The nation’s current attempt at catharsis through a gargantuan report prepared by the Democratic staff of a Senate committee exhibits some familiar patterns. Most of them involve treating a government agency as if it were Dorian Gray’s portrait, which can take on all the hideous marks of our own transgressions while we present ourselves as pure and innocent. The saturation coverage of the report and most early comment about it have displayed several misconceptions and misdirections.
One misconception is that we, the public, and our representatives in Congress are learning something new from this report that better enables us to make policies and set national priorities—better than we already could have done, based on what we already knew about this whole unpleasant business. In fact, the main directions of the activity in question and even many of the relevant gory details have long been public knowledge. Many people seem to believe that wallowing in still more gory details is a form of expiation. The basis for that belief is hard to understand.
The report itself and almost all the coverage of it misses what is the main, big story—missed perhaps because we ourselves are characters in it. The story is that the American people, and thus our political leaders, have had a major change in fears, mood, and priorities from the early days after the 9/11 until the present. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans were far more militant, more willing to take on costs and risks, and more willing to compromise long-held values in the name of counterterrorism. The interrogation techniques that are now the subject of controversy and abhorrence were condoned or even encouraged back then by our political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. As time has gone by without another terrorist spectacular in the U.S. homeland, pendulums have swung back, moods have changed again, and old values have reasserted themselves. It is difficult for anyone, but perhaps most of all for elected politicians, to admit this kind of inconsistency. Thus we get the current effort to focus ignominy on a single agency, where people who were on the tail end of that entire political process happened to work, as a substitute for such admission.
This is by no means the first time that waves of fear in America have resulted in deviation from liberal values, with the deviation later becoming a source of shame and regret. There is a long history of this, going back at least to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the eighteenth century. Another example, now universally seen as a black mark on American history, was the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
Another misconception is that because a report comes from a Congressional committee or some ad hoc commission, it is the Voice of God and the ultimate source of truth on whatever subject it addresses rather than what it really is, which is one particular set of perspectives or opinions. Another official pronouncement is the CIA’s report on the report, which for anyone who bothers to look at it comes across as a sober and balanced treatment of the subject that carefully differentiates between the valid observations in the Senate committee staff’s report and the significant errors in it. The CIA’s report was prepared under senior officers who had no stake in the interrogation program. It is by no means the reaction of someone in a defensive crouch. Unfortunately few people will look at that report and make any effort to learn from it. The Washington Post barely mentioned its existence, let alone any of the substance in it, in its saturation coverage of the Senate committee report.
Anyone who did bother to look and learn from the CIA report would realize how mistaken is another notion being widely voiced: that the abusive interrogation techniques were the result of an agency or elements within it “running amok.” The program in question was authorized by the topmost authorities in the executive branch, as those authorities have confirmed in their public statements or memoirs. Congressional overseers were informed, according to the instructions of those topmost authorities and according to standard practice with sensitive covert actions. Overseers had ample opportunities to object but did not.
A final misconception being displayed from people on various sides of this issue is that the question of whether any useful information was gained from application of the controversial techniques has to be treated in an all-or-nothing manner. People, including authors of the Senate committee report, wishing to make an anti-torture statement seem to believe that they have to argue that the techniques never gained any useful information. They don’t have to argue that. In acting as if they do, they are exhibiting another American trait, which the political scientist Robert Jervis noted almost four decades ago, which is to resist recognizing that there are trade-offs among important values. The coercive interrogation techniques involve such a trade-off. One can accept that the techniques did yield some information that contributed to U.S. security and still oppose any use of such techniques because they are contrary to other important American values, as well as hurting the standing of the United States abroad and yielding bad information along with the good. This is the position expressed by former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Amid all that is misleading in the committee report itself and in reactions to it, some kudos are in order for other reactions. One compliment should go to the Obama White House, which provided in its statement on the subject a principled declaration that torture is wrong along with some recognition of the public emotions and moods that underlay what was done several years ago. A particularly graceful touch was a reference to how “the previous administration faced agonizing choices” in how to secure the United States amid the post-9/11 fears. This fair and correct way of framing the recent history was the opposite of what could have been a partisan “those guys did torture and we didn’t” approach.
Also worthy of compliments in the same vein is Senator John McCain, who made an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate opposing any use of torture. McCain often is as hard-minded a partisan warrior as anyone, but on this matter he spoke on the basis of principle.
Finally, kudos should go to the CIA for not going into a defensive crouch but instead recognizing deficiencies in performance where they did exist and, unlike the Senate committee report, coming up with specific recommendations for improvement. This response, too, represented important American values. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his own statement, “I don’t believe that any other nation would go to the lengths the United States does to bare its soul, admit mistakes when they are made and learn from those mistakes.”
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>Hyping the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) threat risks generating flawed policies. The White House probably is a source of frustration, as its critics claim, but others seem too eager to commit US combat troops. Meanwhile, the administration, under constant pressure regarding the US effort, has not done enough to energize the anti-IS coalition that President Obama worked so hard to assemble. This inclines allies to believe Washington will do the heavy lifting for them. Although addressing IS full-bore (and unilaterally) might seem appealing to some, this urge undermines the patience needed for more sensible courses of action.
The Hagel Affair
The resignation of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month resulted in criticism that the White House is unreceptive to outside views, such as expanding the US military effort against IS. Excessive micromanagement of military related issues by the White House (including the phone line to commanders in Afghanistan that bypassed Hagel) has also been cited.
Past Presidents have done likewise. In overseas crises, many presidents created their own channels, giving White House officials more power than cabinet secretaries. Franklin Roosevelt often relied on Harry Hopkins over Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Richard Nixon used Henry Kissinger in lieu of William Rogers, and Colin Powell found himself outside the Bush administration’s inner circle. Perhaps the most extreme example of presidential micromanagement was Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War.
The Obama White House has long had dicey relations with the Pentagon. This has been, according to the Pentagon’s side of the argument, the source of delays and confusing policy directions on several issues, with the White House accused of falling into “group think.” For his part, Hagel had complained in the early fall to National Security Advisor Susan Rice in a memo about a lack of cohesion in US policy toward IS.
Nonetheless, White House micromanagement or Pentagon-White House difficulties aside, Obama’s reluctance to ramp up the US military effort against IS excessively seems well founded. Of course, Hagel’s position is not entirely clear, but escalation had been advocated by Hagel’s two predecessors: Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.
