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MARTIN KRAMER IN THE LION’S DEN

What happens when a critic of ME studies programs is invited to speak by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

FORGING A NEW COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY

The CIA and the newly established Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) just released the new National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States. Of all the domains that come under the rubric of ” Intelligence” none have been historically more beset by controversy and bureaucratic infighting than Counterintelligence operations.

From the days of the OSS to the CIA CI program under James Jesus Angleton to the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen spy scandals, considerable, even paranoid, CI procedures failed to stem the tide of Soviet penetration of America’s intelligence community. The operational need to practice compartmentalization within the IC to limit the damage caused by Soviet moles combined by CIA – FBI rivalry, left the CI community badly fractured institutionally and to a considerable extent, blind compared to the perspective of their KGB opponents. The fall of the USSR did not result in a relaxation of compartmentalization within the IC to acheive greater CI security, instead security procedures were themselves relaxed in response to the political perception of diminishmed threat. In short, by September 11, 2001 American Counterintelligence had probably reached its nadir.

Fortunately, the Bush administration is taking steps in the right direction with the NCIX, though these steps should be, in my view, a preliminary transition to an institution with a more formidible national CI capability. Policy changes underway include:

• Proactive Posture: The NCIX will seek to disrupt foreign systems – ” neutralize and exploit” in their words – and are correctly viewing the problem as not merely formal intelligence services but also NGO entities like transnational criminal and terror organizations that are now exhibiting intelligence tradecraft. This will force opponents to drain away their relatively more limited resources and get the US ” inside their decision cycle“.

• Recognition of the Importance of Economic Espionage: The Soviets, Romanians and East Germans stole a lot of technology during the Cold War. While troubling, the Soviet bloc was falling so far behind by 1989 that the Russians reached a point where they lacked the ability to even effectively apply the knowledge they had stolen. Their vacumn cleaner approach also left them suceptible to ruinously expensive disinformation programs. Nor could the Soviets use their stolen goods to become stronger commercial rivals of the United States. Today “ 90 countries target sensitive US technologies ” seeking a free ride on our proprietary R&D investments to enhance their market share as much as to develop their military prowess.

• Emphasis on CI Analytical Products: Developing an institutional analytical capability from a counterintelligence perspective that becomes a standard part of the policy maker’s intel consumption will help mitigate the spread of disinformation, manipulation, stovepiping and old-fashioned ” spin. It is a very healthy check and balance and one I would hope is kept separate from being thrown in and watered down in IC consensus documents.

Suggestions for Further Reforms:

Looking at what seems to be a very good start to remediating long-standing, decades-old, institutional culture and operational problems there are some areas that I would like to see aggressively developed. The Bush administration really has only about two years to ram through dramatic CI changes that can stick and take on a life of their own before everyone’s eye shifts to 2008. Priorities must be decided upon so I’ve selected two:

Counter Foreign Strategic Influence in the American Political Process:

One of the useful media contributions during the series of Clinton fundraising scandals was highlighting the degree to which foreign entities, including agents of unfriendly regimes, transnational gangs and various shadowy operators solicited influence in the American political process. Given the preponderant influence in world affairs possessed by the USG and our multiplicity of interests across the globe, a ” stakeholder” mentality has developed in the minds of foreign governments, corporations, political movements where they deem it vital to influence our leaders directly, openly or in secret. None of this is going away and it is going to creep further and further down the ” political food chain” as foreign entities target rising young politicians of both parties for cultivation.

Establish a Foreign Counterintelligence Agency:

What CI needs is an independent and standardized operational capability to ” go on the offensive” abroad in terms of network disruption at their ” source” and to become an institutional center to develop and implement CI tradecraft. NCIX is a major step forward but it lacks ( at least as I am reading it) true operational authorities and to the extent that NCIX can corral,cajorle and coordinate operational teams from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies they are draining away assets from those agencies.

Secondly, as a practical matter establishing a foreign CI agency avoids the hair-raising political brawl over trying to establish a domestic counterpart with the attendent constitutional and legal implications. While we need something on the domestic side of the ledger it is better to work out the kinks overseas and identify some of problems to be avoided before attempting the much more delicate task of fitting CI into an open society.

ADDENDUM: I intended to link to this yesterday but Blogger being Blogger was unusable last night – check out Whirledview’s deconstruction of the Silberman Report.

THE GOP PLAYING THE KETTLE TO PAUL KRUGMAN’S POT

Since this post may irritate my more liberally inclined readers let me first state that Paul Krugman’s point about the ” Flat Earth ” anti-Science faction in the Republican Party being exceptionally damaging to the image of the GOP and national policy is a valid one. Admittedly, there are some highly-placed people in my party who see public virtue or cynical advantage in promoting ignorance and authoritarian social policy. Unless these psuedo-religious wingnuts are reined in by the Karl Rove types or the libertarian wing of the Republican party regains enough of a voice to provide some balance in intraparty debates, I’m pretty sure these jackasses will manage to alienate enough voters within two election cycles to lose at least one house of Congress to the Left. Maybe even the presidency in 2008.

Where Krugman fails is where he usually does,in imagining negative characteristics to be a monopoly of the right side of the spectrum. In “An Aademic Question” Krugman basically argues that conservatism is now intrinsically opposed to scientific thought and that the monolithic domination of American universities by the Left is simply a natural order of things. James Miller at TCS and Lubos Motl have issued rebuttals to Krugman’s more ineptly reasoned points but I wanted to highlight the lacuna that is driving Paul Krugman’s argument.

“Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they’re seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses’ content.

