Good Point

What if those idiots who had some guns and talked about assassinating Obama were Muslim? Thoreau explains.

However, I can’t help but think that if a few Muslims had been found in possession of rifles, and if one of them had said something about killing a politician, right now the Ministry for State Security would be crowing about how they succeeded in foiling a deadly terrorist plot.  After all, these guys still maintain that some Haitian ninjas intent on ripping off Bin Laden, a bunch of clowns who needed an FBI informant to hold their hand through a half-assed “surveillance” operation, were in fact a crack team of terrorist operatives preparing to blow up a building.

Considering that terrorphobia has so stricken our national securiyt and law enforcement apparatus, I’m surprised that non-Muslims aren’t being given the full-Gitmo, so to speak. Generally where governments subvert the law to go after a vague threat like this, their mandate fast goes beyond what they originally were going after. So how long until everything the FBI simply wants to avoid red-tape on becomes terrorism? Or if you’re an ambitious young agent, wouldn’t it make sense to plant some Korans on every idiot you’re investigating? Sure, that sounds conspiratorial, but does it sound at all implausible?

Dignity Promotion Isn’t All It’s Stacked Up to Be, Part II

According to Spencer Ackerman, the concept of “dignity promotion is at the heart of Obama’s outlook on foreign policy.” Dignity promotion is the idea that if the US can drawn the swamp of misery in much of the developing world, it can greatly reduce anti-Americanism and allow “liberty, justice, and prosperity” to take root. This notion is supposed to counter the neoconservative idea that the roots of terrorism can be found in a lack of responsive, democratic governments in the Middle East.

As an example for why a dignity-based perspective is valuable, Ackerman points to the Muslim Brotherhood making gains in Jordan because the government is viewed as illegitimate and nonfunctioning as a result of the run up in food prices. And his argument makes intuitive sense: if we had more humane and sensible food/poverty policies, it would prevent Islamist extremists from being so popular in the Middle East:

And here’s where the choice really is between whether you want to win or lose a winnable fight against extremism. If you want to win, you’ll support what it takes to feed people. If you want to win, you’ll ask yourself who you want a poor family in Jordan to turn to in its hour of crisis: the U.S. or the Muslim Brotherhood. If you want to win, you’ll stand with the politician that wants the U.S. to be the ones that family turns to…And if you don’t want to win, you’ll say that what happens in Jordan is a Jordanian problem and we can’t feed the world and anyway poverty and terrorism are different issues.

At the risk of not wanting to win, I’ll say that while poverty in the developing world is a huge issue (actually, by many utilitarian reasonings, the hugest), it has very little to do with the fight against terror and extremism - and Spencer’s example proves it.

The problem with Ackerman/Power/Obama approach is that it adopts some of the crucial premises of the expansive, neoconservative approach to terrorism. Namely, it aggregates all extremist, Islamist and jihadi groups into one hulking terrorist mass. The approach necessitates this aggregation because the one terrorist group that actually has the capabilities and intentions of attacking the United States (with the exception of groups in Iraq) is Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda has nothing to do with poverty or hunger.

If you look at the 9/11 hijackers or those who have attempted AQ attacks, they are hardly the wretched of the earth. Instead, they’re generally college educated and middle class. Al Qaeda, as opposed to the traditional guerilla/insurgent/political terrorist group, doesn’t actually depend on the type of grass roots support that such a group would generally need to survive. They, instead, depend on the donations and support of ideologically motivated types that want to bring about the global caliphate, get American troops out of the Holy Kingdom and generally hate the United States.

And so, the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in Jordan, although a regrettable side-effect of our essentially taking on the British imperial mantle in the Middle East, probably doesn’t increase the risk of anti-American terrorism all that much. Especially in Jordan, where because of the 2005 Amman bombings, the public mood has turned decisvely against Al Qaeda. And although Jordan isn’t exactly the most pro-American place around, it’s hard to interpret their embrace of the Islamic Brotherhood - which, as Ackerman notes, is greatly opposed to Al Qaeda - as a sign that terrorist attacks against America are going to be launched from Jordan. If Jordanian public support for the US is important, than the dignity promotion agenda seems like an odd place to start.

