Category: War – Peace – Foreign Affairs

The National Psyche and Foreign Wars

I belong to a Google Group whose active members are retired scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and economists — some in their upper 80s — who worked on defense issues from the 1940s to the 2000s. The issues ranged in scope from devising improved tactics for naval, air, and ground operations to assessing the costs and effectiveness of proposed new weapon systems.

Most members of the group were government employees and/or employees of government contractors. Their attraction to government service — and its steady and rather handsome paychecks — derives, in good part, from their belief in the power of government to “solve problems,” and in the need for government to do just that. It is only natural, then, that many members of the group hold an unrealistically exalted view of the power of quantitative methods to “solve problems,” while holding naive views about the machinations of government, human nature, and history. (The pioneers of military operations research in the United States, by contrast, were realistic about the relative impotence of quantitative analysis of complex, dynamic processes.)

Here, for example, is a slightly edited exchange I had with an older member of the group:

Older member (OM):

Does anyone know whether the people of the U.S. were as little involved in the Indian Wars and the opening of the west (some would say stealing) as we seem to be involved with the wars in the Middle East and South Asia.

The greatest asset of our military is its “can do” attitude. The greatest weakness of our military is its “can do” attitude.

Me (Thomas):

I’m not sure what it means for a people to be “involved” in a war. If by “involved” you mean the popularity or unpopularity of the various wars, I have no relevant facts to offer.

But the transient popularity or unpopularity of a war (or any governmental action) shouldn’t matter. If public policy responded to the whims of the “man in the street,” we would be in deep trouble. That’s why there are prescribed processes for making governmental policy. Following the processes doesn’t ensure wise policies, but it beats the alternative of capricious governance.

Our present wars were duly authorized by Congress, and are funded by appropriations made by Congress. Given that the members of Congress are elected representatives of the people, then the people are as involved as they can be under any sensible system of government.

As for the military’s “can do” attitude, decisions about going to war — and staying at war — are the province of civilian authority. When given a war to fight, the only sensible way for the military to approach it is with a “can do” attitude. Does the military’s “can do” attitude color the advice it gives when civilian authority is considering whether to go to war, how to prosecute a war, and whether to persevere in a war? Or are military leaders duly cautious in the advice they give civilian authority, knowing the consequences for their troops and the nation if a war goes badly? I haven’t been close enough to the “inside” — nor have I read deeply enough into military history — to essay answers to those questions.

OM:

I wanted to go a little beyond what might be called the legalities and into the national psyche. The decision to go to war is an awesome political and moral  decision. It has often been said that “old men send young men to war”. In our modern adventures only a fraction of the Country has other than a remote financial involvement in our wars. A small fraction of our Legislative Branch have direct Military Service experience (the smallest in history). An even smaller number has sons or daughters in the Armed Services. We are much moe detached than when the Signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their honor, their fortune, and their good right hand. (Quote not quite accurate).

During the Vietnam War the Country lowered its support as the costs and casualties rose. Now we do not have the draft though even so military leaders warn the political entities that we must not lose the confidence of the people even as we seem to drift away from the “Powell” Doctrine. We certainly see the heavy imprint of the Military-Industrial Complex against which President Eisenhower warned. (That speech is still on Wikipedia).

During Vietnam we had the bugbear of the “Domino Theory”. There are some who argue along those lines now regarding threats to Israel and other major American Interests. Can a small special interests group lead American policy?

I was wondering what other precedents in American History might apply. Most of the 19th Century was dominated by America’s Manifest Destiny (and losses were modes). Then came the War to end all wars. Then the Era of Good Feeling punctuated by the Washington Naval Conference, the Great Depression, and then the rise of Nazi Germany and its Axis with Italy and Japan. Have we found a bizarre combination of of Depression and Manifest Destiny with a liberal dose of hubris as we dismantle our Navy having already essentially worn out much of our Armour and still at the mercy of land mines and IED (a form of landmine).

One parallel that seems to track from the 19th Century is the corruption of the Suttlers [sic] that has transformed nicely into the Military Industrial Complex.

Thomas:

I have great difficulty with the concept of “national psyche,” and thus with generalizations about what “we” (as a nation) have done and should do. I cannot describe my own psyche, let alone the psyches of millions of other Americans, dead and alive, who differ from me (often greatly) in nature and nurture.

In any event, you come close to answering your own questions in your third paragraph, where you ask “Can a small special interests group lead American policy?” My answer is a resounding “yes.” Two, relatively small, interlocking groups of strong-willed individuals were responsible for the Revolution and the Constitution, and those groups were bound by two special interests (at least): independence from Britain (not a universally popular idea at the time) and freedom from Britain’s interference in the colonies’ commerce. (The second interest is a “bad thing” only if one view commercial interests as a “bad thing.” Unlike the historians of the Beard school, I do not.)

Various and shifting coalitions of special-interest groups have determined the foreign and domestic policies of the United States government from its beginning, and always will do so. There is no escape from such an arrangement, given our system of government — the “legalities” to which you refer. Those “legalities” — and the absence of a national psyche which somehow translates the consolidated wisdom of “the nation” into governmental policy — make it inevitable that governmental policy will be the product of various and shifting coalitions of special-interest groups. You (I mean the generic “you” and not you, [OM]) may like the resulting policies in some cases (e.g., if you are a fan of British-style health care you will consider Obamacare a great leap forward) and dislike them in other cases (e.g., if you are an opponent of foreign wars except those that in retrospect seem worthwhile, you will generally oppose foreign wars).

The “dismantling” of the Navy to which you refer is the specific policy of a specific administration (or administrations). It was not the policy of the Reagan administration, nor was it a policy of the Kennedy administration. And, I hope, it will not be the policy of the next administration. In any case, governmental policy toward the Navy is part of a larger set of policies, the combination of which is dictated by the complex interplay of various special interests and the particular psyches of elected and appointed officials. In the present case, the “dismantling” of the Navy arises from a particular view of how to defend Americans and their property and, not coincidentally, also makes certain kinds of domestic government programs more affordable. It should go without saying that the particular view of how to defend Americans (diplomacy, good will, lower defense budgets) finds opposition in millions of Americans’ psyches, as does the present administration’s commitment to various domestic programs. Liberal hawks — to the extent that they still exist — must be having a hard time digesting the present administration’s combination of domestic and foreign policies, just as conservative hawks — whose are legion — had a hard time digesting the previous administration’s combination of domestic and foreign policies.

As for the military-industrial complex, there is a coalition of interests that can be described broadly by that term, though it is a coalition fraught with internal conflicts and rivalries. If that coalition deserves blame for any excesses in defense spending and misadventures in foreign fields, it also deserves a large share of the credit for the outcomes of World War II and the Cold War.

