re: "Shadow of the Past"

Richard Fernandez (the blogger-formerly-known-as-Wretchard) at Belmont Club connected Andrew Breitbart's last video with a narrative undercurrent.

Money quote(s):

"The period concerned is not just Barack Obama’s college days, but more generically what happened after 1968. That’s what Breitbart really seems to want to talk about, what he means when talks about “vetting”.

In that period, if we’re to believe people like David Horowitz, a prominent radical from the New Left, what called itself the Peace Movement was actually a totalitarian conspiracy with possible links to foreign intelligence agencies, which eventually set out to control the Democratic Party, if it has not already."

Silly conspiracy theory, right?

("The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.")

"(I)t’s the stuff of conspiracy theories all right, equal in scope if not greater than those of the Kennedy assassination, which argue that to truly understand things one has to go back to 1968 and what followed. Because that’s when it all began.

What began, you might ask? Well it. And the indication of its subterranean existence is the narrative. One measure of how famous narrative has become, even when it does not supposedly exist is when it becomes a staple of detective fiction."

Wretchard proceeded to reference Stephen Hunter's latest Bobby Lee Swagger novel, I, Sniper, with some juicy popular culture.

His conclusion included the following:

"The narrative is all powerful. And to understand where the narrative comes from, Hunter argued one needed to go back to 1968 and follow the links to that era, the Silver Pony Tails and their Soviet contacts. In some sense, Breitbart was claiming in his last video that here was a rock that was at least worth looking under."

3/3

re: "What Lies Beneath"

Richard Fernandez a Belmont Club critiqued the Administration's habit of pre-emption.

Money quote(s):

"Pre-emption was also in evidence in foreign affairs, but this Pearl Harbor was not directed against America’s supposed enemies, but at its allies. Mark Perry at Foreign Policy writes an article strongly implies that the Obama administration is pre-emptively leaking Israeli military cooperation arrangements with Azerbaijan to protect Iran from a potential strike. Perry says officials told him that Israel was acquiring airfields on Iran’s northern border, something that may not have been common knowledge."

&

"Well if the Iranians didn’t know about Azerbaijan, they know now. Lee Smith says that this may be a blatant tip-off. “A number of Israeli journalists, led by Ron Ben-Yishai, one of the country’s esteemed security correspondents, claimed that Mark Perry’s article was clear evidence the White House was leaking critical information about Israel’s strategy in order to pressure Jerusalem to abandon its war plans and wait for the administration’s sanctions to bring the Iranian regime to its knees.” Maybe they’ll have to wait a long time. But for what it is worth, John Bolton believes the administration is alerting Iran, the administration acting as their Chain Home system, so to speak."

Omitted from my selective excerption were the passages that suggest the information about Azerbaijan may not have been correct, and the whys of that.

About half of Wretchard's post had to do with the Supreme Court's then-pending health care reform decision.

4/4

re: "Shadow of the Past"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club reminded us where the "Democratic" left actually came from.

Money quote(s):

"Breitbart’s video, recorded shortly before his death, is literally a voice from the beyond the grave about the past. The period concerned is not just Barack Obama’s college days, but more generically what happened after 1968. That’s what Breitbart really seems to want to talk about, what he means when talks about “vetting”.

In that period, if we’re to believe people like David Horowitz, a prominent radical from the New Left, what called itself the Peace Movement was actually a totalitarian conspiracy with possible links to foreign intelligence agencies, which eventually set out to control the Democratic Party, if it has not already."

Pres. Obama was in barely in elementary school in 1968; whether that was in Hawaii or Indonesia or on Triton (Neptune's seventh, and largest, moon) is irrelevent to this discussion.

"Well we all ‘know’, or so we read, that David Horowitz is just a looney old renegade who’s got an axe to grind against his old pals. None of that directly argues what he’s saying isn’t true."

Given the historical truths about things like McCarthyism (he was right), Alger Hiss (guilty), the Rosenbergs (guilty), &tc., allegations about HOIS sponsorship in the "Peace Movement" aren't exactly made of moonbeams and spidersilk.

"(I)t’s the stuff of conspiracy theories all right, equal in scope if not greater than those of the Kennedy assassination, which argue that to truly understand things one has to go back to 1968 and what followed. Because that’s when it all began."

