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Archive for the ‘foreign policy’ Category

Speaking truth to power

Posted in CIA, foreign policy, intelligence, United States on July 3, 2011|

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

One of the primary purposes of any foreign intelligence organization like the CIA is that it provide to policymakers the best and most accurate information and analyses. In the language of the trade it’s called “speaking truth to power,” a statement that correctly implies that not all makers of foreign policy welcome the information provided to them by the intelligence community.

It is a simple fact of life that much of our foreign policy evolves as a result of domestic political needs rather than the intelligence and analyses that reflect the facts on the ground where the policy is to be implemented.

An excellent example of the perils involved in foreign policy formulation can be seen in the efforts of the Bush White House to influence the production of intelligence analysis during the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Former CIA officers have reported that Vice President Dick Cheney made numerous visits to CIA headquarters to ensure that a crucial National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on weapons of mass destruction was alarmist enough to scare Congress into authorizing the Iraq invasion.

At the same time, an Office of Special Plans was set up in the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz and headed by Douglas Feith to “relook” or re-examine the raw intelligence that had led to the unhelpful conclusions that the White House found “inaccurate” and unsupportive. Its purpose was to find “overlooked” raw intelligence that would support the White House’s planned Iraq invasion.

It also has been reported that George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, finally told his analysts that if they wished to have any influence on Bush White House foreign policy, they would have to modify their analyses.

This can happen during foreign policy formulation. If the foreign policy authors have already decided on the policy they want to pursue and that policy is not supported by the available intelligence and analyses, it can lead to attempts to subvert the intelligence system.

The appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as director of the CIA raises some interesting issues. In his March 2011 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee he said, “As a bottom line up front, it is ISAF’s assessment that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas. However, while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible. Moreover, it is clear that much difficult work lies ahead with our Afghan partners to solidify and expand our gains in the face of the expected Taliban spring offensive.”

Petraeus is an intelligent, ambitious, educated military officer. He enjoyed unprecedented success with the “surge” in Iraq, even though there were other critical elements over which he had no control that heavily contributed to the surge’s success.

However, while the general was speaking of the progress made in Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times was saying that the analysts of 16 intelligence agencies in Washington (in an NIE) “contend that large swaths of Afghanistan are still at risk of falling to the Taliban” and that Pakistan’s intelligence services continue to train, support and manipulate Taliban groups in Afghanistan.

And this while we are dealing with a totally dysfunctional President Karzai and Afghan realities and history that have defied foreign manipulation and exploitation for centuries.

It was subsequently reported that the 2011 NIEs on Afghanistan and Pakistan said that the fight was not winnable without Pakistani engagement against Taliban militants on its side of the border. Our military commanders have challenged this conclusion.

The question here is not who is right or wrong about Afghanistan. The question is whether or not any individual, despite an exemplary character and record, is capable of changing roles from that of head cheerleader for Americans who favor our continued involvement in the Afghan war to director of the organization that up until now has been reluctant to be optimistic, given the realities that exist in Afghanistan and Pakistan, about our prospects for any kind of success in that region.

Given the current demands on our national purse — our aging population, our current economic fragility, our infrastructural disintegration, our failing educational system and the expense of the largest military establishment in the history of the world, it is inordinately important that the new CIA director be able to accept the analyses of his organization and pass them on to the White House.

He must speak truth to power.

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How we helped al-Qaida

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, terrorism, United States on June 19, 2011|

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]

Terrorism is not designed to overwhelm. It is designed to undermine. In that context, whatever it does to cause or initiate anxiety in populations, it relies on the reaction of those populations equally as much to achieve its final goal.

The reaction of the Bush administration to the slaughter of 9/11, largely continued under Obama, was precisely what bin Laden and al-Qaida would have prayed for as it created an environment which made life for Americans difficult, induced levels of paranoia and ultimately resulted in the loss of many of its citizens’ basic human rights in the name of the fight against terrorism. Terrorism has now been fully planted in our collective psyche. To wit:

We have lived for almost a decade with an insane, multicolored “terrorist warning system” designed primarily to cover the posterior of the administration that designed and implemented it.

Transportation has become a nightmare. The simple preparation for air travel takes infinitely longer now than it did 10 years ago. Controls in airports have become so repressive and intrusive that air travel now proceeds at a crawl.

We have become paranoid and morbidly suspicious and distrustful of anyone we think might be a Muslim.

Our government has been able to get whatever it wanted in terms of surveillance rights. We have been subject to warrantless surveillance of all kinds.

We have watched our government torment, torture and incarcerate people without any regard for human rights or international law and convention.

The sad thing is that we have acquiesced to all of this because of our concerns about our own personal safety. But will we ever get our human rights back or will we lose more? In the dark days of 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote perceptively, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The key here is that without the active, witless involvement and effective acquiescence of our government, al-Qaida terrorism would have caused us far less pain than it ultimately has.

When it came to planning the attack on 9/11, most of the al-Qaida operational management was dead set against it. The plan prevailed solely because Osama bin Laden, their oracle, was its champion.

Ultimately, those in al-Qaida who opposed the 9/11 plan were proven correct. The 9/11 attack was the beginning of the decline of al-Qaida, who did just about everything wrong. They provoked a nasty, powerful and retributive America which turned on them full force. We invaded Afghanistan, denying them their operational base and stability. We methodically began to eliminate their senior and mid-level operational management. We pursued bin Laden so relentlessly that it completely changed al-Qaida’s modus operandi.

