Sunday, March 14, 2004
Policy implication of Spain blast: Not a "war on terror" but a "campaign against fundamentalism"
I guess, since it's Sunday morning, I can make like a talking head. And, inspired by the horrors in Madrid, let's talk about the "war on terror." I'll start with first premisses and meander onward to a conclusion. Not sure where I'll end up, but Hey! That's why they pay me the big bucks (not!)
0. The "war on terror" (WOT) is a deceptive meme and an incoherent concept. The WOT hasn't been declared, like the successful World War II was, and like the disastrous Viet Nam wasn't. (You'd think our national security apparatus could learn from experience). And you can't fight a war against a tactic. Fighting a war against terror is like fighting a war against right-wing flanking maneuvers. France didn't fight a war against the Schlieffen plan; it fought a war against Germany.
1. The very incoherence of the WOT concept makes it a plan for endless fighting (see the PNAC) [2]. The title of Perle's latest tract is revealing: An End to Evil. Well, there will never be an end to evil. Evil is part of the human condition. The best we can do—that is, the liberal perspective—is try to stop it from spreading and ameliorate its effects. (Any Christian would know this, of course. The authors of the Constitution and the Federalist papers knew it too; that's why we have the separation of powers—and, some would argue, the Second Amendment.)
2. Let's ask ourselves: cui bono? Who benefits? Who are the winners an endless WOT? The answer is obvious, and there's no point belaboring it. One example among many: It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the information collected and consolidated by the various efforts in the "Homeland" "Security" apparat to make its way into the credit reporting system (see under MBNA back here), probably under the pretext of creating a system of internal passport controls for air travellers. Privatization, don't you know.
3. Bush is not competent to fight the overt WOT. Atrios, Meteor on Kos, and Kos himself all have excellent posts on this point.
3. There is a covert WOT. This covert WOT is never spoken of by the administration, and never covered in the press, but it must be going on. The covert WOT explains why Bush can keep photos of targeted individuals in his desk drawer and cross them off when he thinks they're dead (see back here). Presumably, the CIA is in charge of this, because that seems like the only way to explain George Tenet's survival, when anyone else who crosses Bush is promptly heaved over the side.
4. Bush is not competent to fight the covert WOT. America's cities are America's heartland. AQ's strategists understood this; Bush, apparently, does not. The worst possible threat to America, if measured in lives, is a loose nuke or a dirty bomb in our complex and very rich coastal and riverine cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami, and of course Washington, DC. [3] Maybe a shipping container, maybe a mass transportation railcar at rush hour as just now in Madrid... And Bush's policies have done NOTHING about this (back here) and in fact may have made the situation worse.
Further, it's just not clear that an assassination program (which is what the covert WOT must be) is going to work. Operation Phoenix didn't win the war for us in Viet Nam. This covert program may in fact make us worse off. In marketing, it's called the rule of 60: When a company screws one customer, figure that 60 others will hear about it. Well, suppose we assassinate someone, and get it wrong. The quality of our intelligence in the Arab world—lousy—makes that inevitable. So, sixty people will know. If the odds are that one of those sixty will seek to act against us, we're worse of than before. If two, we're exponentially worse off. Maybe covert assassination programs like this could be said to have worked for the British in Northern Ireland, for the Spanish (perhaps) with the Basques, and for us in various Latin American adventures. Those programs, however, were in small geographic areas where language was not a problem. Not so for us in the WOT.
We also face the issue of what to do, domestically, with the "war dogs" who are actually doing the assassinations when they come home. (I find it excruciatingly interesting that the theocon's madrassa, Patrick Henry University (back here) is one of the few universities to have a major in intelligence and foreign affairs. I can imagine no better recipe for a crusade against Islam than fostering a network of SICs in our intelligence apparatus.)
5. When Bush came into office—putting aside the utter cynicism required when analyzing any of Bush's actions—it seems that he thought that the major security threat was from states, and covert operations they support.[4] That would explain why he would spend money on ICBM defenses (only states have ICBMs), rather than on the threat of loose nukes. And it would explain the wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq: AQ and their kind were seen as dependent on States. Somehow, if we could "drain the swamp" by eliminating state support for our adversaries, the threat would go away. Madrid proves that the theory that wars with states are the way to win the WOT is wrong (even granting that the WOT can be won, which I don't).
