Kevin Sullivan

Cubbyhole Foreign Policy

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Blog posts

Ezra Klein on Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision:

The Egyptian Brotherhood isn’t a terrorist group. al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist group, hates Iran and is rivals with Hezbollah, a Shi’ite extremist sect. This statement, in other words, made no sense. It was a war against Arabs, and maybe some Persians. not a limited conflict against al Qaeda. As Obama says, one of the clear distinctions between the Left’s approach to terrorism and the Right’s approach to terrorism is that the Left wants to limit the scope of the conflict, while the Right wants to expand it. So though it was only al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11, Romney and Giuliani and McCain and plenty of their colleagues want to zoom out from al Qaeda to terrorism, and from terrorism to Islamic extremism. Rather than this being an effort to hunt down al Qaeda, it becomes a war to hunt down al Qaeda, destroy Hezbollah, eradicate Hamas, overthrow Saddam Hussein, change the regime in Tehran, crush the Muslim Brotherhood, and confront Syria, and whatever else Bill Kristol thought of while eating his Cheerios that week. It is an incredibly dangerous and incoherent approach. And it marks a genuine difference between Obama and McCain.

There’s a lot to appreciate in Senator Obama’s approach to the War on Terrorism.  He clearly understands that there are multiple threats–often operating in a very gray area of complicit networks–that need to be handled respectively.  Understanding the ideological, ethnic and religious distinctions between these organizations and states is indeed important, and it will help us to better leverage one against the other.  Understanding their petty differences and gripes could aid our efforts to target them in certain regions and isolate their access to weapons and resources.  It’s good policy. 

What Klein fails to appreciate is just how nuanced and interwoven these networks really are.  The idea that Sunni and Shia terrorists–in addition to their state sponsors–fit into these distinct cubbyholes reveals a serious misunderstanding of how these groups work.  The examples are countless, but Iran has a long record of bi-faithful terror support.  Hamas and PIJ are Sunni organizations, both of which were direct spin-offs from the Muslim Brotherhood.  Iran has not only dumped millions of dollars into these groups, but they have provided tactical support and training to them through their own asymmetric surrogate–Shia Hezbollah.  According to the Egyptians, the Islamic republic provided weapons to the Al Qaeda-linked Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya; a group dedicated to undermining and terrorizing the pro-Western government in Cairo.  These activities were allegedly coordinated by Iran and Sudan, a Sunni Arab regime with presumably few incentives to work with Shia Iran.  When the 9/11 Commission delved into the pre-attack activities of Al Qaeda, they found that Tehran was likely closer to the terrorist organization than initially believed.   

Etc.

Here’s my point: Terrorist organizations are complex and dynamic.  They share associations, overlapping memberships and often rely on the same sugar daddies.   But more importantly, they all stand on the shoulders of the groups that came before them.  They’re all bound by a sense that America’s global reach has a very visible apex, and if you press the West and expose its democratic vulnerabilities to casualties (Khomeini himself drew upon the lessons of Vietnam and how it could apply to America in the Middle East) you can repel them from Holy Land.  This is the war, and it transcends the simplistic dichotomies often highlighted between Shias and Sunnis; Persians and Arabs.  The Israelis understood this long before we got the message here in the U.S., because they have seen the ugly face of terror in all its pluralistic fervor.  Shrapnel, rockets and bombs don’t have a sect.  Sunnis and Shias alike have terrorized the Jewish state for decades.  Members of the American Left have the luxury of narrowing the “scope” of this conflict, because to them, the conflict is not existential.  One criminal and rouge group attacked America on September 11, 2001, and once we go get those bad guys in Afghanistan we can move on to more pressing concerns.

This is a terribly shortsighted way to look at terrorism.  If Neoconservatives broaden the conflict to the point of absurdity, Leftists in turn do their very best to whittle it into irrelevance.  Neither approach makes much sense.

Some exit thoughts: As I mentioned above, there are without question important distinctions to be made between terrorist organizations and their enablers.  However, would asymmetric warfare against the West be as popular a tactic around the globe today had Hezbollah and Iran not enjoyed their own triumphs in Lebanon?  Would Al Qaeda have pursued the “shell-state” model in Iraq had Yasser Arafat’s PLO not mastered the practice in Jordan and Lebanon? 

Men in the Mirror

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 Andrew Sullivan on America’s slippery torture slope:

And so abuse and torture are entirely dependent, we are told, on the apparent motives of the abusers and torturers. But torture is actually defined in the law as an illegal tool devised not for sadism’s sake but as a means to extract information. And notice the extremely slippery slope. We no longer have torture as an extreme last resort in the face of a ticking time-bomb; we have authorized it simply “to prevent a threatened terrorist attack.” That means any time anywhere by anyone authorized by the government after 9/11, no? And if a foreign government were to use such a standard? What do we say then?

