On September 26, 2010 — 92 years after the WWI officially ended — Germany made her last payment of $94 million in reparations “to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles.” As Keynes rightly predicted, the unreasonably high French demands for financial reparations led to German economic weakness. The end result was hyperinflation, which was one of the principal causes of Hitler’s rise to power and the start of the Second World War. In spite of losing two world wars, Germany did eventually become the most powerful nation in Europe — through trade, capitalism and German ingenuity.

That’s the claim the Obama administration made in court. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

[W]hat’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Italics in the original. My colleagues Gene Healy and Nat Hentoff have expressed concerns about targeted killings. Charlie Savage wrote a good piece on this that highlights how even the most ardent defenders of executive power may blush at this broad claim of power.

The government’s increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.

“I’m a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can’t even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that’s too harsh even for me,” he said.

In fairness, Rivkin would defend the administration’s claim of power on other grounds — that targeting is a “political question” for the elected branches of government — but this approach seems to have lost out because it invites the judiciary to determine whether the U.S. is at war in Yemen.

Amending the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9/11 is long overdue. What groups are we truly at war with, where does the line between war and peace sit, who can we detain and kill, and what process is owed before a citizen may be targeted with lethal force? Questions of war are political in nature, and if we don’t know the answers, it is Congress’ role to step in and provide them.

Earlier this year, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirmed that the Obama administration authorized the CIA to kill American-born, Yemeni-based Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki.

Several people I admire and respect—and who are far more versed in the legal aspects of the “war on terror”—have already weighed in on whether the U.S. Government is authorized to kill U.S. terror suspects abroad, so I defer to those experts.

But what’s interesting is that the U.S. Government has killed “many Westerners, including some U.S. passport holders” in Pakistan’s tribal areas dating all the way back to the Bush administration, according to Bob Woodward’s new book.

Jeff Stein over at WaPo’s SpyTalk writes that according to Woodward, on November 12, 2008, then-CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden disclosed the killings to Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari during a meeting in New York. At the meeting, Zardari allegedly said, “Collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.”

It now appears that two human rights groups are challenging the legality of the Obama Justice Department’s right to kill U.S. citizens abroad. Will these groups now do the same with former Bush officials, too?

USA Today runs an interesting article about the DREAM Act, which Senate Republicans torpedoed this week, and which would have paved the way for many illegal immigrants to become legal.

As journalist Alan Gomez notes, the “less publicized part of the [DREAM Act] is that the Pentagon is pushing for it as a means to staff the armed forces.”

When the Department of Defense published its three-year strategic plan, it listed the DREAM Act as a way it could replenish its ranks.

“If we needed to expand the pool of eligible youth, the (DREAM) initiative would be one of several ways to do it,” spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said in an e‑mail.

Retired Army lieutenant colonel Margaret Stock says a “crisis in military manpower” is looming as the population ages and the economy improves. She says the military struggled to recruit enough people when the economy was booming just a few years ago because people had more employment options.

“DREAM would give us the ability to tap into a huge number of people who grew up in the United States, were educated here, they talk like Americans, they look like Americans and their loyalty lies with America,” says Stock, a former West Point professor who teaches political science at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

[…]

The military part of the act worries Jorge Mariscal, director of Latino studies at the University of California-San Diego.

He says many illegal immigrant families are too poor to pay for college.

“Our concern is that people are just going to get trapped for economic reasons into the military,” says Mariscal, who otherwise supports the DREAM Act.

A few thoughts on this: First, we might be experiencing a “crisis in military manpower” because we’re fighting too many wars and trying to do too much abroad, rather than as a necessary consequence of our aging population.

