Over at Daniel Drezner's blog, Mark Buehner writes:
bq. "So here's my question to you, Oldman (I'll address this to you as a Dean supporter, I'm not implying this is your personal position). Dean claims Iraq has distracted from Al Qaeda and Bin Ladin. He claims as president he will make that his number 1 priority. Now considering that we are already doing what you rightly suggested was the most effective and wise way to operate in Pakistan, and that we have been doing it for better than 2 years, what exactly more do you propose doing to destroy Al Qaeda that Bush hasnt done?"
Oldman then goes on to offer a serious response on his blog. Stay tuned... I've contacted Mark Buehner, and suspect this may become a longer exchange.
That's quite similar to what Wretchard postulates the US Army is currently doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. See http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_belmontclub_archive.html#107595090070527522. At the operational level, this is the right play. At the strategic level, this doesn't address why an organization like al Quaeda arose, and prevent a successor from arising in the future.
I for one, adhere to Bernard Lewis and Steven den Beste in this regard. al Quaeda is a symptom of a larger malaise in the Arab world. So long as their societies don't work, they will continue to sow the seeds of future al Quaedas, like Jason sowed the dragon's teeth. Their societies can't move forward with the dead hand of tyranny on them(a tyranny that we had to support in order to win the Cold War).
Dear Mr. Katzman:
Let's accept for a moment the analogy of the War on Terror with the War on Drugs.
1. The War on Drugs was announced roughly thirty years ago. Although billions have been spent little actual progress has been made in that period. Many of the same people who apparently believe in prosecuting the War on Terror as law enforcement believe in terminating the War on Drugs. This doesn't give me a lot of encouragement. But giving the benefit of a doubt let's accept that thirty years from now we'll have made little progress in the War on Terror as seems to be suggested as acceptable in the analogy.
2. The news of Pakistani nuclear proliferation invites only one conclusion: the methods currently in place to prevent nuclear proliferation are not effective. Unless we can put the jinni back in the bottle, a doubtful proposition at best, it's just a matter of time until the U. S. is attacked by terrorists using a nuclear device. Even more distressing is the possibility of what Wretchard at The Belmont Club refers to as a "Model T" nuclear device: a device that can be made in a machine shop using off-the-shelf components.
3. Does anyone believe that any U. S. president would not retaliate in response to such an attack? Further, as has also been pointed out by Wretchard, the playout of such an exchange is likely to be "total retaliatory extermination".
We must foreclose such an outcome. America would survive such a course of action but her soul might not. To completely prevent such an outcome it's my conclusion that substantially more muscular measures (essentially anything up to but not including preemptive nuclear strike) should be exploited to eliminate terrorist threats by Islamofascists.
I also regret that we don't seem to be enlisting the active support of Russia in producing actual nuclear disarmament by other powers. Anything that we have to lose due to nuclear proliferation they have ten-fold. Their enemies are much nearer and there is no hope for securing their enormous borders.
Dave, you'd think that Russia would be much more receptive given the circumstances you mentioned, plus the fact that she is herself a frequent target of Islamist terrorist attacks.
Unfortunately, Russia's record in Iran suggests that there is no serious appreciation of these dangers.
The millions wasted in unsuccessful attempts to secure, destroy and convert Russian WMD and capabilities don't exactly fill me with optimism, either. In fact, if I had to list the 3 most problematic states with respect to future WMD proliferation and long term risk, my top 3 would be, in order:
[1] North Korea
2 Pakistan
3 Russia/former USSR
Oldman does certainly provide an interesting blueprint for what we should be doing more of, i.e. bone-deep knife-fighting in the right quarters, and criticism of the Bush Administration for not doing more of it may very well be valid. I would disagree that Iraq has been some sort of terrible diversion or something, but that’s an entirely different and even now-tiresome discussion. Suffice to say the War on Terror would NEVER come to any sort of resolution as long as Saddam/Uday/Quday sat on their throne of skulls. Might as well deal with it now.
The problem with Oldman’s plan is that the only potent institutional criticism of the Administration comes from the Democratic Party /Left. And anyone who thinks that organization and its foundational philosophies are prepared to engage in such cutthroat activities is living either on another planet or in the year 1949. The Dem/Left has been hopelessly poisoned by the Kumbaya chalice, and is categorically unable to see any enemy on planet earth that is not a Western conservative, and is pathetically incapable of strategically thinking about same.
I have begged my Dem friends and others to at least give me a glimpse of the OVERALL strategy they would pursue in the WoT, and I even give them two years of hindsight when I ask them to go back to September 12 and tell me their plan. Such answers invariably begin with “Well, I WOULDN’T….. (insert Bush transgressions here). I sure haven’t seen any candidates speak any differently.
As many of us agree, unless the Democrats jettison their McGovernism, and return to Truman/Kennedy thinking about national security (which would entail believing that American society is NOT hopelessly corrupt and thus not worth fighting for, a big stretch for all too many of them), they will be categorically unable to implement the kind of thinking Oldman proposes here.
Dear Joe:
I agree with you. Russia's current posture is puzzling. I suspect that a) they've never been asked b) they have a lot on their plate c) their leaders are still authoritarian enough to believe that they will survive physically and politically come what may. We need to encourage them to see survival in terms of cooperation.
I also agree with your list of proliferation problem children with one exception. I believe that the USSwere (former member states) are a different and more severe problem than Russia itself.
WHAT IS IT with anti-war folks and their fascination with covert action and assassins?
The political and moral cost of a strategy like that is so far greater than what we are doing in Iraq that I'm at a loss to understand what is driving those decisions.
A.L.
A.L.
"Oldman" was actually a Republican (!) before he became a Deaniac, and he has some study and background in this field. So in his case, I'm willing to take his seriousness at face value.
For the others... how cynical do you want to be?
[MILD] Because they have little to no background in this area, the moral and tactical hazards are invisible to them. Covert action is like a movie, where James Bond wins and things happen more cleanly than military operations. That's complete horses---t, of course, but they have no clue. Which is why as soon as anything goes wrong, they get horrified and shut everything down. Leaving zero response on the ground, of course, since all other options were already foreclosed.
[MEDIUM] If terrorism is just souped-up police work, then presumably the solution is souped-up police. That means intelligence agencies. If they behave like police agencies and have tight oversight along the same dimensions as police forces and with similar constraints, goes the thinking, that should prevent anything bad or embarassing from happening ("bad" being defined as "politically embarassing," rather than "ineffective at stopping threats"). This also provides make-work for many client groups, from the oversight bureaucrats to the inevitable reams of lawyers. If it also results in dumb rules that keep intel agencies from talking to bad people, well, c'est la vie. Process, optics, and feelings over results is an established pattern, and it applies here too.
[REDLINED] Because covert action is covert, they can screw around and do basically nothing - their preferred course of action - without oversight or accountability. If anything goes wrong later, well, they had "plans to deal with the problem" but "it just didn't work out."
Comparisons of the Clinton years to that latter characterization are left as an exercise for the reader.
A.L,
I see three options explaining this flight of fantasy.
Option #1
These folks are not serious. They want to pretend that they are doing something when they are not.
Option #2
They are serious and they have forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, LBJ and Nixon.
Option #3
They are serious and they haven't forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, LBJ and Nixon. Instead they want to have that power for themselves to deal with foes both foreign and domestic.
Very good point, Joe.