Friday, August 01, 2003
A note on NATo from the AEI website ( the neocon guys ):
Rethinking NATO
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Friday, August 1, 2003
ARTICLES
NATO Review
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
The Iraq war proved short with a minimum of casualties among both Coalition forces and the Iraqi people. Despite this, it inflicted great damage on the institutions that helped stabilise the world during the Cold War, including history's most successful alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The diplomacy that preceded the Iraq war and the campaign itself revealed fundamental differences of political views among the Alliance’s pillars, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. It also exposed deep differences among the European powers and between the larger and smaller European countries. These differences will not soon be mended.
The Iraq war also revealed the unprecedented military power of combined forces trained to NATO standards. The battlefield performance of Coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom was nothing less than stunning. They operated almost seamlessly in combat and transitioned easily to post-combat stabilisation operations. Indeed, both sorts of operations were conducted simultaneously. Smaller Coalition contingents, such as those from Australia and Poland, were slotted into important supporting roles without the mishaps that historically have plagued combined military operations. But for years of training within NATO, the Coalition could never have succeeded in defeating the Iraqi army and removing the regime of Saddam Hussein in less than one month.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Washington is beginning to understand that even the world’s sole super power needs help. Institutionalising the current Pax Americana – or whatever name best suits today's international order – is unavoidable. Guaranteeing the global order “unilaterally” is not a realistic option. The question, for Americans, therefore, is whether and how to adapt NATO to fit new strategic circumstances.
The question before the Alliance is whether the current geopolitical differences will destroy NATO’s abilities to provide the military basis for future coalition operations. There is a multitude of possible answers. The political differences may yet be solved, or at least be better managed. The value of the Alliance as a “force provider” may be so great that the political differences can be ignored. Conversely, the growing capabilities gap between the United States and the rest of the Alliance may exacerbate the political differences.
The answer will, in large measure, depend upon U.S. policies and programmes in the next few years. Change is coming, and the United States and its closest partners within the Alliance will either lead the reforms that enable NATO to adapt to the “post-Cold-War” world to become a partner in the Pax Americana, or the Alliance will wither. If Washington allows NATO to wither, it will have to create some other institutional basis to underpin future “coalitions of the willing”. No matter how good the U.S. military has become, it remains a small force. Indeed, one consequence of the “capabilities gap” is that the burden of securing today's liberal international order falls more heavily on the United States, increasing the likelihood of military overstretch.
Divisive Issues
Mending the geopolitical rift between the United States and “Europe”--meaning primarily France, Germany and continental public opinion--will take time. Two issues divide us: how to deal with the problems of the Islamic world and the circumstances in which military force can appropriately be used.
Many Europeans, like some Americans, have had trouble keeping up with the change in U.S. policy and strategy since 11 September 2001. Since then, President George W. Bush has articulated a new sense of national mission, that has gradually matured into a formal “Bush Doctrine”, best regarded as a renewed sense of purpose for U.S. power in the world. After a decade of drift and uncertainty, the Bush Doctrine represents a fundamental fork in the road of U.S. policy and it will not be easy for future presidents to backtrack. The United States is now committed to an active form of global leadership and has embarked on an ambitious endeavour to remake the political order in the Middle East, that will be impossible to renounce without conceding defeat.
Many Europeans are still far from sharing this emerging U.S. sense of mission or from formulating any European corollary to the Bush Doctrine. The pace of events--or perhaps more accurately, the pace of change in international politics--has at times seemed dizzying to European leaders and general publics alike. The resolution and clarity of President Bush’s leadership, so comforting to Americans in a time of crisis, is disturbing to many Europeans.
Moreover, the ease of the two military victories in Afghanistan--the “graveyard of empires”--and in Iraq has been yet another reminder of the strengths of U.S. military forces and, by contrast, the relative weaknesses of European arms. “America”, wrote British scholar Timothy Garton Ash after Afghanistan, “has too much power for anyone’s good, including its own.” In Iraq and in the Middle East, observed François Heisbourg, perhaps France’s foremost expert in security matters and generally sympathetic to U.S. concerns, “The French, like most Europeans, don’t want to give carte blanche to the Americans.”
The connections made by President Bush--and accepted by most Americans--between terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and political turmoil in the Islamic world are lost on many Europeans. For France, Germany and many other Western European states, terrorism is a crime more than an act of war, and stability in the Islamic world is to be found in nuanced diplomacy and support for the current crop of Arab governments, despite their repressive nature. Saddam Hussein’s regime was to be contained, not removed from power.
Many Europeans fear that if they take an active role in realising the Bush Doctrine’s prescription to bolster democracy in the Middle East, they will become more frequent targets for terrorists, their carefully cultivated relations with Islamic leaders will degenerate and their economic interests and strategies will be placed at risk. Nevertheless, Europeans are beginning to understand that policies aimed at maintaining stability by supporting authoritarian leaders in the region have essentially collapsed. Certainly, they have not been spared inclusion on Osama bin Laden’s “enemies' list”.
The future of the transatlantic strategic partnership is an open question. In broad terms, and even after the war in Iraq, many Europeans still inhabit a “pre-9/11” and “pre-Bush Doctrine” world. They trust that international institutions or legal arrangements can sustain a peaceful, prosperous and liberal world--a view that was until recently also widespread among Americans. And they remain reluctant to use military force, particularly in pursuit of expansive goals like those now being pursued by the United States in the Middle East.
Atlantic Mission
Yet it is also true that, for the United Kingdom and others, especially the recently oppressed peoples of “new Europe”, the United States' new mission is an Atlantic mission. They wish to keep the United States fully engaged in Europe. They are wary of a European Union dominated by France and Germany. And they are increasingly willing to be engaged elsewhere in the world together with the United States. Now enjoying their first taste of the U.S.-led liberal international order, the Pax Americana, they have no interest in creating a European “counterweight”.
From a strictly U.S. point of view, even this fractured geopolitical basis is enough to make NATO a useful tool of U.S. statecraft and strategy, as long as the Alliance can reform its military structures to overcome Europe's military weakness.
Although Europe's aggregate economy rivals that of the United States, European spending on military power is less than half that of the United States. Moreover, though that amount is still a lot of money--approximately 140 billion Euros--it buys little of value to the new power-projection missions of greatest interest to the United States. Nor has there been any organised effort to transform European militaries for these new missions or to exploit the technologies that are at the heart of the revolution in military affairs. “Mighty Europe”, observed Lord Robertson, "remains a military pygmy.”
In combination, these many smaller relative weaknesses combine to create an enormous gap in capabilities between U.S. forces and even the most modern other NATO forces. This is a problem that has its roots in the very structure of the Alliance, in NATO’s military response to the Cold War and the threat of Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Put simply, for the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, NATO was a power-projection mission, while for continental Europe and Germany in particular, it was an issue of homeland defence. The military requirement for the United States was to defend West Germany at its eastern border, 3,500 miles from Washington, to deploy “10 divisions in 10 days” and defend the north Atlantic sea lines of communication--even while responding globally to other Soviet probes. The military requirement for West Germany was to defend West Germany.
This inherent structural problem was exacerbated during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Reagan Administration began to implement plans for a serious conventional defence of NATO and to rely less on nuclear deterrence. The Reagan build-up, designed not only to fight a strictly defensive war but also to project naval power directly against the Soviet Union and to develop air and land forces capable of counter-attacking deep into Warsaw Pact territory, created not only a “strategic capabilities gap” between U.S. and other NATO forces but also a “tactical and operational capabilities gap”. The military history of the past decade--from the first Gulf War through the Balkan interventions and Afghanistan to Operation Iraqi Freedom--is in part the story of how great these gaps have become.
The geopolitical differences and the wide and widening gap in military capabilities between NATO forces have created an undeniable crack in the core of what was, through five decades of Cold War, a central pillar of U.S. national security strategy. Lord Robertson, who admits to being a “paid optimist and an advocate for NATO”, argued in February that the Iraq war was not “a make-or-break crisis” for the Alliance, rightly recalling the past debates over “Suez, Vietnam, the INF deployments or the early days of Bosnia". But the question is now fundamentally different. What possible role can NATO play in addressing what President Bush has defined as America’s new strategic priority: the roll-back of radical Islam?
Way Forward
Of late, some analysts have described the Alliance disparagingly as a “talking shop”. Ironically, in an era of great geopolitical uncertainty and disagreement, there has never been a greater need for a transatlantic talking shop. If France and Germany are to accept the worldview of the Bush Doctrine; if there is to be a positive role in international security affairs for the European Union; if the newly liberated states of Central and Eastern Europe are to be integrated permanently into the West; and if the Atlantic community is to be seen as a set of principles rather than a finite geographic area, then there are profound reasons to continue talking.
Second, NATO must continue to reform its bureaucratic processes. The structures that served the Alliance well in the past are now liabilities to change. Achieving consensus within an expanding coalition in particular is proving extremely difficult.
Third, the primary purpose of bureaucratic reform should be to ensure that NATO maintains its role as a “force provider”. As the U.S. armed services have their primary mission to provide trained and ready forces to U.S. commanders, and now U.S. Joint Forces Command has the responsibility to ensure that soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are competent to conduct multi-service joint operations, NATO will be the principle vehicle through which Americans learn the evolving craft of combined or coalition warfare and stability operations.
Fourth, and intimately tied to its continuing relevance as a force provider, NATO must be the agent for defence reform in Europe. The process of military transformation promises to make the capabilities gap between U.S. (and UK) forces on the one hand, and even the very modern militaries of France and Germany, on the other, all but unbridgeable. New information technologies, in particular, are creating new concepts of military operations and demanding novel organisations. The simple fact is that, as demonstrated in Operation Desert Storm, the Balkans and Afghanistan, and as a matter of strict combat capacity, the United States finds it easier to act unilaterally when the missions are more challenging.
Fifth, NATO must realign itself by shifting to the south and to the east in a strategic movement to connect with the security problems of the Middle East. Forces must be based in new locations. Training must be done in new ways and in new venues. Exercises must be conducted with new partners. And symbolically but importantly, NATO would do well to move its headquarters from Brussels, possibly by expanding the Alliance's Southern Command in Naples, Italy, or by relocating entirely, perhaps to Istanbul, Turkey.
These proposals are not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Though they are ambitious, they are hardly beyond the scope of what is possible for the Alliance. Indeed, the post-Cold-War years have already seen a remarkable transformation. The narrow understanding of the Alliance as an anti-Soviet coalition has been confounded repeatedly. Many analysts warned of the dangers of including a reunified Germany and then expanding NATO to include former members of the Warsaw Pact because of the potential impact on relations with Russia. Now former Soviet republics have been invited to join the Alliance. The NATO-Russia Council brings Moscow itself into the inner chambers of Western security policy-making. And, if anything, the relationship with Russia will prove an additional force for European engagement in stabilising the Islamic world, where Russia has legitimate security concerns.
Some in Europe think that a “small” NATO--not small in size but in ambition--is all the Alliance is capable of. This is a vision of an organisation devoted entirely to providing security within Europe. But beyond the Balkans and a few other modest scenarios, this is a recipe for continued military decline. There is no reason for any member state to build a modern or transformed force to carry out such missions.
At the other end of the ambition spectrum, other analysts think the only way to keep the Alliance alive and vital is to embrace the new missions in the Middle East and elsewhere without reservation. “NATO must go out of area or it will go out of business,” it has often been said, meaning that the only validation of the Alliance is by a full, “Article 5” embrace of the U.S. project to reshape the politics of the Islamic world. But with deep geopolitical divisions among major Alliance members, this is a recipe for ever greater confrontation over policy, further restricting the ability of the United States and its willing European partners to act in crises.
The utility of NATO as a war-fighting alliance will be further diminished as it expands. Larger coalitions are always more cumbersome when it comes to making decisions in wartime. Therefore, even as NATO struggles to reshape its decision-making processes to make it a more nimble coalition capable of tackling the security challenges of our time, its immediate military future is in its role as a force provider. This is a fundamental change in how the United States and other members view NATO. The Alliance's “Atlantic community” is now not one defined by geographic boundaries but by the propensity to structure, train and equip forces capable of interoperability with U.S. forces and a willingness to join an institutional “coalition of the willing”.
Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defence and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Rethinking NATO
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Friday, August 1, 2003
ARTICLES
NATO Review
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
The Iraq war proved short with a minimum of casualties among both Coalition forces and the Iraqi people. Despite this, it inflicted great damage on the institutions that helped stabilise the world during the Cold War, including history's most successful alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The diplomacy that preceded the Iraq war and the campaign itself revealed fundamental differences of political views among the Alliance’s pillars, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. It also exposed deep differences among the European powers and between the larger and smaller European countries. These differences will not soon be mended.