That’s because, when you ask Arabs about why they don’t like the US, they point to policies that the US is currently engaging in - occupation of Iraq, one sided support for Israel etc - not the lack of development assistance or Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Of course, Ackerman supports changing those policies, which would then lead to some change of Arab opinion of the US and help drain the swamp of anti-Americanism. But the effect of that real policy change is likely to be much, much greater than some vague committment to “dignity.”

And here’s my initial post looking at “dignity promotion.”

But They Wanted To!

Dana Goldstein captures a particularly inane bit of the hearings:

Sen. Lindsay Graham just asked Gen. Petraeus, “Why did they [Al Qaeda in Iraq] come to Iraq?”

Petraeus responded, “To establish a base in the heart of the Middle East.”

Okay, right. But why was that possible? Because we destabilized the region through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, giving terrorist groups a new foothold.

Dana’s obviously right - the key variable in Al Qaeda setting up shop in Iraq was not anything intrinsic to AQ, but instead the fact that we created a near perfect environment for them. Not only did we, as she said, destabilize the country and create a lawless zone in which they could fester - and even this isn’t entirely accurate as much of AQ wasn’t/isn’t foreign - we also gave Al Qaeda a chance to do their favorite thing: shoot at Americans and their allies! Graham’s logic, whereby Al Qaeda does what it wants and then we respond, is backwards: we enact policies and then Al Qaeda is able to act in our wake.

Al Qaeda and such are almost like parasites or viruses in the international system. They have very little agency and can’t just do what they want, when they want, in the same way that a state can. They instead depend on all sorts of conditions and circumstances to be right to implement their agenda. Look at, for example, the occupation of Saudi Arabia or the US funding of guerrillas in Afghanistan. Before that, plenty of people wanted to fight the Soviets with big guns, but couldn’t until we gave them said large guns. And while Bin Laden wasn’t a big fan of the US before the Gulf War, when we had troops in Saudi Arabia, he could make a convincing case that Americans were occupying the Arab world. Also, if you look at terrorist attacks in Europe, they probably wouldn’t have happened (Spain certainly) without the invasion of Iraq.

I think it’s more useful to look at the threat of transnational terror as an emergent property of the world order rather than some sort of exogenous force that is entirely independent of outside influence and is entirely self-directed. To use a comic books reference, transnational Islamic terrorism is not like the Phoenix Force - it’s not the “immortal and mutable manifestation of the prime universal force of life. Born of the void between states of being, a child of the universe…the nexus of all psionic energy which does, has, and ever will exist in all realities of the omniverse“

The problem with making this type of argument these days is that when you do, people claim you’re “blaming America first” or that you’re saying there’s “moral equivalence” between the West and Al Qaeda. To be very clear , I don’t “blame” the US for terrorism, clearly terrorists are responsible , I just want to point out how many of our policies and actions certainly don’t help reduce the threat of terrorism, and how many of them exacerbate it.

In Which I Sometimes Wish I Lived in Europe

What would happen if a major American newspaper ran an Op-Ed promoting a more dovish line in the war on terror in which the first and last paragraphs were a discussion of Foucault’s thoughts about “disciplines”?

Call me a fuddy-duddy American university humanities student (one day, maybe!) but I think the entire blogosphere kerfuffle about the “Foreign Policy Community” could have been illuminated if people used some basic Foucaldian terminiology and ideas.  Just a thought…

And oh yeah, everything Jonah Goldberg said in Liberal Fascism, Foucault wrote more than 30 years ago.  But more on that later…

Should We Prosecute Interrogators?

Spencer Ackerman has a sympathetic article looking at the fate of CIA interrogators, who may be prosecuted for torture while the lawyers and senior administration officials who authorized and encouraged use of these techniques will likely go off scot free.  The assumption is that this is somehow unfair, after all, the interrogators were just doing what the administration was demanding of them.  And Ackerman’s right, in an ideal world, Yoo, Addington et al would also be prosecuted.  But I don’t think there’s an example in American history of administration officials being prosecuted for war crimes, especially when they were directed to do so by the president himself.  I mean, couldn’t Addington and Yoo just claim that they were merely following the president’s directives to write an expansive definition of what legal interrogation was? Should we forestall prosecution of them until we can get Bush and Cheney?