Al-Qaida became a franchise operation, the McDonald’s of terrorism. All a wannabee jihadi had to do was get a group of like-minded folks together and find a building from which to operate. At that point, visits to training facilities in Pakistan or Yemen or wherever, would teach them how to make bombs and how to run a business. Just like McDonald’s.

This progression was largely the result of the environment in which al-Qaida lived. As they ramped up their operations, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and later in Yemen and in North Africa, they created another entire category of enemy — those Muslims who objected to their killing of other Muslims. Since they were killing Muslims in droves, that meant that they could no longer be sure that their living environment was benign.

Worst of all from the Muslim point of view, they began to justify those killings by indiscriminately and in Muslim eyes, inappropriately employing takfir, the practice of branding other Muslims as unbelievers and making them thereby “legally” executable by al-Qaida.

Add to that the fact of lethal Western pursuit of their members, and we see al-Qaida going underground and paranoid. Bin Laden hid in the open in suburban Pakistan. But he was so paranoid that he had no phone, no Internet connection. Under those circumstances, there ceased to be an “al-Qaida Central.” All that was left were the franchises around the world. Given his personal circumstances, bin Laden could not conceivably have exercised classic command and control over them.

Which is precisely where we are now. We see disparate groups freelancing on their own in whatever operations appeal to them and doing so in operational environments that are increasingly hostile to them. Osama’s death hasn’t changed much.

If we could only bring ourselves to mitigate those of our activities, like our Middle East military operations, that provoke moderate Muslims and therefore strengthen al-Qaida, we might find ourselves in a far stronger counterterrorist position than that in which we find ourselves today.

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In Egypt, a perilous journey to democracy

Posted in Egypt, foreign policy, Middle East on June 5, 2011|

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]

 By Haviland Smith


What is happening in Egypt may be unique to that country, but it is certainly a portent of what may come to pass in the Middle East and North Africa. Time will tell as the “Arab Spring,” President Obama’s “new” policy toward the region and American congressional attitudes unfold.

Our president has just said we will support the legitimate wishes of the Arab people for self-determination. But what if that turns into an Islamist government or a military dictatorship in Egypt?

Egyptians will have their first presidential election this fall. There is only one political party that is in any way “established” in Egypt. That is the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 as an Islamist movement.

Egypt doesn’t have a lot of options. With a broad array of political candidates and virtually no established democratic institutions, the Egyptian military is the only other organization with any real power.

Mohamed El-Sayed Habib, first deputy of the chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently made a bold statement in which he outlined his party’s positions. Whether you believe him or not, and many Egyptians do not, he has come out along the following lines.

He said the brotherhood believes in political reform, democracy, pluralism and the peaceful rotation of political power. He sees the nation as the primary source of national power.

Further, the brotherhood is in favor of the termination of the state of emergency, restoring public freedoms, including the right to establish political parties, whatever their tendencies may be. It also supports freedom of the press, freedom of criticism and thought, freedom of peaceful demonstrations and freedom of assembly.

He concluded that the brotherhood also supports the end of Hosni Mubarak’s exceptional courts and exceptional laws. It wishes to establish the independence of the judiciary and fully supervised general elections, and remove all obstacles that restrict the functioning of civil organizations.

Whatever you may have heard about the brotherhood, this statement certainly contains just about all the elements we Americans, as purveyors of liberal democracy, would like to see embedded in constitutions around the world.

And remember, this statement was made for internal Egyptian consumption prior to the fall 2011 presidential election, in which roughly 20 percent of the population is estimated to support the brotherhood; it is unclear if it will even be allowed to run its own presidential candidate.

With the presidential election coming up this fall, the U.S. Congress has already weighed in. The Republican chairman and the Democratic ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs vowed in May at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference to deny aid to Egypt if the Muslim Brotherhood should happen to gain strength in the upcoming elections.

Over the last 50 years, the Egyptian military has invested in and now “owns” somewhere between 5 percent and 40 percent of the entire Egyptian economy. That makes it the only cohesive force in Egypt that has a real, ongoing stake in the status quo, and it is the only ones with guns.

What might happen if the Muslim Brotherhood gets favorable results in a new, free election? It got 20 percent in the rigged 2005 election when it was not even allowed to label its own candidates as belonging to the brotherhood. Will a favorable result trigger the withdrawal of U.S. aid from Egypt? Will that withdrawal include our generous provision of military aid?

If that plays out as our congressmen vow it will, what is the Egyptian military likely to do? For it, everything is at stake. It relies heavily on U.S. aid. What happens immediately after the election is critical for Egypt’s hopes for future liberalization. The military has already begun to threaten some of the civil rights gained after the Tahrir Square revolution.

It has the power and is not about to give it up. Any election result will have to be at least tacitly approved by the military. It may or may not object to the Muslim Brotherhood; however, it can probably re-establish a military dictatorship whenever it wishes.

The military would certainly react badly to a loss of billions in U.S. aid. If ultimately there is a military coup, will it be because Congress is miffed at what it considers to be positive brotherhood election results and halts all aid to Egypt? Do we support real self-determination in the Middle East or not?

America must not kill the Egyptian Spring, ultimately returning Egypt to military dictatorship, simply because of our fear of and suspicions about Islam.

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Syria’s struggle is not our fight

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, Syria, United States on May 22, 2011|

[Originally published in  the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

Syria is a complicated place. Like just about every other modern-day “country” in its region, it has been conquered and reconquered by all the major culprits, Persian, Roman, Greek, Ottoman as well as others.

Since World War II, Syria has evolved much like the other countries in the region. It has survived periods of severe instability and pure repression. In its first 10 years of existence, it went through four constitutional rewrites and 20 separate cabinets.

