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Sidestepping the pitfalls of global policy

November 9, 2008 by Haviland Smith

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

For Americans who closely follow U.S. foreign policy, the end of the Bush era cannot come quickly enough. The precipitous change in the world’s view of American policy between 2001 and 2008 has been absolutely terrifying for those of us who truly believe that given world realities America cannot now and never could “go it alone” in the post-Cold War world.

The future of this country and the world, for that matter, lies not in Bush’s pre-emptive unilateralism, which was so fiercely championed by the neocons, practiced in Iraq and yearned for in Iran, but in establishing and maintaining alliances with other countries for the purpose of dealing with common problems and threats. Issues like terrorism, Korean nukes and Iranian nuclear development do not lend themselves to unilateral solutions.

We now have the potential to put that all behind us. A quick look at the resounding and virtually unanimous approval of the rest of the world of Barack Obama’s election as president, shows clearly not only what the world thinks of Bush’s policy of pre-emptive unilateralism and its total disregard for and rejection of the ideas of other nations, but the yearning for a more cooperative planet.

None of this is to suggest that the United States should simply disregard its legitimate national interests. Quite the contrary, it is to say clearly that our national interests lie not only in the goals we pursue, but in the means we use to pursue those goals. Even though it may be in our interest to seek a nuclear-free Iran, it is not in our interest to accomplish that through unilateral military action. In today’s world, because of our own policies and activities, our importance and influence are daily becoming more marginal. The ramifications of such policies, as embodied in Iraq today and soon in Afghanistan, will continue to be so threatening to our national interests that undertaking them will weaken America, rather than strengthen it. Our Iraq adventure has diminished our influence in the world in general and the Middle East in particular, decreased our ability to maintain friends and allies and limited our effectiveness in combating terrorism.

In the foreign policy context, President-elect Obama has developed policies that are clearly designed to pursue our national interests – with a major exception: Afghanistan and Pakistan, two nations that are joined at the hip. That problem will ultimately prove to be more complicated and intractable than Iraq and has no military solution. There is real peril there for the new president.

The Obama administration will carefully wind down U.S. commitment in Iraq where, successful surge or not, the ethnically and religiously divided Iraqis are historically disinclined to live peacefully together. There is, in fact, no history of such reconciliation in the absence of a repressive hand to enforce it. The purpose of the surge was to create an environment in which reconciliation would be possible, yet there is little evidence today that the Iraqis wish to make that happen.

Without taking the military option off the table, Obama will search for a negotiated settlement on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This will be in direct contrast to the neocon mantra that military action is the first and only useful tool in the conduct of foreign affairs. Such negotiations have the potential to re-establish a group of nations in support of a new policy in contrast to the opposition we face in proposing any military solution.

Palestine is the central issue in the Muslim world that makes problems for the United States. That is because U.S. policy is viewed by Muslims as one-sided. The issues are clear. There are United Nations resolutions on the table. The Obama administration will need to carefully examine past U.S. policies, not to punish either side, but to mitigate a 60-year-old irritant to regional harmony.

In return for real peace, Israel will have to seriously consider a border approximating that which existed before 1967 and the West Bank settlements will have to go. Further, the Obama administration will need to get American troops off Arab soil and reconsider its political and military support of the region’s undemocratic regimes. That may mean that something other than democracy will come to the Middle East, but absent that, turmoil will reign in the region.

Most important, if the Obama administration really wants to have an impact in the region; it will need to stop exporting democracy through force of arms. That simply will not work. Better we get our own house in order, something clearly high on the Obama agenda, to re-create that “shining city on the hill” that has made America so attractive over the decades to the rest of the world. Let the world import our strengths, but only if they choose to.

There are pitfalls and opportunities out there for the Obama administration. Fortunately, many of the pitfalls are amply illuminated by the blunders of the Bush administration and therefore easily avoided. The opportunities are equally identifiable by observing what the Bush administration did not do.

Somewhere in that mix lies a foreign policy that can put America back in sync with the rest of the world.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who lives in Williston.

Posted in foreign policy |

Next Object Lesson: Afghanistan

October 26, 2008 by Haviland Smith

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

America needs to reassess its current policy of exporting democracy to the rest of the world.  It is not working in Iraq and it is even less likely to work in Afghanistan.  The only hope we have for change there is to seek stability and that means understanding and supporting the wishes of the local populations.   We will not be successful in that part of the world, particularly if our policy is based on militarily imposing democracy.

The Bush administration has made it abundantly clear to the rest of the world, particularly the Islamic world, that it sees the democratization of Islam as the answer to radical Islamic terrorism. That is a major mistake that will plague future generations in America and the West.  Our next object lesson in this arena may come in Afghanistan where increased attempts to install democracy will only make the problem worse.