3/3

re: "“Pay to Play” vs “Pay to Pay” "

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club noted a proposal impacting U.S. passport issuance.

Money quote(s):

"The problem with becoming a taxpayer is that it puts you in the system. You become a database record, and there’s no end to the uses that government can put that too. A proposed bill would allow the State Department to “deny, revoke or limit a passport for any individual whom the Internal Revenue Service has certified as having a ‘seriously delinquent tax debt’ in excess of $50,000. The amount would be adjusted for inflation in future years.” The provision was part of a larger amendment by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. to fund a highway bill."

There are a couple of ways that a U.S. citizen can find issuance of a U.S. passport to be delayed or denied. One is to be sufficiently behind on ones child support payments that the state in which they are paid reports that fact to the Department of Health and Human Services. They, in turn, relay that information to the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs and in very short order that information is available to U.S. consular and passport officials across the country and around the world.

Presumably this restriction would work in a similar fashion.

(Just to be clear, it's possible for a U.S. citizen abroad to get a limited validity passport that'll allow them to travel home to the U.S., just to keep them from being stranded.)

"One way to escape this hassle is not to join the system at all. Many Americans will never have to worry about getting their passport canceled for tax reasons because they don’t pay any. The Daily Mail reports: “Only half of U.S. citizens pay federal income tax, according to the latest available figures. In 2009, just 50.5 per cent of Americans paid any income tax to the federal government – the lowest proportion in at least half a century.”"

CAA has a problem with this.

It's not that many American aren't paying taxes at all, but their deductions and tax liability exceeds the amount of income withholding tax so they get a refund at the end of the year. In some cases, it's the entirety of the taxes they paid. Which withholding tax the federal government has the use of, interest-free, for as long as it takes the individual taxpayer to file their return.

4/4

re: "A Reversal of Fortune"

Richard Hernandez at Belmont Club ("the blogger formerly known as 'Wretchard' ") has the Muslim Brotherhood's number, as they have ours.

Money quote(s):

"Remember when the Muslim Brotherhood was reckoned to be part of the movement for democratic change in Egypt? That was then. This is now."

Remember who reckoned the MB to be democratic?

Good, now don't forget. Maybe next time you'll remember who the idiots are.

"Maybe the State Department can get the Muslim Brotherhood to help the US ambassador out. “Egypt’s justice minister said on Tuesday he had sent back a letter from the U.S. ambassador that asked for an end to a travel ban on Americans being investigated for alleged illegal funding of pro-democracy groups.” America is only the biggest aid donor to Egypt, which is kind of nice for the Muslim Brotherhood because they’re going to have money to spend. You would think that the MB should be going out of its way to do America a favor."

The MB read their Koran, it's sort of their "operating system" and "source code" and take it seriously. It frames their worldview. In that particular "reality tunnel," money from infidels is only their just due; it's tribute or jizya.

So expecting it to buy anything, other than temporary tolerance (or not), is on the foolish side of the ledger.

"(T)hey are probably betting that the administration will keep handing out the money however hard they get poked in the eye. After all, it is still “friends” with Pakistan in spite of what the Land of the Pure has done to its nearest and dearest Western ally. And if you can be friends with Pakistan, how can you even have enemies?"

&

"(T)he Muslim Brotherhood had this figured out even before the Washington Post could write an editorial. They know the iron rule of extortion: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Be a nice guy and you get zip. Be the Muslim Brotherhood and the other hand and … as applied to Egypt this implies that the Copts get nothing; America gets nothing, but the Muslim Brotherhood gets everything."

2/1

re: "Nothing Toulouse"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club (the blogger formerly known as "Wretchard") examined some intelligence lessons-learned.

Money quote(s):

"French intelligence may have missed a few indications that Mohammed Merah was not the average guy. He was on the US no-fly list, apart from having been ejected from Afghanistan in 2008 by US forces. French intelligence itself apparently had orders to watch him and had interviewed him on the occasion of his return from Afghanistan, which he described as being a tourist trip."

Repeat after me: there are no tourists in Afghanistan. None. Ever. Niente.

"There was, as one French politician put it, altogether “too many arms, too many trips, too much money” — and too much pull for Merah to be your typical lone gunman next door. The natural thing for conspiracy theorists to suspect was that he was somebody’s asset — just whose and on which side of the fence — is fertile ground for speculation. But there is one depressing alternative. Everybody just screwed up."