Costs of US Escalation
IS appears ready to endure lopsided casualties to inflict some on American combat troops. And IS could follow through on this hope. Not only are its combatants fanatics, the radical Sunni militia also employs deadly suicide bombings against foes in close-up urban combat (as we’ve seen in Kobani). Additionally, IS likely hopes to get a hold of at least a few US military prisoners for filmed beheadings. So why hand IS exactly what it wants?
With large urban areas to be cleared just in Iraq—from Fallujah to Mosul—US combat troops would also likely incur casualties in excess of those suffered in 2003-08 against somewhat less fanatical Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi’a militias during the war.
American military difficulties could be further magnified by reduced interest on the part of Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated government in making the political concessions needed to split Sunni Arab tribes and other secular elements away from IS and marshal its own forces more swiftly. After all, why should Baghdad go the extra mile if the US seems willing to take care of Baghdad’s IS problem militarily?
Recently, despite lost ground in and around Ramadi west of Baghdad, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have made gains between Baghdad and Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) territory to the north. Moving up Iraq’s central line of communications, Iraqi forces have driven IS from some important territory. The siege of the vital Baiji refinery complex has been lifted, and gains have been made in the demographically mixed Diyala Governate northeast of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurds continue to push IS slowly westward. Baghdad and the KRG reached a temporary oil agreement yesterday that should clear the way for greater cooperation elsewhere, like battling IS. Bitter quarrelling under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki left Iraqi-KRG relations in shambles.
Struggling to rebound from severe reverses last summer, however, the Iraqi Army is in no position to mount a major offensive deep into IS holdings. However, successful Iraqi and Kurdish attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of IS’s vast perimeter. Strong IS forces cannot be everywhere at once to repel various challenges and adequately support ongoing attacks (such as its effort against Kobani).
In terms of a military threat, IS has been largely contained. It cannot advance northward against Turkey; isolated pro-IS sympathies exist in Jordan, but the highly professional Jordanian Army would be a tough nut to crack; and in Iraq, most all Shi’a and Kurdish areas lie outside IS control and are fighting hard to maintain this status. In Syria, IS could advance against weaker rebel forces like the Free Syrian Army, but it seems obsessed with seizing Kobani despite heavy losses.
Coalition and US Escalation
The anti-IS coalition the White House assembled is contributing relatively little to the overall military effort, despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s glowing rhetoric at today’s coalition conclave in Brussels. The air campaign is mainly an American show. Committing more US assets would make it easier for others already foot-dragging over contributions to continue dithering. Now is not the time to ramp up US military efforts, but rather to pressure allies to increase their own contributions.
The bulk of IS’s reinforcements in the form of foreign fighters flow through NATO ally Turkey. The CIA in September and the UN more recently sharply increased their estimate of the number of foreign fighters reaching the Islamic State. To date, Turkey has been more helpful to IS than the coalition because of its passivity. If it cannot be pressured to vigorously interdict incoming fighters, IS would be able to replace many lost fighters—although with less experienced cadres.
The White House (and other allies) must press Turkey harder. President Obama delayed air support for beleaguered Syrian Kurds for two weeks in deference to Turkish concerns (allowing IS to gain a foothold inside Kobani). Even today’s 60-nation gathering seems short on clear goals, let alone a robust military agenda on contributions.
Admittedly, although the Administration has done too little diplomatic spadework, its leverage overseas probably has been undermined by American politicians, pundits, and many in the media demanding an expanded US effort.
Bottom Line
IS remains a daunting foe, so it will not be defeated easily, soon, or completely. To Americans pressing urgently for quick solutions, this is difficult to accept. But comments like one yesterday by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the House Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Sub-Committee, suggesting IS could damage everyone’s way of life are typical of exaggerations impeding objective policymaking.
Yet those claiming the air campaign has been ineffective are also naïve. IS has mostly ground to a halt. In some places, like Kobani, IS is hemorrhaging combat casualties. Meanwhile IS’s infrastructure, leadership, training camps, heavy weapons, oil refineries, and lines of communication have been hammered by the ongoing aerial bombardment. This week, assets in IS’s “capital” of Raqqa, Syria were also subjected to a wave of airstrikes.
Many want IS crushed quickly out of fear of IS attacks against the American homeland. Yet, as we saw in Afghanistan in 2001-02 with al-Qaeda, the combatants would not be completely rounded up should substantial US forces be sent in. Many hundreds at the very least would escape to find refuge elsewhere. In that scenario, IS would likely shift toward an international terrorist mode, posing an even greater threat to the United States. Therefore, a more collective effort—forcing IS to truly understand that it faces dozens of foes and not just a few—would be a wiser way forward. It is meanwhile imperative to strip IS of as many of its non-extremist Sunni Arab allies as possible, so they do not have to be dealt with militarily.
Photo: President Obama addresses reporters during a meeting with th anti-IS coalition on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2014
]]>Ehud Barak is retiring from Israeli politics in 2013, after two decades. Or so he says.
A career officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) before entering politics, Barak’s first mention in the US press appears to have been on May 22, 1993, when the New York Times‘ Clyde [...]]]>
Ehud Barak is retiring from Israeli politics in 2013, after two decades. Or so he says.
A career officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) before entering politics, Barak’s first mention in the US press appears to have been on May 22, 1993, when the New York Times‘ Clyde Haberman noted, “Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, army chief of staff during the 1967 war, relies heavily on the military and political advice of the current chief, Lieut. Gen. Ehud Barak”. Although still IDF Chief of Staff at the time, he was “reportedly being groomed by Mr. Rabin for future Labor Party leadership.”
Born in 1942, Barak was part of a new wave of native born military retirees who entered Israeli politics in the 1990s, finally replacing Israel’s pre-state gerontocracy on both the left and the right. (That gerontocracy persists in the person of 89-year-old President Shimon Peres, whose 66-year political career has spanned 11 US presidencies from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barak Obama.) When Barak retired from the IDF, Rabin named him to the cabinet post of Interior Minister. Even then Barak was cultivating American contacts. According to Haberman, when Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited Israel in February, General Barak was on hand almost everywhere the American went.” Apparently Barak cultivated close ties with Leon Panetta, President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff. Now Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration, Panetta responded to the announcement of Barak’s intended departure from Israel’s political scene by presenting Barak with the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service.
When Barak retired from the IDF, Rabin named him to the cabinet post of Interior Minister. After Rabin’s assassination on Nov. 4, 1995, Acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres gave Barak the post of Foreign Minister, which Peres himself had held under Rabin. Barak was elected a Labor Party member of Israel’s Knesset in 1996, where he served as a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. That same year, in Israel’s first direct (non-parliamentary) election for Prime Minister, Peres lost the premiership to Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak subsequently replaced Peres as leader of the Labor Party.
