Month: July 2012

Micah Zenko on Op-Ed militarism:

There is no body of civilians that more consistently makes unrealistic demands for the use of military force than editorial boards and opinion-page writers of major American news outlets. These appeals range from full-blown cockamamie schemes to semi-practical, tactical uses of force to resolve complex and enduring political problems of debatable relevance to U.S. national interests. This practice is a bipartisan exercise, ranging from the quixotic militarist, Nicholas Kristof, to the military-planning staff embedded inside the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

…Having read hundreds of these “tactics-first” proposals for using the U.S. military over the past fifteen years, two underlying themes is that the authors are impatient and the current nonmilitary strategy is not having a demonstrable impact. There is a cognitive bias called hyperbolic discounting, which is defined as “the tendency for people to increasingly choose a smaller-sooner reward over a larger-later reward as the delay occurs sooner rather than later in time.” I suspect that the desire to resolve an enduring problem in the near term explains many of these tough-guy (or girl) proposals. Given that it costs nothing to propose sending someone else to bomb or occupy another country, it’s the least tough and most thoughtless thing for someone to write. Why should we take these proposals seriously?

Zenko also notes that Robert Gates, in his memoirs, writes “In more than twenty years of attending meetings in the Situation Room, my experience was that the biggest doves in Washington wear uniforms.”

I’ve noted previously how interesting it is that most military leaders are, for example, against going to war with Iran, while naive politicians and their surrogates in the major newspapers push and push and push for the “military solution.” We see the same kind of thing with Syria: a flood of commentary about how we ought to launch a war to oust Assad and eliminate Iran’s main ally in the region, contrasted with sober reckonings about why we shouldn’t intervene from top military brass. It says quite a bit about how militarized the civilian elite are in this country and how irrepressibly pugnacious our political discourse has become.

Esam Al-Amin describes US policy towards Egypt:

In this high stakes of international power play the U.S. strategy in the region is to prefer a managed transition to civilian rule and democratic governance as long as the American major strategic objectives are not challenged. In short, the strategy is to give the Islamic rising powers a chance to govern as long as they agree to: keep the Americans in, the Chinese and Russians out, the Iranians down, and the Israelis safe.

In other words, US policy hasn’t changed. There is simply an additional element they have to deal with, namely the renewal of some measure of democracy. Note the caveat though: Washington prefers “a managed transition” to democratic rule “as long as” the leadership obeys us and defers to US power on these central issues. This raises the obvious question, what if the master isn’t obeyed? What measures can we expect the Obama administration to take?

You can expect US support for the democratic victors to turn on a dime if these demands are not respected. And the US is hedging, just in case that becomes a reality. The administration is keeping in close contact with both centers of power in Egypt, the political and the military, which are decidedly separate.

On Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest visit to Egypt, she not only met with newly elected Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Morsi, but she also met with Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Obama decided late last year to start up a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood. And then, as  Al-Amin explains:

In June, President Obama met with a large group of major American Jewish leaders in the White House. According to DEBKA, an Israeli website close to Israeli intelligence agencies, the president assured the group that “President Morsi would be required to devote a section of his earliest speech on foreign affairs to the specific affirmation of his profound commitment to the peace pact with Israel.” Within hours of being declared president, Morsi gave his assurance that Egypt would honor all its international treaty obligations in a not-so-disguised reference to its treaty with Israel.

So Morsi seems to be doing what he’s told. But the SCAF has continued to receive US support (including weapons and riot gear) “seized legislative powers by dissolving the five-month old parliament and issued a constitutional decree that transferred much of the presidential powers to itself, began to re-assert its power and influence by using much of the Mubarak era state media, bureaucracy, and courts to frustrate the new president.” And when Clinton met with Tantawi just recently, “she promised to maintain the $1.3 billion annual military subsidy and offered another $1 billion aid package that Obama promised last year.”

Washington is playing both sides. What matters to them is their interests. It won’t take much for the US to take up their traditional posture and support military dictatorship all over again. It will all depend on how obedient and deferential the democratic leadership is.

