RE-THINKING FOREIGN POLICY AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Thanks to my distinguished brother-in-law Tobe Berkovitz, Professor of Communications at Boston University for calling to my attention Gerald F. Seib’s interesting, frustrating article in the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304887104579304360218759676-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNjEwNDYyWj

Unfortunately, this important piece has a serious flaw, at least in my opinion, it’s premise is just plain wrong.

“It's becoming clear the Arab Spring didn't merely shake up the ossified power structure of the Middle East,” Seib begins. “It launched a total transformation of the region—one that has reduced American influence and ultimately will compel the U.S. to rethink its stake in an area that for half a century was assumed to be central to its global interests.”

Seib is on the money when he says the Middle East region has changed in dramatic and important ways and that American influence there has been sharply reduced, and a re-thinking of America’s stake and policies in that region is both necessary and long overdue.

But dating those catastrophes from the uprisings in Tunisia and Tahrir Square and their sequels from Libya to Bahrain is both historically wrong and politically tainted.  The strategic changes in the region, and the diminishment of Washington’s ability to manage them were obvious more than 5 years before that disrespected Tunisian street-peddler set himself on fire, and sparked the 2011 conflagration that consumed most of the Mideast’s ancien regime. 

What had already changed the balance of power both within the region, and between the region and the United States, what demonstrated and confirmed both the fragility of many of the region’s dictatorships and the incredible shrinkage of Uncle Sam’s moral and transactional influence, was George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld)’s disastrous war in Iraq.  And behind these shifts, was a deeply changed world of widely-available, personally portable weapons of selective destruction and easily-accessible media of immediate communication.

The effect of the gratuitous and ineffective American intervention (done in an even more  gratuitous and ill-chosen alliance with Iraq’s one-time colonial occupier, the UK) made the US not only a definable and familiar kind of regional villain, but an inept, defeatable one.

Dreaming of a benign regional transformation from cruel dictatorships to benevolent democracies, the US bit off more than it could chew (at least within the budgets of money, manpower, and persistence prescribed for the mission; as if transformations ever came cheap!). 

The once-irresistible force of America’s reputation was even more badly damaged than our actual fighting forces, which were damaged more than enough.  The ignorance and foreignness of our concepts for the region appalled even those who had once given lip-service or more to them and us.  Regional leaders, like our own, were somehow caught by surprise by the effectiveness of irregular forces with their mostly light or “improvised” weapons, and their rapid communications building pop-up tactical collaborations, and virtual strategic alliances.

Neither Vietnam nor the monthly recitation of technical developments in arms and media seem to have been observed.     

That’s what is truly important here, and completely overlooked by Seib, is that the same changes manifested by the “Arab Spring” had been building up as obviously as a construction site in a city for decades.  Here’s a short list:

(1)  a widespread popular desire to oust “ossified,” cruel, corrupt leaders,

(2)  the articulation via media both old and new, institutional and personal, of many revolutionary or reforming ideas,

(3)  the increasing dominance of absolutist formulae, dismissive of compromise and collaboration with the “impure,” to create a unifying, and stable governing structure

(4) a myriad of short-horizon, but well-armed mini-states or mini-factions, ruling and only to be subdued by force, that feel like feudalism at its worst.  These are growing, not just in the Middle East, but all around the world.

And what’s driving those changes, what drove the Arab Spring and doomed our dream-mission in Iraq (and Afghanistan)? Changes both broader, deeper, and more consequential than  those above.  The List of Changes continues:

(5) Medical advances which translate into more babies, who survive more often and live longer,

(6) We now live in a world whose demographic  balance has tipped towards youth.

(7) These younger people are ever better educated.

(8) They conceive higher, more developed personal and political aspirations than did their predecessors.

(9)  They are even more likely to be frustrated by poverty and underemployment, which they see as a detailed disgrace and a comparative failure through various media of communication.  Among today’s younger generations bitterness abounds; and our list gets even grimmer.

(10) At least as abundant as bitterness are weapons, which themselves have radically changed over the past 10 to 40 years. 

(11) Arms are becoming smaller and lighter, and thus more portable and concealable, and increasingly destructive in their impact.

(12)  For these smaller but badder weapons, there is a comparable explosion of cynical sellers, as likely to pass death-makers to Goth-costumed high school kids in Colorado as keffiyah-shrouded jihadis in Yemen. 

(13)  The weapons are not only more numerous, they are cheaper.  This is true for brand-name weapons, and for their “improvised” analogs being put together in cellars, garages, and tool sheds.