The Iraq war also revealed the unprecedented military power of combined forces trained to NATO standards. The battlefield performance of Coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom was nothing less than stunning. They operated almost seamlessly in combat and transitioned easily to post-combat stabilisation operations. Indeed, both sorts of operations were conducted simultaneously. Smaller Coalition contingents, such as those from Australia and Poland, were slotted into important supporting roles without the mishaps that historically have plagued combined military operations. But for years of training within NATO, the Coalition could never have succeeded in defeating the Iraqi army and removing the regime of Saddam Hussein in less than one month.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Washington is beginning to understand that even the world’s sole super power needs help. Institutionalising the current Pax Americana – or whatever name best suits today's international order – is unavoidable. Guaranteeing the global order “unilaterally” is not a realistic option. The question, for Americans, therefore, is whether and how to adapt NATO to fit new strategic circumstances.
The question before the Alliance is whether the current geopolitical differences will destroy NATO’s abilities to provide the military basis for future coalition operations. There is a multitude of possible answers. The political differences may yet be solved, or at least be better managed. The value of the Alliance as a “force provider” may be so great that the political differences can be ignored. Conversely, the growing capabilities gap between the United States and the rest of the Alliance may exacerbate the political differences.
The answer will, in large measure, depend upon U.S. policies and programmes in the next few years. Change is coming, and the United States and its closest partners within the Alliance will either lead the reforms that enable NATO to adapt to the “post-Cold-War” world to become a partner in the Pax Americana, or the Alliance will wither. If Washington allows NATO to wither, it will have to create some other institutional basis to underpin future “coalitions of the willing”. No matter how good the U.S. military has become, it remains a small force. Indeed, one consequence of the “capabilities gap” is that the burden of securing today's liberal international order falls more heavily on the United States, increasing the likelihood of military overstretch.
Divisive Issues
Mending the geopolitical rift between the United States and “Europe”--meaning primarily France, Germany and continental public opinion--will take time. Two issues divide us: how to deal with the problems of the Islamic world and the circumstances in which military force can appropriately be used.
Many Europeans, like some Americans, have had trouble keeping up with the change in U.S. policy and strategy since 11 September 2001. Since then, President George W. Bush has articulated a new sense of national mission, that has gradually matured into a formal “Bush Doctrine”, best regarded as a renewed sense of purpose for U.S. power in the world. After a decade of drift and uncertainty, the Bush Doctrine represents a fundamental fork in the road of U.S. policy and it will not be easy for future presidents to backtrack. The United States is now committed to an active form of global leadership and has embarked on an ambitious endeavour to remake the political order in the Middle East, that will be impossible to renounce without conceding defeat.
Many Europeans are still far from sharing this emerging U.S. sense of mission or from formulating any European corollary to the Bush Doctrine. The pace of events--or perhaps more accurately, the pace of change in international politics--has at times seemed dizzying to European leaders and general publics alike. The resolution and clarity of President Bush’s leadership, so comforting to Americans in a time of crisis, is disturbing to many Europeans.
Moreover, the ease of the two military victories in Afghanistan--the “graveyard of empires”--and in Iraq has been yet another reminder of the strengths of U.S. military forces and, by contrast, the relative weaknesses of European arms. “America”, wrote British scholar Timothy Garton Ash after Afghanistan, “has too much power for anyone’s good, including its own.” In Iraq and in the Middle East, observed François Heisbourg, perhaps France’s foremost expert in security matters and generally sympathetic to U.S. concerns, “The French, like most Europeans, don’t want to give carte blanche to the Americans.”
The connections made by President Bush--and accepted by most Americans--between terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and political turmoil in the Islamic world are lost on many Europeans. For France, Germany and many other Western European states, terrorism is a crime more than an act of war, and stability in the Islamic world is to be found in nuanced diplomacy and support for the current crop of Arab governments, despite their repressive nature. Saddam Hussein’s regime was to be contained, not removed from power.
Many Europeans fear that if they take an active role in realising the Bush Doctrine’s prescription to bolster democracy in the Middle East, they will become more frequent targets for terrorists, their carefully cultivated relations with Islamic leaders will degenerate and their economic interests and strategies will be placed at risk. Nevertheless, Europeans are beginning to understand that policies aimed at maintaining stability by supporting authoritarian leaders in the region have essentially collapsed. Certainly, they have not been spared inclusion on Osama bin Laden’s “enemies' list”.
The future of the transatlantic strategic partnership is an open question. In broad terms, and even after the war in Iraq, many Europeans still inhabit a “pre-9/11” and “pre-Bush Doctrine” world. They trust that international institutions or legal arrangements can sustain a peaceful, prosperous and liberal world--a view that was until recently also widespread among Americans. And they remain reluctant to use military force, particularly in pursuit of expansive goals like those now being pursued by the United States in the Middle East.
Atlantic Mission
Yet it is also true that, for the United Kingdom and others, especially the recently oppressed peoples of “new Europe”, the United States' new mission is an Atlantic mission. They wish to keep the United States fully engaged in Europe. They are wary of a European Union dominated by France and Germany. And they are increasingly willing to be engaged elsewhere in the world together with the United States. Now enjoying their first taste of the U.S.-led liberal international order, the Pax Americana, they have no interest in creating a European “counterweight”.
From a strictly U.S. point of view, even this fractured geopolitical basis is enough to make NATO a useful tool of U.S. statecraft and strategy, as long as the Alliance can reform its military structures to overcome Europe's military weakness.
Although Europe's aggregate economy rivals that of the United States, European spending on military power is less than half that of the United States. Moreover, though that amount is still a lot of money--approximately 140 billion Euros--it buys little of value to the new power-projection missions of greatest interest to the United States. Nor has there been any organised effort to transform European militaries for these new missions or to exploit the technologies that are at the heart of the revolution in military affairs. “Mighty Europe”, observed Lord Robertson, "remains a military pygmy.”
In combination, these many smaller relative weaknesses combine to create an enormous gap in capabilities between U.S. forces and even the most modern other NATO forces. This is a problem that has its roots in the very structure of the Alliance, in NATO’s military response to the Cold War and the threat of Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Put simply, for the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, NATO was a power-projection mission, while for continental Europe and Germany in particular, it was an issue of homeland defence. The military requirement for the United States was to defend West Germany at its eastern border, 3,500 miles from Washington, to deploy “10 divisions in 10 days” and defend the north Atlantic sea lines of communication--even while responding globally to other Soviet probes. The military requirement for West Germany was to defend West Germany.
This inherent structural problem was exacerbated during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Reagan Administration began to implement plans for a serious conventional defence of NATO and to rely less on nuclear deterrence. The Reagan build-up, designed not only to fight a strictly defensive war but also to project naval power directly against the Soviet Union and to develop air and land forces capable of counter-attacking deep into Warsaw Pact territory, created not only a “strategic capabilities gap” between U.S. and other NATO forces but also a “tactical and operational capabilities gap”. The military history of the past decade--from the first Gulf War through the Balkan interventions and Afghanistan to Operation Iraqi Freedom--is in part the story of how great these gaps have become.
The geopolitical differences and the wide and widening gap in military capabilities between NATO forces have created an undeniable crack in the core of what was, through five decades of Cold War, a central pillar of U.S. national security strategy. Lord Robertson, who admits to being a “paid optimist and an advocate for NATO”, argued in February that the Iraq war was not “a make-or-break crisis” for the Alliance, rightly recalling the past debates over “Suez, Vietnam, the INF deployments or the early days of Bosnia". But the question is now fundamentally different. What possible role can NATO play in addressing what President Bush has defined as America’s new strategic priority: the roll-back of radical Islam?
Way Forward
Of late, some analysts have described the Alliance disparagingly as a “talking shop”. Ironically, in an era of great geopolitical uncertainty and disagreement, there has never been a greater need for a transatlantic talking shop. If France and Germany are to accept the worldview of the Bush Doctrine; if there is to be a positive role in international security affairs for the European Union; if the newly liberated states of Central and Eastern Europe are to be integrated permanently into the West; and if the Atlantic community is to be seen as a set of principles rather than a finite geographic area, then there are profound reasons to continue talking.
Second, NATO must continue to reform its bureaucratic processes. The structures that served the Alliance well in the past are now liabilities to change. Achieving consensus within an expanding coalition in particular is proving extremely difficult.
Third, the primary purpose of bureaucratic reform should be to ensure that NATO maintains its role as a “force provider”. As the U.S. armed services have their primary mission to provide trained and ready forces to U.S. commanders, and now U.S. Joint Forces Command has the responsibility to ensure that soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are competent to conduct multi-service joint operations, NATO will be the principle vehicle through which Americans learn the evolving craft of combined or coalition warfare and stability operations.
Fourth, and intimately tied to its continuing relevance as a force provider, NATO must be the agent for defence reform in Europe. The process of military transformation promises to make the capabilities gap between U.S. (and UK) forces on the one hand, and even the very modern militaries of France and Germany, on the other, all but unbridgeable. New information technologies, in particular, are creating new concepts of military operations and demanding novel organisations. The simple fact is that, as demonstrated in Operation Desert Storm, the Balkans and Afghanistan, and as a matter of strict combat capacity, the United States finds it easier to act unilaterally when the missions are more challenging.
Fifth, NATO must realign itself by shifting to the south and to the east in a strategic movement to connect with the security problems of the Middle East. Forces must be based in new locations. Training must be done in new ways and in new venues. Exercises must be conducted with new partners. And symbolically but importantly, NATO would do well to move its headquarters from Brussels, possibly by expanding the Alliance's Southern Command in Naples, Italy, or by relocating entirely, perhaps to Istanbul, Turkey.
These proposals are not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Though they are ambitious, they are hardly beyond the scope of what is possible for the Alliance. Indeed, the post-Cold-War years have already seen a remarkable transformation. The narrow understanding of the Alliance as an anti-Soviet coalition has been confounded repeatedly. Many analysts warned of the dangers of including a reunified Germany and then expanding NATO to include former members of the Warsaw Pact because of the potential impact on relations with Russia. Now former Soviet republics have been invited to join the Alliance. The NATO-Russia Council brings Moscow itself into the inner chambers of Western security policy-making. And, if anything, the relationship with Russia will prove an additional force for European engagement in stabilising the Islamic world, where Russia has legitimate security concerns.
Some in Europe think that a “small” NATO--not small in size but in ambition--is all the Alliance is capable of. This is a vision of an organisation devoted entirely to providing security within Europe. But beyond the Balkans and a few other modest scenarios, this is a recipe for continued military decline. There is no reason for any member state to build a modern or transformed force to carry out such missions.
At the other end of the ambition spectrum, other analysts think the only way to keep the Alliance alive and vital is to embrace the new missions in the Middle East and elsewhere without reservation. “NATO must go out of area or it will go out of business,” it has often been said, meaning that the only validation of the Alliance is by a full, “Article 5” embrace of the U.S. project to reshape the politics of the Islamic world. But with deep geopolitical divisions among major Alliance members, this is a recipe for ever greater confrontation over policy, further restricting the ability of the United States and its willing European partners to act in crises.
The utility of NATO as a war-fighting alliance will be further diminished as it expands. Larger coalitions are always more cumbersome when it comes to making decisions in wartime. Therefore, even as NATO struggles to reshape its decision-making processes to make it a more nimble coalition capable of tackling the security challenges of our time, its immediate military future is in its role as a force provider. This is a fundamental change in how the United States and other members view NATO. The Alliance's “Atlantic community” is now not one defined by geographic boundaries but by the propensity to structure, train and equip forces capable of interoperability with U.S. forces and a willingness to join an institutional “coalition of the willing”.
Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defence and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Un-American Activities
Back in the Safe Zone
By David IgnatiusFriday, August 1, 2003; Page A19
Members of Congress were queuing up this week to express their indignation at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's proposal to create a futures market where investors could bet on the likelihood of terrorist attacks.
"There is something very sick about it," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). She demanded that Congress "end the careers of whoever it was who thought that up." Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who made headlines when he and another senator disclosed the program Monday, called it "a runaway horse that needs to be reined in." Even one of the Pentagon's pals, Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, was running for cover, agreeing that the plan was "a very significant mistake."
By Tuesday Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had officially disowned the idea. "I share your shock at this kind of program," he told Congress. "We'll find out about it, but it is being terminated."
And then yesterday the official who oversaw the program, former Reagan-era national security adviser John Poindexter -- a man who seems to have one of those indelible "official bad person'" signs attached to him because of his role in the Iran-contra affair -- indicated he would resign.
And with that, Washington's gods of conformity will be appeased. Purged of this unconventional, off-the-wall idea, the capital can return to its normal play-it-safe rules.