Barak defeated Netanyahu in the 1999 election. In 2000 he ended Israel’s 17 year occupation of southern Lebanon, ordering the overnight withdrawal of all IDF troops, a controversial decision considered long overdue by some Israelis, criticized as too hasty by others. Marketing himself as a peacemaker in Yitzhak Rabin’s image, Barak curried American favor by meeting with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under Clinton’s mediating auspices in 2000 at Camp David. The talks ended in failure. Barak’s stated efforts to reach a peace agreement between Israel and Syria also failed.
After Ariel Sharon’s ceremonious and provocative visit to the Temple Mount with half a dozen members of the Likud opposition in September 2000 precipitated Palestinian outrage that turned violent (now known as the Second Intifada), Barak was forced to call for new elections. As attacks on Israeli civilians became more widespread, Labor was trounced by Likud, making Sharon Prime Minister in Barak’s stead.
Barak spent six years in “the private sector,” rebranding himself as a businessman involved in various energy and security projects, but nonetheless plotting his return to politics. He advocated military action by the US to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein from power. “President Bush’s policy of ousting Saddam Hussein creates an extraordinary standard of strategic and moral clarity,” he wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. None too pleased with “the in-depth, genuine — and so typically American — public debate that is developing before our eyes about Iraq” that might “dilute this clarity” Barak even laid out the necessary military strategy for Bush: “a surgical operation to hit the core of the regime,” and, just in case that didn’t finish the job, a ready-to go “a full-scale operation to include major airborne and ground forces, perhaps 300,000 soldiers.”
Barak returned to politics in 2005, after four years in “the private sector” a/k/a Ehud Barak Ltd. After Ehud Olmert became acting Prime Minister when Sharon went into a coma following a stroke in early 2006, Barak joined Olmert’s cabinet, becoming Minister of Defense. Barak strategized and oversaw the three week IDF operation to counter rocket fire from the Gaza Strip known as “Operation Cast Lead.” Although many Israelis at the time considered Cast Lead to have been justified, necessary, and well executed, outside the country, Israel was criticized for what was seen as excessive and disproportionate use of force inside the densely populated Gaza Strip.
After polls revealed his personal unpopularity with voters, Barak did not seek leadership of the Labor party leader in 2005, but he regained control of the party in June 2007. Deborah Sontag of the New York Times described Barak as “a kind of hawkish dove” who “casts himself in the image of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schroder — as the leader of a political movement that is finding its way from left to center.”
But the inglorious outcome of the 2009 election, necessitated by Ehud Olmert’s downfall amid accusations of corruption, reduced the Labor party — once proud political standard-bearer of the statism of Israel’s founders — to a puny party that placed fourth in the election. Barak was blamed for the loss, and he was increasingly regarded as an opportunist and political chameleon, particularly when he joined Netanyah’s Likud-led government in exchange for the keeping the defense portfolio
Facing the increasing unlikelihood that he will hold onto the post of Defense Minister in the next Netanyahu government — widely regarded as a shoo-in when Israeli elections take place in January 2013 — and lacking the personal popularity that might someday make him Prime Minister again, Barak seems to have chosen to give up on Israeli politics altogether.
Barak’s political obituaries in the Israeli media are mostly muted by dislike for him as a person and a politician. But he wins points from some Israeli journalists for his military acumen. Yoel Marcus writes in Haaretz:
His record as defense minister is excellent – even his rivals admit that, though they add it’s a shame he’s not a mensch. His loyal aides when he was prime minister left angry and bitter. His secretaries dubbed him “Napo,” short for Napoleon. As prime minister he failed, but as a strategist and leader he was considered a genius, even abroad.
During his not quite four years in Netanyahu’s government, Barak has been sending mixed signals on his views of Iran’s nuclear program and how Israel should deal with it. In November 2011, as my Lobe Log colleague Jasmin Ramsey reported, Barak told Charlie Rose that if he were Iran, he would “probably want nuclear weapons.” But this recent Haaretz editorial argues that “Netanyahu considered Barak a close adviser and partner in the formulation of policy toward Iran”, and Larry Derfner of +972 Mag points out that during Barak’s tenure at the helm of the Netanyahu government’s Defense ministry, “he has probably been best known for serving as Netanyahu’s partner in the drive for an attack on Iran.”
In the weeks before his announced retirement, Barak seemed to be situating himself as the Israeli political leader far better equipped to maintain good relations with the US than Netanyahu. Isabel Kershner reported in the New York Times on Oct. 3 that a rift was growing between Barak and Netanyahu, citing Shmuel Sandler, a politics and foreign policy expert at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University (and at one time my next door neighbor). With the Israel elections coming, Sandler suggested that Barak wants to separate himself from Netanyahu. “What is his claim to fame? That he has good relations with Washington,” said Sandler to the Times.
If so, this raises interesting questions about Panetta’s presentation of a Distinguished Service medal to Barak three days after his announced withdrawal from politics. It certainly bolsters Barak’s pro-American image, but was the award presentation planned before Panetta knew Barak would be retiring? Is it an American plea for Barak not to leave the Israeli political scene? Or is it a harbinger that Barak will maintain his close ties with the Obama administration — and perhaps forge evens stronger ties — once he is unencumbered by his role as an Israeli politician?
]]>Jimmy Carter’s former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who now serves on a the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, writes that the US should work with regional allies to unite Syrian opposition movements that are in line with Western priorities and arm them:
So, what should be done? In my view, [...]]]>
Jimmy Carter’s former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who now serves on a the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, writes that the US should work with regional allies to unite Syrian opposition movements that are in line with Western priorities and arm them:
So, what should be done? In my view, the US could work with Turkey, Saudi Arabia (taking care not to support Islamic extremists), and its NATO allies, especially France and Britain, to create a prospective successor government for Syria, and to arm its military element. Such a government would have to be representative and coherent. And Western powers would need to be sure that their weapons would not fall into potentially unfriendly hands.
The fact that Iran is arming the Assad regime calls for countervailing action. Some have suggested a more active military role for the US, beginning with a no-fly zone. It may come to that. But the French and British, who urged that course in Libya, have made no such proposal for Syria. One reason is that Syria has a substantial air-defense system, which would have to be suppressed by a bombing campaign – causing significant civilian casualties and risking the loss of aircraft and crews.
Before starting down that road, the US should be convinced that military action would not require US ground forces in Syria. It should also be confident (which is impossible now) about the nature of a successor government.
As far as the public record goes, the Obama Administration has so far not moved to provide direct military assistance to the rebels, though according to reports it is involved in sharing intelligence with Turkey and Saudi Arabia and has been providing nonlethal assistance, such as communications equipment.