This administration, under the debilitating influence of the Neoconservatives, whose basic philosophical point of departure is to see world events through a purely moral, right vs. wrong filter, has decided to spread democracy. They have decided, under that same Neocon influence, that the only correct answer to the terrorist issue, or, for that matter, any other foreign policy issue, is a military response.

It is this conflation of two distinctly different issues, selling democracy and combating terrorism, into one problem and the concurrent conviction that they only can be addressed with one policy – military action – that has caused us most of our current foreign policy problems.

This is what got us into Iraq, what lost us so many allies.  Remember all the energy expended by the Bush Administration to establish a direct connection between the terrorist bombings on 9/11 and the government of Saddam Hussein?  Well, that was the beginning.  We say we are fighting terrorism in Iraq, but we are really trying to suppress an insurgency in order to impose democracy on them because we think that will create a better world for us and our friends.

It now appears that we will move our military attention from Iraq to Afghanistan.  Both Senators McCain and Obama have stressed their resolve to “save” Afghanistan by transferring more troops there.  Unfortunately, the Afghanis will not be eager for us to impose a democracy, or much of anything else, on their country. There is nothing in their culture, their history, their geography or their reality that would make this likely.

We need to continue to be concerned about terrorism in Afghanistan, not about insurgency.  Al Qaida is, and will remain a threat to us, particularly if we continue our failed policies in the region.  It would be foolhardy to walk away and permit them to reestablish their base of operations there.  However, we should not be concerned with democratizing that country. Afghan stability and denying Al Qaida an operational base should be our dominant goals.

What we need to do is allow Afghanistan to stabilize itself.  That means identifying what political arrangement will be acceptable to the Afghanis and then figuring out how to accomplish that in the face of pressures that will seek both to destabilize Afghanistan and to recreate it as a home for Al Qaida.

That means no major jump in our troop levels, no attempt to control that large country or its borders, no attempt to bring them democracy and no attempt to militarily crush the indigenous insurgency – the Taliban – for if we pursue those paths, we are guaranteeing a repeat of Iraq, or worse.  It would literally take hundreds of thousands of troops to succeed using an Iraq-like “surge” in Afghanistan.  Any serious attempt at military “victory” in Afghanistan will make Iraq look like a walk in the park.

About the only things we should hope to accomplish are Afghan stability and the denial of Afghanistan to Al Qaida. We can do that only if we support governance that is acceptable to the majority of Afghanis.  That means some sort of Islamic government, hopefully, but not necessarily moderate, which, in recognizing the dangers of fundamentalist terrorism, would be willing to have us remain involved in the denial of their land to terrorist groups like Al Qaida.  Right now, the Taliban is the best candidate.  They are not universally violent, they once stabilized Afghanistan and ended poppy cultivation and they contain elements with which we certainly could cooperate toward those goals.  They are far from all bad.

To accomplish those goals, we need to move on from our basic, long held premise of American exceptionalism – the thought that only America has found the Holy Grail when it comes to governance. Instead, we need to understand that the world is full of people who, perhaps because they do not share our history, have no understanding of democracy or the rule of law, are not that displeased with their own lives, and have little interest in adopting democracy.

That most emphatically includes the broadest spectrum of Muslims who have their devoutly held religious and cultural beliefs and who believe that those beliefs, not ours, are the key to their own happiness.

Until we reach that level of sophistication and understanding of how the world really works, we will certainly be seduced by our own notion of exceptionalism into more and more disastrous democracy-driven forays into the rest of the world.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.  He lives in Williston.

Posted in Afghanistan |

Destruction Of
 The Political Center In America

October 23, 2008 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Randolph Herald.]

Back in the years following the Second World War, many European countries were seriously politically divided between the right and the left. In many respects, that was the result of the essentially favorable view of the Soviet Union held by the left in those years.

Even though the Stalinist purges had already taken the lives of tens of millions Soviet citizens, that fact was not widely known or admitted in European leftist circles. Because most of the left wing, or Socialist, parties had their philosophical roots in Marxism, the Soviet Union represented for them a branch of Marxism with which they could identify, a little bit of their heaven on earth, as it were, even though there was little in reality that connected the two.

It would take decades for the Socialist left in Europe to understand and then admit that Marxism-Leninism was nothing more than a crude and repressive perversion of their beloved socialism. Ultimately, that came about as a result of heavy-handed methods used by the Soviets to keep their empire together.

East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were the obvious manifestations of Soviet imperialism that helped the political left in Europe to change its view of Marxism-Leninism.

During that changeover in Western Europe, a mild political anarchy prevailed, which led directly to economic uncertainty. In England, for example, the Labor (Marxist, socialist) Party would win a national election. They would then spend their entire time in office nationalizing as much of basic industry as possible. When the Conservative (capitalist, free enterprise) Party subsequently came to power it would undertake the denationalization of as much of the newly nationalized economy as was possible in the time allotted them.

