Topic: Foreign Policy and National Security

Fomenting Hysteria

By
Jim Harper

Scotland Yard should rein in Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson.

Last week, discussing the foiled attack on passenger air transportation, Stephenson stood before cameras, flash-bulbs popping, and read the following from a prepared statement:

We cannot stress too highly the severity that this plot represented. Put simply, this was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.

Stephenson quite badly over-stressed the severity of the plot. It is easy to comprehend in terms of both execution and anticipated result. The planned attack would have killed many people in a very dramatic way - everyone should be glad that it was defeated - but it wasn’t anything near “unimaginable.”

Is this a quibble about semantics? No. Stephenson’s overwrought statement is a form of incompetence.

As I wrote last week (citing national security expert John Mueller), it is the reaction to terrorist attacks that inflict the most damage. Controlling the reaction through even-handed public communications is the best thing officialdom can do when an attack has succeeded - to say nothing of the opportunity for confidence-building when an attack has been thwarted.

The fact that this embarrassing public display was part of a statement written in advance is reason for Scotland Yard to fully review its communications strategy. Stephenson’s overreaction splashed across America’s television screens numerous times over the weekend.

Fortunately,the public doesn’t appear to be falling for it. A poll appearing in this morning’s Washington Post Express found that 72% of people feel safe flying. USA Today reports that air travelers are adapting quickly to measures that foreclose the threat of a liquid bomb attack. Let’s hope that the measures are quickly minimized to reach what attacks are actually possible, rather than those that are only speculative.

My colleague Gene Healy’s post here last week (preceding news of the foiled terror plot) and his citation to James Fallows’ article ” Declaring Victory ” are even more solid and relevant now than they were before. We do not face an existential threat from terrorism. The “War on Terror” is effectively won. All that’s left is for someone to declare it so.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Antiwar? Anti Which War?

By
Christopher A. Preble

Joseph Lieberman, the sitting Democratic senator from Connecticut who now aspires to be the sitting Independent senator from Connecticut, declared yesterday that the antiwar views of Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont would be “taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.”

Really?

And what do we — and by “we” I mean Senator Lieberman and the rest of us — know about the people who wanted to blow up the planes?

  • We know that they are mainly Britons, many with Muslim names that are common in Pakistan. At least two are believed to be recent converts to Islam.
  • We also know that two British nationals and five Pakistanis were arrested in Pakistan a few days earlier, and have been described by Pakistani officials as ”facilitators” of the wider plot.
  • We know that the tip that initiated the investigation came from a member of the British Muslim community who, soon after the July 7, 2005 London Underground bombings, reported the group’s suspicious behavior to British authorities.
  • And we know that the outlines of the plot look very similar to the failed Bojinka Plot of 1995, which would have involved the downing of airliners over the Pacific using liquid explosives.

These salient facts have led many to speculate that the just-foiled attacks are at least inspired, if not directed, by Al Qaeda, perhaps even Al Qaeda senior leadership such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Remember them? Hint: one is Saudi, the other is Egyptian.

So, to return to Ned Lamont, how is his opposition to a continuation of the ruinous Iraq War, and his support for a refocus on Al Qaeda, good news for the guys now sitting in Pakistani and British jails?

Does Senator Lieberman believe that the expenditure of vast resources on the war in Iraq (to recap: over 2,500 American dead, and over $300 billion spent) directly contributed to the breaking up of the British terror plot?

Does Senator Lieberman believe that the war in Iraq has made it harder for Al Qaeda to recruit followers to its murderous cause? If he does, he apparently disagrees with U.S. intelligence officials, who, according to the Washington Post, ”now identify the war in Iraq as the single most effective recruiting tool for Islamic militants.”

Does Senator Lieberman believe that the war in Iraq has enhanced our ability to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, home of the newly resurgent Taliban and possible home of bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other Al Qaeda leaders?