Tip O’Neill said that all politics is local. I say that all political developments reflect the clash, compromise, and collaboration of special interests — and thus cannot be ascribed to a national psyche.

Defining Treasonous Speech

Eugene Volokh, writing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Aid Project, digs into his archive for a list of five alternative ways of defining treasonous speech. The alternatives range from restrictive (#1) to lenient (#5).

My archive includes a five-year-old post in which I comment on Volokh’s five alternatives. In that post, I state a preference for this option:

2. Speech is unprotected only when the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy, and is paid for such speech. This, though, would be an odd distinction in U.S. constitutional law, given that speech is routinely protected despite being done for money. Most writers, filmmakers, journalists, and other speakers are paid for their speech.

Now, five years later, I lean toward Volokh’s least lenient alternative:

1. Speech is unprotected whenever the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy (and perhaps there’s some evidence that the speech is indeed likely to provide some at least modest aid). That seemed to be the court’s view in Gillars: “The First Amendment does not protect one from accountability for words as such. It depends upon their use. It protects the free expression of thought and belief as a part of the liberty of the individual as a human personality. But words which reasonably viewed constitute acts in furtherance of a program of an enemy to which the speaker adheres and to which he gives aid with intent to betray his own country, are not rid of criminal character merely because they are words.” This exception would justify punishing any speech that falls within the statutory and constitutional definition of “treason.”

How can I be so hard on speech that aids a foreign enemy and yet so supportive of free speech in the context of domestic affairs (e.g., see this post)? The terms “foreign enemy” and “domestic affairs” ought to be a clue. As I say here, in the context of illegal immigration, “the United States exists primarily for the purpose of protecting its citizens and their liberty rights.”

We must not give foreign enemies the same rights as American citizens. If we do, we run the grave risk of losing our own rights.

The Omniscient State at Work

For the benefit of Paul Krugman and other worshipers of the all-wise, all-beneficent state, here’s some news from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – Despite a top-to-bottom overhaul of the intelligence community after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the nation’s security system showed some of the same failures when it allowed a would-be bomber to slip aboard an airliner, congressional investigators said Tuesday.The Senate Intelligence Committee report at times contradicted the Obama administration’s assertion that the nearly catastrophic Christmas Day bombing attempt was unlike 9/11 because it represented a failure to understand intelligence, not a failure to collect and understand it.

The congressional review is more stark than the Obama administration’s report. It lays much of the blame at the feet of the National Counterterrorism Center, which Congress created to be the primary agency in charge of analyzing terrorism intelligence.

‘Nuff said? Not quite. There’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:

What a fiasco. That’s the first word that comes to mind watching Mahmoud Ahmadinejad raise his arms yesterday with the leaders of Turkey and Brazil to celebrate a new atomic pact that instantly made irrelevant 16 months of President Obama’s “diplomacy.” The deal is a political coup for Tehran and possibly delivers the coup de grace to the West’s half-hearted efforts to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Full credit for this debacle goes to the Obama Administration and its hapless diplomatic strategy. Last October, nine months into its engagement with Tehran, the White House concocted a plan to transfer some of Iran’s uranium stock abroad for enrichment. If the West couldn’t stop Iran’s program, the thinking was that maybe this scheme would delay it. The Iranians played coy, then refused to accept the offer.

But Mr. Obama doesn’t take no for an answer from rogue regimes, and so he kept the offer on the table. As the U.S. finally seemed ready to go to the U.N. Security Council for more sanctions, the Iranians chose yesterday to accept the deal on their own limited terms while enlisting the Brazilians and Turks as enablers and political shields. “Diplomacy emerged victorious today,” declared Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, turning Mr. Obama’s own most important foreign-policy principle against him.

Don’t you sleep better at night with those wonderful folks in D.C. watching out for you? It’s not enough that they’ve screwed up the economy in general, and are in the process of further screwing up our medical care. Now, they’re working toward dismantling our defenses against terrorists and regimes that sponsor terrorism.

Well, you can’t say that I didn’t see it coming (here, here, and here).

The State of the Union: 2010

We are in a state of statism.

Statism, as I have said,

boils down to one thing: the use of government’s power to direct resources and people toward outcomes dictated by government. . . .

The particular set of outcomes toward which government should strive depends on the statist who happens to be expounding his views. But all of them are essentially alike in their desire to control the destiny of others. . . .

“Hard” statists thrive on the idea of a powerful state; control is their religion, pure and simple. “Soft” statists [sometimes] profess offense at the size, scope, and cost of government, but will go on to say “government should do such-and-such,” where “such-and such” usually consists of:

  • government grants of particular positive rights, either to the statist, to an entity or group to which he is beholden, or to a group with which he sympathizes
  • government interventions in business and personal affairs, in the belief that government can do certain things better than private actors, or simply should do many things other than — and sometimes in lieu of — dispensing justice and defending the nation.

Hard statists simply reject liberty. Soft statists reject it in fact even as they claim to embrace it in principle. Together, hard and soft statists have harnessed themselves and the liberty-loving minority to the yoke of the state. It is by this tyranny of the majority that America has descended into Europeanism, from which there can be no escape unless the liberty-loving minority begins actively to resist it — as did a similar minority in 1775.

If you are a “fish in water,” and cannot see the extent to which America is in thrall to statism — nationally, regionally, and locally — consider these examples of the ways in which statism grips us:

1. Compulsory public education has been used by statists to inculcate statism. Higher education — especially the so-called liberal arts — is dominated by the products of statist inculcation.

2. “Free enterprise” and freedom of personal action are barely more free than they were under Hitler or Mussolini. If you doubt that, consider the hundreds of thousands of pages comprised in the U.S. Code, its implementing regulations, and the statutes, codes, and ordinances of States and municipalities.

3.  “Private property” has gone by the wayside, in company with “free enterprise,” thanks to the same enactments. If you doubt that, think about compulsory unionism, smoking bans, the continuing misuse of eminent domain, and various restrictions on the sale and use of personal and business property.

4. Productive Americans, on the whole, pay about half of their income to their governments, for the purpose of supporting the counterproductive activities of those governments and their clients. Some of those productive Americans endorse and support this confiscatory regime because (a) they don’t understand its costs and consequences; (b) it makes them feel good; and (c) they subscribe to the Nirvana fallacy, in which an all-good, all-knowing government can (somehow) do the “right” things and do them “right.” The persistence of the Nirvana fallacy owes much to compulsory public education (point 1).

5. Our prosperity, such as it is, waxes and wanes with the whims of the Federal Reserve, which has the power to inflate, to  feed bubbles, to cause depressions, and to fund government’s profligate spending (where taxation is insufficient or politically unpopular).

