congressional approval, despite the obvious lack of support within America's professional military, despite the overwhelming evidence that in the crudest sense a military approach could not work. I've been in the "they wouldn't dare" camp -- and have urged members of Congress to remove doubt by prohibiting use of funds toward this end. Other writers and analysts have consistently said: No, just you wait, it's coming, these guys are determined to get the job done.
Continue reading "Three simple points about Iran/NIE" »
Not so thankful for this at Thanksgiving (Japan Big Brother dept)
Flying from Beijing to Tokyo this morning -- generally an invigorating experience! Japan looks startlingly neat and organized even if you're arriving from Switzerland. And when you're coming not from Switzerland but from China.... Anyhow I arrived excited at the prospect of a few days here.
Unfortunately Japan's way of ushering in the Thanksgiving holidays has been to institute mandatory fingerprinting and photographing of all foreigners entering the country. Let me put this bluntly: this is an incredibly degrading, offputting, and hostility-generating process. The comment is not anti-Japanese: when the U.S. does this to foreigners, it's wrong and degrading too (as many people, including me, have pointed out over the years). But Japan has just ushered in this procedure, and they deserve to take some heat for it.
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Two important documents about Iraq
1) From the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, the paper "Dereliction of Duty Redux?" by Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine officer and long-time military scholar, whom I know.
The paper's title refers, of course, to Col. H.R. McMaster's book from the 1990s Dereliction of Duty, which argued that the uniformed military leadership in the Vietnam era finally betrayed the military and the country by not more forcefully opposing policies in Vietnam it knew to be doomed. The book was extremely influential within today's officer corps -- and since McMaster himself, a youngish West Point grad when he wrote it, has been centrally involved in combat operations in Iraq (and now is part of Gen. David Petraeus's team), it has become a cliched joke that soon there will be "McMaster's McMaster" -- that is, some young officer who describes how even the person who saw what happened to the military in Vietnam was caught by a repetition of many of the same patterns.
Frank Hoffmann's essay goes into the similarities and differences in the military leadership's performance in Vietnam and Iraq -- and in particular the warring "narratives" inside the military about who will take the blame for what has gone wrong this time:
The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging “stab in the back” thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact and code of conduct that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy and the dedicated servants we ask to carry it out. Our collective failure to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security.
The essay is not not long and very much worth reading in its entirety.
2) A paper last week from the Pew Research Center* giving data to back up the general impression that Americans are thinking and talking less about the Iraq war than they did even a few months ago, and that the American media are paying less attention to the war. There's evidence in the paper for both sides of the chicken-and-egg question: less coverage because people don't care, or people don't care because of less coverage. Either way, here is the result:
Again the whole report is worth looking at.
* My wife works for the Pew Internet Project, which is part of Pew Research.
Veterans' Day (and, my interview with Donald Rumsfeld...)
...back in 1993.
By my local China time it is now the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This is November 11, which means variously, Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, or Poppy Day among countries on the Allied side of World War I, and of course Veterans' Day in the United States.
Originally this was a moment for looking backwards, to honor those who had served in the Great War and mourn those who had died. Its retrospective purpose remains. But for Americans right now it should also be a moment to honor the men and women who continue to serve and sacrifice and be injured and die -- and to reflect on the fact that, for the first time in our modern history, they do so with absolutely no shared sacrifice or service from the public at large. Everyone knows this and avoids thinking much about it. Today it's worth at least remembering.
Also it is worth looking at several articles the Atlantic has brought up from the archives and made available free, for now. They're about Vietnam, not Iraq or Afghanistan (or Iran), but several are significant in their own right in addition to shedding indirect light on our current and continuing wars. Let me emphasize two:
Continue reading "Veterans' Day (and, my interview with Donald Rumsfeld...)" »
Mukasey: No
This is not my usual beat nor my usual way of operating, but: on this visit to the U.S. I feel obliged to note, in solidarity with Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias of the Atlantic (among others), that I hope senators will vote No on the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general.
Here's the reason: The Administration has proven that it cannot be given the benefit of the doubt on questions of civil liberties, expansion of executive powers, or the conversion of its open-ended, ill-defined, decades-long state of "war" into an excuse for permanent, abusive, often secret changes in the balance of rights and powers that is America's greatest constitutional achievement.
