:: The Boys Weekend Journal ::

Article: Guerilla Warfare is the Life For Me

Posted on the CS Monitor today is this article, welcoming back our friends the Taliban. I had to laugh a bit at the part where Salam mentions that Russia supplies them with weapons and money. Highly unlikely, but an amusing thought nonetheless. I don't doubt there are people in the Russian military who'd like to.

:: Joe 12:51 PM [+] ::
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Editorial: 5 9's and Fighting Terrorism

Reading Joe Klein's piece in the recent Time Magazine regarding the Democratic hopefuls for 2004 election I was quite disappointed with the position he advocated on national security issues. He seems to feel that the Democrats should simply appear as a somewhat weaker version of Bush, supporting the same basic positions, but not taking such an aggressive stance. According to Klein, they simply need to meet a certain threshold of credibility on security, which they can do by supporting the security measures advocated by the administration.

I disagree. Security will obviously be a major issue in this election. More so than it deserves to be, but such is life. Being a weak-sister to Bush's hawkish, paternalistic self-assured position will be a serious liability. There is no threshold which will magically level the playing field on this issue. The people in love with the aggressive Bush approach will still vote for him even if the Democrats act like a kinder, gentler version of the same thing. But there are many people across the political spectrum who want an alternative. Parroting Bush is not the only way to appear strong on security. Instead there is a very credible position that can be taken to promote security that points out weaknesses of the Bush administration. This comes in two parts,prevention and recovery.

To prevent terrorism, aggressive unilateralism surely can't be the only viable approach. Promoting the value of diplomacy and strengthening international relationships both to weaken the popular elements of anti-Americanism and to build partnerships for investigating and dismantling terrorist organizations would be a welcome alternative for the American people. The Bush administration has been broadly criticized on this account, even within their own party. To agree with the Bush administration on their anti-terror policy and raise this issue as an aside would be a mistake. This failure should be kept front and center in any discussion of national security. Fostering strong diplomatic relations, boosting our international image, and launching a massive multilateral operation to seek and destroy terrorist organizations will do far more to combat terrorism than any war in Iraq ever could.

On the home front, recovery needs to be the name of the game. When creating systems that are expected to be 99.999% effective, as is a major focus for us in telecommunications, recovery is as important as fault prevention, and in many ways more important. The closer one gets to the 5 9's standard the more difficult it is to predict where the next fault may occur, and thus more difficult to anticipate it and prevent it. Terrorism falls very much into this case. It would be sheer foolishness to believe we can secure this nation from every avenue of attack. It is simply not possible. We can take action to prevent the obvious attacks, but it will be trivial for terrorists to find unanticipated means to attack us. Herein lies another major weakness of the Bush administration.

With recovery, the challenges are known. We don't need to know the exact method that would be used for the attacks, but rather the broad areas where we're vulnerable. We can measure how long it takes for the authorities to respond to various types of crises. We can figure out how to mitigate the impact of attacks before they occur. We can plan it out, we can drill it, we can measure the improvements. With recovery, we can be guaranteed tangible results.

For the purpose of prevention sweeping and invasive laws have been passed and many tens of billions of dollars committed. But to recovery? Lip service and hardly a penny of funding. Dictates are given to state and local governments demanding their preparedness to respond to attacks, even as federal funding to those government organizations is slashed to fuel questionable tax cuts, and even as those governments are facing their most severe budget crises in decades. The focus of the Bush administration on prevention within the US is both futile and damaging to civil rights and the freedom and liberty they claim to hold sacred. The funding and focus from the federal government would be better applied to responding to and containing terrorist attacks should they occur.

There is an opportunity for the issue of national security to be a strength for Democratic candidates, rather than a weakness for them to try to gloss over. On this issue, as on many others, they need to find a way to be leaders rather than a cheap knock-off. There is a huge window of opportunity for them to do so, but the writing is already on the wall that this will be just one more failure for the Democratic party and their inept strategists. They seem to be stuck in the same state of denial that led them to authorize the war on Iraq with the belief that doing so would make national security a non-issue for the mid-term elections. Instead they merely strengthened the administration's position on what was the key issue in those elections and what will again, unfortunately, be the key issue in 2004. And I will again be stuck with the feeling that as much as the administration disgusts me, the Democrats deserve to lose.