(14) And, the final blow: the communications revolution, ubiquitous mobile phones, computers and tablets – also getting ever less-expensive, ever more widely distributed – has made it easy to give angry rebels causes that satisfy their sense of self, justify their aggressions and solidify their paramilitary alliances.

All of that pre-dated and helped cause the Arab Spring.  All of that pre-dated and doomed Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Re-evaluating what and where our stakes were in the Middle East, re-thinking the aims and values of American foreign policy, probably should have started with the conclusion of the Vietnam War and the launching of the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. Each of these major events demonstrated changes that had transformed the battlefields and societies of the so-called Third World.

Not only were formerly subject peoples less likely to bend to our will, they were more able to formulate, articulate and organize against us.  Whether the issue was as complex as local sovereignty in the face of external domination, or simply the price of essential raw materials, guns and bankers were increasingly free to work for the other side.

The revolution in global communications allowed “enemy” guns and financiers to work more effectively and market their successes more widely.

CNN showed the whole world how richer people lived, what lucky people considered normal, and posed for poorer, less fortunate people, the question, “Why not us?”

Al Jazeera showed the Arabic-speaking world how other people behaved as consumers and citizens, and proposed not just questions, but answers on how to realize the economic and political opportunities in their lives.  You can, the channel and other competitors in the region and around the world told their viewers, have what they have, but your way.  This is what the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring were after, the opportunity, respect and  empowerment they saw being normalized in the US and  elsewhere, but adapted to their own cultural and religious values.  

American power and influence in the Middle East, and elsewhere through most of the world, have been in decline for decades.  This is due, only in part to the increasing self-awareness and ambition of “them,” and the anti-modern, anti-secular, anti-western or just pro-independence polemicists pushing resistance to the US in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or Yemen. 

Much more, America’s reduction in moral and political force has been caused by what America and Americans have been doing for the past half-century.  Where once we were known, and largely admired for Levis, Coca-Colas and social harmony and prosperity, now the world associates America with aggressive war and invasive surveillance, the repeated use of armed force outside our borders, high-tech snooping everywhere, and increasingly sacrificing the interests of the majority of our own citizens to the whims and prerogatives of the hyper-rich.    

No one loves a bully; no one loves a snoop; no one loves a greed-head, but to much of a disaffected world, that trinity is as representative of America as red, white and blue. But Seib seems convinced,  -- I have no idea why, and he offers no supporting evidence -- that if we double down on the use of force and spying and money, we can bring the brightness back to our tri-color.

“A lot of American influence stemmed from the belief that the U.S. could, and just might, intervene militarily to realign the balance of power in the region,” he says, adding, “After the exhaustion borne of more than a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the wake of a conscious decision not to intervene to help rebels in Syria's civil war, that idea simply isn't taken as seriously.”

American influence stemmed from the belief the US could succeed with military intervention.  It is the failure to succeed in Iraq (or Afghanistan), not just “exhaustion” that has diminished our sway.  Does Seib think “a conscious decision” to intervene in Syria will pay off?

Our re-think must be not just about “our foreign policy,” but about the world in which it must operate.  Military intervention simply does not work anymore.  Local forces do not need to “win,” just to bleed the invaders to a standstill.  The realities of today’s weaponry and communications have created a planet of achievable quagmires.

As more people learn to read text, to interpret and create video, to ingest information about the world, and communicate what they think they know, real power is going “soft.”  Respect and persuasion yield greater and longer-lasting influence than force and coercion. Insurgents can’t really rule, nations can’t really influence, until they win, not just military superiority, but popular consent.    

What does America want, what do we stand for in the Middle East?  If it is justice, then the Israeli land theft in Palestine must be halted and reversed.  If it’s just stability, then we should say, we believe might makes right.

But as we say it, we should remember, in today’s changed world, almost everyone on earth can listen in. 

That’s why the “American value” we should be advancing through our “re-thought” foreign policy should simply be this: seek consent of the governed, and sustain it through rule of law and justice.  We should hold our fire, restrain our data-digging, and work towards restoring a real balance of power that entitles all citizens, not just the rich, aggressive and unscrupulous.  If we can accomplish that, America will not only regain its stature and influence, but the respect and affection that was ours before military intervention and surveillance penetration replaced blue jeans and soft drinks as our global brand.

QUESTIONS FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA

This is so nice, you should read it twice....(pageview count is everything, y'know).