Although it would be nice to go up the chain and prosecute all these people for their role in torture, it’s untenable to say that we can’t prosecute the actual interrogators themselves until after we get their bosses.  From what I understand, following an illegal order is a crime in and of itself.  We really don’t get anywhere by saying that we have to prosecute the top people before we can go after the people actually doing the torture.  Sure, it’s unfortunate that they’re being hung out to dry/mislead by the Justice Department and their higher-ups, but that doesn’t excuse responsibility for breaking some very basic laws.

What? Expansive Law Enforcement Power Abused? No Way!

There are a lot of problems with the Bush administration’s argument that civil liberties have to be restricted for the duration of the War on Terror.  The first is that the War on Terror is necessarily endless; how can we ever say it will be over?  The second problem is related to the first, that because it’s really unclear who exactly the enemy is and because governments tend to use their power as expansively as possible, it’s inevitable that there will be abuses of these new powers.  Just think, if you’re an FBI agent, and you have this sweet new authorization to get warrants with less stringent judicial oversight, wouldn’t you try to use that power as much as possible?  Well, they have been:

The FBI has increasingly used administrative orders to obtain the personal records of U.S. citizens rather than foreigners implicated in terrorism or counterintelligence investigations, and at least once it relied on such orders to obtain records that a special intelligence-gathering court had deemed protected by the First Amendment, according to two government audits released yesterday.

The episode was outlined in a Justice Department report that concluded the FBI had abused its intelligence-gathering privileges by issuing inadequately documented “national security letters” from 2003 to 2006, after which changes were put in place that the report called sound…

A report a year ago by the Justice Department’s inspector general disclosed that abuses involving national security letters had occurred from 2003 through 2005 and helped provoke the changes. But the report makes it clear that the abuses persisted in 2006 and disclosed that 60 percent of the nearly 50,000 security letters issued that year by the FBI targeted Americans…

In total, Fine said, the FBI issued almost 200,000 national security letters from 2003 through 2006, and they were used in a third of all FBI national security and computer probes during that time. Fine said his investigators have identified hundreds of possible violations of laws or internal guidelines in the use of the letters, including cases in which FBI agents made improper requests, collected more data than they were allowed to, or did not have proper authorization to proceed with the case.

Of course this happened, so is the nature of giving law enforcement agencies the power to do anything - they’ll always use it to the max.  But what exactly is a National Security Letter, and why should you care?  Well, an NSL is a authorization approved by the head of the FBI to “demand certain types of personal data, such as telephone, e-mail and financial records, while barring the recipient from disclosing that the information was requested or supplied.”  So basically, you’re shit gets searched and you can’t tell a lawyer about it.  Just for a little refresher, the 4th amendment says:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So we have the FBI doing searches of the “effects” of US citizens - without warrants or probable cause.  There’s also the implicit violation of free speech, namely that you can’t tell anyone about the search.  What makes the FBI’s massive abuse of National Security Letters even more galling is why they used NSLs. They used them because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wouldn’t authorize their warrants: “The court had concluded “the ‘facts’ were too thin” and the “request implicated the target’s First Amendment rights,”  This is just blatant.

To give some background, the FISA court was set up in 1978 to let intelligence agencies do surveillance and spywork with some judicial oversight, but less than accorded to a regular criminal case. Some of the protections afforded to law enforcement in the FISA court are a 72 hour window to get a warrant after surveillance starts and a lower level of proof to get a the warrant itself - all the government has to do is to prove that the subject of surveillance is an “agent of a foreign power.”  Between 1978 and 1994, the court approved 13,995 out of 14000 warrant requests.  So if this court, which is basically an American Star Chamber, wouldn’t approve a warrant for the FBI, then they probably shouldn’t have gotten them in the first place.

The FBI’s justification for circumventing the FISA court would be hilarious if it weren’t so disturbing:  the FBI’s general counsel “told investigators it was appropriate to issue the letters in such cases because she disagreed with the court’s conclusions.”  Last time I checked, the way the legal system is supposed to work is that law enforcement agents have to listen to a court’s decision.  Otherwise, why do we even have courts to oversee law enforcement activity?

The Post’s article indicates that the FBI has been actually cleaning up since 2006, when these massive abuses became apparent, but I doubt that we’ll ever see any real, voluntary restriction on the use of these expansive powers until Congress and Courts actually take some strong steps to restore civil protections.