These events, alas, embody a fundamental problem with Washington, though not the one Congress was so indignant about. The nation's capital operates as a zero-defect culture, one where failure is impermissible. In that respect, it is the opposite of what's creative and dynamic about America. The second-guessers and headline-hunters who populate Congress lack the essential American willingness to take risks, to propose outlandish ideas and, on occasion, to fail.
I'm not necessarily arguing for the futures market in terrorism. It would have the same problem as any unregulated market: A trader with inside information could skew outcomes -- place a bet on assassination, say, and then help others do it. And it does sound callous to let people bet directly on the possibility that a regime could be overthrown or a leader killed -- even though markets are implicitly doing that all the time.
The point is that for all its defects, the political futures market was an interesting, unconventional idea for capturing information that's "on the street" -- the subtle tips and clues that ordinary people know but that are often lost to our intelligence agencies. My response to critics would be: Okay, if this approach is wrong, what's a better idea? But I doubt any brave soul will be funding a similar project soon.
As it happens, on the day the futures-market flap broke, I was attending a conference sponsored by DARPA, the very agency that launched this insidious assault on conventional thinking. The topic of the conference was "Life Sciences, Complexity and National Security," or in more blunt terms, the intersection of biology and warfare.
The point of the meeting was to think, provoke and discuss -- in the hope of making the nation safer. To get some outside ferment, DARPA invited a dozen or so scientists, some business consultants, two journalists and a novelist. We all came away astonished by the boldness and creativity of some of the research DARPA is funding with America's tax dollars.
Here are some of the projects DARPA is sponsoring: teaching a rat how to get water just by thinking about it; creating an electronic substitute for the part of the brain known as the hippocampus, so that we might eventually be able to download memories or complex instructions, or to communicate brain to brain; building artificial organs and prostheses that could greatly increase human performance; making pills that could alter soldiers' metabolisms so they could go days without food, sleep or water.
And there's more in DARPA's magic box: bio-inspired robots, modeled partly on cockroaches, that have supple, flexible legs and can scramble over rocky terrain and up stairs; honeybees that can detect explosives; and systems for remotely monitoring mental states through MRIs and other screening technology, so that authorities might someday detect the intent to hijack an airliner the way a metal detector can now find a gun.
Are some of those ideas off the wall? You bet. Will they all work out? Of course not. Do some of them pose ethical or legal dilemmas? Probably. But is the country better off because DARPA is willing to take risks and fund unconventional research? Absolutely.
It's impossible in the early stages of research to know which are the good ideas and which are the clinkers. But the notion that people who propose unconventional ideas should be punished is . . . well, it's downright un-American.
Back in the Safe Zone
By David IgnatiusFriday, August 1, 2003; Page A19
Members of Congress were queuing up this week to express their indignation at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's proposal to create a futures market where investors could bet on the likelihood of terrorist attacks.
"There is something very sick about it," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). She demanded that Congress "end the careers of whoever it was who thought that up." Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who made headlines when he and another senator disclosed the program Monday, called it "a runaway horse that needs to be reined in." Even one of the Pentagon's pals, Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, was running for cover, agreeing that the plan was "a very significant mistake."
By Tuesday Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had officially disowned the idea. "I share your shock at this kind of program," he told Congress. "We'll find out about it, but it is being terminated."
And then yesterday the official who oversaw the program, former Reagan-era national security adviser John Poindexter -- a man who seems to have one of those indelible "official bad person'" signs attached to him because of his role in the Iran-contra affair -- indicated he would resign.
And with that, Washington's gods of conformity will be appeased. Purged of this unconventional, off-the-wall idea, the capital can return to its normal play-it-safe rules.
These events, alas, embody a fundamental problem with Washington, though not the one Congress was so indignant about. The nation's capital operates as a zero-defect culture, one where failure is impermissible. In that respect, it is the opposite of what's creative and dynamic about America. The second-guessers and headline-hunters who populate Congress lack the essential American willingness to take risks, to propose outlandish ideas and, on occasion, to fail.
I'm not necessarily arguing for the futures market in terrorism. It would have the same problem as any unregulated market: A trader with inside information could skew outcomes -- place a bet on assassination, say, and then help others do it. And it does sound callous to let people bet directly on the possibility that a regime could be overthrown or a leader killed -- even though markets are implicitly doing that all the time.
The point is that for all its defects, the political futures market was an interesting, unconventional idea for capturing information that's "on the street" -- the subtle tips and clues that ordinary people know but that are often lost to our intelligence agencies. My response to critics would be: Okay, if this approach is wrong, what's a better idea? But I doubt any brave soul will be funding a similar project soon.
As it happens, on the day the futures-market flap broke, I was attending a conference sponsored by DARPA, the very agency that launched this insidious assault on conventional thinking. The topic of the conference was "Life Sciences, Complexity and National Security," or in more blunt terms, the intersection of biology and warfare.
The point of the meeting was to think, provoke and discuss -- in the hope of making the nation safer. To get some outside ferment, DARPA invited a dozen or so scientists, some business consultants, two journalists and a novelist. We all came away astonished by the boldness and creativity of some of the research DARPA is funding with America's tax dollars.
Here are some of the projects DARPA is sponsoring: teaching a rat how to get water just by thinking about it; creating an electronic substitute for the part of the brain known as the hippocampus, so that we might eventually be able to download memories or complex instructions, or to communicate brain to brain; building artificial organs and prostheses that could greatly increase human performance; making pills that could alter soldiers' metabolisms so they could go days without food, sleep or water.
And there's more in DARPA's magic box: bio-inspired robots, modeled partly on cockroaches, that have supple, flexible legs and can scramble over rocky terrain and up stairs; honeybees that can detect explosives; and systems for remotely monitoring mental states through MRIs and other screening technology, so that authorities might someday detect the intent to hijack an airliner the way a metal detector can now find a gun.
Are some of those ideas off the wall? You bet. Will they all work out? Of course not. Do some of them pose ethical or legal dilemmas? Probably. But is the country better off because DARPA is willing to take risks and fund unconventional research? Absolutely.
It's impossible in the early stages of research to know which are the good ideas and which are the clinkers. But the notion that people who propose unconventional ideas should be punished is . . . well, it's downright un-American.
From the WSJ on the state of the Dems:
The Shrinking Democrats
Voters don't trust the party on taxes and security.
Friday, August 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT Karl Rove often gets credit for being smart, but it doesn't hurt that President Bush's chief political strategist is lucky. His latest good fortune is the battle between Howard Dean and John Kerry over how much to raise taxes. The scrap is a microcosm of the current Democratic problem.
Consistent with his punch-in-the-gut campaign style, Mr. Dean wants the full monty. In the name of his Vermont "fiscal conservatism," the Democrats' new Presidential front-runner proposes to repeal all three of the Bush tax cuts, right down to the last penny for every taxpayer. In addition, as he recently told NBC's Tim Russert, he'd raise the income threshold on the payroll tax, another huge tax increase on anyone making more than $87,000 a year.
Mr. Kerry, who has lost his New Hampshire lead to Mr. Dean, says this is going too far. "Real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class," he charges, explaining that he'd preserve the Bush tax credits for children and marriage penalty relief. But he'd still repeal the rest of the Bush tax cuts, including the rate cuts on income, dividends and capital gains. (Apparently the Massachusetts Senator thinks no one in the middle class owns stock.) Mr. Dean fired back that this is a sign that Mr. Kerry lacks the courage of Democratic "principles."
Mr. Rove must be wondering what he did to deserve this. In pursuit of Mr. Dean, every Democratic Presidential candidate is now proposing some kind of tax increase, from the humongous (in Mr. Dean's case, $2 trillion over 10 years) to merely the huge. Not being masochists, they must believe this will help them retake the White House. But we'd suggest they all study Mark Penn's latest analysis on the Democrats' shrinking political appeal.
Mr. Penn is the pollster most famous for fashioning Bill Clinton's New Democratic political themes. This week he released a survey, sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council, that has ominous news for his party going into an election year. Though he found that Mr. Bush is vulnerable, "the Democratic Party is currently in its weakest position since the dawn of the New Deal." The share of voters who identify themselves as Democrats is down to 33%, lower even than in the GOP landslide year of 1994 and down from 45% as recently as 1968.
Whatever happened to the ballyhooed "emerging Democratic majority?" Mr. Penn finds that it is vanishing along with support for Democrats in the suburbs and among white men and women raising children. "Today only 22% of white men identify themselves as Democrats," he writes, compared with 37% for Republicans.
Among white men age 25 to 49, only 41.5% even have a favorable view of Democrats. More than 70% of that group view the GOP favorably. As for income groups, the nearby table shows how the heart of the tax-paying middle class is abandoning the Democrats.
Mr. Penn attributes this mass defection to "current perceptions that Democrats stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal, and are beholden to special interest groups." They also suffer from what he calls a "security gap," or the "wide chasm" between the parties on keeping America safe after 9/11. "Today, Democrats must be strong on security to be heard on the economy," the strategist writes.
Alas, these days Mr. Penn is a prophet without followers. Democratic candidates are all chasing Mr. Dean's poll numbers in the opposite direction, competing to see who can attack Mr. Bush most aggressively on the war and for his tax cuts.
On taxes, in particular, they are listening too much to the Beltway pundit class. These sages are prodding the Democrats to stand proudly for repealing the Bush tax cuts, on grounds that they benefit mainly "the rich" and have caused the budget deficit. Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who urged Al Gore to assail business in 2000, is also promoting a Democratic tax increase.
These are the same folks who applauded Walter Mondale back in 1984 when he claimed to be brave in proposing to repeal the Reagan tax cuts. Fritz carried Minnesota and the District of Columbia. They look fondly back on 1992, when Bill Clinton won while proposing a tax increase on "the rich." But Mr. Clinton also ran on a tax cut for the middle class, and against a George H. W. Bush who had given the issue away by raising taxes himself. This President Bush has no such credibility problem, and with the economy now beginning to accelerate he'll be able to give the tax cuts much of the credit.
The tax issue is only one of the many signs that the Democratic Party is veering back to the left. Mr. Dean's rise is another, but the trend also shows up in the relentless partisan opposition to the Bush agenda in Congress. Democrats seem to have concluded from their 2002 defeat that their mistake was that they weren't obstructionist enough.
This is all great news for Republicans, though we'd argue not for the country. On the present Democratic course the GOP may have a chance to finally become a governing majority in 2004 and beyond, but sooner or later the Democrats will get their turn again. We'd much prefer a center-left party in the mold of Britain's Tony Blair, one that is tough against terror and recognizes that private markets create wealth. It isn't healthy in our democracy to have a major political party run off the rails.
The Shrinking Democrats
Voters don't trust the party on taxes and security.
Friday, August 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT Karl Rove often gets credit for being smart, but it doesn't hurt that President Bush's chief political strategist is lucky. His latest good fortune is the battle between Howard Dean and John Kerry over how much to raise taxes. The scrap is a microcosm of the current Democratic problem.
Consistent with his punch-in-the-gut campaign style, Mr. Dean wants the full monty. In the name of his Vermont "fiscal conservatism," the Democrats' new Presidential front-runner proposes to repeal all three of the Bush tax cuts, right down to the last penny for every taxpayer. In addition, as he recently told NBC's Tim Russert, he'd raise the income threshold on the payroll tax, another huge tax increase on anyone making more than $87,000 a year.
Mr. Kerry, who has lost his New Hampshire lead to Mr. Dean, says this is going too far. "Real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class," he charges, explaining that he'd preserve the Bush tax credits for children and marriage penalty relief. But he'd still repeal the rest of the Bush tax cuts, including the rate cuts on income, dividends and capital gains. (Apparently the Massachusetts Senator thinks no one in the middle class owns stock.) Mr. Dean fired back that this is a sign that Mr. Kerry lacks the courage of Democratic "principles."
Mr. Rove must be wondering what he did to deserve this. In pursuit of Mr. Dean, every Democratic Presidential candidate is now proposing some kind of tax increase, from the humongous (in Mr. Dean's case, $2 trillion over 10 years) to merely the huge. Not being masochists, they must believe this will help them retake the White House. But we'd suggest they all study Mark Penn's latest analysis on the Democrats' shrinking political appeal.
Mr. Penn is the pollster most famous for fashioning Bill Clinton's New Democratic political themes. This week he released a survey, sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council, that has ominous news for his party going into an election year. Though he found that Mr. Bush is vulnerable, "the Democratic Party is currently in its weakest position since the dawn of the New Deal." The share of voters who identify themselves as Democrats is down to 33%, lower even than in the GOP landslide year of 1994 and down from 45% as recently as 1968.