Published today at www.cjr.org, the website of the distinguished Columbia Journalism review:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/questions_for_president_obama.php

merely copied here (help convince cjr that I am worth publishing!)

1)    Mr. President, what is your strategic goal in Syria? Taking chemical weapons off the board?  Punishing Bashar al-Assad for using them?  Weakening Assad? Regime change?

2)    In the event the balance of power in Syria’s civil war changes, or Assad is defeated, what is the US plan to stabilize Syria without ceding power to Al Qaeda-linked and other radical Islamist militias? 

3)    Is the Russian proposal to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control and destroy them an acceptable outcome for the US?  Or it only good enough as a step towards regime change?

4)    When Russian President Putin put his chemical disarmament idea before you last week at the G-20 meetings, did you take it seriously?  Did you instruct Secretary of State John Kerry to pursue the idea with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in their ministerial-level talks?  Kerry’s first public mention of the Russian proposal seemed to denigrate the plan as unlikely to work.  Were those his instructions?  Was his “one week” deadline part of a White House strategy?

5)    Now, you have asked for a pause in House and Senate votes to authorize military action in Syria.  How long do envision the pause should last?  What outcome could convince you to call off the votes entirely and abandon plans for military action? If the Russian plan can be completed and implemented what effect will this have on future US policy in Syria?  What effect would this have on Russian-American relations?

6)    How important has the threat of American use of force been in moving towards even a temporary solution in Syria? How do you assess the cost of the apparent global disapproval of the US threat to use military force?  Have the rejection of collaboration by the British Parliament, the refusal of the Arab League to endorse a military strike, and poll results in Western Europe and elsewhere opposing US action weakened the United States? 

7)    This has been a crisis heightened by global video communication, from the original “amateur” videos that revealed the horrific results of the chemical attacks to the round-the-world, round-the-clock coverage of your threat and the political reactions to it.  How should US policy be adjusted for this new “wired world” reality?

8)    You said in your speech to the American people that we “know” of actions and discussions among the Syrian military command to prepare chemical weapons for use, and to distribute gas masks to troops to protect them against chemical weapons, German newspapers have quoted German intelligence intercepts that appear in part to contradict your scenario, and point the finger at some Syrian rebels for initiating the chemical attack. What makes you sure your sources are right and the German sources are wrong, and why have you not presented more facts that support your conclusions directly to the American people? .

9)    Secretary of State Kerry has gotten a lot of bad reviews recently for his rhetoric on Syria.  His gratuitous presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of hypothetical reasons for the possible dispatch of American “boots on the ground” created a huge backlash among those who saw this as an invitation to  quagmire, and his negative characterization of the Russian proposal seems to have been swiftly discarded.  Does he still have your confidence?

10)  In your televised speech, you pledged to the American people that there would be no American “boots on the ground” in Syria, but the language of a draft Senate resolution put a limit forbidding only the use of US Armed Forces in Syria.  Do that limitation and your pledge extend beyond the involvement of Armed Forces to forbid the use of CIA personnel or civilian contractors inside Syria? 

11)  Polls show the US public, by a 3-1 majority want you to be bound by the results of any future Congressional votes?  Will you be so bound, or do you feel, as Constitutional Commander-in-Chief you maintain independence to act, even in the face of popular and legislative disapproval?

12)  The former US Mideast diplomatic representative Dennis Ross said recently, if the US doesn’t act on Syria’s chemical weapons, this will convince Israel (and Iran) that we will not act if Iran does achieve the ability to make nuclear weapons, and therefore will heighten the possibility of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran.  Do you accept Ross’ arguments?  Would unilateral Israeli action against Iran serve American interests?  If Israel attacked Iran, would you support such action? Would you join it?  Or would you try to prevent it, and if so, how?

 

SYRIA, WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

“Well, this time we’re really mad.” That seems to be gist of the message President Obama has charged Secretary of State John Kerry with giving to the world.

After a widely suspected chemical attack on Syrian civilians earlier this summer, almost certainly on orders from their murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, reportedly killed between 100 and 150 people, The Obama White House said we were pretty steamed, and told Assad we were finally going to start arming his enemies in response. But we did not do so.

Just as we did not do anything to Assad after 2 years of his desperate attempts to hold onto power had produced an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths and more than a million refugees.

But now, Kerry says, things are different: now we know Assad ordered what we know was a chemical weapons attack that we know has killed upwards of 1000 civilians, who like the 100,000 dead who have preceded them are disproportionately women and children.

