Benghazi thoughts

The Benghazi story certainly seems to have heated-up again this week, with three “whistle-blowers” reportedly coming forward to testify before Congress.

CAA has a few thoughts and observations, but first the caveats and digressions.

Caveat #1:  CAA has neither personal involvement nor knowledge about the Benghazi attack, events leading up to it, and the aftermath/cover-up (beyond, that is, what’s available to all from what we like to call “open sources”).

CAA has read the (unclassified) ARB report on Benghazi; CAA assumes there’s (at least one) classified version.  If I can ever allocate some free time and share some thoughts on the ARB report itself, I’ll do so.

There are so many aspects and questions left begging by the Benghazi attack that it’s hard to know where to start.  DiploMad provided a handy list of some of those here.  

--What was that facility meant to do?--Why was it so poorly protected?--Why did the Ambassador go there on September 11 of all dates?--What was he doing there on that date that was so important?--Why did he meet a Turkish diplomat there of all places on that of all dates?--Why was political hack Susan Rice sent out to do the Administration's cover up?--Why was it so hard for the media to "discover"who wrote Rice's talking points?--Why were the people present during the attack not made available for the press or others?--Where was Hillary Clinton throughout this mess?--Where was the President?--What was the President told? What did he say? 

But I have some thoughts I’d like to meander though a bit.

Leading up to the attack, there are several issues.  WTF we were doing at a facility in Benghazi is certainly a relevant question, given that it was not a consulate (no consular services were being provided there so far as anyone can tell) and the U.S. embassy had re-opened in Tripoli subsequent to the fall of Qaddafi’s government.  It’s a good question; what were we doing in Benghazi that was sufficiently important that we had U.S. personnel in a risky security environment, but since I don’t know myself beyond educated guesswork I’ll only address that in a general way.

“The Gee” (or U.S. government) has more than 260 diplomatic posts open abroad at any given time.  Countries with which we have full diplomatic relations generally merit a U.S. embassy headed by an ambassador (although some smaller countries make do with having a U.S. ambassador accredited to them who is actually resident in a neighboring or nearby country).  Important inter-/transnational organizations such as the UN, NATO, or the EU get a U.S. mission, also headed by a U.S. ambassador.  Within quite a few larger countries, or where there are particular economic or historic reasons to do so, there are various consulates and consulates general that fall (almost always) under the authority of a particular U.S. embassy (and U.S. ambassador).  (The differences between a consulate and a consulate general are technical and mostly seem to have to do with a post’s size.)

Many embassies (or consulates/consulates general) will also have consular agencies at locations remote from them where it’s useful to have a sort of branch office to offer consular services to U.S. citizens in that location.

Speaking of branch offices, those sometimes exist, as do “liaison offices,” and a host of other odd facilities mostly having to do with what State likes to call “tenant agencies.”

“Tenant agencies” are simply those U.S. federal agencies which operate overseas under the umbrella (and authority) of a chief of mission (COM; i.e., a U.S. ambassador in charge of a country mission).  In larger missions those can be a virtual alphabet soup as quite a few federal agencies have one international focus or another.  To give some common examples, the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. Marshal Service (USMS) are all law enforcement agencies with a need to station their people abroad, as are several of the agencies which comprise DHS such as ICE or CBP or even USCG (the Coast Guard).

Much of the time, these folks work out of their embassy’s chancery or other office facility on or near the embassy compound.  In other instances, it’s not unusual for a “tenant agency” to have a building or compound of its own.  One example of that is U.S. Embassy Cairo, which has (or used to have) not only a group of folks from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) keeping an eye on potential epidemics but some representatives of the Library of Congress (LOC), presumably on a permanent book-buying mission.  Both of those “tenant agencies” had their own building or compound nowhere near the embassy itself.

So after all that explanation, let’s just say it’s a reasonable enough assumption to make that the “facility” in Benghazi was housing one or more tenant agencies.

(Digression #1 - A detour of thought:  CAA has had a Top Secret clearance or the equivalent for more than 30 years.  It was over 20 years ago when I realized that, on certain subjects, even my educated guesses on certain subjects were, themselves, classified.  So don’t hold your breath waiting for me to get all speculate-y about the purpose of our Benghazi facility.  It either was or was-not a classified activity.  CAA doesn’t work that part of the world currently, isn’t read-onto anything related to the Benghazi facility, and reads many of the same open source articles that you do.  In the absence of any actual knowledge, I’m not going to guess in a public forum.).

Caveat #2 - CAA doesn’t know what the Benghazi facilities’ purpose was.  It might have been classified in nature, but that’s not terribly remarkable by itself either, even in a diplomatic facility.  Classifications and classified activities have to do with national security, which is not limited to military secrets but extends far beyond that to include much of the inside work of diplomacy and international relations.