6. Since states are not our main adversaries, who do we fight? It looks to me like even AQ, as such, is not our adversary. We already know that AQ and our adversaries are "post-modern", project-based "learning organizations" that act more venture capitalists than general staffs or revolutionary parties.[5] And Madrid shows at least the possibility that AQ has passed "the test of independent invention": there will be other AQs, and AQ itself can subcontract, mutate, join with others... To put this another way, when Bush pulls the OBL October surprise, it won't mean a thing. [LATEST from Rummy: Move along people, no story here.] Any more than putting Martha Stewart in jail means that all crooked CEOs have been punished.
7. Make no mistake: Since I regard cities, and the high culture to which they give rise, as the highest products of human civilization, I am very serious about preventing further 9/11s, as all Democrats should be; it's Bush's fundamental unseriousness in conceiving and fighting the WOT—a product of his seeing it solely as an opportunity to advance his own interests and those of his retinue—that I object to. That's why the issue of how Bush handles loose nukes is the key, the litmus test, that shows how feckless, how reckless, he really is.
8. I think the right way to think about our adversaries and our situation is to wage a Campaign Against Fundamentalism (CAF), not a "war on terror." Doesn't that really capture reality better? From what we know about the 9/11 hijackers, they were all well-educated, skilled, middle-class. What radicalized them—what turned them into fundamentalists, individuals willing to fly airplanes into buildings and kill thousands to make a religious point—was the encounter with, yes, liberalism in the modern city (for example, Hamburg). Imagine! People who worship different gods! People who speak different languages! People who eat different food! Gay people! The fundamentalist impulse is to cleanse all that. The liberal impulse is to embrace it. This dynamic is not going to change, and it's the mainspring that drives our adversaries.
We need more liberalism, not less. Values like tolerance, settling down, making a little money at something that's worth doing, "live and let live"... People who organize their lives like that tend not to fly airplanes into buildings. Or embark on crusades.
9. The only way to wage the CAF is by campaigning to create the political and social structures that contain it. That was the lesson that Americans learned, escaping from the fundamentalist wars in Europe, and enshrined in the Constitution with the First Amendment against the establishment of religion. All the tools of statecraft possessed by great imperial powers—including conventional war, intelligence, covert war—need to be part of the CAF, but as servants, not masters. Bush, alas, reverses this. He takes the appearance of power—guns, airplanes, weapons, and images of same—for the reality of power, which is the strength of our political and economic institutions—a strength created by liberals and liberalism [6].
10. Obviously, the CAF needs to be waged here as well as abroad. A United States dominated by fundamentalist Christians at war with fundamentalist Islam is recipe for disaster on a global scale.
Well, that's all for the present. Funny how the CAF turns out to be the mother of all wedge issues. I wish this were more coherent, but I don't know where else this thinking is being hammered out. Readers, can you help?
Notes
[1] Eliot Cohen's brilliant book, Military Misfortunes, calls such misconceptualizing a "failure to learn." If there is another 9/11 on US soil, that will be evidence of complete systems breakdown; "catastrophic failure." I think this is exactly what Bush's policies are going to bring about. It's interesting to watch how the efforts of a military as innovative and as brilliant in the operational arts as the army of Von Runstedt and Rommel can be undone by a government as feckless and incompetent as Gamelin's and Petain's.
[2] I know the PNAC seems like "old news." But just because we get tired of saying it, doesn't mean that the Bushogarchy gets tired of doing it.
[3] We remember very well that Bush treated the first round of DHS spending as a political slush fund, distributing it into the Red States (here, "flyover state" really is the right term) instead of to the Blue States that are actually threatened.
[4] I believe, in the intelligence world, this is called "mirroring"—thinking our adversaries think just like we do. Bush, that is, thinks the entire world is run like the Bush Dynasty (Kevin Phillips, back here) is run. Another Texan war president, LBJ, had a problem mirroring the Vietnamese. Escalation worked with LBJ's domestic political opponents, but it didn't work with the Vietnamese at all.