On crucial points, Mukasey's second-day testimony amounted to a request that he and the Administration be trusted to do the right thing. Nothing against him personally, but the time for trust has passed. Unless Mukasey explicitly repudiates the most abusive parts of his predecessor's (and his President's) record, the Senate would be negligent and reckless to approve him.
A specific point: the "waterboarding" outrage. As is now becoming famous, Mukasey said this, when asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse whether waterboarding was constitutional:
“I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”
Either way you slice it, this answer alone is grounds for rejecting Mukasey. If he really doesn't "know what is involved" in the technique, he is unacceptably lazy or ill-informed. Any citizen can learn about this technique with a few minutes on the computer.* Any nominee for Attorney General in 2007 who has not taken the time to inform himself fits the pattern of ignorant incuriosity we can no longer afford at the highest levels.
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Just curious (re the Armenian Genocide vote)
Before leaving China, I hadn't heard about the House of Representatives' vote on a resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide of the World War I era.
Now that I've heard about it, I find that it leads naturally to this question:
Is America insane??????
To be more precise: have the Congressional Democratic leaders lost their minds in not finding a way to bottle up this destructive and self-righteously posturing measure?
Maybe they think that the U.S. has so many friends in the Islamic world, especially in countries bordering Iraq, that it should go out of its way to make new enemies?
Or -- and this is truly appalling possibility -- perhaps they think that America’s moral standing is so high at the moment that we will be admired and thanked worldwide for delivering condemnations of sins committed in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire?
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Update: people who are glad they went to work for GW Bush
As mentioned yesterday, it's hard to think of people whose reputations have been burnished through service in the GW Bush Administration. Making the opposite list is easy: Eight years ago, Dick Cheney's reputation was as a level-headed foreign policy pro. Same for Donald Rumsfeld. Alberto Gonzales was a rising talent. Scooter Libby, a cosmopolitan lawyer. Paul Bremer, a successful diplomat....
Several people have written me with suggestions, almost all of them people who look better than those around them because they said, Watch out, things are going to hell! Richard Clarke; Lawrence Lindsey; Eric Shinseki; the Abu Ghraib investigator Antonio Taguba, etc. A less obvious but worthy suggestion would be Conrad Crane and Andrew Terrill, principal authors of the Army War College's prescient, and of course overlooked, pre-war handbook on how to run a successful occupation. (The study's history recounted here; subscribers only.) James Baker and Lee Hamilton of the Iraq Study Group?
A very interesting discussion is going on in the comments section of Ezra Klein's blog, here. The interesting part is the way you have to bend definitions to argue that the Administration has made certain people look "better." Eg, John Ashcroft: a better reputation as Attorney General than in his previous political career? Maybe not. A better reputation than what came after him, especially for his apparent sickbed opposition to a surveillance scheme? Maybe so.
But people who will be honored for an unambiguously positive contribution through these years? So far it's a challenging search. We have a John Yoo with his Yoo Theories on torture, but no George Marshall with his Marshall Plan. Any positive suggestions welcomed.
Additional discussion here by Brian Beutler, and some interesting possibilities from Moira Whelan.
Update/correction on previous CNN item
For oddball tech reasons, I am unable to update the previous CNN item without breaking all existing links to it. So I'll add the new info this way.
The original item said:
* Michael Ware, usually a very, very tough critic of U.S. policy, narrates a perilous drive through Baghdad and refers maybe 50 times to "al Qaeda" threatening to attack him or Iraqi civilians.
Actually Ware's drive was deep into al Anbar. (Anderson Cooper was narrating the drive to the Baghdad airport -- I'm pretty sure.) Sorry for that misrecollection. The real point concerned Ware's repeated references -- and Cooper's, and those of everyone else during the hour or so of CNN coverage I saw -- to "al Qaeda" (along with Iran) as the adversary in Iraq.
Not "al Qaeda in Iraq," as President Bush himself is typically careful to say. Not "AQI," as the U.S. military typically puts it on its charts and PowerPoints. From CNN it was plain old "al Qaeda."
To U.S. viewers, plain old "al Qaeda" is the organization that attacked America six years ago. I don't see CNN consistently enough to be sure when they began applying this term to fighters within Iraq -- or whether it's a phenomenon of more than this one show. But on the basis of its unvarying use by a number of correspondents on this one show, I would have to assume that the change in terminology reflects a shift in "house style," as we in the media biz call it. Michael Ware himself, whom I don't know but do admire, has been the very opposite of a patsy for the Administration in his reporting from Iraq.