It suffered through numerous military coups and suffered often under martial law. An emergency law, which effectively ended most of the protections afforded to its citizens by its various constitutions, was declared in l962 and lasted until 2011. In short, throughout its existence, Syria has been the victim of invasion, plotting, coups, instability and chaos.

Like Iraq, Syria is another example of rule by a repressive minority. Syria is roughly 74 percent Sunni, 16 percent Shiite (Alawites) and 10 percent Christian and “others,” including a very few Jews. The Alawites are a mystical minority of Shiite Islam. They came into power with Hafez al-Assad in 1970, which was something of an unwelcome surprise to the three quarters of the population that was Sunni and had held power in Syria for centuries.

The Assad years were anything but rosy for Syrians. His rule was characterized by automatic repression of any opposition. This, of course, was made doubly difficult and doubly repressive by the minority status of the Alawites in Syria. Assad ran a pervasive internal security apparatus comprising thousands of agents, all of whom were reporting primarily on real and imagined dissent.

During the period, he is accused of having been responsible for literally thousands of extrajudicial executions of Syrian citizens. Perhaps the most memorable of these was the Hama massacre in February 1982, when the Syrian army put down a revolt by Sunnis in Hama; it is said that 10,000 to 40,000 Sunni civilians were killed and the city almost completely razed.

In foreign affairs, modern Syria has been involved in the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars with the Israelis. It has been in the forefront of the opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestine, financing and assisting both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Lebanon, which is considered by Syrian irredentists to be rightfully theirs, has been a constant target for their military and political action. In recent times, during and even after the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990, Syrian troops were invited into Lebanon by partisan factions seeking support from the Assad regime. Particularly sensitive and contentious even today is the popular belief that in more recent years Syrian agents assassinated a pro-Western Lebanese prime minister and several other prominent leaders regarded by Damascus as hostile to Syria’s historic ambitions to control Lebanon.

Now Syria is under new management. Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar, has been president of Syria since 2000 when his father died. As Bashar had studied in Great Britain as an ophthalmologist, there were some hopes that Syria might enjoy a less repressive rule under his hand.

That has not proven to be the case. The fact is that he is a minority Alawite working in a government with fellow minority Alawites who are generally resented by the majority Sunnis whom they rule. They have ruled for the past 40 years because they have stuck together and terrorized the majority Sunnis.

There are neighbors who have conflicting stakes in the current Syrian rebellion. For example, anti-American elements like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which have been closely allied to and supported by Syria, are finding today that many of their youthful members are sympathetic to the protesters being ruthlessly suppressed by the Assad regime.

The result here is simple and pervasive. The Sunnis who are now in fairly full rebellion against the sitting Syrian government are not going to be handed the reins of power. The Alawites will fight them to the end, if only to save their own lives.

We have no dog in this fight. The Syrians, whether they rid themselves of the Assad government or not, have no history, no experience, no training in anything we Americans would recognize as politically attractive or worth actively supporting.

Direct American intervention of any kind and at any level would simply risk being drawn into another potentially costly and bloody civil war in which vital U.S. national interests are clearly not at stake.

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Don’t leave counterterrorism to the Military

Posted in Afghanistan, foreign policy, intelligence, Middle East, terrorism, United States on May 12, 2011|

The old saw tells us that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.  But that really isn’t true.  A terrorist is a  terrorist and an insurgent, or freedom fighter, is an insurgent. If we are able to stick to labeling them on the basis of what they actually do, rather than what we think they represent, we will be able to keep them straight and stand a much better chance of dealing effectively with terrorism.

Insurgencies are movements designed to overthrow existing governments.  Some are popular and have pretty good prospects for success. Some are not. Generally they spring from within populations.  If they are successful, it is because they generally represent the population’s views and thus have their support.  That makes them very difficult to defeat, particularly by a foreign government.

It is extremely difficult to define “terrorism” largely because it is such an emotional subject.  The United Nations has been unable to do so. Having said that, there are certain characteristics that are helpful in identifying terrorists.  They use violence and asymmetrical warfare as their primary tools.  They are not typically organized like insurgencies, but rather resemble politically oriented covert action groups. They use their terror psychologically for maximum impact to intimidate populations rather than simply kill individuals.  Finally, they are non-state groups.

Historically, governments have been far more successful against terrorist groups than they have been against insurgencies, primarily because insurgencies tend to enjoy more support from local populations

Today’s American foreign and domestic counterterrorism policies have been built on the “Global War on Terror” or (GWOT).  The Bush Administration labeled everyone it didn’t like a “terrorist”, never taking the time to differentiate between terrorism and insurgency.  That was our first mistake. The Taliban, despite the fact that it commits terrorist acts, is essentially an insurgent organization. Yet, until recently, they were constantly referred to as terrorists, perhaps because we needed terrorists for our GWOT in an Afghanistan where there were hardly any Al Qaeda members left.  Even though Afghans generally hate Taliban policies, and with good reason, they will often chose them over us if they are forced to do so.  We are, after all, the foreigners in the fracas.

Our second mistake was in deciding to “solve” our terrorism problems with the military might that had so brilliantly served us during the preceding fifty years.  In employing a military response, we were using an asset that had been designed in the Second World War to sweep across northern Europe in an attack on Germany and then further fine-tuned during the Cold War to sweep across Germany and Poland to defeat the USSR.  How we figured that was an appropriate tool for dealing with the new terrorism is hard to understand.  The answer probably lies in the fact that the military establishment wanted a piece of the action, and all it had to offer was its sword.