If you were a businessman in England at the time, what were you to do? The parties were so radicalized and the voting public so polarized that there was no way to know what would work economically. There was no stability in the economy or markets, and that did not create an economy that was conducive to national economic growth.

At the same time, the United States was the polar opposite. Republicans and Democrats were not that far apart in either their political or economic philosophies. As a result, there was a level of predictably in this country that created the perfect environment for economic growth, and we had that in spades.

That harmony began to come unstuck with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which led to a realignment of our political landscape. Where the Republican Party previously had been socially liberal and fiscally conservative, the Act, so strongly supported by the Democrats, almost forced southern Democrats to look for another party. They tried the Independent approach for a while, but in the end, the Dixiecrats (Southern Democrats), who had never been socially liberal, moved into the Republican Party and turned it, as we now see, into a socially conservative, some would say intolerant, but economically spendthrift party. In 40 short years, we have seen total role reversal.

The real importance of this change in our political landscape has been the marginalization of the political center. Before 1964, the center, whether Republican or Democrat, had run the country. Today, however, America—to its detriment— is in the hands, or at the mercy of, the right or the left, not the center.

We see the result in the sub-prime meltdown. It followed 12 years of Republican domination of the Congress, featuring a fiercely partisan laissez-faire approach to economic regulation, an approach which speeded up the required conditions for our economic problems. Now we see the Democrats beginning to assert their ideological positions in reaction to the proposed Republican solution, as proffered by Secretary Paulson.

During the deliberations on the financial rescue legislation, both parties trotted out much of their ideological hardware. Democrats insisted on reforming pay for top executives, gaining equity in bailed-out companies and permitting judges to rewrite mortgages. Republicans have called for the suspension of the capital gains tax and an additional, permanent tax cut as a way to create capital.

That has led to a “compromise” bill that, while carrying out the $700-billion intent of the Bush administration, contains pork from all political persuasions. That is not to say that this fat does not represent valid political issues. They are, however, not mainly economic issues. This shows clearly, at a time when speed may be the only thing that can save us from further disaster, that the old ideological political imperatives persevere even at a time when bipartisanship should be mandatory.

Forty years ago, that would have come to us naturally. Today, after forty years of political warfare and the virtual destruction of the political center, we seem not to know how to do it.

Given the often petty bickering of both Republicans and Democrats, it may well be time to seriously consider a third party, if for no other reason than, for the sake of the nation, we need to move our political structure back toward the center.

Haviland Smith is a former long-time resident of Brookfield who now lives in Williston.

Posted in United States |

Go-it-alone woes beset America

October 12, 2008 by Haviland Smith

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

Since World War II, perhaps as a reaction to European appeasement of Nazi Germany, the United States has become more and more interested in and committed to military responses to international problems.

In recent decades, the Republican Party has consistently advocated a foreign policy that features the projection of U.S. power abroad. During the past eight years, that position has been further amplified through the extraordinary influence of the neoconservatives on Bush administration foreign policy.

The neoconservatives believe that foreign policy should be based strictly on issues of good and evil (choose sides and take the moral high ground); that the prime tool in foreign policy is military power and our willingness to use it pre-emptively in a new unipolar world; that we should avoid conventional diplomacy including international organizations, particularly the United Nations; and that our focus should be on the Middle East and global Islam as the principal theaters for U.S. overseas interests.

It is impossible to argue logically that these neocon principles have not been the backbone of Bush administration foreign policies. So, the issue is not the nature of our foreign policy; it is whether that policy is serving our national interests.

We have had seven years of a pre-emptive, unilateral foreign policy. It has lost us whatever hopes we initially had for Afghanistan. It has brought us a political, ethnic/secular stalemate inside Iraq with little progress by those factions toward stable governance. It has cost us trillions of dollars, mortgaging our country to foreign investors. It has lost us just about all our traditional allies and turned neutral nations against us. It has stretched our military establishment to, or if you believe the Pentagon, perhaps beyond the breaking point. It has helped fundamentalist Muslim terrorist recruiting, training (the Iraq experience) and fundraising. Our uneven approach to democracy in the Middle East, as embodied in pushing it in Iraq and ignoring it in Palestine, has alienated Arabs and the greater Muslim world.

At the same time, we have accomplished nothing to promote a solution for the critical Palestine issue. Further, we have had no effect on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We continue to occupy Iraq and to station our troops in Muslim countries to the displeasure of their peoples. And we give political and material support to the most repressive regimes in the region to the detriment of their people.

As a result, America has little credibility in the world in general and the Middle East in particular. No one likes us, no one respects us and no one fears us. Now that we have overextended ourselves politically, economically and militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have become fair game for other world powers that do not share our goals or views. Let’s face it, the only weapons we have in sufficient numbers are nuclear and that is neither a flexible or useable tool.