The administration’s most significant action this week towards Syria was the dispatch of US forces to Jordan so “[w]e have a group of our forces there working to help build a headquarters there and to insure that we make the relationship between the United States and Jordan a strong one so that we can deal with all the possible consequences of what’s happening in Syria,” the AP reports.
]]>In recent months, we have had some strong views expressed, by people who have real knowledge of the situation, about the potential consequences of a military strike by Israel and/or the United States against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Former Mossad head Meir Dagan says it is “The stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
[...]]]>
In recent months, we have had some strong views expressed, by people who have real knowledge of the situation, about the potential consequences of a military strike by Israel and/or the United States against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Former Mossad head Meir Dagan says it is “The stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
On Friday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, speaking to a strongly pro-Israel audience at the Saban Center in Washington, responded as follows to a question about how long a military attack on Iran would postpone it from getting a bomb:
SEC. PANETTA: Part of the problem here is the concern that at best, I think – talking to my friends – the indication is that at best it might postpone it maybe one, possibly two years. It depends on the ability to truly get the targets that they’re after. Frankly, some of those targets are very difficult to get at.
That kind of, that kind of shot would only, I think, ultimately not destroy their ability to produce an atomic weapon, but simply delay it – number one. Of greater concern to me are the unintended consequences, which would be that ultimately it would have a backlash and the regime that is weak now, a regime that is isolated would suddenly be able to reestablish itself, suddenly be able to get support in the region, and suddenly instead of being isolated would get the greater support in a region that right now views it as a pariah.
Thirdly, the United States would obviously be blamed and we could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, striking our ships, striking our military bases. Fourthly – there are economic consequences to that attack – severe economic consequences that could impact a very fragile economy in Europe and a fragile economy here in the United States. And lastly I think that the consequence could be that we would have an escalation that would take place that would not only involve many lives, but I think could consume the Middle East in a confrontation and a conflict that we would regret.
So we have to be careful about the unintended consequences of that kind of an attack.
When news broke two weeks ago that the U.S. had sent bunker buster bombs to Israel in 2009 or 2010, many worried that shipping the bombs — which can penetrate deep into underground bunkers like those that protect the Iranian nuclear program — might be perceived [...]]]>
When news broke two weeks ago that the U.S. had sent bunker buster bombs to Israel in 2009 or 2010, many worried that shipping the bombs — which can penetrate deep into underground bunkers like those that protect the Iranian nuclear program — might be perceived by Israel or Iran as a U.S. “green light” for an Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic. Retired General James Cartwright said that the military had worried about “how the Iranians would perceive it,” and “how the Israelis might perceive it.” And according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, U.S. and Israeli military and diplomatic officials meeting in Israel in late 2009 agreed that “the transfer should be handled quietly to avoid any allegations that the [U.S. government] is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran.”
But Defense Secretary Leon Panetta threw cold water on the idea of an Israeli military strike on Iran during a trip to Israel yesterday. At a joint press conference with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta signaled that the U.S. didn’t want to see a surprise strike by Israel: “I think the most effective way to deal with Iran is not on a unilateral basis,” he said in response to a question. Panetta went on to say that, like Israel, the U.S. sees the Iranian nuclear program as a priority, but that countries should work “together” to address it:
- We are very concerned [about Iran] and the best approach for dealing with this threat is for all of us to make it clear to them that they cannot proceed on the path that they are on. We will work together to do whatever is necessary to make sure that they do not represent a threat to this region and it depends on countries working together.
The defense correspondent of the Israeli paper Haaretz wrote that Panetta “repeated the word ‘together’ several times in this context.” And the Jerusalem Post added that:
- The combination of Panetta’s warning that Israel is “growingly isolated” and his calls for Israel to “work together” were understood within the government as carrying an underlying message that since Israel can only really rely on the US, it will not be able to surprise it with unilateral military action against Iran.
Panetta’s thinly-veiled message came on the same day that the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency Meir Dagan — echoing comments from May that attacking Iran was “the stupidest thing [he's] ever heard” — said that Iran was not close to having a nuclear bomb and a military attack was “far from being Israel’s preferred option.”
]]>In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Others countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. [...]]]>
In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Others countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.
As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.” As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically. The U.S. Air Force is already training more personnel to become drone “pilots” than to pilot actual planes. You don’t need it in skywriting to know that, as icons of American-style war, they are clearly in our future — and they’re even heading for the homeland as police departments clamor for them.
They are relatively cheap. When they “hunt,” no one dies (at least on our side). They are capable of roaming the world. Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of “hive minds.”
“The drone,” writes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, “has increasingly become the [Obama] administration’s ‘weapon of choice’ in its efforts to subdue al-Qaeda and its affiliates.” In hundreds of attacks over the last years in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, they have killed thousands, including al-Qaeda figures, Taliban militants, and civilians. They have played a significant and growing role in the skies over Afghanistan. They are now loosing their missiles ever more often over Yemen, sometimes over Libya, and less often over Somalia. Their bases are spreading. No one in Congress will be able to resist them. They are defining the new world of war for the twenty-first century — and many of the humans who theoretically command and control them can hardly keep up.
Reach for Your Dictionaries
On September 15th, the New York Times front-paged a piece by the estimable Charlie Savage, based on leaks from inside the administration. It was headlined “At White House, Weighing Limits of Terror Fight,” and started this way:
- “The Obama administration’s legal team is split over how much latitude the United States has to kill Islamist militants in Yemen and Somalia, a question that could define the limits of the war against al-Qaeda and its allies, according to administration and Congressional officials.”
Lawyers for the Pentagon and the State Department, Savage reported, were debating whether, outside of hot-war zones, the Obama administration could call in the drones (as well as special operations forces) not just to go after top al-Qaeda figures planning attacks on the United States, but al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers (and vaguely allied groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and al-Shabab in Somalia).
That those lawyers are arguing fiercely over such a matter is certainly a curiosity. As presented, the issue behind their disagreement is how to square modern realities with outmoded rules of war written for another age (which also, by the way, had its terrorists). And yet such debates, front-paged or not, fierce or not, will one day undoubtedly be seen as analogous to supposed ancient clerical arguments over just how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. In fact, their import lies mainly in the fascinating pattern they reveal about the way forces that could care less about questions of legality are driving developments in American-style war.