And it wouldn’t just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes”

The question is not whether or not Friedrich Hayek should be put on a pedastal on par with Lord Keynes but whether a freshman can graduate from a first rate university without ever hearing Hayek’s name or that of equivalent figures whose ideas and actions have had a deep impact on the affairs of the 20th century. They can and that’s the crux of the problem, an intellectual cleansing of university programs of ideas, thinkers and points of view that most irritate politically active leftists.

Politics have determined the course content at most major universities. Politics have driven out the required canon, instituted grade inflation, established fuzzy ” studies” programs that are often sinecures for race and gender socialists, defunded traditional history fields, established speech codes and put white males at a disadvantage in the hiring process.

It has been politics from one direction up until now. No, students suing professors isn’t the solution but leaving university policy in the hands of people like Paul Krugman isn’t the answer either.

RECOMMENDED READING

Two winners tonight.

Dan the Man at tdaxp has several posts up in his ” Doctrine” section that I liked, particularly ” Definition of 4GW “and ” Mao’s 3 Stages of 4GW ” plus an homage post to John Boyd featuring Boyd’s definition of character “To be or to do”.

Dr. Demarche celebrates the new border realism emerging at the White House.

A CRITIQUE OF PNM AS A POLICY MOVEMENT

While I was lazing on a beach last week, Dave Schuyler put out a typically thoughtful post called
” Narratives, tribes, and The Pentagon’s New Map” on how PNM theory needs to make inroads amongst core foreign policy-political groupings in order to succeed. With the second book by Dr. Barnett, A Blueprint for Action, cruising toward completion and realease, this was a timely discussion to begin.

“I’ve written before that I believe that the single most significant failing of the Bush Administration is its inability (or unwillingness) to communicate clearly with the American people. And I agree with Robert Reich (registration required or use BugMeNot) that, in order to communicate effectively, politicians need to frame the explanations of policies that they propose in terms of narratives that make sense to most Americans.

This isn’t just true for the Administration, of course. It’s true for the Democrats (as Reich points out) and it’s true for Thomas Barnett. If he really wants to get the American people on board with his Pentagon’s New Map approach to, as he puts it, “creating a future worth living in”, he needs to frame his arguments in terms of the actual points-of-view that have had historical force in constructing American foreign policy. Barnett clearly recognizes that himself when he writes:

Because until the Bush Administration describes that future worth creating in terms ordinary people and the rest of the world can understand, we will continue to lose support at home and abroad for the great task that lies ahead.

Communication begins at home and so far he appears to have been preaching to the choir: Wilsonians. But he notes something interesting in The Pentagon’s New Map in the correspondence he’s received on his Esquire article that formed the basis for his book:

The first basic response I would locate on the left, or liberal, end of the political spectrum. What these people are most upset about is the notion that the U. S. military is clearly headed toward “perpetual war” all over the Gap, which in their minds will only make things worse there. They advocate a sort of Hippocratic “do no harm” approach that readily admits that the Core is largely to blame for the Gap’s continuing misery and therefore should rescue those in pain, but do so primarily through state-based foreign aid and private charities.

That’s not a characteristic Wilsonian view. A true Wilsonian would have no problem with the use of force to “make the world safe for democracy” so long as we played by the rules. In my estimate that’s why those who have expressed such outrage at the issues of detention of illegal combatants, torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, and extraordinary rendition (assuming they’re sincere in their concern and not merely using these issues as stalking horses for opposition to the Administration or opposition to war per se) have reacted as they have. But, without putting words into Barnett’s mouth, holding illegal combatants indefinitely without trial or counsel and the torture of prisoners (and extraordinary rendition) are not inconsistent with the “different rule-sets in the Core than those in the Gap” approach that he’s advocating.

Those who hold this view (quoted above) would appear to believe that there is neither Core nor Gap but just one big Kantian parousia already in which case he has a major sales job ahead of him. It might be reasonably contended that this view has no particular influence over current policies and can be discounted. The problem here is that this view does appear to have substantial support among Democratic Party activists. If Barnett is going to develop real bi-partisan support for his PNM, this point-of-view must either be converted or marginalized. And without such support there’s no practical likelihood for maintaining the policy over the long period of time that will be necessary

Wilsonians like Barnett would appear to be best situated for critiquing the Kantian one-worlders by couching their critique in the language of morality and holding their feet to the fire for moral turpitude. We haven’t seen nearly enough of that kind of critique so far. “

I think Dave is dead on with the compelling moral power that can be marshalled by the advocates of PNM against the shills for the foreign despot of the day. PNM strategy is also potentially more appealing than Stabilitarian- Realist or Neoconservative foreign policy visions because PNM ‘s desire to ” shrink the Gap”contains both a measure of altruism and a preference for non-zero sum outcomes.

The trick here of course is that in these debates there are always two audiences – the relatively small elite of foreign policy, national security, intelligence and defense intellectuals who are the system’s insiders. In the second group is everyone else who form the outsiders. The second group lacks expertise possessed by the first group but not the power because “the outsiders” also includes most of Congress and the media punditocracy.

Insiders are most frequently Stabilitarian-Realists and Dovish internationalists who are unswayed by moral arguments as an impetus to American military intervention. The response of the Clinton State Department to acts of genocide, for example, was to prohibit State Department officials from uttering the word ” genocide”. Problem solved, in their view.

These sorts of people are swayed only by practical political arguments – primarily that action is urgently needed in order to prevent politically embarrassing defeats for the United States – and in particular – defeats that would tarnish their own elite careers. Give them that and heaven and earth will move.

Outsiders may have a variety of positions on foreign policy but their status as ” outsiders” and less familiarity with the gritty details of foreign affairs permits them the luxury of idealism. Moral arguments resonate here because complex knowledge bases are not required to look upon a situation abroad and recoil in horror.

PNM will be an effective strategy for the United States because it is Good. PNM is a good strategy for the United States because it will be Effective. This is the equation that must be embraced.