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CONSIDERING THE IMPLICATIONS…

Why was this story just a blip on the radar ?

DESIGNING A STRATEGIC INFLUENCE PROGRAM

The United States has not handled the memetic aspect of the GWOT particularly well – “We are losing a public relations war in the Muslim world to people sawing the heads off other Muslims.” as Tom Friedman put it. Yet we need more than just better communication or ” on message” talking heads from the White House, the country needs a comprehensive, long-term, Strategic Influence program – something the current Intelligence Reform bill does not address.

The Pentagon attempted to set up – and this has precedent as a wartime measure – a black propaganda office to plant stories in foreign media before a political uproar forced the closure the proposed Office of Strategic Influence. Despite the name, the OSI, from what information was available was really not strategic in scope but mostly tactical and concerned with the usual psychological warfare and propaganda operations germane to modern military campaigns. A genuine Strategic Influence program would be more akin to what is happening with the Intelligence Community and with Homeland Security – a tight interagency coordination effort directed by an official close to the President. This would make sense because there are a number of facets to Strategic Influence, both overt and covert:

OVERT…………………………………………………………….COVERT



Diplomacy…………………………………………..Agents of Influence

Public Diplomacy………………………………….Black Propaganda

Government Contracts…………………………..Bribery

Lobbying………………………………………….Recruitment of Assets

Foreign aid……………………………………………Black Operations

Op-Eds…………………………………………….Counterintelligence

Political Consultation

Military Aid and Training Programs

Project Development Grants

USG Media/VOA/USIA

Trade Policy

Macroeconomic Policy

Monetary Policy

Scientific, Cultural and Educational Exchange

Think Tank/Friendly NGO programs



Covert activities actually would play a relatively small, if vital, part in a Strategic Influence program one role being the identification of future foreign leaders to be cultivated as friends or diverted/distracted from politics by other attractive opportunities if hostile. The IC would also develop the psychological and cultural-historical expertise staff to help devise and craft context specific ” messages” appropriate for different societies.

At this juncture in the GWOT though, the task is primarily organizational – getting the manifold agencies, departments, bureaus, services and offices of the USG working toward a set of common strategic goals, each in their own field with their particular skill-sets. Rather than build a new, attention-getting, megabureaucracy, the National Security Adviser should quietly assume the coordinator role, assisted by a strongly disciplined interagency process established by an executive order. A section of career staff, lodged somewhere in the IC in a permanent office, would be required to monitor and maintain the longitudinal aspects of Strategic Influence operations to assure continuity and success.

No time like the present to get started.

TERRORISM AND LIBERALISM II – ARE THE DEMOCRATS GOING TO BECOME A RADICAL PARTY ?

Kevin Drum, one of the major liberal bloggers, is taking enormous heat from his wingnut commenters for two posts that examine the premises of the Beinart article and for suggesting that perhaps liberals might need to look at their positions on terrorism and on war. The reaction to Kevin’s extremely mild call for self-examination was a blistering torrent of invective and abuse, evasion of his points, changing of the subject and ad hominem argument ad nauseum. Some of it was plainly absurd. A few samples:

“Oh please, the religious right would just as soon deliver the left into trenches filled with fire than express sympathy or offer help with any of their agenda. We on the left want to believe red/blue, us/them, religious/secular are minor differences to be finessed or massaged. They’re not. They’re real, brutal, clear lines of demarcation. The right views us as the enemy, an enemy just as pernicious and evil and dangerous as any Islamic terrorist. When the left finally comes to realize this truth and works every bit as hard and ruthlessly as DeLay and Rove and Norquist to crush and eventually destroy the right we may save this nation. Don’t patronize ANY business you know to be owned or run by a Republican or fundamentalist Christian. Don’t hire them if you can legally pull it off. Don’t leave them anything in a will, even if they’re your children. The children must be made to believe developing into a Republican is the most shameful, dangerous, despicable path a person can travel. Do everything in your power to make their lives as difficult and miserable as possible. “



“This country is too rich and too fat for its own good. Our politics is spinning out of control when otherwise intelligent liberals are sucked into the hysteria. I just hope when we come to a stop somewhere we land in a place that doesn’t do the world major harm. “



“The war on Afghanistan was cowardly and futile. An appropriate action to capture and bring to justice those responsibloe for 9-11 would have been acceptable. By far the largest number of people punished were just ordinary poor people who have already suffered too many years of war. The people responsible for 9-11 appear to have escaped, and the whole episode left the US as vulnerable to terrorist attack as before, if not more so. A Democratic Party that doesn’t have room for critics of the US war on Afghanistan is not a party I care to work or vote for. “



“I think, as a nation, we all suffer from Bushitis. We are largely a bunch of gutless cowards who refuse to accept any responsibility for our actions. As horrific as 9/11 was, we cannot honestly play pure victim. Bin Laden was partially our creature. Accepting that fact, and learning from it (gosh, that was a screw up, just like Noriega, Sadam, Franco… , let’s fix it by getting in bed with Pakinstan…) would be a first real step towards a more secure America.”



