National Security(Readings): Let the Debate Begin
Now that the candidates are settled it's time to get down the the real debates. First up will most likely be economic issues as we've been forecasting for months but the one we're going to que is the neglected one that's slide to the back burner. That's Foreign Policy and National Security. Here the contrast between the candidates is about as broad as it gets, though again both are reasonable men given more to argument than shouting. Which is about time.
The fundamental lesson we'd draw from our series on the State of the World and Good Government is that the US is best served by constructive engagement with the rest of the world. By that we mean it does its' best to encourage and support the emergence of as good a government as feasible in the local circumstances, working with established and legitimate governments while recognizing their rights to their own interests and defending ours. And working to suppress those who are attempting to use violence to overturn these processes. Over the decades that at the end of the day has actually been US foreign policy in a nutshell, though with perhaps more emphasis on protecting our agendii at the expense of respect for others occasionally. At the same time no power has done what the US has done to support the emergence of an open and pluralistic world system. If we are a Hegemon we're the most benign one in human history.
But as usual the wheel of History keeps on rolling and it's time for us to roll with it. A while back Joe Lieberman had a great editorial in the WSJ asking how the party of FDR, Truman and JFK had become the party of McGovern, Gov. Peanut and appeasement. He didn't quite put it that strongly of course. Sen. Biden responded quickly, articulately and disingenuously on the whole with a reply. Both are excerpted below.
What Lieberman argued in the main (2/3 with 1/3 being a bit of partisan politics) was that the Democrats used the troubles of the Iraq war to pursue a partisan political agenda, despite having supported the original authorizing vote. Now we are where we are and those are sunk costs never to be recovered. If everybody, and we do mean everybody, believed in WMD and no smoking test tubes were found Iraq and the ME is still better off w/o Saddam and that ticking, oil-funded timebomb. If the Dims disagreed so vehemently as Americans it was incumbent on them to help change policy - not retreat to Namdrome responses and an attack mentality, which they did. Despite them the last year has seen enormous progress with a long way to go. Meanwhile the War on Terror is actually being won and much of the world's Islamic population has developed an accelerating disenchantment with Islamic terrorists because of their indiscriminate violence.
Joe Biden goes on to attack the Bush administration for the rise of Iran, the lack of communications with same, over-concentration on the WoT and the neglect of China, India, Russia and the rest of the world. None of which addressed the core of Liberman's primary point but was very clever. And not very constructive - rather more of the same partisan politics (he's editorial probably gets a ranking of 1/4 good points and 3/4 disingenuous and non-constructive critiscism). Without going into too much detail in fact what would he propose as alternatives ?
Talking to Iran - this administration and every other has had numerous attempts over two decades. Meanwhile a multi-lateral negotiation has been being pursued under the auspices of of the IAEA involving Britain, France, Russia, et.al. What more is possible ? The Administration has carefully pursued a multi-party approach in NE Asia involving China, Russia, Japan, S.Korea that's kept the lid on and made some slow progress. In particular it has gotten China heavily involved and committed as part of a broader set of evolving strategic relationship developments that exceed those of any prior administration. Similarly our relationships with India are deeper and wider than at any time in history. The US had done more for Africa than at any other time as well.
While there have been a lot of slips twixt cup and lip of which we've been vehement critics Biden's editorial was polemical and partisan, as well as disingenuous. If anything a practical and pragmatic US policy will in fact have to build on the initiatives established and the situation as it is. So as we move into the heart of the campaign you can keep this shopping list in mind and challenge the candidates and their representatives to do one of two things. Speak truth to Power - that is, US ! Or continue to posture to win over whichever audience we most need to get votes.
Boy...when you put it like that the answer's sure obvious isn't it.
National Security Readings
Democrats and Our Enemies How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose? Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful. This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.
- Republicans and Our Enemies Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush's reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered. The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead – by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests – Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.At the heart of this failure is an obsession with the "war on terrorism" that ignores larger forces shaping the world: the emergence of China, India, Russia and Europe; the spread of lethal weapons and dangerous diseases; uncertain supplies of energy, food and water; the persistence of poverty; ethnic animosities and state failures; a rapidly warming planet; the challenge to nation states from above and below.
