The Anti-Strategy Board Cometh
President Barack Obama has established by an executive order an Atrocity Prevention Board. After the 120 day study and planning period (which will determine the writ of the APB), the board will be chaired by Samantha Power, a senior White House foreign policy adviser, NSC staffer and an aggressive advocate of R2P .
This is not likely to end well.
Presidential boards, commissions, study groups and other executive branch bodies are political agendas that power has made into bureaucratic flesh. Some, like the Warren Commission or the Iraq Study Group were transient for an instrumental purpose; others, like the Defense Policy Board put down roots and become real institutions. Some are killed for partisan reasons by new administrations (as Rumsfeld did to DACOWITS by letting it’s charter expire and then remolding it) or from congressional pique (this terminated the Public Diplomacy Commission) while some linger on for decades in zombie status, politically irrelevant but still animate, due to the inertia of bureaucracy.
What is interesting about these various bodies is that without the statutory powers granted to agencies created by legislation, they are merely empty shells unless filled with influential figures with clout or blessed by the patronage of high officials. If this is the case, even very obscure bodies can be platforms for impressive political action. Creepy and cloying old Joe Kennedy parlayed a minor post on a maritime commission and his vast fortune to become successively FDR’s SEC Chairman and the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, where he dispensed bad geopolitical advice and pushed the future careers of his sons, netting a president and two senators. The role of the Defense Policy Board in the run-up to the Iraq War is well known and I am told that one can even launch a constellation of careers and a powerhouse think tank from something as mundane and thankless as writing a COIN manual 😉
It is safe to say that the new Atrocity Prevention Board is not going to be window decoration.
Many people who are seeing what I am seeing in this move are now uneasily prefacing their critical comments with “Well, who can be against stopping atrocities, right?”. Let me say with complete candor: I can. The Atrocity Prevention Board is a great sounding bad idea that represents an impossible task in terms of Ways, unaffordable in terms of Means and unacheivable in relation to Ends. Worse, by holding the national security community hostage to the serendipity of governmental cruelty on a global scale, the intelligent pursuit of national interests are effectively foreclosed and the initiative ceded to random, unconnected, events. This worst kind of institutionalized crisis management time horizon also comes weighted with implicit theoretical assumptions about the end of national sovereignty that would, I expect, surprise most Americans and which we will soon regret embracing.
Given the ambitions and missionary zeal of some R2P advocates and their ADHD approach to military intervention, it is unsurprising that this new entity was not titled “The Genocide Prevention Board”. Genocide, which the United States has definitive treaty obligations to recognize and seek to curtail, is too narrowly defined and too rare an event for such a purpose. “Atrocities” can be almost any scale of lethal violence and could possibly include “non-lethal” violence as well. This is a bureaucratic brief for global micromanagement by the United States that makes the Bush Doctrine appear isolationist and parsimonious in comparison.
A while back, while commenting on R2P, I wrote:
…As Containment required an NSC-68 to put policy flesh on the bones of doctrine, R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.
The president is entitled to arrange the deck chairs as he sees fit, and in truth, this anti-strategic agenda can be executed just as easily through the NSC or offices in the West Wing, but the creation of a formal board is the first step to institutionalizing and “operationalizing a R2P foreign policy” under the cover of emotionalist stagecraft and networking machinations. A doctrine of which the American electorate is generally unaware and the Congress would not support legislatively (if there was a hope in Hell of passage, the administration would have submitted a wish-list bill).
This will not be a matter of just going abroad looking for monsters to slay but of a policy machine that can spew out straw monsters at need even when they don’t exist.
ADDENDUM:
What others are saying about the APB:
Foreign Policy (Walt) –Is the ‘Atrocity Prevention Board‘ a good idea?
Duck of Minerva (Western) –Institutionalizing Atrocity Prevention
April 25th, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Hi Zen,
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Excellent post!
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The road to hell is paved with good intentions…this “board” is yet another dumb idea. Let us hope it is short-lived.
