More On Torture

As if you needed more reasons to oppose it, another government official experienced in interrogation and counter-terrorism, has publicly registered his disapproval of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – also known as torture.

Back in America, Back in Iraq

Today the Washington Post printed an opinion piece by an American officer in charge of interrogations in Iraq.

Matthew Alexander (a nom-de-plume for this homme-de-guerre) has conducted more than 300 and overseen more than 1,000 interrogations. His experience says: Abide by the U.S. Army Field Manual and the spirit of American freedom. Do not torture. We found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi this way, it works.

But his experience is falling on deaf ears and obstructive bureaucracy. Top brass at the Pentagon and in Baghdad is not in the mood for ’soft’ interrogation.

Why? Because they are neo-conservative Bush Doctrine supporters? I suppose we will find out once the Obama administration takes the reins. Because they have existed in and propagate a culture based on aggression and the ability to dole out violence? Perhaps, but Mr. Alexander  exists in the same culture and is not so bent on using torture. While we debate the morality and motivations for torture, we are losing ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sir Janus previously addressed Victor Davis Hanson’s opinion that the Western war machine works because democracy is responsive to the public. But now we see the inevitable discord between ideal and reality: we espouse freedom, we bring torture.  Should we despise and denegrate our nation and our ideals because we can not live up to them?

I think not. Our ideals are still intact. We will probably never fully live up to them. We probably never have. Of course, we have our beautiful and ugly aspects. The liberty of the Constitution, the inhumanity of the Three-Fifths Compromise. The success of western expansion, the blood of native Americans and Mexicans. The triumph of the Second World War, the black mark of Japanese detention camps.

But neither should the knowledge that we will always fail our highest principles lull us into complacency. Are our leaders, in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in the White House, in the Pentagon – are they responsive to cries for justice? Will they stop torture, not only because it is ineffective but because it is wrong? Can we culturally and ideologically triumph over terrorism if we indulge in barbaric and anti-American practices? This antithesis between American freedom and American torture can only co-exist for so long before it mars our memory of this war, and more immediately hinders our ability to defeat Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

“We Call Them Pirates Out Here”

In the wild waters off the Horn of Africa, local fishermen have turned to piracy. And this week they hit the jackpot in the form of a ship registered in Belize - $30 million of Ukrainian arms bound for Kenya. The booty includes grenades, small arms, and yes, Soviet tanks.

Piracy has been an increasing problem in the Indian Ocean waters hugging Somalia. Earlier this year a Jordanian ship was seized en route to Mogadishu with international aid supplies. Pirates took hostage a French yacht and her crew in April before the French military led a successful raid on the pirates’ headquarters in the Gulf of Aden on the northern coast of the country. The International Maritime Bureau believes that pirate attacks were up 10% in 2007 from 2006 – and most of these attacks occurred off of Somali and Nigerian waters.

Piracy is an increasingly popular career option in the nearly-anarchic Horn nation, which is one of the most lawless countries in the world. After independence and unification in 1960, rebels forced out the president in a 1990 invasion of Mogadishu; a UN invasion followed in 1992. In 2006, an Ethiopian-led coalition stepped in, in order to shore up a government besieged by rebels. Violence has continued between Ethiopian forces and various insurgent groups up until now. The de jure government in the south can not control the de facto independence of the northern regions, where the pirates operate.

We should seemingly be quite dismayed that pirates now have a column of T-72 tanks. Not exactly so – they may be in possession of them, but it remains to be seen that they have the technology to offload them. In fact, most pirate operations are known to store captured ships in coastal caves. None are known to have the technology or know-how to get the tanks off the ship, which requires specific types of machinery.

Where this episode will get interesting is the international response. Russia has already deployed a flotilla to hunt down the missing ship. The U.S. Navy is not far behind. I do not expect African Union and Ethiopian forces to delay long. I do not think it would be a stretch to say that, in conjunction with their military exercises South America, this is a great opportunity for Russia to assert influence in a Third-World area and possibly gain some friends among Somalia’s more stable neighbors.

America’s involvement is interesting, within the framework of African criticism of American military presence in Africa. The Africa Command, established in 2007, has come under fire as being a vehicle for combating Chinese influence in oil-rich African nations. The U.S. military responds that its primary mission is to prevent terrorist networks from operating effectively in Africa. The current pursuit of the pirates could also be an excellent opportunity for the United States to aid the political stabilization of the Horn, strengthen relations with Kenya (by rescuing their arms – which might similarly help relations with the Ukraine, but hurt those with Russia), and then return to a general policy of non-interference.

A New Army for Every War

Strictly speaking, no two moments are ever alike.  Even on an infinitesimal scale, the measure of time spent between breaths contains entire univereses of possibility, no two exactly similar.  Now blow this up to the grand scale of politics and it doesn’t take a professional philosopher (ha!) to figure out that no two situations will exactly repeat themselves.