Until the early May operation that dispatched Osama bin Laden, the only example we had that argued that massive military response might not be the best approach, was the initial invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.  In that operation, a handful of special operations troops accompanied by a small number of intelligence officers, kicked off a blitzkrieg that ended in very short order with the literal destruction of Al Qaida in Afghanistan and, coincidentally, the defeat of the Taliban.  Remember, this was the “GWOT”.  Afghanistan initially had nothing to do with insurgencies, only with 9/11 and the terrorists.  Even though it all went south with the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the lesson was there to be studied, absorbed and implemented.

SOME HISTORY

In 2010, the Rand Corporation reviewed the findings of its own 2008 study of 648 terrorist groups that existed around the world between 1968 and 2006.  It concluded that of those groups, 43% were absorbed quietly back into the environments in which they had been active, 40% were defeated by police and intelligence operations and 7% by military confrontation.

In Islam, as elsewhere, true terrorist groups most often are involved in activities that are dangerous to the general population.  Such groups, as in the case of Al Qaeda, often include members who are foreigners, who have goals inimical to the local population’s goals, or serve non-local causes. In the case of Al Qaeda, they often kill Muslims, a sin under the Koran. In short, they do not necessarily spring from and represent the ideas and desires of the local population.

Terrorists normally operate clandestinely in their local environments, trying to avoid identification by local populations. In fact, they often conduct operations designed to pit one portion of the population against another, simply for the purpose of creating chaos.  That was part of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) operational approach under Abu Musab al Zarqawi. AQI provocations were designed specifically to goad Shia into attacking Sunnis or vice versa, simply to keep the pot boiling.

When terrorists are the object of an essentially clandestine response like the one we conducted in Afghanistan in early October 2001, it is they alone, not the local population that are being targeted. That fact gives operational advantages to the special ops personnel and non-military police and/or intelligence officers working against them and permits local resident neutrality or even support for the local authorities.

When terrorist operations become known to local populations and are recognized as threatening or opposed to their interests, those populations often turn against them, as was the case with AQI at the beginning of the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, when the Sunni “Awakening” began to methodically wipe them out.

In direct contrast, when terrorists are confronted with military power, particularly foreign military power, the entire equation changes.

Let’s start here by stipulating that what America seeks from local Muslims in the struggle with radical Muslim terrorism, is optimally their support or, failing that, their neutrality.

As we know from our own experiences in the Middle East, American military confrontation tends to force the local non-combatant population to make a decision about whom to support, particularly if the local population believes that our “terrorist” is his “insurgent”. Will it be the foreigner or the local?  This is the main reason that accurate labeling is so critically important and that a non-military approach is preferable in cases of terrorism. Is he a terrorist who is not seeking the same goals as the population and can be justly opposed? Or is he an insurgent who is on the same page with the population and must be supported?  If he is a terrorist he is less likely to be accepted or protected by the locals.  If he is really an insurgent, he will be one of them and they will back him against the foreigner.

If we misidentify out of carelessness, stupidity or even willfulness, as may very well have been the case in the past, we will likely employ the wrong techniques against the troublemaker, whatever he really is.

TODAY’S MIDDLE EAST DESTABILIZERS

As if all this terrorism/insurgency discussion is not enough, our problems in the Middle East are made especially difficult by the facts that exist both there and here in America.  The historical, political and cultural differences between us are numerous and important.

The Middle East is rife with ongoing conflicts.  Sometimes they are absolutely overt, sometimes they are less obvious, but they are always there and have been for millennia.  The Shia/Sunni split, the Persian/Arab competition for hegemony in the Gulf, the anomalous position of the Kurds. The hangovers of the Crusaders, Western imperialism and US Regime change operations in Syria and Iran have all added up to a region in which, today, the notion of liberal democracy is quite foreign and its bearer is viewed with extreme suspicion.  There is little history of democracy. The peoples of the region, particularly given their tribalism, ethnic and sectarian differences have no experience that would prepare them for the freedoms and responsibilities that must come with self-rule and liberal democracy.  What they do have is a Koran which gives any believing Muslim an exhaustive blueprint for life.

On the other side of the ledger, we have a United States that is ruled by its own American exceptionalism and eager to save the world by exporting its model.  Yet, we are a wildly impatient, ADHD nation, short on planning, and married to short-term political timetables. In foreign affairs, we tend to evolve policies for American domestic political reasons, eschewing the realities that exist abroad.  We talk democracy and support the most repressive rulers in Islam. For over sixty years we have failed miserably to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. We are so bereft of influence there that the sides are preceding in their own respective directions without reference to America.   Yet, our goal seems to be a desire to install “democracy” in a world that has little reason to want to accept it.  As a result, we are seen as opportunistic, narcissistic and hypocritical.

Many, if not most of these problems have solutions that would help us.   The “Arab Spring” will change the Middle East forever, as the rebellions against existing authority have completely stolen the show from Al Qaeda, rendering their dreams of a medieval caliphate virtually obsolete.  The rebellions have brought some sort of self-determination to those people who outlast the tyrants that have recently ruled them.  If we can bring ourselves to accept self-determination in place of democratization as a viable goal for them, active nation-state hostility to us will subside.

What we can do completely on our own is change our counterterrorism policy.  When we attack terrorism with our military establishment, as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2003, terrorism morphs into insurgency. That insurgency then demands our involvement in the export of democracy and nation building, all of which are matters at which we are demonstrable failures.

We are proposing to do all of this in the face of popular American disinterest in and lagging support of our adventures in the Middle East.  Reality is additionally determined by a burgeoning national debt, ongoing national economic problems, a wildly expensive military establishment built for wars we do not face and acute national taxophobia.