:: Joe 10:59 PM [+] ::
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Article: The Educated Terrorists

In a very interesting article in CSM (can you tell we like this paper?), it appears that terrorists and suicide bombers may not be the poor, uneducated wretches that many make them out to be. According to the article, only 13% of Palestinian suicide bombers came from poor families, whereas some 32% of the Palestinian population in a similar age group were considered poor. Furthermore, virtually all of these bombers had at least finished primary school. This reminds me of some of our previous discussions regarding the origins of revolt (see Discussion: The Revolutionary Threshold beginning 5-30-03). I believe we came to the conclusion that the poor and uneducated were unlikely to revolt against the status quo. On the other hand, the middle class or elites would have the time, money, and knowledge to be the key players in leading a revolt to change the economic and social circumstances. Perhaps this is reflected in the background of the suicide bombers. The more they know, the more they detest the occupation of Palestine. I can't say I blame them for their feelings, although I find it impossible to condone their actions against civilians (no more than I would condone Israel's extrajudicial executions of both suspected militants and innocent bystanders).

:: Ryan 6:08 PM [+] ::
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::The Other Costs of War::

This lengthy and well-written Sept 11th story in the New York Times doesn't say anything that hasn't been said before, but its prominence on this day and in that paper took me a bit by surprise. I think it is important to recall, while the human and financial costs of our adventure in Iraq occupy the headlines, that the diplomatic costs were equally severe, and may end up hurting us the most in the long run.

:: Joe 3:03 PM [+] ::
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::Al Qaeda Is Not An Island::

The Christian Science Monitor frequently has wonderful guest editorials, but I've never been very sold on their "The Monitor's View" editorials. They're typically too short by half, and avoid taking any stand on the issue, rather being content to simply point out that the issue exists. After reading this rather atypical Monitor editorial, I can see why. They present a rather simplistic view on how the war with Iraq is not helping Al Qaeda, and that it may, in fact, curtail terror as the increase of democracy sweeps through the middle east (hope truly does spring eternal). This seems to ignore a few basic facts.

Fact: no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda was ever demonstrated. The best the Bush administration could come up with was that a known Al Qaeda agent was hiding out in Baghdad. Of course, we also know that at various times Al Qaeda agents hung out in Florida, Boston, and up-state New York, and this was never assumed to mean that the local governments there were complicit (although you never know with Jeb Bush).

Fact: the US has limited military and financial capacities. Resources spent destroying and then rebuilding Iraq are not being spent to pursue Al Qaeda and their allies. And this is no small potatoes. We're looking at hundreds of thousands of troops tied down for years, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent.

Fact: the US has limited diplomatic capital. The goodwill that was squandered in pursuit of the war with Iraq will without a doubt hinder the US's international operations (and it's ability to pursue Al Qaeda) for years to come.

Fact: Al Qaeda is not an island. They are the focal point of a broad array of Muslim and arab militant organizations spanning from East Africa through the South-west Pacific. Many of these groups have little in common. One unifying point they can all agree on: they are enraged by Western colonialism, empirialism, interference with, and domination of Muslim states. All of these organizations need funding. All of these organizations need recruits. All of these organizations need local sympathy to shelter and abet their operations. And after the outrage generated by the attack on Iraq, all of these organizations will have an easier time procuring all of those things.

In light of all that, one would have to be delusional to suggest that the war on Iraq did not in any part interfere with our pursuit of the war on terror.

:: Joe 1:08 PM [+] ::
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::A victory for liberty and freedom from tyranny::

No, I don't think the headline is too bold. United States District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ordered today that Zacarias Moussaoui may not be sentenced to death or be charged with having any involvement in the September 11th attacks because the government refuses to produce certain detainees in Government custody who may be able to provide favorable testimony for Moussaoui's defense.