It’s important to take lessons from the past, recognize patterns where they exist (and acknowledge where they don’t), and make educated plans for the future.  It is reckless, and a mistake oft repeated, to seize on a model and apply it wholesale to new conditions.  This is best illustrated in the arena of armed conflict.

The Atlantic points out how the apparent success, and political popularity, of the Petraeus Doctrine is reshaping the future of the army. The Petraeus Doctrine was overdue for Iraq, there is no denying that.  If civilian leaders had done any research on Iraq, or any history at all, they would have recognized the need for a counterinsurgency plan and an occupational strategy.  As it was, the army was forced to reinvent itself on the fly, and what a testament it is to the soldiers and officers that they were able to do this.  That being said, it’s in danger of going too far.

Undoubtedly, the Patraeus Doctrine will help the army avoid a similar shock in the future.  But the article points out the dangers of seeing the Doctrine as an end in itself for armed forces.  It’s most vocal opponent deserves to be listened to, fearing:

that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.

While it is important that the army be ready to take on all situations, and all aspects of war, it should not put slack on the most basic abilities in order to refocus the battle to hearts and minds.  It needs to be remembered that before the stage of “winning hearts and minds,” one needs to conquerer hearts and minds, armed with weapons, and shooting them at our soldiers.

I take issues with Gentile’s assertion that Abrams’ strategy wouldn’t work in Vietnam.  I think the evidence currently supports the claim that, with continued funding (and no American soldiers) victory was possible.  That being said, I understand his defense of this position.  Strategy is not always strictly about “victory,” it’s also about cutting losses.  If the army is being geared to fight long wars, it will fight long wars, even when they are best avoided altogether.

Ultimately, the goal of the army must be the protection of Americans, and that includes the soldiers who serve it.  Rigid plans to fight past wars will not accomplish this.  The army should absorb the Patraeus Doctrine like a sponge and let it soak alongside the Powell Doctrine before it decides to wring it all out. The army needs to be flexible and ready to adapt, not stiff and forced to adapt.

Better yet, their civilian bosses should remember the Washington Farewell Doctrine.

1914 –> 2008

I am surely not the first to compare the recent conflict in Georgia to the Balkans in 1914, where two bullets from Gavrilo Princip’s revolver started the First World War. Mr. Putin clearly has dreams of a new Russian Empire dancing in his head. If he does not, his strongly nationalist attitudes, couched in nineteenth-century concepts, and the tsar-esque executive powers he has arrogated to himself certainly give a reasonable facsimile. Georgia has its own strongly nationalist president, Mr. Mikheil Saakashvili, who is intent on seeing the whole of Georgia – including breakaway provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia – under Georgian control.

In order to reassert Georgian control of the de facto independent region, Mr. Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops into South Ossetia after midnight, 8 August. The Russian Federation moved to protect pro-Russian South Ossetia, whose official languages include Russian and whose currency is the Russian Ruble.

On 25 July 1914, Russia became the first nation to mobilize in what would become the First World War. Tsar Nicholas II moved to protect his sphere of influence in the Balkans, which he believed was strengthened by an ethnic bond between South Slavs (Yugo-Slavs) in Serbia and Slavs in Russia, after Austria-Hungary demanded that Serbia severely punish the conspirators of the 28 June assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and suppress all nationalist elements of its government.

The analogy becomes more acute when it is considered how much worse the situation could have been. Georgia has been campaigning for NATO membership for some time. If that had been granted before recent hostilities, the United States would have been legally obligated to give military aid to Georgia. However, a Georgian farmer seems to grasp with relative clarity the moral and political obligation that the United States already has to Georgia.

Spheres of influence and complex alliances formed several automatic systems of defense in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905 forced Russia to allow Japanese influence in southern Manchuria and China, and to grant Britain (Japan’s supporter) expansion of its sphere of influence in Afghanistan, in order to maintain its own influence over northern Manchuria and parts of Mongolia. This also fostered anti-American feeling in Russia, whose Far Eastern foreign policy aimed at minimizing the number of other nations with a foothold in China. With Russian potency in the Far East somewhat neutralized, Russia renewed interest in the Balkans, becoming the patron state of Serbia and nurturing Slavic nationalist sentiments. Austria-Hungary similarly supported Bulgaria. Meanwhile, in order to check Austro-Hungarian aggression from the other direction, the Triple Entente powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia signed a secret alliance with Italy in September 1914, when Italy was still formally and openly allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Tripping any of the wires criss-crossing Europe and their spheres of influence could set in motion prearranged contingency plans for military action.

