Exploring the GOP Id Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at Foreign Policy, I have a new piece up on Monday's Huntsman/Gingrich debate in New Hampshire, which besides offering few areas of disagreement between the two candidates, provided a fascinating glimpse into the preferences of GOP primary voters:

Huntsman, to date, has been banking in large measure on his experience as an ambassador to China and his sober and adult approach to policy matters both domestic and international. He's the safe pick; the clean-cut boyfriend you can feel comfortable bringing home to your parents. That serious figure was on display Monday afternoon.

Then there is Newt Gingrich; the bad boy to Huntsman's upright and dependable boyfriend.  While others may couch their words in diplomatic language or achievable policy specifics, Newt doesn't waste his time with such niceties.

. . . For Gingrich, every single government institution, from the State Department to the intel community to the Defense Department's procurement capabilities to NASA's bureaucracy is in need of radical transformation.  It's not enough to come up with a new energy policy; America must wean itself off all foreign oil. Manufacturing capabilities must be completely rebuilt; a national debate and comprehensive strategy on dealing with radical Islam is required. Everything for Gingrich is bigger and fundamentally transformational.

. . . There is no nuance with Newt; no half-measures or mere modifications to what is currently being done. Everything must change. And every story is told with a leading anecdote offered in breathless tone that suggests only a fool would fail to grasp the historic nature of Newt's arguments. After a while, listening to Gingrich feels like a bit like listening to a couple of undergraduates in a dorm room talking about how to fix the world while passing around a joint.

Guess which candidate is the current frontrunner and which one is mired in the single digits. Read the whole thing here

The Chosen People? Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at Foreign Policy, I have a new piece up on the toxic manner in which Republican presidential candidates have been talking about the Middle East recently - with unquestioned support for Israel and harsh even racist epithets for the Palestinians:

At times during Saturday, Dec. 10's Republican presidential debate, it was hard to figure out whether the GOP aspirants were running for president of the United States or prime minister of Israel. With the notable exception of Ron Paul, each of the major GOP candidates practically fell over themselves to express solidarity with a country that, in their narrative, appears to not only be the most important U.S. ally in the world, but a country that simply can do no wrong.

. . .  But this is basically par for the course in GOP debates: Any enemy of Israel is an enemy of the United States, and any threat to Israel is a supremely magnified threat to the United States . . . There was a great deal of controversy in Washington last week about the way that some foreign-policy commentators describe the U.S. relationship to Israel -- with some intimating in the pages ofPolitico that those who don't walk in lock step with the current Israeli government are either anti-Israeli or "borderline anti-Semitic."

This is an old game in U.S. foreign-policy debates -- and one that was on full display Saturday night. But perhaps the greater area of inquiry would be to look at how Americans have reached a point in their political discourse where the behavior of Israel can go virtually unquestioned and the national characteristics of the Palestinian people can be described in the most odious -- and borderline racist -- terms imaginable without it raising even a hint of controversy.

You can read the whole thing here

Richard Clarke: Presidents, Not 'Commanders on the Ground,' Decide Posted by Jacob Stokes

Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has a piece in the New York Times today that explains why it’s a core part of the president’s job to exert control over the military. Clarke explains how this imperative is by design: the president is in charge of grand strategy and the intersection of foreign and domestic affairs – and the military understands this:

There’s no doubt that the United States has the most professional military officer corps in the world, and certainly the one with the most combat experience. Part of their training and professionalism is, however, a deep-seated understanding of the American tradition of “civilian control of the military.” They know that Article II of the Constitution says that the elected civilian president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.

But civilian control isn’t just a matter of law; it’s also a matter of effectiveness. Being on the ground may provide for an understanding of local circumstances, but it does not necessarily offer insight into what is best in the long run for our nation. We want our president to think about that larger context, and to make decisions that take as much as possible into account. 

Clarke goes on to explain how this concept should inform our choice about who becomes president:

Of course, we choose our presidents in part because of how we think they will handle crises, how they will see the bigger picture, the greater good, the historic moment. We expect them to exercise their own judgment after listening to military and civilian advisers, not just to do what the “commanders on the ground” want. 

In countries like Pakistan the president cannot tell the military what to do. Not so in America. But by offering to cede automatically to the will of military commanders, some presidential candidates are telling voters in advance that there is an important part of the president’s job that they are unwilling to perform. 

The whole thing is worth reading. You can find it here.

