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[ by Charles Cameron ]

As far as I can tell from a quick search on Google, ElBeltagy is a Muslim Brotherhood MP, while Muhammad Ghanem is the Muslim Brotherhood’s representative in London.

Some will see in this DoubleQuote, further evidence of “taqiyya” — I think that’s quite a stretch. Some will see evidence of a struggle in which two opinions use media access as part of the process of jockeying for position — that seems a lot more plausible. Or it may be as simple as the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Here’s one analytic overview that came highly recommended by my more expert friends:

Hossam Tammam, Islamists and the Egyptian revolution

Wikistrat

I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an offer from CEO Joel Zamel to join Wikistrat as an analyst.

What this means, in essence, is that I will become a contributor of exclusive content to the Wikistrat site and will be collaborating on specific analyical products. In return, I will be able to feature some of their interesting pieces here, such items from future issues of their CoreGap Bulletin 11.04 [PDF] or video presentations by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett or other Wikistrat experts. Here is their current public sample:

Wikistrat will also become a sponsor of zenpundit.com (actually, the only sponsor,as I do not normally accept advertising). If you have been visiting Chicago Boyz lately for the ongoing Roundtable, you may have noticed a Wikistrat banner ad there; there will be one here at ZP soon as well.

If you have enjoyed reading ZP over the years, I encourage you to subscribe to Wikistrat – not just to see what I’m writing, or Tom, but to get in early into an interactive, analytical community that is going to grow rapidly in terms of talent and influence.

Hope to see you there!

[Cross-posted to the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz]

Big Peace blogger Sun Tzu has dug into the historical archives to post NSDD-32, the cornerstone document for coordinating the Reagan administration’s foreign, defense and intelligence policies ( Hat tip to Col. Dave).

“NSDD” stands for “National Security Decision Directive”. In essence, the document is an executive order issued through the National Security Council to executive branch agencies represented or under the supervision of the NSC. A NSDD (or “PDD” in Democratic administrations) carries the force of law and is often highly classified, frequently being used for presidential “findings” for approving covert operations, as well as to set national security policy.

NSDD-32: Ronald Reagan’s Secret Grand Strategy

CLASSIFIED:  TOP SECRETTHE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON

May 20, 1982

National Security Decision
Directive Number 32

U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

I have carefully reviewed the NSSD 1-82 study in its component parts, considered the final recommendations of the National Security Council, and direct that the study serve as guidance for U.S. National Security Strategy.

Our national security requires development and integration of a set of strategies, including diplomatic, informational economic/political, and military components.  NSSD 1-82 begins that process. Part I of the study provides basic U.S. national objectives, both global and regional, and shall serve as the starting point for all components of our national security strategy.

The national security policy of the United States shall be guided by the following global objectives:

• To deter military attack by the USSR and its allies against the U.S., its allies, and other important countries across the spectrum of conflict; and to defeat such attack should deterrence fail.
• To strengthen the influence of the U.S. throughout the world by strengthening existing alliances, by improving relations with other nations, by forming and supporting coalitions of states friendly to U.S. interests, and by a full range of diplomatic, political, economic, and information efforts.
• To contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence throughout the world, and to increase the costs of Soviet support and the use of proxy, terrorist, and subversive forces.
• To neutralize the efforts of the USSR to increase its influence through its use of diplomacy, arms transfers, economic pressure, political action, propaganda, and disinformation.
• To foster, if possible in concert with our allies, restraint in Soviet military spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weaken the Soviet alliance system by forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.
• To limit Soviet military capabilities by strengthening the U.S. military, by pursuing equitable and verifiable arms control agreements, and by preventing the flow of militarily significant technologies and resources to the Soviet Union.
• To ensure the U.S. access to foreign markets, and to ensure the U.S. and its allies and friends access to foreign energy and mineral resources.
• To ensure U.S. access to space and the oceans.
• To discourage further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
• To encourage and strongly support aid, trade, and investment programs that promote economic development and the growth of humane social and political orders in the Third World.
• To promote a well-functioning international economic system with minimal distortions to trade and investment and broadly agreed and respected rules for managing and resolving differences.

In addition to the foregoing, U.S. national security policy will be guided by the operational objectives in specific regions as identified in Parts I and III of the study.

Read the rest here.

Normally, for important NSDD, there will be several preliminary meetings of principals (the statutory members of the NSC) or their key deputies, before the text of the NSDD is prepared by the NSC adviser or executive director (sort of the chief of staff of the NSC) and the White House Counsel before it is formally approved by the NSC and signed by the President. This however, is not set in stone. Presidents are free to determine the NSC procedures of their administrations or ignore them if it suits their purpose. It is hard to imagine Richard Nixon fully briefing his SECSTATE William Rogers on anything of importance, much less doing it through Kissinger’s NSC, or JFK permitting any kind of bureaucratic structure to constrain his prerogatives.