Russia has also mobilized its Black Sea Fleet for action against Georgia; the Fleet is bilaterally commanded by Russia and Ukraine. Kjiv has already warned that the Fleet will not be allowed to return to its station at Sevastopol in the Ukrainian Crimea. Both Russia and South Ossetia have accused Ukraine of supplying Georgia with arms.

Western Europe has been relatively ambivalent: a French official called Mr. Saakashvili mad for invading South Ossetia while French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Moskva and Tbilisi to broker a cease-fire. After all, Russia controls most of the petroleum supply into Europe. For nations like Germany, almost one-quarter of their petroleum and forty percent of their natural gas needs are provided by Russia. In the past, the Kremlin has not shied away from using this power. Ukraine’s vocal support of Georgia and apparent readiness to help their brother former Soviet republic is even more surprising, and perhaps brave, considering three major flare-ups in an ongoing petrol trade war between Kjiv and Moskva in January 2006, October 2007, and January 2008.

But, should we really be surprised that we engage in complex political and economic relations, and that the webs we weave often bring us to unpleasant choices? Should we renounce these complex foreign alliances, to follow the advice of George Washington? The Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Treaty of Paris (1783), the Congress of Vienna (1815), the Peace of Paris (1919), and the Potsdam Agreement (1945) all stand in a long line of European peace accords that set the standard for diplomatic theory and strategy: peace was instituted, and supposedly guaranteed, by territorial transfers, political quid-pro-quo, and economic provisions with the ultimate goal of enabling a balance of power. Today we have the United Nations – has it changed the rules of the balance of power game, or has it just applied the same strategies to the whole world?

So what are the options on the table for the United States and Europe? Several strategies have been suggested in an attempt to slap Russia’s wrist hard enough without souring relations further. These include denying Russia entrance into the G7, and/or speeding up Georgian and Ukrainian bids for NATO membership. But Western Europe has shown itself reluctant to do the latter, precisely because of the obligations demanded if there are future hostilities between Georgia and Russia. The United States has shown willingness to enter the fray with limited military assistance to Georgia (ferrying its troops in Iraq back home), and a promised humanitarian aid campaign. President Bush delivered some sharp words this morning, saying that Russia has “tended to view the expansion of freedom and democracy as a threat to its interests.” But the tightrope walk for America is made that much thinner by Russia’s support of Iran, which could be aggravated and increased by American action in Georgia – much to the detriment of troops in Iraq and civilians in Israel. The UN has been rendered useless by Russia’s veto power.

Mr. Putin’s strongly centralizing power and foreign policy initiatives are is couched in terms that belong to the nineteenth century or the Cold War: nationalism, spheres of influence, and satellite states. But in order to prevent the Georgian conflict, or any future conflicts propagated by Russia (or other aggressive nations: North Korea, Iran, China), from becoming the spark to the powder keg, there needs to be twenty-first century diplomatic innovation that combines a versatility to deal with complicated economic, military, and political relationships with a strength to solve these problems without allowing compromise to undermine the outcome.

The United States and Europe have the bear by the ears. Europe cannot let go, for fear of an energy crisis. America cannot let go, for fear of Russia’s enduring political clout in areas of the world that have become vital to American interests. But neither can they hold onto it for much longer, for the bear has them too and it has claws.

Russia Invades South Ossetia

Yesterday, the Russian Federation invaded the semi-autonomous and pro-Russian Georgian province of South Ossetia in response to Georgia’s increased efforts to rein in the area’s de facto independence. Today, Russian officials report that 1,500 civilians have been killed and that they have taken the regional capital of Tskhinvali. Georgian forces shelled the city today as Russia advanced beyond the southern borders of South Ossetia  and into Georgia proper to the town of Gori. The Russian air force bombed the city, which is the birthplace of Josef Stalin.

Georgia has increasingly faced the Kremlin’s wrath, particularly from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, because of the Caucasus state’s attempts at Westernization. Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili is seeking NATO membership for the country and the country had, until Russia’s invasion forced their recall, the third-largest troop presence in Iraq after the United States and Great Britain.

It should be noted that while Dmitri Medvedev is the President of the Russian Federation, and as such is head of Russia’s foreign policy. Mr. Putin, whose office does not have control over foreign policy, was actually the one who announced the beginning of hostilities.

Russia invaded South Ossetia on the opening day of the Olympic games. Both Russia and Georgia are participating in this summer’s games.

Quote of the Day

In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world. Little else will change. Radical Islam will still authorise murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. All those who argued that the ‘root cause’ of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired.

Nick Cohen, “Why Bush has been a liberal’s best friend“

This is actually one of my biggest reasons for supporting Obama as a conservative: to essentially call the world’s bluff on everything being the fault of George W. Bush.