The Russians are ignoring us and our threats in Georgia because they know there is little we can do other than complain. The Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs have simply gone about discussing their issues without us. Pakistan ignores us while most of Afghanistan unites against us. Iran and North Korea do what they please in connection with their nuclear programs. The rest of the world treats terrorism as a criminal matter while we continue our “war,” with all its negative implications. In short, the world is going about our business without involving us and they are doing so because of their strong disagreement with our motives, goals and tactics.

Our woes in the world are the result of seven years of a go-it-alone, my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. It is a simple fact that as long as our standard answer to foreign policy problems is a unilateral military response, we will continue to have major troubles internationally.

It is time to ask whether continuing these policies is in our interest. If it is, then we should elect John McCain who has been clear in his support of the “long war” in the region. On the other hand, Republicans have always painted Democrats as unwilling or unable to project American power abroad. Under that formulation, if you think we are on the wrong track, Barack Obama might appear to represent an alternative.

The fact is, however, that Democrats are ambivalent about the use of force. Even though he wants us out of Iraq, Obama wants to use additional force in Afghanistan. About the best we can hope for out of that adventure is political and military frustration, the further loss of American treasure, deeper troubles with Pakistan and continued collateral damage with its unintended consequences. Success, however it’s defined, will be extremely elusive. Although Obama’s position is probably driven by a perceived need to rebut ongoing Republican attacks on him for his “naiveté and inexperience,” the fact is that the military option remains high up in both candidates’ lists despite its many drawbacks.

We can’t have it both ways. If we continue our unilateral, pre-emptive military policies, we will need masses of money we don’t have and an infinitely larger military establishment to handle the predictable, coming threats that we are encouraging with our current policies.

Given the results we already have had from those policies, we need to look at alternatives. The “military option” is valid only if we are feared. Given our economic and military problems and the world’s current opinion of us, the only policy that makes much sense is a combination of diplomacy, alliances and negotiation, a policy that has served us so well in the past.

Unfortunately, neither candidate is wedded to that approach. Although Obama appears to support that policy on matters other than Afghanistan, McCain is openly opposed and dismissive, preferring to pursue the concept of the “long war.”

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff. He lives in Williston.

Posted in foreign policy, Israel/Palestine |

Fostering investment, corralling greed

September 25, 2008 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald.]

Make no mistake about it, our current financial problems are the direct result of greed supported by a lack of effective regulation by the federal government. This is a climate that has been consciously created by the Bush administration, which, true to its Republican roots and convictions, does not believe in regulation and has done everything humanly possible to weaken and minimize it.

Lacking effective regulation, the markets revert to a jungle in which anything goes. The overwhelming greed involved in the subprime mess is a natural adjunct to our free enterprise system. When given the opportunity, people will cut virtually any corner to make money. And that is why we need regulation.

For anyone who has lived abroad, the democratic capitalist, free enterprise system is the one to beat. Essentially, it lets market forces provide the risk/reward system for investors. Communism, fascism, socialism, are all systems that impose political ideologies on economic activity, to the detriment of those managed economies everywhere.

The key to this issue lies in the corruptibility of man. If you acknowledge his imperfections and his proclivity to cheat, then you will conclude that in a country where we have the best known system, we must have regulatory systems that minimize man’s ability to successfully cheat. We haven’t had that since the Carter administration, and that’s why we are dealing with our financial meltdown today.

The consensus is that our current economic miseries are the result of the subprime mess and that we will not move on to better times until there has been a further “correction” in the housing market — shorthand for a further drop in the value of our homes.

The fact that banks were able to pull the sleight-of-hand required to slip the marginal mortgages they were selling in among other, stronger items, obfuscating, but not eliminating, the inherent weaknesses in their products is laid to the weak regulatory system.

If you balk at the thought of greater, more comprehensive regulation, consider the fact that in the AIG meltdown, all the fiscal problems that caused the collapse came in the unregulated sectors of the company. The regulated sectors within AIG had no problems, remain viable and are the only thing about the company that potential investors might find financially attractive.

The only peril in bolstering the regulatory climate in America lies in an overreaction. If in America’s currently politically polarized condition, class warfare, or political, populist grandstanding against corporate interests gain sway, we will be in trouble. To be successful and effective, any regulatory changes will have to carefully retain and nurture a free-enterprise, entrepreneurial system. That is what attracts capital investment and creates wealth.

The other side of our problem is that we create far too little capital here at home. Our main sources of investment capital come from abroad. Yet we live in a society that canonizes spending. We were recently told by our president to spend, spend, spend as the way out of the perils of 9/11. In fact, we spend more than any people in the world. We buy the most inefficient vehicles on earth and then spend, spend, spend to keep them rolling. We spend like drunken sailors at any mall. To do this, we mortgage ourselves to the hilt in our credit card and other retail debt. We pay for nothing and borrow everything.