So why the change in CNN labeling? It's a mystery to me.
On the problem of rogue states
Within the last two two weeks, Chinese military hackers reportedly tried to break into secure servers run by the German and U.S. governments. German and U.S. officials have reportedly both complained – for reasons spelled out in this story by David Lague: How can they trust Chinese leaders' assurances of non-threatening intent if they can't be sure the People's Liberation Army sees things the same way? The PLA's successful test of an anti-satellite weapon early this year awakened the same fears.
Yes, having some degree of certainty, of reasonable boundaries, about what a nation might and might not do is an important element of international stability. With that point in mind, think of this: No one on earth can be sure that the U.S. government will not launch an aerial strike or a land invasion of Iran in the next 16 months.
Continue reading "On the problem of rogue states" »
When a theme starts showing up in pop fiction...
... you know that it's moved beyond the realm of Policy Expert Debate.
Here's the Policy Expert version of a certain concept:
Talking about the "global war on terror" and the constant focus on threat Americans face from terrorism has been an unwise strategy. It has magnified any terrorists' influence, by helping them do their work of scaring the public; it has unified rather than divided potential adversaries; it has made it hard to think carefully about where and how the public can most effectively defend itself. At best it has not helped, and at worst it has impeded, the case-by-case surveillance and police effort through which British and now, apparently, Danish and German authorities have thwarted possible plots. (Recall that British officials went out of their way to avoid the term "global war on terror" when talking about their successes in penetrating potential terrorist groups.)
Here is the pop-fiction version of the same concept:
1) Daniel Silva, A Death in Vienna: As in many of Silva's books, the plot turns on the discovery of an elderly Nazi war criminal nestled in comfortable respectability in today's Western Europe. I am spoiling no surprises by saying that in this book, a crack Israeli team nabs the latest aged, hidden malefactor in Austria and is trying to smuggle him out of the country by car. Their nemesis, a (Nazi-sympathizer-at-heart) Austrian police official named Kruz, wonders how to stop them. Suddenly a brilliant idea pops into his mind:
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The cost of Iraq (cont.)
My colleague Matthew Yglesias quotes the latest (very good) Newsweek article detailing how the war in Iraq undercut the original "war on terror."
By the beginning of 2002 -- when Osama bin Laden was still on the run after his narrow escape at Tora Bora, when the United States still enjoyed vast, strong international support in its effort to evict the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan, when no member of the Bush Administration had publicly discussed the prospect of invading Iraq -- preparations to invade Iraq were already underway. They gutted the effort in Afghanistan.
It is easy to prove now, and was easy to figure out at the time, that the more the United States concentrated on Saddam Hussein, the less it could concentrate on Osama bin Laden. This was one of many reasons to oppose the war before it began: not just the direct costs it would bring inside Iraq but what we could bloodlessly call its opportunity costs elsewhere.
The story of this tradeoff is an old one. It has been told many places, including in a cover story I did for the Atlantic three years ago. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) Even then, when Iraq was less obviously a disaster, people let me put them on the record saying things like this:
"Had we seen Afghanistan as anything other than a sideshow," says Larry Goodson, a scholar at the Army War College who spent much of 2002 in Afghanistan, "we could have stepped up both the economic and security presence much more quickly than we did. Had Iraq not been what we were ginning up for in 2002, when the security situation in Afghanistan was collapsing, we might have come much more quickly to the peacekeeping and 'nation-building' strategy we're beginning to employ now."...
Continue reading "The cost of Iraq (cont.)" »
Steve Riley, meet John Mueller
Steve Riley is a security expert at Microsoft; John Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at Ohio State.
I know and like John Mueller (who is also a leading expert on Fred Astaire), and in my Atlantic article "Declaring Victory" one year ago I talked about his argument that America's over-reaction to the threat of future terrorist attack had damaged it more deeply than attacks themselves were ever likely to. He laid out this theory at length in his book Overblown.