Were McCain to win, the talking heads would simply denounce him as Bush II and we’d have at least another 4 years of Europeans hiding their head in the sand instead of acknowledging that maybe some problems are not the fault of George W. Bush.

Only with a symbolic and decisive break from the past–in this case an Obama election–will the world be willing to stop blaming us. And if even the election of the consummate anti-Bush is not enough to get Europeans to act like allies, perhaps it will finally sink in to the editorial board of the New York Times that maybe Europeans simply cannot or will not cooperate with us, and coupled with the fact that their relative power on the world stage declines even faster than our own maybe it’s time we look for some new allies.

Like, say, India.

Narcotics, Economics, and the War in Afghanistan

The poverty-crime cycle is well-known to the practitioners of the social sciences. It goes something like this:

Step 1: An area is impoverished for a variety of economic and social reasons.

Step 2: On account of the aforementioned poverty, residents start trafficking in narcotics to their neighbors, who use narcotics because of their impoverished condition.

Step 3: Narcotics trade attracts black market businessmen and violence to the area, which prevents property values from rising and thus overall equity remains low and the potential for high-end business, cultural establishments, and families effectively becomes nil.

So far, pretty simple and sensical. We have all personally witnessed this sort of process in American cities, and if we have not, it is certainly easy to imagine as happening.

Until…WHAMMY! Afghanistan defies all social science logic by actually following the lines of rational thought: Afghanis are gaining wealth by selling drugs. Afghani opium farmers are actually becoming prosperous off of the narcotics trade and supporting Hamid Karzai’s government. However, for many years the drug trade in central Asia has been represented as the recourse of poor farmers in the war-torn north. A recent UN report reveals that the largest opium estates are in the southern part of the country, which is relatively free of violence. Who could have guessed that being the number one exporter of opium could make you rich?

Thomas Schweich, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, details the fight against opium trading, its involvement in Mr. Karzai’s government, and its relation to the war in Afghanistan in this New York Times article. The recommendation? That we, and our allies (including Mr. Karzai and Europe), need to step up to the plate and offer some serious and consistent negative incentives to opium cultivation. Mr. Karzai may be funded by the narcotics trade, but so too is Al Qaida and putting a stopgap in their funding source needs to be a priority.

Salmonella in my Salsa

The so-called federal “War on Salsa” continued to rage across bureaucratic boardroom meetings and vegetable killing floors today as the FDA (headed by Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach, Philadelphia native and a graduate of both Saint Joseph’s Preparatory School and Saint Joseph’s University) accused a singular Texan jalapeno pepper of containing the salmonella which has sickened more than 1,200 people.

The federal government has waged an incessant and costly global war against the influx of salsa and salsa paraphenalia in the hopes of stemming the flow of the illicit substance across its borders and put a halt to a massive black market. Salsa-decriminalization proponents have criticized the government’s policy as being ineffectual, calling it a “no-win war.” Anti-salsa measures has also come under fire for the racial profiling of suspects the government alleges are more likely to consume salsa. But the feds say that salsa use has been statistically demonstrated to occur more frequently in inner-city communities. To date, the government has falsely accused tomatoes of carrying the poisonous salmonella strain that they now blame on the jalepeno.

The FDA discovered that this particular jalepeno, hailing from McAllen, Texas, was the likely culprit after affidavits indicated that all 1,251 poisoned persons were at the same burrito eating competition in that south Texas border town.

Looks Like VDH is Vindicated

Victor Davis Hanson, the classicist and military historian at Stanford University’s invaluable Hoover Institution has long advocated that the culture of Western civilization has throughout history given its constituents a decisive advantage over its enemies. In the brave new world of 21st century asymmetric terrorist and anti-terrorist warfare, this shamefully antiquated, western chauvninist, orientalist, </ivory tower newspeak> proposition of VDH seemed destined to meet its Waterloo in the bloody streets of Baghdad.

But it looks like VDH may wind up with the last laugh after all. The quantitative and qualitative success of General Petraeus’s COIN [COunter-INsurgency] strategy has turned the tables on the insurgency (knock on an entire rainforest’s worth of wood, of course), whose brutal tactics and inflexibility have cost it the strategic advantage and popular support it once commanded. As Andrew Sullivan opines:

Maybe this will be history’s judgment of the last few years: both the US and al Qaeda over-reached. But al Qaeda’s over-reach was greater. And in this we see why democracies do actually do better in warfare in the long run: because our leaders have to be responsive to the people; because legitimate internal criticism and debate forces course correction and exposes self-defeating hubris. With the Bush administration, this process took much longer than it should have, and the Bushies did all they could to stamp out, rather than hear, criticism. But in the end, democracy adjusts to reality; religious extremism cannot.

Whammy! Western Civ for the win!

Petraeus for President. and VDH as veep. And Andrew Sullivan as Secretary of the Interior[-Design].