The Media Equation: The Wars We Choose to Ignore Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There’s plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September. Television network news coverage in particular has gone off a cliff. Citing numbers provided by a consultant, Andrew Tyndall, the Associated Press reported that in the months after September when Gen. David H. Petraeus testified before Congress about the surge, collective coverage dropped to four minutes a week from 30 minutes a week at the height of coverage, in September 2007. I asked Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, how a war that had cost thousands of lives and over $1 trillion was losing news salience. “There is a cold and sad calculation that readers/viewers aren’t that interested in the war, whether because they are preoccupied with paying $4 for a gallon of gas and avoiding foreclosure, or because they have Iraq fatigue,” he wrote in an e-mail message, adding that The Times stays on the story as part of an implied contract with its readers. Other news editors have made the judgment — perhaps prodded by falling revenue and slashed news budgets — that public attitudes toward the war have become so calcified that few are interested in learning more. Why bother when things don’t change?
The Gates Doctrine Far from treating Iraq as a distraction, Gates has posed the question: Why not concentrate on winning the wars our soldiers are currently fighting? In a series of groundbreaking speeches, Gates has argued that asymmetrical conflicts in the "long war" against "violent jihadist networks" will remain the likely face of battle for decades to come, that "procurement and training have to focus on that reality," and that shaping civilian attitudes in these conflicts will be just as important as winning battles.There have been at least three practical outcomes of the nicely rhymed Gates Doctrine -- "the war we are in ... is the war we must win" -- in Iraq and beyond.First, Gates has pushed to deploy technologies immediately useful in low intensity conflict, particularly unmanned aerial vehiclesSecond, Gates is institutionalizing the teaching of counterinsurgency strategy. The old theory, says my contact, went: "If we could do the big stuff -- major combat operations -- we could take care of the little stuff, the asymmetrical stuff. But the little stuff turned out to be more prolonged and difficult." So the Army's new manual on "Full Spectrum Operations" trains new officers to conduct simultaneous offensive, defensive and "stability operations" -- things like political reconciliation, providing basic services, promoting local government. "The human terrain," says my source, "is the decisive terrain, and Gates gets it." Third, Gates argues that while American military power can be a prerequisite for stability, winning asymmetrical wars requires other elements of American power. So he calls for "a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security -- diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development." Elements of the defense establishment, he charges, have been "preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low-gear." Recently -- seven years after 9/11, five years after the Iraq War began -- Gates noted that portions of the military are still not on a "war footing." With Americans engaged in a war, this scandal dwarfs any Gates has faced. In confronting it, the "realist" has become genuinely transformational.
INFORMATION WARFARE: Al Qaeda Discusses Losing Iraq Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about "why we lost in Iraq." Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several of these Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. According to their stats, in late 2006, al Qaeda was responsible for 60 percent of the terrorist attacks, and nearly all the ones that involved killing a lot of civilians. The rest of the violence was carried out by Iraqi Sunni Arab groups, who were trying in vain to scare the Americans out of the country. Today, al Qaeda has been shattered, with most of its leadership and foot soldiers dead, captured or moved from Iraq. As a result, al Qaeda attacks have declined more than 90 percent. Worse, most of their Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have turned on them, or simply quit. This "betrayal" is handled carefully on the terrorist web sites, for it is seen as both shameful, and perhaps recoverable.
An Open Offer to U.S. Senators One of the biggest problems with the Iraq War is that politics has frequently triumphed over truth. For instance, we went into Iraq with shoddy intelligence (at best), no reconstruction plan, and perhaps half as many troops as were required. We refused to admit that an insurgency was growing, until the country collapsed into anarchy and civil war. Now the truth is that Iraq is showing real progress on many fronts: Al Qaeda is being defeated and violence is down and continuing to decrease. As a result, the militias have lost their reason for existence and are getting beaten back or co-opted. Shia, Sunni and Kurds are coming together -- although with various stresses -- under the national government. If progress continues at this rate, it is very possible that before 2008 is out, we can finally say "the war has ended." Yes, likely there still will be some American casualties, but if the violence continues to drop and the Iraqi government consolidates its gains, we will be able, in good conscience, to begin bringing more of our people home. I will be paying very close attention to the words of Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, who is replacing General Petraeus as the overall commander in Iraq. Whatever we do in Iraq from here forward, we must strive to make better decisions than those made between 2003 and 2006. And one way to achieve that is by making certain that our civilian leaders are fully informed. All three candidates for President are extremely intelligent, but that doesn't mean that all three are tracking the truth on the ground in Iraq. Anyone who wants to be President of the United States needs to see Iraq without the distorting lenses of the media or partisan politics. I would be honored to visit Iraq with Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain or any of their Senate colleagues. I hereby offer to accompany any Senator to Iraq, whether they are pro-or anti-war, Democrat or Republican.