Strength Through Fear

Abe Greenwald has an odd definition of what it means to defeat — and be defeated by terrorists.  He seems to think that we show our resolve by being in constant fear, constantly using 9/11 to promote all sorts of unsound policies and constantly living like there’s another attack just around the corner:

It shouldn’t be so hard to see that six years into this ongoing war “9/11 fatigue” is a luxury beyond our means. But Americans must always live beyond their means, so now we’re tired of having to worry about the armies sworn to kill us. Could this possibly be what Osama bin Laden was driving at when he said the Russians were hard to defeat but the Americans, because they’re decadent, will be a piece of cake?

Wouldn’t the ease of defeat run the opposite way?  The point of terrorism is to strike fear into the population one attacks and to generally make their lives miserable out of proportion to the actual threat.  Isn’t it our “decadence” of not living in the shadow of 9/11 — despite Giuiliani and Abe Greenwald’s exhortations — that makes America more difficult to defeat?

Shouldn’t the fact that we’re different from the Russians, we’re willing to be “decadent” in the face of danger, be a source of national pride?  But I guess it’s hard to mobilize the nation for endless war if you’re optimistic about our ability to cope with danger…

The “-Stat” Candidate

Giuliani’s City Journal essay laying out his homeland security vision is notable for a bunch of reasons, including his shocking refusal to mention that he put his disaster command center in the World Trade Center so he’d have a “shag shack” in which to…do stuff…with his girlfriend, but more importantly, he has decided that his response to every policy question is to establish a “-stat” program.   For example, here’s what he wants to do on counter terrorism:

 To gather and analyze such useful information, first preventers can be assisted by the widespread implementation of a “Terrorstat” program, an idea proposed by former NYPD police commissioner William Bratton and criminologist George Kelling… By bringing all crime and arrest data together by category and by neighborhood, Compstat revolutionized policing, enabling officers to focus their efforts in problem areas, armed with up-to-the-minute, accurate intelligence, rapid deployment of resources, individual accountability, and relentless follow-up. Terrorstat would do the same for counterterrorism.

And border security:

To bring real order to the border, we should establish a “Borderstat” program, also based on Compstat principles. Borderstat would use technology to monitor illegal border crossings and compare them with captures…Even before the completion of SBI, however, we can use Borderstat to monitor incidents better along the border—shootings, petty crimes, and garbage dumping—that indicate illegal crossings and deploy border law enforcement resources to where they can have the most impact. Borderstat will apply a version of the Broken Windows policing theory to our borders.

Disaster Preparedness:

Federal officials need a new “Readystat” system to measure localities’ preparedness against risks and prioritize federal funding accordingly. Readystat would conduct annual assessments to determine the needs of each locality based on geography, population, and the unique threats that each community faces. These data would then be used as an objective guide to funding and grant decisions. Armed with the data, DHS regional directors would also work with state and local leaders to ensure preparedness. Readystat could have pointed out New Orleans’s pre-Katrina vulnerabilities and given us the chance to correct them.

What’s next?  How about “healthstat”to address people not using government programs like medicaid or S-CHIP? (oh wait, Rudy already proposed that) Abortionstat to identify women who are likely to have unwanted children?

Biden’s quip definitely needs an update.  “Noun-Verb-9/11-Stat”

Who’s Taking a Holiday From History?

John Podhoretz’s post, claiming that Bhutto’s assassination is the turning point from venal campaign riff raff to serious talk about foreign policy, seems to have captured the emerging CW. While I agree that candidates using Bhutto’s assassination as a chance to talk about their foreign policy is a good thing, J-Pod is wrong in saying that up until now, the campaign has just been about silly stuff.

On the Democratic side, foreign policy has been constantly discussed. Obama’s judgment on the Iraq war is why many Democrats are supporting him. They realize how serious a foreign policy disaster Iraq was, and they want a candidate who won’t make the same mistake. When Clinton harped on Obama for promising to meet with foreign leaders or pledging not to use nukes against terrorists or saying he would bomb Pakistan, that was a serious foreign policy debate. When Obama and Edwards go after Clinton for voting yes on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, it’s because they think that giving Bush any war-making authority with Iran would be a huge error for America’s security and foreign policy.

