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“He refused to classify it as terrorism.”

“At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity”

Really?

Where did Stack’s idea to fly a plane into a building originate?

Or to attack a building with the offices of Federal agencies?

It is fortunate that a very large number of people were not killed earlier today and for that we should all be thankful.

Joseph Stack may have been mentally ill. He may have been an evil loser unable to come to grips with his own failures. We can accept that as a given, but those conditions do not preclude someone from committing an act of lone wolf  terrorism. More than likely, they facilitate it. Stack’s manifesto, while mixed with personal frustration and rambling, perseverating, thoughts, was clearly political in nature. We are fortunate that Stack may have been emotionally disturbed, it is only chance that so far has prevented the coming of a superempowered suicide bomber.

The undue haste by authorities to put forth the meme that today’s event is “not terrorism” is unseemly as well as inaccurate. Arguably, it is born out of an unspoken anxiety that, like during the Great Depression when some people cheered bank robbers, calling a spade a spade here might cause others with grievances to revere nutcase perpetrators. Perhaps imitate  them.

If so, then officials underestimate the intelligence and character of their fellow Americans. Crazies with axes to grind will do as insane people do while the rest of us will be horrified by Stack’s actions. Deep-down, the real issue for officials is that they are squeamish that Stack may have scored a rhetorical point or two about elite behavior and oligarchical economic policies in his otherwise unhinged, online rant. Evading the truth makes for bad policies.

Let us be clear: the Austin bombing was a terrorist act and crazy Joe Stack was a terrorist.

ADDENDUM:

Join in on the debate at the Small Wars Council.

Charles Cameron, in his latest guest post here, penned a beautiful essay regarding the ongoing exchanges between Australian counter-terrorism scholar Leah Farrall and Abu Walid al-Masri, an adviser to the Taliban and an experienced strategist of Islamist insurgency. Farrall has translated and posted this dialogue on her blog, All Things Counter Terrorism, which has received much attention, commentary and criticism in the blogosphere and on private listservs and quasi-official bulletin boards.

Generally, I leave this sort of subject to Charles, since he has the academic expertise to drill down to a granular level of Islamic theology and Islamist ideology, but al-Masri is an intriguing figure and his public conversation with Farrall is a novelty worth investigating. It would be hard to imagine during the Cold War, an open media debate between a Western CI official and a Soviet spymaster still engaged in espionage in the field ( Kim Philby hurled public jermiads it is true, but that was in retirement in Moscow and only after his long-suffering KGB handlers had managed to get his severe alcoholism under control). In that spirit, I want to offer a few observations.

While there is artifice present, as al-Masri is consciously speaking to a multiplicity of audiences in his remarks, the idea that we should therefore dismiss the dialogue with Farrall, as some suggest, is an error. There is also posturing in purely intra-Islamist-debates on which we eavesdrop and, frankly, within our own arguments inside government and out. We learn from what people do and do not do, from what they say and what is left unsaid. Being able to speak to multiple audiences is a constraint, as well as an advantage, as it shapes the parameters of the premises to be employed and the extent to which the underlying logic can be permissably extrapolated. To quote a Zen saying, if you wish to fence in a bull, give him a large meadow. 

The constraints, if correctly discerned, are illuminating and are analytically useful in constructing our own tactical responses and message strategy (assuming someone can convince the State Department bureaucracy that IO and public diplomacy are important and persuade Congressional leaders to fund such activities with more than pocket change). They are also useful in helping to understand the worldview and governing paradigms of our opponents in more complex and nuanced manner than reflexively saying “they hate our freedoms”. Well, many jihadi types do in fact, viscerally hate our freedoms or deny that democracy is a legitimate form of government in an abstract sense, much the same way they casually disparage Hindus as “cow worshippers” or Thais as “crazy Buddhists”; however those loose attitudes and spasms of hostility are not akin to operational principles or strategic doctrines.

For that, we have to dig deeper into the politico-religious motivations of violent Islamists and listen closely to what our enemies are saying – particularly when they are making an effort to speak to us directly, as al-Masri is doing, his determination to score propaganda points in his little elicitation dance with Farrall notwithstanding. Americans are not very good at listening and our elites are deeply uncomfortable with the entire subject of religion, tending to view pious expressions of Christianity with contempt and Islam as a completely taboo subject. There is a strong preference in government and academia for analytical models of terrorism or insurgency that dwell on DIME spectrum variables because these fit in the personal comfort zones and the educational, social and professional experiences of the American elite. This would be a perfect approach if al Qaida’s leadership were composed of Ivy League alumni and Fortune 500 CEOs.

Economics and military force are always factors in geopolitical conflict, the war of terror included, but until Islamist extremists oblige us by becoming secular Marxist revolutionaries waving little red books, it would behoove us to look with greater scrutiny at the curiously reified religious ideology with which they justify or eschew courses of action to themselves. Our own strategies might be more focused and effective if the operators across our intelligence, military, diplomatic and law enforcement agencies had something approaching a shared understanding of violent Islamism and if they could communicate this understanding along with the benefit of their experience and current intelligence to help political leaders shape American policy.

HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930’s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big business capitalism.

Therefore, the following series amounts to an intellectual food fight between Goldberg and (mostly) a band of clearly enraged Leftist professors. Enjoy!:

HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

• Neiwert: Introduction
• Paxton: The Scholarly Flaws
• Griffin: An Academic Book – Not!
• Feldman: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions
• Berlet: The Roots of the Book
• Michael Ledeen Responds to Liberal Fascism
• Goldberg: Definitions and Double Standards
• Feldman: An Open Letter to Mr. Jonah Goldberg
• Griffin: Definitions and Double Standards – A Rebuttal
• Neiwert: Goldberg’s Response Fits His History of Evasion

After all, who doesn’t like an intemperate, online argument about Nazs? 🙂

Boyd Acolyte Franklin “Chuck” Spinney writing on the QDR ( Hat tip to Kev Hall).