I don't know Riley but was intrigued by this report, on the Australian tech website APCMAG, of his saying that the unthinking attempt to remove all possible security threats often destroys the efficiency, value, and integrity of the thing you are trying to "protect." What's intriguing is that Riley, unlike many tech officials, drew the explicit comparison: too many security features can make software unusable, and too much security can make free societies unrecognizable. (Or just hopelessly inefficient, as with the recent impossible legislative requirement that every single shipping container entering the United States be scanned before it leaves a foreign port.)
This leaves only two questions: Did the report accurately reflect Riley's views? I emailed him via his site to ask. And if so, why did he let his company include in Windows Vista something called "User Account Control," which exemplifies the overkill approach to security that he so astutely warns about?
Actually, there's one more question: Who will be the first historian to say of America in the years after 9/11: they had to destroy the country in order to save it?
Sane thinking about airborne threats (updated)
The pattern is too strong to be ignored: traditional conservatives (Heritage) and libertarians (Cato) have done a better job of of thinking about how a free society can defend itself without giving up its freedom than the Democratic or Republican establishment has. Unlike Democrats, they're not so worried about looking "weak" that they have to posture about every conceivable threat. Unlike the Administration -- well, they're sane.
Two well-known examples: Cato, for sponsoring the work of John Mueller, of Ohio State. (His influential 2004 essay, "A False Sense of Insecurity," is here in a large PDF file.) And, oddly enough, AEI, which apparently harbors an actual conservative among its neo-cons and "surge" enthusiasts. This is Veronique de Rugy, who has looked very critically at the homeland-security- industrial complex. I won't even get into Ron Paul....
A recent entry in the honor roll: James Jay Carafano, a West Point graduate who works at Heritage. His new essay, concerning the potential terrorist threat from small airplanes, is the first I've seen that both acknowledges there is some threat and proposes reasonable, proportionate steps to deal with it. Perhaps I'm biased because Carafano calls for elimination of the stupidest "homeland security" measure of all: the creation of a Potemkin air-defense zone called ADIZ, covering thousands of square miles around Washington. Even beyond my bias, this is a very good analysis.
Update: Ah, now this makes more sense. Veronique de Rugy is no longer at AEI but instead at a non-neocon, "classical liberal" plus libertarian stronghold, George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Phew!
The two Benjamin Friedmans of Cambridge, Mass.
It's important to keep your Benjamin Friedmans straight.
Benjamin M. Friedman, who must be in his early 60s, is an eminent professor of economics at Harvard and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and, yes, the Atlantic. He has helped lead us to clear thinking about economics and related political/cultural matters.
Benjamin H. Friedman, who must be in his late 20s, is a PhD candidate at MIT who has done some very valuable work at a tender age. An essay three years ago in MIT's publication "Breakthroughs" was one of the earliest attempts, anywhere, to say: wait a minute, how much are we willing to give away or throw away in the name of being "safe"? (The essay is "Leap before you look" and is on page 29 of this 6MB PDF file.) The logic is now familiar: just as a person can avoid many "risks" by never leaving the house or answering the phone, so a society can be "secure" by keeping everyone under scrutiny all the time. The only problem is, what makes life worth living disappears. Again, many people say this now: fewer did in 2004.
As far as I know, the two Benjamins are not related.
Benjamin "MIT" Friedman has recently pointed out another "leap before you look" step in the quest for security:the impending Congressional mandate, reported here by our sister publication Government Executive, to require the government to scan all cargo containers before they are shipped to the United States.
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More on Chertoff's folly
The more I think about it, the more I marvel (as in previous item) at Sec. Chertoff's "gut feeling" comment. It's very much in the spirit of the wonderful "Demotivational" posters offered by Despair.com:
Think if Sec. Chertoff had been on hand at other big moments in history:
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'Weekend Edition Sunday' interview / Chertoff's folly
Audio here from my interview yesterday (from Shanghai) with Liane Hansen of NPR, looking back on my Sept 2006 Atlantic article arguing that the best way to hold down the threat and consequences of terrorism was to declare the "War on Terrorism" over. (Original article here; related Atlantic material here and here.) The question arose, of course, in light of Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" that another strike might be imminent.
I didn't think to put it this bluntly over the radio, but Sec. Chertoff's comment ran about as contrary to all prevailing thought on dealing with terrorism (except, perhaps, the thoughts of GW Bush and RB Cheney) as is possible to do.