Under globalization, most of the goods we see are made somewhere else. That means that our spendthrift tendencies not only create debt at home, but cause the flow of dollars abroad to pay for the goods we buy on credit at the mall. Dollars that could become capital instead end up in foreign producers’ hands.

A country that behaves this way cannot conceivably accumulate capital. Without capital, no one prospers, because it is the basis of all borrowing, not just for retail profligacy, but for business formulation and expansion and all the other endeavors that create wealth.

There is potential for a vast, untapped source of capital out there in the middle class, if one of the parties could figure out a way to make long-term investing more attractive and safe for them. That does not mean privatizing Social Security, for if we had given all the Social Security money to Wall Street, as the Republicans wished, that would have wiped out not only Social Security, but the middle class with it.

Not only must we design the world’s best regulatory system, we need to change our ways on capital creation.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who lives in Williston.

Posted in United States |

Real Change Means Democrats in Charge

September 25, 2008 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]

The word “change” is all the rage these days on the presidential campaign trail.  Unfortunately, its meaning has been so obscured for political reasons that it’s hard to sort through what’s really going on.

In today’s America, when any politician talks of change, it simply has to mean change away from the policies of the Bush Administration, starting with Iraq, continuing through New Orleans/Katrina, tax cuts, deficit spending to the sub-prime mess, to name but a few. The need for change, if you are looking at it substantively, has to be change from current Republican policies – Republican because those policies were enacted with the compliance of a Republican Congress in the days before 2006.  That means, presumably, that the Republicans in Congress agreed with the President and supported him on his policies.

John McCain, who has supported Republican positions in 88.3% of his Senate votes, has decided that he is the true agent of change because he has disagreed with the Administration on a small number of points.  He is against earmarks, wants to stop lobbyist using money to get at legislators, co-authored a bill on climate change control, believes in using embryonic stem cells, and wants to legalize the flow of foreign workers to the US.  Thus, he sees himself as a maverick who has taken on his own party on a number of issues.  But, essentially, he has been an “agent of change” on only a few hobby issues.  In the main, he has supported Republican legislative goals at an almost 90% rate,

Sen. McCain has redefined “change” to mean taking on one’s own party, rather than the onerous policies of the opposition party.  He says that Obama can’t be an agent of change because he is a died-in-the-wool liberal Democrat who has never taken on his own party on any issue and therefore, under the new McCain definition, cannot be an agent of change!

Please, that’s why he is an agent of change!  The only politicians who can really be agents of change in today’s American context are the Democrats.  They are the only ones who think that the Republican policies of the Bush era are absolutely wrong and have to be changed for the good of the country.  They actually have alternative policies to offer as a change from Republican policies largely supported by McCain and are prepared to spell them out, if anyone will listen.

But then, this campaign, more than most, and thanks largely to Republican strategy, is not about issues and reality. It is about emotion and cosmetics. As long as the campaign remains that way, we will focus on a Republican presidential candidate whose best and boldest changes have been designed to make himself more appealing to the Republican base and a Democrat candidate whom Republicans paint negatively as a captive of his own party!

On real policy issues there isn’t a nickel’s difference between McCain and Bush and that covers economic, tax, energy, health care, military, education and foreign policies.  He calls himself an agent of change because he plans to “clean up Washington”, not radically change its current policies, with the help of a vice presidential candidate who has allegedly “cleaned up Alaska”, but whose main attraction to his base is her ultra-conservative philosophy.

There is no talk of changing those Bush policies that got us into the multiple messes in which we now find ourselves. That is presumably because he has no plans to change them.  No, he will fight corruption, lobbyists, the old ways of doing business, and that’s just fine, but he has articulated few plans to change the Bush policies that Obama says he will change.

The campaign appears to be going well for McCain, proprietor of the “Straight Talk Express”. On the heels of the Republican Convention, he is pulling even and even surpassing the Democrat candidate while running a campaign that has almost nothing to do with issues and everything to do with his new definition of “change”.  Is that really straight talk?

Unless the voting public suddenly becomes interested in the critical issues involved – the candidates’ real positions on Iraq, foreign policy, deficit spending and the rapidly worsening economy at home – it seems likely that this strange, disingenuous campaign strategy will continue in place, largely because the McCain campaign sees it as potentially leading to the White House.

If that is the case, we will have elected a new president who will change little other than the cosmetics of Washington dynamics, while pursuing the policies of his predecessor, policies that gave gotten us into the mess in which we now find ourselves and which easily could change the current downturn in America’s fortunes into a total disaster.

Haviland Smith is a former Northeastern Republican turned independent who believes in social liberalism and fiscal conservatism.   He sees his former party as having been hijacked by Dixiecrats and turned to social conservatism and fiscal profligacy.  He lives in Williston.

