With All Our Might Posted by Michael Signer

A great big shout-out to the good folks at the Progressive Policy Institute for their publication this week of a volume called With All Our Might:  A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, edited by the redoubtable Will Marshall. 

The book is a spectacular example of how engaged progressives are coming up with specific policy to envision a brighter future -- and to lead the country and the world toward security.  A collection of essays by top scholars and policymakers, including Ken Pollack, Graham Allison, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Rachel Kleinfeld and Matt Spence of the Truman Project (of which I'm a Principal), the book is based on three premises:

1)  Defeating Islamic extremism is America's top security imperative
2)  Victory will require new strategies that are at once tough and intelligent
3)  Progressives need to stop just reacting to President Bush and instead should be taking the lead with their own initiatives on security.

Katrina Style Government: Our Gift to Iraq Posted by Lorelei Kelly

From the outside, today's Congress looks like a dank Gollum's den of tricksy, swilling, one-armed-bandits wearing golf pants and traipsing to the Lear jet courtesy of taxpayer subsidized corporations. But we do still have elected leaders who valiantly insist that our legislature perform its oversight duties. This week, Rep. Henry Waxman (CA) released a memo about corruption run rampant in the post-hurricane Gulf Coast.  Like Iraq deja vu, private contractors exploited the system to make millions and ripped off the taxpayers while the folks who needed the help were left wanting. 

Here's a fun irony: Conservatives who ignore all free-market principles when it comes to product delivery. Its called a "cost plus" contracting system and it works exactly like it sounds. Be ready to go when crisis erupts then charge for the cost and add a profit that is a percentage of the cost... Wheeeee! a recipe for unending, no-questions- asked profit!  In Iraq, because monopoly contracts were awarded before specific projects were identified, there was no actual price competition for more than 2,000 projects.  That must be how Halliburton, despite $263 million in unaccounted for reconstruction funds for the project "Restore Iraqi Oil" -- still managed to pay out $100 million in profits and bonuses or that it racked up $1.2 billion in unaccounted costs for the logistics support to the war and still served up contaminated water to our troops! Back in 03, we did hear a few yelps about no bid contracting for Halliburton and the fact that VP Cheney was prior CEO of that very same company. We were told that Cheney was not involved in the decision. Yet the DoD political appointee who secured the billions for Halliburton did so after consulting with a "principles committee" that included the now indicted Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby. The wikipedia description of "cost-plus" sounds like today's conservative leadership  philosophy in a nutshell:

easy to calculate
minimal information requirements
easy to administer
tends to ignore the role of consumers
tends to ignore the role of competitors

So, What About Civilian Control? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

It’s gotten awfully trendy to toss around concerns over civilian control of the military.  But do we really have a problem, and if so, what is it?

This week, conservative Republicans think that naming an active-duty military officer to head the CIA puts dangerous pressure on civilian control of intelligence affairs.

Last month, when half-a-dozen retired generals called for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s resignation, a line of worry ran from the White House talking points to the Washington Post editorial board and even some progressives:  the generals were, in the words of the Post, assaulting "the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control…. If [the generals] are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, they will set an ugly precedent."

And, lest we forget, for much of the 1990s we heard from the right how the incompetent Clinton Administration was unable to master the military.

Now, I’m in a strange position here.  I do think we have a problem with the balance of power in our civil-military relationship.  But our friends on the right are wringing their hands about symptoms, not root causes.  Retired generals trashing Don Rumsfeld, or Les Aspin for that matter, is hardly the heart of the matter.  Neither is appointing active-duty military officers to senior positions in intelligence, the war on drugs, etc. etc.

Last month the problem was (retired) military officials questioning the judgement and qualifications of the civilian Secretary of Defense.  This, said Charles Krauthammer, might lead to factions within the active-duty military:

That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

Lest you think I am picking an extreme target here, Slate’s Fred Kaplan agreed that the long-term threat is factionalism within the force.

And when you stop to look at the analyses, folks have quite different definitions of what the problem is.

This week the problem seems to be expanding military control of our intelligence apparatus:

Dennis Hastert said “I don’t think a military guy should be head of the CIA, frankly.”