The proof, journalists have been told, will be found in “sigint,”digital messages with traceable sources and signatures that will establish, it was Bashar and his henchmen who put the poison gas into play.

Could this be the opportunity the Securicrats have been waiting for?  Is this when the surveillance capability which I accept cannot be undone can be used to benefit American security (if it is really being threatened)?  Could just the kind of message mining the NSA says it occasionally, accidentally uses to tap the communications of Americans be used righteously, to protect the innocent (even if they are not Americans) against their oppressors (even if they have never proposed oppressing America)?

If the NSA et al can really produce evidence that will convince reasonable people that the Syrian regime has indeed broken one of the world’s most serious laws and taboos, against using chemical weapons for mass attacks against civilians, that would be an important accomplishment.  And it might even provide a proper predicate for a serious response against those responsible.

But the US Government’s “proof” had better be good. As my brilliant friend George Kenney points out today in Huffington Post: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-kenney/syria-air-strikes_b_3814293.html

"From the reporting it seems ineluctably clear that chemical weapons were used. That's a tragedy. But it remains far from clear who did it. None of the many insurgent groups are saints; to be honest, with the fighting going against the insurgency in recent months there would be far greater incentives on their side to use chemical weapons, in the hope of triggering western intervention, than there would be on the part of Syrian government forces."

But assuming, the charges against the Assad regime stand up, some hard questions still remain, like why would we respond?  To defend international law? To defend Syrian lives? Or would we be acting to defend our “credibility, “ to make good on President Obama's "red line" warnings?  As today's NY Times editorial puts it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/opinion/responding-to-syrian-atrocities.html?hp&_r=0

"Presidents should not make a habit of drawing red lines in public, but if they do, they had best follow through. Many countries (including Iran, which Mr. Obama has often said won’t be permitted to have a nuclear weapon) will be watching."

This sounds a little like Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg raised to geo-strategic levels: "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant, and an elephant's faithful 100%."

Yes, it is a good thing for our allies and our enemies to know we are steadfast. But it is a better thing, if what we propose to do makes sense.

So what is that President Obama is considering?

Here is what the NY Times says we can expect:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/world/middleeast/syria-assad.html?hp

“a limited military operation — cruise missiles launched from American destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea at military targets in Syria.”

The Washington Post has a bit more detail,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kerry-obama-determined-to-hold-syria-accountable-for-using-chemical-weapons/2013/08/26/599450c2-0e70-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html?hpid=z1

adding that “long-range bombers” may also be used for “no more than two days “ to hit “military targets not directly related to Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.”

Like what? Well, Army Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey told Congress in June, “Potential targets include high-value regime air defense, air, ground, missile, and naval forces as well as the supporting military facilities and command nodes.”

But the Post says the attack under contemplation would be something, “far smaller and designed more to send a message than to cripple Assad’s military and change the balance of forces on the ground.”

Clearly the Times heard the same ideas with slightly different words: “not a sustained air campaign intended to topple Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, or to fundamentally alter the nature of the conflict on the ground.”

So, the American government wants the world to know that making good on the President’s word means sending a message and a punishment to President Assad, but nothing more. Take that! Take your un-toppled self and un-crippled military and carry on. Carry on with an unchanged balance of forces in an unaltered conflict and just restrict yourself to killing without chemicals, the old-fashioned ways.

Huh?

If, as Secretary Kerry said, Assad’s gassing his own people to keep power is a “moral obscenity,” then what is our killing a few of Assad’s soldiers (and almost inevitably, his people,) while keeping the arch-murderer in power and still dominating a majority of Syria’s citizens and territory?

It sounds like that’s America’s objective: to keep things as they are. Show a little might. Kill some Syrian Muslims. Intimidate some Iranian Muslims. But do not change the unrelieved awfulness of Syrian reality today.

 

Is this because we think, facing reality in a world and particular case of nothing but bad options, that this is all we really can accomplish?  If so, keeping that a “secret,” is another example of “old world thinking.”  Better to explain what we can and cannot do, and why, than simply to leave the globally visible results (the explosions will be seen on all-the-world’s TV, computer and tablet screens) to be interpreted unaided.

 

Our plan of action seems to be all about limiting risk, not in itself a bad thing. But if the limits, using only “stand-off” weapons, whether they be missiles, or drones, of bombers flying high (as in Kosovo and Serbia to keep pilots safe,) exacts a cost in targeting accuracy (as it did in Kosovo and Serbia,) it may not be so well received among the people on the ground or the people watching it all at home. 