6. Incentives to work and save — to be self-reliant, in other words — have been diminished by the establishment of welfare “rights,” Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. To this list has been added the expansion of Medicare-Medicaid known as Obamacare.

7. Affirmative action, equal lending opportunity, equal housing opportunity, and other  “preference” schemes penalize the more-capable at the expense of the less-capable. In a single stroke, such schemes enable advancement based on personal characteristics instead of merit, while destroying freedom of association and freedom of contract.

8. Various legislative, executive, and judicial acts have led to a kind of perverted legality that requires prisoners to be released when prisons become “overcrowded”; allows unborn and partially born human beings to be killed on a whim; stifles the free expression of political views for which the Founders fought and suffered; and treats foreign enemies as mere criminals with the same jurisprudential rights as the American citizens whose lives and property they would destroy.

There is much more, but that is all I can bear to acknowledge in a single post.

Is it any wonder that the Tea Party movement enjoys strong support, that Barack Obama (our statist-in-chief) merits strong disapproval, or that we must resort to civil disobedience if we are to enjoy a smattering of liberty?

Have a nice day!

Blasts from the Past

I have republished much of the pre-blog (“home page”) version of my old blog, Liberty Corner, in 29 posts at The Original Liberty Corner. (There’s a link to TOLC in the right sidebar, for permanent access.) Some of the material at TOLC is dated; most of it remains current; some of it is prescient.

The preceding post, “First Principles,” is based on one of my early contributions to the pre-blog version of Liberty Corner. From time to time, I will update other material and re-post it at this blog.

First Principles

The Constitution is for “we the people,” not “we the politicians” or “we the bureaucrats.”

A society is formed by the voluntary bonding of individuals into overlapping, ever-changing groups whose members strive to serve each others’ emotional and material needs. Government — regardless of its rhetoric — is an outside force that cannot possibly replicate societal bonding, or even foster it. At best, government can help preserve society — as it does when it deters aggression from abroad or administers justice. But in the main, government corrodes society by destroying bonds between individuals and dictating the terms of social and economic intercourse — as it does through countless laws, regulations, and programs, from Social Security to farm subsidies, from corporate welfare to the hapless “war” on drugs, from the minimum wage to affirmative action. On balance, the greatest threat to society is government itself.

The promises made in America’s Constitution are valid only within the United States, not across international borders. Even with the benefit of a common Constitution, we Americans find it harder every year to honor and respect each other’s lives, fortunes, and honor. Expecting other nations to behave as if they were bound by our Constitution is like trusting Hitler in the 1930s — an exercise in false hope and self-delusion.>Free speech is a right. A free pass based on gender, race, religion, or any other incidental characteristic is extortion.

Liberty is not anarchy, nor is it the government dictating how we may live our lives and pursue happiness.

Liberty: the right to make mistakes, to pay for them, and to profit by learning from them.

The best government is that which walks the fine line between the tyranny of anarchy and the tyranny of special interests.

The constitutional contract charges the federal government with keeping peace among the States, ensuring uniformity in the rules of inter-State and international commerce, facing the world with a single foreign policy and a national armed force, and assuring the even-handed application of the Constitution and of constitutional laws. That is all.

The business of government is to protect the lawful pursuit and enjoyment of income and wealth, not to redistribute them.

Each citizen is a unique minority of one who should enjoy the same rights as all other minorities.

The most precious right these days is the right to be left alone.

The “Predator War” and Self-Defense

There is a body of opinion which holds that the use of new war-fighting technology is illegal and tantamount to murder. Those who hold that opinion have particular reference to the Predator drone, which the U.S. has used to some effect in the Middle East. The position of the nay-sayers permeates a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, entitled “The Predator War.” By the standards of Mayer and the anti-predator critics upon whom she leans heavily, David (of “David and Goliath”) and the English longbowmen at Agincourt were war criminals, just because they used superior technology to defeat their enemies. This pseudo-legal nonsense is merely a pretext for anti-American Americans, and others, to find fault with the United States.

The correct view of this matter is taken by Kenneth Anderson here, here, here, and here. In the fourth-linked item, Anderson outlines the legal position that the U.S. government should take (but has not):

  • Targeted killings of terrorists, including by Predators and even when  the targets are American citizens, are a lawful practice;
  • Use of force is justified against terrorists anywhere they set up safe havens, including in states that cannot or will not prevent them;
  • These operations may be covert—and they are as justifiable when the CIA is tasked to carry them out secretly as when the military does so in open armed conflict.
  • All of the above fall within the traditional American legal view of “self-defense” in international law, and “vital national security interests” in U.S. domestic law.

Moreover,

The U.S. government should . . . defend what its officers in fact believe to be the case—that targeted killing from drone platforms is not merely a question of hard-edged military necessity, but is also a humanitarian step forward in technology. The president believes that and so does the vice president, and they are correct. These technologies are lessening, not increasing, civilian damage, are being applied in ways (because it is killing that is, indeed, targeted) that lessen collateral damage from what it would otherwise be in traditional war. The U.S. government should react with outrage to the charge, implied or express, of American cowardice or some abstract increased propensity to violence on account of drone strikes, and assert its humanitarian moral ground.

For that matter, hostile journalists ought to be pressed to explain why drone attacks are significantly different from missiles fired from aircraft or offshore naval vessels​—save for the vastly greater ability to monitor the circumstances of firing through sensor technologies. Senior officials believe that drone warfare allows the United States to take far greater measure and care with collateral damage than it can using either conventional war or attack teams on the ground. The U.S. government should say so, rather than simply falling back on narrow arguments of military necessity, operational convenience, and force protection, while ceding the moral high ground to the international soft-law community.

The Near-Victory of Communism

It is said, often, that communism failed, and that its failure was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communism is in fact alive and as well as it ever was in the Soviet Union. Where? In the so-called Western democracies. In evidence, I quote from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (English edition of 1888):

[T]he first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.

So much of the agenda of Communism has been adopted by the “Western democracies” — through executive fiat, legislation, judicial decree, taxation, regulation, and nationalization — that I wonder why we bothered to wage and win the Cold War.

Our Sacred Honor?

In “Sizing Up Obama,” I wrote:

On the one hand, we have FDR II, replete with schemes for managing our lives and fortunes.

On the other hand, we have Carter-Clinton II, ready to: kowtow to those who would bury us, create the illusion that peace will reign perforce, and act on that illusion by slashing the defense budget (thereby giving aid and comfort to our enemies).

I have said a lot more about Obama’s schemes for managing our lives and fortunes. (See this, this, this, this, this, and this.) I also have addressed Obama’s apparent willingness to compromise our sacred honor. But it is clear that I have been preoccupied with Obama’s economic agenda, to the neglect of his foreign follies.