April 25th, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Sounds like the story from early last decade about incident regarding first days in Afghanistan and rules-of-engagement required lawyer to approve firing … somebody had eyes on Ben Laden .. but they couldn’t find a lawyer to approve taking the shot. A darker slant on the story … if that had happened … there might not have been the trillions spent on the wars since then.
April 25th, 2012 at 2:55 pm
Good post, indeed. When I heard about the board, it set off all kinds of alarm bells….
April 25th, 2012 at 3:46 pm
Excellent post, Mark.
“What is interesting about these various bodies is that without the statutory powers granted to agencies created by legislation, they are merely empty shells unless filled with influential figures with clout or blessed by the patronage of high officials.”
An example from my world:
Even WITH explicit statutory powers, in this case just a DOD Directive penned by Gordon England (merely the DEPSECDEF), given the way our government works (or, rather, allows itself to ‘work’) these ‘good’ ideas can fall prey the impotence you mention. 2000.19E, which established JIEDDO stated, “The JIEDDO shall focus (lead, advocate, coordinate) all Department of Defense actions in support of the Combatant Commanders’ and their respective Joint Task Forces’ efforts to defeat Improvised Explosive Devices as weapons of strategic influence.” There is no power to compel, however, the individual services, nor is there adherence to a chain of command in this respect – even though one is detailed in the directive. Thus, we’ve seen duplication of effort on a massive scale, inter-service system incompatibility, and, basically, JIEDDO acting solely as a funding source and whipping boy for the C-IED efforts of the services when they screw up.
April 26th, 2012 at 3:56 am
Hi Scott & Doc Madhu,
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I am assuming it is here for the duration and has better than even odds of surviving into 2013.
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Hi Lynn,
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Yes I recall that story. Someone in a F-16 or maybe a helo had a lock on Omar Mullah’s caravan of range rovers and a JAG officer vetoed the strike because, if I recall, it would be an “assassination” (assassinating the enemy in wartime) or some similar idiocy.
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Hi JIEDDO
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It has been a while my friend. The power to compel (or control budgets) is the only real power in the bureaucracy in terms of positive effects ( there are lots and lots of negative power options to resist). That turns most officials by force of circumstance into courtiers if they want to get anything at all accomplished
April 26th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
This is an important post, Mark. Essentially, transitory and politically slanted humanitarian concerns may be contradictory to strategic concerns, as well as influenced by transnational elites hostile toward or unconcerned with US strategic concerns. The appointment of R2Per Samantha Powers, who once advocated invading Israel, does not add comfort. Your title, “The Anti-Strategy Board” is apropriate.
All that said, and true, all too true, the elevation of humanitarian concerns is welcome, if for no other reason than strategic concerns have been so far devalued in our conduct of foreign affairs that it will impel those with strategic focus to counterweigh with focus, good thought and arguments. Further, if the Atrocity Prevention Board continues past this sorry administration, it is likely to be shaped by the countervailing arguments of differing views on each humanitarian concern as well as those who emphasize strategic concerns.
Strategic thinkers better step up our game.
April 26th, 2012 at 5:23 pm
It would be interesting to see what a Romney administration would do with this. Focus on abuses of women in the Muslim world? Gang criminality in Mexico? Arming Christians in Nigeria and South Sudan and maybe Egypt to resist being “religiously cleansed”?
April 26th, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Hi Lex,
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This was a question I considered. I could see the press having a field day with a republican abolishing the initiative when “there is so much suffering in the world.”
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It would be interesting to know what Romney thinks of GWB’s idea of exporting democracy (for this is a symptom of that line of thought)—and, if he’s elected, we’ll probably know by his choices for NSC/State/Def, etc.
April 27th, 2012 at 3:43 am
Hey Bruce,
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I think you analyzed that very well. In addition to the transnational agenda, I suspect is a grant of power to the MSM to drive policy with media coverage of “X” atrocity over “B” ethnic cleansing or “C” artificial famine. Having an in-house lobby with a range of the moment time horizon aggravates the worst tendencies of the existing national security bureaucracy to pander to influence domestic media coverage. I went and read Powers comment on Israel – it was crackbrained fantasist in nature.