After all, this fierce “argument” about what constraints should be applied to modern robotic war was first played out in the air over Pakistan’s tribal borderlands. There, the CIA’s drone air campaign began with small numbers of missions targeting a few highly placed al-Qaeda leaders (not terribly successfully). Rather than declare its latest wonder weapons a failure, however, the CIA, already deeply invested in drone operations, simply pushed ever harder to expand the targeting to play to the technological strengths of the planes.
In 2007, CIA director Michael Hayden began lobbying the White House for “permission to carry out strikes against houses or cars merely on the basis of behavior that matched a ‘pattern of life’ associated with al-Qaeda or other groups.” And next thing you knew, they were moving from a few attempted targeted assassinations toward a larger air war of annihilation against types and “behaviors.”
Here’s another curiosity. The day after Charlie Savage’s piece appeared in the Times, the president’s top advisor on counterterror operations, John O. Brennan, gave a speech at a conference at Harvard Law School on “Strengthening our Security by Adhering to our Values and Laws,” and seemed to settle the “debate,” part of which he defined this way:
- “Others in the international community — including some of our closest allies and partners — take a different view of the geographic scope of the conflict, limiting it only to the ‘hot’ battlefields. As such, they argue that, outside of these two active theatres, the United States can only act in self-defense against al-Qaeda when they are planning, engaging in, or threatening an armed attack against U.S. interests if it amounts to an ‘imminent’ threat.”
He then added this little twist: “Practically speaking, then, the question turns principally on how you define ‘imminence.’”
If there’s one thing we should have learned from the Bush years, it was this: when government officials reach for their dictionaries, duck!
Then, the crucial word at stake was “torture,” and faced with it — and what top administration officials actually wanted done in the world — Justice Department lawyers quite literally reached for their dictionaries. In their infamous torture memos, they so pretzled, abused, and redefined the word “torture” that, by the time they were through, whether acts of torture even occurred was left to the torturer, to what had he had in mind when he was “interrogating” someone. (“[I]f a defendant [interrogator] has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture.”)
As a result, “torture” was essentially drummed out of the dictionary (except when committed by heinous evil doers in places like Iran) and “enhanced interrogation techniques” welcomed into our world. The Bush administration and the CIA then proceeded to fill the “black sites” they set up from Poland to Thailand and the torture chambers of chummy regimes like Mubarak’s Egypt and Gaddafi’s Libya with “terror suspects,” and then tortured away with impunity.
Now, it seems, the Obama crowd is reaching for its dictionaries, which means that it’s undoubtedly time to duck again. As befits a more intellectual crowd, we’re no longer talking about relatively simple words like “torture” whose meaning everyone knows (or at least once knew). If “imminence” is now the standard for when robotic war is really war, don’t you yearn for the good old days when the White House focused on “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” and all that was at stake was presidential sex, not presidential killing?
When legalisms take center stage in a situation like this, think of magicians. Their skill is to focus your attention on the space where nothing that matters is happening — the wrong hand, the wrong face, the wrong part of the stage — while they perform their “magic” elsewhere. Similarly, pay attention to the law right now and you’re likely to miss the plot line of our world.
It’s true that, at the moment, articles are pouring out focused on how to define the limits of future drone warfare. My advice: skip the law, skip the definitions, skip the arguments, and focus your attention on the drones and the people developing them instead.
Put another way, in the last decade, there was only one definition that truly mattered. From it everything else followed: the almost instantaneous post-9/11 insistence that we were “at war,” and not even in a specific war or set of wars, but in an all-encompassing one that, within two weeks of the collapse of the World Trade Center, President Bush was already calling “the war on terror.” That single demonic definition of our state of existence rose to mind so quickly that no lawyers were needed and no one had to reach for a dictionary.
Addressing a joint session of Congress, the president typically said: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.” And that open-endedness was soon codified in an official name that told all: “the Global War on Terror,” or GWOT. (For all we know, the phrase itself was the invention of a speechwriter mainlining into the zeitgeist.) Suddenly, “sovereignty” had next to no meaning (if you weren’t a superpower); the U.S. was ready to take out after terrorists in up to 80 countries; and the planet, by definition, had become a global free-fire zone.
By the end of September 2001, as the invasion of Afghanistan was being prepared, it was already a carte-blanche world and, as it happened, pilotless surveillance drones were there, lurking in the shadows, waiting for a moment like this, yearning (you might say) to be weaponized.
If GWOT preceded much thought of drones, it paved the way for their crash weaponization, development, and deployment. It was no mistake that, a bare two weeks after 9/11, a prescient Noah Shachtman (who would go on to found the Danger Room website at Wired) led off a piece for that magazine this way: “Unmanned, almost disposable spy planes are being groomed for a major role in the coming conflict against terrorism, defense analysts say.”
Talk about “imminence” or “constraints” all you want, but as long as we are “at war,” not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but on a world scale with something known as “terror,” there will never be any limits, other than self-imposed ones.
And it remains so today, even though the Obama administration has long avoided the term “Global War on Terror.” As Brennan made utterly clear in his speech, President Obama considers us “at war” anywhere that al-Qaeda, its minions, wannabes, or simply groups of irregulars we don’t much care for may be located. Given this mentality, there is little reason to believe that, on September 11, 2021, we won’t still be “at war.”
So pay no attention to the legalisms. Put away those dictionaries. Ignore the “debates” between the White House and Congress, or State and Defense. Otherwise you’ll miss the predatory magic.
Beyond Words
Within days after the news about the “debate” over the limits on global war was leaked to the Times, unnamed government officials were leaking away to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal on an allied subject of interest. Both papers broke the news that, as Craig Whitlock and Greg Miller of the Post put it, the U.S. military and the CIA were creating “a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen.”
A new base, it seems, is being constructed in Ethiopia, another somewhere in the vicinity of Yemen (possibly in Saudi Arabia), and a third reopened on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean — all clearly intended for the escalating drone wars in Yemen and Somalia, and perhaps drone wars to come elsewhere in eastern or northern Africa.
These preparations are meant to deal not just with Washington’s present preoccupations, but with its future fears and phantasms. In this way, they fit well with the now decade-old war on terror’s campaign against will-o-the-wisps. Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal, for example, quotes an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying: “We do not know enough about the leaders of the al-Qaeda affiliates in Africa. Is there a guy out there saying, ‘I am the future of al-Qaeda’? Who is the next Osama bin Laden?” We don’t yet know, but wherever he is, our drones will be ready for him.
All of this, in turn, fits well with the Pentagon’s “legal” position, mentioned by the Times’ Savage, of “trying to maintain maximum theoretical flexibility.” It’s a kind of Field-of-Dreams argument: if you build them, they will come.