While the war in Iraq winds down to a successful conclusion, and the outcome of the war in Afghanistan depends on Obama’s willingness to buck the surrender lobby (of which Obama is a leading member), there is the problem of Iran:

The price of a pre-emptive attack on Iran might be high, but the price of inaction will be even higher. Legitimate U.S. interests in the Middle East (i.e., access to oil) will be threatened by a regime that has proceeded thus far in the face of sanctions and is unlikely to be fazed by more sanctions. The economic hardships caused by the “oil shocks” of the 1970s will be as nothing compared with the hardships caused by Iranian dominance of the Middle East.

Where will Western Europe, Russia, and China be in our hour of need? Western Europe will be busy emulating Vichy France, in the hope that its obseqiousness toward Iran is rewarded by dribbles of oil. Russia and China will actively support Iran (covertly if not overtly), in the expectation of profiting from higher prices on the oil they sell to Western Europe and the United States. Eventually, Russia and China will exploit the inevitable decline of American military power, as our defense budget disappears into the maw of Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other misbegotten ventures.

What has happened since I wrote those words on September 26? Just about what you would expect. Here is Charles Krauthammer, writing on October 16:

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign-policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile-defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? . . .

. . . Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it’s too late? . . .

. . . Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

“Russia Not Budging on Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart.” Such was the Washington Post headline’s succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared that “threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure” are “counterproductive.” Note: It’s not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved — to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? “We are not at that point yet,” she averred. “That is not a conclusion we have reached. . . . It is our preference that Iran work with the international community.”

But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever, or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

And so it goes, in the Orwellian world of Obama, where a temporary illusion of peace is attained through accommodation and surrender.

The McNamara Legacy: A Personal Perspective

The death earlier this year of former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara caused me to reflect on my brief time as a “whiz kid” in McNamara’s Systems Analysis office. SA was run by assistant secretary of defense Alain Enthoven, a quintessential whiz kid who was only 30 when he began his eight-year reign as the Pentagon’s “doubting Thomas.”

My own days as a minor whiz kid ran from July 1967 to March 1969, that is, from late in McNamara’s regime (January 21, 1961 – February 29, 1968), through the interregnum of Clark Clifford (March 1, 1968 – January 20, 1969), and into the early months of Nixon’s appointee, Melvin Laird (January 22, 1969 – January 29, 1973). SA’s influence dwindled sharply upon McNamara’s departure from the Pentagon, but SA had been very powerful until then, for three reasons.

First, of course, SA was a key ingredient of McNamara’s management
“revolution,” which came straight from the playbook of RAND — the Air Force’s influential think-tank. McNamara recruited Charles Hitch from RAND to serve as comptroller of the Department of Defense. Hitch — a leading proponent of the use of planning, programming, and budgeting systems (PPBS) and co-author of the “bible” of systems analysis, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age — brought with him Alain Enthoven, who began as deputy assistant aecretary of defense for systems analysis in 1961 and was elevated to assistant secretary of defense for SA in 1965. (For a recounting of McNamara’s love affair with RAND-ites and their techniques, see “Early RAND and the McNamara Revolution,” which begins on p. 4 of the RAND Review, Fall 1998. A Time magazine piece from 1962 about McNamara’s “whiz kids” profiles five top McNamara aides, including two RAND-ites, Enthoven and Henry Rowen.)

A second, closely related reason for SA’s power was its central position in McNamara’s decision process. SA exercised its power mainly through the so-called draft presidential memorandum (DPM). DPMs, which originated in SA, took the form of lengthy memos from the secretary of defense to the president, none of which — as far as I know — actually went to the president. DPMs were, in fact, vehicles for obtaining and recording McNamara’s decisions on major program issues. Each DPM treated a broad set of issues (e.g., force structure, force mix, manning levels, major procurement programs) in a particular mission area (e.g., strategic forces; tactical air forces, naval forces, and land forces). For each of the dozen or so issues addressed in a DPM (e.g., the number and mix of amphibious ships), the responsible SA analyst(s) would (in about a page) summarize the sponsoring service’s proposed program and the analytical basis for the service’s position, criticize the service’s analysis (usually by focusing on critical but debatable assumptions and the inevitable uncertainty of cost estimates), briefly discuss alternatives (almost always less ambitious and expensive than the service’s proposal), recommend one of them, and give a tabular comparison of the alternatives, using simple figures of merit chosen for the purpose of making the recommended alternative look good. (We called it “tablesmanship.”) The coup de grace often would be a “clinching” reason for approving SA’s recommended (less-expensive) alternative (e.g., the unlikelihood of another amphibious assault on the scale of the landing at Inchon, given the location of approved planning scenarios). DPMs would be sent to the services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) for comment. After some back and forth, decision versions would go up to McNamara, who almost always chose the alternatives recommended by SA.

In sum, we SA civilians played “gotcha.” We did it because we were encouraged to do it, though not in so many words. And we got away with it, not because we were better analysts — most of our work was simplistic stuff — but because we usually had the last word. (Only an impassioned personal intercession by a service chief might persuade McNamara to go against SA — and the key word is “might.”) The irony of the whole process was that McNamara, in effect, substituted “civilian judgment” for oft-scorned “military judgment.” McNamara revealed his preference for “civilian judgment” by elevating Enthoven and SA a level in the hierarchy, 1965, even though (or perhaps because) the services and JCS had been open in their disdain of SA and its snotty young civilians.

A third reason for SA’s power, and its ability to play “gotcha,” was the essential lack of structure in the Department of Defense’s PPBS. For all of the formality and supposed rigor of the system, it lacked an essential ingredient: budget constraints against which the services could submit realistic program proposals. Budget constraints had existed de facto under Eisenhower and were to exist de jure under Nixon. In fact, Melvin Laird introduced a decision process built around fiscal constraints soon after taking office, on the recommendation of a former subordinate of Enthoven’s who stayed on as acting assistant secretary for about a year into Laird’s regime.

In any event, because McNamara didn’t give the services budget targets, the services were effectively encouraged to ask for a lot more than they could get. That incentive was reinforced by the reorientation of the defense program toward “flexible response” in the 1960s. Each service, naturally, sought a piece of the new action, and — lacking fiscal guidance — each of them did the sensible thing by asking for a lot more than it was likely to get. Under such a system, SA was bound to look good, and SA analysts were bound to make the services look bad by playing “gotcha.” It turns out that I didn’t have the stomach for it, which is why I left SA after 20 increasingly depressing months.

And that brings me to the players and their “tone.” What did the SA staff look like?

– There were a lot of youngish civilians, like me, who were bereft of military service and may never have seen a military unit or military equipment, except in a parade. Many of the young civilians had Harvard MBAs, and they were notorious, even within SA, for their brashness and rudeness.