Does Senator Lieberman believe that the would-be attackers share the same goals as the people who are waging violence in Iraq today? If so, just to be clear, which people in Iraq? The Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr? The successors to the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? The secular ex-Baathists? And, remind me again, just WHO are we fighting in Iraq?

It is time for the opponents of the Iraq War to clarify for Senator Lieberman — and anyone else who wishes to conflate the war in Iraq with the war against Al Qaeda — that the anti-Iraq War movement is not opposing the essential war against the people who killed over 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and not against fighting those people who were planning to kill thousands more over the Atlantic in the next few days.

The war in Iraq was, is, and will be a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda. People who argue otherwise either misunderstand the enemy that we are fighting or are engaged in a cynical ploy to exploit the anxiety of millions of Americans.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Reaction vs. Response

By
Jim Harper

See if you can pick out which statement below represents reaction to yeterday’s news of the foiled terror plot, and which statements represent response to the strategy of terrorism.

  • “This country is safer than it was prior to 9/11.” — President George W. Bush, 8/11/06, quoted in the Washington Post Express.
  • “We cannot afford no security, but we cannot afford total security, because … absolute security could come only at the expense of grounding all the planes and really undermining our way of life. And that would, of course, be a defeat for America.” — Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, 8/11/06, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
  • “Everything that can be done to protect [travelers] is being done.” — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 8/11/06, quoted in the Washington Post Express

As Ohio State University national security expert John Mueller points out in his brilliant Regulation article, A False Sense of Insecurity, ”The costs of terrorism very often are the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.”

By communicating messages of confidence, control, and resolve, two of three top administration officials have done a good job of responding to news of the foiled terror plots. The third has unwittingly played into the terrorism strategy.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics

Lieberman Mangles History — Again

By
Ted Galen Carpenter

The Democratic Party’s most notorious hawk has struck again.

During the NATO military intervention in Kosovo in 1999, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) embraced the notorious Kosovo Liberation Army, asserting that “fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values” (Linda Wheeler, “Marchers Strut Support for Independent Kosovo,” Washington Post, April 28, 1999). The KLA-dominated government in Kosovo has since proven his point by ethnically cleansing more than 240,000 Serb and other non-Albanian inhabitants of the province.

Lieberman has now brought his acute powers of analysis to bear again. Responding to the disruption of the latest terror plot in the UK, he opined that Islamic terrorists pose an even greater threat to America’s security than did the Soviet communists during the Cold War.

That comment exhibits historical illiteracy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the world’s number two military power. Its conventional forces could have overrun Europe and condemned hundreds of millions of additional people to communist slavery. Its arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons was capable of killing tens of millions of Americans and effectively ending American civilization. The USSR was a strategic threat of the first magnitude.

Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists are certainly scary, but their ability to cause destruction and loss of life is decidedly more limited. We need to remember that terrorism is the strategy of weak forces, not strong ones. The terrorists killed some 3,000 people on September 11. Subsequent incidents, such as those in Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London, and Mumbai, have each killed dozens or hundreds more. That is certainly tragic, but it doesn’t begin to compare to the number of deaths caused by the Soviet Union and its communist allies during the Cold War in various wars, much less to the deaths that would have occurred if the Cold War had erupted into World War III.

Lieberman’s scare mongering — and the similar tactics of others who hype the threat by saying that we’re already in World War III (or IV–or V!) — is profoundly unhelpful. We need to keep the terrorist threat in perspective (pdf).

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

A Civil War May Be the Necessary Next Step Toward a Political Equilibrium in Iraq

By
William A. Niskanen

Iraq is an artificial country, the combination of three former Ottoman provinces with a quite different Muslim group dominant in each province. Few people have significant loyalty to any government of the combination of these provinces, and Iraq can probably be held together only by a strong man who commands the support of the military. After Tito’s death, for example, the former Yugoslavia broke up into six independent governments, and the separation of Serbia and Kosovo is still likely.