It’s simple enough. The machines (and their creators and supporters in the military-industrial complex) are decades ahead of the government officials who theoretically direct and oversee them. “A Future for Drones: Automated Killing,” an enthusiastic article that appeared in the Post the very same week as that paper’s base-expansion piece, caught the spirit of the moment. In it, Peter Finn reported on the way three pilotless drones over Fort Benning, Georgia, worked together to identify a target without human guidance. It may, he wrote, “presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial ‘Terminators,’ minus beefcake and time travel.”
In a New York Review of Books piece with a similarly admiring edge (and who wouldn’t admire such staggering technological advances), Christian Caryl writes:
- “Researchers are now testing UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] that mimic hummingbirds or seagulls; one model under development can fit on a pencil eraser. There is much speculation about linking small drones or robots together into ‘swarms’ — clouds or crowds of machines that would share their intelligence, like a hive mind, and have the capability to converge instantly on identified targets. This might seem like science fiction, but it is probably not that far away.”
Admittedly, drones still can’t have sex. Not yet anyway. And they can’t choose which humans they are sent to kill. Not so far. But sex and the single drone aside, all of this and more may, in the coming decades, become — if you don’t mind my using the word — imminent. It may be the reality in the skies over all our heads.
It’s true that the machines of war the Obama administration is now rushing headlong to deploy cannot yet operate themselves, but they are already — in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words — “in the saddle, and ride mankind.” Their “desire” to be deployed and used is driving policy in Washington — and increasingly elsewhere as well. Think of this as the Drone Imperative.
If you want to fight over definitions, there’s only one worth fighting over: not the phrase “the Global War on Terror,” which the Obama administration tossed aside to no effect whatsoever, but the concept behind it. Once the idea took hold that the United States was, and had no choice but to be, in a state of permanent global war, the game was afoot. From then on, the planet was — conceptually speaking — a free-fire zone, and even before robotic weaponry developed to its present level, it was already a drone-eat-drone world to the horizon.
As long as global war remains the essence of “foreign policy,” the drones — and the military-industrial companies and lobbying groups behind them, as well as the military and CIA careers being built on them — will prove expansive. They will go where, and as far as, the technology takes them.
In reality, it’s not the drones, but our leaders who are remarkably constrained. Out of permanent war and terrorism, they have built a house with no doors and no exits. It’s easy enough to imagine them as beleaguered masters of the universe atop the globe’s military superpower, but in terms of what they can actually do, it would be more practical to think of them as so many drones, piloted by others. In truth, our present leaders, or rather managers, are small people operating on autopilot in a big-machine world.
As they definitionally twitch and turn, we can just begin to glimpse — like an old-fashioned photo developing in a tray of chemicals — the outlines of a new form of American imperial war emerging before our eyes. It involves guarding the empire on the cheap, as well as on the sly, via the CIA, which has, in recent years, developed into a full-scale, drone-heavy paramilitary outfit, via a growing secret army of special operations forces that has been incubating inside the military these last years, and of course via those missile- and bomb-armed robotic assassins of the sky.
The appeal is obvious: the cost (in U.S. lives) is low; in the case of the drones, nonexistent. There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.
In an increasingly cash-strapped and anxious Washington, it must look like a literal godsend. How could it go wrong?
Of course, that’s a thought you can only hang onto as long as you’re looking down on a planet filled with potential targets scurrying below you. The minute you look up, the minute you leave your joystick and screen behind and begin to imagine yourself on the ground, it’s obvious how things could go so very, very wrong — how, in fact, in Pakistan, to take but one example, they are going so very, very wrong.
Just think about the last time you went to a Terminator film: Who did you identify with? John and Sarah Connor, or the implacable Terminators chasing them? And you don’t need artificial intelligence to grasp why in a nanosecond.
In a country now struggling simply to guarantee help to its own citizens struck by natural disasters, Washington is preparing distinctly unnatural disasters in the imperium. In this way, both at home and abroad, the American dream is turning into the American scream.
So when we build those bases on that global field of screams, when we send our armadas of drones out to kill, don’t be surprised if the rest of the world doesn’t see us as the good guys or the heroes, but as terminators. It’s not the best way to make friends and influence people, but once your mindset is permanent war, that’s no longer a priority. It’s a scream, and there’s nothing funny about it.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.
[Note on further reading: A small bow to four websites I particularly rely on when gathering information for pieces like this one: the invaluable Antiwar.com, the War in Context website with its sharp-eyed editor Paul Woodward, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog (a daily must-read), and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room website, which no one interested in military affairs should miss.]
Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt
]]>Mitt Romney continued his attack on the Obama administration’s Iran policy yesterday evening in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Romney, once again, falsely claimed the Obama administration has taken the “military option” off the table and claimed he would impose “crippling sanctions” on Iran’s nuclear [...]]]>
Mitt Romney continued his attack on the Obama administration’s Iran policy yesterday evening in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Romney, once again, falsely claimed the Obama administration has taken the “military option” off the table and claimed he would impose “crippling sanctions” on Iran’s nuclear program. Blitzer asked Romney about his Iran policy:
- BLITZER: How far would go to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb?
ROMNEY: Well Iran has to be convinced that we would go all the way, we would take military action, and that military action is on the table. I think our president has communicated in various subtle ways that there is not a military option that we would consider. I think that’s a mistake. I think you have to have crippling sanctions against Iran. I think you have to have covert action in Iran to convince the people there of the folly of becoming a nuclear nation. But I think the Iranians have to believe as well, and particularly their leadership believe, that America is would considering taking military option [sic]. That has to be on the table and plans have to be in place and that’s clearly something that you have to consider.
Watch it:
It’s unclear what “subtle ways” the White House indicated that the “military option” was off the table but Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, when asked about military contingencies for attacking Iran during his Senate confirmation hearing, said that such planning was occurring.
Romney’s claims that the administration failed to successfully use covert action or sanctions to slow Iran’s nuclear program would also appear to be politically motivated, yet factually baseless, charges. Covert action, such as the Stuxnet computer virus, and sanctions appear to have had the intended effect of slowing the Iranian nuclear program. Indeed, IAEA reports would indicate that the nuclear program is moving much more slowly than either Tehran or Washington’s Iran hawks would care to mention.
But Romney’s baseless attacks on Obama’s Iran policy appear to have become a go-to talking point in the GOP presidential hopeful’s interviews. What’s even more interesting is that, so far, no interviewer has called him out on the blatantly false statements he is making about the U.S.’s efforts to slow Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
]]>The week before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 saw several alarmist editorials about Iran in leading U.S. new outlets. Leon Panetta also did something he probably shouldn’t do: prophesize about Iranian domestic politics.
