Arsenal Abroad: Welcome Anita Sharma Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Now batting Wednesday mornings and whenever else she desires for the next week, please welcome Anita Sharma.  Anita is currently working tsunami relief in Indonesia for the International Organization for Migration, having previously served with IOM in Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait. She is also a veteran of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, and Kerry-Edwards ’04, among other fine causes.

I am leaving behind the laptop and hitting the road for a week, with my beloved, the BloggerBabe, a backseat of new car toys, and a frontseat full of reading to catch up on. (Granta, the New Yorker, Squandered Victory, Matt Bai’s piece on George Lakoff, a bio of George Balanchine, who am I kidding?).  See you offline.

Another Go at Exceptionalism Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Maybe it's because I am getting ready to head off to my high school reunion, but in the aftermath of the London bombings I've been remembering my first encounters with the different ways American and European societies confront our problems with ethnicity and race.

We had Swedish exchange students one summer, and the first thing those supposedly-sophisticated young folk wanted to do was go "see some black people in a slum."  I remember my mother shamefacedly trying to talk them out of it.

So you can imagine my astonishment when I got to puttering around Western Europe a few years later and discovered that Britain and France had slums and no-go zones, too.  Then I got to Eastern Europe and was hailed by a Nicaraguan student -- "ah, Americans, not racist like the Soviets."

If this is my 20th high school reunion I'm far too old to be shocked, but I was, um, surprised to hear people on the BBC feeling betrayed that this carnage had been unleashed by their "fellow Britons."

Americans who have lived in many European countries for any length of time will tell you, much as they love the people, the atmosphere, the politics, the way of life, they often are surprised at how much a foreigner they feel after decades, marriage, children, real commitment to the society.  Immigrants from less-developed countries will often tell you worse.

You want American exceptionalism, here it is:  we are better, not perfect, not faultless, not immune from such attacks but better, at offering anyone who comes here the chance to fit in as much as they want to.  Have dark skin?  You're still American.  Speak funny-sounding English?  Hey, join the club.  Practice an unusual religion -- you've still got a fighting shot.  Have a baby here, as of yet, anyhow, and the kid is an American, no questions asked.

This isn't something any political movement can claim credit for -- we're an immigrant society.  And it does have a dark side -- Americanization can be pretty relentless, and yes, the resulting culture can be rather lowest common denominator.  (On the other hand, much European tv is abominably bad too.) 

But this is something American politics can ruin.  We can ruin it by preaching a version of American exceptionalism that ignores our failings and is so grandiose we couldn't possibly live up to it. 

We can ruin it by undermining the level of tolerance we've achieved, by failing to use our secular and spiritual pulpits to keep America's climate open and inclusive.  (Compare the pronouncements of Blair, other British officials, and British religious figures with some of the things that happened after 9-11, when clergypeople from conservative and "liberal" denominations were denounced for appearing on pulpits with Muslim clergy.)

And, by the way, we could ruin it by slamming our doors shut on immigrants.

With that, I'm off to celebrate that temple to liberty, the American high school.  (Gulp.)

Have Foot, Will Shoot Posted by Michael Signer

Last week, I wrote a piece suggesting that Al Qaeda's strategy to continue to catalyze world opinion against America may have backfired by attacking Great Britain during the G-8 summit.  The argument there was that Al Qaeda, viewed as a strategic actor, wants and needs to have major nations tilting against the United States and toward sympathy with Palestine and allegedly embattled Muslim nations in general.  But it screws this up by attacking a nation who's not as obviously polarizing -- the United Kingdom.

A WaPo article today by Robin Wright suggests that Al Qaeda may have stumbled in another way -- this time domestically (among its own people) rather than internationally (among the world community).  The article discusses survey results among several Muslim nations about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and democratization.  The survey was completed before the London bombings, but its results suggest what Al Qaeda was already up against:

Osama bin Laden's standing has dropped significantly in some pivotal Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to a new survey released yesterday.

Predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of six North African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries share to a "considerable degree" Western concerns about Islamic extremism, according to the poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization.