The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

….Even by the dismal intellectual standards of Pentagon bureaucracy, the QDR and the FY 2011 budget, taken together, establish a new standard of analytical vacuity, psychological denial, and just plane meaningless drivel. I will keep this short by using just one important case to prove my allegation. Judge for yourself if it is necessary and sufficient to make the point.

First, I must bore you with a little background: The Pentagon has been producing FYDPs since 1962. But these FYDPs have been repeatedly criticized for producing defense budgets that were disconnected from the national military strategy — and because the dollar allocations made in any budget determine what any government’s policy really is, the critique was logically equivalent to saying there was no strategy. The congressional legislation in the mid 1990s that established the QDR was only the most recent attempt to deal with this long standing criticism. The aim of that legislation was to require the Pentagon to lay out an intellectual framework for matching its military strategy and ambitions to the resource constraints shaping those ambitions, especially budgetary constraints, but also constraints relating to people, the limitations imposed by available technologies, etc.

The new FY 2011 budget and its accompanying FYDP, therefore, are supposed to attach budgetary and programmatic meat to the strategic skeleton that is the QDR, both of which were completed at the same time and made public on 1 February — itself a somewhat illogical sequence, given that one is supposed to precede the other. In theory, these documents should permit an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses implicit in the matchup between resources and strategy. Therefore, these documents should enable the Secretary of Defense to send the President and the Congress a comprehensive set of priorities, opportunity costs, and risks associated with his strategic plan. This information would then become the grist for a rational national debate by linking strategic considerations to the inevitable compromises made in the sausage making factory that is Congress. Moreover, as this is President Obama’s first budget, and because it represents $700+ billion that Mr. Obama just put off limits in the coming national debate over whether or how to shrink the federal deficit, it was crucially important for the Pentagon to get the QDR and the accompanying FY 2011-2015 FYDP right in a logically consistent and transparent manner.

If we apply this standard to the Pentagon’s recently completed handiwork, only one conclusion is possible: the Pentagon flunked the test by being intellectually absent without leave.

Read the rest here.

Defense acquisitions and budgeting process arcana are not my forte, but Spinney is not the only defense analyst giving the QDR a thumbs down for being insufficient on important issues. If the process is rigidly determinative of the kinds of outcomes generated and if that process is dysfunctional or broken, then even a talented top DoD civilian staff armed with an ocean of money and a deep reservoir of political capital will not be able to translate our national security priorities into concrete military results.

“Methods are the masters of masters.” – Talleyrand

The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama by Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman

I mentioned this book previously, expressing some serious skepticism of the authors’ core argument of a struggle between President Richard Nixon and the Neocons. Nevertheless, I ordered a copy and found The Forty Years War to be an absorbing read; for those with an interest in the administration of Richard Nixon, the history of the late Cold War period or the politics of American foreign policy, this book is a must read. I have a good working knowledge from my own research of primary and secondary source material related to Richard Nixon and his battle to re-shape American foreign policy and national strategy; yet I can say that and Colodny and Shachtman, working with newly transcribed archival material, demonstrated that we still have much to learn about the inner workings of the Nixon administration.

The authors have three important themes in The Forty Years War:

1. The intellectual legacy of militarist- moral idealism of Fritz G.A. Kraemer, the German-born Defense Department geopolitical theorist who was a mentor, adviser or ally to a glittering constellation of policy makers including Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Schlesinger, Fred Ikle, Andrew Marshall, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others. Shachtman and Colodny call Kraemer:

“….the unacknowledged godfather of the George W. Bush administration’s ways of relating the United States to the rest of the world – more so than the philosophies of the university of Chicago’s Leo Strauss or those Trotskyites turned conservatives who founded the neocon movement”

2. That there has been a “forty years war” for the control over U.S. foreign policy not between Left and Right or Hawks and Doves but between foreign policy “Pragmatists” in the mold of Richard Nixon and “Neocons” or more broadly (and accurately in my view), “Hardliners” adhering to the rigid moralism and supreme confidence in military supremacy of Fritz Kraemer.

3. That Watergate, contrary to the orthodox historiography (argued by historians like Stanley I. Kutler and Robert Dallek), was exploited and aggravated by Kraemerites and proto-Neocons, especially General Al Haig, specifically to bring down Richard Nixon in an attempt to smash detente and institute more aggressive U.S. posture in the Cold War. Haig emerges as a central villain in the Watergate conspiracy in The Forty Years War and Nixon’s ability to inspire disloyalty in his closest aides is breathtaking.

While illuminating and deeply provocative, The Forty Years War is a quirky book, almost two different books with the first half devoted to the Nixon era and the second half sailing from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. In a sense, this is unavoidable because it is the Nixon administration docs that are being rapidly declassified and subsequent administrations will not be releasing similar material for years or decades. Equal depth of treatment for every administration would also have swelled the number of pages to a staggeringly unmanageable size for authors and readers alike.

I am also not comfortable with the authors’ casual use of the label “Neocon” to describe a range of policy makers on the right, some of whom are not at all neoconservatives in a tight or ideological sense of the term. Toward the end of The Forty Years War, Colodny and Shachtman draw more nuanced distinctions that I think, is a more precise rendering of the positions of various figures in Republican administrations or Congress.

The Forty Years War is a book that deserves to have a much higher public profile as Colodny and Shachtman are marshalling new evidence to challenge conventional interpretations of late Cold War political history and foreign policy.

Strongly recommended.