And that's another harsh lesson of intelligence as practised in the real world. Not simply the sterile "mistakes were made," but the grittier fact that people make mistakes.

"The dangers of figuring out just who is working for whom was illustrated by the Camp Chapman attack in Afghanistan, when an entire CIA cell was blown up by their prize agent, who as it turned out, was working for the other side."

That disaster could have been prevented quite simply, more's the pity. CAA sincerely hopes that the CIA's operators have incorporated the lessons-learned therefrom.

"Intelligence operations are by their very nature a high-risk business. But as a CIA study remarked, the biggest intelligence failures are marked by two characteristics: a failure of fusion of knowledge and a lack of objectivity."

Good points. Intelligence fusion can take place at many levels; its quality is going to vary based on many factors, not least of which will be the quality of the analysts doing the fusion and the level and breadth of access they have to various sources of intelligence and information.

As for objectivity, well, there's always the danger of "falling in love with your source." Not actual love-love, you understand; just losing objectivity.

"Everything is always clear on Monday morning to the intelligence pathologist. But everyone who died in the Sunday game is still dead."

Harsh. But not untrue.

"Lack of Objectivity is even more damaging to the intelligence cause."

If you already have a conclusion, then why go through the motions of the intelligence process, why do all that collection and analysis, unless as a form of theater?

"(P)eople have agendas. They want to see the world in certain ways — whether the world is really like that or not — because their political masters want to view the world in that way. So you distort intelligence and if you want a world in which there are no jihadis, only right wing Neo-Nazis, then you get a world with only right wing Neo-Nazis.

The result of course, is that bad stuff happens. And here’s the third rule of intelligence failure which the CIA document omits. The really useful thing about post-mortems on failures is not what you learn, but who you can blame. The entire purpose of a post-mortem is to protect bias in the system. The result in these cases is that the least powerful bias is sacrificed to the gods. Such a sacrificial victim becomes the designated Fall Guy." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

3/22

re: "In Your Face"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club ("the blogger formerly known as Wretchard") explained our logistical and political difficulty.

Money quote(s):

"Translation: Both you and I know we’ve stabbed you in the back, but keep paying us and like it.

How can Islamabad have the temerity to act like this? Well consider their hand. Pakistan’s biggest ace in the hole lies in being able to hold Afghanistan, Barack Obama’s strategic centerpiece in his war against terror, hostage. The full price of waging operations in an area that can’t be supplied from the sea has become apparent. America is maritime power and to conduct land warfare without being able to look back on the sea is to forgo a major source of strategic strength. In fact Afghanistan is the only major military operation in US history, apart from the Indian wars, in which America had to supply its troops largely through a foreign power’s sovereign territory.

That choice to shift emphasis to Afghanistan gave Pakistan veto power over the major part of NATO’s ground effort. Its multinational character made it a particularly expensive political investment. And it was all conditional on Pakistan’s support."

How's that working out for us?

9/23

re: "See No Evil"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club described some uncomfortable truths.

Money quote(s):

"When Admiral Mike Mullen told the Senate that Pakistan directed the attack on the US embassy in Kabul it probably surprised no one. And when the Spectator sadly concluded that the Euro has finally been proved a swindle, probably not many were shocked many either. America has been stabbed in the back by it’s allies; its ‘partners against terrorism’. And Europe has been misled by its leaders."

Pakistan is, like unto it's near-neighbor Iran, is not a monolithic unitary entity. Not just within its governmental structure, but even within its military and intelligence organs there are factions and competing power bases, each with their own sets of interests and agendas.

So yes, Pakistanis.

(As for Europe's leaders, well, that's what you get for electing prime ministers and the like through a parliamentary system rather than the way we do it here. Our accountability mechanism isn't so diffuse as theirs is.)

"Did anyone expect the US to reorient its position away from Afghanistan and confront Pakistan? Does anyone believe the EU will give up the Euro, even if it is manifestly ruining them? Policy is no longer the art of doing the right thing. It is the craft of carrying forward a narrative.

Mullen said that “with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” and “we also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.” Most tellingly he added “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” Pakistan attacked the national territory of a country at which it was at peace, that had supported it in the past diplomatically and from which it receives billions of dollars in aid. It was an act as perfidious as the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Nor is this the worst of it. It is not inconceivable to think that al-Qaeda was also a “veritable arm of Pakistan’s ISI, though perhaps with assistance from the Middle East."