The numbers are significant.  2 percent of Lebanese respondents and 7 percent of Turkish thought OBL would "do the right thing regarding world affairs."  In Morocco, OBL's support dropped from 50% to about 25% over the last two years, and in Indonesia from 58 percent to 37 percent.

The one exception was in support for opposition to the American occupying forces in Iraq.  Again, taking everyday, lay Muslims as the audience (rather than supercharged fanatical extremists), this makes a certain kind of sense.  It's easy to rationalize, generically, attacks on the imperialist superpower; it's harder to accept the strategy when it bleeds across boundaries into countries that you can conceive as your neighbor.  Ms. Wright quotes an academic:

"Muslims, like non-Muslims, are plugged into the world. . . . It is one thing to be caught up in the supposed glamour of attacking the superpower or global bully, but it is quite another to have to pay the consequences economically, politically -- not to mention personally. This is what has happened in places like Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey, where many people now see extremist Islam as a threat to their lives, not a fantasy game of kick Uncle Sam."

The tipping point will come when everyday Muslims see extremist Islam, lurking in their communities and living nextdoor, as the threat.  People overshoot their aims all the time (as we've done in Iraq).  Hopefully, Al Qaeda has done the same thing by bombing innocent civilians in Great Britain, a country that has been gracious about assimilating Muslims (like, ironically, its large Pakistani community). 

God willing, they're pushing themselves over a cliff already.  If only the Bush Administration had the diplomatic savvy to give them a hand.

Facing a Terrorist Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The story is out today about how one of the London suicide bombers was a beloved teacher of immigrant kids in a primary school.  He is being described as "gently spoken, endlessly patient and hugely popular with children."

This is very tough to square with the mentality driving the Global War on Terror.  Among the 19 9/11 hijackers, there never really emerged a human story that gave one cause to consider them as anything but the face of evil.  It will take time to see what if any impact these revelations from Britain have on how terrorist acts by extremists are viewed, but in the meantime one personal story that I've long struggled with:

During the early 1990s I worked in South Africa for something called the National Peace Accord, a multi-party initiative to curb the political violence burning in the country's townships in-between Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990 and the first elections in 1994.

At the time, one of the notorious political prisoners in the country was a guy named Robert McBride who was on death row for having plotted a 1984 bombing at a beachfront bar called Magoos that had killed 3 people and injured 69.   The incident was part of the ANC's campaign of violence against "soft targets" - meaning civilians.   I had grown up associating the term terrorist primarily with Yasser Arafat and I mentally classed McBride in the same camp.   When I heard or read his name, the image was one of a dangerous deviant.

In my Peace Accord work I dealt daily with the ANC (a signatory to the Accord), but was often frustrated with the party's disorganization.  The ANC lacked a full-time regional coordinator who could help me plan our efforts to mediate disputes, convene local multi-party committees and monitor rallies and funerals.    One day an ANC contact told me that a new staffer had just been hired and put him on the phone.  This man was on the ball, cooperative and helpful.  We finalized plans for that weekend's rally and exchanged phone numbers.  Just before hanging up I asked his name.  I will never forget the feeling in my stomach when he said Robert McBride.

McBride had been pardoned as part of a political deal.  He is now (no joke) a police chief:

McBride is also the subject of a terrific documentary on SA's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At the time I encountered McBride, I was dealing daily with members of the holdover apartheid era South African police and armed forces, people responsible for razing shanty-towns, brutal interrogations, deaths in detention, and (as we suspected and was later proven) funneling guns and money to stoke the very violence they professed to be trying to curb.  How to compare these men to McBride?

The ANC's cause was what had led me to South Africa - I thought theirs was the great liberation struggle of my time, and (as the daughter of 2 South Africans) I wanted to be part of it in some way.  I gradually understood that the definition of terrorist that covered McBride also probably covered Nelson Mandela, who led the ANC into armed resistance.   

Remember the saying "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"?  That's not something we've heard much since 9/11.  We associate it with another kind of terrorism an older and less menacing (though still deadly) version.  Freedom fighters are not out to destroy whole swaths of society.

What of al Qaeda?   I put them in a singular class:  a nihilistic cult of death with no concrete political aspirations or grievances, no openness to reason, no capacity to engage productively in society.  With many notable exceptions including this piece by Zbigniew Brzezinski, pointing out that some terrorists may be acting in part based on legitimate grievances has been a political no-go zone in America for the last four years. 