Photo: Wikipedia

The Politics of Apologies Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at Foreign Policy my new column looks at the false charge that Obama is our Apologist-in-Chief . . . and how it still affects foreign policy decision-making:

There are political lies; and then there are charges that fall squarely in the realm of pants-on-fire untruths. The repeated assertion by conservative politicians, commentators, and pundits that President Barack Obama has consistently apologized for America during his global travels -- the "American Apology Tour" as Mitt Romney calls it -- falls squarely into the latter category. 

It is a lie that has been reiterated so often that it has become conventional wisdom on the right. The fact that Obama has never directly apologized for America; that he has never expressed direct sorrow or regret for U.S. actions; that alleged charges of contrition have been repeatedly and comprehensively debunked appears not to matter much at all -- particularly to those such as Romney, who in last month's CNN national security debate repeated the charge again. It's worth mentioning that Romney is so enamored with the topic of presidential apologizing that he titled his recent foreign policy book, you guessed it, No Apologies. 

. . . All of this might sound like the inevitable back and forth of American politics. After all, politicians exaggerate the faults of their opponents all the time -- and it's hard to imagine that the Obama administration would take any of these obvious untruths seriously. But even the most mundane and misleading of political attacks can shape foreign policy decision-making. If, as Clausewitz suggested, "war is the expression of politics by other means," then foreign policy is often the expression of domestic politics by other means -- with often unsettling consequences.

You can read the whole thing here

While you're at it check out me and Robert Farley debating the implications of an Iranian bomb:

 

Just Another Depressing Day At The Office Posted by Michael Cohen

Besides the fact that we're getting a torrential downpour here in New York, scanning today's headlines kind of makes me want to crawl into my happy place and rock back and forth.

First, comes news that General John Allen, commander of US troops in Afghanistan, has been privately telling congressional delegations and others that he disagrees with President Obama's plan for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and wants to maintain higher troop levels into 2013. Its shocking I know that an American general wants to keep US soldiers on a battlefield longer than his civilian overseers. That never happens.

But what is so maddening about this is, 'what part of civil-military relations' is unclear to Allen. It seems to me that there is a chain of command for Allen to make his concerns known; referencing them to congressional delegations and others is a sure-fire way for that news to leak to the media (which I suppose is the point). All that does, of course, is put political pressure on Obama to go along with Allen (also the point) and delay troop withdrawals further (the ultimate point). 

I know this has sort of become par for the course in Afghanistan; with a steady stream of American generals contradicting the president and both privately and publicly trying to undermine his policy decisions - but it doesn't make it any less outrageous or aggravating.

Of course, Obama is hardly blameless here. This is what happens when you fail to maintain tight control over your own military leaders and let them do whatever the hell they want in the field. John Allen is way out of his lane here, but ultimately the failure for the hash that US policy in Afghanistan has become lies with Barack Obama. If you don't want generals doing things like this how about exercising some damn civilian control over them.

Next, Politico discovers that people in Washington occasionally have different views about Israel than AIPAC. It turns out that the folks at CAP and Media Matters refuse to kowtow to AIPAC's party line on US policy toward Israel . . . and as a result they get utterly shameless attacks like this lodged against them:

"Either the inmates are running the asylum or the Center for American Progress has made a decision to be anti-Israel,” said Josh Block, a former spokesman for AIPAC who is now a fellow at the center-left Progressive Policy Institute. “Either they can allow people to say borderline anti-Semitic stuff” – a reference to what he described as conspiracy theorizing in the Alterman column – “and to say things that are antithetical to the fundamental values of the Democratic party, or they can fire them and stop it.”

The Alterman op-ed that is referenced to is here. It's not my cup of tea, but it takes quite a reach to call this even borderline anti-Semitism or Alterman an anti-Semite in general. Of course calling Matt Duss, Ali Ghraib, Eli Clifton or MJ Rosenberg "anti-Israel" or claiming they are expressing views antithetical to the values of the Democratic Party simply because they disagree with Israeli policies that are driving the Jewish state over a cliff is also depressingly par for the course - and additionally a complete load of crap. (That Matt Duss, in particular, is one of the single best DC-based analysts writing about the Middle East today merits mention here as well.) 

Also worth mentioning that Block's comments would be accurate if appropriating land from Palestinians, severely restricting their mobility and preventing them a right to self-determination are reflective of the values of the Democratic Party. Thankfully they are not. 

In the end, the issue here is not that CAP and other progressive groups are breaking with the Administration on Israeli policy (though it's nice to see them do it on this and on a host of other issues. Ben Armbruster for one has been crushing on his coverage of Leon "The Sky Is Falling" Panetta). The issue here is that those in the bizarrely and wrongly named "pro-Israel community" want to police the discourse on what people can and cannot say about Israel and US policy toward it. Diverge from the accepted nomenclature, apparently, at your own peril.