Judge Brinkema's opinion may be found here and stories from the Washington Post and New York Times may be found here and here, respectively. I take some issue with the New York Times headline, which reads: "In Setback to U.S., Judge Refuses to Drop Moussaoui Case." Far from a setback, this case vindicates the fundamental right to a fair trial, which necessarily includes the right to mount a meaningful defense to criminal charges.

:: Barry 7:07 PM [+] ::
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::Update: A victory for liberty and freedom from tyranny::

According to this Washington Post article, the government has appealed the ruling of Judge Brinkema in the Moussaoui case. The notice of appeal may be found here. The government has asked for permission to file extra-long briefs and asked for an expedited ruling.

According to the Classified Information Procedures Act (section 7), the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals would be required to hear oral arguments within four days of adjournment of trial and issue an opinion four days after that. However, because the appeal was not taken during trial, the court is not under the same time pressure but will probably act quickly all the same. I believe the trial court's decision was sound and should be upheld by the appellate court. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

The Washington Post seems to think that this appeal means the government has decided to forego a military tribunal, but I would not be surprised if the government changed its course after the Court of Appeals upholds the district court. Of course, if it succeeds, then there would be no reason to resort to a military tribunal. Again, we'll just have to wait and see.

:: Barry 9:26 PM [+] ::
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::The Original PATRIOT ACT Critic Speaks Out::

Senator Russ Feingold has an editorial in this morning's Washington Times calling for repeal of some of the Act's more troubling provisions.

:: Barry 6:42 AM [+] ::
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::Guantanamo Case::

The Supreme Court today granted cert on the question whether federal courts can hear petitions from detainees in Guantanamo. The Second and DC Circuits have held that there is no jurisdiction over these cases, and the Ninth Circuit has not yet decided the case in front of it.

:: Barry 11:24 AM [+] ::
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::Watching Over Us::

CSM's daily update today rounds up a lot of good coverage of all the creepy tricks the feds are up to. I don't understand how we can still give power to government agencies, without narrowly defining it, under the assumption that they will never use it in any way other than it was intended by Congress. Haven't we had ample proof by now that this doesn't work? Have we not figured out yet that if there is room for power to be abused it is simply a matter of when, not whether, that abuse will occur? Is that not the entire reason why our founders insisted that we have a government of laws not of men? I guess naming a bill some bit of jingoistic nationalist pap exempts it from any rational scrutiny.

:: Joe 3:53 PM [+] ::
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::God Bless America... Or Else!::

Apparently substantial portions of the bill previously known as Patriot II have been inserted into an intelligence funding bill which was passed by both houses of Congress last week. If their goal was to get under the public radar, this bill is apparently the stealth bomber of oppressive legislation. After all the uproar about the Patriot II back when it was first circulated, I can't find a single major media source that is covering this. Wired has it, slashdot grabbed it from there, Asia Times has it, even the AP has a story on it, but it doesn't look like anyone much picked it up, and those that did didn't pay any attention. By tying this crap onto an "intelligence" bill they apparently get a pass by the press to keep everything hush-hush. In any case the feds now have more freedom to collect records on us all while forbidding anyone from whom they acquire those records from letting us know about it. And also the requirements for numerous reports to Congress have been eliminated. More power, less oversight, yeehaw! That sounds like a recipe for a lot of wacky and wild fun times. It's a good thing we know that the FBI always shows such good judgment.

:: Joe 4:36 PM [+] ::
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::Collateral Damage::

Geez, we're getting good at this. But then we're learning from the best.

:: Joe 2:05 AM [+] ::
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::Civil Rights Make a Comeback::

Thanks to our judiciary for slamming the brakes on the Guantanamo/Camp Xray/enemy combatant scheme to bypass Constitutional protections. The 2nd circuit decided that US citizen, Jose Padilla, cannot be held indefinitely without trial, which seems like a no-brainer, but I guess you never know these days... Meanwhile the 9th ruled that even the internationals held in Guantanamo must have access to lawyers and the courts. Hooray for the good guys!