Reading through, as I sometimes do, the great collection of essays in We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing From 1812 to Now, edited by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, I came across a piece by William Jennings Bryan. Resigning as Wilson’s secretary of state in 1915, Bryan had opposed the US occupation of the Philippines, a conflict in which US soldiers committed sadistic atrocities and which caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. In his essay “The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism” he writes his own version of Eisenhower’s famous farewell address, only 61 years early.

If we have an imperial policy we must have a great standing army as its natural and necessary complement. The spirit which will justify the forcible annexation of the Philippine Islands will justify the seizure of other islands and the domination of other people, and with wars of conquest we can expect a certain, if not rapid, growth of our military establishment.

…A large standing army is not only a pecuniary burden to the people and, if accompanied by compulsory service, a constant source of irritation but it is even a menace to a republican form of government. The army is the personification of force, and militarism will inevitably change the ideals of the people and turn the thoughts of our young men from the arts of peace to the science of war. The government which relies for its defense upon its citizens is more likely to be just than one which has at call a large body of professional soldiers.

The late 1800s and early 1900s was really a time of transition for America towards overseas bases and military empire. And today, that empire of bases continues to grow.

According to this article from the Telegraph, at least one pro-Syrian-opposition lobbyist in Washington thinks the Obama administration’s decision not to intervene any further in the Syrian conflict is made primarily due to the demands of the electoral cycle, and that it may change after Obama wins reelection. The title of the article is “US refuses to help Syrian rebels until after election.”

“Basically the message is very clear; nothing is going to happen until after the election, in fact nothing will happen until after inauguration [Jan 2013]. And that is the same message coming from everyone, including the Turks and the Qataris,” said a Washington lobbyist for the group.

I’m not so sure about this. It’s certainly possible that the administration is holding off on more substantial military action – direct or indirect – until after the election when the president doesn’t have to walk on egg shells in anticipation of heavy criticism from Republicans and the electorate. But I doubt it, if for no other reason that the potential political fallout that would materialize from a foolish decision to intervene in Syria is approximately the same now as it will be in January. Sure, Obama doesn’t have to worry about getting reelected, but he still has four more years of shameless political self-promotion, image-shaping, and legacy-molding.

Every decision made by a presidential administration is political, but the Obama administration’s objections to further intervention in Syria have been largely strategically based. As White House spokesman Jay Carney said in May, “We do not believe that militarization, further militarization of the situation in Syria at this point is the right course of action. We believe that it would lead to greater chaos, greater carnage.” This is the opinion of even most hawks in Washington, with the exception of people like McCain and Graham.

In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said “military intervention has been absolutely ruled out.” She also said that while she is “incredibly sympathetic” to calls for intervention, “it is also important to stop and ask what that is and who’s going to do it and how capable anybody is of doing it.” She went on to say “we really don’t know who it is that would be armed” and to ask rhetorically:

what are we going to arm them with, and against what? You’re not going to bring tanks over the borders of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. That’s not going to happen.

So maybe at the best, you can smuggle in automatic weapons, maybe some other weapons that you could get in. To whom, where do you go? You can’t get into Homs. Where do you go? And to whom are you delivering them? We know al-Qaida. Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria. Are we supporting al-Qaida in Syria? Hamas is now supporting the opposition. Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?

These seem like fundamental objections to further interventions on a logistical and a strategic level. It doesn’t sound like campaign rhetoric or evasion to me. True, it was shortly after these statements that the US began to aid the rebels with non-lethal support and to facilitate other countries (like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey) in aiding them with weapons. But this decision seemed political, rather than the other way around. Last week I wrote a lengthy blog post objecting to former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht’s call to elevate the conflict to a CIA proxy war. But there was one thing he wrote that I agreed with to a large extent:

Press reports already suggest that a rudimentary, small-scale CIA covert action is under way against Assad. But these reports, probably produced by officially sanctioned White House leaks, reveal an administration trying not to commit itself. According to Syrian rebels I’ve heard from, the much-mentioned Saudi and Qatari military aid—reportedly chaperoned by the CIA—hasn’t arrived in any meaningful quantity.