It’s on the Republican side, however, that we’re seeing the “holiday from history.” With the exception of Paul and Huckabee, the Republican candidates are in lockstep with Bush on Iraq and on foreign policy more generally. When Mitt Romney talks about “doubling Gitmo” or when Rudy says that the problem with out foreign policy is that State Department officials don’t advocate for America enough, that’s taking a holiday from history. I could go on and on with the un-serious, inane or just batshit insane ideas Republican candidates have about foreign policy, but I think you get the point.

But we all know that when Podhoretz talks about moving “foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign” he clearly means that the campaign should become a contest to see who will invade the most Muslim countries and crack down on civil liberties the hardest. Which makes us wonder, why is he disappointed with the GOP race so far?

Was Bhutto Pakistan’s Chalabi?

Robin Wright’s WaPo front pager, which details the back room diplomacy that allowed Bhutto to return to Pakistan, is incredibly interesting. It seems like that Bhutto was the establishment favorite in Washington and charmed various State Department officials into thinking that she was Pakistan’s final hope. The comparisons with Chalabi are obvious. Bhutto, as opposed to say, Nawaz Sharif, went to Harvard and Oxford and was friends with people like Zalmay Khalizhad, thus allowing her to win influence.

While it was beyond the pale to support Bhutto supplanting Musharraf or pushing Musharraf to have a legitimate democratic election, Bhutto got support in the States for her to provide a democratic facade for Musharraf to insure his staying in power. Pakistan expert Barret Rubin explained, “The idea was to consolidate the alliance of the so-called moderate forces in the Pakistani military through this election that the military was going to rig but we were going to certify anyway.”

It’s extremely unclear why this was the optimal policy. Bhutto being prime minister would do very little to direct our Pakistan policy in a sane direction. The problem was that we were supporting a dictator and giving him billions of dollars in military aid that he largely squandered and/or spent on arming troops on the Indian border. Arranging for Bhutto to share power wasn’t going to change that. The reason US officials felt like they needed to support Bhutto’s bid to become Prime Minister and boost Musharraf was that he’s supposedly the only person who can prevent Pakistan from falling into Jihadist hands. While it’s certainly true that militant jihadists have the ability to wreak all sorts of havoc in Pakistan, the risk of an Islamist coup is incredibly low. The polled support of Islamists parties peaked in 2002 at 12 percent, and they are now polling at a measly four percent.

Bhutto, instead of being a force for change in Pakistan, was just another part of our failed and counterproductive Pakistan strategy.

Now Everything is Back to Normal

It’s comforting that, in these times of turmoil, we can still be assured that bloggers at the Corner, and Andy McCarthy in particular, are still willing to ascribe profoundly negative characteristics to a whole group of people based on little evidence besides the fact that they’re brown and Muslim.   From a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, no less.

WOLVERINES!

Gordon Chang is very worried about *gasp* Iran establishing diplomatic and economic ties with Latin American countries.  He links to this San Antonio Express News article about Iran in Nicaragua, which features this hilariously overblown passage:

What worries state department officials, former national security officials and counterterrorism researchers is that, if attacked, Iran could stage strikes on American or allied interests from Nicaragua, deploying the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah and Revolutionary Guard operatives already in Latin America.

Sound familiar?  That’s because it’s the plot from Red Dawn.  Just switch out the USSR for Iran and Gordon Chang for Patrick Swayze and there you go.

Looking for a Plumber

Is anyone surprised that in the face of evidence that CIA destroyed tapes showing the torture of a mentally unstable man who wasn’t that high up in Al Qaeda and provided tons of made up intelligence - tapes that were subpoenaed by a federal court - Gabriel Schoenfeld’s first concern is to find and punish the leakers? Commentary is rarely disappointing.

Torture, Lies and Videotape

While I, like Mike, think that Americans have always accepted the ticking time bomb rationale for torture and am not particularly surprised by the fact we’ve thrown out the Geneva Conventions and our own domestic laws against torture, it’s still a bad jolting to know that the CIA destroyed subpoenaed evidence in a criminal trial.  I always hope that the next revelation of the Bush’s administration lawlessness — the torture memos, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping — will be the one which causes Congress and Courts to finally push back.  I’ve been disappointed every time. Perhaps this will the revelation.  While the act of destroying tapes is, in a sense, not as bad as the actual sanctioned torture, the case that the CIA was breaking the law seems to be an order of magnitude more clear than previous cases.  There was a federal criminal trial, the court subpoenaed evidence, the CIA first lied about the existence of said evidence and then destroyed it.  Even Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarter’s thinks this was a step too far.