Whatever happened to the ballyhooed "emerging Democratic majority?" Mr. Penn finds that it is vanishing along with support for Democrats in the suburbs and among white men and women raising children. "Today only 22% of white men identify themselves as Democrats," he writes, compared with 37% for Republicans.
Among white men age 25 to 49, only 41.5% even have a favorable view of Democrats. More than 70% of that group view the GOP favorably. As for income groups, the nearby table shows how the heart of the tax-paying middle class is abandoning the Democrats.
Mr. Penn attributes this mass defection to "current perceptions that Democrats stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal, and are beholden to special interest groups." They also suffer from what he calls a "security gap," or the "wide chasm" between the parties on keeping America safe after 9/11. "Today, Democrats must be strong on security to be heard on the economy," the strategist writes.
Alas, these days Mr. Penn is a prophet without followers. Democratic candidates are all chasing Mr. Dean's poll numbers in the opposite direction, competing to see who can attack Mr. Bush most aggressively on the war and for his tax cuts.
On taxes, in particular, they are listening too much to the Beltway pundit class. These sages are prodding the Democrats to stand proudly for repealing the Bush tax cuts, on grounds that they benefit mainly "the rich" and have caused the budget deficit. Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who urged Al Gore to assail business in 2000, is also promoting a Democratic tax increase.
These are the same folks who applauded Walter Mondale back in 1984 when he claimed to be brave in proposing to repeal the Reagan tax cuts. Fritz carried Minnesota and the District of Columbia. They look fondly back on 1992, when Bill Clinton won while proposing a tax increase on "the rich." But Mr. Clinton also ran on a tax cut for the middle class, and against a George H. W. Bush who had given the issue away by raising taxes himself. This President Bush has no such credibility problem, and with the economy now beginning to accelerate he'll be able to give the tax cuts much of the credit.
The tax issue is only one of the many signs that the Democratic Party is veering back to the left. Mr. Dean's rise is another, but the trend also shows up in the relentless partisan opposition to the Bush agenda in Congress. Democrats seem to have concluded from their 2002 defeat that their mistake was that they weren't obstructionist enough.
This is all great news for Republicans, though we'd argue not for the country. On the present Democratic course the GOP may have a chance to finally become a governing majority in 2004 and beyond, but sooner or later the Democrats will get their turn again. We'd much prefer a center-left party in the mold of Britain's Tony Blair, one that is tough against terror and recognizes that private markets create wealth. It isn't healthy in our democracy to have a major political party run off the rails.
UUPPPSSS! A chilling article form the Washington Post :
For an Iraqi Family, 'No Other Choice'
Father and Brother Are Forced by Villagers to Execute Suspected U.S. Informant
By Anthony ShadidWashington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 1, 2003; Page A01
THULUYA, Iraq -- Two hours before the dawn call to prayer, in a village still shrouded in silence, Sabah Kerbul's executioners arrived. His father carried an AK-47 assault rifle, as did his brother. And with barely a word spoken, they led the man accused by the village of working as an informer for the Americans behind a house girded with fig trees, vineyards and orange groves.
His father raised his rifle and aimed it at his oldest son.
"Sabah didn't try to escape," said Abdullah Ali, a village resident. "He knew he was facing his fate."
The story of what followed is based on interviews with Kerbul's father, brother and five other villagers who said witnesses told them about the events. One shot tore through Kerbul's leg, another his torso, the villagers said. He fell to the ground still breathing, his blood soaking the parched land near the banks of the Tigris River, they said. His father could go no further, and according to some accounts, he collapsed. His other son then fired three times, the villagers said, at least once at his brother's head.
Kerbul, a tall, husky 28-year-old, died.
"It wasn't an easy thing to kill him," his brother Salah said.
In his simple home of cement and cinder blocks, the father, Salem, nervously thumbed black prayer beads this week as he recalled a warning from village residents earlier this month. He insisted his son was not an informer, but he said his protests meant little to a village seething with anger. He recalled their threat was clear: Either he kill his son, or villagers would resort to tribal justice and kill the rest of his family in retaliation for Kerbul's role in a U.S. military operation in the village in June, in which four people were killed.
"I have the heart of a father, and he's my son," Salem said. "Even the prophet Abraham didn't have to kill his son." He dragged on a cigarette. His eyes glimmered with the faint trace of tears. "There was no other choice," he whispered.
In the simmering guerrilla war fought along the Tigris, U.S. officials say they have received a deluge of tips from informants, the intelligence growing since U.S. forces killed former president Saddam Hussein's two sons last week. Acting on the intelligence, soldiers have uncovered surface-to-air missiles, 45,000 sticks of dynamite and caches of small arms and explosives. They have shut down safe houses that sheltered senior Baath Party operatives in the Sunni Muslim region north of Baghdad and ferreted out lieutenants and bodyguards of the fallen Iraqi president, who has eluded a relentless, four-month manhunt.
But a shadowy response has followed, a less-publicized but no less deadly theater of violence in the U.S. occupation. U.S. officials and residents say informers have been killed, shot and attacked with grenades. U.S. officials say they have no numbers on deaths, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the campaign is widespread in a region long a source of support for Hussein's government. The U.S. officials declined to discuss specifics about individual informers and would not say whether Kerbul was one.
Lists of informers have circulated in at least two northern cities, and remnants of the Saddam's Fedayeen militia have vowed in videotaped warnings broadcast on Arab satellite networks that they will fight informers "before we fight the Americans."
No Protection From U.S. Troops
The surge of informants has also provoked anger in Sunni Muslim towns along the Tigris. Some residents say informants are drawn to U.S. field commanders' rewards of as little as $20 and as much as $2,500. The informants are occasionally interested in settling their own feuds and grudges with the help of soldiers, the residents said. Others contend that the informers are exploiting access with U.S. officials to emerge as power-brokers in the vacuum that has followed the fall of the government on April 9.
"Time's running out. Something will happen to them very soon," said Maher Saab, 30, in the village of Saniya.
The U.S. military says bluntly it does not have the means to safeguard those providing intelligence. "We're not providing any kind of protection at the local level," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. military commander in Iraq.
In Saniya, where slogans still declare "Long Live Saddam Hussein," Abdel-Hamid Ahmed sat in a well-to-do house along dirt roads and arid fields of rolling hills where sheep graze. He proudly described himself as the first person to greet the invading Americans and ticked off the help he has offered since they arrived, most notably information on saboteurs of electricity wires.
Since then, he said, he has met U.S. soldiers at his house at least once a week, usually for no more than 15 minutes.
"I'm not an informer, but I help explain to the Americans the situation here," he said in a well-kept living room, adorned with a new Toshiba television, a stereo, karaoke machine and 15 vases of plastic flowers.
Ahmed, who works in the mayor's office, was on two lists of informers circulated in the village and in the nearby city of Baiji, 120 miles northwest of Baghdad. Under the heading, "In the name of God, the most merciful and compassionate," each list had about 20 names, and, over the past month, the leaflets were left before dawn on doorsteps and utility posts. On the first list, he was ranked 10th; on the second, he said, he was fourth. He said he told the Americans about two men who distributed the list, and they were arrested.
In the street, some people have heckled him as an agent -- "a grave word," he said. He has not been physically threatened, but a grenade was thrown at another person on the list, Kamil Hatroush, although neither he nor his family was hurt. Ahmed said he carries only a 9mm pistol, eschewing the almost standard AK-47s wielded by most Iraqis in the countryside.
"I'm not scared," Ahmed said, flicking his hand lazily and insisting that only a minority resent those working with the Americans. "If someone wants to kill you, why would they give you a warning first? They would just kill you right away."
Ahmed was kicked out of Baghdad's National Security College in 1983, the training ground for the government's sprawling apparatus of intelligence services. He said the disappointment led him to alcoholism, then part-time work, most recently at the mayor's office, where he earned the equivalent of about $2 a month.
"If the Americans offered me a job in security, I would work with them," he said. "Every person has to plan for the future."
U.S. military officials attribute most of their tips to good will, either out of an informant's desire to eliminate the vestiges of Hussein's rule that are unpopular even in the Sunni Muslim-dominated north, or to end attacks that have unsettled a region still reeling from the government's fall. Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, which is based in Hussein's home town of Tikrit, said only a "very small percentage receive money" and that the U.S. military vets intelligence before acting on it. Ahmed denied seeking money, saying he cooperates for the good of his town.
In Hussein's government, informers were encouraged, paid and protected by the intelligence services, a crucial but despised means of control in 35 years of Baath Party rule. Some residents contend today that at least some people in the new batch of informers -- those willing to defy mounting threats -- have charged protection fees or sold their services as perceived intermediaries with U.S. forces.
Outside Ahmed's house, a group of men sat in a battered white Toyota, as relatives sought an audience with Ahmed for help in getting back a car that was seized by the Americans.
Over the weekend, the family of five men arrested by U.S. forces near their base in Baiji said they gave Ahmed a sheep, worth about $30, to help secure the men's release. He denied it.
In Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad, Abdel-Razzaq Shakr, the brother of the town's mayor, was on another list distributed in the town two weeks ago, with at least six names of suspected informers. Residents said people in the town had gone to Shakr for help with U.S. forces in getting their guns back and to deflect suspicion from friends and relatives.
Shakr acknowledged providing the Americans information on Baathists, but he denied taking money from residents.
"I haven't taken even a cent," said Shakr, 45, who is unemployed. "On the contrary, I want to leave a mark on our town so that our children will thank their fathers for what they did."
A grenade was thrown at his house on July 18. It landed in the courtyard near a tangerine tree, shattering windows but hurting no one. Another person on the list, Mustafa Sadeq Abboudi, was shot in the arm with an AK-47. Shakr said he has a pistol and a rifle, but his brother, Mayor Mahmoud Shakr, has urged him not to seek help from U.S. forces.
"The Americans cannot offer protection," the mayor said. "If the Americans stood outside the door, it would only cause more trouble because it would mean he is definitely working with them."
Sitting in a chair and holding a cup of sweet tea, the mayor expressed frustration. Suspicions have become so common that more than 100 Muslim clerics met last week and issued a statement that not all Iraqis working with U.S. forces should be considered informers. "When ever somebody talks to the Americans," he said, shaking his head, "they think he's an agent."
Calls for Revenge
Residents of Thuluya said they had no doubt about Kerbul. After the operation in the village, dubbed Peninsula Strike, a force of 4,000 soldiers rounded up 400 residents and detained them at an air base seven miles north. An informer dressed in desert camouflage with a bag over his head had fingered at least 15 prisoners as they sat under a sweltering sun, their hands bound with plastic. Villagers said they soon recognized his yellow sandals and right thumb, which had been severed above the joint in an accident.
"We started yelling and shouting, 'That's Sabah! That's Sabah!' " said Mohammed Abu Dhua, who was held at the base for seven days and whose brother died of a heart attack during the operation. "We asked his father, 'Why is Sabah doing these things?' "
In the raid, three men and a 15-year-old boy were killed, all believed by villagers to have been innocent. Within days, many focused their ire on Kerbul, who had served a year in prison for impersonating a government official and was believed to have worked as an informer after he was released. Young children in the street recited a rhyme about him: "Masked man, your face is the face of the devil." Calls for revenge -- tempered by the fear of tribal bloodletting getting out of hand -- were heard in many conversations.
Kerbul's family said U.S. forces took him to Tikrit, then three weeks later, he went to stay with relatives across the Tigris in the village of Alim. As soon as word of his release spread, his brother Salah and uncle Suleiman went there to bring him back.
"We sent a message to his family," said Ali, a retired colonel whose brother was among those killed during the operation. "You have to kill your son. If you don't kill him, we will act against your family."
His father appealed, Ali recalled, saying he needed permission from U.S. forces.
"We told him we're not responsible for this," Ali said. "We told him you must kill your son."
Kerbul's body was buried hours after the shooting, his father said, carried to the cemetery in a white Toyota pickup. He said he and Kerbul's brother accompanied the corpse. Salah, his son who fired the fatal shots, said he stayed home.
Neither U.S. military officials in Thuluya nor Tikrit said they were aware of the killing.
"It's justice," said Abu Dhua, sitting at his home near a bend in the Tigris. "In my opinion, he deserves worse than death."
For an Iraqi Family, 'No Other Choice'
Father and Brother Are Forced by Villagers to Execute Suspected U.S. Informant
By Anthony ShadidWashington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 1, 2003; Page A01
THULUYA, Iraq -- Two hours before the dawn call to prayer, in a village still shrouded in silence, Sabah Kerbul's executioners arrived. His father carried an AK-47 assault rifle, as did his brother. And with barely a word spoken, they led the man accused by the village of working as an informer for the Americans behind a house girded with fig trees, vineyards and orange groves.
