Society

An Ugly Smear of Jeremy Scahill

Robert Golan-Vilella — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:30:00 +0000

In the Weekly Standard, Bruce Bawer reviews Jeremy Scahill’s recent book, Dirty Wars, which is about America’s approach to war, counterterrorism and targeted killings over the past decade. Bawer’s review is an ugly piece of work that is awash in evidence-free assertions and attacks on Scahill’s character. He calls Scahill “a radical ideologue out to discredit America and debilitate its defenses,” and closes with this paragraph:

What Scahill has given us here is, in short, an indictment of the West’s entire post-9/11 struggle against jihad. To offer serious criticism of American strategy is, of course, thoroughly legitimate. But Scahill isn’t a patriot who wants to see America triumph. On the contrary, it seems clear that the only thing he would hate more than a mismanaged war on jihad would be a successful one. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid feeling that this book’s definitive goal, like that of Awlaki’s sermons, is to swell the jihadist ranks—anything to bring down the Evil Empire with which Scahill has been at war all his professional life.

Keep Cyberwar Narrow

Panayotis A. Yannakogeorgos — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Panayotis A. Yannakogeorgos

For too many Americans, “cyber warfare” is an amorphous concept that conjures everything from Hollywood’s Die Hard 4.0 to the blue screen of death on our personal computers.

The absence of a clear understanding of what cyber warfare is—and more importantly, what it is not—continues to present challenges to even the most experienced technologists and policy makers responsible for the safety of global networks and the laws and policies that govern cyberspace. Even these experienced professionals all too often confuse cybercrime and espionage with cyber attacks and cyber warfare. These are all very different phenomena and call for responses that fall under mutually exclusive sections of U.S. Code, making it increasingly important that discussions of malicious cyber activities are accurately described.

Although I focus on functions and platforms for armed attacks in cyberspace, if there is political will, there is always a risk of escalating a case of espionage or crime to international armed conflict.

Business vs. National Security

Kenneth Waltz's Crucial Logic

James Joyner — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

James Joyner

Kenneth Waltz, the most important Realist theorist of the last half-century, died Monday, a few weeks before his 89th birthday.

His Columbia University doctoral dissertation was published in 1959 as Man, the State, and War. He followed up with Theory of International Politics in 1979. Georgetown professor of government Daniel Nexon doesn't exaggerate when he says those two books "provided the framework within, and against, international-relations scholars have argued for much of the post-WWII period." Indeed, some concepts Waltz introduced are quite literally part of the Day 1 lecture in any course on world politics.

The Classical Realists, of whom Hans Morgenthau was the most influential modern theorist, argued that the relations between states were an extension of the men who ran them and the fixed laws of human nature, with the pursuit of power and survival the key components.

Kenneth Waltz and the Power of Pure Theory

Michael C. Desch — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Michael C. Desch

Kenneth Waltz died this week, just shy of his 89th birthday. I can’t say that I knew the famous Berkeley scholar well, though I did once have lunch with him early in my career. It was a harrowing experience for me as he challenged me about why I thought the Third World mattered. I learned later that my noontime grilling was nothing compared to the tough love he gave his students, who invariably remember him with deep respect and affection but also still present some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

But what all of us in the field of international relations experienced on a regular basis was the power of Waltz’s intellect, which towered over the discipline and inspired all of us who inclined toward a realist approach with his application of rigorous theory to the most important practical issues statesmen grappled with.

Waltz’s scholarly stature was due entirely to the force of his intellect and his willingness to challenge prevailing orthodoxies. He never served in government. And while his writings touched on many of the major events of the day—Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, the Cold War—he did not aspire to be a public intellectual.

Instead, Waltz made his mark through a handful of books and articles in which he advanced simple, yet counterintuitive, theories about how international politics works. His theories often struck other scholars as implausible at first, but their logic often proved irresistible over time. And when he applied his theoretical insights to the real world, they regularly made sense of some otherwise puzzling things.

The Crushing of Middle Eastern Christianity

Richard L. Russell — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Richard L. Russell

Americans of all political stripes have embraced the promotion of democracy as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. But this American democracy crusade has caused huge, and largely overlooked, collateral damage since the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks against the United States in 2001. The fall of authoritarian regimes throughout the greater Middle East has fueled growing persecution of minority Christian communities. The Pew Research Center has charted extensive government restrictions on non-Muslim religions in numerous countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. Pew also has gauged very high social hostilities in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

These government restrictions and social hostilities directed against Christians are causing many to flee the region. In the early twentieth century, Christians accounted for about 20 percent of the Middle East population, but now that figure is down to only 5 percent. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the “Arab Spring,” Christian communities throughout the greater Middle East find themselves increasingly besieged. While the United States seems to notice bits and pieces of this picture, the full magnitude of the horrific Christian plight is largely ignored.

Sieges against Christians in Lands “Liberated” by the American Military

When We Began

Dalibor Rohac — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Dalibor Rohac

Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels. 1979 and the Birth of the 21^st Century. New York: Basic Books.

The 1970s were not a glamorous period of human history. From today’s perspective, they were a decade of questionable taste in clothing, hairstyles, music, and architecture. There was a general sense of economic and political unease in the West. But there are good reasons to study the 1970s, argues Christian Caryl in his latest book, Strange Rebels. Most importantly, it was a decade in which the overall malaise prompted cataclysmic events that have irrevocably shaped the world in which we live today.

Who Are the Internationalists, Again?

John Allen Gay — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:00:00 +0000

John Allen Gay

Jacob Heilbrunn rightly praises Danielle Pletka for exposing the hollowness of the Republican internal debate on foreign policy. It’s past time for a discussion of what, exactly, America aims for in the world beyond its borders, and how the government should work abroad to advance the interests of the citizens it exists to serve. (That debate shouldn’t be confined to the GOP, either—a national conversation is in order.) Yet there’s an unsettling undercurrent to Pletka’s article: the effort to rebrand neoconservatism as internationalism.

Pletka is hardly the only example of this. A major Foreign Policy essay by John McCain, whose views are almost the Platonic ideal of neoconservatism, repeatedly uses the label. The American Enterprise Institute has launched the American Internationalism Project, co-chaired by former senator Joe Lieberman, another neocon. The project’s media presence has been full of neoconservative bromides.

White Collar Workers Turn on the Red Light

Lewis McCrary — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:42:22 +0000

Lewis McCrary

For job seekers, sometimes there's no substitute for pounding the pavement—or even putting yourself on display in a storefront window, hoping to catch the attention of a potential employer passing by. In Denmark, the Wall Street Journal reports, some white-collar professionals have resorted to this awkward, sidewalk self-exhibition, a practice often associated with prostitutes in Amsterdam's red-light district.

The Situationist International, postwar Marxist activists who decried the "society of the spectacle," would have a field day pointing out this commodification of the individual worker. Perhaps they had a point, anticipating that there are instances in which capitalism really does start to resemble a theater of the absurd.

But in the market of our time, where flexible labor is valued over job security, workers are already in the habit of constanty advertising their services in very public albeit virtual forums such as LinkedIn. The window stunt may simply acknowledge that for the unemployed, posting to online forums and sending out dozens of resumes via email per day has limited utility—particularly when many of these messages are lucky to be read by a computer algorithm, let alone a human hiring manager. And to be fair, it's not as if the shop window is akin to some medieval slave market: the job seekers sit in relative comfort, tapping away on their laptops.

Google Recognizes Palestinian Statehood

Lewis McCrary — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:24:30 +0000

Lewis McCrary

Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information." But that's not always as simple as providing the best Chinese takeout menu: in its attempt to classify vast amounts of data, the internet search giant also must make choices that cause controversy—and the occasional international incident.

Its popular maps product, for example, informally adjudicates in numerous international border disputes. The ubiquity of Google Maps means that even unintentional glitches can have real world consequences. In one instance, reports the New York Times, "Google Maps’ imprecision reignited a long-standing border dispute that, with a few miscalculations, could have led to a real war."

Last week Google weighed in very publicly on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Reuters reports that following last November's UN vote to recognize Palestinian statehood, "Google's Palestinian homepage and other products previously labeled 'Palestinian Territories' were changed on May 1 to read 'Palestine.'"

As one might imagine, Palestinians are elated: Google has "put Palestine on the Internet map, making it a geographical reality," said an advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas. According to Reuters, he added "that the Palestinians had invited Google's cartographers to come and gather more data for their online maps." Israel, unsurprisingly, is furious, claiming that the Google's endorsement of Palestinian statehood is an attempt to circumvent the negotiations process.

The Destructive Power of Conventional Wisdom

Paul R. Pillar — Mon, 06 May 2013 01:29:00 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

The lead article in the current International Security, by Alastair Iain Johnston of Harvard, addresses the now firmly entrenched idea that over the past two or three years China has become markedly more assertive in its relations with other countries than it was previously. That China is “newly assertive” has become so broadly and automatically accepted that it gets expressed often enough to have become a cliché. “Newly assertive” is a descriptor that routinely gets inserted before “China,” just as easily as “long-suffering” routinely gets inserted before “Chicago Cubs fans.”

Johnston closely examines the evidence for the supposed new assertiveness and finds it wanting. The notion of new assertiveness by Beijing overstates actual change in Chinese policy and overlooks the complexity of the issues on which the assertiveness has been perceived. Johnston sees maritime disputes as the only area where one could make a case for increased Chinese assertiveness. On other matters over the past couple of years China's policy has not changed, has become more moderate, or has been an understandable response to changes in conditions that Chinese policymakers face.

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Alexa L. McMahon — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:06:02 +0000

Alexa L. McMahon

Mohamedou Ould Slahi courtesy of Wikimedia commons. On the difficult business of writing, people of letters often like to quote a maxim attributed to Ernest Hemmingway: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Yet, we are not all so fortunate as to bleed metaphorically. You could call Mohamedou Ould Slahi one of the unlucky few for whom the bell tolls.