Politics is the art of the possible. As long as we remain engaged in Afghanistan, we need Pakistan. So Pakistan, and its sub-entities, get cut a lot of slack.

That being said, anyone who thinks we're in Afghanistan for the long haul is much more optimistic (if that's the right word) than CAA has been since 9/11. So Pakistan should enjoy its "immunity" while it can.

(In a more civilized age, I'd be confident that somewhere, in a Quiet Room, someone is making a little list.)

"(J)ust as the appeasers have now about abolished the last remaining justification for national self defense and as the Left continued to operate on the Western side of the Berlin Wall in the guise of their transnational schemes, nothing in recent history indicates that being correct about an issue settles anything. Being right has nothing to do with politics. It’s what you can sell that counts."

Once the Berlin Wall came down (and after the Left completed a period of ritual mourning), the reds re-branded themselves as greens, social democrats, &tc. It wasn't, for them, a very far walk after all. (And continued their struggle against human liberty, &tc.)

"The market is writing down the value of the world economy. Right across the board. It is making a judgement on what they think the future is worth. By recent numbers, not much. Not just because policymakers have gotten it wrong about the “root cause” of terrorism, or the Euro; but also about “Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming, to name a few. The financial, national security and educational systems of the world are in utter collapse because they are stuffed with lies, which even when they are shown to be obviously false suck up trillions of dollars in their pursuit. And nothing will turn the global elites from continuing their ruinous path until they have spent the last nickle and dime they can lay their hands on. Certainly not the media." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Garbage in, garbage out. And if you find enough ratholes to throw enough money down (e.g., "“Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming"), you ought not be surprised that there's an economic cost.

"Neither the BBC nor any of the similar organizations which have jointly created our fantasy world will return to honesty. Not until it annihilates itself into bankruptcy along with all the other causes it touted and supported."

9/22

re: "Bayes and Nice People"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club ("My main interests are in software, history and information.") remarked on some intellectuals recanting their views.

Money quote(s):

"Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan are intelligent, well-educated people. Nobody has seriously suggested they are either perverse or evil. Now they see the truth. But once upon a time they didn’t have a clue. So the disturbing question is: how did they get it wrong? Setting aside for a moment the fact that someone slipped past, the most pressing problem is to determine why the system failed."

At least two of the three are, nominally, considered conservative. Noonan's really the only one of the three I'm fairly certain about.

"(G)iven his near absolute lack of a substantial track record, it was natural for Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan to be taken for a ride. Not because they were dumb, but because they were “quality” people.

Now the quality people can see certain kinds of truth, because they are familiar with the sort of data that now alarms them. Now that they can observe the betrayal of Israel, the lunacy of Obamanomics, and the erratic management, the full magnitude of their error becomes apparent. But they didn’t see it at the outset; lurking on the edge of his expression as he campaigned, nor in the little niggling inconsistencies the media was determined to ignore. Now the problems are as big as life: upheaval in the Middle East, the bankruptcy of the country, the scandals of the administration."

&

"But there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit."

That's the scary part.

9/20

re: "Countersign"

"There is one thing no head of a country can know and that is: how good is his intelligence system? He finds out only by having it fail him." - R.A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club has given some big civic-political issues some serious thought.

Money quote(s):

"Walter Russell Mead asks whether Pakistan is at war with the US. “The United States government believes it has evidence linking the Haqqani network, a terrorist organization which has repeatedly carried out attacks against US government personnel and positions, with the government of Pakistan.” Maybe before Haqqani the network of choice was “al-Qaeda”.

Today “war” is less to do with armies of millions marching across borders than with skilled operators backed by millions of dollars. What the Pakistanis might have done is take over the Saudi connection built during the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan and turn it to their own purposes. Then they could wage “intelligence war” on the United States. The public wouldnt necessarily know. As the WMD Commission report concluded the man on the street would probably only find out when the attack was already under way.

Today, we mostly wait for foreign intelligence officers to appear on our doorstep before we even take notice. The lion’s share of our counterintelligence resources are expended inside the United States despite the fact that our adversaries target U.S. interests globally."