We need to acknowledge that our current use of military might against terrorism in acutely counterproductive. In the absence of that constant military presence, local governments will find it politically more acceptable to share Al Qaeda as an enemy than they do today.  We need to concentrate on our liaison relationships with friendly countries, our production of intelligence on all terrorism activities and our training and deployment of the kind of special operations teams that we have recently seen operating so successfully.

The effectiveness of those teams and of a program based on them, coupled with the absence of our provocative uniformed military in battle all over the region, will give us a better shot at solving our problems in the region.  At the same time, a change in counterterrorism tactics and the deployment of a greatly reduced, but uniquely competent force should permit the saving of billions of dollars and the opportunity to put our economic house in order here at home, while it raises our prospects of diminishing the future threat of terrorism.


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The U.S Government and the Arab Spring

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, United States on April 28, 2011|

[Originally Published in the Herald of Randolph]

What is there about the United States that makes it possible for us to get involved in foreign affairs when we have little, if any idea exactly what is going on or how our involvement, whatever that may be, will effect the outcome.  The “Arab Spring” is the perfect example of this issue.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have supported any regime in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, providing we believed that the regime in question would support US interests.  Over time, that has brought us into uncomfortable relationships with Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the old Soviet Central Asian Republics, now states.

We signed on with those countries simply because we felt it in our interest to do so.  Oil was important, although far less so for us than for Europe and Asia.  What we were really after, whether we articulated it clearly or not, was regional stability. The Cold War caused us to seek allies against the Soviet Union to deny them oil and international support.  In support of that, we believed we needed those states to be politically stable.

The problem was that those geographic entities that called themselves states were inherently unstable largely because they had been created without any particular thought being given to ethnic, tribal, or religious realities by the imperial powers that created them. They were, as can be seen in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, made up of ethnic, religious and tribal groups that had little sense of nation, and loyalty primarily to their tribe or religion.  Libya is the perfect example.  As a country which is probably likely to turn into two or three separate states, Libya comprises something on the order of 140-150 separate tribes and tribal groupings.

That has always been true and we have always known it.  How can we now employ a policy based on the likelihood that there is hope for unity in Libya? How can we assume that those disparate groupings will cast aside of thousands of years of animosity and suddenly enter into the 21st century world with a welcoming hand?

In Afghanistan, we predicate our success in creating a unified state on being able to assemble and train police and Army forces that will keep order once we leave.  Absent a repressive government like the Taliban we overthrew, how can that be possible?  If we want a police force that represents all the people, we have to have Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Aimak, etc, etc, on it and they have to serve throughout the nation, despite the fact that they are historically at odds with each other.  There’s nothing new here.

Iraq is no different, just a bit farther down the road toward internal strife.  Because of their past, the Sunnis, who have always run things, honestly believe they are entitled to do so in the future.  Why, many of they still actually believe they are the majority group in Iraq!

The Shia, never having been allowed to run anything and having been horribly mistreated by the Sunnis, know they are the majority group and believe they should rule.

And the Kurds!  The Kurds have been mistreated by just about everyone in the Region and are not about to let that happen again.  They will look out for their own interests despite the interests and needs of any other group.  And to further complicate everything, the Kurds who at thirty million people are the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own, have something up to fifteen million living in Turkey where they are restive, repressed and a source of major concern for Turkish stability.

What started simultaneously with our invasion of Iraq and subsequent re-invasion of Afghanistan was a process of ferment in the Middle East. It is difficult to argue that the invasion was irrelevant to the Arab Spring.  What we have done, quite simply, is start the process that is leading to the forcible removal of all the old tyrants who have been our stability-friendly allies for the past 75 years.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, with all the religious, tribal and ethnic divisions in the Middle East today and given its dismal record of accommodation, it seems unlikely that there will be comity in the short run or that we will see what we think of as a positive outcome there for a very long time.


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We risk widening cracks in Iraq

Posted in foreign policy, Iraq, Middle East, United States on April 24, 2011|

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and Barre Times-Argus]


A nation-state is by definition a political, geopolitical, cultural and/or ethnic entity which derives its internal legitimacy through national consensus.

Since today’s Iraq was first established after the First World War by western imperial interests and modeled on the concept of a nation-state, relative stability has been maintained there through repressive governance.

That has been necessary because there has never been enough common interest among the diverse religious, sectarian and ethnic groups in the geographic area called “Iraq” to find government by consensus.  The concept of nation-state has existed only  geographically, never politically, culturally or ethnically.

As a “country” characterized by centuries-old, deep, sectarian and ethnic divisions, Iraq does not have the kind of citizenry that is suited by belief, culture, experience or history to make consensus government prosper. One hundred years of repressive internal indigenous governance, plus almost 400 years of previous Ottoman rule, have not created an electorate that is prepared for anything remotely resembling self-governance, let alone democracy.

Iraq, as now configured, is a poor bet for successful self-determination.  Its people hold little in common.

According to the existing Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between America and Iraq, all remaining US forces will have to exit Iraq by December 31, 2011.

Room for negotiation on our final departure date is contained within the SOFA, but it seems unlikely that there will be political will in Iraq to make any changes.

The powerful Shia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr is currently studying religion in Iran.  He continues to command the Mahdi Army which fought very effectively against our troops, particularly in 2004. Al-Sadr has just replied to Secdef Gates’ recent suggestion that the SOFA might be extended.

He first organized a massive march by tens of thousands of his followers in Baghdad.  He then indicated very clearly that any SOFA extension is unacceptable, saying that if it were changed, “The first thing we will do is escalate the military resistance activity and reactivate the Mahdi Army …… Second is to escalate the peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins”.