Not only do such practices stand in stark defiance of the values we espouse in this war, but they ultimately prove counterproductive in a war that transcends bullets and bombs.  If we’re to fight a war on ideology–one chock-full of caliphates, Jihads and insurgents–than we need to remember that maintaining our own ideals is part of such a war.  When pressed on closing Guantanamo, or the extreme (if not illegal) tactics being used by Americans there, the Right often responds incredulously.  To them, this unacceptable measure would be like the offering of quarter to those who’d likely deny us the very same.    

And I think that’s precisely the idea.

Terror Lexicon, Cont’d

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Ali Eteraz holds a different view on the change in State’s terror language.  Check it out.   

The Terror Lexicon

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The good folks over at Counterterrorism Blog (a daily requirement if you’re interested in the subject) have been tracking the State Department’s whitewashing of the word “Jihadist” from government communications, and are rightly perturbed.  Jeffrey Imm does a good job of breaking down the inanity in this move.  Some of the suggested adjustments make sense to me; but the labeling of all Islamic terrorists as “extremists” not only waters down the mission to prevent Islamic terrorism, it lumps the mere psychology of extremism into the realm of terror.  Doing this makes extreme thought and coordinated behavior (the latter being something closer to Jihadism) virtually the same thing. 

I’ve addressed this before, and it’s worth revisiting: What we’re seeing is a confusion between tactics and challenges.  If we intend to chase every band of “extremists” lurking in caves and spider holes around the world, we’ll get nowhere.  It would be like treating cancer with aspirin.  If you can’t even say who the enemy is, than how do you target the states and other actors that are bankrolling these people?

This is yet another departure from the Bush Doctrine, if such a thing every truly existed.

Failure or Extension?

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I’m posing this question to all 7.5 of my readers.

Approximately half of the Palestinian population is increasingly open to the idea of targeting and terrorizing Israeli citizens.  Support for suicide bombings is up, particularly in the Gaza Strip.  Ironically enough, support for their own political institutions continues to waver, while their general hatred for the Israeli people remains a constant in their lives.  This is partly understandable, considering the level of propagandizing and revisionist inculcation they’re exposed to from a very young age.  A life of constant warfare and embargo will of course foster intense feelings, too.  We should be extra critical of any polling data that comes from these territories, especially from those living in such conditions.

However, delving into this a bit further, I’m having a hard time understanding this apparent increase in anti-Israeli sentiment.  Gaza, after all, is arguably more autonomous now than it has ever been in its territorial life.  Settlements were dismantled, and although Israel obviously maintained the right to strike when necessary, there was an overall military withdrawal from the territory.  The fact that sentiments are more virulent in Gaza than the West Bank strikes me as counterintuitive.  It tells me that Gazans are smart enough to see the finite agenda of their own political institutions, however they lack the clarity to see how those institutions have crafted and cultivated popular perception of the Jewish state.  

This puts the Israelis in a precarious position, and its different than their tensions with Lebanon, Syria and even Iran.  All of the aforementioned states have a population with higher living standards, higher education, more freedom and some semblance of a middle class.  In the case of the Palestinians, you have an instance of perpetual warfare between two peoples that are seemingly irreconcilable.  Israel has a proven record of land (and relations) for peace, but not the other way around.  See Egypt, see Jordan and see Turkey.  But the overall Israeli policy (and I believe it to be the right one, incidentally) has been “you don’t respect me, I don’t respect you.”  So what we thus get is a cultural enactment of Newton’s first law: two irreconcilable forces that will perhaps only be stopped once they are made to stop (I won’t speculate on the “unbalanced force” is this analogy). 

I know this is a controversial proposal, but keeping two diplomatic ”schools of thought” in mind, I wonder if war is the only “diplomatic” option left for both sides, keeping the psychological conditions, the current tensions and the poor diplomatic relations between both parties in mind.  If you view war as a failure of diplomacy, than you probably fall in the camp that sees such an outcome as disastrous.  However, if you see war as something more linear, or as an extension of exhausted diplomacy, than you might view conflict with a certain degree of inevitability between the two.

Legitimacy and Credibility are Two Different Words

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For those who are struggling with the distinction. 

Smuggling Incompetence

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Michael on Iran’s Gaza gun smuggling:

It’s as simple as this: this constitutes an act of war against the state of Israel. For some reason, the international community responds to actions like these however by either ignoring them or pretending that it is a minor criminal act. It’s not. It’s very significant, and it should be treated as such.

Nuclear energy / weapons isn’t the only problem with Iran. Another major problem is that Iran is actively supporting terrorist organizations. We all know that, yet the West seems to be willing to accept it (probably because those terrorist organizations do not attack us directly, only our allies in the region).