The Terror Dream And Counterfactuals

First of all, whatever the merits of The Terror Dream and Michicko Kakatuni’s scathing review, would it hurt TPM Cafe so much to invite someone to the bookclub who doesn’t write a post saying, essentially “Oh, Faludi, you’re just so right, allow me to go on for the next 1000 words celebrating your rightness”?  That’s just boring for us readers.  But let’s get on to the substance.  It’s all below the fold.

CommieNazi? Vote Hillary

Mark Hemingway has one of the most breathtakingly stupid pieces I’ve read in a “respectable” magazine in quite some time.  He takes Hillary’s complaint that Bush’s remarks (implicitly) comparing the Democratic response to terrorism as similiar to the world’s relative lack of response to Lenin and Hitler before their respective rise to power as a sign of Hillary’s deep affinity for totalitarianism.  Hemingway is shocked, shocked! that Hillary could possibly find this rhetoric offesnive.  He then puts his reporter cap on and emails the respective heads of the American Communist and Nazi parties.  The commie finds the analogy offensive because Lenin was great and HItler was awful, and the Nazi doesn’t care so much but sure as hell hates Bush (I wonder what he would think of Hillary).  In Hemingway world, this means that Hillary is some sort of CommieNazi, or as he puts it:

 if the American Nazi Party and Communist Party USA are not the company in which Clinton wishes to place herself, then what did she mean? I, for one, would be grateful for some clarification about exactly how evil the Senator regards Osama Bin Laden — if he’s not fairly mentioned in the same breath as Hitler and Lenin.

This is the worst type of McCarythite rhetoric, or as it’s  cleverly rephrased “mandatory maoist repudiation.”  Just because Hemingway was able to dig to the bottom of the American ideological barrel to find despicable people whose words could be twisted to be similar to HIllary’s, she must now renounce them.  And if she refuses to? Then she’s a CommieNazi. If anything, this crap reminds me of Pynchon’s Peter Penguid Society, the Southern California group in Crying of Lot 49 so deeply opposed to communism that it opposes capitalism because it inevitably leads to communism.  That’s the level of dimwitted nuttiness we’re dealing with here.

Thailand And the Dangers of Islamofascism

The phrase “islamofascism” has many problematic elements. One of the worst is that it encourages conflation of loosely and even unrelated groups and movements. When one says the enemy is Islamofascism and that Islamic militants with diverse goals and interests including, but not limited to, the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, Hamas, the Government of Iran, Al Qaeda, Chechen rebels, Shia insurgents in Iraq and various Muslim militants in Southeast and East Asia are all Islamofascists — you’ve basically rendered it impossible to play various groups off one another (Iran and AQ, for example, aren’t exactly big fans of eachother, but in Podhoretz world, they’re both heads on the Hydra of Islamofascism) or to focus ones energy on the most pressing problems to American interests or the safety of the international order more broadly. Hitchens takes his formula for evaluating militants — if they’re muslims, they’re islamofascists on par with AQ — and rather embarrasses himself:

The latest news is of a very nasty Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand, butchering Buddhist villages (remember the Taliban assault on the Buddha statues at Bamiyan?) and making demands for the imposition of sharia law. Perhaps someone will identify for me which Thai and Buddhist—or Western imperialist—crimes have led to this sudden development. Or perhaps it will be admitted, however grudgingly and belatedly, that there is something sui generis about Islamist fanaticism: something that is looking for a confrontation with every non-Muslim society in the world and is determined to pursue it with the utmost violence and cruelty. It is also seeking a confrontation with some Muslim states and societies.