His father raised his rifle and aimed it at his oldest son.
"Sabah didn't try to escape," said Abdullah Ali, a village resident. "He knew he was facing his fate."
The story of what followed is based on interviews with Kerbul's father, brother and five other villagers who said witnesses told them about the events. One shot tore through Kerbul's leg, another his torso, the villagers said. He fell to the ground still breathing, his blood soaking the parched land near the banks of the Tigris River, they said. His father could go no further, and according to some accounts, he collapsed. His other son then fired three times, the villagers said, at least once at his brother's head.
Kerbul, a tall, husky 28-year-old, died.
"It wasn't an easy thing to kill him," his brother Salah said.
In his simple home of cement and cinder blocks, the father, Salem, nervously thumbed black prayer beads this week as he recalled a warning from village residents earlier this month. He insisted his son was not an informer, but he said his protests meant little to a village seething with anger. He recalled their threat was clear: Either he kill his son, or villagers would resort to tribal justice and kill the rest of his family in retaliation for Kerbul's role in a U.S. military operation in the village in June, in which four people were killed.
"I have the heart of a father, and he's my son," Salem said. "Even the prophet Abraham didn't have to kill his son." He dragged on a cigarette. His eyes glimmered with the faint trace of tears. "There was no other choice," he whispered.
In the simmering guerrilla war fought along the Tigris, U.S. officials say they have received a deluge of tips from informants, the intelligence growing since U.S. forces killed former president Saddam Hussein's two sons last week. Acting on the intelligence, soldiers have uncovered surface-to-air missiles, 45,000 sticks of dynamite and caches of small arms and explosives. They have shut down safe houses that sheltered senior Baath Party operatives in the Sunni Muslim region north of Baghdad and ferreted out lieutenants and bodyguards of the fallen Iraqi president, who has eluded a relentless, four-month manhunt.
But a shadowy response has followed, a less-publicized but no less deadly theater of violence in the U.S. occupation. U.S. officials and residents say informers have been killed, shot and attacked with grenades. U.S. officials say they have no numbers on deaths, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the campaign is widespread in a region long a source of support for Hussein's government. The U.S. officials declined to discuss specifics about individual informers and would not say whether Kerbul was one.
Lists of informers have circulated in at least two northern cities, and remnants of the Saddam's Fedayeen militia have vowed in videotaped warnings broadcast on Arab satellite networks that they will fight informers "before we fight the Americans."
No Protection From U.S. Troops
The surge of informants has also provoked anger in Sunni Muslim towns along the Tigris. Some residents say informants are drawn to U.S. field commanders' rewards of as little as $20 and as much as $2,500. The informants are occasionally interested in settling their own feuds and grudges with the help of soldiers, the residents said. Others contend that the informers are exploiting access with U.S. officials to emerge as power-brokers in the vacuum that has followed the fall of the government on April 9.
"Time's running out. Something will happen to them very soon," said Maher Saab, 30, in the village of Saniya.
The U.S. military says bluntly it does not have the means to safeguard those providing intelligence. "We're not providing any kind of protection at the local level," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. military commander in Iraq.
In Saniya, where slogans still declare "Long Live Saddam Hussein," Abdel-Hamid Ahmed sat in a well-to-do house along dirt roads and arid fields of rolling hills where sheep graze. He proudly described himself as the first person to greet the invading Americans and ticked off the help he has offered since they arrived, most notably information on saboteurs of electricity wires.
Since then, he said, he has met U.S. soldiers at his house at least once a week, usually for no more than 15 minutes.
"I'm not an informer, but I help explain to the Americans the situation here," he said in a well-kept living room, adorned with a new Toshiba television, a stereo, karaoke machine and 15 vases of plastic flowers.
Ahmed, who works in the mayor's office, was on two lists of informers circulated in the village and in the nearby city of Baiji, 120 miles northwest of Baghdad. Under the heading, "In the name of God, the most merciful and compassionate," each list had about 20 names, and, over the past month, the leaflets were left before dawn on doorsteps and utility posts. On the first list, he was ranked 10th; on the second, he said, he was fourth. He said he told the Americans about two men who distributed the list, and they were arrested.
In the street, some people have heckled him as an agent -- "a grave word," he said. He has not been physically threatened, but a grenade was thrown at another person on the list, Kamil Hatroush, although neither he nor his family was hurt. Ahmed said he carries only a 9mm pistol, eschewing the almost standard AK-47s wielded by most Iraqis in the countryside.
"I'm not scared," Ahmed said, flicking his hand lazily and insisting that only a minority resent those working with the Americans. "If someone wants to kill you, why would they give you a warning first? They would just kill you right away."
Ahmed was kicked out of Baghdad's National Security College in 1983, the training ground for the government's sprawling apparatus of intelligence services. He said the disappointment led him to alcoholism, then part-time work, most recently at the mayor's office, where he earned the equivalent of about $2 a month.
"If the Americans offered me a job in security, I would work with them," he said. "Every person has to plan for the future."
U.S. military officials attribute most of their tips to good will, either out of an informant's desire to eliminate the vestiges of Hussein's rule that are unpopular even in the Sunni Muslim-dominated north, or to end attacks that have unsettled a region still reeling from the government's fall. Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, which is based in Hussein's home town of Tikrit, said only a "very small percentage receive money" and that the U.S. military vets intelligence before acting on it. Ahmed denied seeking money, saying he cooperates for the good of his town.
In Hussein's government, informers were encouraged, paid and protected by the intelligence services, a crucial but despised means of control in 35 years of Baath Party rule. Some residents contend today that at least some people in the new batch of informers -- those willing to defy mounting threats -- have charged protection fees or sold their services as perceived intermediaries with U.S. forces.
Outside Ahmed's house, a group of men sat in a battered white Toyota, as relatives sought an audience with Ahmed for help in getting back a car that was seized by the Americans.
Over the weekend, the family of five men arrested by U.S. forces near their base in Baiji said they gave Ahmed a sheep, worth about $30, to help secure the men's release. He denied it.
In Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad, Abdel-Razzaq Shakr, the brother of the town's mayor, was on another list distributed in the town two weeks ago, with at least six names of suspected informers. Residents said people in the town had gone to Shakr for help with U.S. forces in getting their guns back and to deflect suspicion from friends and relatives.
Shakr acknowledged providing the Americans information on Baathists, but he denied taking money from residents.
"I haven't taken even a cent," said Shakr, 45, who is unemployed. "On the contrary, I want to leave a mark on our town so that our children will thank their fathers for what they did."
A grenade was thrown at his house on July 18. It landed in the courtyard near a tangerine tree, shattering windows but hurting no one. Another person on the list, Mustafa Sadeq Abboudi, was shot in the arm with an AK-47. Shakr said he has a pistol and a rifle, but his brother, Mayor Mahmoud Shakr, has urged him not to seek help from U.S. forces.
"The Americans cannot offer protection," the mayor said. "If the Americans stood outside the door, it would only cause more trouble because it would mean he is definitely working with them."
Sitting in a chair and holding a cup of sweet tea, the mayor expressed frustration. Suspicions have become so common that more than 100 Muslim clerics met last week and issued a statement that not all Iraqis working with U.S. forces should be considered informers. "When ever somebody talks to the Americans," he said, shaking his head, "they think he's an agent."
Calls for Revenge
Residents of Thuluya said they had no doubt about Kerbul. After the operation in the village, dubbed Peninsula Strike, a force of 4,000 soldiers rounded up 400 residents and detained them at an air base seven miles north. An informer dressed in desert camouflage with a bag over his head had fingered at least 15 prisoners as they sat under a sweltering sun, their hands bound with plastic. Villagers said they soon recognized his yellow sandals and right thumb, which had been severed above the joint in an accident.
"We started yelling and shouting, 'That's Sabah! That's Sabah!' " said Mohammed Abu Dhua, who was held at the base for seven days and whose brother died of a heart attack during the operation. "We asked his father, 'Why is Sabah doing these things?' "
In the raid, three men and a 15-year-old boy were killed, all believed by villagers to have been innocent. Within days, many focused their ire on Kerbul, who had served a year in prison for impersonating a government official and was believed to have worked as an informer after he was released. Young children in the street recited a rhyme about him: "Masked man, your face is the face of the devil." Calls for revenge -- tempered by the fear of tribal bloodletting getting out of hand -- were heard in many conversations.
Kerbul's family said U.S. forces took him to Tikrit, then three weeks later, he went to stay with relatives across the Tigris in the village of Alim. As soon as word of his release spread, his brother Salah and uncle Suleiman went there to bring him back.
"We sent a message to his family," said Ali, a retired colonel whose brother was among those killed during the operation. "You have to kill your son. If you don't kill him, we will act against your family."
His father appealed, Ali recalled, saying he needed permission from U.S. forces.
"We told him we're not responsible for this," Ali said. "We told him you must kill your son."
Kerbul's body was buried hours after the shooting, his father said, carried to the cemetery in a white Toyota pickup. He said he and Kerbul's brother accompanied the corpse. Salah, his son who fired the fatal shots, said he stayed home.
Neither U.S. military officials in Thuluya nor Tikrit said they were aware of the killing.
"It's justice," said Abu Dhua, sitting at his home near a bend in the Tigris. "In my opinion, he deserves worse than death."
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
An interesting perspective on the shift to the " East " of American military bases:
The Pentagon's Eastern Obsession
By LAWRENCE J. KORB
The Pentagon is smitten with Romania. And Poland. And Bulgaria, too.
The Defense Department is considering closing many, if not all, of its bases in Western Europe — which are primarily in Germany — and to shift its troops to spartan new sites in the former Soviet bloc. Already we are told that the First Armored Division, now on the ground in Iraq, will not return to the bases in Germany it left in April. And Gen. James Jones, the head of the European Command, said this month that all 26 Army and Air Force installations in Germany, except for the Air Force base at Ramstein, might be closed. In effect this could mean transferring five army brigades, some 25,000 troops, to the East.
Supporters of this proposal argue that this has nothing to do with pique at our longtime allies for their opposition to the Iraq war, but that the move would save money and enable American forces to move more rapidly to remote hot spots in the Middle East and Central Asia. Both of these claims are unfounded.
It costs the Pentagon about $7 billion a year to maintain its German bases. Ramstein, the biggest, costs about $1 billion — so the others average only about $240 million each, or the same as a single F/A-22 fighter jet. Moreover, the costs of constructing these bases were paid long ago — most were built during the cold war with German money. To move its forces to Eastern Europe the United States will still have to build bases or upgrade existing ones — these facilities, built in the Soviet era, are crumbling and out of date. Many have severe environmental problems like unexploded ordnance and toxic waste, including old chemical weapons.
Moreover, although the cost of living in Eastern Europe is lower than in Germany, it is unlikely that these countries will contribute to the maintenance of our bases — as Germany has been doing to the tune of $1 billion a year. Finally, as we have seen with our domestic efforts at downsizing, closing bases takes time and money — in America it has taken at least five years and as many as eight to recoup the costs of the shutdown.
Some supporters of the plan also claim that the move would save money because soldiers who have wives and children in Germany would not bring families along to the East. This is a poor argument on two grounds: for one, expensive new housing and schools would have to be built in the United States to accommodate the families and, more important, it would have a dreadful effect on morale. Soldiers sent to Eastern Europe on a routine six-month deployment may well end up being deployed to the Middle East or Central Asia for extended periods, and could then be separated from their families for as long as 18 months. This would lower retention and thus substantially increase training costs.
The strategic rationale behind the move is as spurious as the cost-efficiency one. Yes, Eastern Europe is a bit closer than Germany is to the Middle East and Central Asia, and thus soldiers there could fly to the hot spots more quickly. But this is an advantage only for the very lightest of military operations. Most heavy armaments like tanks and artillery have to be moved by ship from the United States. And any such equipment we might have at the Eastern European bases would have to move by rail or truck to seaports on transportation networks far inferior to those we can use now in Western Europe.
If the proximity to the Middle East is the rationale for the move, why does the military still plan to keep 12,000 troops in Britain, which is even farther from these volatile regions?
Since moving to new bases would not save money or improve our strategic flexibility, there must be another motive. If it is being done to punish "Old Europe" over Iraq, it will be a case of the Bush administration cutting off its nose to spite its face.
The Pentagon's Eastern Obsession
By LAWRENCE J. KORB
The Pentagon is smitten with Romania. And Poland. And Bulgaria, too.