Digression #2 - Another digression, this one about security classifications, national security, and diplomacy.  In the U.S. government, information is classified at one of three levels, depending upon the degree of damage to national security that its compromise or inadvertent release would cause.  “Unclassified” means simply that and isn’t, technically, a security classification.  The three levels of classification are Confidential. Secret, and Top Secret.

When it comes to deciding who gets to know what about classified matters, there are two principles employed:  level of access (i.e., security clearance) and need-to-know (NTK).  The second principle, when applied in a formal and regulated manner, is what gives us things like “codeword access,” “special access,” and “compartmented information.”

Backtrack a moment to the bit about damaging national security.  CAA isn’t going to go out on a laughably long limb and suggest that national security and security classifications have never been misused to avoid political embarrassment.  That assertion would be silly.

So let’s talk, briefly, about what security was provided in Benghazi before the 9/11/2012 attacks.

Physical security measures (walls, alarm systems, &tc.) required for U.S. diplomatic facilities are fully specced-out by existing law and regulation, in this instance Volume 5 of the 5 series Foreign Affairs Handbook (FAH) or 12 FAH 5.  Whenever physical security doesn't meet those standards, someone at a very high level is on the hook for having signed a waiver or exception, either temporary or permanent.  Hindsight being 20-20, CAA isn't going to sharpshoot those decisions if the procedures themselves were followed, as the ARB (IIRC) suggests they were.

(For those interested in the topic of physical security as it applies to U.S. embassies, I recommend regular visits to The Skeptical Bureaucrat.  TSB worked in that field long before I ever came to it and remained in it long after CAA went off to the consular salt mines.)

But I will suggest that the standards and procedures, if they haven't been already, might need a fresh going-over in light of the Benghazi experience.  And here's why:

Back in the time period leading up to the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, physical security standards at individual embassies were different depending upon the security threat levels for terrorism in that particular country.  So, since Kenya was at that time a Low or Medium Threat (for terrorism) country, our embassy in Nairobi was only believed to require the security measures for a Low/Medium threat.

Nature abhors a vacuum, water flows downhill, and bad actors will seek out more vulnerable targets, whether they are pickpockets, rapists, or international terrorists.  The thing we hadn't yet internalized about international terrorists was just how international they were prepared to be.

So we changed how did things; security standards became more uniform and applied broadly around the world.  This made sense in a couple of other ways too.  Embassies and consulates are big-ticket items with working life-cycles many decades long.  I think a modern office building can expect at least a 60 year life cycle (figure on at least one renovation/refurbishment in that timeframe) and the sort of robust, purpose-built security architecture involved in our embassies probably extends that lifetime to something closer to a century.

So during a 60-100 year building life, it's not unreasonable to predict that security conditions and threat will fluctuate some, and it's really hard to make a building more robust and security decades after you built it.

CAA won't be around to see it, but I fully predict that many of our recently-constructed "fortress embassies" will outlast the countries in which we've built them.

Getting back to Benghazi, the DS bureau is probably taking a serious look at how physical standards were applied in Benghazi and considering whether it's time for another paradigm shift.

That's the physical security piece, in a nutshell.  As for requests for additional security officers (DS agents), DoD security details, and the like, clearly (in hindsight) some of post's requests for additional security should have been approved rather than disapproved or ignored.  Easy to say in hindsight and we've already seen a systemic change within DS as to how those sorts of requests are going to be handled in the future.  Greg Starr, the likely next DS assistant secretary is a retired RSO with long experience in this area and is someone who can, if others don't get in the way, be trusted to make needed changes.

As for those who made the wrong calls, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of the sort of Employee Efficiency Rating (EER) they're likely to get this year.  But a mistake in judgment is not the same as a crime.  Transfer or retirement may be the appropriate sanctions.

Now, today's testimony before Congress may have answered some questions (and raised even more) about what happened when, who made what decisions to act or refrain from action, and so forth.  The testimony went on for several hours so I expect the transcripts will amount to a considerable vein of information that will be mined extensively, and blogged-to-death, over the next few days.

Some CAA opinions:  First, CAA was never so embarrassed as an FSO as when then-SecState Clinton said:

"What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Up to that point, CAA (no Clinton partisan he) would honestly state that Sec. Clinton's tenure at the Department had not been so bad as he'd feared, that she had done some good things (her positive interest in the welfare of American citizens abroad was widely known and remarked-upon in consular circles), and that while some of her policy focus went beyond what's passed as traditional diplomacy (women's issues, LGBT, &tc.) that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone.

That was then.  After her it-just-doesn't matter rant, I couldn't really say that anymore.  The true Clinton colors had been unfurled from mothballs and political viability and presidential electability was again the name of the game.

We shall see what we shall see, in the coming months and years.

Security Decisions, part the second

This earlier post discussed the application of security standards to existing buildings in terms of some of the limitations that reality imposed.  That is, that along with prohibitive expense, the practicality of such endeavors rests firmly somewhere in the range between Extremely Difficult and Bliddy Impossible.

