In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”
Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the [...]]]>
In what is sure to be one of the most glaringly obvious headlines written about the General Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair, the Washington Post writes: “Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director.”
Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Right after the election, Petraeus submitted his resignation to President Obama after being under investigation by the FBI for months; he had already reportedly broken off his relationship with Broadwell, his biographer.
ABC reports that the FBI did not in fact inform the White House because their findings were “the result of a criminal investigation that never reached the threshold of an intelligence probe” — but even as the FBI was mulling over what to do next, one of the agents on the case was contacting Florida socialite Jill Kelley to inform her of their findings so far.
The investigation showed just how broad the Bureau’s powers are with respect to communications monitoring. Rather than observing what The Daily Beast calls “the spirit of minimization to lead the FBI to keep any personal revelations within the bureau and not say anything to anybody” in other cases involving personal threats, it seems that the since-dismissed agent violated this policy and not only told Kelley, but Members of Congress as well, before the Tampa office handling the email-reading contacted the Director of the FBI to warn of possible national security implications.
As a result of the FBI’s case with Kelley, the US/NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen, is also now “involved” in the scandal due to his lengthy email correspondence with Kelley that has raised concerns over potential breaches of national security.
Though the details of the affair have captured headlines and a large number of officials and foreign policy commentators are bemoaning the damage done to Petraeus’s military-policy reputation, some discussion is occurring over the ex-DCIA’s record as top general in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Langley’s chief drone advocate.
Issandr El Amrani at the Arabist offers a succinct observation of how Petraeus’s star rose in the Beltway hierarchy as the US sought a way out of Iraq: “[h]e delivered results of sorts for the US, which gave Washington political cover for an exit.” While this certainly represented a success for a despairing Bush White House, it was not a step towards carrying out an extended occupation, or even reinvigorating the potpourri of war aims increasingly advanced after 2003 to re-spin the war’s WMD casus belli. Iraq’s ongoing political troubles offer few hints as to how counterinsurgency, or COIN, may have staved off total collapse. At least, from the military’s perspective, the “Surge” staved off a complete collapse and ensured the US could withdraw in the near future, not unlike Nixon’s 1973 “peace with honor” adage in Vietnam. With Iran maintaining its influence in Baghdad (handed to them by the US invasion), disparate militias eyeing each other warily in Kurdistan, and Iraq’s anti-Iranian & anti-American terror cells looking to Syria to revitalize their regional struggle, America’s 21st century “peace with honor” may sound just as hollow for some Iraqi officials today as it sounded for South Vietnamese negotiators back then.
COIN itself never came to reoccupy the spot formerly reserved for “nation-building” in the years Robert McNamara’s whiz kids rode high. As Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hastings note, the general himself did not exactly follow his own press in practice when he transfered over to Afghanistan, emphasizing air strikes and special operations missions over his much-lauded counterinsurgency practices of going door-to-door to win the population over. As Spencer Ackerman, who has issued an apology for not being more aware of how the general’s Army office was influencing his past reporting, Petraeus has done much to expand the CIA’s own drone program, calling for a significant expansion of the program just weeks before his resignation.
COIN and its mythologizing aside, there are few reasons to expect that the general’s counterterrorism policies will suddenly fall out of favor with the White House, not least because Deputy NSA John O. Brennan has been one of the driving forces for institutionalizing drone warfare since his appointment in 2009. The influential former DCIA Michael Hayden, now coming off of his stint as an advisor to former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is urging the agency to move away from its targeted killing trajectory and back towards threat assessment and anticipation. He remarked that looking to the future of the Agency, “[t]he biggest challenge may be the sheer volume of problems that require intelligence input.”
There is little chance though that Petraeus’s downfall will see the downgrading of the Agency’s robot presence. With both the US and Pakistan unwilling to launch ground major operations into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions due to the casualties their armed forces would incur, the drone wars are regarded as the most effective military option available. Neither Washington nor Islamabad — or on the other side of the Indian Ocean, Sana’a and Mogadishu — have either the capacity or will for anything more. Or for anything less, in fact, since that would mean ceding the field to the targets, who despite their losses, can draw strength from these strikes. The CTC man told the Washington Post last year while the Agency may be “killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now,” he himself does not think he’s implementing a truly sustainable policy for this Administration, or for those that will follow.
But as the Post reported this past month, Deputy NSA Brennan seems to think otherwise, along with those reportedly elevated in the CIA under Petraeus’s directorship.
While the relationship between reporter and officer — whether sexualized or not — is likely to remain a topic of debate and “soul-searching” for commentators in the coming months, and COIN may fade away from Army manuals trying to plan out the next “time-limited, scope-limited military action, in concert with our international partners,” the new face of counterterrorism that is the General Atomics MQ series is likely to be the general/DCIA’s most lasting legacy. And this will be the one that holds the fewest headlines of all in the weeks to come, given it’s broad acceptance across both major parties and the “punditocracy.”