The Defense Department is considering closing many, if not all, of its bases in Western Europe — which are primarily in Germany — and to shift its troops to spartan new sites in the former Soviet bloc. Already we are told that the First Armored Division, now on the ground in Iraq, will not return to the bases in Germany it left in April. And Gen. James Jones, the head of the European Command, said this month that all 26 Army and Air Force installations in Germany, except for the Air Force base at Ramstein, might be closed. In effect this could mean transferring five army brigades, some 25,000 troops, to the East.
Supporters of this proposal argue that this has nothing to do with pique at our longtime allies for their opposition to the Iraq war, but that the move would save money and enable American forces to move more rapidly to remote hot spots in the Middle East and Central Asia. Both of these claims are unfounded.
It costs the Pentagon about $7 billion a year to maintain its German bases. Ramstein, the biggest, costs about $1 billion — so the others average only about $240 million each, or the same as a single F/A-22 fighter jet. Moreover, the costs of constructing these bases were paid long ago — most were built during the cold war with German money. To move its forces to Eastern Europe the United States will still have to build bases or upgrade existing ones — these facilities, built in the Soviet era, are crumbling and out of date. Many have severe environmental problems like unexploded ordnance and toxic waste, including old chemical weapons.
Moreover, although the cost of living in Eastern Europe is lower than in Germany, it is unlikely that these countries will contribute to the maintenance of our bases — as Germany has been doing to the tune of $1 billion a year. Finally, as we have seen with our domestic efforts at downsizing, closing bases takes time and money — in America it has taken at least five years and as many as eight to recoup the costs of the shutdown.
Some supporters of the plan also claim that the move would save money because soldiers who have wives and children in Germany would not bring families along to the East. This is a poor argument on two grounds: for one, expensive new housing and schools would have to be built in the United States to accommodate the families and, more important, it would have a dreadful effect on morale. Soldiers sent to Eastern Europe on a routine six-month deployment may well end up being deployed to the Middle East or Central Asia for extended periods, and could then be separated from their families for as long as 18 months. This would lower retention and thus substantially increase training costs.
The strategic rationale behind the move is as spurious as the cost-efficiency one. Yes, Eastern Europe is a bit closer than Germany is to the Middle East and Central Asia, and thus soldiers there could fly to the hot spots more quickly. But this is an advantage only for the very lightest of military operations. Most heavy armaments like tanks and artillery have to be moved by ship from the United States. And any such equipment we might have at the Eastern European bases would have to move by rail or truck to seaports on transportation networks far inferior to those we can use now in Western Europe.
If the proximity to the Middle East is the rationale for the move, why does the military still plan to keep 12,000 troops in Britain, which is even farther from these volatile regions?
Since moving to new bases would not save money or improve our strategic flexibility, there must be another motive. If it is being done to punish "Old Europe" over Iraq, it will be a case of the Bush administration cutting off its nose to spite its face.
Friedman, the great. Again from the NYT :
A New 'New Mideast'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Back in the mid-1990's there was a lot of talk about "a new Middle East" that seemed to be aborning. It turned out to be, shall we say, "premature" — as the newest new Middle East came crashing down with the collapse of Oslo, the breakdown in Arab-Israeli relations, 9/11 and the massive passive support for Osama bin Laden. With hindsight, it's now easy to see that there could be no "new Middle East" without a new kind of Middle East politics. It was like trying to build a new house on swampland. Eventually, it just sank.
Understanding that is the key to understanding the significance of what is happening today. There are two very radical political experiments under way in the Middle East. These two experiments are to the post-9/11 world what the rebuilding of Germany and Japan were to the post-World War II world — at least in terms of the stakes involved.
One experiment is the new Palestinian political authority, spearheaded by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, which is attempting to bring real rule of law, financial accountability and control over all military affairs to the Palestinian leadership. Palestinians are trying anew to prove that they can rule themselves responsibly, after so many years of misrule under Yasir Arafat. And the other is the new political authority that was just appointed by the U.S. in Iraq: the 25-person Governing Council, which is set to write a new Iraqi constitution, name ministers and prepare Iraq for elections, as Iraqis try to prove they can rule themselves after so many years of tyranny under Saddam Hussein.
These two infant authorities — the one Palestinians brought about by a vote of their own legislature and the one Iraqis had handed to them, thanks to America's toppling of Saddam — are, in theory, fundamental departures from both the style and substance of their predecessors. America and the world have an overwhelming interest in their success.
After all, the most important thing America did during the cold war was to rebuild West Germany and Japan. That project tilted the world in our favor and was critical to the containment and ultimate defeat of Soviet Communist totalitarianism. Just as a Germany rebuilt on the foundations of democracy, free markets and the rule of law anchored postwar Western Europe, and a rebuilt Japan was essential to the growth, liberalization and stability of postwar Asia, so a new kind of political authority among Palestinians and Iraqis — who sit at the emotional heart of the Arab and Muslim world — could do the same for the Middle East. This is the only answer to Saddam's secular totalitarianism and Osama's religious totalitarianism.
The Bush Pentagon has already, idiotically, wasted critical months in Iraq trying to prove it can do nation-building on the cheap and without serious allies. But this task will also require political capital. President Bush has been right to stipulate to the new Palestinian leadership that there will be no Palestinian state unless it can deliver real security to Israel. But Mr. Bush also has to make clear to Israelis that no Palestinian Authority will be able to deliver that security unless the Palestinian people believe that they're going to get a real state in return — and that means a removal of Israel's West Bank-Gaza settlements, bypass roads, fences, etc.
But while there is much that we must do, there is also much that they must do. Palestinians have to want to get rid of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as military groups for their own reasons. You cannot build a new state with parties who believe that it is O.K. to take the flower of Palestinian youth, wrap them in dynamite and have them blow themselves up in Israeli pizza parlors. Nothing normal can come from that. And Iraqis have to prove that they really can work together and are willing to sacrifice for the chance to rule themselves. (Why are we offering them $55 million in rewards for finding Saddam and his sons? They should be paying us!) We don't need U.N. or French troops in Iraq right now. We need more Iraqis who want to sacrifice to be free.
When you see Iraqis risking their lives to protect and nurture their new infant self-ruling authority, when you see Palestinians ready to take on the extremists in their midst because they are a cancer on the Palestinians' own future, and when you see a Bush administration ready to pay any price and bear any burden, economic or political, to help them both, then you can legitimately start to speak again about a "new Middle East."
A New 'New Mideast'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Back in the mid-1990's there was a lot of talk about "a new Middle East" that seemed to be aborning. It turned out to be, shall we say, "premature" — as the newest new Middle East came crashing down with the collapse of Oslo, the breakdown in Arab-Israeli relations, 9/11 and the massive passive support for Osama bin Laden. With hindsight, it's now easy to see that there could be no "new Middle East" without a new kind of Middle East politics. It was like trying to build a new house on swampland. Eventually, it just sank.
Understanding that is the key to understanding the significance of what is happening today. There are two very radical political experiments under way in the Middle East. These two experiments are to the post-9/11 world what the rebuilding of Germany and Japan were to the post-World War II world — at least in terms of the stakes involved.
One experiment is the new Palestinian political authority, spearheaded by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, which is attempting to bring real rule of law, financial accountability and control over all military affairs to the Palestinian leadership. Palestinians are trying anew to prove that they can rule themselves responsibly, after so many years of misrule under Yasir Arafat. And the other is the new political authority that was just appointed by the U.S. in Iraq: the 25-person Governing Council, which is set to write a new Iraqi constitution, name ministers and prepare Iraq for elections, as Iraqis try to prove they can rule themselves after so many years of tyranny under Saddam Hussein.
These two infant authorities — the one Palestinians brought about by a vote of their own legislature and the one Iraqis had handed to them, thanks to America's toppling of Saddam — are, in theory, fundamental departures from both the style and substance of their predecessors. America and the world have an overwhelming interest in their success.
After all, the most important thing America did during the cold war was to rebuild West Germany and Japan. That project tilted the world in our favor and was critical to the containment and ultimate defeat of Soviet Communist totalitarianism. Just as a Germany rebuilt on the foundations of democracy, free markets and the rule of law anchored postwar Western Europe, and a rebuilt Japan was essential to the growth, liberalization and stability of postwar Asia, so a new kind of political authority among Palestinians and Iraqis — who sit at the emotional heart of the Arab and Muslim world — could do the same for the Middle East. This is the only answer to Saddam's secular totalitarianism and Osama's religious totalitarianism.
The Bush Pentagon has already, idiotically, wasted critical months in Iraq trying to prove it can do nation-building on the cheap and without serious allies. But this task will also require political capital. President Bush has been right to stipulate to the new Palestinian leadership that there will be no Palestinian state unless it can deliver real security to Israel. But Mr. Bush also has to make clear to Israelis that no Palestinian Authority will be able to deliver that security unless the Palestinian people believe that they're going to get a real state in return — and that means a removal of Israel's West Bank-Gaza settlements, bypass roads, fences, etc.
But while there is much that we must do, there is also much that they must do. Palestinians have to want to get rid of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as military groups for their own reasons. You cannot build a new state with parties who believe that it is O.K. to take the flower of Palestinian youth, wrap them in dynamite and have them blow themselves up in Israeli pizza parlors. Nothing normal can come from that. And Iraqis have to prove that they really can work together and are willing to sacrifice for the chance to rule themselves. (Why are we offering them $55 million in rewards for finding Saddam and his sons? They should be paying us!) We don't need U.N. or French troops in Iraq right now. We need more Iraqis who want to sacrifice to be free.
When you see Iraqis risking their lives to protect and nurture their new infant self-ruling authority, when you see Palestinians ready to take on the extremists in their midst because they are a cancer on the Palestinians' own future, and when you see a Bush administration ready to pay any price and bear any burden, economic or political, to help them both, then you can legitimately start to speak again about a "new Middle East."
Wolfowitz in trouble is the story today: Senators began attacking DOD pretty hard yestrday, perhaps a sign of the times to come. From the NYT
Blanket of Dread
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
There is no more delightful way to pass a summer's day in Washington than going up to Capitol Hill to watch senators jump ugly on Wolfie.
Many Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee felt they had been snookered by Paul Wolfowitz, and they did not want to be played again.
They waited gimlet-eyed yesterday while Wolfowitz of Arabia shimmied away once more from giving the cost, in lives or troops or dollars, of remaking a roiling Iraq.
Instead, he offered a highly dramatic travelogue of his recent Iraq trip, sleeping in Saddam's palace and flying with members of the Tennessee National Guard, who made him "very unhappy" when they told him about their nearly two years of active duty. (Gee, whose fault is that?) He described Saddam's "torture tree," "unspeakable torture," "torture chamber" and "a smothering blanket of apprehension and dread woven by 35 years of repression."
"The military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror," Mr. Wolfowitz proclaimed, capitalizing the "W" and the "T" in his written testimony, and underlining the sentence for those too dim to understand its essential importance.
Brazening out the failure to find the Saddam-Qaeda links and W.M.D. the administration aggrandized before the war, Mr. Wolfowitz has simply done an Orwellian fan dance, covering up the lack of concrete ties to the 9/11 terrorists with feathery assertions that securing "the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror."
It is a new line of defense that was also used by Dick Cheney in a speech last week ("In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror") and by the president in a speech on Monday ("And our current mission in Iraq is essential to the broader war on terror; it's essential to the security of the American people").
Even now that it's clear the Bushies played up the terror angle because they thought it was the best way to whip up support for getting rid of Saddam, the administration refuses to level with the public.
It dishes out the same old sauerkraut — conjuring up images of Al Qaeda by calling Iraqi guerrillas and foreign fighters "terrorists." Meanwhile, the real Qaeda may be planning more suicide hijackings of passenger planes on the East Coast this summer, Homeland Security says.
Noting that the administration is tamping down Iraq while Al Qaeda is bubbling up elsewhere, Senator Russ Feingold pressed: "I would ask you, Secretary Wolfowitz, are you sure we have our eye on the ball?"
Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, responded to Mr. Wolfowitz's oration about Saddam's tyranny by noting sharply that Liberia's Charles Taylor is also a vicious tyrant famous for dismembering and burning victims, and spreading war. "But we're doing nothing in Liberia," he said. He objected to Mr. Wolfowitz's using 9/11 to push regime change in Iraq, even though the hawk had advocated getting rid of Saddam all through the late 90's.
Senator Joseph Biden excoriated Mr. Wolfowitz for his lack of candor and said his own review of the Iraqi police force — "almost looked like the Katzenjammer Kids" — had convinced him democracy was way off.
"I no more agree, just for the record, with your assessment that Iraq is the hotbed of terror now than I did [with] your assertions about Al Qaeda connections at the front end," Mr. Biden said, adding that if officials did not tell the truth to the public about the costs in Iraq, they would lose credibility.