There is such a broad consensus in the military and academic establishment against more direct action in Syria, that it seems the Obama administration’s decision to nominally support the rebels was a political decision meant to deflect criticism that they were doing nothing. As the same Telegraph article noted:

the Syrian Support Group (SSG), the political wing of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), recently presented American officials with a document requesting 1,000 RPG-29 anti-tank missiles, 500 SAM-7 rockets, 750 23mm machine guns as well as body armour and secure satellite phones. They also asked for $6m to pay rebel fighters as they battle the regime. All their requests were rejected.

So, if this report is true, the administration has rejected opportunities to expand on their current (if feigned) policy of supporting rebel militias. If the administration’s aim is to protect themselves politically, I can’t see how they could possibly believe that an intervention post-election could possibly fulfill that goal.

While MSNBC and Fox News bicker over how many of Mitt Romney’s tax returns have been released, there is a giant gaping void where they could be talking about substance. To remind those talking heads and their producers trying their best to imitate ESPN, the US is at war, and at least one of the two candidates refuses to clearly articulate a policy on Afghanistan.

Josh Rogin, of Foreign Policy’s The Cable, “asked several senior senators from both parties whether they supported Romney’s plan for Afghanistan. None was able to articulate exactly what that policy is or what the U.S. force in Afghanistan might look like if Romney is elected.”

To be fair, Romney has pointed to two superficial things he would do differently than Obama on Afghanistan. First, he would obey the military commanders. In order to make that sound less fascistic, Romney’s website says he would “never make national-security decisions based upon electoral politics.” This has to be a joke. Romney’s current opaqueness on Afghanistan is itself  “based on electoral politics,” just like everything else Romney has ever done.

The second difference Romney points to is that he would not have publicly announced the 2014 withdrawal date, although he “supports” it “as a realistic timetable.” So he would have the same policy as Obama, he just wouldn’t tell the American people.

Thanks to Rogin, we can see senior senators squirm trying to play it off like they know what Romney’s policy on Afghanistan is, whether they can discern any difference with Obama’s policy.

“What is it?” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a Romney supporter and senior member of the Armed Services Committee. “I think [Romney’s policy is] ‘listen to the commanders’ and if it’s that, that’s OK with me.”

…Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said he wasn’t sure exactly what Romney’s Afghanistan policy entailed and didn’t want to get into it.

“You would have to tell me what exactly you mean by ‘his policy.’ That’s a long discussion that I don’t want to get into,” Kyl told The Cable.

…Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) told The Cable that the issue is just one more example of the Romney campaign avoiding tackling tough issues.

“I sure don’t know what [Romney’s Afghanistan policy] is,” Levin said. “From what I’ve read, I can’t fathom his position on Afghanistan any more than I can fathom his position on a whole bunch of other things.”

“I don’t know that he’s flip-flopped on Afghanistan. I don’t know that he’s ever taken a clear position. It’s not like some of the other positions he’s so consistently flip-flopped on,” Levin said. “Here, I don’t know what the flip is or the flop.”

Romney’s evasion is a result of two things. First, 60 percent of Americans want to bring the troops home quickly and the entire political establishment, including about 50 NATO countries, agree with the current “withdrawal” plan. Clearly, Romney’s not going to get more hawkish on Afghanistan, because its not politically palatable. Everyone agrees the war is a lost quagmire. As Dexter Filkins wrote recently in the New Yorker, reiterating the establishment view: “After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished.”

The second reason Romney is intentionally evading is because he is about as unprincipled as he was portrayed in the primary campaign. Romney’s convictions depend on their current political advantage. If having a conviction is unlikely to yield political benefits, Romney becomes indistinct, noncommittal. He seems to be rendering a crude imitation of exactly the sort of “empty suit” Obama was accused of being in 2008.

[For a similar look at Romney’s foreign policy vis-a-vis the 2012 campaign, see Romney & Obama Agree on Iran: Keep Up Aggression, Impede Peace]