My judgment is that the only plausible political equilibria in Iraq are the emergence of a strong man or the fragmentation into three independent governments dominated by the Sunnis, Shia, and the Kurds. A civil war, I suggest, may be the necessary next step toward either of these outcomes. Current U.S. government policy, of course, is to try to achieve an accomodation among these groups without continued violence or an indefinite U.S. military role, an outcome that is desirable but increasingly implausible.

The U.S. government may not have the capability to prevent a civil war in Iraq, and in any case, we may not have a dog in that fight.

Our government, ironically enough, may prefer the emergence of a Sunni strong man to maintain a unified Iraq, someone like Saddam Hussein who is not subservient to Iran; and of course, Hussein was “our” man in the Middle East during the Iran-Iraq war. Fragmentation into three governments would be the preferred outcome only if it did not precipitate a larger regional war. The problem is that the Turks may oppose an independent Kurdistan on their border, and the Saudis may oppose a Shia state subservient to Iran on their border.

The increasing sectarian violence in Iraq may yet be controlled by the military and police forces of the current government without indefinite U.S. military support. Fine, but the Iraqi government should be aware that popular support for an indefinite U.S. military role in Iraq is falling rapidly. In the event of a more open civil war, the U.S. government should avoid taking any side in the conflict and should pursue a loss-minimizing strategy during a rapid phase-out of U.S. troops. In anticipation of a possible fragmentation of Iraq, the U.S. government may still have enough leverage on other governments to reduce the prospect of a larger regional war.

There is no plausibly rewarding outcome to the U.S. role in Iraq. Sometimes, the wisest course, if also the most difficult, is to choose the least bad of a set of bad outcomes.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Michael Gerson Thinks You Are “Morally Empty”

By
Justin Logan

If you like the work of the Cato Institute, that is.  “Morally empty” is how Bush’s former head speechwriter described the “small-government” aspect of small-government conservatism in this interview with Foreign Policy magazine:

It is superficially attractive. But in the long run, it’s politically self-destructive because [candidates] end up talking about the size of government while others are talking about education, healthcare, and serious public concerns. It’s morally empty because, from my tradition and political philosophy, any political movement has to have a vision of social justice and the common good in order to appeal [to people]. And government can play a part in that. I’ve seen over the last five years that it clearly can.

And in case you had caught your breath after almost six years of Bush’s foreign policy, here he is on the question “Which of the president’s speeches do you think best expresses his worldview?”

Probably the second inaugural, which he wanted to be the democracy speech—the culmination of a series of doctrines and approaches that we had defined in the previous two to three years. It talks very frankly about the necessity of democratic transformation for the future of American security. Particularly in the Middle East, the cycle of tyranny and radicalism has produced an unsustainable situation. That dynamic has to be changed, and democracy is the only way to do it. Some of it is working with authoritarian governments that may go down the path of reform, some of it is standing up for dissidents and taking the side of the oppressed, and some of it is confronting outlaw regimes that threaten the international order. This is, in many ways, the clearest crystallization of his foreign policy.

It’d be comforting to think they’ve learned their lesson, but they clearly haven’t.  In case your outrage quotient isn’t yet filled, you can read this interview at Christianity Today.  Gerson on the Democratic Party:

I would love to see the Democratic Party return to a tradition of social justice that was found in people like William Jennings Bryan. During that period, many if not most politically engaged evangelicals were in the Democratic Party, because it was a party oriented toward justice.

I don’t see much of that now in the Democratic Party. Instead of an emphasis on the weak and suffering, there’s so much emphasis on autonomy and choice. And so the party of William Jennings Bryan, the party of Franklin Roosevelt, I’m not sure it exists any more. But it would be good if it did.

Gerson on Republicans:

There are some members of the Republican Party who…have a much more narrow view of government’s role. It would be a shame if conservatism were to return to a much more narrow and libertarian and nativist approach.

Your Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen.  Bomb-slash-democratize the Arabs, accomplish “social justice,” cure AIDS in Africa, and ban gay marriage.  There’s going to be a lot of work left for the federal government, apparently, even after Bush leaves office.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

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