Well, lets see what experts have to say. The Jamestown Foundation, a think tank that exclusively studies terrorism and even has “Al-Qaeda” in it’s tagline, concludes that “there is as yet no concrete evidence to suggest the region has been decisively transformed into a new beachhead for pan-regional jihadism. While it is true the scale and sophistication of violence has increased, there is nothing to link this change in tempo to outside militant forces. Indeed, in the opinion of informed local commentators, the heightened intensity of attacks reflects learning and development on the part of indigenous rebel groups, possibly combined with the infusion of an increasingly competitive criminal interplay involving gambling syndicates, drug lords and corrupt members of the security forces and political elite.”

So maybe not every Muslim with a gun and grievance is part of the great transnational Islamofascist movement. But the movement has gotten much more religious, so surely Hitchens can’t be too far off by connecting this to revisionists Islamic militants in the Middle East and Central Asia? Wrong, the report continues, “although there is a definite religious element to many of the attacks that are currently taking place in the three Malay provinces, it is not apparent that this has altered the essential localized and nationalistic aspect of the conflict. At root, the objective is to protect the region’s unique identity and traditional way of life—both from the (perceived) unjust incursions of the Thai Buddhist state and, just as importantly, the unprecedented influx of cross border movements of trade, commerce and people.”

And finally, “As noted above, one cannot dismiss the possibility that at least some external penetration may have taken place in southern Thailand. Accurately disaggregating the extent to which this has actually taken place, however, is of vital importance—both as an issue of substance and policy. To inappropriately conflate local grievances and objectives with outside imperatives will not only serve to greatly complicate the possibility of peace agreements on the ground, it also risks creating the very conditions for the type of cross-border radicalism that governments in this part of the world so fear.” We should heed these words

The French Counter Terrorism Model

Max Boot thinks that the French model for fighting terrorism - extensive powers granted to magistrates to both investigate and prosecute terrorism suspects - is a good one and claims that it disproves any claims about a slippery slope to authoritarianism that American liberals think is occurring here:

France, they note, has been facing the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism since the 1980’s and has done an impressive job of marshaling its resources to defend itself. What’s the secret of French success? Gerecht and Schmitt point to the fact that the French “grant highly intrusive powers to their internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and to their counterterrorist investigative magistrates (juges d’instruction).”The last office, whose most famous holder is Jean-Louis Bruguière, was created in 1986 and is utterly without parallel in the American system, because it gives a single magistrate the power to use both intelligence and police services to stop terrorists before they strike. Magistrates even have the power to lock up French citizens when there is not enough evidence to convict them of a crime.In fact, as they stress, the kind of steps the French take work. And yet in the more than twenty years since this system was created, “France has not gone down the slippery slope into tyranny. France’s society, its politics, and many of its laws have actually become much more liberal and open.”

Boot’s analysis is quite faulty. The first major difference between the French effort against terrorism and the American is that in France, despite giving very wide latitude to counter terrorism efforts, terrorism is still a law enforcement concern. There is no indefinite “war on terror” in France. All of the expansive powers granted to French law enforcement are very carefully codified within the legal system. In France, the President doesn’t claim the right to indefinitely detain French citizens because they’re “enemy combatants.” France doesn’t have a Guantanamo Bay, in which prisoners are in a near permanent legal limbo as to their status and reason for detention. France hasn’t opted out of any international treaties to allow for the torture of detainees, France doesn’t kidnap terrorism suspects in French airports and fly them to a third country so they can be tortured. France doesn’t operate a ring of secret prisons outside the French legal system.

So yes, France does have a more intrusive domestic intelligence operation as codified under their laws, but at least it’s all out in the open and inside the legal system. When we liberals talk about the slippery slope towards authoritarianism and the destruction of the rule of law, it’s because the executive branch claims powers that can be checked by any other branch and go against hundreds of years of common law tradition and jurisprudence.

Boot also fails to mention key differences in the French and American legal system. France’s legal system isn’t adversarial like ours. In America, we have prosecutors vs defense lawyers, and out of that adversarial process presided over by an impartial judge, the truth is supposed to emerge. In France, they have magistrates, which are a sort of combination of prosecutor and judge. Because of this key difference, the French legal model for terrorism investigations can’t be imported to the United States. Boot should have probably pointed this crucial fact out…

Cultural Relativism OR How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Support Torture When Other People Do It

Max Boot says that as long as our local allies in counterinsurgency campaigns do the torturing, we should just turn a blind eye:

West notes that when he was an adviser in South Vietnam in 1966 he saw a village police chief named Thanh using “what is now called waterboarding, rubbing lye soap into a wet cloth and placing it across the face of the prisoner. I never saw a prisoner die or not be able to walk out of that room. But they talked. I reported it and our orders were to keep the Marines in our Combined Action Platoon out of that room.”