:: Joe 7:42 PM [+] ::
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::"But the fact that he is not there is, means America's a more secure country."::

I sure feel more secure. Orange is safer than yellow, right?

:: Barry 4:48 PM [+] ::
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::Osama Bin-Krar::

Kudos to CSM for finally highlighting an intended case of domestic terrorism that was glossed over earlier by the national media. William Krar had a sodium-cyanide bomb (among other things) that could have killed thousands according to the article. What may shock most Americans is that this man is a home-grown white supremacist that hates the government. Perhaps not so surprising, he is from Texas...

:: Ryan 8:15 PM [+] ::
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::Get Off It::

My 3rd CSM story of the day, this one is a late-breaking entrant for the 2003 Most Nauseating Column Award that has jumped ahead of the pack and looks like a front-runner. How can a person be so completely wrong. I particularly like the part about the Osama bin Laden followers killing the 18 Americans in Mogadishu. Wrong. Try again. And Libya as a response to the Iraq war. That's a hell of stretch. Ugh....

:: Joe 1:37 PM [+] ::
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::The Long Sneaky Arm of the Law::

In an update to a story reported previously on TBW Journal, Wired is running a feature on the new powers the feds acquired through the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004. It expands their ability to acquire, without a warrant, personal information from businesses including "insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships". And not only are the feds not required to inform their suspects, the businesses themselves are forbidden by law from disclosing to their customers that their information was turned over. Yikes! Meanwhile we have at least one confirmed case where that Patriot Act was used to investigate a non-terrorism related case. Additionally, over the holidays the Feds took advantage of the new provisions by grabbing reams of data on all visitors to Vegas. Sounds ripe for abuse, but are the American people disturbed? The three everyman quotes in that last article speak volumes: "Anything they do is a good thing. I have no problems with it." "...it's justified because they have to take every precaution after 9-11." "In today's world, it makes sense for the FBI to look at these lists, and they'd be crazy if they didn't do it."

:: Joe 9:00 PM [+] ::
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::Richard Perle and Paul Krugman Debate on the War on Terror::

Democracy Now has the coverage.

:: Barry 9:13 PM [+] ::
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::Comments on Bounding the Global War on Terrorism::

As Joe pointed out a week ago (see here), Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Strategic Studies Institute (the think tank for the U.S. Army War College) published an criticism of President Bush's military policies. Record's piece is entitled, "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism," and may be found here.

Record conducts a review of several policy papers released by the Bush administration, including The National Security Strategy (released in September 2002), The National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (released in December 2002), and The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (released February 2003). Record identifies several flaws found in these documents, several of which I found very persuasive. First, he notes that the policies conflate the threat from rogue states and terrorist groups and that leads to unintended and potentially disastrous consequences, like the war on Iraq. Quoting from Record's article:

Both terrorist organizations and rogue states embrace violence and are hostile to the existing international order. Many share a common enemy in the United States and, for rogue states and terrorist organizations in the Middle East, a common enemy in Israel. As international pariahs they are often in contact with one another and at times even cooperate. But the scope and endurance of such cooperation is highly contingent on local circumstances. More to the point, rogue states and terrorist organizations are fundamentally different in character and vulnerability to U.S. military power. Terrorist organizations are secretive, elusive, nonstate entities that characteristically possess little in the way of assets that can be held hostage; as The National Security Strategy points out, a terrorist enemy's "most potent protection is statelessness." In contrast, rogue state are sovereign entities defined by specific territories, populations, governmental infrastructures, and other assets; as such, they are much more exposed to decisive military attack than terrorist organizations.

Or to put it another way, unlike terrorist organizations, rogue states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. (Page 16-17.)