Finally, there is this tidbit from Andrew Exum on the future of COIN. As is now the wont among COIN advocates who have seen their population centric dreams for Afghanistan fizzle out, Exum makes the argument that we can't afford to forget our COIN lessons because, after all, it is the future of war (and also apparently the past):

According to the Correlates of War dataset, roughly 83% of the conflicts fought since the end of the Napoleonic Era have been civil wars or insurgencies. And while scholarship (.pdf) suggets more recent civil wars are less "irregular" than those fought during the Cold War, it's safe to assume irregular wars will continue to be phenomena military organizations will wrestle with . .  it is a mistake to assume the U.S. military will never fight these wars again. We've done that before, with disastrous results

Actually the disaster was that we fought these wars in the first place! And here's why they were disasters -- because the United States is quite ineffective at fighting population centric counter-insurgencies like the kind advocated for in 2009 for Afghanistan. Indeed I was pleased to see that CNAS just released a report recognizing that a COIN mission in the Hindu Kush might not be sustainable. As the old joke goes, better nate than lever.

Still I'll make a deal with the COIN folks; I'll recognize that we should keep COIN knowledge in the cupboard (but way in the back behind the fondue kit and the can of waxed beans) if you loudly acknowledge - indeed even shout to the hills - that every time someone recommends fighting a counter-insurgency this is really, really, really bad idea and that the United States lacks the core competency to do it effectively. In the end, friends don't let friends do population centric COIN. And after all, it wasn't like you were all too shy about saying that it's something we could - and should - do in 2009. 

Deal?

Reading List: Nuclearizing Iran Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Gosh, Foreign Policy, do experts "of all stripes" really think that Iran getting a nuclear weapon -- something no one, conservative or liberal, really wants -- is such a catastrophe that, as it is reported Senator Kirk will say tomorrow:

if Iran gets the bomb -- we, the United States of America and freedom-loving nations around the world, will have failed in what could be our generation's greatest test,

Well, no.  In fact, lots of former intelligence officials and non-ideological types have been in the forefront of urging caution on exactly this topic.  Their reports are good to read with the AEI report...

Brookings' Bruce Reidel, former National Intelligence Officer:

Israel will continue to have military superiority over any and all of its enemies, backed by the support of the world’s only super power, the United States. Iran is backed only by Syria, and that relationship is in deep trouble because Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is in deep trouble. Iran is not an existential threat to either America or Israel.

RAND's James Dobbins, who spent a career at the State Department dealing successfully with bad guys from Iran to Kosovo to Haiti:

It is not inevitable that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons or even that it will gain the capacity to quickly produce them. U.S. and even Israeli analysts continually push their estimates for such an event further into the future. Nevertheless, absent a change in Iranian policy, it is reasonable to assume that, some time in the coming decade, Iran will acquire such a capability.

There's more -- our team will add it as we pull it up.

Weapons Don’t Make War Posted by The Editors

This post by Adam Elkus, an analyst specializing in foreign policy and security studies. He is currently associate editor at Red Team Journal and a contributor to the ThreatsWatch project. He blogs at Rethinking Security.

Observers of global security are growing very concerned about flying robots with guns, more commonly known as unmanned aerial systems or drones. As a remotely piloted, automated, and even autonomous weapons leave the realm of science fiction and enter into grimy reality, some worry that taking humans out of the tactical decision cycle and out of danger, will enable a new age of remote (and frequent) warfare. 

While there are certainly problematic issues with the emerging military robotics revolution, weapons do not make war.  It is likely that future historians will look back on today’s speculations about drones with the same bemusement military historians regard H.G. Wells’ writings about unstoppable strategic bombing today.

Human beings make war. Force—whether executed by a human or a robot—is a function of politics and policy. Drones do not change this reality. Unless one is describing Skynet, there is no taking the human being “out of the loop.”  Human beings still remotely pilot today’s unmanned aerial systems, and even autonomous systems would still be the creation of human designers and programmers. Tactically or even operationally autonomous systems would still be subordinated to a military chain of command.

To be sure, evolution of unmanned aerial systems pose legal and moral problems, such as issues over accountability, compliance with the rules of engagement, and dealing with negative public perceptions. But the introduction of airpower (and other weapons throughout history) caused similar ethical dilemmas—many of which have yet to be resolved. Many critiques of drone targeting are really critiques of airpower writ large that could have been stated with contextual fidelity at many other points in modern military history.