Posted in United States |

Redefining success in Iraq

September 21, 2008 by Haviland Smith

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

In this election season, much is made of the surge. What is not clear in this ongoing discussion, and what is rarely discussed in the context of the surge, is its original purpose. It is not whether the surge has succeeded militarily (it has, and wildly so), but whether its far more important non-military goals are likely to be achieved. That is, conservatively speaking, the $3 trillion question.

The surge was undertaken against prevailing public opinion, congressional approval, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group findings, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Just about no one wanted it.

Grudging approval of the surge by those contrary elements was reached using the argument that the president needed a strategy that would bring decreased violence and with it the opportunity for political reconciliation. In 2007, after more than four chaotic years in Iraq, the president needed a policy that would provide the opportunity for “success” – defined as Iraqi political reconciliation.

Most Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama, and some Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Hagel, opposed the surge. Most Republicans, including Sen. John McCain and one Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, supported the surge.

There is little reason to argue about the military success of the surge, for it has been extraordinary and as such, a great credit to our armed forces. Violence is way down, and that is precisely what the president sought when he undertook the surge.

The problem here is that today’s American politicians, who for purely political reasons want or need to be associated with success, are touting the undeniable military success of the surge as its ultimate goal. That is the case with McCain and all those Republicans and Democrats who have supported the Iraq war over the years. Needing the political capital brought by success, they have redefined the word: They no longer speak of national political reconciliation in Iraq, only of military success.

However, there are other factors involved that have nothing whatsoever to do with the surge, but which have had a major calming effect in Iraq.

Apparently our people in Iraq have developed methods that have allowed them to assassinate ranking members of al-Qaida. They have done that to the point where al-Qaida has been substantially weakened.

Further, Muqtada al-Sadr has unilaterally suspended his Sadrist Shia militia attacks on American forces and on his Shia and Sunni rivals. This has had a major calming effect in the country.

The Kurds have simply withdrawn into their historic lands, in effect creating a de facto Kurdistan. They participate in the al-Maliki government, but their only real purpose is to consolidate their post-Saddam gains in furtherance of their own autonomy.

Last, but perhaps most important, in 2007, American forces in Diyala and Anbar provinces began a program called the Sunni Awakening which has enlisted Sunni militias, some 80,000 strong, into the fight against their former allies, al-Qaida. We have paid, armed and trained these militias, which had formerly fought side by side with al-Qaida against our forces. They have been most effective.

The result has been that a diminished al-Qaida fights us alone; the Sunnis are allied with us and not killing us or Shia; and the main Shia militias have withdrawn from the battlefield, at least for the moment. These elements alone have probably had at least as much to do with the drop in violence as the surge.

However, the purpose of creating this lull in violence was to establish an environment conducive to reconciliation between Iraq’s traditionally warring factions. That has not happened.

Under the best of circumstances, such reconciliation is extremely difficult and improbable. These people really hate each other and if past is prologue, will live peacefully only under smotheringly oppressive rule. Turn them loose, as we have, and all those centuries-old animosities come to the surface.

Despite the lull in violence, all the old issues remain. The al-Maliki government has so far failed to schedule critical national elections. In a curious way, the Sunni Awakening turnabout represents an additional threat to the peace. The al-Maliki government is not only Shia, but highly partisan. It is wildly suspicious of the other ethnic and religious groups, the Kurds and the Sunnis. Unless the al-Maliki government integrates those Sunni militias into the army and police, which it has persistently refused to do, they will represent the potential for increased, severe future Sunni on Shia violence.

Certainly if that happens, the Shia Sadrists will re-evaluate, further weakening the prospects for reconciliation. Thus, all of the elements which caused the instability before the surge are intact, or even strengthened and waiting to protect their own interests against the others’.

However successful, if the surge does not enable an Iraqi national reconciliation, it will not “succeed.” There is not much history that argues for that ultimate success.

Posted in Iraq |

Why is the U.S. being so provocative toward Russia?

September 15, 2008 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published on Nieman Watchdog.]

Does anyone really think that expanding NATO into Eastern Europe is going to bring out the best in Russia? A former CIA station chief says there’s a lot more to the Georgian conflict than meets the eye.

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Georgia, the media have been filled with accusations, charges and countercharges about what “really” happened.  The simplistic, disingenuous claims and explanations from all the parties — the U.S., Russia, and Georgia — leave a lot to the imagination and a great deal of unexamined and unreported fodder for the media.

Q. Just what sort of threat does Russia pose to the U.S. today? Should the nature of this threat persuade us to undertake an aggressive policy toward them, such as expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and involving Poland and the Czech Republic in a “missile shield”?

It is difficult to see how Russia, unlike the U.S.S.R. with its ideological imperatives and military might, represents a strategic threat to the U.S. and hard to understand why we treat them as provocatively as we do.