The Kosovo precedent was, in a way, great for us – a war with no casualties:  none; no  American lives were lost in the campaign to free Kosovo.  But the idea of risk-free military action is a dangerous one, and to outsiders may seem both brutal and cowardly.  This is already how much of the world already perceives our military strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, America killing “because it can.”

We limit our targeting in both those places, too, and claim “good intelligence,” implied allied consent, and legal justification for everything we do, but much of the world hates us for it.

And wouldn’t you, if some foreign force meted out its brand of justice in our backyards, or even our boondocks? And wouldn’t you hate it even more if what the outsiders called justice were just geo-political posturing to protect its “word,” while changed nothing, while practically guaranteeing, of not enabling future crimes by the oppressor, and future repetitions of violent correction, further wastes of our blood and treasure?

If we choose force, death and destruction, shouldn’t it be to change something, to end, not prolong violent conflict.

Unless we cannot realistically expect to do better. 

So, tell us, if we can use our spy tech to track Assad’s messages, can we also use it to track the man himself?  If we can trace the communications of the Syrian chain of command to prove that carries out war crimes, can we not to target enough significant links in that chain to disassemble it?

Or are we just sticking to the pre-precision warfare rule of law, that killing “leaders” is unacceptable, while killing their forces and their victims is not?

Decapitation and not punishment is what needs to be done to the Assad machine if we mean to effect change.

Playing pattycake for 2 years while Syria has imploded in government-dominated violence has not worked. Quite the contrary, it has ceded the battlefield to forces that see themselves as either enemies of or betrayed by us.  Making our slaps slightly harder will not change the hearts and minds of those now fighting in Syria, nor will it save Syrian lives or stabilize Syria’s neighborhood.

But can America do that?  And if we can’t what can we do and how? If we decimate and thereby bring under control the Syrian government’s war machine (military and internal security), can we then quiet and reorganize a chaotic battleground state overrun by several different fighting forces, some of them unalterably opposed to any peace on American terms.

As Syria’s neighbor Iraq (and Libya and Yemen) eloquently demonstrate, it is much easier to create a state of war than it is to end one. And, make no mistake, after, and in part because of, our own 2 years of passive acceptance, Syria is in an advanced state of war, where every inch of ground is controlled or contested by force.

The disasters in those 3 states (and the continuing troubles in Egypt and Tunisia) show the rule of force must be ended before rule of law can start, and that almost always demands the application of greater force. We say peace, freedom and stability for Syria is our ultimate goal, but what risks will be run for that goal? Stand-off force cannot hold ground.

Almost unheard of these days in Washington, there seems to be a solid consensus, from the White House to the Congress, to the American people, that we want to keep our “commitment” completely risk-free. We do not want to get involved in Syria’s Civil War. Me neither. But, face it; nothing far short of that is likely to work.  And, even one American cruise missile means we are involved.

We may deny it, call it an isolated “punishment,” “surgical” and clean, but that’s not what the world watching the explosions is going to think. They’re going to say, the US is involved in murder, in destruction. And they are going to ask, for what? “Sending a message,” delivering a punishment, sounds a lot like, what were John Kerry’s words? Oh yes, “a moral obscenity.”

No, if we’re going to use the bullet, we’re going to have to bite the bullet. If we’re going to shoot at the beast, we have to kill the beast. If the only way to end war is to use war, we should, and then, with help from allies, with support from local participation, against some very determined foes, we must also be prepared to win the peace. Which, we should acknowledge in front,  is likely to involve a lot of time, a lot of costs, and some serious risks, including if we are honest, (even if for a limited mission over a limited period of time,) somebody’s boots on the ground.

If domestic politics, or the limits of our military strength, forbid that, the White House should say so.  Honesty about the relationship between policy and reality is something every government owes its people.   Bluster or weasel words or half-measures are not likely to work, as domestic politics, much less as foreign relations.

 

SOME MAXIMS FOR 21ST CENTURY WARFARE

 

First, let me confess, I have never served in the military, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse (except for one terrible accident when I was about 8 years old when, mischievously tipping a big oil barrel to see what I could spill out of it, I was caught in the act, and in dropping my side of the tilted barrel, caught a curious piglet beneath it. It is one of the worst memories of my life.  So in addition lacking any warrior experience, I am squeamish.

Nevertheless, in a 50+ year career in journalism, I have seen warfare and its consequences (on the streets of New York, Newark, and Kent, Ohio, as well as in the Balkans, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Rwanda, and have spent a lot of time talking with troops and their commanders.