Well, maybe.  Quite frankly, Iran and the United States have been engaging in a coldish proxy war since the Revolution.  The problem with turning it into an episode of diplomatic grandstanding is that such displays go both ways.  The Iranians have made an issue of alleged American support for Iranian separatist groups, most notably the Baluchis. 

I’m not a fan of this strategy of soft subversion.  A part of me would like to chide the Iranians for so incompetently dumping guns into the water, hoping the tides can do the Jihad for them.  But our own efforts in Iran are equally questionable, and their utility is debatable.  Despite the paranoia of the Iranian public, The CIA has never had very strong intelligence gathering capabilities in Iran, mostly due to the dearth of Farsi speaking super-spies.  The Shah kept us at arm’s length that way, and it has probably gotten worse since his fall.  Now we rely on expats for information, which is always a dubious proposition.  Point being–both sides have labored for over 25 years to subvert and irritate the other, with varied degrees of success.  If we want to take the Gaza smuggling as a direct act of war, than we had better be prepared for war. 

I don’t believe that we are.

Bin Laden’s TPS Reports

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When real life is far more interesting than fiction:

Mohammed Atef was furious.

The Al Qaeda leader had learned that a subordinate had broken the rules repeatedly. So he did his duty as the feared military chief of a global terror network: He fired off a nasty memo.

In two pages mixing flowery religious terms with itemized complaints, the Egyptian boss accused the militant of misappropriating cash, a car, sick leave, research papers and an air conditioner during “an austerity situation” for the network. He demanded a detailed letter of explanation.

“I was very upset by what you did,” Atef wrote. “I obtained 75,000 rupees for you and your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder claiming you have a right to do so. . . . Also with respect to the air-conditioning unit, . . . furniture used by brothers in Al Qaeda is not considered private property. . . . I would like to remind you and myself of the punishment for any violation.”

The memo by Atef, who later died in the U.S.-led assault on Osama bin Laden’s Afghan refuge in 2001, is among recently declassified documents that reveal a little-known side of the network. Although Al Qaeda has endured thanks to a loose and flexible structure, its internal culture has nonetheless been surprisingly bureaucratic and persistently fractious, investigators and experts say.

I had read of the pre-invasion bureaucracy in Afghanistan before, like car vouchers and pay stubs, but I had no idea how closely it resembled the slow death that is American cubicle life.  Amusing.

Nonpolarity

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Richard Haass has an interesting essay in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, wherein he addresses the issue of nonpolarity.  In short, Haass argues that unlike the pre-WW I era, the global system is now embarking on a quasi-anarchic journey that involves more than state-oriented actors; instead branching out to players such as NGO’s, large corporations, terrorists and energy providers.  It’s well worth the read, and Haass proposes a litany of ameliorating measures to help manage this new world order (such as a “World Investment Organization,” more trade, etc.).  All of his points aside, the thing that grabbed me was the question of multilateralism, and the makeup of global deliberation:

Multilateralism will be essential in dealing with a nonpolar world. To succeed, though, it must be recast to include actors other than the great powers. The UN Security Council and the G-8 (the group of highly industrialized states) need to be reconstituted to reflect the world of today and not the post-World War II era. A recent meeting at the United Nations on how best to coordinate global responses to public health challenges provided a model. Representatives of governments, UN agencies, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, foundations, think tanks, and universities were all in attendance. A similar range of participants attended the December 2007 Bali meeting on climate change. Multilateralism may have to be less formal and less comprehensive, at least in its initial phases. Networks will be needed alongside organizations. Getting everyone to agree on everything will be increasingly difficult; instead, the United States should consider signing accords with fewer parties and narrower goals. Trade is something of a model here, in that bilateral and regional accords are filling the vacuum created by a failure to conclude a global trade round. The same approach could work for climate change, where agreement on aspects of the problem (say, deforestation) or arrangements involving only some countries (the major carbon emitters, for example) may prove feasible, whereas an accord that involves every country and tries to resolve every issue may not. Multilateralism à la carte is likely to be the order of the day.

Nonpolarity complicates diplomacy. A nonpolar world not only involves more actors but also lacks the more predictable fixed structures and relationships that tend to define worlds of unipolarity, bipolarity, or multipolarity. Alliances, in particular, will lose much of their importance, if only because alliances require predictable threats, outlooks, and obligations, all of which are likely to be in short supply in a nonpolar world. Relationships will instead become more selective and situational. It will become harder to classify other countries as either allies or adversaries; they will cooperate on some issues and resist on others. There will be a premium on consultation and coalition building and on a diplomacy that encourages cooperation when possible and shields such cooperation from the fallout of inevitable disagreements. The United States will no longer have the luxury of a “You’re either with us or against us” foreign policy.

A lot of ideas get floated here, but I think Haass is essentially right.  We’ve seen how the UN has encountered problems in dealing with world affairs; mostly due to an antiquated framework that elevates some not-so-relevant actors, while belittling the emergent ones.  This not only affects commerce and trade, as Haass notes, but it has direct bearing on the way in which wars are waged, and what conflict will look like in the new century. 