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Donnez moi un break: Bush press conference
It is hard to know what is the most contemptible part of President Bush's press conference (ongoing as I write -- and as I listen to it, on a Cspan internet feed, in Shanghai). But it's going to be hard to top what he just uttered: the most blatant attempt so far to blame everything that went wrong in Iraq on the advice of the military.
Don't have the transcript in front of me now, but the point was: Hey, I asked Tommy Franks if he was ready to go -- including the postwar phase; and he said Sure, no problem. So (says the President), Don't blame me! I was listening to the experts!
Yes, as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz so notably listened to Gen. Eric Shinseki. And yes, the president's laser-like assessment of Gen. Franks' shortcomings must have lain behind his decision to give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Talk about "personal accountability" and "supporting the troops." (Franks does deserve a good share of the blame, and so do other military commanders -- but not for reasons the President apparently even grasps.)
Close second in the most-contemptible derby, half way through the press conference: Catechism-like repetition of the idea that we have to "fight them in Iraq so we don't fight them here." I wonder if anyone has ever dared challenge the logic of this to the President's face. (Ie, what are you talking about??? Why should people bother to plant bombs in Baghdad if they thought they had a chance of planting them in DC?) My oh my.
More on Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and war with China
Several days ago I recounted a story Gary Hart had told about Lynne Cheney, who was chomping at the bit to confront China militarily early in 2001 -- before her husband and his president had their attention directed elsewhere later that year. As Hart said in concluding the story, "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today."
Various voices in blog-world have complained that there's nothing new here: Of course the neo-cons were raring for a confrontation with China. And of course that is true. Anyone who was paying attention to defense debates knew that during the "monopower" era of the late 1990s, when the familiar old Soviet enemy had gone away and the new enemy of Islamic extremism had not clearly announced itself, the long-term Chinese threat was what military thinkers were thinking about. The notoriety of a translated Chinese military text, known in English as Unrestricted War: China's Master Plan to Destroy America, is a subtle little clue that some people have been working this theme for a long time.
The point of the Lynne Cheney story is not that it confounded all previous understanding. It is that it confirmed what we already suspected. It would be like finding a recording of a conversation between Paul Wolfowitz and his mentor Donald Rumsfeld in the late 1990s, saying something like: You know, if we ever have the chance, we have to do whatever it takes to get rid of that damned Saddam. The details would be important even if the main theme was less than a dumbfounding surprise.
After Gary Hart told me about Lynne Cheney's petulance, I asked him: has this ever been publicized? He said, No (but he had no objection to people knowing about it now). That is the point of the story: new and interesting details in a tragedy whose central plot line we already know.
Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and War with China
I mentioned this yesterday in the (somewhat-insiderish) realm of the Atlantic's "Aspen Ideas Festival" blog, but the point seemed worth repeating in this marginally more public venue. The item appears after the jump, or at this link. It concerns the war that some public officials tried to prevent, and the war that at least one official tried to foment:
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Surprise post-9/11 movie tip
I liked the book but was in no hurry to see the movie version of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. As Pacific Northwest atmospherics it was great; as a mystery it was very good; as a story of star-crossed love it was not that interesting to me; and as a reminder of the racial injustices against Japanese-Americans in World War II it was worthy but I thought already got the point.
Now I realize: that was pre-9/11 thinking. (The movie came out in 1999.)
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What is Rudy Giuliani talking about???
This is what I am denied, or spared, by being trapped in Chinese factories or hospitals and getting only intermittent glimpses of real-time Campaign 2008 rhetoric:
Rudy Giuliani’s answer to the first substantive question of the debate. Knowing everything we know now, good idea or bad idea to have invaded Iraq?
Absolutely the right thing to do. It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.
Huh????
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More good news about American Muslims
Last fall, in an Atlantic cover story called “Declaring Victory,” I discussed the one big advantage the United States held over most European countries when it came to dealing with Islamic terrorists: the loyalty and assimilation of America’s Muslim and Arabic-origin populations. The two categories are not identical — many U.S. Muslims are from Pakistan, India, Iran, or other non-Arab countries; many Arab-Americans are non-Islamic, especially Lebanese Christians — but they are similar in overall success in America and resistance to extremist views. For instance (from that article):
“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”
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Here is a good idea: Brits drop "war on terror"
It has been obvious for quite a while that calling the effort to contain violent extremists a "global war on terror" does nothing to help the cause, and hurts in many ways. It unifies opponents who might otherwise have little in common. It gives them what they want, in elevating them to parity with the world's great powers. To the extent the U.S. or U.K. public pays attention to it, it further helps the terrorist cause, by making people, well, terrorized. To the extent the public comes to ignore it, it cheapens the whole concept of war.