Not enough to make me an expert, but more than enough to conceive these ideas.

1)    Power Projection Is Over:  Wikipedia says that power projection and force projection are the same thing, and that “soft power” can also be successfully projected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

This is, to me, very confused thinking.

Power projection, once upon a time, meant the ability of a distant state to control other states.  The apex of power projection was the era of colonial empires, when the economies and polities of distant, usually African, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American nations, and the daily lives and ultimate fates of their people could be controlled from places like London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and, yes, Washington.

Force projection is a lesser capability.  It can intimidate, punish, oppress its targets, but it, as we have learned to our sorrow, cannot control them.  One way of looking at force projection is that it is power projection without empire, since force projection does not imply the durability or the continuity of power projection.  For its targets the difference between force projection and power projection is the difference between a sock in the jaw and life in prison.  For its projectors, the limited power of force projection was nicely summed up by American fighters in Vietnam (or Afghanistan): “We control the day; they control the night.”  

Soft power, which eschews brute force, conveys influence, which can have both durability and continuity, but neither controls nor intimidates or oppresses.  The soft power of “rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca Cola,” is impressive, whether you see it as liberating or annoying, but it, even in its state-directed iterations of diplomatic alliance or exclusion or economic sanctions allows it targets to choose their outcomes.   

What power projection controlled was not just territory, but equally important, communication.  The armies of empire had superior firepower, but, more important, they knew, both strategically and tactically, what they were doing.  By and large, their victims did not.  Imperial fleets could move with speed and stealth, outpacing both warnings and preparations.  Once landed, imperial troops could overpower territories and kill or corral their inhabitants and move on, before their next targets knew they were in danger.

And control of communications was a 2-way street.  Not only were power projections‘ victims ignorant of their future, the projectors’ folks back home could be kept completely in the dark about the crimes and brutalities being committed in their names.

Which brings us to maxim #2:

 

2)    There Are No More Secret Wars:  Back when power projection worked, wars were a secret to their victims until it was too late, and they could be kept secret from disapproving citizens of colonial powers until the state decided otherwise, or until the disapproval was of faits accomplish, which are harder to argue against, and much harder to undo.

Now, like God’s sparrows, not a bomb or missile falls unobserved, and news of the damage done can be communicated both locally and globally, instantaneously.  For the would-be projectors of power or force, even their most incurious or controlled news media must now contend with other media voices, with other, likely often opposing, points of view, and with an anarchic world of video-capable mobile phones, cameras, computers and satellite links to tell the world of every death, every burning building.

As the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases make obvious, secret attempts to project power or force can be revealed to the world, not just after the fact, but in the planning or even pre-planning stages.

As I have said before, as long as institutions involve human beings in conceiving or executing their plans, the betrayal of secrecy is not just possible, but predictable.

The cruel depredations of perhaps the world’s last empire, the Soviet bloc, its oppression, corruption and bureaucratic paralysis, were so well known that it was rejected by its own people, and shunned by the rest of the world. 

Now, with all the world witness to our projections of force in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our airborne killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and our connections to coupsters in Honduras and Egypt) and the threats of force against Iran regularly made by belligerent blowhards in Congress, there is a widespread sense of, “There, but for the grace, or lack of interest, of the Pentagon and the White House, go I.”

In addition to the projection of power, force or influence, there is their opposite, the projection of repulsive arrogance.  This kind of arrogance and ignorance can only be remedied by my Third Maxim.

 

3)    WHERE YOU CANNOT TELL FRIEND FROM FOE, DO NOT GO:  I was going to propose as my Third Maxim, There Are No More Short Wars, but the exception proves the rule promulgated above.  The US military did conduct short, successful wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.  What made these “incursions” short and successful was not just that they occurred before the globe was digitally interconnected but because in both cases, our troops, and almost all the citizens in both places knew who the “bad guys” were.  In Panama, there were few remaining supporters of the corrupt and criminal regime of Manuel Noriega, while in Grenada, the Stalinist Bernard Coard was almost universally seen as an oppressive, vicious usurper who had overthrown -- and unforgivably, killed -- the perhaps unsteady, but still widely-liked, Socialist Maurice Bishop.  In neither place did American forces face popular or dogged opposition, and we were in and out too fast for particular factions to use us to target their political or personal rivals or enemies.

Would that had been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan!  In both of those places, we invaded in support of allies, most of whom had been out of their countries for years or decades before we projected our forces.