Diplomacy, like politics, is an art of the possible.  Diplomatic security must matrix both the imperative to provide security, to protect, with the need to carry out  the diplomatic mission itself.  Sometimes that means that the security situation is so dire that the diplomatic mission must be abandoned; other times the diplomatic mission will be considered so imperative that security measures take a backseat.  Or are adapted to fit the situation.  Thus we have active and ongoing diplomatic missions, and have for years, in countries where we would otherwise have shuttered our embassies and evacuated our staff.  E.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Libya might be considered a reasonable addition to that list.

States are responsible, under the Vienna Conventions and customary international law, for providing the protection necessary to secure those diplomatic and consular facilities which it has accepted within its territory.  Not being an area expert on Libya specifically or the Mahgreb generally (but not being completely ignorant of those regions either), the question of just how much control the new, post-Qhadafi, central government of Libya has beyond the city limits of Tripoli seems fairly relevent with respect to how much the U.S. should have relied upon them to provide adequate security to our facilities in Benghazi.

Just what the purpose of the U.S. mission in Benghazi was is still very much an open question, the opening of an “American Corner” notwithstanding.  But its purpose(s) were (was?) of sufficient importance to the accomplishing of the larger goals of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya that:

- It was established in the first place (to the accompaniment of whatever security waivers and exceptions may have been necessary to do so); and

- It remained upon until it was destroyed; and

- Amb. Stevens believed it necessary to travel there on as inauspicious a date as the 11^th anniversary of 9/11.

Now, CAA is going to pull back the gauzy veil that obscures some of the nuts-and-bolts of actual diplomacy with some observations and caveats.

Caveat #1:  CAA doesn’t know what the purpose of the Benghazi mission (beyond what little can be found at the embassy website) was because it is not now nor has it ever been part of my professional portfolio.  If there’s some especially classified aspect to that mission, as a professional matter CAA has had no need-to-know.  So I don’t know.

Caveat #2:  As someone who’s held a top secret clearance since before he could legally drink hard liquer, CAA realized decades ago that the possession of certain secrets meant that forever after, with respect to some fields of endeavor, even my guesses could be considered to be classified information.  So there are quite a fews things about which, due to the meandering nature of what I laughingly describe as my “career path,” CAA does not speculate aloud.  And CAA certainly does not do so in public fora such as the internet.

Observation #1:  Technically, there are a few clearcut categories of U.S. diplomatic facilities located overseas:  embassies, consulates general, and consulates. 

(But real life is never that neat and clearly delineated.)

Observation #2:  Since the breakup of Yugoslavia (if not before) and U.S. intervention in the Balkans, the State Department came up with things called “U.S. Liaison Offices” (or “USLO”).  These were kinda/sorta consulates, in that they often performed the sorts of services usually associated with U.S. consulates, but were generally not intended as permanent facilities.  USLOs sometimes get upgraded into more-or-less permanent posts and become consulates or consulates general; other times they are eventually closed.  The U.S. has continued using this model in places like Iraq.

Observation #3:  Once upon a time, CAA used to go TDY from the U.S. and participate in surveys of various U.S. diplomatic facilities.  Never mind what kind of surveys:  the point is that my teams would visit every U.S. diplomatic office in a particular country.  Off the top of my head I did that in eight or nine countries around Africa and the Middle East.  In some of the countries where we had a largish diplomatic presence, we might have “official” Americans scattered in penny-parcels across a vast landscape, all of them falling under the authority of the chief of mission (i.e., the U.S. ambassador) and all of the going about the legitimate business of foreign affairs, international development, or military assistance (to list just three examples).

So I don’t find it especially mysterious or troubling that the U.S. had an official office-building in Benghazi that wasn’t formally flagged as a consulate (or consulate general) under a U.S. consul (or consul general).

Foreign Service Family

The latest figures I’ve seen show State Dept. as having 16,631 Civil Service (i.e., GS or “General Schedule” and Senior Executive Service or SES) employees, 44,764 Locally-Engaged Staff (i.e., what used to be called “Foreign Service Nationals,”) who are predominantly foreign nationals but also FS family members employed at our missions overseas, and only 13,636 Foreign Service staff members, including both Foreign Service Specialists (FSS) and “Generalists.”

The Foreign Service is a very small corps, overall.  It’s been said, truthfully, in this and other fora that there are more Army bandsmen than U.S. diplomats, more military lawyers in the Pentagon, &tc.

Looked at through the other end of the telescope, it’s also something of a very large extended family.  We’re pretty spread out, it’s true, but we get our orientation, language, and professional training in the same place, through the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) at Arlington Hall.  Then we work in widely dispersed locations around the world or across the country, oftentimes living in the same buildings or on the same residential compounds with our co-workers (with your kids going to the same schools) before winging back to D.C. to work at “Main State” in Foggy Bottom (near the GWU campus) or one of the various State Annex facilities scattered around Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

After awhile, the “degrees of separation” narrow down pretty far, so that if you don’t know someone in the Foreign Service personally, from having worked or trained with them, chances are pretty good that someone you have worked or trained with has worked or trained with them.  Or your spouse has.