NSDD-32 was prepared under the auspices of Reagan’s second NSC Adviser, “Judge” William P. Clark, who succeeded the hapless William V. Allen. Clark was the most conservative of Reagan’s many NSC Advisers and, as a California political crony of the president, the only Washington outsider. As a result, Clark was in tune with DCI William Casey and UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, hostile toward the views of State Department Soviet experts and far more interventionist than the top officials at Cap Weinberger’s OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense). Clark had previously served at State as Deputy Secretary under Al Haig, an experience that did not leave him with a good impression of the loyalty of senior State Department officials to the administration’s foreign policy goals.

The activist “we win, they lose” strategy laid out NSDD-32 reflects Clark’s alignment with William Casey and it is very hard to credit Reagan’s national security strategy looking like NSDD-32 if it had been concocted by Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci and George Schultz, making Clarks brief tenure of critical historical importance. Powell, Carlucci and Schultz are all fine public servants but were disinclined by temperment and institutional loyalty to have articulated a strategy that “went on offense”; though, in fairness to Schultz, as SECSTATE he made very effective diplomatic use of Reagan Doctrine programs that State consistently opposed ( Contra aid, covert aid to the Afghan Mujahedin, UNITA and RENAMO) to extract concessions from the Soviets at the bargaining table.

At Best Defense, Thomas Ricks indicates that “the Rumsfeld Files” might be the new “wikileaks”, in terms of interesting data points:

Playing Rummy Bingo

Speaking of the Rumsfeld files, he has put up all sorts of stuff up there on his website. Just start typing in names and see what pops up. Put in “Chalabi” and see that he was still taking advice from Ahmed Chalabi about Iraq as late as November 2005: “Chalabi was in and he, along with everyone else who has been in during the last two months, says we ought to reduce our presence in the cities — that it is causing a problem. Is George [Casey] sensitive to that?”

Have to think that Secretary Rumsfeld selected more than one document bombshell in that mass of papers with care.

Speaking as someone trained in diplomatic history back in the day when FRUS was years behind on the usual 30 year de-classification standard, the speed with which confidential and secret information enters the public domain, by hook or crook, is amazing. As more and more docs are being overclassified by government bureaucrats, the faster the secrets are stolen, leaked or released.

Probably a correlation there.

seydlitz89 at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Ronald Reagan Roundtable: Reagan and the End of the Cold War

Ronald Reagan gave one of his most famous speeches in Berlin in June 1987, the famous one where he invited the Soviet leader of the time to “tear down this wall”. I was in the audience of that speech, about five rows back, and close enough to see the man very clearly. I had voted for Ronald Reagan in both 1980 and 1984 and had been present at his first inaugural in Washington DC. Count me as a true believer. At the time in Berlin we thought it a rather significant speech and he was after all not only addressing Berlin, but the whole world. There were indications that big changes were in the works, but no one could have guessed how momentous those changes would in fact be.

Too often, the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the Cold War is seen from a military-technological perspective, which is the way we have come to view military affairs in general, simply as a endless quest for “enhanced capabilities” in search of a threat. That confusion has particularly taken root since 1992 (the “Defense Planning Guidance” of that year is significant in this regard). This is not what I wish to point out and I hardly see defense spending in general as a positive legacy, although spending on personnel in the 1980s did much to allow us to respond quickly to the changing political environment exploiting to the full the military intelligence collection potential, as we did between 1989-92.

In my view, Reagan’s significant contribution to ending the Cold War was in what he brought to diplomacy. Specifically his ability to negotiate effectively with Soviet Leaders, particularly Mikhail Gorbachev, and convince them that he could deliver on his promises. Ronald Reagan realized that Gorbachev was serious in his reform efforts and quickly discarded any confrontational approach adapting one of cooperation instead.

Things did not start off well however. Gorbachev had not appeared impressed with Reagan at first, but soon Mitterrand and other Western leaders convinced Gorbachev that Reagan was a person he could negotiate with and not the “clown and fool” that Gorbachev had portrayed him as previously. This set up Reykjavik in 1986 which in turn set up the INF treaty. Without this relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev there would have been no treaty and Soviet reformers would have shelved much of their reform program since it would have been impossible to face Gorbachev’s domestic opposition (the Soviet Military industrial complex or “VPK” and the state security apparatus) without having the road open to negotiation with the US….

Read the rest here.