They told us who our enemies were, when in reality, they were theirs.  Think of Ahmed Chalabi conning ignorant fools like Paul Bremer and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld into disbanding the Iraqi Army, which they defined as “Baathist,” while most Iraqis defined as “ours.”

Then there were the “night raids” launched in Iraq and Afghanistan against people who were fingered by “our friends” for what frequently turned out to be very private beefs. Every household we overturned, every prisoner we took and held, often for years at a time, did indeed become our enemy, for reasons we gave them.

Now, the latest Inspector General’s report from Afghanistan chronicles a waste of billions given to people we knew or later learned were already against us.  And still the dollars spill across the country where they cannot be traced, much less monitored, because it is completely unsafe for Americans to go beyond Kabul.  Because we don’t know who is on which side, and a misjudgment can mean death.  Which leads us to the Fourth Maxim, which is actually the first and foremost rule of warfare in our time.

 

4)     IN TODAY’S WARS, THE VISITING TEAM NEVER WINS:  The former advantages that made Power Projection work, an outsider’s preponderance of firepower and control of communications no longer work.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns, budget cuts may force him to reduce the US Navy’s aircraft carrier battle groups and the size of Army and Marine forces.  So what?  Those carrier groups are primarily useful for force projection, which is, as I’ve argued, something we should be reducing anyway, and the days of massed troops overrunning opposing hordes on big battlefields is as dead as the harquebus and halberd.  In fact, these days, with remote-controlled, satellite guided munitions, any mass of forces is simply an inviting target.  Enemies will no longer mass against us.  It’s much easier and more effective to pick us off with small groups, carrying portable, often “improvised” (meaning home-made, not put together spur of the moment) weapons.

Massive numbers of soldiers are now chiefly useful for military occupations (as Rumsfeld tragically refused to recognize when he invaded Iraq).  Even the small, mobile forces Rumsfeld championed there served principally to drag us deeper into the briar patch.  Once there, we discovered that occupation is a thankless, often hopeless task, which, one devoutly hopes, we will avoid in the future.

And the thing about occupations, and about power or force projection, is that they are temporary.  Everyone knows that: especially the home team, whether they be our enemy, our friends, or just innocent civilians.  In Afghanistan from the day the war began, the Taliban have been telling the people they live among, or within arms’ reach of, “The foreign forces will leave one day.  We will not.”

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion inherent in that formulation, and Afghans, whether horrified or pleased by that prospective outcome, live every day in its shadow.  That’s why so many of “our friends” prove perfidious.  They want their children to survive.

Everywhere we have projected power since the 1990s, our control of events has disappeared as soon as our troops have left.  In Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, in Iraq, Somalia, and soon in Afghanistan, the projection of force leaves only one certainty behind: the rule of force, usually the force we fought to defeat.

The cost in blood and treasure and in America’s international reputation has been catastrophic.  The benefits to ordinary people are very hard to find.    

WAR IS EASY; PEACE, NOT SO MUCH

WAR IS EASY; PEACE NOT SO MUCH.

 

War is all about one thing: force.  Whoever applies force most successfully rules.  Period.  End of story.

Peace is the perfect opposite of war in this: it, too, depends on one thing, the subjugation of force to governance, and, hopefully, rule of law.  Unless and until all of the use of force within a country is brought under the command and control of government, there is no peace.

When, after defeating the government and army of Saddam Houssein, American peacemakers declined to force the Kurdish pesh merga militias to subordinate themselves to the government in Baghdad, they guaranteed and legitimized the resistance of Sunni and Shi’ite Arab militias to state control, not to mention smaller mosque or mafia-based paramilitary units.  What the international forces (i.e. the US) wouldn’t do, the al-Maliki government in Baghdad couldn’t do, and this failure to subdue the many centrifugal armed groups in Iraq is what has turned that once rich and functional country into a ruin.

In Libya, the triumph of a congeries of international and local forces over the government and army of Muammar al-Qaddafi was also followed by no effective regulation of those various heavily-armed local fighting groups by a legitimate central government.  Instead, Tripoli is the isolated capitol of a dysfunctional pseudo-country overwhelmed by internecine blood-letting.

Back in the day, when armed force was a prerogative of the state, peace was relatively easy to obtain.  One side just had to defeat the other and install its own or puppet governance.