As a certain dead Prussian informed us, war is political intercourse, with the addition of violence. Weapons are used because a given set of political and cultural mores and policy decisions set the stage for their employment. Drones did not fly themselves to Waziristan, but were animated by a domestic political and strategic consensus about the utility of killing enemies of the state with standoff firepower. And in that respect they differ little from the conditions under which we use existing technologies.

Perhaps the most persuasive critique of drones is that they desensitize us to the costs of war by allowing us to target without risk. But such analysis has seemingly forgotten the mid-90s debate over “post-heroic warfare” in the airpower-centric humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. The capability to wage war with minimal risk goes back to the post-WWI British policy of air control, the standoff bombing of those challenging imperial rule in the Crown’s backwater.

Despite the nearly century-long prevalence of airpower, we have not become numb to war. Witness, for example, the powerful desire for retribution after the 9/11 attacks and its impact on domestic and international policy. Airpower—drones included—has not erased emotion from war because war is a complex mixture of irrational forces (emotion, hatred, and enmity), chance (friction and the fog of war) and rational policy. And as long as humans are involved in conflict, these forces will continue to exert themselves on the theory and practice of war. This does not mean that we won’t regret our emotions after the end of hostilities, but placid push-button war is unlikely. Just ask the drone pilots who experience significant emotional turmoil from the consequences of their strikes.

There is also something erroneous in the idea that targeting at a distance itself is somehow alien to war’s true nature. As Lukas Milevski observed, popular ideas of “real” war in the West always seem to focus around the idea of two sides on a field contesting the day. But while battle avoidance may be alien to the History Channel ideal of war, it is not alien to war itself. With very few exceptions, every disruptive technology with military utility is initially decried as cowardly before being integrated into standard operating procedure.

Lastly, it should not be presumed that targeting long range always means targeting without risk of injury or death. The minimization of operational and strategic risk is a function of geopolitical primacy, the benefits of which include being able to project force decisively against enemies with either third-rate industrial armies or bands of militants. But if we are truly entering a more militarily multipolar world in which adversaries assimilate the same precision-strike capabilities we currently possess, the American monopoly on battle network systems—which include drones—will steadily erode.

Such unpleasant realities put the future of drones in a different light. Efforts to heighten drone autonomy will likely begin because current remotely piloted vehicles are vulnerable against opponents with sophisticated integrated air defense systems. And those opponents will likely have the ability to put Americans at risk through their own conventional, irregular, or nuclear capabilities. We have air superiority over Iran, for example, but their capabilities for irregular retaliation give us pause when we consider the utility of a strategic air campaign.

In a world of decreased American military advantage, we might look back nostalgically to our current nightmares about frictionless war regardless of what sophisticated robots we possess.  

Photo: Flickr

Leon Panetta's Follow Friday: @Iran, @Israel, @Tough Love Posted by Heather Hurlburt

The Obama national security team is notorious for its habit of dropping national security news at moments that are unconducive to the news cycle, so Leon Panetta’s 6pm Friday speaking engagement at Brookings’ Saban Forum was tipped to be worth checking out.  And the SecDef did not disappoint, coming loaded for multiple bear:  first, to announce a new, largest-ever joint US-Israeli military exercise next year (superseding 2009’s largest-ever US-Israel exercise), at which new ballistic missile defenses will be tested.  Second, to convey firmly to Iran (the intended audience of the aforementioned missile defense test), but also to Israel, that in the effort to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, “it is my department’s responsibility to provide the President with a range of military options” and “no option has been taken off the table.”

With that throat-clearing out of the way, Panetta launched into a to-do list for Israel that was impressive in its scope and firmness.  Israel should mend fences with Turkey and Jordan.  Israel should lean into cooperation with Egypt along its border more, rather than pulling away.  Israel should find ways to do more security cooperation with the US-trained Palestinian Authority forces (and Abbas should make that possible).  Israel should see the changes of the last year as an opportunity and work to secure peace for the long term.  Israel “has a responsibility to work toward our common goals” and “build regional support for our shared objectives.”

While we wait for the wailing about the Israeli relationship to start, a few public opinion figures you might've missed in the last week:

% of Americans who believe Iran can be contained by diplomacy:  55.

% of Israelis who support an Israeli strike on Iran: 43.

% of Israeli Jews who have a favorable view of Obama, and of the US:  54 and 80.