This statement has already had a major impact on the sitting Maliki coalition government.  The Sadrists are part of that Maliki coalition.  Their only apparently inflexible condition, one that has brought them in and out and back into that coalition, has been strict adherance to the SOFA. If U.S. troops are not totally out of Iraq by December 31, 2011, not only will he gin up the old Mahdi army with all its fractious implications, he will also withdraw support from the Maliki Government and thus precipitate its fall.

This will leave Iraq without a government and at the mercy of the Mahdi army which would probably turn out to be the dominant military organization in Iraq and which is not particularly friendly to the concept of Iraqi democracy or even statehood, except on its own terms.  There is so little appetite in Iraq for this scenario that change in the SOFA and the continued presence of US troops in Iraq is short of zero.

Implosion is certainly a nightmare scenario for Iraq and only slightly less so for the US.  Without sufficient ability to keep law and order, as Saddam and the US have done over the past 30+ years, present day Iraq is more than likely to fracture into its component parts – Sunni, Shia, Kurd. That process will attract all kinds of attention from the region.  Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, and particularly Iran all have major stakes in any Iraqi outcome.

The only real issue is whether or not the neighbors are prepared to initiate and support hostilities against their rivals.  This seems unlikely, but no one really knows.

What is clear is that, without some sort of effective power center, which has historically been repressive, Iraq will be unlikely to be able to maintain internal stability and is likely to fracture into its component parts.

More importantly, given the sub rosa reality of a deeply divided Iraq, that is precisely what is likely to happen whenever we leave, whether in nine months, nine years or nine decades!  With or without Al-Sadr in the government, Iraq will face the future with inadequate internal control.

At the end of this year we will leave because we have no leverage to change the situation.  Rather than fruitlessly pursuing SOFA changes, we should spend the rest of the year working to make our departure as minimally threatening to regional stability as possible.


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Idealist vs. Realist Foreign Policy

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, United States on April 18, 2011|

[Originally published in American Diplomacy]


What we are seeing today in the Arab World is at least partly the result of underlying ambivalence in US foreign policy since World War II. During that period we have vacillated between a “realist” foreign policy that purports to reflect our national interests and an “idealist” policy that purports to reflect our higher values. Changes in administrations, and thus policy, have resulted in a practical, observable ambivalence.

The success of any country’s foreign policy lies at least partly in its consistency and in the ability of other nations to “read” that policy on a long-term basis. In that regard, an ambivalent policy is absolutely the hardest to read and deal with.

During the Cold War, there was little misunderstanding between America and the Soviet Union. Both sides understood the other’s policies. The Soviets understood that we were committed to containment and that Mutually Assured Destruction was an absolute. We both believed that if we were to get too aggressive, those policies would go into effect, resulting in a nuclear holocaust.

It’s a pretty straightforward issue for a country to identify its national interests both at home and abroad. Those reflect the country’s economic, cultural, political and social goals. In short, they represent the reason for the existence of the state.

Foreign policy in any given country at any time is a reflection of either the national interests of that country, or the values of its peoples. It is where the two are combined or conflated that troubles begin. In a purely logical way how can you have a consistent foreign policy that is based on national interests and on higher values when changing from a liberal to a conservative administration? The two are far too often in conflict!

There are essentially two distinct approaches to foreign policy. First, a “realist” foreign policy places national interests and security above ideology, ethics and morality. The second or “idealist” school posits that foreign policy must reflect the ethical, moral and philosophical values of the country.

Under Woodrow Wilson, “Idealist” foreign policy did not accomplish what it was designed to do which was to eliminate wars in Europe after WWI. As a result, there have been modifications, which have approached the problem by creating international mechanisms like NATO, the UN, and GATT. That seems to be working a bit better as we have not had a third world war in Europe.

Since the Second World War, the United States has bragged increasingly about American “exceptionalism” – the notion that our system is superior to any other in the world. The backbone of that claim lies in our liberal democracy where “liberal” is defined, inter alia, as “favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.” Exceptionalism has been the basis of our “idealist” foreign policies. We have had a foreign policy that sporadically has been based on our own principles, but also on our national interests. Unfortunately, foreign policy is at its worst when it vacillates between “realist” and “idealist.”

One of the biggest complaints that Arabs have about US policy is the fact that we have traditionally supported, or at best turned a blind eye to some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, Iran, the list goes on and on. The history of the post-WWII Arab world is littered with dictators or autocrats. Did we support them because we liked the stability they provided? Or was it their oil, or their support for us in the Cold War, or their grudging tolerance of our Palestine policy? Never mind that it was at the cost of freedom for their peoples.

The Arab League

So there we were, supporting and selling the ideals of liberal democracy while at the same time doing everything undemocratic that we possibly could. We were in the throes of the most “realist” period of foreign policy imaginable. We did what was in our national interest, but not what we said we were all about morally, ethically and philosophically. And we did that for an Arab world that did not fail to see just how hypocritical we really were.

Then, the “Arab Spring” hit Tunisia. Faced with mounting evidence of Arab discontent, we have turned 180 degrees to a new “idealist” foreign policy in which we have sought to support all of those peoples in Islam on whom we had turned our back during our “realist” period. We also turned on all those undemocratic leaders we had supported for 75 years!

Are we offended that so many states in the Arab World are upset with us; or that they are apparently going their own way without our counsel; or that we have almost zero credibility and less than zero influence in the region?