– There was a smaller cadre of lightly less-young civilians, imported from other parts of DoD and the defense industry. Their SA experience lent them a certain cachet that they could trade on for advancement in government and industry.

– There were many junior officers with ROTC commissions who had deferred their active service to pursue graduate degrees. Because of those degrees, they were snatched up by SA instead of being sent to Vietnam. They were really civilians, at heart, who happened to carry military ranks.

– Most of the major components of SA had one or two “service reps” — senior officers nominated by the services. Some of them were dead-enders with nothing to lose (which worked against their sponsoring services). Others (notably the Navy reps) were rising stars who (a) tried to keep SA “honest” and (b) kept their sponsoring services informed of what SA was up to.

– The higher echelons were populated by “seasoned” civilians, with military analysis experience at places like RAND and the aerospace industry. One such senior civilian exemplified the tone of SA. He wrote a white paper in which he discussed (among other things) the role of amphibious forces in defense strategy. In the course of that discussion, he pointedly and sneeringly referred to amphibious forces as “ambiguous forces.”

In my 20 months at the Pentagon, I came to understand the essential difference between Systems Analysis, as it was in McNamara’s day, and outfits like the Operations Evaluation Group, a Navy-sponsored civilian organization. SA, to put it baldly, existed to work against the services. OEG, by contrast, existed (and exists) to work with a service, to help it make the best use of its forces and systems. There is no doubt in my mind that the contributions of OEG were (and are) far more valuable to the nation’s defense than the “contributions” of SA, which may well have harmed it.

Analysis per se is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It’s like a loaded gun, in that its goodness or badness depends on who wields it and for what purpose.

Getting it Wrong and Right about Iran

Jeffrey Miron, an economist who graces the halls of Harvard University and Cato Institute, has a new blog, Libertarianism from A to Z. There, Miron mirrors Cato’s approach to policy issues, taking a free-market line on economic affairs and a knee-jerk isolationist line on defense matters. Consider this passage from Miron’s post, “Iran: Engagement, Sanctions, or Nothing?“:

Let’s take as given that, other things equal, it is in the world’s interest that Iran not possess nuclear weapons. . . . Then the following propositions all seem plausible:

1. Continued engagement just allows Iran to continue developing its nuclear capabilites.

2. Sanctions might slow Iran’s nuclear development a bit, but since both Russia and China are not really on board with sanctions, this effect will be minimal. (UPDATE: Miron, in a later post, has more to say about the essential futility of sanctions.)

3. Military action to destory the Iranian nuclear capabilities will address the issue in the short term, but Iran will just start over. Plus, such military action might escalate into something far more costly.

Faced with these choices, my vote is to do nothing.

Note the glaring contradiction. Miron postulates that it is not in the world’s interest for Iran to possess nuclear weapons, but he prefers to do nothing about it. If it is not in the world’s interest for Iran to have nuclear weapons, then something ought to be done about it — and I don’t mean having a “serious, meaningful dialogue” with Iran, as our “glorious leader” proposes.

The time to deal with a serious threat is before it becomes an imminent one. So what if Iran might “start over” if we and/or Israel destroy its nuclear capabilities? Here, from DEBKAfile, is a realistic take:

Defense secretary Robert Gates hit the nail on the head when he said Friday: “The reality is there is no military option that does anything more than buy time. The estimates are one to three years or so.” . . .

The answer to this argument is simple: It is exactly this approach which gave Iran 11 quiet years to develop its weapons capacity. For Israel and Middle East, a three-year setback is a very long time, a security boon worth great risk, because a) It would be a happy respite from the dark clouds hanging over the country from Iran and also cut back Hamas and Hizballah terrorist capabilities, and b) In the volatile Middle East anything can happen in 36 months. (Emphasis added.)

What’s missing from Miron’s analysis of the situation is an assessment of the consequences (i.e., costs) of allowing Iran to proceed. That’s a strange omission for an economist, an omission which suggests that Miron, like many another libertarian, “adheres to the [non-aggression] principle with deranged fervor.”

Well, evidently it takes a law professor (Tom Smith of The Right Coast) to get it right:

A nutcase regime in Asia is about to get nuclear weapons and not long after that the missiles to send them to Israel, Europe, Saudi Arabia and after that, who knows. The regime is populated by religious fanatics who deny the Holocaust and profess the desire to wipe Israel off the map in all apparent sincerity. Normally, one could rely on the Israelis to take care of themselves, but in this case, the crazed regime has gotten too powerful for the Israelis to handle. Just to fill out the picture, the folks building the nukes just stole an election and are imprisoning, torturing and killing into silence their domestic critics. These leaders are backed up by a praetorian guard of fanatics, a Waffen-SS if you will, to switch to another entirely appropriate comparison, on whose secret bases (for what is a geopolitical villain without secret bases?) the nuclear weapons are being gestated.

So who ya gonna call? Obviously, patently, indisputably the only people who can stand up to these frightening thugs are us. But as luck would have it, we are presently governed by the party who strategy is to talk to death the people whose idea of dialog is to throw their opponents in prison and beat them with hoses until they change their minds.

What will happen if the U.S. continues to muddle along in a Chamberlainesque fashion? For starters, this:

By now, Iran has used the gift of time to process enough enriched uranium to fuel two nuclear bombs and is able to produce another two per year.

Its advanced medium-range missiles will be ready to deliver nuclear warheads by next year.

Detonators for nuclear bombs are in production at two secret sites.

And finally, a second secret uranium enrichment plant – subject of the stern warning issued collectively in Pittsburgh Friday by Obama, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British premier Gordon Brown – has come to light, buried under a mountain near Qom. Its discovery doubles – at least – all previous estimates of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

The price of a pre-emptive attack on Iran might be high, but the price of inaction will be even higher. Legitimate U.S. interests in the Middle East (i.e., access to oil) will be threatened by a regime that has proceeded thus far in the face of sanctions and is unlikely to be fazed by more sanctions. The economic hardships caused by the “oil shocks” of the 1970s will be as nothing compared with the hardships caused by Iranian dominance of the Middle East.

Where will Western Europe, Russia, and China be in our hour of need? Western Europe will be busy emulating Vichy France, in the hope that its obseqiousness toward Iran is rewarded by dribbles of oil. Russia and China will actively support Iran (covertly if not overtly), in the expectation of profiting from higher prices on the oil they sell to Western Europe and the United States. Eventually, Russia and China will exploit the inevitable decline of American military power, as our defense budget disappears into the maw of Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other misbegotten ventures.