Second, Mariscal’s concern about illegal immigrants joining the military out of financial considerations rather than support for the nation’s wars makes them…a lot like the people who are in the military already. In a poll of active-duty military personnel published in the April 12, 2010 Defense News, responses to the question “What are the three most important reasons you would stay in the military?” were as follows:

• Job security (50%)
• Pension (49%)
• Patriotism (48%)
• Health care for my family and me (42%)
• Career satisfaction (32%)
• Pay (31%)
• Educational opportunities (21%)
• Travel, adventure (16%)
• Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (11%)

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Credit: Jamie Rose for The New York Times[/caption]

 
Finally, those in Congress who support American militarism but oppose immigration have a few contradictions to reconcile. The late Samuel Huntington, whose last book was searingly unpersuasive and draped a veneer of scholarly credibility over rank nativism, nonetheless got it right when he wrote that

[W]ars have furthered assimilation of immigrants not only by reducing their numbers but also by giving them the opportunity and the impetus to demonstrate their loyalty to America. Readiness to fight and if necessary die in war cemented their attachment to their new home and made it difficult if not impossible for nativist, anti-immigrant groups to oppose their full membership in American society.

So if you’re in any way interested in “assimilation,” getting people into the military is one of the best ways to do it.

Further, when you have DOD pushing for a bill on the grounds that it provides for a future where the nation’s armed forces can be fully staffed, and congressional war hawks spiking it because–well, for whatever variety of reasons they might have–it raises the question what the pro-war, anti-immgration folks’ plan is for perpetuating American hegemony while keeping immigrants out of the armed forces. Keeping unemployment at 10%? Cranking up pay and benefits even faster, making the military budget even less sustainable?

Actually, one additional point: Mark Haas wrote an interesting article a few years back positing a “geriatric peace” on the grounds that large and powerful countries may age so fast that they may not have concentrations of young men (or women) needed to fight and die in war. In that article, Haas wrote that

The United States is currently the youngest of all the Group of Eight nations. Because it has the highest fertility and immigration rates of all these countries, it will maintain, even strengthen, this position in coming decades.

[…]

Both the opportunities and challenges for U.S. security in an aging world are substantial. The United States’ aging crisis is less acute than in the other great powers, and its ability to pay the costs associated with this phenomenon is significantly better than most of these states. These facts, however, should not disguise the magnitude of these costs for the United States nor lull U.S. leaders into inaction on this critical issue. The more the United States maintains its enviable demographic position (compared with the other great powers) and relatively superior ability to pay for the costs of its elderly population, the more it will be able both to preserve its own position of international power dominance and to help other states address their aging (and other) problems when it is in U.S. interests to do so. A critical implication of these facts is that such domestic policies as means-testing Social Security and Medicare payments, raising the retirement age to reflect increases in life expectancies, maintaining largely open immigration policies to help keep the United States’ median age relatively low, encouraging individual behaviors that result in better personal health, and perhaps above all restraining the rising costs of its health-care system are critical international security concerns. A defining political question of the twenty-first century for U.S. international interests is whether U.S. leaders have sufficient political will and wisdom to implement these and related policies. The more proactive U.S. leaders are in minimizing the scope of its aging population and the costs associated with it, the more protected U.S. international interests will be. To ignore these costs, or even to delay implementing various reforms designed to limit their size, will jeopardize the level of global influence and security that the United States enjoys today.

Food for thought.

On the National Interest’s Skeptics blog, I have a new post about my lack of outrage over the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book about Obama and Afghanistan.

Unlike John Bolton and Heritage, I don’t think that the President’s comment that we can withstand another terrorist attack like 9–11 is offensive. After all, we can, and saying so doesn’t mean you want to try it.

As I put it there:

What’s truly outrageous is the notion that the only valid response to terrorism is cowering fear at home and endless warfare abroad. Somehow, for much the right, crediting our enemies with the ability to wreck our society is required, and it is verboten to say that we are something other than a pathetic, brittle nation that cannot manage adversity.

I also fail to get upset about the President’s worry that expanding the war in Afghanistan would alienate his base. Politics not only doesn’t stop at the water’s edge; it shouldn’t. I’m not sure exactly when popular checks on the war-making power went out of style, but I think we could use more of that in Afghanistan, not less. If pandering to the base can get us out of there one of these years, pander away.

The solution to bad policies is better politics, not no politics, to paraphase.

*I also recommend Paul Pillar’s post on the same subject. He says that the real news here is the Pentagon’s refusal to offer the President a policy alternative between population centric counter-insurgency and exit.