We are paying the price for the vagaries of foreign policy inconsistency. Over the decades, we have tried to sell Arabs a bill of goods. Claiming an “idealist” foreign policy, we have said that we represent an exceptional, liberal democracy that should be the envy of the world and a model for its further development. At the same time, we employed a “realist” foreign policy that, in our ongoing reaction to emerging Arab yearnings for self-determination, is being show to have supported every evil thing in Arab life that we have claimed to oppose.

We have been playing both ends shamelessly against the middle and we have now been caught. There are good and bad things about both the “idealist” and “realist” schools of foreign policy. If we were as powerful and macho as we like to think we are, the “realist” policy might be an option. Given today’s world, it is not and for a power on the wane, “idealist” has its advantages. The true “shining city on the hill” requires no aggressiveness, no hypocrisy, only that we look and behave like a liberal democracy!

Obama’s “idealist” foreign policy in the Arab World now stands in direct contradistinction to the “realist” policies of George W. Bush and we are accused of hypocrisy. It would appear that our Obama foreign policy has completely replaced that of Bush. The question of which of those policies has the greater chance of success is not the pragmatic issue today. That issue is pretty straightforward: What will be the practical effect of this changeover from “pragmatic” to “idealist”?

Much of the Arab World is what it is today because of its exposure to western Imperialism during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. During those times, western imperial powers created “states” to suit their own needs. Consciously or unconsciously, they bunched inherently hostile tribal, ethnic and religious groups into single states. That resulted in the creation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to mention only those now actively bedeviling us, states that contained within them enough hostility to remain perpetually in a precarious state of instability and thus, perhaps more easily governed. In some of those states, leadership was taken over by minority groups that could only govern repressively.

Incidentally, those are precisely the kinds of states to which Al Qaida is attracted.

So, the Arab World is composed of many “states” that up until now have been governable only through repression. That is the region into which we have so naively intruded. Apparently, we have either been disinterested in the realities of the region, or contemptuous of them. With American political leadership that believed so strongly in our exceptionalism, we thought we could be successful despite those realities!

Of course, the verdict is not yet known. Perhaps Arab self-determination will lead to some sort of governance that will be acceptable to such diverse and hostile local groupings. Or Perhaps ancient animosities will prevail.

What we can safely say right now is that it is the United States that has let this genie out of the bottle. With that genie has gone the old stability that was maintained, to our net advantage, without the consent of the governed. And stability is a primary requirement for progress.

In a country governed by idealism, that was almost certainly the right thing to have done. However, the world under discussion here is neither idealistic nor democratic. If history offers wisdom, it is difficult to see how things will improve, either for us, or for the peoples of the Arab world.

If one eliminates repressive rule, as we are now so fervently advocating, the only way to stability lies in consensus and self-determination, neither of which seems like a logical winner in the religiously, ethnically and tribally divided and hostile Arab world.

Finally, what does our new “idealist” foreign policy portend for the future? Will we broaden our humanitarian mission to other countries where the citizens are threatened by their governments? There certainly are a lot of them around the world. How does China fit into that? North Korea? Syria? And what about all similar countries in Africa?

Just what will our criteria for involvement be? Precisely what will cause us to intervene? Will we say it has to be something important, like oil or the end of a hateful dictatorship we really don’t like? Or will we stay flexible and only intervene when it suits us politically?

Talk about slippery slopes!

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief. A graduate of Dartmouth, he served in the Army Security Agency, undertook Russian regional studies at London University, and then joined the CIA. He served in Prague, Berlin, Langley, Beirut, Tehran, and Washington. During those 25 years, he worked primarily in Soviet and East European operations. He was also chief of the counterterrorism staff and executive assistant to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Frank Carlucci. Since his retirement in 1980, he has lived in Vermont.

 

Website:

https://rural-ruminations.com/

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In bare-knuckle fight, leadership needed

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, United States on April 10, 2011|

Originally published in the Rutland Herand and Barre Times-Argus

Many American independents voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because they thought he was the smartest Democrat available. They put him in office. Given what we were facing in the aftermath of the incredibly profligate and counterproductive Bush presidency, smarts were what were needed.

Many voters figured he was smart enough to successfully lead the Democrats against what was bound to be a single-minded, ruthless Republican onslaught intent on retaking power in Washington.

Many in the political center hoped in 2008 that Obama understood that he was taking over the helm of a Democratic Party on the cusp of a particularly virulent philosophical and political war with the Republicans. They hoped he would provide the kind of leadership required to protect moderates from the core beliefs and philosophies of the American social, economic and political extremes.

Unfortunately, he has done none of this. He has sailed blithely into his presidency as if it were simply another Ivy League old-boy’s session, persuaded that well-intentioned people would surround him in Washington and that reason would prevail.

Well, guess what! Washington is not populated by reasonable people. It is run by power-hungry career politicians who don’t fret about bending the rules and who sleep well when they break them.

This is not a loving family picnic. In fact, it is a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle fight to the political end. For today’s Republicans, that means consigning the Democrats to the political trash bin for as long as humanly possible, preferably forever.

It’s wonderful and touching to hear Democrats tell us about taking care of the disadvantaged, the elderly and the sick. But that’s not a viable strategy for 2012. That’s a plan that sold in the past when times were far different and we had the luxury of being willing to stick to our core principles and beliefs.

Now, given our economic and fiscal realities, it’s all about jobs and money and if you look closely, you will see that while the Republicans are offering new and radical ideas for change, the Democrats, under Obama’s leadership, are offering today’s status quo. Unfortunately for them, the preservation of our entitlement programs, as written, is not going to be a winner in 2012.

