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# Posted 1:53 PM by Patrick Porter

'STAY ON OFFENCE' IS NOT A STRATEGY: Happy holidays everyone! Sorry its been so long between posts, but this is the closest I've ever been to being busy.

Over Christmas, I had a read through 'World War IV', culture warrior Norman Podhoretz's latest call to arms. And just in time for Christmas, its an awful turkey of a thing.

But before dissecting it, its worth making some observations about the broad political philosophy ‘neo-conservatism.’ Thanks to the horrific loss of life and anarchy in Iraq especially in late 2006, the word ‘neocon’, like the word ‘liberal’ in US domestic politics, has degenerated into an empty and lazy word for anything in foreign policy that is undesirable.

So in some quarters both right and left, to believe in containing Iranian nuclear ambitions through sanctions and a global alliance, or to enjoy the film ‘300′, or even to favour continued in-principle support for Israel’s existence, is to be hyper-aggressive, irresponsible and naive.

In fact, neoconservatism is a school of thought with defenders who vary wildly in their intellectual calibre. One of its more powerful spokesmen is Kenneth Anderson, whose overall appraisal of the failures and insights of neocons is one I share:

In the case of Iraq, neoconservatives preferred war. Their search for a quick and painless democratic transformation, which they did not find, was a naive one. But their other belief was not so naive: this is the belief that over the long run, the realist strategy of accommodation and containment of execrable regimes – the pursuit of stability at all moral costs practised by the West for thirty years – would only serve to feed the beast.

In other words, neoconservatism is a form of tough democratic idealism, and it has its strengths and weaknesses. Its strength is to go beyond amoral and short-sighted policies of backing friendly dictatorships no matter how reprehensible, to see the linkages between long-term security and political liberalisation, and to seek some alignment between liberal values and foreign policy beyond the paralysing ineffectuality of liberal internationalism.

It has also contributed to serious foreign policy failure. Needless to say, so has so-called realism. President Jimmy Carter and Brent Scowcroft, quick to point to Iraq as a vindication of their world view, may be reminded that it was ‘realist’ counsel that led Carter to encourage Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, a catastrophic attack that became the longest conventional war of the past century, beggared two countries, killed millions, involved chemical warfare and ‘human wave’ slaughters. Its unfortunate that so much foreign policy debate and analysis of the crises in the Arab-Islamic world is carried on as though ‘neocons’ are the only ones with any explaining to do.

But if neoconservatism has an ideational value, its failures also need to be recognised and explained. One of those failures is the underlying and misplaced confidence that if the ideology and policy is correct, execution and detail don't matter that much. This can be done with the aid of Podhoretz’s book. If Kenneth Anderson’s writings are the vintage Pinot Noir of the neocon vinyard, Podhoretz’s manifesto is the rancid two-dollar Spumante.

‘World War IV’ is written primarily to endorse the ’Bush Doctrine’ (the need to spread democratic freedom to ensure US security) and from a hugely partisan standpoint to defend Bush against any and all charges. Most importantly, his argument is strong on belligerent rhetoric and the need for resolution and a historic sense of mission. We must awaken and realise the threat, Podhoretz argues, and mobilise together against the foe.

But it is strategically illiterate. The will to prevail in a vital struggle is not a strategy. Churchill’s soaring speeches used to end with a call to solidarity and common purpose, but this call would be preceded with an outline and strategic vision of the conflict. By contrast, the relationship between ends, ways and means, the search for achievable goals, the direction of resources towards a goal, the development of more astute strategy from inevitable and avoidable mistakes, none of this is considered in any depth by Podhoretz. Instead, we get a morality tale containing only a plea for greater willpower and a resentment of people who disagree. Capacity or competence is barely considered.

Disturbingly, Presidential candidate Rudi Guliani has appointed Podhoretz as an advisor and has identified himself with this book. Rudi’s continual claim about foreign policy is that he will ’stay on offence’ against Islamic terrorists. What does this mean? I would assume that any responsible US President would continue to pursue, arrest, capture and kill AQ agents, and there is little there that even the far left wing of the Democratic Party would dispute. Beyond that, is he saying he would like to stay in Iraq for thirty years, expand the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan, bomb Iran, or dismantle civil liberties or legal obstructions at home? The point is, we don’t really know, and maybe neither does he. Podhoretz takes rather longer to say roughly the same thing, and without much idea of any policy content. It would just read as a silly manifesto, were it not being taken seriously in some influential quarters.