So when something like Benghazi happens, where a senior foreign service officer/ambassador like Chris Stevens is killed, along with a long-time Information Management Officer (IMO) like Sean Smith and two of our contract employees, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, it hits home.  It’s like four of your fellow citizens in small hometown were suddenly murdered.

There’s a sudden and visceral impact, something like hearing of casualties from another military unit within the same division.  You might not have known them yourself, but you know you’ve walked the same hallways, sat in the same classrooms, and have similar missions facing similar dangers.

Another of those factoids that comes up from time to time is how there have been more ambassadors killed in the line of duty, since World War II, than general officers or admirals.  That remains true.

(One columnist or commenter, I forget where, voiced the criticism that if, in a decade of warfare, not a single general has been killed, our senior military leaders are leading from too far behind.)

Much of Main State emptied out, apparently, in order to be bused to Andrews AFB for attendance at a sort of ceremonial or memorial reception of the four caskets containing our fallen diplomats.   It was pretty well-attended, by all accounts, although marred somewhat by the behavior of those who simply had, in contravention of their instructions, to raise their arms in a sort of fascist salute as they took cell phone pictures.

(And don’t quibble with about whether our two ex-SEAL colleagues count as diplomats.  If they were part of our diplomatic mission in Libya, that’s good enough for me.)

Ping

Just to be clear, CAA is not dead, injured, committed to an asylum, nor otherwise being held incommunicado.

Nor have the Tigers (or Black Dragons) eaten me.

CAA has been the victim of a horrible plot to "upgrade" my Blogger/Blogspot experience.

Oh joy.  My "experience" is now so upgraded that I'm seriously considering giving up on the whole thing entirely.

In other news, there's been lots of goings-on ongoing in CAA's world.  Which is your world, come to think of it.  So you likely have heard all about most of it.

There are many conflicting reports about the events of this year's 9/11 attacks.  Which is what I'm calling them.  Because that's what they were.

CAA has no special knowledge of those events, privileged or otherwise.  CAA's clearances and accesses simply don't run to those areas these days.  So if I opine just a bit, it's not like I'll be betraying any confidences.

So if, between my cranky home computer and this annoying-as-Hell "upgrade, I can manage to sketch out a more topical post, well, don't hold your breath.

Marking 9/11

CAA's observances of the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 began much like that fateful day itself. It was a normal, pleasant, sunny September day in Washington begun with the usual morning routine and ablutions, followed by a fairly typical commute involving sluggish traffic and/or crowded Metrorail cars.

That day, as did today, a brand-spanking-new A-100 class had just commenced the day before at the Foreign Service Institute: the 169th today and the 104th back in 2001. So the not-particularly-cloistered hallways and common spaces, not to mention the over-burdened parking lot and cafeteria, at the Schultz Center were clogged with the shiny, smiling faces of the newly-annointed.

By the end of today's workday, reports from two of our Middle Eastern posts, in Libya and in Egypt, would bring news of angry mobs, damaged or looted buildings, and casualties.

Back on that fateful day, the trouble came much closer to home.

Even at this decade-plus remove, it is still difficult to put the 9/11 attacks into a bloodless, intellectual perspective. It's just too soon, the wounds are perhaps scabbed or scarred over but remain all too fresh.

So we remember our fallen, remember that many of them did not fall but had to jump to their deaths rather than burn alive, and are thankful for the many who survived. We remember the fire fighters and other first-responders, the police, the veterans-turned-private-citizens, and the passengers and crew of Flight 93 and while we mourn their loss we also celebrate their sacrifice and count ourself fortunate that such men and women yet live among us.

We also look at the last eleven years and marvel at the hundreds of thousands of American and allied soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and others who rallied to their colors and fought (and still fight) the wars their countries asked them to fight. CAA will take quiet (okay, sometimes not-so-quiet) pride in having once been among their number.

Are there lessons we should have learned from our experiences of the last 11 years? Almost certainly. But today the lesson that's over-shadowed my every interaction has been rage.

CAA isn't done being angry. While that's undoubtedly a huge personal failing on my part and something I should pray upon to Jesus most sincerely, it's not simply that I'm stuck somewhere between denial, grief, and acceptance. There's a bit more there that the subconscious is trying to get the intellect to comprehend.

America's enemies are still trying to hurt, humiliate, and if they can manage it, kill us. That much is clear.

What's also clear is that our enemies have a really hard time managing that anywhere close to our home shores and cities. Our enemies best efforts seem to be possible only in those places where we're trying to make nice with Janus-faced local government whose most impressive accomplishments seem to be their marvelously exact calculation of just how much mayhem they can plausibly get away with perpetrating against us.