Our advisers in Iraq don’t have the same option of turning a blind eye. As West notes: “Today, 40 years later, the order would be for the American adviser to physically stop Thanh and to bring him up on charges.” As West notes, that is a misguided attempt to impose our cultural norms elsewhere—you might even call it “cultural imperialism.”

“Neither our advisers nor our military units are involved in waterboarding or other such techniques, be they labeled ‘torture’, or ‘harsh interrogation’ or whatever the vernacular,” he notes. But we should be more tolerant if our allies, who are fighting for their lives and that of their families, practice a harsher brand of counterinsurgency than we’re comfortable with.

The most obvious objection is that if an American soldier isn’t allowed to torture because it’s immoral and goes against the ethics and norms of American, Military and International Law, than those local soldiers he’s working with damn well shouldn’t be able to do so under American supervision.  I thought one of the hallmarks of neoconservatism was a staunch stand against moral relativism, but I guess when it comes to one of the strongest taboos in the West, neocons think that “cultural imperialism” is bad.

But, in all fairness, Boot isn’t likely to convinced by those type of arguments.  The most important reason for why we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to torture is that when the US is perceived as being enablers of torture — even when done by locals — it makes a counter-insurgency campaign pretty difficult.   It’s worth noting that  the South Vietnamese and the United States lost the Vietnam war in large part because of actions of those like Thahn and a general disrespect for the humanity of the Vietnamese people (not that the NVA were saints or anything).  Remember, we managed to win WWII without any torture, and we lost in Vietnam.

Democratic Fear Mongering

One of the lamest lines going from Democrats since 2002 was that the GOP was somehow doing something underhanded or illegitimate when they ran on the message that electing Democrats would endanger America. The thing is, Americans care about national security, so if one party is continually hammering home the idea that the other party means more terrorist attacks, they’re gonna win. Ilan Goldenberg says that Democrats should so some fear mongering of their own, and point out that conservative foreign policy more broadly is nothing more than imprudent militarism that has made us no more safe:

However, what Democrats can begin doing is solidly reinforcing the frame that Republicans are too militant, dangerous and quite frankly a bit nuts. That’s because the incredible incompetence and militancy of the Bush Administration has made this story very believable for the public. Because of this vulnerability, all the fear mongering on Iran and Islamofascism can be turned against the Republicans. Democratic fear mongering needs to focus on how scary it would be to have another Republican President and how much that could endanger all of us (Especially if the nominee is Giuliani). Republicans spent years cultivating the frame that Democrats are weak and it was just as important to their dominance of the issue as their own ability to seem competent and tough.

This is all very true. I’m so tired of hearing how bad it was that the GOP ran ads in 2002 implying that Senator Max Cleland was functionally pro Al Qaeda and pro Saddam. Where are our ads making the argument that Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are essentially allied in raising the stakes in Iran, or explaining that the war in Iraq, and Bush more broadly, has been the best recruiting tool or Al Qaeda? We Democrats surely believe that Republican foreign policy is bad for the national security of our country, so why don’t we make that argument in very, very strong terms?

There’s a tendency in the netroots and in some liberal quarters to underplay the threat of terrorism. And while analytically they have a pretty strong case, in the realm of electoral politics, John Mueller’s argument isn’t going to win any votes. By saying that under a Giuiliani presidency we’ll foolishly strike Iran thus increasing their support for terrorism and accelerating their nuclear development, continue our war in Iraq, thus further ignoring Al Qaeda not-in-Iraq (i.e. in Pakistan), drain international support for our foreign policy and invite a whole host of other disastrous outcomes, we will be able to finallly take back any Republican advantage on national security.

Goldenberg mentions the infamous Daisy Ad, which Johnson ran in 1964, showing a little girl plucking the petals off a daisy only to be incinerated in a nuclear explosion due to (presumably) Goldwater’s policy of increased confrontation with the USSR. I pray that Clinton or Obama will be running similar ads.