Forbes: The writing of Mark Dubowitz of the neoconservative
The week before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 saw several alarmist editorials about Iran in leading U.S. new outlets. Leon Panetta also did something he probably shouldn’t do: prophesize about Iranian domestic politics.
Forbes: The writing of Mark Dubowitz of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies reads like a broken record. On Wednesday he produced yet another “Iranian threat” article fraught with hyperbole. This is how it begins:
- Ten years after Sept. 11, the Islamic Republic of Iran constitutes the most serious threat to American national security, and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the world’s most deadly terrorist organization.
Dubowitz ends by admitting that the Obama administration’s sanctions policy has taken a toll on Iran’s economy, but says they are ineffective because “they have become an end in themselves, rather than means of making the regime vulnerable to other measures.” Dubowitz does not specify what “other measures” amounts to. He also criticizes the U.S. and E.U. for not providing “material support” to Iranians to overthrow their government in 2009.
The Washington Post: Another board editorial opinion piece argues that Iran is intent on building a nuclear weapon and has taken “two more steps toward” that goal without providing any supporting evidence.
Certainly Iran’s nuclear ambitions have advanced—even Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld admitted the Iranians would be “crazy” to not pursue nuclear weapons capability considering the threats they face—but many analysts argue that the Islamic Republic is moving towards “surge capability” or the ability to quickly produce a nuclear weapon should a situation require it. This capability would also serve as deterrence from foreign aggression. But the idea that Iran is trying to produce a nuclear weapon to have in hand suggests that it is pursuing an offensive rather than a defensive position, and considering its weak position both domestically and internationally, is that even plausible? Moreover, what could Iran possibly gain by attacking another country with a nuclear weapon? Surely nothing could exceed the losses such a move would result in if it was aimed at the U.S. and likely Israel as well.
Reuters: During an appearance on the Charlie Rose Show U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the Iranian reform movement is “learning” from the Arab Spring and “it’s a matter of time before that kind of change and reform and revolution occurs in Iran as well.”
Panetta also indirectly explained why pursuing an open regime change policy (advocated by Michael Ledeen and many of his neoconservative colleagues) is counterproductive for U.S. interests:
- “We should try to take every step to try to support their effort but at the same time, we’ve got to analyze each situation to make sure that we do nothing that creates a backlash or that undermines those efforts.”
While “change” and “reform” are possible in the near future, revolution is unlikely. Most U.S. policy analysts abandoned the hope of another Iranian revolution in 2010 after it became clear that the Green Movement’s leadership was going to work within the system rather than directly against it — so it’s not clear why Panetta has revived that language.
Iranian discontent with their government is long-running and justified. Iranians are not only dissatisfied with President Ahmadinejad who no longer has the backing of even his superiors, they are also tired of the entire political and social system they are forced to live in. But as Iran analyst Farideh Farhi told me several months ago, revolutions don’t happen so quickly one after the other, and Iran’s revolution is only a little over 30 years old.
My own sense from talking to Iranians in the country during my last visit this year is that there was a narrow window of time in 2009 when millions were once again contemplating sacrificing everything, but it passed without its potential being seized. Since then the Green Movement has been simmering, but the leadership has lost much momentum. Iranians face deadly repression on a daily basis, but as shown by the revolutionary movements in Arab countries, that can’t be the only reason why people didn’t stay in the streets. Many Iranians told me they weren’t willing to fight to the death unless they were guaranteed that something worse wouldn’t replace the current government. Others didn’t seem able or willing to go that length. They were preoccupied with their jobs, their bills and family issues; they were simply trying to live. But considering the Islamic government’s history with political dissent, fighting to the death is the minimum requirement for bringing down this government forcefully and quickly. At present there is little to suggest that the majority of Iranians are going to take this approach.
]]>Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch
The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta [...]]]>
Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch
The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a “doomsday mechanism” for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger military budget.
None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.
Consider this my contribution to a future 12-step program for national security sobriety.
- Let’s start with the three basic post-9/11 numbers that Washington’s addicts need to know:
1. $5.9 trillion: That’s the sum of taxpayer dollars that’s gone into the Pentagon’s annual “base budget,” from 2000 to today. Note that the base budget includes nuclear weapons activities, even though they are overseen by the Department of Energy, but — and this is crucial — not the cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, even without those war costs, the Pentagon budget managed to grow from $302.9 billion in 2000, to $545.1 billion in 2011. That’s a dollar increase of $242.2 billion or an 80% jump ($163.6 billion and 44% if you adjust for inflation). It’s enough to make your head swim, and we’re barely started.
2. $1.36 trillion: That’s the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars by this September 30th, the end of the current fiscal year, including all moneys spent for those wars by the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other federal agencies. Of this, $869 billion will have been for Iraq, $487.6 billion for Afghanistan.
Add up our first two key national security spending numbers and you’re already at $7.2 trillion since the September 11th attacks. And even that staggering figure doesn’t catch the full extent of Washington spending in these years. So onward to our third number:
3. $636 billion: Most people usually ignore this part of the national security budget and we seldom see any figures for it, but it’s the amount, adjusted for inflation, that the U.S. government has spent so far on “homeland security.” This isn’t an easy figure to arrive at because homeland-security funding flows through literally dozens of federal agencies and not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A mere $16 billion was requested for homeland security in 2001. For 2012, the figure is $71.6 billion, only $37 billion of which will go through DHS. A substantial part, $18.1 billion, will be funneled through — don’t be surprised — the Department of Defense, while other agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion) and the Department of Justice ($4.1 billion) pick up the slack.
Add those three figures together and you’re at the edge of $8 trillion in national security spending for the last decade-plus and perhaps wondering where the nearest group for compulsive-spending addiction meets.
Now, for a few of those questions I mentioned, just to bring reality further into focus:
How does that nearly $8 trillion compare with past spending?
In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon base budget added up to an impressive $4.2 trillion, only one-third less than for the past decade. But add in the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars and total Pentagon spending post-9/11 is actually two-thirds greater than in the previous decade. That’s quite a jump. As for homeland-security funding, spending figures for the years prior to 2000 are hard to identify because the category didn’t exist (nor did anyone who mattered in Washington even think to use that word “homeland”). But there can be no question that whatever it was, it would pale next to present spending.
Is that nearly $8 trillion the real total for these years, or could it be even higher?