It should be clear to anyone who thinks seriously about the state of the world that the time to act against Iran was years ago. That opportunity having passed, now will have to do. The Obama-ish left will cry “no blood for oil,” but the burden should be on the left to offer affordable alternatives to Middle Eastern oil in lieu of war. If the left cannot offer affordable alternatives, the left’s low-to-moderate income constituencies are likely to suffer disproportionately when Iran begins to squeeze the West, and — surely — the elite left does not want that to happen. (Actually, the elite left couldn’t care less about lesser mortals, as long as the elitist agenda of political and environmental correctness becomes writ.)

The rub is that the  left cannot offer affordable alternatives without relaxing its embrace of radical environmentalism. The left has thus far decried “dependence” on foreign oil as an excuse to pour money into ethanol, wind power, and solar energy — none of which is a viable alternative to oil. And, of course, the left opposes feasible and relatively efficient alternatives, such as nuclear energy, coal-fired power plants, drilling in ANWR, and additional off-shore drilling. That leaves us with no choice but to import a lot of oil, much of it from the Middle East. But the left is loath to defend our interests there.

The left’s irreconcilable positions with respect to Iran, oil, and the environment — like the left’s positions on so many other issues — epitomize the “unconstrained vision” of which Thomas Sowell writes. The left, like Alice in Wonderland, likes to believe in “six impossible things before breakfast,” and all the rest of the day, as well.

We are now at a point in history similar to that of England in 1935. If England had begun to rearm then, Hitler might have been deterred or — if not deterred — defeated sooner. Doing nothing, as Miron and his libertarian and leftist brethren would prefer, is a prescription for eventual economic disaster or a longer, bloodier war than is necessary.

P.S. Tom Smith says it all, far more vividly and vigorously.

P.P.S. Two relevant items, here and here.

Related posts:
Not Enough Boots
Defense as the Ultimate Social Service
I Have an Idea
The Price of Liberty
How to View Defense Spending
The Best Defense…
Not Enough Boots: The Why of It
Liberalism and Sovereignty
Cato’s Usual Casuistry on Matters of War and Peace
The Media, the Left, and War
A Point of Agreement
The Folly of Nuclear Disarmament

The Folly of Nuclear Disarmament

From the Associated Press:

UNITED NATIONS [September 24, 2009] – With President Barack Obama presiding, the U.N. Security Council on Thursday unanimously endorsed a sweeping strategy aimed at halting the spread of nuclear weapons and ultimately eliminating them, to usher in a world with “undiminished security for all.”

“That can be our destiny,” Obama declared after the 15-nation body adopted the historic, U.S.-initiated resolution at an unprecedented summit session. “We will leave this meeting with a renewed determination to achieve this shared goal.”

The lengthy document was aimed, in part, at the widely denounced nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, although they were not named. It also reflected Obama’s ambitious agenda to embrace treaties and other agreements leading toward a nuclear weapon-free world, some of which is expected to encounter political opposition in Washington.

On both counts, Thursday’s 15-0 vote delivered a global consensus — countries ranging from Britain to China to Burkina Faso — that may add political impetus to dealing with nuclear violators, advancing arms control in international forums and winning support in the U.S. Congress.

“This is a historic moment, a moment offering a fresh start toward a new future,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, saluting the first such Security Council gathering of presidents and premiers to deal with nuclear nonproliferation.

Yeah, and “peace for our time,” to you. For the youngsters out there, that’s a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous capitulation to Hitler, whose peace was the peace of his victims’ graves.

Well, today’s charade in New York — like the one in Munich 71 years ago — simply gives the bad guys more time in which to perfect their evil designs. When nuclear weapons are outlawed, only outlaws will have nuclear weapons.

P.S. So, Obama and other Democrats are now talking tough about Iran’s nuclear program. Two questions: Where were those Democrats when Bush called Iran out a couple of years ago? Will Obama back his tough talk with action? Answer to the second question: Not bloody likely.

P.P.S. As I was saying . . . Instead of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, Obama offers Iran “serious, meaningful dialogue.” Gimme a break.

The Incredible Shrinking Obama

“Sizing Up Obama” (April 24, 2009):

On the one hand, we have FDR II, replete with schemes for managing our lives and fortunes.

On the other hand, we have Carter-Clinton II, ready to: kowtow to those who would bury us, create the illusion that peace will reign perforce, and act on that illusion by slashing the defense budget (thereby giving aid and comfort to our enemies).

Through the haze of smoke and glare of mirrors I see a youngish president exhorting us to “fear nothing but fear itself” while proclaiming “peace for our time,” as we “follow the yellow-brick road” to impotent serfdom.

The schemes persist, most notoriously (but not exclusively) in health care “reform,” about which Arnold Kling writes today:

What is misleading about statements (a) – (k) [taken from Obama’s speech on September 9] is that each of them referred to a plan that, strictly speaking, does not exist. As far as I know, the Obama Administration never submitted a plan to Congress. . . .

If you are going to repeatedly refer to “my plan” or “this plan” or “the plan I’m proposing,” then unless you have a plan you are lying. The only question is whether it is a little lie or a big one. Obviously, most people think it is only a small lie, or the President would have been called out on it. However, I think that health care policy is an area where there is too much temptation to promise results that are economically impossible to achieve. In that context, my opinion is that giving a speech in favor of a nonexistent plan is a really big lie.

Now — on the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s invasion of Poland — comes Obama’s decision to placate the Russians and insult our allies in Eastern Europe:

President Obama dismayed America’s allies in Europe and angered his political opponents at home today when he formally ditched plans to set up a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The project had been close to the heart of Mr Obama’s predecessor, President Bush, who had argued before leaving office in January that it was needed to defend against long-range ballistic missile attacks from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea.

But it had hobbled relations with Russia, which considered it both a security threat and an unnecessary political provocation in its own backyard.

At a White House appearance today, Mr Obama confirmed that the defence shield envisaged by the Bush Administration, involving a radar base in the Czech Republic and interceptor rockets sited in Poland, was being abandoned. . . .

“The decision announced today by the Administration is dangerous and short-sighted,” the No 2 Republican in the Senate, Jon Kyl, said in a statement.

Mr Kyl said that the shift would leave the United States “vulnerable to the growing Iranian long-range missile threat” and would send a chilling message to former Soviet satellites who had braved Moscow’s anger to support the system.

“This will be a bitter disappointment, indeed, even a warning to the people of Eastern Europe,” said Mr Kyl, who pointed out that both Poland and the Czech Republic had sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. “Today the Administration has turned its back on these allies.”

Senator John McCain, Mr Obama’s defeated Republican White House rival in 2008, said he was “disappointed” with the decision and warned it could undermine US standing in Eastern Europe amid worries there of a resurgent Russia.

“Given the serious and growing threats posed by Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes, now is the time when we should look to strengthen our defences, and those of our allies,” he said in a statement.

“Missile defence in Europe has been a key component of this approach. I believe the decision to abandon it unilaterally is seriously misguided.”