CAA reads the news every day and wonders how anyone not blindered by wishful thinking can imagine the war is over yet. That's yet another reason he's so angry today.

re: "Obama's Misplaced Mideast Optimism"

Daniel Pipes at danielpipes.org (" Opine briefly on diverse topics ") provided some thinkery on likely fallout from the Arab Spring.

10/25

re: "New Libyan Ruler Proposes More-Radical-Than-Expected Islamic Law"

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ noted the fallability of experts and that social evolution doesn't happen overnight.

Money quote(s):

"Unexpectedly.

I am beginning to note our current cadre of putative "experts" is surprised by "unexpected" news that our non-experts actually expected (and predicted).

Perhaps "expertise" now means "idiocy.""

An "expert," as it was explained to me when I was just a wee street-agent-in-training, is either:

a. Someone from out-of-town with a briefcase; or

b. (etymology) "ex" (former or "has-been") + "spurt" (a drip under pressure).

"I've had mixed feelings about these uprisings. Some say that tearing down despots is a necessary step in the process of political maturation.

Others say that such despots will be replaced by vicious thugs worse than before.

Here's the thing: I think both are right. I think that democracy, for this part of the world, will only come after a long series of violent spasms and failures. I think one purge will give way to the next. I think one tyrant will replace the next, and then share his fate." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

&

"(T)he people of these lands are probably going to have to learn all the lessons of history that the West learned from ca. AD 1300 to the present. The Islamic world has been essentially frozen in the middle ages forever.

I suppose, if they were smart, they could skip over the long, violent process of discovering that a liberal (classic sense) democratic republic is the only system that really works, by studying our example, and applying the lessons our ancestors learned.

But of course they despise us, and despise democracy because they despise us, so they will endeavor to prove that "their" ways can work.

I think they will try virtually everything before attempting the model of the despised Western infidels." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Awhile back CAA attended a brown-bag presentation at Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

(This is not to brag, it was open to the public.)

The developing country under discussion that day was Congo (formerly Zaire) and academic superstar Francis Fukuyama was one of the speakers (although he disavowed any country-specific knowledge or experience of Congo).

The main speaker was an academic, Dr. Séverine Autesserre. From my notes:

"She noted the difficulties inherent with development and nation-building in a place like Congo due to the interconnectedness of the various mutually reinforcing political elements of nationhood: laws, representative institutions, and an independent judiciary. Perhaps her most crucial observation had to do with the unrealistic expectations of donor nations and international institutions regarding development in Congo and elsewhere. This was that nation-building in Europe and North America was a process which took centuries, five hundred or even a thousand years, to accomplish, uniting tribes and regional groups into a single nation. She deconstructed the European model of state development into three historical phases: state building to establish central institutions, development of a rule of law to limit the excesses of the state through equal protection and rights under the law, and finally institutionalizing of processes of accountability, so that state institutions and officials are accountable under the law to the people or their representatives."

(Bold typeface added for emphasis.)

Unexpectedly!

10/24

re: "Blogger Agonizes Over Col. Momo Not Being Given a Fair Trial"

Emperor Misha I at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler ("HQ of the Rottweiler Empire. An Affiliate of the VRWC.") was untroubled by Col Qadhafi's end.

Money quote(s):

"(W)e really don’t give a hoot how obviously guilty beasts like Momo get sent to hell.

You see, we tend to believe in “live by the sword, die by the sword”, just in the same way that our SympathyMeter™ doesn’t as much as register a twitch of the needle when people holier than us agonize over terrorists not being offered the full protections of the Geneva Conventions.

Momo died the way he chose to live. He had tyrannized, murdered and brutalized without ever giving a second thought to the “rights” of his victims and those victims, some of them we might add, chose to send him off to Satan in the same way."

&

"Was he given fair treatment by American standards? Of course he wasn’t, but he had deliberately chosen todisregard anything even resembling those standards for every year of his tyrannical, murderous regime, so why should he be treated differently? Because he “deserved” it?

We could think up at least four full pages of what he truly deserved, and we can assure you that the list would make even the most hardened barbarian savage vomit his guts out in fear.

His Imperial Majesty firmly believes that the only way you can convince somebody to play by the rules is to make it abundantly clear that if he disregards the rules, then the rules will be disregarded where he’s concerned too." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

10/24

re: "Libya: Muslim law and secular dreams"

McQ at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") was unsurprised at anti-secular developments in Libya.

Money quote(s):

"If your hope for the latest version of “Arab Spring” to be found in Libya was a secular democratic state, you can quickly forget the secular part of the dream."

&

"I’d love to tell you this comes as a complete surprise, but then I’d be acting like some politicians I know.

I’m certainly not going to contend that keeping Gadhafi was the best thing we could do, but let’s be clear, what has happened darn sure doesn’t seem to be an outcome that we’d have hoped to see either. At least as it now seems to be shaking out.

In that area of the world, secular dreams seem to me to be the most foolish. How that particular dream manages to stay alive among the elite of the West is beyond me. It isn’t now nor has it ever been a probable outcome of any of these so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The revolutions are steeped in Islam because the governments being replaced were relatively secular for the area and the Islamic groups now rising were the ones being repressed."