Spill all the facts? This crowd? Fat chance. Only yesterday, the administration showed ingenious new talent for insidious secrecy. President Bush refused to declassify the 28-page redaction about the Saudi government's role in financing the hijackings, even though the Saudi foreign minister flew to the U.S. to ask the president to do that. (You know you're in trouble when the Saudis are begging you to be more open.)
And Mr. Secrecy, John Poindexter, had another boneheaded scheme canceled at the Pentagon, when stunned senators learned that his department had started an online trading market, a dead pool, where investors could wager on terror attacks.
Even Mr. Wolfowitz, who has shown an audacious imagination in refashioning the Middle East, thought the death wagers were over the top: "It sounds like maybe they got too imaginative in this area."
The Pointdexter story is widely reported and has brought a great deal of ridicule on DOD. This Blog has been worried about the Pointdexter-Ashcroft intellectual alliance since the beginning. The world would be a safer place without them!
Blanket of Dread
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
There is no more delightful way to pass a summer's day in Washington than going up to Capitol Hill to watch senators jump ugly on Wolfie.
Many Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee felt they had been snookered by Paul Wolfowitz, and they did not want to be played again.
They waited gimlet-eyed yesterday while Wolfowitz of Arabia shimmied away once more from giving the cost, in lives or troops or dollars, of remaking a roiling Iraq.
Instead, he offered a highly dramatic travelogue of his recent Iraq trip, sleeping in Saddam's palace and flying with members of the Tennessee National Guard, who made him "very unhappy" when they told him about their nearly two years of active duty. (Gee, whose fault is that?) He described Saddam's "torture tree," "unspeakable torture," "torture chamber" and "a smothering blanket of apprehension and dread woven by 35 years of repression."
"The military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror," Mr. Wolfowitz proclaimed, capitalizing the "W" and the "T" in his written testimony, and underlining the sentence for those too dim to understand its essential importance.
Brazening out the failure to find the Saddam-Qaeda links and W.M.D. the administration aggrandized before the war, Mr. Wolfowitz has simply done an Orwellian fan dance, covering up the lack of concrete ties to the 9/11 terrorists with feathery assertions that securing "the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror."
It is a new line of defense that was also used by Dick Cheney in a speech last week ("In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror") and by the president in a speech on Monday ("And our current mission in Iraq is essential to the broader war on terror; it's essential to the security of the American people").
Even now that it's clear the Bushies played up the terror angle because they thought it was the best way to whip up support for getting rid of Saddam, the administration refuses to level with the public.
It dishes out the same old sauerkraut — conjuring up images of Al Qaeda by calling Iraqi guerrillas and foreign fighters "terrorists." Meanwhile, the real Qaeda may be planning more suicide hijackings of passenger planes on the East Coast this summer, Homeland Security says.
Noting that the administration is tamping down Iraq while Al Qaeda is bubbling up elsewhere, Senator Russ Feingold pressed: "I would ask you, Secretary Wolfowitz, are you sure we have our eye on the ball?"
Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, responded to Mr. Wolfowitz's oration about Saddam's tyranny by noting sharply that Liberia's Charles Taylor is also a vicious tyrant famous for dismembering and burning victims, and spreading war. "But we're doing nothing in Liberia," he said. He objected to Mr. Wolfowitz's using 9/11 to push regime change in Iraq, even though the hawk had advocated getting rid of Saddam all through the late 90's.
Senator Joseph Biden excoriated Mr. Wolfowitz for his lack of candor and said his own review of the Iraqi police force — "almost looked like the Katzenjammer Kids" — had convinced him democracy was way off.
"I no more agree, just for the record, with your assessment that Iraq is the hotbed of terror now than I did [with] your assertions about Al Qaeda connections at the front end," Mr. Biden said, adding that if officials did not tell the truth to the public about the costs in Iraq, they would lose credibility.
Spill all the facts? This crowd? Fat chance. Only yesterday, the administration showed ingenious new talent for insidious secrecy. President Bush refused to declassify the 28-page redaction about the Saudi government's role in financing the hijackings, even though the Saudi foreign minister flew to the U.S. to ask the president to do that. (You know you're in trouble when the Saudis are begging you to be more open.)
And Mr. Secrecy, John Poindexter, had another boneheaded scheme canceled at the Pentagon, when stunned senators learned that his department had started an online trading market, a dead pool, where investors could wager on terror attacks.
Even Mr. Wolfowitz, who has shown an audacious imagination in refashioning the Middle East, thought the death wagers were over the top: "It sounds like maybe they got too imaginative in this area."
The Pointdexter story is widely reported and has brought a great deal of ridicule on DOD. This Blog has been worried about the Pointdexter-Ashcroft intellectual alliance since the beginning. The world would be a safer place without them!
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
From the Washington Post on the state of the Democratic Party:
Poll Finds Democrats Lack Crucial Support to Beat Bush
Party Must Strongly Reposition Itself to Regain White Male Voters' Support, DLC Advised
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 29, 2003; Page A03
PHILADELPHIA, July 28 -- Dramatic erosion in support among white men has left the Democrats in a highly vulnerable position and unless the party strongly repositions itself, President Bush will be virtually impossible to beat in 2004, according to a new poll commissioned for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
The gloomy prognosis came despite evidence in the poll and in the assessments of Democratic elected officials attending the DLC's "national conversation" here that the economy alone makes Bush vulnerable for reelection. But Mark J. Penn, who conducted the poll, said that the party's image has regressed since former president Bill Clinton left office and that those weaknesses put Democrats in a weakened position.
Penn said his polling indicates that since Clinton left office in 2001, more Americans believe Democrats are the party of big government and higher taxes and he said Bush's handling of the war on terrorism has opened up a huge gap with Democrats on who is more trusted on issues of national security.
"If Democrats can't close the security gap, then they can't be competitive in the next election," said Penn, who polled for Clinton in his second term and who is the pollster for the presidential campaign of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.).
The poll showed Bush's vulnerabilities. Fewer than half of those surveyed (48 percent) think he deserves to be reelected and 53 percent said the economy is heading in the wrong direction.
But Penn said Democrats must make a concerted effort to appeal to white voters, particularly men and married women, to make the 2004 race competitive. He said just 22 percent of white men identified with the Democratic Party in his poll, and he said younger men are even more strongly Republican in their leanings.
Penn's poll was used by DLC leaders to press their argument that Democrats must embrace the kind of centrist policies espoused by Clinton to avoid a humiliating defeat in 2004, and they used the two-day conference to continue a debate over the direction of the party that has intensified in recent months.
DLC leaders have criticized former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose antiwar rhetoric fueled his rise to prominence in the Democratic presidential race, and today, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), the DLC chairman, warned that the party is "at risk of being taken over by the far left." The choice for Democrats, Bayh said, is, "Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?"
But not all of those in attendance agreed with the Dean bashing. Washington state Rep. Laura Ruderman decried the battles between party centrists and liberals, and told the audience, "I don't think we can be successful if we go down that rat hole."
Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell went out of his way to praise Dean's record as governor and said he had "great respect" for Dean. Rendell also challenged the findings of Penn, who claimed Democrats were at a 50-year low ebb. Citing the election of Democratic governors in 2002 in states such as Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, Rendell said, "I think the talent bank is beginning to be replenished."
Rendell appeared with six other Democratic governors: Arizona's Janet Napolitano, Kansas's Kathleen Sebelius, Michigan's Jennifer Granholm, New Jersey's James McGreevey, New Mexico's Bill Richardson and Virginia's Mark Warner. They said that Bush has broken his promises to fund homeland security and his education accountability bill in their states but expressed frustration that Democrats have been unsuccessful in making a case against the president on these issues or the economy.
Poll Finds Democrats Lack Crucial Support to Beat Bush
Party Must Strongly Reposition Itself to Regain White Male Voters' Support, DLC Advised
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 29, 2003; Page A03
PHILADELPHIA, July 28 -- Dramatic erosion in support among white men has left the Democrats in a highly vulnerable position and unless the party strongly repositions itself, President Bush will be virtually impossible to beat in 2004, according to a new poll commissioned for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
The gloomy prognosis came despite evidence in the poll and in the assessments of Democratic elected officials attending the DLC's "national conversation" here that the economy alone makes Bush vulnerable for reelection. But Mark J. Penn, who conducted the poll, said that the party's image has regressed since former president Bill Clinton left office and that those weaknesses put Democrats in a weakened position.
Penn said his polling indicates that since Clinton left office in 2001, more Americans believe Democrats are the party of big government and higher taxes and he said Bush's handling of the war on terrorism has opened up a huge gap with Democrats on who is more trusted on issues of national security.
"If Democrats can't close the security gap, then they can't be competitive in the next election," said Penn, who polled for Clinton in his second term and who is the pollster for the presidential campaign of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.).
The poll showed Bush's vulnerabilities. Fewer than half of those surveyed (48 percent) think he deserves to be reelected and 53 percent said the economy is heading in the wrong direction.
But Penn said Democrats must make a concerted effort to appeal to white voters, particularly men and married women, to make the 2004 race competitive. He said just 22 percent of white men identified with the Democratic Party in his poll, and he said younger men are even more strongly Republican in their leanings.
Penn's poll was used by DLC leaders to press their argument that Democrats must embrace the kind of centrist policies espoused by Clinton to avoid a humiliating defeat in 2004, and they used the two-day conference to continue a debate over the direction of the party that has intensified in recent months.
DLC leaders have criticized former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose antiwar rhetoric fueled his rise to prominence in the Democratic presidential race, and today, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), the DLC chairman, warned that the party is "at risk of being taken over by the far left." The choice for Democrats, Bayh said, is, "Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?"
But not all of those in attendance agreed with the Dean bashing. Washington state Rep. Laura Ruderman decried the battles between party centrists and liberals, and told the audience, "I don't think we can be successful if we go down that rat hole."
Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell went out of his way to praise Dean's record as governor and said he had "great respect" for Dean. Rendell also challenged the findings of Penn, who claimed Democrats were at a 50-year low ebb. Citing the election of Democratic governors in 2002 in states such as Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, Rendell said, "I think the talent bank is beginning to be replenished."
Rendell appeared with six other Democratic governors: Arizona's Janet Napolitano, Kansas's Kathleen Sebelius, Michigan's Jennifer Granholm, New Jersey's James McGreevey, New Mexico's Bill Richardson and Virginia's Mark Warner. They said that Bush has broken his promises to fund homeland security and his education accountability bill in their states but expressed frustration that Democrats have been unsuccessful in making a case against the president on these issues or the economy.
From The New Republic. An interesting view of the Bush Administration's view of things:
DAILY EXPRESS
Domestic Disturbance
by Reihan Salam
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 07.28.03
The Bush administration has frequently been described as "more Reagan than Reagan," whether as fulsome praise or as fiery condemnation. Both men are unapologetic conservatives and both are best known for championing an assertive American role in the world, a position Bush came to relatively late in the day and that Reagan had held from the start of his political career. Still, the comparison is misleading. If anything, Bush is more Nixon than Reagan--not because of allegations of deceit, but because Bush, like Nixon, increasingly uses his foreign policy as a weapon in the domestic culture war.
Historical myopia has led many to believe that Bush is Reagan without the silver tongue. But because Reagan was so focused on the Soviet threat, and because he began public life as a Cold War liberal, he believed that politics should end at the water's edge. He fought alongside hawkish Democrats like Scoop Jackson against those who opposed a stronger defense. While far from flawless, it is difficult to imagine Reagan, who vividly remembered the excesses of the McCarthy years, tarring Democratic allies by juxtaposing them against images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. This approach had resonance beyond domestic politics. Reagan's opposition to the Law of the Sea Treaty, a sweeping effort to regulate the world's oceans that included onerous redistributive measures, is but one example. In a move characteristic of his forays into the West's war of ideas with the Soviets and the Third World Left, Reagan focused less on the initiative's threat to American national interests than its negative implications for global innovation, investment, and trade--an argument tailor-made for international consumption. And so opposition to American policies in allied countries, however strident on the margins, never reached the fever-pitch it has in recent years. Reagan's worldview wasn't that of a narrow nationalist; rather, it was a right-wing internationalism that closely resembled the neoconservative idealism of Paul Wolfowitz and others, which is precisely why he remains the patron saint of the neocons.