Record observes that a similar failure to discriminate was made during the 1950s when "Communism was held to be a centrally directed international conspiracy; a Communist anywhere was a Communist everywhere, and all posed an equal threat to America's security. A result of this inability to discriminate was disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam against an enemy perceived to be little more than an extension of Kremlin designs in Southeast Asia and thus by definition completely lacking an historically comprehensible political agenda of its own." Record does not argue that rogue states are not a threat to American security, but rather any reliable strategy must properly distinguish between those states and non-state actors like al Queda.

Another problem that Record identifies (and "the chief problem," as he sees it) is that the goal "is not a proper noun." Records continues:

Like guerrilla warfare, it is a method of violence, a way of waging war. How do you defeat a technique, as opposed to a flesh-and-blood enemy? You can kill terrorists, infiltrate their organizations, shut down their sources of cash, wipe out their training bases, and attack their state sponsors, but how do you attack a method? (Page 25).

Record takes on several statements that Condoleezza Rice has made over the last few years, and successfully demonstrates that the policies outlined in the National Security Strategy are inconsistent and flawed. For instance, Rice published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 where she argued that, with respect to Iraq, "the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration." While it is true Rice made this statement before 9/11, it nonetheless seems to support a different strategic approach for rogue nations like Iraq from that appropriate for non-state terrorist groups. Yet that was not the course of action chosen by the administration.

Record takes issue with another Rice quote espousing the "domino theory" of democracy that seems to underly the current justification for the war. Rice stated in August 2003 that "Much as a democratic Germany became a linchpin of a new Europe that is today whole, free, and at peace, so a transformed Iraq can become a key element of a very different Middle East in which the ideologies of hate will not flourish." Record argues that in addition to conflating the threat from rogue states with terrorist organizations, as discussed above, this approach "also ignores the prospect of those opposed to democracy using the democratic process to seize power, as Hitler did in Germany in 1933." (Page 27.) Records asks, "Are U.S. strategic interests in the Muslim world really better served by hostile democracies than by friendly autocracies?"

I would like to highlight one last point that Record makes. One of the goals listed in the the National Security Strategy is to stop the proliferation of WMD and prevent their distribution to terrorist organizations. Again, Record contends that the strategy should be different from rogue states to terrorist groups. And he notes that the best strategy when facing rogue states is to deter the use of weapons, not their acquisition in peacetime. The threat of preventive war, he argues, "may actually encourage proliferation. Moreover, considerable disagreement surrounds the potential effectiveness of proposed new nuclear weapons designed to destroy subterranean nuclear weapons facilities. In any event, the development and certainly the use of such weapons could in the long run prove catastrophically counterproductive to the goal of halting proliferation by undermining or demolishing the [non-proliferation treaty] regime and the now universally respected moratorium on nuclear weapons testing." (Page 29.) He continues:

Paradoxically, explicit U.S. embrace of a forward-leaning doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" followed by invasion of Iraq may inflate the very threat that is the focus of U.S. policy. It is a mistake to assume that rogue states seek nuclear weapons solely for purposes of blackmail and aggression. Rogue states want such weapons for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is self-protection against enemies also armed or seeking to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. The United States is the greatest of those enemies. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that rogue states view acquisition of nuclear weapons as a means of raising the price of an American attack. Take Iran for example. Iranian interest in nuclear weapons began under the Shah and was stimulated by having a hostile nuclear superpower (the Soviet Union) to the north, an aspiring hostile nuclear power (Iraq) to the west, and yet another nuclear aspirant (Pakistan) to the east. Throw in a nuclear-armed Israel and a history of violence, instability, and war in the region, and later, a U.S. declaration of Iran as "evil," and you get a perfectly understandable explanation fo Iran's nuclear ambitions. (Page 33).

More than anything, Record's paper illustrates the need to have deliberative discourse in the formulation of policies as important as this nation's security strategy, but it appears the ideology of some make up the whole landscape of debate in this administration. The issues Record raises should be evaluated and our strategy modified if necessary. Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen with this President.

:: Barry 1:08 PM [+] ::
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