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The theater of "security," part 1037
United Air Lines, San Francisco-Dulles, oversold plane, passengers fighting to avoid being bumped. My wife and I luckily end up with really nice seats. In keeping with our larger attitude these first few days back from China, we are actively grateful for every comfort.
While waiting for the flight we end up sitting in the area where all the flight attendants are congregating and chatting about their schedules. From this vantage point, 30 minutes before boarding time, we see two people who are obviously this flight's air marshals walk down the jetway toward the plane. To ensure the safety of the traveling public, I won't give further details, except to say:
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Airline security update: the knives are back!
Shanghai-San Francisco, UAL, 10 hours+ in the plane, the magic of business class! I am tall enough, and old enough, and have had enough experience with the 31" seat pitch in economy, to appreciate every minute in which my knees are not jammed into the seat ahead.
Bigger surprise: full set of metal cutlery with the meal, knife too!
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'Declaring Victory' on free part of Atlantic site
The National Magazine Awards are a highly quirky part of journalistic culture, but magazines naturally embrace any good news they offer and scratch their heads at the nuttyness of it all when the results are disappointing -- I mean, "surprising." Meaning no disrespect to anyone, it was, umm, surprising last year when ESPN: The Magazine beat The New Yorker in the "General Excellence" category.
This year's crop of finalists was just announced, and the news the Atlantic will embrace is that we are in the finals in three categories, including my "Declaring Victory" article for the "Public Interest" award. The Atlantic's web site has, for now, made its nominated entries (and many past winners) freely available, not just for subscribers. My article, from September 2006, is here.
The surprising anti-war message of '24'
Jane Mayer's article about the casually pro-torture message of '24' has gotten a lot of attention, and with reason. It's a wonderful piece of journalism that makes an important point.
But here's a less obvious side of '24' -- or, perhaps, a generally-forgotten one, just because of the passage of years.
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Am I being too rational? The prospect of war on Iran
Starting late in 2004, I have been writing that the United States could not rationally comtemplate attacking Iran. (For reasons laid out in 2004, 2006, and 2007.) Through that time I have been arguing with friends, adversaries, and people I do not know, all of whom keep saying: rational or not, it's coming!
This dispute is strange in one obvious way.
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A new record for stupidity in the "Global War on Terror"
All right, I am biased. The most egregious empty-symbolism measures to "protect" Americans often involve aviation -- because airplanes attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because airplanes scare many people, and because the inconvenienced community of aviation enthusiasts is so small. Because tens of millions of people take commercial airline flights, some sanity eventually returns to TSA airline-screening rules. For example: allowing tiny tubes of toothpaste or hand cream back onto flights. The measures that affect small-plane travel tend to get stuck at their lunatic extreme, since so few people are exposed to them and see how nutty they actually are. When I was flying in the United States, I was one of that small number; that's why I'm biased.
I had thought that the rules for "defense" of Washington DC airspace against small planes set the standard in foolishness. But we have a new winner.
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The cost of "security" (Cory Lidle connection)
The post-9/11 "security" restrictions in airspace around Washington have always been pointless. Now they may actually have killed people -- or helped to, and the ones who perished were not terrorists.
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Interview with Sir Richard Dearlove at Aspen
Sir Richard Dearlove was the former head of British secret intelligence, and a central figure in the famed "Downing Street Memorandum," reporting eons before Bob Woodward that the intelligence had been "fixed" for the plan to invade Iraq. Here is a .WMV file of my interview with him and Shashi Tharoor at Aspen. It is notable especially for his argument about why the U.S. was destroying itself by cutting legal and ethical corners in the Global War on Terror -- as described at the time here.
How Gary Cooper can save us (from Mayor Daley, among others)
Here are the four ways we'll know that Americans are regaining their sanity about "Homeland Security"
1) When some politician has the guts to stop using the hideous term Homeland Security, or "Homeland" itself.
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun
