The Buzz

In the aftermath of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, then defense secretary Robert Gates was agitated about the number of leaks that emerged from the White House about the details of the operation. As David Sanger relates in Confront and Conceal, the leaks were problematic because “the reaction in Pakistan grew uglier and uglier with every revelation of how long the operation had been planned and how the country’s leadership was deliberately left in the dark.” So Gates approached White House national-security adviser Tom Donilon and told him, “I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend.” Donilon asked what it was. Gates then memorably replied, “Shut the f*ck up.”

As the ongoing saga over who President Obama will nominate to serve as his next secretary of defense continues, Gates’s advice is particularly relevant. Last week, Bloomberg reported that former senator Chuck Hagel had emerged as the “leading candidate” for the position, according to “two people familiar with the matter.” This set off a furious campaign against Hagel led by neoconservatives and the “pro-Israel” Right. He was called an “anti-Semite,” accused of being “out on the fringes,” described as an “isolationist” and much more.

Others have convincingly countered the substance of these baseless attacks. See, in particular, Robert Merry here at TNI and Robert Wright at the Atlantic, who also has a useful roundup of Hagel’s other defenders. But it’s also worth noting that this leaking practice has created a number of significant problems for the White House. As with Susan Rice a month ago, Obama has given the impression that Hagel is clearly his preferred pick for the position. Now, if he backs down, he will once again be seen as having abandoned a potential nominee under political pressure. It doesn’t matter that there are perfectly good reasons to prefer other candidates—for example, John Hamre or Michele Flournoy. As Peter Beinart writes at the Daily Beast, “Throw one high-profile foreign policy nominee to the wolves and you look ruthlessly pragmatic. Throw two in the space of a few weeks and you look like an administration that can be rolled.”

More importantly, floating Hagel’s name and then backing down on it will only serve to further circumscribe the range of “acceptable” dialogue in Washington on a number of critical foreign-policy issues. The best case for Hagel’s nomination is precisely that he holds some of the opinions that he is being assailed for by people like William Kristol. Namely, he questions the utility of a military strike on Iran. He doesn’t believe that “supporting” Israel requires following every position of the current Israeli government, even when they conflict with America’s own national interests. And he thinks the defense budget can be reduced responsibly. Americans should welcome the idea of these views being represented by their secretary of defense. But if Hagel is not nominated now, it will create the perception and the precedent that these views are unacceptable for any future cabinet-level position relating to national security.

Once again, Beinart sums it up well:

By leaking Hagel’s name but not defending him, the White House has, in other words, encouraged major “pro-Israel” groups to pick a fight they might otherwise have ducked. And if Obama backs down, it will leave the perception that those groups have more power over top foreign policy appointments than they actually do. That perception will create a new reality since any future administration considering a high-level foreign policy appointee who strays from the AIPAC line will remember the Hagel fiasco. And even more importantly, anyone who fancies themselves a future high-level foreign policy appointee will take even greater care to avoid independent thinking about the Middle East.

In short, if Obama does not intend to nominate Hagel, these leaks will have done some level of serious harm. Conversely, if he does intend to nominate Hagel, he should do it now so that the former senator can begin to defend himself and the administration can begin to make the case for him. In either case, the leaks have not served him well.

In this month’s issue of Commentary, John Agresto, a self-described neoconservative who served as an adviser to the Iraqi government just after the 2003 invasion, thoughtfully questions the idea that the United States should actively and forcefully spread democracy. He identifies the assumptions that lie beneath the idea:

We seemed convinced of two things: First, that democracy is the form of government under which all men are meant to live, and that democracy, unlike autocracy of any kind, is just in itself. Being just, it includes the very essence of ideas of freedom, equality, protection of rights, and toleration. Democracy is natural, democracy is how men achieve just political life and, most surely, democracy means freedom. Second, we constantly gave the impression that democratic government, being natural, is easy. Throw off the tyrant, overturn the ruling class, write a constitution, hold elections, and voila—Democracy.

Phrased this way, the tension at the heart of the word “neoconservative” is quite clear—neoconservative foreign policy is rooted in radical, not conservative, conceptions of social order, social change and human nature. Institutions emerge ex nihilo. Old traditions and old elites are destroyed without consequences. Societies achieve stability without much effort. These are the thoughts of a Robespierre or a Marx, not of a Burke. Agresto seems to realize this, charging that he and his comrades

betrayed an understanding that was alien to our own country’s democratic beginnings as well as removed from any reading of history, ancient or modern. To be seduced by the rising tide of democracy worldwide, one had to block from view the democratic election in Gaza, where a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of its sovereign neighbor won the day. . . . One might want to look at the democratic mobs in Libya executing all the blacks they capture, both men and women; or the mobs in Egypt burning Coptic churches.

The real question for democratization, says Agresto, is not “Don’t all men want to be free?” After all, “some people, perhaps most people, prefer other goods” over freedom, like order, safety or religious purity. “The right question,” he states, is “Do you want your neighbors to be free?” When the citizens cannot answer this with something close to “yes,” democracy cannot flourish.

The essay is worth reading in its entirety—it also includes a thoughtful discussion of the influence of culture and religion on democratic values. Abe Greenwald’s response to all this merits examination on its own. Greenwald takes Agresto to task for an inadequate examination of the possibility of cultural changes that can foster democracy—as he points out,

If you had asked 18th-century Americans . . . "Do you want your neighbors to be free?"—most would certainly have failed to produce the right answer, at least as regarded their black, Indian, and female neighbors. . . . To have been true to liberal values upon the Founding would have been to preside over its dissolution.

This is certainly accurate, but it also presentist—it uses modern attitudes to judge the past. It is right to condemn the gross illiberalism of a society that denied the vote to women and freedom to slaves. But we cannot fully understand the past unless we examine it by its own values. That lets us see the tension in a state that declared its independence with a claim that all men are created equal, yet which treated some men unequally. This tension was immediately seized upon by various critics, and they would eventually widen our definition of "neighbors" to include many more Americans. The Nineteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act didn't create freedom in America—they expanded it. 

Greenwald attributes the failure of the democracy drive in places like Iraq—whose elections “can only be interpreted as evidence of at least a capacity for liberalism”—to American irresolution, arguing that “where the United States keeps its commitments to liberalism, transformative miracles occur.” This language of the supernatural is appropriate for discussing Iraqi democratization, for only a true believer could look at such a deeply divided society and expect democracy to emerge. The 2010 election Greenwald trumpets came after years of sectarian bloodletting and the departure of fully half of Iraq’s Christians and four in five Mandaeans; many experts see an Iraq primed for another round of violence. Could ancient animosities and prejudices really have been buried by American commitment? If so, Israel and the Arab states should be at peace, for our government has been against their conflict long before it was against a divided Iraq.

Agresto is quite right. America can help countries become democracies, but only when the social, economic and ideological forces driving democratization are strong and internal. Our might can break militaries and hang dictators; it cannot create toleration or forge common bonds.

Over at Real Clear Politics, reporter Scott Conroy reviews some of the latest soul-searching within the Republican Party concerning the party’s future on foreign-policy issues. He quotes Danielle Pletka, who makes a somewhat remarkable statement (flagged by Daniel Larison):

The truth is that what matters much more in choosing a leader is that that person embraces a clear set of principles. And if they have a clear set of principles and a vision to go along with it, I’m not worried that they don’t know what the capital of Burkina Faso is. If they have no vision, no amount of knowledge is going to make up for it.

In response, Larison makes the crucial point:

Candidates that have “a clear set of principles and a vision to go along with it” but lack knowledge will tend to promote policies that are not tethered to reality. If a candidate has a “vision” and just a little knowledge, that can be the most dangerous of all, and the ambitions of his “vision” and his limited knowledge may be a very poor match. A more knowledgeable candidate that lacked a “vision” might not be ideal, but he’d definitely be preferable to his opposite number.

Larison gets this exactly right. Of course, Pletka is correct on the narrow point that we shouldn’t expect our presidential candidates to be experts on every area of the world. But while a “clear set of principles” and a “vision” are good things for a candidate to have, they’re certainly no substitute for at least a reasonable level of substantive knowledge on major international issues.