The U.S. really does have people, trained people, who consider these issues on a daily basis. Unfortunately, by all outward appearances, it would seem as if the leadership they report to don't take them all that seriously. (And that's the charitable interpretation.)

"The sum total of these foreign intelligence efforts is striking. During the Cold War, every American national security agency—with the possible exception of the Coast Guard—was penetrated by foreign intelligence services. Moreover, in just the past 20 years CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, NRO, and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have all been penetrated. Secrets stolen include nuclear weapons data, U.S. cryptographic codes and procedures, identification of U.S. intelligence sources and methods (human and technical), and war plans. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the damage that foreign intelligence penetrations have caused.

Some of that juice is certainly going to manifest itself in lobbying and political influence peddling. Indeed, the most fertile ground for “intelligence war” will be in Washington DC itself. Here the potential leverage is greatest, mostly by affecting the form in which “policy questions” are posed. If the questions are phrased right so that all the answers lead nowhere then America might not even recognize it had an enemy at all, except for a bunch of people it has wronged and ought to feel sorry for. If intelligence operations were correctly designed then 9/11 might in memory become just another tragedy" (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

A free and democratic political system is no guarantee against subversion and active measures by a foreign intelligence service. In some ways, all that freedom and openness actually makes us more vulnerable. It certainly makes us a dangerous adversary (and thus a target) for lots of unsavory folks.

"The most important function that Israel performed in the Middle East was to serve as a scapegoat upon which to vent political dissent within the repressive countries in the region. It was the “far enemy” that regional dictators used to distract their populations so that they would forget the “near enemy”."

Remember who are the "Great Satan" and the "Lesser Satan."

"The media (once called the “press”) was supposed to Americas defense against foreign political intelligence operations. The media is not only the open source world’s main “intelligence agency”, but also its main counterintelligence organ. But if it has performed poorly as the former, it has worked even worse in the latter role. While the blogosphere is full of screeds inveighing against the MSM’s spinning of the news narrative, relatively less has been written about what it does not choose to investigate. And yet it is in what it does not attempt to cover, rather than what it covers poorly where the media’s main failure may be.

Although we can deduce that a very active political intelligence war is probably being waged by foreign powers in Washington DC you almost never hear the press write about it. That is either because it does not really exist or simply because these questions are not asked. If history is any guide, the revelations will come from foreign correspondents who will run into foreign operatives eager to talk about what no one will believe exists. Or perhaps it will come from declassified documents far the future. Traditionally, it is sources from the other side rather than internal security investigators who reveal the presence of hostile operations.

It was the Venona transcripts, derived from signals intercepts for example, that ultimately showed Julius Rosenberg to be a spy and indicated that many of Joseph McCarthy’s accusations were in fact true. The public never learned the truth from the Government during the Cold War. They didn’t learn the truth from the media either."

Readers of the Cold War classic "The Spike" will recall the media itself being a priority target for subversion and compromise of a free society.

"The Fall of the Berlin Wall may have marked the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it may not have marked the end of the Shadow War. Is Pakistan at War with America? Who in the Middle East is America’s friend? Have the perpetrators of 9/11 been brought to justice? It is politicians who answer these questions and if foreign powers start supporting politicians, who’s to stop them?

Domestic counterintelligence is largely a function of the FBI. The problem with that arrangement is that many of the objects of foreign influence are the agency’s civilian superiors. Either the FBI becomes a law unto itself and watches the President or it becomes a plaything of the President and watches his political enemies.

Clearly the utility of the FBI as an agency able to fend off Senators, Congressmen or other high officials under the influence of foreign powers is limited. Therefore the ability to blow the whistle on an illegitimate (however you want to define this) agency of influence belongs in the political process itself, probably largely through the press."

What can America's counterintelligence organs, such as the FBI, really do to defend against high-level agents of influence such as Mr. Fernandez posits? Outside of Ludlum-esque fantasies involving assassinations and arranged "accidents," not too much. The American system for ensuring the (Constitutional) fidelity of its elected officials is the election itself, with vetting conducted on behalf of the people themselves by our press (and by opposing candidates).

"Political counterintelligence is what the “gatekeepers” do, but the lesson of the last decade is that they are probably not doing it too well."