Senator Susan Collins saw the problem as DoD moving to take control of the intelligence apparatus by “seeking to fill any vacuum or create one if necessary.” 

International Order Building Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I posted back in October on the deliberations of the Princeton Project on National Security, an effort to devise a grand strategy to guide US foreign policy.  Last week I moderated a discussion led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on the Princeton Project findings at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Dean Slaughter posted her observations on the discussion over at America Abroad.  Here are a few of mine:

1.  Order-building - A centerpiece of the project's thinking relates to "order-building," or the idea that US foreign policy should center on creating structures and norms that together frame an international order that's friendly to our aims and values.  I like this:  its something like what America's founders undertook - the task of building up a society based on particular values, but flexible enough to adapt to unpredictable growth and change.   One discussion point at CFR is that the Chinese are today undertaking a kind of order-building on their own, based on mercantilist principles and the feeding of their immense need for energy and natural resources.  So American order-building would hardly occur in a vacuum. 

The trick, as Dean Slaughter discusses, is how to build this order:  can we reform existing institutions? where existing but imperfect institutions (i.e. the UN) are entrenched, can new ones be created?  I would argue that these days the Chinese may sometimes find the UN a more effective vehicle for their form of order-building than we do.

2.  US Hegemony/Superpowerdom - Dean Slaughter argues that we don't need hegemony for its own stake, that prolonging America's sole superpowerdom ought not be a goal unto itself.  I am not so sure.  It seems to me that the most likely alternative right now to supplant American sole-superpowerdom is not a concert of like-minded Western countries striding atop an international order they've created (Slaughter's vision), but rather a potentially tense situation in which powers with competing interests vie forcefully over natural resources and disagree on how to handle threats.   We may have no choice but to gradually cede to that, but I don't see how its preferable to the kind of preeminence we enjoyed during the 1990s.   

Iran Learns from North Korea Posted by Derek Chollet

As we all focus on the escalating problem with Iran, there seems to be some serious cognitive dissonance about another nuclear problem – North Korea.  Remember that other part of the “axis of evil?”  The U.S. approach to these problems has been largely the same, as have the results.  Writing in yesterday’s Boston Globe, my colleague (and occasional DA contributor) Jon Wolfsthal and I take a look at this.  Here’s some of what we say: 

For nearly three years the Administration approached the North Korea issue by wavering between half-hearted diplomacy and uncoordinated pressure tactics, refusing to talk to North Koreans face-to-face and choosing instead to argue over the shape of the table.

It was not until last fall that American diplomats began to act decisively.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice swept into office pledging that the “time for diplomacy is now,” and empowered Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill to deal directly with the North Koreans.  This new engagement worked, as Hill extracted important pledges from Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear programs in exchange for discussions about possible cooperation on alternative energy sources.

But even then the administration began to falter.  As soon as the North Koreans inevitably and expectedly tried to negotiate for more, the Administration reverted back to its previous approach and allowed important but secondary issues like North Korea’s counterfeiting American currency to get block progress.  The September deal unraveled, and now seven months later, the U.S. is back at square one – no other six-party talks are even scheduled.  Meanwhile Pyongyang has quadrupled its nuclear arsenal potential and continues to operate a plutonium production reactor and could extract the material as early as this month, providing it with enough material to take its suspected nuclear arsenal from 9 to 12 nuclear weapons.

Instead of walking away from the problem, the U.S. must work to test North Korea’s willingness to deal by engaging them directly.  Rather than allowing less urgent issues to stand in the way, it should offer to meet with North Korea anytime and anywhere to make rapid progress on the nuclear issue.  And in the event that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions cannot be reversed, the U.S. needs to act now to shore up its deterrence on the peninsula, including by bringing back the troops moved from Korea to Iraq back and strengthening tactical missile defenses, and air and naval forces.

Finding a way to jump-start dealing with the North Korea threat is critical for the stability of East Asia; but it will also shows a possible way out of our current impasse with Iran. North Korea’s success in acquiring a nuclear capacity has provided Iran with a reliable playbook -- one they continue to use with great success.

Until I Figure Out whether the Iranian President is Crazy... Posted by Shadi Hamid

I'm still trying to figure out whether Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is rational. In the meantime, here is my latest article on the "origins" of the nuclear confrontation with Iran, beginning with the 1953 coup (can you say "blowback" ?).