[5] Here again we may have the possibility of mirroring; Bush may think that fundamentalist Islam is driven by the same "unholy alliance between the dynastic class and the religious right" (Phillips) that has proven so powerful in our own country.
[6] Institutions which liberals are periodically called upon to save.
0. The "war on terror" (WOT) is a deceptive meme and an incoherent concept. The WOT hasn't been declared, like the successful World War II was, and like the disastrous Viet Nam wasn't. (You'd think our national security apparatus could learn from experience). And you can't fight a war against a tactic. Fighting a war against terror is like fighting a war against right-wing flanking maneuvers. France didn't fight a war against the Schlieffen plan; it fought a war against Germany.
1. The very incoherence of the WOT concept makes it a plan for endless fighting (see the PNAC) [2]. The title of Perle's latest tract is revealing: An End to Evil. Well, there will never be an end to evil. Evil is part of the human condition. The best we can do—that is, the liberal perspective—is try to stop it from spreading and ameliorate its effects. (Any Christian would know this, of course. The authors of the Constitution and the Federalist papers knew it too; that's why we have the separation of powers—and, some would argue, the Second Amendment.)
2. Let's ask ourselves: cui bono? Who benefits? Who are the winners an endless WOT? The answer is obvious, and there's no point belaboring it. One example among many: It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the information collected and consolidated by the various efforts in the "Homeland" "Security" apparat to make its way into the credit reporting system (see under MBNA back here), probably under the pretext of creating a system of internal passport controls for air travellers. Privatization, don't you know.
3. Bush is not competent to fight the overt WOT. Atrios, Meteor on Kos, and Kos himself all have excellent posts on this point.
3. There is a covert WOT. This covert WOT is never spoken of by the administration, and never covered in the press, but it must be going on. The covert WOT explains why Bush can keep photos of targeted individuals in his desk drawer and cross them off when he thinks they're dead (see back here). Presumably, the CIA is in charge of this, because that seems like the only way to explain George Tenet's survival, when anyone else who crosses Bush is promptly heaved over the side.
4. Bush is not competent to fight the covert WOT. America's cities are America's heartland. AQ's strategists understood this; Bush, apparently, does not. The worst possible threat to America, if measured in lives, is a loose nuke or a dirty bomb in our complex and very rich coastal and riverine cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami, and of course Washington, DC. [3] Maybe a shipping container, maybe a mass transportation railcar at rush hour as just now in Madrid... And Bush's policies have done NOTHING about this (back here) and in fact may have made the situation worse.
Further, it's just not clear that an assassination program (which is what the covert WOT must be) is going to work. Operation Phoenix didn't win the war for us in Viet Nam. This covert program may in fact make us worse off. In marketing, it's called the rule of 60: When a company screws one customer, figure that 60 others will hear about it. Well, suppose we assassinate someone, and get it wrong. The quality of our intelligence in the Arab world—lousy—makes that inevitable. So, sixty people will know. If the odds are that one of those sixty will seek to act against us, we're worse of than before. If two, we're exponentially worse off. Maybe covert assassination programs like this could be said to have worked for the British in Northern Ireland, for the Spanish (perhaps) with the Basques, and for us in various Latin American adventures. Those programs, however, were in small geographic areas where language was not a problem. Not so for us in the WOT.
We also face the issue of what to do, domestically, with the "war dogs" who are actually doing the assassinations when they come home. (I find it excruciatingly interesting that the theocon's madrassa, Patrick Henry University (back here) is one of the few universities to have a major in intelligence and foreign affairs. I can imagine no better recipe for a crusade against Islam than fostering a network of SICs in our intelligence apparatus.)
5. When Bush came into office—putting aside the utter cynicism required when analyzing any of Bush's actions—it seems that he thought that the major security threat was from states, and covert operations they support.[4] That would explain why he would spend money on ICBM defenses (only states have ICBMs), rather than on the threat of loose nukes. And it would explain the wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq: AQ and their kind were seen as dependent on States. Somehow, if we could "drain the swamp" by eliminating state support for our adversaries, the threat would go away. Madrid proves that the theory that wars with states are the way to win the WOT is wrong (even granting that the WOT can be won, which I don't).