Hope is still not a plan. (And it's not a very useful analytical tool either.)

10/24

re: "In post-Qaddafi Libya, there's still a lot of work to be done"

Dov Zakheim at Shadow Government ("Notes From The Loyal Opposition") contrasted post-Qadhafi Libya with post-Saddam Iraq, based upon remarks by Amb. Paul Bremer.

Money quote(s):

"It is noteworthy, and not a little bit ironic, that Ambassador Paul Bremer, he of the late and unlamented Coalition Provisional Authority, identified several criteria for ensuring that the departure of the dictator does indeed lead to a fundamental change in the governance of Libya. He argues, in bold typeface, that "the population must believe that the political change is real and lasting;" that "someone has to provide security;" that "a new political order must be established quickly."

It is difficult to argue with Bremer's main points."

&

"He adds that "unless some system is put in to demobilize the fighters, there is sure to be trouble." But who exactly should be the "someone" who provides security? What plans have been drawn up for a "system" to demobilize the fighters? And who will implement the plan for such a system. Surely not the United States, I hope. We have enough on our plate, both domestically and internationally. The military and financially exhausted Europeans? The Arabs? The United Nations?"

CAA doesn't see that happening, everyone's distracted by what's happening in Syria and what could happen in Iran.

"(W)ho will constitute that political order and what sort of political order will it be? There is no evidence that the current Interim Government has in mind the kind of democratic, pro-Western political order that Bremer seems to be calling for. Nor is it clear that, democratic elections notwithstanding, Iraq is pursuing policies that align with America's interests -- and that is before all American troops have left his country."

10/24

re: "Negotiations"

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor (" The Original Blog and Daybook. ") posted some thoughts on the Middle East and the Occupy movement.

Money quote(s):

"The Israelis have traded 1,000 well treated prisoners for one mistreated sergeant.

I once told then Israeli President Weizman that I didn’t know how to govern his country. Of course that was preparatory to my suggestions on what I thought they were doing wrong. I still don’t know how to govern Israel, nor do I have the stake in the outcome that the Israeli government does, but that doesn’t stop me from suggesting a different course of action.

Were it up to me to negotiate for the return of a soldier kidnapped by Hamas, I would simply ask how many Hamas officials they wanted in exchange for my sergeant. “I need to know the number, because I have Mossad standing by to make up the list of Hamas officials we will have the IDF take as prisoners. The sooner I have the number the quicker Mossad and our special forces can do their work. We can then have the exchange. Please tell me the number.” "

I rather like the way Dr. Pournelle thinks.

"I have some sympathy for those who have a lifelong debt in exchange for some years of their lives acquiring an education that is in essence worthless. They learned no history, no economics, and little else of any real value, and they have little prospect of a job until the economy revives. They saw a $Trillion spent on stimulus and bailouts with not much result other than enormous bonuses paid to people whose contribution to the world is to move money around in circles. Not much of it seems to get down to the levels where they live.

Their view of the world is somewhat distorted but their education didn’t show them how to see it all more clearly."

A university education used to mean (correct me if I'm wrong) at least a core curriculum that should have been grounded in some basic humanities (English lit., composition, world history, Western civilization, &tc.) that would at the very least given college graduates the factual and analytical basis from which to think about things and make more-or-less rational decisions.

The proliferation of hyphen-studies courses crowding out the old-fashioned syllabi have lead to this.

"(I)t does seem a bit odd that the NATO air power including a US killer drone were waiting for the cavalcade out of Sirte. It’s unlikely that they stumbled on it, or that they were maintaining air patrols there. This appears to be a reasonably well planned kill operation. As to whether it conforms to the directive of protecting the civil population of Libya I have no idea. One wonders how the Presidents of Syria and Yemen understand the messages here.

Khaddafi’s body has been subjected to practices not permitted under the Quran, so it is clear that Sharia law does not yet govern Libya.

The execution of Qadafi was no more than he deserved, and the desecration of his body echoes that of the founder of united Libya, Benito Mussolini." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

&

"Iraq will probably break up into its component provinces; almost certainly the Kurds will refuse to accept the sovereignty of Baghdad and the Shia. It is not likely that Baghdad has the means for the conquest of the Kurdish province, which may well proclaim its independence and apply for membership in the United Nations. Libya was united under the Italian rule under Mussolini. Just how strong the union between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania has been forged is not clear. There are plenty of reasons for conflict. The stakes are high, and the US has considerable interest in the matter, but it is not clear that the US has any strong influence over the outcome." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

10/24

re: "Springtime for Islamists in Libya?"

Neo-Neocon (" slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon ") is one of those who possess an Inigo Montoya-like sensibility regarding the meaning of words.

Money quote(s):

"The headline reads “interim [Libyan] ruler unveils more radical than expected plans for Islamic law.”