Torture and Silence: This Year's Arab Spring? Posted by Shadi Hamid

You perhaps doubted claims of Arab autocracy’s renewed vigor? Well then, there is this from The Arabist:

“You bitches. You sons of bitches. This is how it is going to be from now on if you do not behave and know your limits. If you do not behave you’ll have the bottom of my old shoes all over you." These and more were the exact words of Sami Sedhom, Assistant to the Egyptian Minister of Interior, Habib el Adly.

There is torture, Abu-Ghraib style. There is also torture, Egyptian style. Anyone with politically active friends in Egypt has heard the horror stories. More:

Friends of two of the detainees received phone calls from their mobile phones describing how they were being tortured. “We are screwing them right now” were the exact words, raising fears that our colleagues may be subject to the well known brutality of Egyptian police.

Let me just note, once again, that Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt is one of America’s closest allies in the region. More importantly, it receives more than 2 billion dollars of US economic and military aid (in other words, our tax dollars). I spoke over the weekend with a State Department official, who will remain unnamed, about the deteriorating situation in Egypt. He assured me that they have made clear to Cairo their concern over such human rights abuses. But he wondered aloud why some people exaggerate the US government’s ability to pressure other governments to do what we want them to do. So, let me get this straight - you can invade a country, occupy it for a couple years, and spend endless billions in the process, but you can’t get your good old boy Mubarak to respect even the most minimum and basic of human rights standards?

10 Reasons Why the Community of Democracies Can't Be Progressives’ Big Idea Posted by Suzanne Nossel

This past week I joined a couple of progressive brainstorming sessions discussing the new foreign policy ideas that can help us out of the hole.  Oftentimes the question of creating a “Community of Democracies” as a caucus at the UN and a forum for building international consensus is raised.  (I’m now on a flight to Asia hoping to post when I arrive and to be asleep before I can put in all the links, but google “community of democracies” and you’ll get the background you need.   Our own Mort Halperin and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have been championing this idea for a decade or more.  Ivo Daalder and others at www.tpmcafe.com’s America Abroad have talked about it more recently).  While the proposal has merit, it won’t work either politically or policywise as the centerpiece of new progressive thinking, and here’s why:

1. The Community of Democracies Already Exists -  Mort and Secretary Albright likes the idea so much they went out and created it, getting dozens of countries to participate in a forum that now meets regularly.   The Bush Administration has continued to support the existing COD.  While many progressives now argue that the current COD is too big and diverse to do the sorts of things it should, I frankly don’t see how we get away with dissolving it in favor of something new that excludes some current members.

2. The Idea is Too Abstract to Ignite Excitement Among the American Public – The American public will be hard pressed to rally around a proposal to form a new international organization, much less one whose purposes and membership are, at least at this point, abstractions.  That doesn’t make the community a bad idea, it just says it won’t be “the idea” that jumpstarts a progressive foreign policy platform.  The fact that a version of the COD already exists also undercuts public enthusiasm.

3. Membership Issues Will Be A Quagmire – Particularly now that Iraq and the Palestinian Authority have held democratic elections yielding outcomes that are worse from our perspective than most coups d’etat, its hard to envision how we’d delineate a criteria for membership that would be seen as fair, and yet encircle only those countries who could productively be part of the forum.

4. Noone’s Clear on What the Organization Will Do – Caucusing at the UN inevitably gets brought up as an option, and certainly it would be helpful for us to have more ways of building support for our positions at Turtle Bay.  But the regional, economic and political agendas of democracies are highly diverse, and its not clear what the group could build consensus on.  I believe one of the original notions was a caucus to promote the advancement of democracy around the world but, after Iraq, that’s no longer a proposition most countries will sign onto readily.

5. Concerns About China May Dilute the Organization's Ambitions – A lot of discussion these days in progressive circles revolves around forming alliances and relationships to gird against China’s rise, without at the same time provoking Beijing.  With that goal in mind, some favor shaping a community of democracies loosely so as not to raise Chinese ire.  Indeed this may be necessary to get Asian democracies on board.  But tempering the organization’s ambitions in deference to Beijing could end up defeating the purpose.