The good news is that Americans seem to have wised up to the Obama scam:

Obama's net approval_090917Sources: Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll and Health Care Reform Poll. Overall net approval ratings represent the difference in the number of  respondents strongly approving and strongly disapproving of Obama (negative numbers mean net disapproval). Health care ratings represent the difference in the number of respondents supporting and opposing Obama’s health care “plan,” or what they take to be his plan.

The mini-wave of approval that followed Obama’s health-care speech on September 9 seems to have dissipated. Obama’s appeasement of Russia, if it becomes widely perceived as such, will only push his numbers further south.

September 11: A Remembrance

When my wife and I turned on our TV set that morning, the first plane had just struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later we saw the second plane strike. In that instant what had seemed like a horrible accident became an obvious act of terror.

Then, in the awful silence that had fallen over Arlington, Virginia, we could hear a “whump” as the third plane hit the Pentagon.

Our thoughts for the next several hours were with our daughter, whom we knew was at work in Building Three of the World Financial Center, only a few hundred feet from the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Had her office struck by debris? Had she fled her building only to be struck by or trapped in debris? Had she smothered in the huge cloud of dust that enveloped lower Manhattan as the Twin Towers collapsed? Because the attacks and their aftermath disrupted telephone communications, we didn’t learn for several hours that she had made it home safely.

Our good fortune was not shared by tens of thousands of other persons: the grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, lovers, and good friends of the 3,000 who died that day in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and western Pennsylvania.

Never forgive, never forget, never relent.

Torture

Can torture be justified? I say yes, because where torture has a reasonable chance of saving innocent lives, it is a proper course of action.

I begin by stipulating that certain practices constitute torture by almost everyone’s standards. Given that there is such a thing as torture, is it ever justified? Let us consider the  objections to torture, which are several:

1. It doesn’t work.

2. Even if it works (in rare circumstances), it is counterproductive because it creates enemies.

3. Torture is wrong — period. Therefore, it does not matter what good ends may be served by torture (e.g., gaining information to prevent terrorist attacks).

4. “We” (i.e., the American government, acting on behalf of Americans) must not sink to the level of those we would torture. Despite all threats and provocations, “we” must stand up for our ideals, which include respect for human life.

5. The practice of torture may be hard to contain, like a contagious disease or a slide down the slippery slope: enemies today, Americans tomorrow.

Here are my responses to the objections:

1. Torture doesn’t work. Never say never, as the saying goes. Of course torture works, sometimes. If you count waterboarding as torture, as do the opponents of torture, there is a strong case that torture prevented post-9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. Those who say that torture doesn’t work really mean something else, for example: it may not work in all cases, it will not work if not done skilfully, or there may be ways — short of torture — to achieve the same result. All such objections may be correct, but their possible correctness does not rule out torture on practical grounds.

2. Torture creates enemies. This may be true, but what is another enemy if his enmity is impotent — as is the enmity of most of the anti-American world. (It should not be forgotten that the most potent enemies of liberty are Americans, who — with increasing success — seek to dictate the terms and conditions of our daily lives.) We are not engaged in a popularity contest; we are engaged in a death struggle against predators. The real issue here is whether anti-American sentiment translates into reliable threats of action against Americans and their interests (as opposed to demonstrations), and — even if it does, to some degree — whether the threat is to be feared more than more imminent threats (e.g., terrorist attacks). Further, there is a strong case that signs of weakness (i.e., inaction, negotiation, the pursuit of “justice” rather than vengeance) do more to encourage our enemies than do signs of strength (of which a demonstrated willingness to torture surely is one). There is evidence, for example, that Osama bin Laden was emboldened to attack the U.S. on 9/11 because of the weakness of American responses to earlier attacks. In general, the historical record — notably in the history of the Third Reich and Soviet Russia — points to the folly of accommodation and appeasement.

3. Torture is wrong — period. How can torture be wrong — period — if it can be used to prevent harm to innocents? To assert that torture is always wrong is the same thing as asserting the wrongness of self-defense. It replaces a noble goal — protection of innocent persons from harm — with an ignoble goal — protection of miscreants from harm. If torture is always wrong, then attacks on innocents which could be prevented by torture are always right. That is the logical implication of an absolute injunction against torture. The proponents of an absolute injunction (e.g., this one) usually start from the premise that it is wrong to take human life. But I wonder how many of them would persist in that premise were they in a life-or-death struggle with an armed intruder. Would success in such a struggle mean that a proponent of the “life is precious” view had somehow “sunk” to the intruder’s level of moral depravity? Let us see.

4. “We” must not sink to the level of those “we” would torture. Even the most obdurate opponents of torture (excepting rigid pacifists) would agree that self-defense is a fundamental right. To oppose torture is, therefore, to oppose self-defense. Self-defense is not a matter of “sinking” to the level of those who would kill us; it is a matter of acting rightly against predators. Did we “sink” to the level of Japan and Germany when we warred against them? We did not; to the contrary, we rose to the occasion of defending humanity against brutality. Thus it is (or can be) with torture, in the right circumstances.

5. There is a slippery slope from torturing enemies to torturing Americans. This may be the most telling objection to torture. But, like the other objections, it fails to entertain the alternative: harm to Americans and their interests. It is the prevention of harm, after all, which justifies government. The question of “harm to whom?” was confronted in the creation of American armed forces and police forces. Both can be used (and in the case of police forces, sometimes are used) against innocent Americans. But Americans, by and large, are willing (often eager) for the protections afforded by organized defenses against foreign and domestic predators. It has long been understood that the defenders must be controlled to ensure that they they do run amok, but it also has long been understood that the risk of their running amok is worth the payoff, namely, protection from predators. The point is that adequate control of the timing and methods of torture can ensure against a slide down the slippery slope.

In sum, torture is moral — and therefore justified — when it becomes necessary for the purpose of eliciting information that could save innocent lives and the lives of those whose job it is to defend innocent lives. I do not mean that torture must be used, but that it may be used. I do not mean that torture will not have repulsive consequences for its targets, but that the thought of those consequences should not cause the American government to renounce torture as an option.

Related reading:

An example of the payoff: “Cracking KSM” (here and here, too)

The “torture memos” and why they shouldn’t have been released

The politicization of the “torture issue” (AG Holder cannot conduct an investigation on his own authority, despite disingenous claims to the contrary)

The always insightful Megan McArdle: here, here, and here

The brilliantly incisive Thomas Sowell: here and here

Other commentary: here, here, here, here, here, and here

My earlier (and unchanged) views: here, here, here, here, and here

A Point of Agreement

Timothy Sandefur and I have disagreed about as often as we’ve agreed, despite the fact that both of us are “libertarians.” (Sandefur is, or was, an Objectivist; I am, to use my terminology, a radical-right-minarchist.)