The war-cost calculations I’ve used above, which come from my own organization, the National Priorities Project, only take into account funds that have been requested by the President and appropriated by Congress. This, however, is just one way of considering the problem of war and national security spending. A recent study published by the Watson Institute of Brown University took a much broader approach. In the summary of their work, the Watson Institute analysts wrote, “There are at least three ways to think about the economic costs of these wars: what has been spent already, what could or must be spent in the future, and the comparative economic effects of spending money on war instead of something else.”
By including funding for such things as veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related borrowing, they came up with $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in war costs, which would put those overall national security figures since 2001 at around $11 trillion.
I took a similar approach in an earlier TomDispatch piece in which I calculated the true costs of national security at $1.2 trillion annually.
All of this brings another simple, but seldom-asked question to mind:
Are we safer?
Regardless of what figures you choose to use, one thing is certain: we’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. And given the debate raging in Washington this summer about how to rein in trillion-dollar deficits and a spiraling debt, it’s surprising that no one thinks to ask just how much safety bang for its buck the U.S. is getting from those trillions.
Of course, it’s not an easy question to answer, but there are some troubling facts out there that should give one pause. Let’s start with government accounting, which, like military music, is something of an oxymoron. Despite decades of complaints from Capitol Hill and various congressional attempts to force changes via legislation, the Department of Defense still cannot pass an audit. Believe it or not, it never has.
Members of Congress have become so exasperated that several have tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to cap or cut military spending until the Pentagon is capable of passing an annual audit as required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. So even as they fight to preserve record levels of military spending, Pentagon officials really have no way of telling American taxpayers how their money is being spent, or what kind of security it actually buys.
And this particular disease seems to be catching. The Department of Homeland Security has been part of the “high risk” series of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) since 2003. In case being “high risk” in GAO terms isn’t part of your dinner-table chitchat, here’s the definition: “agencies and program areas that are high risk due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of broad reform.”
Put in layman’s terms: no organization crucial to national security spending really has much of an idea of how well or badly it is spending vast sums of taxpayer money — and worse yet, Congress knows even less.
Which leads us to a broader issue and another question:
Are we spending money on the right types of security?
This June, the Institute for Policy Studies released the latest version of what it calls “a Unified Security Budget for the United States” that could make the country safer for far less than the current military budget. Known more familiarly as the USB, it has been produced annually since 2004 by the website Foreign Policy in Focus and draws on a task force of experts.
As in previous years, the report found — again in layman’s terms — that the U.S. invests its security dollars mainly in making war, slighting both real homeland security and anything that might pass for preventive diplomacy. In the Obama administration’s proposed 2012 budget, for example, 85% of security spending goes to the military (and if you included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that percentage would only rise); just 7% goes to real homeland security and a modest 8% to what might, even generously speaking, be termed non-military international engagement.
Significant parts of the foreign policy establishment have come to accept this critique — at least they sometimes sound like they do. As Robert Gates put the matter while still Secretary of Defense, “Funding for non-military foreign affairs programs… remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military… [T]here is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.” But if they talk the talk, when annual budgeting time comes around, few of them yet walk the walk.
So let’s ask another basic question:
Has your money, funneled into the vast and shadowy world of military and national security spending, made you safer?
Government officials and counterterrorism experts frequently claim that the public is unaware of their many “victories” in the “war on terror.” These, they insist, remain hidden for reasons that involve protecting intelligence sources and law enforcement techniques. They also maintain that the United States and its allies have disrupted any number of terror plots since 9/11 and that this justifies the present staggering levels of national security spending.
Undoubtedly examples of foiled terrorist acts, unpublicized for reasons of security, do exist (although the urge to boast shouldn’t be underestimated, as in the case of the covert operation to kill Osama bin Laden). Think of this as the “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” approach to supposed national security successes. It’s regularly used to justify higher spending requests for homeland security. There are, however, two obvious and immediate problems with taking it seriously.
First, lacking any transparency, there’s next to no way to assess its merits. How serious were these threats? A hapless underwear bomber or a weapon of mass destruction that didn’t make it to an American city? Who knows? The only thing that’s clear is that this is a loophole through which you can drive your basic mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle.
Second, how exactly were these attempts foiled? Were they thwarted by programs funded as part of the $7.2 trillion in military spending, or even the $636 billion in homeland security spending?
An April 2010 Heritage Foundation report, “30 Terrorist Plots Foiled: How the System Worked,” looked at known incidents where terrorist attacks were actually thwarted and so provides some guidance. The Heritage experts wrote, “Since September 11, 2001, at least 30 planned terrorist attacks have been foiled, all but two of them prevented by law enforcement. The two notable exceptions are the passengers and flight attendants who subdued the ‘shoe bomber’ in 2001 and the ‘underwear bomber’ on Christmas Day in 2009.”
In other words, in the vast majority of cases, the plots we know about were broken up by “law enforcement” or civilians, in no way aided by the $7.2 trillion that was invested in the military — or in many cases even the $636 billion that went into homeland security. And while most of those cases involved federal authorities, at least three were stopped by local law enforcement action.
In truth, given the current lack of assessment tools, it’s virtually impossible for outsiders — and probably insiders as well — to evaluate the effectiveness of this country’s many security-related programs. And this stymies our ability to properly determine the allocation of federal resources on the basis of program efficiency and the relative levels of the threats addressed.
So here’s one final question that just about no one asks:
Could we be less safe?
It’s possible that all that funding, especially the moneys that have gone into our various wars and conflicts, our secret drone campaigns and “black sites,” our various forays into Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other places may actually have made us less safe. Certainly, they have exacerbated existing tensions and created new ones, eroded our standing in some of the most volatile regions of the world, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the misery of many more, and made Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, potential recruiting and training grounds for future generations of insurgents and terrorists. Does anything remain of the international goodwill toward our country that was the one positive legacy of the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001? Unlikely.
Now, isn’t it time for those 12 steps?
Chris Hellman, a TomDispatch.com regular, is a Senior Research Analyst at the National Priorities Project (NPP). He is a member of the Unified Security Budget Task Force and the Sustainable Defense Task Force. Prior to joining NPP, he worked on military budget and policy issues for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and the Center for Defense Information. He is also a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill, where as a congressional staffer he worked on defense and foreign policy issues.
[Note on further reading: Check out the latest National Priorities Project Report, "U.S. Security Spending Since 9/11." For full details of the 2012 homeland security request, see the “Homeland Security Mission Funding by Agency and Budget Account” appendix to the FY2012 budget (.pdf file); for the Government Accountability Office's "High Risk" series, click here; and to read the Institute of Policy Studies’ “A Unified Security Budget (USB) for the United States,” click here (.pdf file).]
Copyright 2011 Chris Hellman