We don't know enough about this British schoolteacher to say whether his case challenges any of that.  That he lived a quiet, respectable life and was an ostensibly productive member of society says nothing about what his grievances and goals - real or imagined - may have been.    There's a good chance the primary school job was nothing more than a foolproof cover.  Maybe he was a naive flunky who got lured in to do the dirty work.  Was his effort part of a wholesale assault on the West, an heir to 9/11 or did he see it as something different?

We are a long way from understanding the motivations behind this schoolteacher-turned-suicide-bomber (or was it the other way 'round?), his predecessors, and those who will inevitably follow.    But we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook without even trying.

No Excuses Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Well, I thought I could write something this evening about the Irregular Warfare conference that I attended Monday and Tuesday at Quantico, VA Marine Corps Headquarters.  Instead, however, having just taken a flight from DC to New Orleans to visit southern kin and having just returned from Jacques Imo's restaurant where I got to choose from a menu that included amberjack with mojo sauce and something called Godzilla meets the green tomatoes (this is a batter fried soft shell crab atop an empire state building of tomatoes) and having just taken a pause from listening to a song called "Fat Shrimp" at the Maple Leaf Bar, and jumped at the chance for ten minutes on a powerbook, I don't think I can do justice to the Marine Corps at the moment.

Suffice it to say that the Irregular Warfare conference gave me much hope and encouragement that our military institutions are growing and changing  and learning many lessons despite the hardships of high tempo deployment and the Cold War additctions of the US Congress.  And, not surprisingly, the Marine Corps is leading the way to a modern understanding of how to fight wars in an era of globalization.  The Marines are progressive traditionalists--or perhaps traditional progressives is a better way to put it. A scrappy and inventive group, the Marines are updating their storied Small Wars manual to better reflect how the world has changed.  One theme of the conference was that war remains unchanged--it is still a contest of wills between enemies. What has changed is the technology available to impose said will.  Moreover, defeating today's enemies will require far more than policy made at the pointy end of the spear. Prevention is key.

The Marines have been expeditionary since their 1775 genesis--and so it is in their very nature to lead the way in figuring out how to fight in an era when large massed combat will be replaced by hundreds of conflicts--often taking place far away from US borders and at the level of the individual.   Another common theme of the conference was the need for far more investments in understanding culture, psychology, anthropology and other social sciences.  Oddly, these discussions reminded me of the recent comments of Karl Rove--that pouty scamp and national security risk--who resides in the White House and makes pronouncements about how liberals want to give therapy to terrorists. Well, Karl should hang out at Quantico to realize just how ridiculous he is.  The Irregular Warfare conference covered everything from group dynamics to social bonding to understanding the identities, motivations and intentions of terrorists.  Seems that achieving victory in the age of terror is going to require a lot of time on the couch for everyone.

I'm going to lose my turn at the powerbook in 30 seconds, but promise to write more about what I learned at Quantico before I head North.

Bolton Down the Hatches Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The latest word from the WashPost is that Bolton is now saying he'd deign to accept a recess appointment.  Offering him one is bad idea on an array of fronts, as I wrote last week in The Prospect.

Stygius (whoever that is, exactly), asked me for my take on a side-note in the Post piece, reporting that Bolton was seeking to enlarge the office suite allotted to the so-called USUN-W, the Washington office of the U.S. Ambassador to the UN.  The Post reported that:

Two months ago, while his confirmation was in trouble, Bolton began efforts to double the office space reserved within the State Department for the ambassador to the United Nations, according to three senior department officials who were involved in handling the request.

Previous ambassadors have kept a small staff in Washington in a modest suite. Bolton told several colleagues he needs more space and a larger staff in Washington because, if confirmed, he intends to spend more time here than his predecessors did.

"Bolton isn't going to sit in New York while policy gets made in Washington," the administration source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the source lacks authorization to discuss this on the record. But Bolton's efforts to obtain more space have encountered resistance. Two colleagues said Bolton's request was inappropriate because he had not been confirmed.