Q. Does the United States have the moral authority lead the charge against Russia?

Our adventure in Iraq and our moral ambiguity in supporting undemocratic regimes in that region make that an open question.

Q. What was Russia really trying to accomplish in invading Georgia?

The invasion appears to have been a response to Russian concerns over what it views to be increasing NATO hostility toward them.  The past inclusion of so many countries within the Soviet sphere of influence was bad enough.  But the proposal to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and the installation of “missile shield” components in Poland and the Czech Republic are seen as  matters of national interest to the Russians.  They are seen as a pure NATO provocation, appropriately met with the full force of Russian diplomatic and military power.

Q.  Did Georgia believe it had western guarantees for protection? Do we really believe that Georgia would have attempted the invasion of South Ossetia, without some hope or maybe even assurance that we would support them when the Russians responded militarily?

Given the historically difficult relationship between the two counties, it is doubtful that Georgia would have taken such a risk without some assurances.

Q. Why did the Georgians send 2,000 troops to Iraq, the most of any other nation other than Great Britain?

The logical conclusion is that they saw it as a chip in the game designed to get the U.S. and NATO to support their territorial ambitions in Abkhazia and Ossetia.

Q.  Did anyone in the Bush administration encourage Georgian President Saakashvili to attack the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali?

Post-invasion comments by Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican presidential candidate John McCain support the contention that they welcomed the invasion.

Q. Is there a difference between Kosovo and Ossetia/Abkhazia?

We recognized Kosovo as an independent country despite Russian protests.  Now we protest when they do the same with Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Q. What is the purpose of a militarized NATO today?

It looks to the Russians like a continuation of the West’s Cold War containment of the U.S.S.R.  Other than that — and supporting the U.S. in Afghanistan — what other purpose could it possibly have?

Q. Did the Reagan administration tell the Russians prior to the fall of the U.S.S.R. that we would not extend NATO into the East European countries?

This is said to have been the quid pro quo for Soviet acceptance of German reunification. Whatever assurances we gave them, our expansion of NATO has been a pure provocation to Russia.

Q.  Why is the U.S. supporting Georgian membership in NATO?

Are we intent on picking a fight with Russia — something that is clearly not in our interests? It was our intention 17 years ago to see Russia peacefully join the rest of the world, yet NATO remains an active barrier to that integration.

Q. What role has Randy Scheunemann, Sen. McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, played in the Georgia affair?

Scheunemann is a neoconservative, on the board of directors of the Project for a New American Century, and is a registered agent for Georgia. The Los Angeles Times has reported that the Georgian government has paid his two-member lobbying firm $830,000 since 2004.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief, who served in Eastern and Western Europe, Lebanon and Tehran and as chief of the counter-terrorism staff.

Posted in Russia |

U.S. hamstrung by irrational foreign policy

September 7, 2008 by Haviland Smith

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

The Bush administration’s foreign policy is internally inconsistent. It claims the virtually exclusive right to bring democracy to any poor, misbegotten, non-democratic country of its choosing, while at the same time supporting some very undemocratic regimes.

It would be easy to understand this bifurcated policy if it were possible to determine that it was in the U.S. national interest, but that does not always seem to be the case. Far too often, the support or non-support of a given country is dependent on factors that have nothing to do with any rational thought process.

If you examine the best of America’s philosophical underpinnings, it is easy to understand why this administration or any other, for that matter, would want to spread democracy around the world. We truly believe that we have the best political system that has ever existed. We believe that if the entire world were based on democratic principles, there would be far fewer conflicts and far fewer dangers facing us from abroad. Whether or not this is objectively true, as a nation, we believe it to be.

We also know that this is a wildly dangerous world. If we learned nothing from the immense dangers of the Cold War, 9/11 taught us a lesson we will never forget: America, despite its historic sense of geographic isolation (safety) from the constantly warring worlds in Europe and Asia, is newly vulnerable in today’s technologically advancing world.

For the first time, our enemies really can get to us! They can cause us to be afraid – a traditionally alien emotion in fortress America. As we know from the past seven years, fear promotes compromise on constitutional issues like: civil rights, torture and interrogation and personal freedoms. The world has watched as we have fearfully condoned or at least overlooked wireless wiretapping, the abrogation of habeus corpus rights, questionable detention, interrogation and torture activities and the physical and mental abuse of military prisoners in the hope that such compromise would bring us more safety. This has not helped our image in the world. Sadly, we have forgotten Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that he who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither.

So, we are faced with a real dilemma. Who are we? Are we, as we believe, the most democratic people in the world? Or are we a people faced with a real existential threat from those terrorists who would do us harm and thus backed into a corner where adopting undemocratic methods and supporting undemocratic foreign elements is our only route to survival?