An aggressive rhetorical posture is not a strategy. It is a sound-bite. And his book has a few other dragons.

Podhoretz is a conservative cultural critic ever mindful of the 1960’s, and he also launches attacks on a host of enemies in the US, from extremist campus professors to hippies revisiting the glory days of Vietnam war protests, from the Clinton Administration who apparently with AQ deserve all of the blame for 9/11, to conservative isolationists. But its not sufficient to criticise their positions. If Podhoretz wishes to mobilise all of America for a global struggle against militant jihadism, he needs to make a substantive case for how this might be done. Instead, much of the book is a lament that the 1950’s are over and won’t be coming back.

Beneath the surface of much of this debate, between those who argue that America has isolated itself and those who argue that the world has abandoned America, there is a more interesting story. France and Germany have politically evolved into pretty close Atlantic partners. The Bush administration has managed over a few years to craft a diverse coalition of partners with an interest in containing or at least counterbalancing Tehran with its regimes existential hatred of Israel. America rates very highly in polls of Indian opinion, and even the countries most vocally critical of American unilateralism continue to track down, round up and pursue wanted terrorists. Sunni insurgents of 2003-5 have turned on their predatory guests AQI, who are now reeling from the Anbar awakening. The long project of containing AQ is unspectacularly working, without a need to silence dissent or unify America behind Podhoretz’s world war.

But this complexity is often lost in the polarising rhetoric of the ‘neocon’ debate, a debate that has suffered a bit at the hands of Podhoretz’s strange screed.

Labels: War on Terror

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# Posted 10:03 AM by Taylor Owen

TOWARDS A PROGRESSIVE FP?: On a train from Rome to Venice, I just tucked into Samantha Power's review essay on the future of War on Terror in this Sunday's Times. Again, she shows why she a leading driver of an emerging liberal foreign policy position that deviates at once from the utopian militarism of neoconservationism, the isolationism of realism, and the dangerous reliance on Bush-bashing that dominates much of the left. Dare I say, she is working and thinking towards an emerging progressive foreign policy agenda.

The piece begins with a framing that is not always recognized. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, Bush defined the War on Terror in srikingly broad terms. He did not confine the war to defeating Al Qaeda, but that it would begin with Al Qaeda, and “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

The greater paradigmatic change, and the object of Power's ire, however, was not in this definition of the enemy, but rather in a redefinition of the mechanisms that should be used to defeat it. This redefinition, ostensibly designed to adapt to a new security environment, had four parts: the criminal justice approach to counterterrorism was being replaced by a military one; States were either with the US or against them; international institutions were seen as constraining factors that needed to be circumvented; and that the executive, in such a time of emergency, should be given the balance of power over the congressional and legislative branches of government.

So how has this worked out? By Power's assessment, rather poorly. Using Rumsfeld's metric for sucess ("Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”), her conclusion is damning:

Leaked intelligence reports have shown that the answer is negative. The administration’s tactical and strategic blunders have crippled American military readiness; exposed vulnerabilities in training, equipment and force structure; and accelerated terrorist recruitment. In short, although the United States has not been directly hit since 9/11, we are less safe as a result of the Bush administration’s rhetoric, conduct and strategy.

But in her words, "criticizing the calamities of the last six years of American foreign policy has become all too easy. And it does not itself improve our approach to combating terrorist threats that do in fact loom large — larger, in fact, because of Bush’s mistakes."

I couldn't agree more, and therefore welcome what lies at the core of this piece - a broad stroke review of three texts that each in their own way help us begin to define this new toolbox:

We must urgently set about reversing the harm done to the nation’s standing and security by simultaneously reasserting the moral difference between the United States and Islamic terrorists and by developing a 21st-century toolbox to minimize actual terrorist threats. Several new books take up this
challenge, each addressing a different piece of the national security predicament. Together, they allow one to begin to define a new approach to counterterrorism.

The first book is the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, notably heavily influenced by David Patraeus. The manual is a response to the near complete lack of counterinsurgency capability in the US military following 9/11. What the manual suggests, is nothing short of revolutionary, and if implemented, I have no doubt would dramatically change the prospects for sucess certainly in Afghanistan, and possibly in Iraq. Powers aptly describes just why this manual is so dramatic:

The fundamental premise of the manual is that the key to successful counterinsurgency is protecting civilians. The manual notes: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral
damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more insurgents.” It suggests that force size be calculated in relation not to the enemy, but to inhabitants (a minimum of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents). It emphasizes the necessity of coordination with beefed-up civilian agencies, which are needed to take on reconstruction and development tasks.