My take is this:

- USUN-W is an important office, because - as I lay out in the Prospect piece - a key element of the UN Ambassadorship is to not just represent the U.S. at the UN, but also to represent the UN's interests and concerns to official Washington.  The State Department office takes the lead on this;

- Bolton's move, however, raises several concerns:

1.  That, contrary to Condi Rice's promise that Bolton will be kept on a tight leash, if appointed Bolton intends to make the most of his contacts and sway in Washington.

2.  Bolton intends to focus heavily on Washington even though, with no U.S. perm rep at the UN for 6 months and the U.S.'s influence at the world body and with our allies around the world in question, the efforts of the ambassador must be trained on repairing relations with other countries and advocating U.S. positions and policies to the UN membership.

3.  Despite all the misgivings about Bolton's high-handedness and power-mongering, there's not the faintest sign of repentance on his part.   This latest maneuver - done while Bolton's nomination was on the rocks - signals just the opposite.

Withdraw This? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

I have been looking for, and/but not finding, insightful analysis of whether the UK "Reid memo" that surfaced this week is correct that  the Coalition will have multiple provinces ready, really ready to be turned over to Iraqi forces later this year and next.

The Daily Mail story that broke it, and most of the commentary that followed, referred to the paper as a secret "Exit strategy."  Maybe it is for the Brits, but not for us.  It proposes to halve our troop levels in a year or so, a cut that manages to be breathtaking without, of course, being an exit.

Either it is a brave and optimistic statement of support for Iraqi forces, and understanding for the need to get ourselves out of their way -- or it is a political strategy for hanging on to Congress in the '06 midterms. 

I know, I know what you're thinking.  But if those provinces are in fact not ready, cutting our troop strength in half magnifies so dramatically the threat for those who remain.  All the problems we have now with porous borders, shell game insurgencies and angry civilians continue.  The downsides are so obvious -- and so potentially damaging politically for '08 -- that the Iraqis must really be ready in those provinces, right?

But then the memo says the in-country commanders disagree with this.  Uh-oh.   I'd like to see the "out now" and "stay the course" wings of the progressive movement get together, look at what folks more expert than I have to say, and agree strongly that, if the Iraqis are not well and comprehensively ready, this is the worst of all possible worlds.  Is that too much to ask?

In Defense of Maximalism Posted by Derek Chollet

Yesterday over 30,000 people gathered in a small hill village in eastern Bosnia to mourn over 8,000 people – mostly men and boys – who were slaughtered 10 years ago at Srebrenica.  Much has been written about this grim anniversary over the past few days – about the horror of the biggest war crime in Europe since the Holocaust; about the failures of the United Nations, Europe, and the United States; about the pathetic fact that, a decade after thousands of international peacekeepers poured into Bosnia (first led by NATO, and now the EU), the chief perpetrators of this and other genocidal acts – Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic – remain on the loose, even though we know where they are and have the power to apprehend them; and about how far Bosnia has come, but most important, how far that deeply troubled country still has to go.

But there’s another reason to remember Srebrenica: for what came next.  After years of dithering, letting the Europeans take lead and trying endlessly to reach consensus before taking any action, Srebrenica forced President Clinton and his team finally to decide to move decisively and launch a muscular, no-holds-barred American effort involving both diplomacy and military force to end the war, culminating in the November 1995 Dayton peace accords.  Their policy had a patina of allied involvement and buy-in, but in the end it was—do I dare say it?—unilateral, rejecting the UN and keeping allies at long-arms-length (and ticking them off in the process) so the United States could basically do what it wanted.

Yes, the Administration tried to work with others first (remember the Clinton mantra: try to work together if we can, go alone if we must), but it tried for too long – after all, it did not prevent Srebrenica.  And many Clinton officials (including Albright and Holbrooke) were calling for decisive, unilateral U.S. action for some time. 

The course the Clinton Administration belatedly chose fit within a well-established American diplomatic tradition: a policy that challenged the status quo and rejected incrementalism, reflecting an all-or-nothing approach that was driven less by concerns about niceties or allied consensus than by getting something done.