On the one hand, we support undemocratic regimes in Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and elsewhere, either because they support us on our “War on Terror,” have oil or are somehow politically or economically important to us. The same is true in Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. China is hardly a bastion of democracy. Yet, we have been told by our administration, after admissions that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to 9/11 and that Iraq was really no threat to the United States, that we invaded Iraq in order to install democracy there. Why have we not invaded Myanmar to throw out those horrible people, or the Sudan to stop the horrors in Darfur, or Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe? The list goes on and on. Their peoples have suffered no less and probably considerably more than the Iraqis did under Saddam Hussein.

The purpose here is not to say which road we should take. The purpose is to point out that as long as we are pursuing two mutually incompatible policies, we will continue to marginalize ourselves as hypocrites in the outside world.

Today, all America has is its military power which is being worn down and overextended in its roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have no diplomatic, political or economic clout in the world. That is the case because our policies are laughed at by much of the rest of the world. If you don’t believe that, take a look at the Pew poll that shows what the rest of the world thinks of us today. It is not a pretty sight.

We need to decide what course to take. Shall we be the ultimate pragmatists who conduct our relationships based on our own national interest, without reference to difficult, nuanced issues of right and wrong? That’s our Saudi Arabian or China or Egypt policy today. Or shall we do this totally idealistically by supporting all movements that employ the democratic process? That’s what got us Hamas in Palestine.

This is not a simple issue, but it is one that needs to be examined and debated in this country. Whatever we actually are, or wish to think we are, we can’t get away with supporting two mutually contradictory policies at the same time.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff. He lives in Williston.

Posted in foreign policy |

Let’s Define ‘Terrorism’ More Carefully

September 3, 2008 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Randolph Herald.]

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has changed the way America looks at the two phenomena of terrorism and insurgencies. It has blurred the lines between the two and in doing so, has created some long lasting foreign policy problems for the United States simply because there is a vast difference between a pure terrorist group like Al Qaida and an insurgency that practices terrorism.

The US Code defines international terrorism as “violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state…. (and which)….appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping and occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum. [18 U.S.C. § 2331(1)]

The Department of Defense defines insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict”.

It is important to carefully differentiate between terrorism and insurgency because, once classified into either group, a dissident movement will be given a level of treatment either formally or by general international consensus from which it will be difficult for it to extricate itself.

Historically, it has been easier to deal with terrorism than insurgencies.  When terrorist movements are left to run their course they tend to last around a dozen years. The good news about them is that, unlike insurgencies, which rarely lose, terrorism never seems to win. Terrorism is a short-term, dramatically violent irritant and not much more.

Terrorist organizations cannot survive unless local populations support them.  Recently Al Qaida has been losing support from mainstream Muslims because it indiscriminately kills civilians in defiance of the teachings of the Koran.

Insurgents, on the other hand, generally have fairly widespread support from their local populations, largely because they are normally fighting against a repressive ruler or occupier.  That is why they tend to endure and succeed.

How does any ruler or occupier protect itself under those conditions? They simply focus their military might on the assumed enemy positions and pull the trigger. Insurgents have no uniforms, barracks or bases.  They live and work in and around the rest of the civilian population, whether in Pakistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan or Iraq. Under attack, there is bound to be a lot of collateral damage which is likely to be seen as collective punishment and equally likely to encourage more indigenous support of the insurgency.  It is a difficult enemy to vanquish.

The Bush administration is prone to brand any group which threatens any status quo, including insurgencies, as a terrorist organization, without any thought to the origins of or reasons for the struggle being waged.  If a group of dissident Egyptians, tired of their repressive government, decided to try to overthrow the Mubarak regime, how would we label them?  How would we label indigenous dissidents trying to overthrow the “friendly”, but not necessarily democratic government of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or any other “friendly” country?  It’s not a stretch to say that they would be labeled terrorists overnight.

What this does is de-legitimize what are or could be legitimate national liberation movements involved in insurgencies, much like the American War of Independence in 1775-1783.  It goes back to the old saw, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.

If America wishes to be seen as a supporter of the democratic process in the world, which the Bush administration constantly avows it does, then it can’t pick and choose where and when to support it without risk of being immediately labeled as hypocritical.  Our decision to not even acknowledge the existence of Hamas in Palestine, even though they were elected as the result of a democratic process, is a perfect example of the pitfalls involved in the selective application of democratic principles.  It earned us a diplomatic black eye, as has our similar attitude toward Hizballah in Lebanon.

If we are going to support the democratic process, we will not be able to randomly label indigenous insurrections as terrorist movements simply because we don’t like their politics or because we think that the status quo government in power in their country, however repressive or undemocratic, is a better alternative.  The rest of the world is not dumb enough to let us get away with that kind of hypocrisy.  And yet, we continue to try!

Haviland Smith is a retired CIÅ station chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle east and as Chief of the counterterrorism staff.  A longtime resident of Brookfield, he now lives in Williston.

Posted in terrorism |

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