National Security

Ezra Klein:

A few months back, Mitt Romney, who's now on John McCain's short list for the vice presidency, said, "I don't want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there's going to be another and another. This is about Shi'a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate."

The Egyptian Brotherhood isn't a terrorist group. Al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist group, hates Iran and is rivals with Hezbollah, a Shi'ite extremist sect. This statement, in other words, made no sense. [...]

As Obama says, one of the clear distinctions between the Left's approach to terrorism and the Right's approach to terrorism is that the Left wants to limit the scope of the conflict, while the Right wants to expand it. [...] Rather than this being an effort to hunt down al Qaeda, it becomes a war to hunt down al Qaeda, destroy Hezbollah, eradicate Hamas, overthrow Saddam Hussein, change the regime in Tehran, crush the Muslim Brotherhood, confront Syria, and whatever else Bill Kristol thought of while eating his Cheerios that week. It is an incredibly dangerous and incoherent approach. And it marks a genuine difference between Obama and McCain.

Scott Lemieux on the recent Boumediene v. Bush decision that restored habeas corpus (The American Prospect):

The first section of Justice Scalia's dissent contains a screed that seems more likely to have come from an O'Reilly Factor transcript than from a Supreme Court opinion in a landmark case. "The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief," Scalia asserts, "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." [...]

[I]t is important for progressives not to approach arguments like Scalia's from a defensive crouch. In particular, there is no reason for progressives to accept the argument that there is a zero-sum tradeoff between reasonable protections of civil liberties and national security. Especially when one considers opportunity costs, there is, in fact, little security value in arbitrarily detaining people against whom the government lacks evidence. As Stephen Holmes has argued in his book The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, the Bush administration's aggrandizements of executive power (and Congress' unwillingness to properly exercise its restraining and oversight functions) have undermined national security rather than preserved it. Long-term arbitrary detentions are bad for both civil liberties and the security of the American public, and it's crucial for liberals not to concede the latter half of the equation.

... is the subtitle of U.S. Versus Them by J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic. He argues that plain old conservatism — as opposed to neo-conservatism — is what landed us in the mess in Iraq and the Middle East. The bad ideas that mark the Bushies' foreign policy are classic conservative policy ideas.

In foreign policy, "conservative" describes a distinct attitude in which the world is conceived in terms of "us vs. them" or "good vs. evil," with the United States assuming the role of a righteous protagonist facing a monolithic enemy. It is often an explicitly religious vision, with frequent allusions...to God, Satan and Armageddon. Characterizing the Soviet Union as an earthly manifestation of evil, rather than...

Read the rest of this entry...

From Rand Beers, U.S. counterterrorism adviser and current president of the National Security Network. Beers quit the NSC in protest in March 2003 five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Progressives have a tremendous opportunity — and a real challenge — on national security this cycle. The public has decisively rejected the Bush administration's national security framework. But nothing in the public discourse gives non-expert Americans a clear understanding of what the alternatives might look like. [...]

One way to fill that gap is for progressives to begin setting out the core ideas that underlie our theory of national security — and then share specific policy positions and critiques that show what those core ideas would mean, and how they would produce results different from what we have seen in recent years. The thinking behind this two-part approach is simple: there's a crying need for sophisticated, pragmatic, deep policy thinking that returns serious, non-hyped discussions of security issues to the public eye.

The challenges we face — Afghanistan, Pakistan, energy, to name just three — have no magic solutions and will be with us for years to come. Yet there's also a need for clear-sighted, unadorned talk about why we make the choices we do and what kind of nation we want to be. That is a debate that is much less technical, but no less important, than the details of our policy in Pakistan's borderlands or how many gallons of alternative fuels we can produce by 2015. Everybody, however much or little time their lives give them to think about national security, can join a debate about what kind of country we want to be.

Read more at www.nsnetwork.org.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cumulative cost of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be between $1.2 trillion and $1.7 trillion by 2017. The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board responds:

From these numbers, we draw the conclusion that U.S. national security would be better served by winding down the Asian wars as quickly as possible and concentrating the
money now being spent there on developing renewable energy sources that will reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil. It may be cheaper to develop alternatives to oil than to fight for it in Asia. [...]

[G]iven the costs of the war in Iraq and the price of oil, the huge numbers that are often quoted for developing renewable energy in the United States do not look so daunting. For example, the editors of Scientific American magazine estimate that the U.S. government would have to invest about $450 billion to help build solar arrays in the Southwest that could produce 69 percent of the nation's electric power and 35 percent of its total energy needs by 2050. That would cut both oil consumption and carbon emissions that contribute to global warming by roughly one-third.

In the context of the Asian wars, that looks like a bargain.

The Gavel:

The House has just passed the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 3773, to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to establish a procedure for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence, and for other purposes, by a vote of 213-197-1. The revised House legislation to amend FISA grants new authorities for conducting electronic surveillance against foreign targets while preserving the requirement that the government obtain an individualized FISA court order, based on probable cause, when targeting Americans at home or abroad. The House bill also strongly enhances oversight of the Administration's surveillance activities. Finally, the House bill does not provide retroactive immunity for telecom companies but allows the courts to determine whether lawsuits should proceed.

Rep. Jim Matheson voted for the House bill; Cannon and Bishop (and every other Republican) voted against it (roll call). If you'd like to give Rep. Matheson some positive reinforcement, you can contact his office at (202) 225-3011 or via his e-mail contact form.

The front page of the Trib today:

When you read the accompanying story, you learn that investigators have yet to link the case to terrorism in any way.

But hey, if it sells newspapers...

Now that Democrats in the Senate have caved and given the telcos retroactive immunity from breaking the law, a reader at Talking Points Memo suggests that Bush's justification — the "unitary executive" — might have some other benefits:

I actually like the idea of a unitary executive, because it implies that there could be a unitary citizen. I have begun to consider myself a unitary citizen. I am allowed (by virtue of the definition of a unitary executive) to pick and choose the laws I would like to follow, kind of Thoreau like.

I also like the idea of retroactive immunity paired with the unitary citizen. I could decide not to follow a stupid law and then forgive myself afterwards.

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, writing in the Washington Post in 2005:

Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

[...] Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. [...]

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders?

Most folks in the U.S. would be happy to learn that it would be extremely difficult for a group of terrorists to detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city (Raw Story):

After appearing in numerous film and TV programs and even creeping its way into American political discourse, the suitcase nuke, a nuclear bomb small enough to be easily hidden, is unlikely to exist, according to experts. The revelation left the anchors of the Fox News program Fox & Friends more than a little disappointed.

"You mean '24' isn't true," Co-host Page Kelly inquired, referring to Fox's national security-themed prime time hit, starring Kiefer Sutherland as CIA agent Jack Bauer. "'24's my favorite show."

"It is a little bit of a let down," agreed Greg Kelly.

See the Washington Post for more details.