6. Since states are not our main adversaries, who do we fight? It looks to me like even AQ, as such, is not our adversary. We already know that AQ and our adversaries are "post-modern", project-based "learning organizations" that act more venture capitalists than general staffs or revolutionary parties.[5] And Madrid shows at least the possibility that AQ has passed "the test of independent invention": there will be other AQs, and AQ itself can subcontract, mutate, join with others... To put this another way, when Bush pulls the OBL October surprise, it won't mean a thing. [LATEST from Rummy: Move along people, no story here.] Any more than putting Martha Stewart in jail means that all crooked CEOs have been punished.
7. Make no mistake: Since I regard cities, and the high culture to which they give rise, as the highest products of human civilization, I am very serious about preventing further 9/11s, as all Democrats should be; it's Bush's fundamental unseriousness in conceiving and fighting the WOT—a product of his seeing it solely as an opportunity to advance his own interests and those of his retinue—that I object to. That's why the issue of how Bush handles loose nukes is the key, the litmus test, that shows how feckless, how reckless, he really is.
8. I think the right way to think about our adversaries and our situation is to wage a Campaign Against Fundamentalism (CAF), not a "war on terror." Doesn't that really capture reality better? From what we know about the 9/11 hijackers, they were all well-educated, skilled, middle-class. What radicalized them—what turned them into fundamentalists, individuals willing to fly airplanes into buildings and kill thousands to make a religious point—was the encounter with, yes, liberalism in the modern city (for example, Hamburg). Imagine! People who worship different gods! People who speak different languages! People who eat different food! Gay people! The fundamentalist impulse is to cleanse all that. The liberal impulse is to embrace it. This dynamic is not going to change, and it's the mainspring that drives our adversaries.
We need more liberalism, not less. Values like tolerance, settling down, making a little money at something that's worth doing, "live and let live"... People who organize their lives like that tend not to fly airplanes into buildings. Or embark on crusades.
9. The only way to wage the CAF is by campaigning to create the political and social structures that contain it. That was the lesson that Americans learned, escaping from the fundamentalist wars in Europe, and enshrined in the Constitution with the First Amendment against the establishment of religion. All the tools of statecraft possessed by great imperial powers—including conventional war, intelligence, covert war—need to be part of the CAF, but as servants, not masters. Bush, alas, reverses this. He takes the appearance of power—guns, airplanes, weapons, and images of same—for the reality of power, which is the strength of our political and economic institutions—a strength created by liberals and liberalism [6].
10. Obviously, the CAF needs to be waged here as well as abroad. A United States dominated by fundamentalist Christians at war with fundamentalist Islam is recipe for disaster on a global scale.
Well, that's all for the present. Funny how the CAF turns out to be the mother of all wedge issues. I wish this were more coherent, but I don't know where else this thinking is being hammered out. Readers, can you help?
Notes
[1] Eliot Cohen's brilliant book, Military Misfortunes, calls such misconceptualizing a "failure to learn." If there is another 9/11 on US soil, that will be evidence of complete systems breakdown; "catastrophic failure." I think this is exactly what Bush's policies are going to bring about. It's interesting to watch how the efforts of a military as innovative and as brilliant in the operational arts as the army of Von Runstedt and Rommel can be undone by a government as feckless and incompetent as Gamelin's and Petain's.
[2] I know the PNAC seems like "old news." But just because we get tired of saying it, doesn't mean that the Bushogarchy gets tired of doing it.
[3] We remember very well that Bush treated the first round of DHS spending as a political slush fund, distributing it into the Red States (here, "flyover state" really is the right term) instead of to the Blue States that are actually threatened.
[4] I believe, in the intelligence world, this is called "mirroring"—thinking our adversaries think just like we do. Bush, that is, thinks the entire world is run like the Bush Dynasty (Kevin Phillips, back here) is run. Another Texan war president, LBJ, had a problem mirroring the Vietnamese. Escalation worked with LBJ's domestic political opponents, but it didn't work with the Vietnamese at all.
[5] Here again we may have the possibility of mirroring; Bush may think that fundamentalist Islam is driven by the same "unholy alliance between the dynastic class and the religious right" (Phillips) that has proven so powerful in our own country.
[6] Institutions which liberals are periodically called upon to save.