Once upon a time, major cities would have newspapers (plural) that leaned Republican as well as Democrat, or neither. With all but Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere utterly in the tank for just one party, that party gets a pass on actual scrutiny. Witness the court proceedings no afoot in Georgia, deliberating over whether the presidential incumbent will even be on the ballot this time around.

Say what you like about "birthers," but if the media had done any due diligence four years ago (beyond paeans to the Democratic candidate's multiple biographies), this sort of thing would have no traction at all.

"The two party system is largely the guardian of legitimacy. Back in the day both parties were far more accountable to local leaders than they are today. The emergence of a permanent political and media class has meant that notions of “legtimacy” (sic) — they would call it bigotry — at the grassroots count for less and less.

This centralizing tendency has meant that it becomes easier for foreign shadow warriors to “capture the flag” due to the nodal nature of its structure. The best political counterintelligence activity is ironically reforming governance and bringing back the power to local levels insofar as possible. It is far harder for Middle Eastern potentates to capture 50 states than it is for them to capture DC."

9/19

re: "No Foe, No Friend"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club discussed having it both ways (or not).

Money quote(s):

"Walter Russell Mead, writing in American Interest, believes the root of the problem is that the President wants to fight terrorism in two potentially contradictory ways: as a war and a non-war; as combat and as law enforcement. In his view the Al-Awlaki operation highlights the problem of trying to have it both ways at once."

It's interesting how this circle has been squared. Rightly or wrongly, then-presidential candidate Sen. Kerry was vilified for comparing international terrorism for comparing international terrorism to a law enforcement problem such as prostitution (IIRC). But keeping one's options open is generally thought to be a good thing.

"(W)hat Walter Russell Mead believes and what Barack Obama believes are two different things. While Mead may want clarity, Barack Obama is following the time honored political tradition of creating two sets of rules which he can separately invoke as convenience demands. When it suits him to act the “law enforcement officer” in order to mollify his left wing base and European opinion, then he will don that hat. When it suits him to act like a Commander in Chief to prevent the eventuation of a threat (which would lose votes), he will don the other other hat."

We should be thankful that sufficient motivation exists for acting like a commander in chief.

"The basic cultural problem is the media has conditioned the public not to be able to handle the truth. Certain segments of the public want safety but don’t want to be told how it is obtained."

"You can't handle the truth!"?

Well, judging by what we've seen of the Occupy Wall Street phenomena, Solyndra, and other stories, there's no desire on the parts of many to be told the truth, at least not by those who those many are likely to be listening.

"But trying telling the truth on the air and a whole line of pundits will queue up to call you a bigot and warmonger; except when the same set of people aren’t demanding that you do the opposite to be kept safe. Walter Russell Mead is right. You can’t have it both ways. But it is politically incorrect to say so. Therefore people like Judyth Hill of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation can say with a straight face that our response to September 11 should be to “make soup … Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown fields”. This passes for wisdom and if you disagree you’re a bigot.

And since logic like that can stand as public policy, we will inevitably reap its logical conclusion. We’ll get fantasy for fantasy. A fantasy strategy will eventually result in an imaginary victory for the protection of imaginary rights. Because what goes around comes around. You get what you pay for. So what does US citizenship count for? What in a war or under law enforcement? It is ironic that no one realized that when the clear bright line between enemy and dissident was muddled that everyone would wind up in the same pot. When there are no enemies — except sometimes, then there will be no rights — except sometimes."

10/2

re: "The Pound of Flesh"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club examines where sub-state warfare is heading.

Money quote(s):

"Warfare is older than the modern state. When the Strategy Page described what it calls “vigilante warfare” by Israeli settlers on members of Hamas it might have been talking about a process of “going native”. In the Middle East the tradition of pre-Westphalian warfare is strong. Private war, from the action of clans against other clans to the sponsorship of belligerence by warlords never completely went out of style."

It took centuries for it to go "out of style" even in the Westphalian-style nation-states of Western Europe, where it never truly died out. Inter-state warfare is something of a historical curiousity really, sort of like jousting.

"One of the great innovations of the Westphalian system was that private individuals who had previously been responsible for visting retribution, were supposed to leave justice — and warfare — to the state. For as long as the population trusted the King (or the State) to punish criminals and protect them from foreign attack, private individuals were content to leave things in the hands of uniformed officialdom.