]]>Henninger’s basic point (which Frum also makes) is that although we now know that Saddam had no nuclear weapons program, he surely would have gone back to pursuing nukes by now if we hadn’t taken him out. After all, both North Korea and Iran have intensified their nuclear programs since 2003, and Saddam therefore would have felt the need to keep pace.
There are two things to note here. First: traditional just war doctrines argue that a first strike is only justifiable if it is preemptive — that is, aimed at heading off an imminent threat. The Bush Doctrine famously sought to justify preventive as well as preemptive warfare; according to the Bush administration, it did not matter that Saddam posed no imminent threat in 2003, because he was seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction (in particular, nuclear weapons) that he might use in the future. He may not have been a threat, in other words, but he was threatening to be a threat. Even putting aside the intense controversy about the legitimacy of preventive war itself, we now know that this line of argument was false: Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, nor was he actively seeking a nuclear weapon.
So Henninger, in his attempt to salvage a justification for war after the collapse of the WMD argument, simply takes the Bush logic one step farther. Sure, Saddam had no nuclear weapons, and sure, there is no evidence that he was seeking them. But how can we know that he wouldn’t do so in the future? He may not have been a threat, and he may not even have been threatening to be a threat — but he was threatening to threaten to be a threat. The tortured language reflects the flimsiness of the underlying argument. The case for war was not terribly strong even on the assumption that Saddam was seeking nukes; it is even weaker when the supposed emergency is that Saddam might decide to seek nukes at some unspecified moment in the future.
The second flaw with Henninger’s logic is in his argument that Saddam would have been compelled to seek nukes to keep up with Iran and North Korea. The problem here is that Henninger simply assumes that the increasingly confrontational stance that Iran and North Korea took in the wake of the Iraq war (and Bush’s January 2002 “axis of evil” speech) reflect what they would have done regardless of American actions.
This is a highly dubious assumption. By lumping Iran and North Korea in with Iraq in the “axis of evil” and by demonstrating that the U.S. was willing to use military force to overthrow such regimes, the Bush administration gave these countries both a motive for adopting a confrontational stance and an incentive for developing nuclear deterrents of their own to head off a potential invasion. While both countries’ nuclear programs predate the Bush Doctrine, it should surprise no one that the invasion of Iraq would cause both to redouble, rather than curtail, these programs.
Similarly, Henninger suggests that rivalry with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have inspired Saddam to greater mischief, but it is far from clear that Ahmadinejad would currently be president at all if it weren’t for the events of Bush’s first term. If the U.S. had not been perceived as so hostile to Iran and to Muslims generally, both Khamenei and the Iranian populace may well have been far less receptive to the appeal of an anti-American demagogue such as Ahmadinejad. In any case, we can see from this how nonsensical it is to treat Iranian and North Korean behavior post-2003 as if it existed in a vacuum that was utterly unaffected by the Iraq war, and to seek to justify the invasion ex post facto by referencing events that may not even have occurred if it hadn’t been for the invasion itself.
This sloppiness is typical of the new Iraq revisionism. The case for war remains as weak as it has been ever since the original justification based on WMD and al-Qaeda ties collapsed, so it is not surprising that advocates of the invasion are forced to resort to such flimsy arguments to defend it.
]]>It explains its setbacks, which it argues came at the height of its power and influence, on what it calls two smart and effective U.S. moves in 2006-07: an effective U.S. media and psychological campaign, which convinced many that the “mujahideen” had committed atrocities against Iraqis and killed thousands of Muslims; and the Awakenings, achieved through its manipulation of the tribes and the “nationalist resistance.” The document doesn’t mention the “Surge” much at all, at least not in terms of the troop escalation which most Americans have in mind.
Back in the U.S., of course, hawks have been keen to emphasize the third element–the troop escalation–at the expense of the other two. After all, to suggest that the Awakenings bore primary responsibility for the drop in violence comes uncomfortably close to implying that jihadists are not a monolithic group of bloodthirsty fanatics who “hate us for our freedom”; instead, it might suggest that we should actually talk to them and perhaps (gasp!) offer the relative moderates among them incentives to defect. Classic appeasement, in other words. Similarly, although talk of winning “hearts and minds” is all the rage in counterinsurgency (COIN) discussions these days, hawks have been careful not to focus too much on the role that atrocities (by the U.S. or its enemies) play in swaying public opinion; that might imply that the U.S. should, for instance, close Guantanamo and Bagram, thoroughly reform its detainee system, or halt the drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Far better, from the hawks’ perspective, to credit the drop in violence and the wane in AQM’s fortunes entirely to the surge. Doing so sends a nice unambiguous message: when in doubt, the solution is always more troops, more money, more war.
Iraq experts continue to vigorously debate which factors were most important in causing the drop in violence, and in any case I am no Iraq expert myself. Nonetheless, it is striking that strategists associated with AQM itself appear to attribute their downfall primarily to public perceptions of their own atrocities, and to the U.S. decision to reach out to former members of the insurgency, rather than to the surge itself.
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