Nixon, by contrast, was well aware of the domestic uses of foreign policy and was happy to avail himself of them. Nixon revisionists will often point to the fact that affirmative action and school desegregation policies were instituted on his watch, which is true enough. At the same time, Nixon, as the self-designated tribune of the "silent majority," railed against the counterculture, as well as run of the mill coastal liberals, and used coded racial language in an effort to woo George Wallace's unreconstructed segregationists. By focusing his ire on domestic enemies, Nixon was able to circumvent the basic and inescapable fact that he was deeply unlikable. And conflating his domestic enemies with a policy of vacillating weakness abroad made the pitch that much stronger, and so anti-communism became a crucial cultural weapon--ironically, even as the policy was abandoned in substance in the era of détente. In May of 1970, flag-carrying workers in hardhats, allegedly egged on by union leader Peter Brennan, attacked antiwar protesters. At the end of the month, Brennan presented Nixon with a hardhat, which the president wore proudly before those assembled. After his reelection, Nixon named Brennan secretary of labor, a strangely apposite capstone to a cultural moment that captured a great deal about his administration.
Nixon also used brazen foreign policy tactics, such as the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, to sucker-punch his domestic critics and help shield himself from the increasingly unpopular involvement in Southeast Asia and the corrosive political effects of rising inflation. Opponents of these tactics were tarred by their association with the marginal upper-middle-class activists that Nixon had already written out of the "silent majority." Meanwhile, because Nixon (or rather Kissinger) had in fact decided that the United States could no longer sustain its postwar policy of containment, this strategy of demonizing the left had the added benefit of protecting him from a potentially more dangerous assault from the right.
Perhaps not surprisingly, former Nixon speech writer William Safire has been one of the few to note the Nixonian dimensions of Bush's foreign policy. Take Safire's July 7 conversation with Nixon from beyond the grave:
Q: With unemployment rising and the federal deficit ballooning--and all the Democratic candidates accusing him of having gone to war under false pretenses--how come Bush's approval rating hasn't nose-dived?
RN: Because he keeps his eye on the ball in center court. He's a war president fighting a popular war and doesn't let anybody forget he's winning. Afghanistan and Iraq are the first two battles in that war on terror. The more the elites here and in Europe holler, the solider the Bush support gets.
Difficult as it is to take a figment of William Safire's imagination seriously, this is a powerful insight: While diplomatic squabbles and reckless off-the-cuff remarks are to be avoided, one needn't try too hard. In either case, the inevitable dust-up once again demonstrates Bush's populist bona fides. Wearing a flight suit has the same effect. Liberals are exercised and conservatives cheer lustily.
Indeed, it is the often-truculent nationalist conservatism of Nixon-Ford veterans Cheney and Rumsfeld, both widely despised among all those who aren't American conservatives, and not the bleeding-heart conservatism of the Reaganite Wolfowitz that sets the tone for this administration. On Kyoto and the International Criminal Court, the president chose not to marshal the many good reasons why said treaties were disadvantageous for the world as a whole; instead, as conservatives like Jeffrey Gedmin and Gary Schmitt have noted, he made "America First" arguments and left it at that. But these gestures do more than that. They also antagonize and alienate many Americans, including the so-called Tony Blair Democrats who went to bat for regime change.
Ditto for the president's "bring them on" comment when discussing rogue Baathist guerrillas. Many in the mainstream and on the right (myself included) are impressed: Bush sounds bold and determined, thus appealing to our bloodthirsty Jacksonian impulse. That revenge will be had for these cowardly attacks is the clear implication. And yet it's a message designed just as much to be used as a cudgel against dovish liberals and those on both the right and left who prefer a more sober and statesmanlike approach--the "nattering nabobs of negativism," in Spiro Agnew's memorable turn of phrase--as it is to appeal to the hawks among us. Polarization is the inevitable result.
For Bush, in fact, the polarization strategy is arguably even more important than for Nixon. That's because there is no equivalent of the alienated counterculture of the late '60s and the early '70s, the hippie freak demographic that proved to be Nixon's most effective ally in realigning American public opinion. Antiwar elements today are just as upper-middle-class and college-educated as they were, but they are careful to disassociate themselves from cultural anti-Americanism. Many on the center-left actively support Bush's efforts to remake the Middle East; to the extent they're critical, they want him to go further--to spend more money and to solicit more in the way of international support. It is a disagreement on means, not ends. Were the Democrats able to successfully convey that they embraced a policy of strength and that they would be more responsible stewards of such a policy--that their approach would be more successful in managing the transition to a democratic and sovereign Iraq, for example--the Bush team would be in serious jeopardy.
This applies more broadly. As Bush abandons the fiscal conservatism that was so important to his father and embraces corporatist as opposed to pro-market policies, like bloated agricultural subsidies and steel tariffs, disdain for pointy-headed elites, along with tax cuts, is the glue that holds together his coalition--marginalizing his critics on the left and quieting potential criticism on the right.
In this, Bush resembles another president, namely Bill Clinton. Though the left of the Democratic Party had every reason to despise Clinton--the man who sold them out on trade, welfare reform, and any number of other issues--with a virulent passion, they doggedly defended him during the impeachment scandal. His foibles marked him as one of their own: a partisan of the sexual revolution and thus, in a strange leap of logic, of left-liberalism broadly conceived. Meanwhile, conservatives, who in many cases ought to have embraced Clinton as more or less one of their own, were frequently influenced by the strongly anti-Clinton right-leaning press and by a general distaste for his aura of sleaze--which too often led them into self-destructive adventures. Amid the passions raised by the war in Iraq and its aftermath, Bush has had a similar effect. Unfortunately, the stakes today are far higher.
Reihan Salam is a former TNR reporter-researcher.
DAILY EXPRESS
Domestic Disturbance
by Reihan Salam
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 07.28.03
The Bush administration has frequently been described as "more Reagan than Reagan," whether as fulsome praise or as fiery condemnation. Both men are unapologetic conservatives and both are best known for championing an assertive American role in the world, a position Bush came to relatively late in the day and that Reagan had held from the start of his political career. Still, the comparison is misleading. If anything, Bush is more Nixon than Reagan--not because of allegations of deceit, but because Bush, like Nixon, increasingly uses his foreign policy as a weapon in the domestic culture war.
Historical myopia has led many to believe that Bush is Reagan without the silver tongue. But because Reagan was so focused on the Soviet threat, and because he began public life as a Cold War liberal, he believed that politics should end at the water's edge. He fought alongside hawkish Democrats like Scoop Jackson against those who opposed a stronger defense. While far from flawless, it is difficult to imagine Reagan, who vividly remembered the excesses of the McCarthy years, tarring Democratic allies by juxtaposing them against images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. This approach had resonance beyond domestic politics. Reagan's opposition to the Law of the Sea Treaty, a sweeping effort to regulate the world's oceans that included onerous redistributive measures, is but one example. In a move characteristic of his forays into the West's war of ideas with the Soviets and the Third World Left, Reagan focused less on the initiative's threat to American national interests than its negative implications for global innovation, investment, and trade--an argument tailor-made for international consumption. And so opposition to American policies in allied countries, however strident on the margins, never reached the fever-pitch it has in recent years. Reagan's worldview wasn't that of a narrow nationalist; rather, it was a right-wing internationalism that closely resembled the neoconservative idealism of Paul Wolfowitz and others, which is precisely why he remains the patron saint of the neocons.
Nixon, by contrast, was well aware of the domestic uses of foreign policy and was happy to avail himself of them. Nixon revisionists will often point to the fact that affirmative action and school desegregation policies were instituted on his watch, which is true enough. At the same time, Nixon, as the self-designated tribune of the "silent majority," railed against the counterculture, as well as run of the mill coastal liberals, and used coded racial language in an effort to woo George Wallace's unreconstructed segregationists. By focusing his ire on domestic enemies, Nixon was able to circumvent the basic and inescapable fact that he was deeply unlikable. And conflating his domestic enemies with a policy of vacillating weakness abroad made the pitch that much stronger, and so anti-communism became a crucial cultural weapon--ironically, even as the policy was abandoned in substance in the era of détente. In May of 1970, flag-carrying workers in hardhats, allegedly egged on by union leader Peter Brennan, attacked antiwar protesters. At the end of the month, Brennan presented Nixon with a hardhat, which the president wore proudly before those assembled. After his reelection, Nixon named Brennan secretary of labor, a strangely apposite capstone to a cultural moment that captured a great deal about his administration.
Nixon also used brazen foreign policy tactics, such as the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, to sucker-punch his domestic critics and help shield himself from the increasingly unpopular involvement in Southeast Asia and the corrosive political effects of rising inflation. Opponents of these tactics were tarred by their association with the marginal upper-middle-class activists that Nixon had already written out of the "silent majority." Meanwhile, because Nixon (or rather Kissinger) had in fact decided that the United States could no longer sustain its postwar policy of containment, this strategy of demonizing the left had the added benefit of protecting him from a potentially more dangerous assault from the right.
Perhaps not surprisingly, former Nixon speech writer William Safire has been one of the few to note the Nixonian dimensions of Bush's foreign policy. Take Safire's July 7 conversation with Nixon from beyond the grave:
Q: With unemployment rising and the federal deficit ballooning--and all the Democratic candidates accusing him of having gone to war under false pretenses--how come Bush's approval rating hasn't nose-dived?
RN: Because he keeps his eye on the ball in center court. He's a war president fighting a popular war and doesn't let anybody forget he's winning. Afghanistan and Iraq are the first two battles in that war on terror. The more the elites here and in Europe holler, the solider the Bush support gets.
Difficult as it is to take a figment of William Safire's imagination seriously, this is a powerful insight: While diplomatic squabbles and reckless off-the-cuff remarks are to be avoided, one needn't try too hard. In either case, the inevitable dust-up once again demonstrates Bush's populist bona fides. Wearing a flight suit has the same effect. Liberals are exercised and conservatives cheer lustily.
Indeed, it is the often-truculent nationalist conservatism of Nixon-Ford veterans Cheney and Rumsfeld, both widely despised among all those who aren't American conservatives, and not the bleeding-heart conservatism of the Reaganite Wolfowitz that sets the tone for this administration. On Kyoto and the International Criminal Court, the president chose not to marshal the many good reasons why said treaties were disadvantageous for the world as a whole; instead, as conservatives like Jeffrey Gedmin and Gary Schmitt have noted, he made "America First" arguments and left it at that. But these gestures do more than that. They also antagonize and alienate many Americans, including the so-called Tony Blair Democrats who went to bat for regime change.
Ditto for the president's "bring them on" comment when discussing rogue Baathist guerrillas. Many in the mainstream and on the right (myself included) are impressed: Bush sounds bold and determined, thus appealing to our bloodthirsty Jacksonian impulse. That revenge will be had for these cowardly attacks is the clear implication. And yet it's a message designed just as much to be used as a cudgel against dovish liberals and those on both the right and left who prefer a more sober and statesmanlike approach--the "nattering nabobs of negativism," in Spiro Agnew's memorable turn of phrase--as it is to appeal to the hawks among us. Polarization is the inevitable result.
For Bush, in fact, the polarization strategy is arguably even more important than for Nixon. That's because there is no equivalent of the alienated counterculture of the late '60s and the early '70s, the hippie freak demographic that proved to be Nixon's most effective ally in realigning American public opinion. Antiwar elements today are just as upper-middle-class and college-educated as they were, but they are careful to disassociate themselves from cultural anti-Americanism. Many on the center-left actively support Bush's efforts to remake the Middle East; to the extent they're critical, they want him to go further--to spend more money and to solicit more in the way of international support. It is a disagreement on means, not ends. Were the Democrats able to successfully convey that they embraced a policy of strength and that they would be more responsible stewards of such a policy--that their approach would be more successful in managing the transition to a democratic and sovereign Iraq, for example--the Bush team would be in serious jeopardy.
This applies more broadly. As Bush abandons the fiscal conservatism that was so important to his father and embraces corporatist as opposed to pro-market policies, like bloated agricultural subsidies and steel tariffs, disdain for pointy-headed elites, along with tax cuts, is the glue that holds together his coalition--marginalizing his critics on the left and quieting potential criticism on the right.
In this, Bush resembles another president, namely Bill Clinton. Though the left of the Democratic Party had every reason to despise Clinton--the man who sold them out on trade, welfare reform, and any number of other issues--with a virulent passion, they doggedly defended him during the impeachment scandal. His foibles marked him as one of their own: a partisan of the sexual revolution and thus, in a strange leap of logic, of left-liberalism broadly conceived. Meanwhile, conservatives, who in many cases ought to have embraced Clinton as more or less one of their own, were frequently influenced by the strongly anti-Clinton right-leaning press and by a general distaste for his aura of sleaze--which too often led them into self-destructive adventures. Amid the passions raised by the war in Iraq and its aftermath, Bush has had a similar effect. Unfortunately, the stakes today are far higher.
Reihan Salam is a former TNR reporter-researcher.