The most counterintuitive, as well as the most politically difficult, premise of the manual is that the American military must assume greater risk in order to gather much-needed intelligence and, in the end, achieve greater safety. The emphasis of the 1990s on force protection is overturned by the assertion of several breathtaking paradoxes: “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.” “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.”

Sarah Sewall, a former Pentagon official who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (and a close colleague of mine), has contributed an introduction that should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand the huge demands effective counterinsurgency will place on the military and the voting public. “Those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it,” she writes, “or at least what it’s up against.”...

Military actions that cause civilian deaths, she argues, are not simply morally questionable; they are self-defeating.

The second book reviewed is Ian Shapiro's 'Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror', which urges for for a return to legitimacy as a central tenant of US foreign policy. Where as Patreaus sees local legitimacy as critical to mission success in counterinsurgency warfare, Shapiro sees international legitimacy as a required tool of the War on Terror. Both argue that sucess is nearly impossible without it.

While Powers is sympathetic to his position on the diffuse, as opposed to unified nature of the threat, (which he sees as a good thing), she is quick to highlight the gulf between the ability to actualize a new containment doctrine, and the aggressive position of the Bush Administration:

For containment to work, Washington needs to be able to deliver credible threats. The irony of Bush’s flawed approach is that it has exposed the limits of American enforcement tools, stretching military and financial resources beyond recognition. This has a doubly negative effect: it emboldens those who need to be contained, and it deters those we once might have counted on for help in doing the containing.

She also seems concerned that he is far too quick to dismiss, or at least minimise the threat of nuclear proliferation: "In fact, after six years of dishonesty and alarmism, it seems especially important — if challenging — to retain a capacity for grave, calibrated concern about the proliferation of nuclear aspirant states and their proud ties to terrorist networks."

If the new counterinsurgency doctrine strikes at the core of the identity, tactics and purpose of the US military, the third book reviewed, Talal Asad's 'On Suicide Bombing' challenges the core belief that there is a difference between the 'us' and 'them' cleanly delineated in Bush's post-9/11 world view.

Here Powers seems sympathetic to the call for greater cultural awareness, but falls short of endorsing Asad's moral equivalency. While she notes that "if you continue to believe (as I do) that there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective, you will indeed find “On Suicide Bombing” disturbing, if not always in the way he intends." Here, however, I don't think that recognizing the moral distinction oneself, and seeing that others do not, are mutually exclusive. The very fact that people who's families are killed by cluster bombs see no difference between them and suicide attacks, is highly relevant to the discussion of our counterterrorism tactics, whether we agree with it or not.

Finally, Powers looks to the US disaster preparedness status post 9/11 through a review of Stephen Flynn's 'The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation'. Here, she has little critique and seems as horrified as Flynn that so little has been done on this front:

By defining American security objectives in military terms, the Bush administration has failed to set achievable goals that could vastly decrease the human and financial damage from a large-scale attack at
home. While the United States military has done its best to adjust to the inadequacies recent conflicts have exposed, almost no meaningful midcourse corrections have been made on the homefront...not in educating the public, training emergency responders, fortifying “soft targets,” securing hazardous materials or strengthening critical infrastructure.

In Powers' somewhat schizophrenic assessment of these three works lies an encapsulation of the challenge facing liberals. She endorses the radical new counterinsurgency doctrine, but worries that it is simply too difficult to implement on the fly as it requires a complete institutional overhaul (it is one thing for Patreas to tell his commanders to take far greater risks, it is quite another for them and their soldiers to do so given the decentralized command structure.) She is sympathetic to Shapiro's breakdown of the terrorist threat, but seems to worry that a containment strategy marks a return to an isolationism she is loath to endorse. While she sees the relevance, and indeed necessity, of better cultural understanding, she is concerned with the end result of cultural relativism. In short, she lies in the middle on most of these debates. Her position is nuanced.

In these reviews, she is clearly articulating, if not explicitly, a moderate, and I would argue, progressive stance on US foreign policy.

Where she is undoubtedly correct, is that liberals and progressives cannot sit on the sidelines of these debates. Out of the criticisms of the Bush administration's counterterrorism record, a relatively large bulls-eye, MUST come a new strategy - both for Iraq and for the war on terror. I for one, think she is right.

Labels: Samantha Powers, War on Terror

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