In the Q and A, Panetta soberly laid out the problems with the “military option for Iran”  he said, it will only delay, not stop, Iran’s program; it will reverse Iran’s regional isolation; it could spark retaliation against US forces; it would have economic implications; and it could throw the entire region into conflict.

So given all those factors, with which many nonpartisan and military analysts agree, as well as concerns about an unintended slide from heated rhetoric to confrontation and war, why would a sober, thoughtful defense secretary go so far out of the way to insist that force is not ruled out?  Panetta said that the Administration’s goal is to force Iran to choose between a nuclear weapon and re-integration in the region and the world.  He knows that diplomacy and economics are the way to achieve that goal -- and said so. The Secretary also knows that what he called Israel's increasing isolation makes things easier for Iran.  Hence the invitation to Israel to reach out in its region and alter the dynamic. Panetta, who has developed since arriving at the Pentagon a reputation for speaking off the cuff from time to time, seemed highly calibrated throughout, which made the curtness of his last response, to the question of what Israel should do now, all the more striking: “just get to the damn table.”

 

http://www.brookings.edu/events/2011/1202_saban_forum.aspx

Max Boot's Ridiculous "Bomb Iran" Op-ed Posted by Michael Cohen

Max Boot has an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today that shockingly argues the US should bomb Iran to stop its nuclear program. I know . . . who could have seen that coming. 

Since this is such a terrible idea that, in the abstract, is difficult to defend Boot must rely on some rather dubious historical analogies to make his case:

In retrospect, weakness in the face of aggression is almost impossible to understand — or forgive. Why did the West do so little while the Nazis gathered strength in the 1930s? While the Soviet Union enslaved half of Europe and fomented revolution in China in the late 1940s? And, again, while Al Qaeda gathered strength in the 1990s? Those questions will forever haunt the reputations of the responsible statesmen, from Neville Chamberlain to Bill Clinton.

. . . After the failure to stop Hitler and Bin Laden, among others, Westerners were said to have suffered a "failure of imagination." We are suffering that same failure today as we fail to face up to the growing threat from the Islamic Republic.

Just from an historical perspective this is simply wrong. First of all, Bill Clinton did make effort to stop Al Qaeda in the 1990s (albeit unsuccessfully). One can argue that he should have done more, but the notion that he did "so little" is clearly incorrect. Also, there was another presidential adminstration that proceeded followed Clinton's, which did basically nothing to stop Al Qaeda and saw America attacked on their watch. Oddly they go unmentioned.

Second, the US clearly did try to prevent Maoist revolution in China in the 1940s and unless Max is suggesting that the US should have launched a preventive war against the Red Army in 1945 I'm not sure what the thinks should have been done to stop the Soviet Union from enslaving half of Europe. But of course to root around inside the feverish mind of Max Boot is to ignore the fact that even the United States has limitations on what it can accomplish on the global stage.

Third, if my eyes don't deceive me Max is comparing Osama bin Laden and the Iranian mullahs to Adolf Hitler.  It seems relevant to mention here that Iran is isolated diplomatically and politically; can only project power through the use of terrorist proxies; has no real allies in the region; is roiled by serious domestic upheaval; has a weak conventional military force that utilizes obsolete weapons and technology; and is out spent militarily by basically all of its key rivals. The argument that Iran can be compared, historically, to the rise of Nazi Germany is utterly laughable.

Finally, Boot argues that the world has responded with "scarcely believable passivity" to Iran's provocations and that "The only credible option for significantly delaying the Iranian nuclear program would be a bombing campaign."  

Notice that Boot doesn't say stop, but rather delay Iran's nuclear program (it goes without saying that Boot fails to address the issue of costs or unintended consequences in using military force against Iran, but of course the first rule of Neo-Con Fight Club is not to talk about the costs of Neo-Con Fight Club).

Nonetheless, the notion that the world has responded with "passivity" to Iranian provocations only makes sense if you believe that every action short of the use of military force is an example of passivity. For Boot, covert action, economic sanctions, diplomacy and a regional containment strategy are the actions of wimps.

Also unmentioned by Boot is the inconvenient fact that according to the most recent IAEA report the Iranian nuclear weapons program has been shuttered since 2003. This isn't to suggest that Iran's nuclear aspirations are not real, but rather that the argument Tehran can't be delayed in its effort to build a bomb is not true.

To be sure, it is certainly important to have a debate about the threat posed by an Iranian bomb, but it is precisely this sort of over-inflated rhetoric that makes the Iranian mullahs into a modern day Third Reich that does precious little to further that discussion.