In a recent article in The National Interest (and in a New York Times oped making many of the same points), former Clinton Administration official Steve Sestanovich describes this as “maximalism,” making the point that this is the way the U.S. typically—and successfully--addresses big international problems.  It often makes people nervous, and always ruffles allied feathers, but it gets results.   “Had the most controversial American policies…been more thoroughly compromised,” Sestanovich writes, “had they, to be blunt, been diluted by the counsels of allies—they might easily have failed.”

This is not a wholesale endorsement of unilateralism--we are seeing everyday, in Iraq and elsewhere, the costs of going it alone.  But thinking about Srebrenica does serve as a reminder that when it comes to solving the world’s problems, a little American muscular unilateralism—maximalism—ain’t always a bad thing.

Did I Go to Sleep and Wake Up in 1973? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

According to Newsweek's account, Karl Rove had a "double super secret background" conversation with Matt Cooper to tell him:

... Rove offered him a 'big warning' not to 'get too far out on Wilson.'  Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA" -- CIA Director George Tenet -- or Vice President Dick Cheney.  Rather, 'it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.' 

In all of the commentariat's heavy breathing about whether Rove gets indicted or not, I would hate for it to get lost that, whether or not it turns out to be illegal, it is now clear that Rove and others as yet unnamed were taking up a lot of time (paid for by taxpayers) to smear and embarrass two public servants, one of whom spoke in public certain uncomfortable truths which we now know to be, well, true.  I'm hoping to see this smear operation laid out in some detail somewhere soon (mass circulation, please?) so that more people have a chance to understand what kind of White House this is, indictments or no.

My better half sticks his head in and wonders, if Nixon was tragedy and Iran-Contra was farce, what is this?

More Musings on London Posted by Suzanne Nossel

just a couple of questions that strike me:

Why has al Qaeda pulled off nothing close to 9/11 ever since.  As terrible as the Madrid and London attacks have been, they don't approach the scope of the attacks on the WTC, Pentagon, etc.  A few possibilities come to mind: 

- They Aren't Capable of Inflicting Worse - The GWOT has severely undercut al Qaeda's ability to operate, such that they could not pull off another 9/11.  This is a tempting thought, although the most difficult part of the 9/11 attack was the undetected advance planning (flight training, etc.) and coordination on the day of the assault.  The simultaneity of the London attack would also have taken careful coordination.  Perhaps al Qaeda has yet to develop a new method of wreaking mass casualties without significant firepower (as was done by using passenger jets as missiles).   In other words, perhaps al Qaeda had just one devastatingly clever terror scheme up its sleeve, and has yet to invent a second.

- Their Major Efforts Are Trained on Iraq - This is a variant of Bush's notion that we're fighting in Iraq to avoid fighting on the streets of New York.  It would hold that al Qaeda now attacks periodically in the West only to prove that they are still capable of hitting us at home.  Perhaps they've concluded that this limited objective can be accomplished without inflicting mass casualties.  In other words, perhaps they've concluded that we're significantly bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan with insurgent attacks, and that the main front of the war is being waged there.  Lest we believe that fighting in the Middle East and Central Asia will forestall attacks in the West, however, they periodically launch an assault.  According to this logic, with sustained casualties being inflicted in Iraq, large scale attacks in the West are in a sense superfluous.

- In the Wake of 9/11, Similar Effects Can Be Achieved With Fewer Casualties - A corollary of the point immediately above, this is the notion that because all subsequent attacks echo 9/11, their impact is more terrorizing than would otherwise be true.  September 11 magnifies all future efforts, allowing al Qaeda to get away with less effort and firepower.   Britain's stoic reaction to last week's attacks calls into question this notion, although the 9/11 hangover understandably remains highly potent here in the U.S.  It may be that Americans were as much or more terrorized by the London attacks than Londoners.

- They Differentiate Between the U.S. and Other Enemies, Saving the Worst for Us - This theory would suggest that another devastating attack along the lines of 9/11 may await us.  Because the Spanish and British are only following the U.S.'s lead (for example in Iraq), the scale of the attacks on them is lesser.  al Qaeda does not want the U.S.'s singular status as the supposed source of Western evil lost on any observers.

Curious what the Qaeda-watchers will say.