This is particularly relevant to the situation the Republican Party finds itself in now when it comes to foreign policy. Simply put, the party is still haunted by the legacy of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. The fact that the Bush administration launched that misguided war, along with the institutional GOP’s apparent inability to learn any real lessons from it, is probably the single greatest reason why the U.S. public still does not trust the GOP on foreign-policy issues. And the Iraq War was a textbook example of “vision” trumping expertise, with disastrous consequences. Indeed, in the lead-up to the war, some experts on Iraq and the region were actively banned from the war and postwar planning for ideological reasons. As Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, later told Tom Ricks, “Anybody that knows anything” was removed from the planning groups.

Moreover, this attitude does not make for good politics either. Recall the scorn that was (rightfully) heaped upon Herman Cain after he declared during the GOP primaries that it was unimportant whether he knew who was the president of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” The American people may not require that their president be the next George Kennan, but they also certainly don’t want him or her to be another Herman Cain.

In short, a party that downplays the importance of substantive knowledge is both unlikely to manage world affairs well and unlikely to be politically successful. The Republican Party still has a lot of serious thinking to do about what its “vision” is and what it stands for on foreign policy. But the work of restoring its reputation for managerial competence, which has been crippled since 2003, is equally serious.

Following a New York Times Magazine article about the challenges of conducting diplomacy while under security threat, the Times’ Bill Keller has expanded the conversation to similar tensions faced by journalists.

The death toll for journalists in dangerous situations is high—the Committee to Protect Journalists counts 956 since 1992. Keller notes that the Times is “running out of [meeting] rooms” to name after its fallen correspondents. Just like in diplomacy, a risk-averse culture has developed at some media outlets, leading to lower-quality coverage by reporters unable to move about freely and independently. Combined with newspapers’ shrinking revenues and “a wrongheaded belief that Americans don’t care that much about foreign news,” Keller sees a major shift in the media’s presence abroad—as of 2010,

Eighteen American newspapers and two entire newspaper chains had closed every one of their overseas bureaus. Other news outlets, including most TV networks, have downsized or abandoned full-time bureaus in favor of reporters or anchors who parachute in when there’s a crisis. They give us spurts of coverage when an Arab Spring breaks out or Hamas fires rockets into Israel, but much less of the ongoing attention that would equip us to see crises coming and understand them when they erupt.

This, says Keller, leads to mistakes as stories are written by reporters who aren’t even in the same country. Journalists for major publications writing from Cairo, Washington, and New York reported (as the U.S. government would) that the Benghazi consulate attack was carried out by a mob angered by the Muhammad video, only to be corrected later by journalists who were actually there.

A similar phenomenon occurred during the 2009 Iranian presidential-election protests. Thanks to better Internet and English skills, America heard more from the opposition than from others. This was a product of Iran’s postfeudal society, where class and political views are often entwined—the urbane upper and middle classes that had always loathed Ahmadinejad were also the ones learning English and tweeting. The result was an incredible torrent of anti-government coverage; the media at the time were concerned with sorting through it all, checking facts, and making sure everybody knew what a whole lot of tweets were tweeted. They did not seem aware—as anyone familiar with Iranian society should be—that the tweets were never going to be a cross-section of Iranian opinion. The result was an impression that the regime was being fought by the overwhelming majority of its people. The truth was far more complex.

More journalists on the ground—especially journalists with a deep familiarity with Iranian society—could have led to a fuller picture. However, the regime was heavily restricting Western journalists' access, and those with Iranian citizenship (even if they were dual citizens of Western countries) faced arrest and torture. The media didn't turn to Twitter because it was lazy (well, not entirely because it was lazy) but because many other options had been eliminated.

Keller is quite right that journalism needs to be wary of choosing safety over access, and his call for journalists on the scene—not staffers half a world away—to make final decisions about risk is sensible. But a fundamental question still remains: how can governments too repressive or badlands too unstable for safe access be covered accurately and comprehensively?