There’s that word again: expected. But those who thought they knew what to expect in Libya were either arrogant or daft, or both. And one of the many things that was clearly possible there was the ascendance of Islamist elements." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Wishful thinking, like hope, is not a plan. Nor is it a particularly useful analytical tool.

"David Warren contrasts the irony of the relatively orderly Bush-overseen judicial end of Saddam Hussein with Gaddafi’s extra-judicial lynching under forces promoted by Obama."

CAA has nothing but good things to say about Mr. Warren, one of our neighbors in the Great White North.

"Not unexpected at all. That’s why there is something to be said for what happened in Iraq, where—because we invaded and stuck around, despite the huge cost in blood and treasure—that country has at least a chance of coming out relatively well compared to others in the region."

From her keyboard to God's monitor.

10/24

re: "Iraq, Libya, and Imperialism"

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor (" The Original Blog and Daybook. ") shared his thoughts on NATO's Libyan intervention.

Money quote(s):

"Qaddafi was likely executed by one or another militia faction, or even by a militiaman, possibly for his possessions. He was shot by rebels, which may have been merciful compared to what they might have done with him. It’s hard to say that beating him to a pulp then shooting him out of hand wasn’t justice. Qaddafi wasn’t quite the monster that Uday Hussein was, but he’d done enough to earn his fate, and indeed the US Air Force tried to kill him with TFX fighter-bombers in the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon. They didn’t get him, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was an old fashioned harbor bombardment from the old days of Great Powers diplomacy. Reagan acted in retaliation for Libyan terrorist activities after consultation with the Congressional leadership of both parties. Had Gaddafi been killed in the raid the history of North Africa would have been considerably different.

In any event, NATO has brought the tyrant down, which must have been the mission. The official authorization for air NATO air strikes (including US acts of war) in Libya was a UN resolution mandating the protection of civilians from a Khaddafi massacre, but it’s very difficult – for me impossible – to connect an air strike against a convoy fleeing a city just before it falls to the rebels with the mission of protecting civilians. Even assuming that most of those in the convoy were military – and surely some were not since it was a chief of state and his entourage – there were likely to be civilian casualties from the air strikes, not to mention possible massacres in the looting that followed the convoy’s defeat.

And that does raise the question of whether the President of the United States has the authority to order such acts on his own authority. The UN cover mandate didn’t authorize regime change or execution of the chief of state of Libya. The President did tell Ghadaffi to get out (but apparently wasn’t willing to let him get out alive)." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

&

"The Constitution empowers Congress to declare war. The President has the authority to protect and defend the Constitution, but unlike the King of England he has not the power to make war on whomever he pleases (a right that remains with the Ministers who act for the Crown to this day). In England you must go to Parliament to get the financing to pay for a war, but the King along can declare it. That right was specifically and intentionally taken from the President and given to Congress (along with the power of the purse). Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who passionately believed that the US ought to be involved in the War in Europe that began in September 1939, understood this very well. He could promise Churchill that the US would come to Britain’s aid, but that was restricted to support until December of 1941 when Germany honored the Axis alliance and declared war after the US and Japan were at war. In those days war was considered a serious event.

The problem with going to the rescue of the Libya rebels without any declaration of war is that the US has little say in what happens next. Perhaps we shouldn’t have any say.

On the other hand, we have spent about $1 Billion on our Libyan adventure, and we don’t know what we have put into power in Tripoli. We do know that one faction claiming to speak for the rebels has said that the basis of law in Libya will be Sharia. It is clear that had we not spent the $1 Billion, Libya would either remain unified under Khaddafi or be partitioned, probably at Marble Arch. Whether that would be a better outcome than unified under Sharia law is not clear to me. It is also not at all clear that the White House thought this through before committing us to borrow a billion dollars from the Chinese in order to intervene in the Libyan civil war. Was this outcome worth the cost?"

It certainly was for someone, but not necessarily the U.S. taxpayers who'll have to pay back the Chinese. With interest.

"I am not much in favor of imperialism as a policy for the United States, but I do favor competent imperialism over the present policies. If we must have an empire, should we not be competent at it? Of course there is the problem that Afghanistan has little to nothing that we want.

I was opposed to extending our Afghan adventure beyond the punishment of the Taliban for harboring out enemies; left to me we’d have been out as soon as Kabul fell to the anti-Taliban forces, with perhaps a billion dollars in bribe money squirreled away to be spent at the discretion of whomever we left behind as resident. Our policy in Afghanistan should have been simple: don’t harbor our enemies, don’t let your country be used as a base for attacks on the US, and apply to the Ambassador if you need anything. Been good to know you. A policy, by the way, that would have been as welcome to the Afghans as to the Legions." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

CAA rather likes Dr. Pournelle's punitive expeditionary model for Afghanistan. Of course, it's much too late for that now.

"There is no way that we could leave US troops in Iraq subject to the tender mercies of the Iraqi courts. US troops are not going to be subject to Iraqi law. But can you imagine the Japanese making that sort of demand as part of their surrender in 1945?