It is inconceivable that the leader of the Democratic Party would simply continue to preach compromise when the Republicans are prepared to do and say anything, however outrageous or unprincipled or half true, that will weaken his chances for re-election and make his party even more irrelevant.

So, in the interim, and lacking any brilliant, innovative or hopeful new proposals or initiatives from the supine congressional Democrats, what can Obama do? So far, under his leadership, all the Democrats are doing is trying to maintain as much of the status quo as possible. Without attendant prosperity and economic well-being, that is not the basis for a viable election campaign.

Before the 2012 elections, the president needs to convince his supporters that he is not a dilettante sitting on the sidelines, waiting for his political enemies to “compromise.” He needs to come up with his own concrete initiatives that will address the country’s existential issues, rather than waiting to react negatively to provocative Republican proposals.

He and his party might start with concrete proposals for the modification of Social Security and our other increasingly economically non-viable entitlement programs, to make them capable of surviving this century in ways consistent with his party’s principles.

Could Democrats propose an entirely new, infinitely more equitable approach to taxation?

Our military establishment, designed to fight the great land wars of the 20th century, is poorly designed to fight the kinds of struggles that now face us. If we had the right model, which Democrats could design, it would not only be far more effective, but would cost us billions, perhaps trillions less than our present military establishment. In light of our national interests and financial situation, can we afford not to change?

In that context, could we consider wholly new proposed policies for terrorism and for the Middle East to replace those that have failed us for years? By any rational measure, we are not heading for successful conclusions to our ongoing adventures in that region.

The Democrats look bereft of helpful ideas. They propose nothing new, preferring to cling to past programs that, even they will acknowledge, need to be modified to survive. They are being beaten to the draw every day by a hungry, purpose-driven, unprincipled Republican Party that has far more on its agenda than a re-do of Social Security.

That’s the kind of situation that can best be reversed by presidential leadership and we haven’t seen much of that coming from this White House.

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U. S. Has Much at Stake in Middle East, But Little Influence

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East on March 30, 2011|

Originally published in the Herald of Randoph

The popular uprisings and protests in the Middle East that began in December 2010 and America’s reactions to them have left many wondering precisely what our policy is in that region and what motivates it.

Of course, years of established policy have left to the Obama administration only bad options today.  There really is nothing they can do that is both practical in the sense that it forwards our national interests and is, at the same time, consistent with what we claim to be our basic national principles.

Over the years, our policy has been driven neither by pure pragmatism, nor by pure ideology.  It has been an admixture of the two and that dichotomy has not been to our advantage.  In fact, we are viewed in the region as hypocritical, seen, for example, in our overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1953.

What were the factors that drove our Middle East policies after the Second World War?  First, we were either dismally or willfully ignorant of realities in Islam.  We seldom let facts on the ground get in the way of or influence our chosen policies.

During Cold war, we felt it necessary to keep as many nations as possible on our side and aligned against the Soviet Union.  Thus, even in the aftermath of years of Imperialism in the region, we found it pragmatically necessary to make whatever accommodations were necessary to maintain the support of the autocratic, repressive and corrupt Middle East regimes that had replaced the imperialists.  Democracy, what’s that?

The creation of a democratic, Zionist Israel and our decision to support literally whatever they felt they needed to do in support of their national goals, left us, ultimately, in the same ambivalent boat of pragmatism vs. idealism.  In the face of UN vetoes, and international rulings on, for example, the illegality of the ongoing west Bank settlement program, America edges ever further into the arena of hypocrisy.

Additionally, we have stationed our foreign American troops on Islam’s holiest ground and fought wars that have killed Muslim civilians – very much taboo under the Koran.  With all of our strident talk about bringing Democracy to Islam whether they want it, need it or not, we have turned into the twenty-first Century Crusaders.  That really means something in Islam.  Even though the first Crusades were in the 11-12th Centuries, no one in Islam forgets them!

We have seen three wars fought between Arabs and Israelis.  The Palestinians have endless shelled Israel and Israel has invaded Lebanon and Gaza to suppress them.

The very nature of the Muslim Middle East with its Sunni-Shia and Arab-Persian splits, Its multiple ethnic rivalries, tribalism, corruption, bellicosity and political instabilities, introduces realities which we cannot control and poorly understand.  As a nation, we are sadly lacking in our grasp of the complexities that dominate the Middle East, making the creation of rational foreign policy illusive at best. In addition, we have the constant negative and confusing intrusion of internal American politics into the formation of foreign policy.

Add oil into this volatile mixture in a time of rising international demand and shrinking resources, and any observer will begin to see the problem for U.S. policy makers.

Rami Khouri, an Arab-American educator and commentator, recently wrote perceptively and accurately that “……..Washington has become a marginal player in much of the Middle East, largely as a consequence of its own incompetence, inconsistency, bias and weakness ….”

Our past foreign policy inconsistencies, our decline of influence in the Middle East and our ongoing activities have put us in the position of alienating someone, somewhere, every time we make a policy decision.

Informal polling shows about half the Arab “street” in favor of Western involvement with the Libyan rebels, while the other half are suspicious of western intentions.  Our “allies” in the region like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and the Gulf states, along with those whom we do not support like Syria and Iran, are very nervous about our involvement in Libya, fearing it might catalyze their own peoples.  Ongoing tendencies toward self-determination even have the Chinese worried.

The larger question here is what the result of these rebellions will be.  Will they spread further to places like Saudi Arabia where we have far more at stake?  How will we react to that?  Then, what will evolve in Tunis, Egypt and Libya?  Will we see stability?  Will the outcomes be in our favor?

The genie is out of the bottle and we are without significant influence!

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