“…an aggressive, militant policy toward Islamic totalitarianism is necessary simply because any other policy will end up with a lot of dead people.”

Wow.



Let’s cut to the chase. By this, you can only mean, “a lot of dead Americans” or “a lot of dead non-Muslims,” because our “aggressive, militant policy” has already, and will by definition, result in a lot of dead Muslims. And basically what you’re looking for is for some figurehead from the left to come out and say this is OK.



Well, all right. Thanks for clearing that up. I think you’re wrong, though. I think a lot of people would respond to a policy that said we would aggressively pursue genuine fairness and justice in our dealings with other sovereign nations.”



“Atrios’s whole fucking point was that opinions like the one expressed in Drum’s earlier post do NOT facilitate “conversation” but rather limit it to a very narrow range of acceptable viewpoints.



Kevin Drum: the Joe Lieberman of the blogosphere.”



“I had two thoughts in opposing the Afghan War:1) It is Pashtun tradition that when a man asks another for shelter, then shelter MUST be given, it’s a matter of personal honor. If bin Laden was being hosted under Nanawatai, then some degree of sensitivity on our part was called for. Bush displayed a gross ignorance for the culture of the Afghans. There was a chance this could have been resolved peacefully. Afghans, in general, were VERY distrustful of foreigners.”



“Fuck you, Lieberman-wannabe.”

The tone of the conversation, where the name of a moderately liberal Jew known for his dedication to public service is invoked as an epithet, is not a good indication of rationality – or for that matter, liberality – on the part of people claiming to be ” liberals “. These folks however really are not liberals so much as they are Leftists who happen to vote Democratic.

And they appear to be the future of the Democratic Party unless the real liberals – those in the tradition of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey – align themmselves with moderates to take the world’s oldest political party out of the hands of the Hate-America, Chomskyian, lunatics.

WHY ISLAMIST TERRORISM IS MORE IMPORTANT TO AMERICANS THAN NON-ISLAMIST TERRORISM

Juan Cole falls below his usual high standards of analysis today with his comments on the ETA bombings in Spain.

“I was struck at how little coverage US news organizations were giving this terrorist strike. If the Bush administration were serious about fighting terrorism, surely the FBI and CIA would be flying off to Madrid and trying to catch the perpetrators? There would be extensive consultations between Bush and Prime Minister Zapatero about cooperation in fighting these groups.



If these bombings had been carried out by al-Qaeda, it would be front-page news and something of concern to Washington.



That it isn’t raises the question of anti-Muslimism. Is the difference in the way that the American press responds to ETA from the way it responds to al-Qaeda a form of racism? “



To answer Professor Cole’s question, frankly, no it is not. The coverage of foreign news by MSM that does not directly impact American interests is typically, with the exception of very few media outlets like The Christian Science Monitor, exceedingly shallow. It’s self-absorption and lack of curiousity, not racism. Any American who desires to know what is going on outside of the United States is best off regularly reading the direct wire reports of the AP and Reuters and the English editions of the better foreign newspapers.

For historical purposes compare the amount of space given to the terrorism of Italy’s Red Brigades in their heyday with the coverage given to them when they kidnapped an American general, James L. Dozier. You would think that a group of Marxists that assassinated a sitting Prime Minister of a major NATO ally would have been better known to Americans prior to the Dozier incident but they were not.

Secondly, aside from the fact that Muslims are not a race ( nor are Arabs really, being a cultural-linguistic group. Somalis and light skinned Syrians alike consider themselves to be Arabs) a hierarchy of prioritization in the GWOT makes eminent rational sense. I’d say the Bush administration like the press follow the same scale of importance:

1. al-Qaida and it’s direct affiliates/allied groups like Abu Sayyaf and the Taliban.

2. Other radical Islamist groups – Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Call to Combat etc.

3. Non-Islamist Terror groups that plague our allies enough that they ask for American assistance – Colombia with FARC for example.

The ETA would be a Category III terror group and Prime Minister Zapatero, being an anti-American fool, probably does not have the sense to ask for help. Even if he did, the Bush administration should require that Zapatero ask formally for American aid so as to not further enable Zapatero’s spitting in our eye as a political platform. If the request is a public one we should give Spain all asistance because it is a NATO ally, even if their current Prime Minister leaves much to be desired.

AN IRRESISTIBLE FORCE AND THE IMMOVABLE OBJECT: AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE UNITED NATIONS

Dave Schuyler at The Glittering Eye has delved into the recent Report on UN Reform issued with great fanfare by Secretary-General Kofi ” What…me worry ? ” Annan. Dave has posted a synopsis here and has extended remarks here. An excerpt of Dave’s commentary in bold/italicized text with my kibbitzing observations in regular font:

“I’ve only read the report once quickly but I want to get a few preliminary thoughts out. The report extends the notion of security beyond inter-state conflict or terrorism to include issues like poverty, disease, civil war, international crime, and the international sex trade. It repeatedly observes the connection between poverty and civil war”

I’ll give them some points for looking at problems in context but inevitably, given the UN’s history and membership, this will shortly become special-pleading for Gap states to *not* be accountable for the horrific actions and massive corruption of their elite and a demand for North-South transference of wealth.