The result of the Iraqi war? We have removed Iran’s worst enemy. We have installed a Shiite government in Iraq. We have succeeded in changing the Middle East beyond Iran’s fondest and wildest dreams. This is the result Iran has worked toward since we invaded Iraq. They have their goals. Now we go home." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA)

10/23

re: "Khadafi's Box; Climate Change Experiment: anyone want to bet?"

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor (" The Original Blog and Daybook. ") expressed his misgivings about the U.S., er, NATO waging of war against Libya.

Money quote(s):

"They are now displaying Khadafi laid out on a child’s mattress stuffed into a freezer in a mall. Sic semper tyrannis, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but it does raise some problems of International Law.

The UN mandate to NATO and the US strike forces was to protect the civilian population of Libya from Kadaffi and his sons and his mercenaries and his tribal supporters and the Libyan fascisti who found his rule congenial. I don’t understand how shooting up his 40 vehicle convoy fleeing his home town was any larger threat to the civilian population of Libya than the 42 vehicle cavalcade in which President Obama is riding. Surely Qadafi wasn’t driving through shooting everyone he saw. Surely he was no threat to the civilians?" (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

The "responsibility to protect" figleaf seemed to quickly transmute into acting as the rebel militia's air force (and navy) in order to perform decapitating strikes and otherwise disrupt the dictator's command, control, and communications capabilities.

Nothing disrupts one's C3 ability like being dead, of course.

"Now of course I do not mourn Khaddaffi and his sons. But I do mourn blows to the Constitution of the United States, which clearly gives the Congress the power to declare war. We understand that the war powers are and must be ambiguous – particularly so in the thermonuclear ear. During the Cold War the President had the power to order the release of thousands of nuclear weapons in retaliation for an incoming strike to the United States. One of the problems I worked on was how to structure the chain of command – now just organizationally but physically – so that the counterstrike could happen without putting the power to begin Armageddon into the hands of a bored Captains and Lieutenants sitting in concrete bunkers in bases out near the end of nowhere; and how to train those Captains and Lieutenants to make it credible that they would, at need, launch those birds at need."

Not just captain and lieutenants, but staff sergeants and privates first class, as CAA has reason to recall.

"All those war and peace decisions in which a mistake could wipe out a significant portion of humanity — Herman Kahn asked, “Will the survivors envy the dead?” – all those decisions might have to be made in minutes. There wouldn’t be time for a Congressional debate or even to summon Congress into session. I do not believe that is true of Khadaffi, It seems to me that if we wanted to wage war on Khadaffi – and I certainly argue that shooting up his convoy, killing his sons and bodyguards, is close enough to war as to make no never mind – if we are to wage war on Qadhaffi then let the President go the Congress and explicitly say so. That is what the Constitution demands." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

CAA doesn't believe in standing too much on ceremony when it comes to declarations of war; it's not like there's a "e-Form" that can be completed online and then sent electronically to Congress. Any format and font will suffice so long as Congress tallies the yays and nays.

"I do not mourn the tyrant, and he go not more than he deserved, and less than he meted out to others. His sons were not such rapacious monsters as the Sons of Saddam Hussein are reliably said to have been, and I know those who argue that had power passed from the Colonel to one of his sons the result would not only have been good for Libya, but better than the Libyans will now get; but I do not know that my opinion is worth much. I do know that the tyrant of Syria must be frantically casting about trying to buy at least one nuke from North Korea. If he isn’t, he hasn’t thought out the situation."

Countries with their own nukes get respect; said "respect" being defined as not-invaded-or-attacked-by-other-nuclear-powers.

10/21

re: "Gaddafi and the desecration of the dead"

Neo-Neocon ("slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon") was troubled by the barbarity of barbarians.

Money quote(s):

"It’s hard to escape the grisly death photos and videos of Gaddafi. A flamboyant figure who was photographed often during his long and very public life, his well-earned enemies have made sure that his death has been especially well-documented, too."

It's called globalization, which, St. Thomas Friedman of Globalization notwithstanding, is not an unmixed blessing. Nowadays even barbarians can, and do, use cell phone cameras to record video of grisly torture and executions.

"My reluctance to gaze on Gaddafi’s dead face or to watch people mistreating his corpse has nothing to do with any admiration for the man. I have little doubt that he’s perpetuated many murders and kept the people of Libya under his brutal and capricious yoke for four decades, and that their rage at him is justified.

However, the moral stature of a culture and its people are judged by many things, and one of them is the way the bodies of the dead are treated, even the most hated and reviled dead on whom they understandably wish to wreak revenge."

So consider the "moral stature" of the culture of Libyan militiamen for a moment.

"This issue is not Gaddafi at all, nor anyone in particular—it’s about how a society behaves. There is a word for this sort of thing, and that word is “barbaric.”"

None of this bodes well for the "Arab Spring."

10/21