The New York Times reports that the book, Obama’s Wars, by longtime Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that is scheduled for publication next week, depicts an administration completely at odds over the war in Afghanistan.

According to Woodward, the president concluded from the start that “I have two years with the public on this.” He implored his advisers at one meeting, “I want an exit strategy,” and he set a withdrawal timetable because, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”

It’s unfortunate that the policy debate over Afghanistan will be further spun into a left-vs.-right issue. After all, there are growing, if nascent, signs that some on the political right have reservations about our continued military involvement in Afghanistan. Earlier this year, Congressman Tim Johnson (R‑Ill.), who earned an 80 percent favorable rating from the American Conservative Union, was a GOP co-sponsor to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D‑Ohio) resolution to force the removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. In March, Congressman John Duncan (R‑Tenn.) came to the Cato Institute and explained why “there is nothing conservative about the war in Afghanistan.”

And as Cato founder Ed Crane wrote last year in the pages of the LA Times:

Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional non-interventionist roots, and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus and forcefully oppose the war in Afghanistan. The Republicans have a chance at this moment to reclaim the mantle of the party of non-intervention — in your health care, in your wallet, in your lifestyle, and in the affairs of other nations.

I am not a conservative, and neither are many of my Cato colleagues. But these comments are intended to highlight that leaving Afghanistan is far beyond Left vs. Right. In fact, many conservatives used to deride nation-building as a utopian venture that had little to do with the nation’s real interests. In the case of Afghanistan, troops are being deployed to prop up a regime Washington doesn’t trust, for goals our president can’t define. There is a principled case to be made that a prolonged nation-building occupation is weakening our country militarily and economically. It’s a question of scarce resources and limiting the power of government. The immense price tag for war in Afghanistan can no longer be swept under the carpet or dismissed as an issue owned by peaceniks and pacifists, much less “the Democratic Party.”

Last Wednesday, former Pakistani President and military leader Pervez Musharraf announced he intends to return home as head of a new political party called the All Pakistan Muslim League. Sources close to Musharraf say he is reportedly eyeing the presidency and prime ministership. Amid ongoing political unrest and economic uncertainty under the leadership of President Ali Asif Zardari, U.S. leaders may hope that Musharraf can bring some semblance of stability to the country given recent developments, but his return could be something of a mixed blessing.

On Friday, Imran Farooq, a founding leader of MQM (Muttahida Quami Movement), the fourth-largest political party in Pakistan, was stabbed to death in London. Since 2009, more than 200 MQM workers and supporters have been the victims of targeted killings. Because MQM dominates the Muhajir urban centers of Sindh, including Karachi—Pakistan’s largest city of more than 16 million—each targeted killing unleashes waves of violence that further contributes to the city’s deteriorating law and order situation. Indeed, when news of Farooq’s death reached Karachi, rioters torched vehicles and scores of people were killed and injured.

These targeted killings reflect a multi-dimensional problem. Part of it is tit-for-tat gang warfare between Muhajir-dominant MQM and Pashtun-dominant ANP (Awami National Party). [Note: When I was in Karachi a couple years back, I was warned to steer clear of certain areas that were MQM “turf.”] It is important to note, however, that MQM has made it a point not to conflate violence with Pashtuns; in fact, ANP continues to make it a point of joining the two together in order to condemn MQM for highlighting the increasing number of Taliban seeking refuge in Pashtun areas of Karachi. Another part of this ongoing violence is competition over new development in the city, the ANP’s resistance to the government’s redress of illegal land encroachment, and the collusion of political parties with criminal networks and religious extremists. MQM has been quite vocal about what they called the increased “Talibanisation” of Karachi, a concern that foreign diplomats have continually ignored.

The tragedy is that Musharraf was driven from power to bring democratic governance back to Pakistan. But despite his back-room dealings that brought an incompetent Zardari to power, and a crackdown on the judiciary that led to the former military leader’s ignominious resignation, Pakistanis stuck in desperate straights might welcome Musharraf back with open arms. Perhaps if he returns to the political game, the West will pay more attention to events unfolding in Pakistan.