“The equation the authors of the report are pressing upon us is that poverty and the other ills they list leads to war and terrorism and that the only solution to the threats of war and terrorism is a global one spearheaded by the United Nations.

Nowhere in the report is there any mention of the role of liberal democracy in this equation. I believe that liberal democracy and free markets foster economic and social welfare. While soothing to the autocrats and totalitarian members of the United Nations the formulation used by the authors of the report renders down to turning the poor nations of Africa, Asia, and South America into permanent charity cases. This approach has failed in the past and there’s absolutely no reason to believe it will succeed any better now.”

Amen, brother. Dave neatly discerns how the UN uses it’s own members irresponsible misgovernance as a justification for a self-aggrandizing expansion of power for an international bureaucracy that has demonstrated that it shares the corrupt and undemocratic values of it’s membership.

Dave addressed the recommendations for reform in the report as well:

“Re-vitalize the General Assembly

The committee acknowledges that a key problem with the General Assembly is its lack of ability to achieve consensus. Their basic recommendation is that the member nations grow up. As I wrote earlier consensus is not merely an expediter of democratic processes it’s a prerequisite. My own recommendation is that requirements be placed for membership in the General Assembly. Accepting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be a start. Establishing such a requirement would effectively preclude nearly all of the Arab League nations from membership and one Security Council member: China. No consensus can be reached at this time for that reason and the General Assembly is irremediable”

I generally agree here with Dave except for using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a standard which Dave has adopted for efficiency’s sake ( and scoring a nice debating point as well I might add). Most of the treaties of this nature we signed during the Cold War came under the heading of ” Not To Be Taken Seriously ” because the idea of the Soviets or Libya living up to any of them inspired wild peals of laughter, much like the rights enshrined in the Soviet Constitution.

Therefore our diplomats, out of a mixture of realism and idealism, let slip a fair amount of language back then that Transnational Progressive international law professors and NGO’s today would like to twist to promote an agenda hostile to civil liberties, liberal democracy, sovereignty and capitalism. I don’t blame our diplomatic corps too much here because at the time, a world without the unhelpful presence of the USSR wasn’t envisioned by anyone and often times, putting in a plug for the Feminist ideologues and the environmental extremists was the policy of the U.S. administration then in power.

Most of these treaties themselves need almost as much reform as does the UN to be made into freedom-promoting rather than freedom-obstructing covenants. Leave them in the “salutary neglect drawer” for now. Dave’s general point however, is well-taken.

“Expand the Security Council

As I’ve mentioned here and here the Security Council should be a forum for security producing nations not security consuming nations. The committee acknowledges, as I’ve said, the problems with the General Assembly. How does making the Security Council more closely resemble the failed General Assembly render the Security Council more effective? My own solution is to establish formal membership criteria for Security Council membership and make veto-wielding membership automatic on meeting the criteria. Since any reasonable membership criteria would either remove current veto-wielding members or include nearly the whole General Assembly, this will never happen. The Security Council, too, is irremediable”

All good points. I’ll add taking up a *substantial share* of the UN budget, something that of the prospective candidates, only Japan can afford. Japan is the only true ” great power” among the candidate that deserves membership on the merit of having a stake in the stability of the world economic system worth the requisite sacrifices. India would make sense as the next best choice for obvious reasons. The others are there as a political sop to the Gap or to win brownie points for us with those particular states.

The UN is unreformable in the sense that it will always reflect it’s membership. On the day the bulk of the General Assembly are stable Core states with reasonably liberal-democratic political economies, the UN might be relatively useful. I do not expect that day to come much before the year 2100.

In any event, the principle of collective security – which requires that nation’s sacrifice their own interests to send blood and treasure to rescue other states that are unwilling and unable to defend themselves is as unrealistic today as when the League of Nations was tut-tutting about Japanese annexation of ” Manchukuo ” and Italian Fascists marching through Abyssinia. The UN will *never* function as it was conceived, regardless of it’s membership. At best, all we can do is harness humanitarian motives to self-interest when contemplating intervention. If you have any doubt, just ask the people of Dar Fur.

What to do ?. The UN needs to be – like a dysfunctional brother-in-law in family matters – discreetly but determinedly marginalized over time and by competing and effective organizations. The Anglosphere, the G-20 and democratic states are all viable starting points for such organizations with the intent that this conglomeration of new entities be created with the purpose of enforcing what Dr. Barnett calls ” a new A-Z Rule-Set “. None of these organizations should be allowed, like the UN has since Bush I. and Clinton, to become more existentially important than the principles for which they were created to serve. They will be tools and means, not ends.

POSTSCRIPT: The Glittering Eye is vying for a top blog position and needs your vote ! As we say in Chicago, ” Vote early and vote often “.