Today, defeated governments rarely control all the armed forces within their borders.  In fact, as a government nears defeat, it usually disintegrates into a chaos of superseding loyalties to sectarian or ethnic concepts or to local tribes, clans, imams or mob bosses, each with its own paramilitary force. Under these conditions, the law of war: force wins, rules, and governments obey the gunmen. 

Another good example of what happens when American and international forces declare peace and go home is Bosnia, whose wretched state was well described recently by NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/opinion/global/roger-cohen-enough-of-the-daytonians.html?hp

Oddly, Cohen leaves undescribed the American decisions, enacted through the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, which helped make Bosnia the mess it is today.

Peace a la Dayton was declared but not enforced, and so power in Bosnia was allowed to revert to the self-same warrior bands that had plunged the place into mutual murder in the first place. The UN “Peacekeepers” had neither the mandate, the will, nor the resources to subdue, much less disarm the Bosnian Serb, Croat or Bosniak (Muslim) Nationalist militias, many of them made up of underworld strong-arm squads.  Across Bosnia, they retained their wartime control of most of the “entity’s” constituent areas.  All the UN administration achieved was the creation of militia/mafia-controlled nationalist political parties to give the warriors’ absolute power a civil mask.

Mafia control of politics meant corruption-dominated governance, steeped in hyper-nationalism, insuring a fractured, multiply mutually antagonistic citizenry and a duplication, or in Bosnia’s sad case, a triplication of thieving, conniving government jobs.  Bosnian citizens were cowed but not fooled.  They knew what the international peace had brought them, and so did foreign investors, who declined to pay for the inefficiencies and extra costs of Bosnia’s criminarchy, and stayed away.  Today, Bosnia is not so much a failed as a faux-state  Still split into ethnic parts, Bosnia exemplifies the pathologies of its people, mutual hatred and self-loathing.

Peace in name, but with outlaw forces still in considerable control of government, also disfigures Bosnia’s original attackers, the governments of Serbia and Croatia, whose reputations with their own peoples and potential investors are stained by well-documented criminal impunity and administrative corruption.   

The real impetus of Dayton, never admitted and rarely suggested by critics, was the preservation, not of peace, but of the status quo.  The genealogy of American Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s Dayton deal was out of Metternich by Kissinger, an anachronistic, academic exercise in “balance of power” self-delusion, in which Slobodan Milosevic was to be America’s regent of regional stability.

The rush to conclude a treaty was to head off a humiliating military defeat of Serbian forces by a joint Bosnian-Croatian army, trained and armed with the help of the United States.  As the delegates convened in Ohio, this force was rolling up the Serbs across all of northern Bosnia.  Within weeks, it seemed likely, Milosevic’s military and their Bosnian Serb surrogates would have their backs to the Sava and Drina Rivers, without nothing less than a full withdrawal from Bosnian territory in store.

Holbrooke knew enough about Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Itzetbegovic to doubt the results of endowing them with a post-war victor’s independent powers.  Better, he thought, to cede regional place to a Milosevic in debt to the US for his political survival.  So Holbrooke bought Milosevic, not as a failed politico turned war criminal, but as a respectable former client of Kissinger Inc. --when he ran Tito's National Bank his personal Kissinger adviser was Laurence Eagleburger -- and as America's "regent" in the Balkan region. He proved exactly as successful as the Shah of Iran had been as our -- actually Kissinger's and his pathetic smudged copy, Brzezinski’s -- regent in the Gulf region.

Somehow, Holbrooke ignored Slobo’s much greater debts to the Serb nationalists and organized crime leaders who had done his bidding in Bosnia.  Once he made “peace” in Dayton, his killers transferred their lusts for blood, plunder and ethnic triumph to Kosovo, and reining them in, just because his partners from Washington were asking him to, just wasn’t in the cards. 

After 10,000 Kosovars had been killed and 800,000 displaced by Milosevic’s security forces and associated “irregulars,” it took almost a year of US and NATO bombing (sometimes of civilian and diplomatic targets) to conclude yet another uneasy “peace” and a brace of new corrupt and mob-compromised oligarchies to the Balkans.

Yes, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo all have regular elections and civilian governments now, and the beginnings of normal regional relations.  But behind this mask, people who actually live there will tell you, are governments dominated by a few billionaires and a few organized crime gang leaders.

In Afghanistan, our real allies, the people who have staked their families and their futures on the dream of a modern, democratic state shudder as a justifiably impatient Obama rails at an unjustifiably corrupt and inept Karzai and heads for the exit, beyond which lies a false and murderous peace that an international consensus seems to think is “good enough for them.”