Slahi has been detained at Guantánamo since August 2002 under the authority of AUMF. After largely growing up in Germany, the native Mauritanian traveled to Afghanistan in late 1990 to train in an Al Qaeda camp and support the mujahedeen, whom the United States/CIA was covertly supporting at the time against Soviet invasion. After the conflict ended in 1992, Slahi severed ties with Al Qaeda and returned to Germany for studies—with a brief stint in Canada for a job—eventually returning home to Mauritania in 2000.

Democracy Promotion Benefits the United States

Zalmay Khalilzad — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Zalmay Khalilzad

In his recently published criticism of U.S. democracy programs, particularly those of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Jordan Michael Smith characterizes that organization’s work as “controversial.” Controversial? In 2003, on the twentieth anniversary of NED’s founding, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution commending its work and pledging future support. The vote was 390-1. A not-for-profit organization that receives federal funding, the Endowment has been a line-item in the budget of every president, Democratic and Republican, year in and year out, since its inception thirty years ago.

Of course, supporting civic organizations that seek our assistance is indeed regarded as controversial by authoritarians who seek to crush the aspirations of their own people. Smith takes at face value the accusations of such authorities as the Kremlin-funded Russia Today, Iran’s former envoy to the United Nations, and Egypt’s justice minister, that NED and other democracy-assistance groups seek “to determine the governmental systems of other countries.” Had he interviewed NED's grantees (detailed in its freely available annual report), he would have found that NED supports independent democratic activists and NGOs that are politically diverse, pragmatic, and reformist. Often, their activities are in tension with the array of interests that the U.S. government pursues.

The Guantanamo Political Game

Paul R. Pillar — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:48:46 +0000

Paul R. Pillar

The national disgrace that is the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is still in operation largely because of another familiar national disgrace, which is partisan gamesmanship. At his press conference this week President Obama stated accurately the multiple reasons, which include significant political damage to U.S. interests overseas, the facility needs to be closed. Those reasons are even more compelling today, amid force-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners, than they were when the then newly inaugurated Mr. Obama first committed to closing the place.

A prevalent theme in current commentary is that a fluent but timid president is not getting anything done about Guantanamo because he is displaying the kind of weakness that is also preventing him from getting things done on gun control and other issues. Civil libertarians and others who might usually be sympathetic to Mr. Obama charge that he has been an insufficiently tough leader in dealing with a recalcitrant Congress that has placed multiple roadblocks in the way of closing Guantanamo, including a ban on movement of any of the detainees to federal prisons or any other facilities in the United States. One is entitled to ask in such situations whether the responsibility lies with someone who cannot overcome recalcitrance or with those who are being recalcitrant. But let us instead just review the bidding on how Guantanamo got to be what it is now.

One can identify three motives—all of them misguided at best and reprehensible at worst—that have been involved. They partly correspond to different phases in the detention facility's history.

Xi's Reforms Face Big Obstacles

Robert Keatley — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Robert Keatley

“[Bureaucrats] are conceited, complacent…truculent and arbitrary; they force orders; they do not care about reality; they maintain blind control….they connive with bad persons and tolerate bad situations; they engage in villainy and violate the law; they are a threat to the Party and the state…”

—Mao Zedong

One reason China’s Chairman Mao launched his destructive Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 47 years ago was to prevent Communist Party and government bureaucrats from morphing into what he feared would become just another ruling class—exploiting the common man like the “capitalists and landlords” he had defeated en route to seizing power. As with so many of his madder policies, Mao failed.

And that spells trouble for his successor, six times removed, the self-styled reformist and current party general secretary (and Chinese president) Xi Jinping. Today’s China is ruled by exactly the kind of people Mao opposed. To a great extent, they comprise a self-serving combination of officials from the party, government, military and state-owned industry, tied together by family and personal connections (guangxi), endemic corruption and a fierce determination to retain the power and privileges that go with their special positions. They bring the nation more modern education, management skills and technical knowledge, plus greater understanding of the wider world, than Mao ever contemplated. But for the most part, they also lack the revolutionary zeal and desire for the equitable society that Mao, in his sometimes bizarre ways, proclaimed as his national goal—and President Xi himself appears to be quite at home among them.

The Onion Goes to War

Robert Golan-Vilella — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:35:49 +0000

Robert Golan-Vilella

Does the Onion want the United States to fight another war in Syria? The satirical newspaper’s coverage of the two-year-old civil war in that country has taken a dramatic turn. While the publication made semi-regular references to Syria throughout the war’s earlier stages, its barbs have gotten more common and very pointed lately. Its recent posts have been deeply and darkly critical of current U.S. policy in Syria, and sometimes appear to border on outright calls for American intervention.

Consider three examples from the past six weeks. First, there is this mock op-ed on March 25, written from the perspective of the Syrian leader:

Hello. My name is Bashar al-Assad. I am the president of Syria, and in the last two years, you—the citizens of the world and their governments—have allowed me to kill 70,000 people. You read that correctly: I am an individual who has murdered 70,000 human beings since March 2011, and you have watched it happen and done nothing.

Then there is this news brief from April 4:

WASHINGTON—While tucking in his daughters as they settled into bed Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama reportedly kissed the two children gently on the forehead and reminded them that the lives of Syrian people are “worthless” and “completely insignificant.” “I love you two so much and Syrians are subhuman and don’t matter at all,” said the president.