The emergence of so-called failed states and non-state actors has handcuffed the United Nations, which approaches many of the world’s dilemmas with a “grand strategy” sort of approach, when a more focused, regional and short-term solution would often make more sense.  Because of the control over resources and energy, alliances and interests will constantly shift at the behest of external actors lacking a state-oriented mindset.  In other words, asking the “whole wide world” to make slow, deliberative and overly bureaucratized decisions on every pressing matter makes little sense, and it only serves to make states less relevant when corporations and terrorist cells can operate with a freedom that nations united cannot. 

Haass’ diagnosis is pretty sound, but in the case of global terrorism, I would also add a stronger emphasis on the true Bush Doctrine.  The enabling of violent extremism is one result of an increasingly nonpolar world, and it’s essentially a redefinition of warfare (proxy wars via various money channels, financing of militias and separatists, etc.).  We’ve seen how this has made progress difficult in the Middle East.  During the Nixon years, the U.S. relied on a “twin pillars” policy that asked Saudi Arabia and Iran to essentially police the region on our behalf.  With the states receiving internal competition for influence in the region, this kind of arrangement is no longer possible (if it ever truly was).  This may be unavoidable, which makes isolating the regimes that perpetuate this anarchism all the more important.  We should thus continue to freeze assets going towards terror, sanction regimes that knowingly attack the state system and fight these terrorists when and where it’s possible.              

Mental and Moral Vacuity

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Steve Clemons puts it on display for us regarding Senator Obama’s repudiation of Jimmy Carter:

Apparently, he’s OK meeting Israeli leaders because they disavow terrorism — but still they protect and establish illegal settlements and have installed more roadblocks and inhibitions to Palestinian mobility than was the case since the November 2007 Annapolis Summit. And while knocking Carter’s efforts, Obama fails to articulate how any negotiation that does not include in some way a wrestling match and attempt at a negotiation with Hamas will be stable enough to believe in.

Ahh, it’s all of the old classics.  Naive moral equivalence, followed by a kowtow to terrorists and a quick cheap shot at the Evil Zionist Occupiers.  Just one problem: Settlements were forcefully removed from the Gaza Strip, the place in question, back in 2005.  If the terrorist regime in Gaza displayed even half of the Israeli propensity to rein in on their own radical elements, the entire region would be an exponentially better place.  Instead, Hamas chooses to concoct mini-crises, while they skim profits and fuel off the top for their own gains.  By fostering misery in their pseudo-state, they can mold and mobilize the kind of public sentiment that justifies firing shrapnel-laden rockets into school yards.  This organization–which refuses to even acknowledge the existence of those they terrorize–belongs at the discussion table, according to Clemons.

But wait, he gets dumber:

The correct position for Obama to have taken is to say that he would be open to what someone like a Jimmy Carter. . .or a Colin Powell. . .or a Tony Blair, Joschka Fischer, Javier Solana, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, or Saudi King Abdullah might be able to achieve by way of Hamas and Fatah. Emissaries are important, and they can create opportunities a President can’t often take the risks to do himself or herself.

Obama, in my view, has tarnished his foreign policy credentials here. If he can’t embrace what these Americans have been able to do — and what Senator Chuck Hagel has suggested be done with Hamas — then what use is his new vision?

What is his position today if not one that has been influenced by special interests whose political weight has undermined the strategic interests of the United States?

And we have an (albeit veiled) AIPAC jab!  Ding ding ding!  All we need now is something about the Rothschild family, and we can give Clemons his trophy.

So all of the Israel hatred aside, what is Clemons’ primary point?  Well, the responsible thing for the next president to do would be to embrace some unofficial document drafted and signed at a summit that nobody cared about.  This should be done, apparently, despite the stated position of the United States government; which considers Hamas to be a purveyor of terrorism (which, incidentally, they are).  

What escapes Clemons is the issue of legitimacy.  Senator Obama appears to understand what the United Nations, The Quartet, President Carter and even President Bush fail to grasp.  By negotiating with terrorists you legitimize terrorists, thus codifying the tactics they utilize.  Terrorism then becomes “resistance,” and dolts like Clemons are allowed to wrongly equate road blocks with Qassam rockets.  Like a mosquito with amnesia, we keep flying into the zapper over and over and over again, allowing those who deserve no voice a chance to be heard.  We allowed Yasser Arafat to become the defacto spokesman of of an entire people in 1974; despite his lacking in any legitimate claim to that title.  The Road Map plan has produced much of the same, granting authority to an organization that has no place being at the negotiating table. 

Barack Obama, thankfully, understands the folly in this naive cycle.

UPDATE: Thanks to TMV for the link love!