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Hey Lex,
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I would hope that Romney would kill the board and take up these causes through State, but I am not holding my breath.
April 27th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Hi zen-
This is a bureaucratic brief for global micromanagement by the United States that makes the Bush Doctrine appear isolationist and parsimonious in comparison.
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I was with you up to this, although I would have written everything in the past tense. We’ve already made the changes/dissolved into the dysfunctions you’ve mentioned. It seems to me that US “Strategy” died a while ago.
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From a Clausewitzian perspective? . . . When you come down to it, this post is just another polemic in this an election year. If you are going to talk US politics, simply add the appropriate label, what could be wrong with that? It would also provide the appropriate context to the comments, which have little to do with “strategy” or anything else beyond trashing Obama. Not that he doesn’t deserve trashing mind you . . . but then what does “Neo-con” deserve? Far harsher treatment, or much the same? Is there even much of a difference?
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So, what’s your label zen?
What adjectives you would have to use to describe it . . .
April 27th, 2012 at 1:27 pm
Huh?
April 27th, 2012 at 1:31 pm
Woops, sorry, I left out a bit:
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“It would also provide the appropriate context to the comments, which have little to do with “strategy” or anything else beyond trashing Obama.” I think the effect of strategy has already been spelled out very well in zen’s post, which is that such a board is just one more step in making the world America’s problem. Team Nato, World Police (my favorite little joke.) I saw Samantha Powers speak at the Brattle when I was still practicing and teaching in Boston. I’ll never forget it because it seemed so, well, kind of banal at the time, and, now, she has the ear of the President.
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Gives me shivers, how this stuff works in actuality and how influence is garnered and used.
April 27th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
The adjective I would use is that it is a very American sort of know-it-all-ism, which both the Bush administration and the Obama administration practice. It’s the ultimate example of “sahibism,” which is so very evident in most military themed blogs I read, right and left, or non-partisan. The man knows better. The man who read the right books know better. Always.
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Doesn’t surprise me we keep losing wars.
April 27th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Hi seydlitz
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you wrote:
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” When you come down to it, this post is just another polemic in this an election year. If you are going to talk US politics, simply add the appropriate label, what could be wrong with that? It would also provide the appropriate context to the comments, which have little to do with “strategy” or anything else beyond trashing Obama.”
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I have not trashed Obama here. Nor is this an election polemic. Nor am I a supporter of Mitt Romney. Not sure what you are getting at.
April 27th, 2012 at 2:20 pm
Er, zen and seydlitz89, sorry about my weird third comment. I don’t know where that came from? I think I was commenting at SWJ and dragged my whining attitude from there over here, which was inappropriate. Seriously, I reread my OWN comment and have no idea what I meant.
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I don’t know what gets into me, sometimes 🙂
April 27th, 2012 at 10:16 pm
zen-
This is a bureaucratic brief for global micromanagement by the United States that makes the Bush Doctrine appear isolationist and parsimonious in comparison.
How is that not a polemic? A “bureaucratic brief for global micromanagement”, which you also describe as an “anti-strategy”, which has done nothing particularly impressive up to now? That, compared with the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war which has resulted in two on-going strategic disasters? Obama’s little board in fact being “isolationist and parsimonious in comparison”? Quo bono?
I’m not saying not to be political, a Clausewitzian would hardly advise that, but simple label it as such . . .
April 28th, 2012 at 2:46 am
Hi seydlitz,
If I wanted to write a political polemic, I’d find a less obscure issue to which more than 1% of the population might relate and engage in the sort of personal attacks that are the currency of political discourse in America.
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I’m criticizing a policy here that is an agenda for open-ended -and likely erratically implemented – micromanagement and one that is far more broad in it’s implications than the much criticized Bush Doctrine. We are doubling down here. If that’s not an accurate assessment in your view, kindly tell me why. If it is accurate and your beef is really that you feel I am defending the Bush administration or pimping for Romney here – well, you’re inferring that. I find it depressingly likely that Romney if elected would keep the agenda (and many others) and just change the factional cui bono.