But a strange thing happened on the way to the 21st century: political correctness as imposed by a variety of lawyers, human rights activists and the like progressively reduced the power of the state to defend its population against external aggressors to the point where it failed to provide an adequate level of protection. When private individuals could no longer rely on uniformed officialdom to protect them, they did the natural thing. They took the matter of warfare back into their own hands."

The truly scarey thing isn't mentioned by Mr. Fernandez; what happens when political correctness so contrains Western law enforcement that Western citizenry again takes up torches, pitchforks, and hayrakes? We're likely to see this sooner in places like France, the Benelux, Nordic states, and British isles before here (but I could be wrong about that).

"(I)n doing away with the Westphalian system, political correctness unintentionally — or perhaps unthinkingly — undermined the Laws of War. The whole panoply of uniforms, ranks, discipline and obedience — so hated by pacifists — were all Westphalian mechanisms designed to ensure some kind of law and order on the battlefield. By taking the armies out of the game, the disciples of political correctness didn’t end war; they merely ended the old rules of war and returned the field to private warfare.

Maybe that isn’t too bad. If the 20th century is any gauge, Westphalian Armies did precious little to prevent widespread loss of life. Indeed World War 2, a Westphalian War, was the most devastating episode of belligerence in human history. For all its ugliness, one might argue that private war sheds less blood than the regular kind per unit of time. Unfortunately it also did away with that other Westphalian innovation, Victory. World War 2 for all its destructiveness had one great virtue. It ended. Today wars are far less destructive. The bad news is they never end.

Today warfare is no longer entirely a matter of soldiers fighting each other under the Geneva Convention. Instead, it every man for himself; it is the knife in the dark, the molotov cocktail thrown from the passing car and the IED along the road."

Modern armies operating under the Geneva Conventions as various international jurists would have them interpret it do suffer from systemic disadvantages. But the laws of warfare, as written, aren't actually intended to disadvantage those who follow them.

"It is what happens when vigilantes take a leaf out of Hamas’ book and start waging non-Westphalian warfare on the international agencies that should keep them up at night. The Strategy Page notes that nonstate actors have long had recourse to methods of intimidation denied to Westphalian states."

State actors have their own advantages, but they must be willing to exercise them.

"At the limit non-state actors can simply frighten the UN or the humanitarians into agreeing to their demands out of pure fear. The Canal Hotel bombing, directed by al-Qaeda in Iraq against the United Nations, killed a top UN bureaucrat and 22 others and ultimately led to the withdrawal of most UN staffers from Baghdad. The UN responded by declaring The World Humanitarian Day — they could have hardly taken a hard line against the private warfare directed against them."

This is why lots of people no longer view many international and "humanitarian" actors as being neutrals. There's a reason why the Colombians (IIRC) were able to rescue some long-held hostages by posing as members of an NGO whom the kidnappers believed to be neutral-in-their-favor.

10/31

re: "You mean, now?"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club shared some observations on the disconnect between policy and practice.

Money quote(s):

"President Obama has failed to lay the legal groundwork for acts of targeted killing of “non-state enemies of the United States” and thereby risks impaling itself on the horns of a dilemma of his own making. By relying on “international humanitarian law” instead of asserting its own legal doctrine, the Obama administration will eventually find that it cannot defend the United States without condemning itself by the legal standard it has embraced."

Ouch.

"The really interesting thing about the administration’s increase in the use of targeted hits, its unwillingness to take custody of prisoners and indeed to hand them over to people like the Pakistani military; and indeed its declining ability to take any enemy combatant alive at all is that it is rooted not in what Anderson called Dick Cheney’s “brutish, simplistic” determination to defend America, but in President Obama’s desire to live up to the highest standards of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)."

That would the the Law of Unintended Consequences in operation.

Remember: you can't do just one thing.

&

"The problem goes back to the inability of political leadership to declare war and name an enemy. America is at war yet not at war. It is fighting an enemy, but none are named. It is fighting a something which respects no rules by applying the full protection of the Constitution to enemy combatants. And the predictable result of these contradictions is that it is tying itself into philosophical knots."

re: "A brilliant post"

KG at Crusader Rabbit ("For Liberty") highlights a recent post by Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club.

Money quote(s):

"(W)hen the Best and the Brightest are actually forced to find a solution to a crisis the result is inevitably the Last Helicopter out of Saigon."