In any event, Sandefur and I have tended to agree about matters of defense and foreign policy. A good case in point is his post of earlier today, “Cato’s foreign policy, don’t speak up for freedom’s defenders,” in which he says:

One thing you can usually expect from the Cato Institute’s foreign policy experts is that America shouldn’t use military force to defend freedom against tyranny in other countries. While I often find myself disagreeing with that position, it’s at least one that reasonable people can take in various cases. What I find much harder to take is the idea that the United States should not even cheer on freedom’s defenders from the sidelines, or speak up for the rights of democracies to do perfectly innocent things. I noted last year Ted Galen Carpenter and Justin Logan making a really deplorable argument that it is somehow “antagonistic” to the People’s Republic of China for Taiwan to seek to change the name of its airline to “Taiwan Airlines” or to put “Taiwan” on its passports. For Carpenter to say that these things are “antagonistic” to the PRC is nothing short of taking the side of a totalitarian communist dictatorship against the perfectly legitimate rights of a democracy that has never for even a minute of its history been governed by the PRC.

Well, here we are again: Logan argues that “President Obama should keep quiet on the subject of Iran’s elections.” Not that the United States should hold off from intervening in any direct or military way—again, a reasonable position—or that the United States should be wary of Mousavi, who is probably not the “moderate” he’s called on CNN. No, Logan’s argument is that the United States should “keep quiet” while a totalitarian theocratic dictatorship sends its masked thugs to shoot and beat demonstrators who seek some minor degree of political freedom. This he characterizes as “narcissism,” and he ridicules the idea of “anoint[ing] from afar one side as the ‘good’”—a word he puts in scare quotes…..

How sad that libertarians, supposedly America’s most consistent defenders of liberty, are so eager to avoid the possibility of military confrontation that they will adopt and even encourage cravenness and appeasement to the egos of totalitarian dictators. We should reject that approach. John Quincy Adams famously said we were “friends of freedom everywhere; defenders only of our own.” We may disagree at times over the second half of that proposition, but we should never waver on the first.

I couldn’t put it better. Sandefur captures the outrage I felt when I read Justin Logan’s post.

Cato, for all of the wisdom it dispenses on economic matters, is institutionally stupid on matters of defense and foreign policy. Cato isn’t alone on the “libertarian” anti-war flank, which mistakes defense for aggression, and bows slavishly toward non-aggression — as if anything other than last-ditch defense is an act of aggression.

There are times when it is necessary to fight in the defense of liberty. Taking a step backward, then, a lack of preparedness can be fatal to liberty. Taking another step backward, a lack of forthrightness toward those who would “bury us” is too easily taken as a sign that we are unwilling and even unprepared to fight. (We were attacked on 9/11, in part, because bin Laden perceived us as “soft” and unwilling to defend ourselves.)

We cannot afford to let acts of tyranny slide by without a peep, nor should we if we are to stand for liberty and against tyranny. Thus Sandefur is exactly right to call out Cato in the matter of the Iranian elections.

There are several issues on which many a “libertarian” shares ground with Leftists. Defense is one of those issues. What I say in “The Media, the Left, and War” also could be said of most “libertarians.” See also “Parsing Political Philosophy,” where I point out the similarity of left-minarchists (a.k.a. left-libertarians) to left-statists (a.k.a. “liberals”).

Finally, I should note that I have taken to putting “libertarian(s)” and “libertarianism” in quotation marks because “libertarianism” — in its internet-dominant strains (anarchist and left-minarchist) — is a recipe for the destruction of civil society, and thence the ascension of a truly oppressive regime. For more on the fatuousness of  the dominant strains of “libertarianism,” see “On Liberty” and “The Meaning of Liberty.”

I have posted before on the obdurate, head-in-the-sand, Chamberlainesque attitude exemplified by Cato and other “libertarian” organizations:
Libertarian Nay-Saying on Foreign and Defense Policy
Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part I
Right On! For Libertarian Hawks Only
Understanding Libertarian Hawks
More about Libertarian Hawks and Doves
Sorting Out the Libertarian Hawks and Doves
Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part II
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Non-Aggression?
More Final(?) Words about Preemption and the Constitution
Thomas Woods and War
“Peace for Our Time”
How to View Defense Spending
More Stupidity from Cato
Anarchistic Balderdash
Cato’s Usual Casuistry on Matters of War and Peace

The Media, the Left, and War

Ralph Peters writes:

The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar. (“Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars,” Journal of International Security Affairs, Spring 2009.)

Seems about right to me. As I once said of an American “intellectual,”

He and his ilk cannot satisfy their power-lust in the real world, so they retaliate by imagining a theoretical world of doom. It is as if they walk around under a thought balloon which reads “Take that!”

It is the politics of adolescent rebelliousness:

The Left is in an arrested state of adolescent rebellion: “Daddy” doesn’t want me to smoke, so I’m going to smoke; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to drink, so I’m going to drink; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to have sex, so I’m going to have sex. But, regardless of my behavior, I expect “Daddy” to give me an allowance, and birthday presents, and cell phones, and so on….

Persons of the Left simply are simply unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want, regardless of the consequences for others.

And now that they are “in charge,” that’s precisely what they’re doing. Where will it all end? I reflected here on the following passage from an essay by Thomas Sowell:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Peters has a similar thought:

Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. [Emphasis added, with glee.] Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom….

He concludes:

The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters.

In closing, we must dispose of one last mantra that has been too broadly and uncritically accepted: the nonsense that, if we win by fighting as fiercely as our enemies, we will “become just like them.” To convince Imperial Japan of its defeat, we not only had to fire-bomb Japanese cities, but drop two atomic bombs. Did we then become like the Japanese of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Did we subsequently invade other lands with the goal of permanent conquest, enslaving their populations? Did our destruction of German cities—also necessary for victory—turn us into Nazis? Of course, you can find a few campus leftists who think so, but they have yet to reveal the location of our death camps….

Of all the enemies we face today and may face tomorrow, the most dangerous is our own wishful thinking.

The wishful thinking is for quick, clean wars, and preferably, no wars at all — because we can avoid wars through “dialogue” and “understanding.” Bosh! As Peters says,

The violent, like the poor, will always be with us, and we must be willing to kill those who would kill others.

Moreover, we must be prepared for long, dirty wars. With whom? It doesn’t much matter, as Peters suggests:

It may not be China that challenges us, after all, but the unexpected rise of a dormant power. The precedent is there: in 1929, Germany had a playground military limited to 100,000 men. Ten years later, a re-armed Germany had embarked on the most destructive campaign of aggression in history, its killing power and savagery exceeding that of the Mongols.

Which nation or stateless power will be the next Germany or Japan? We don’t know and can’t know. All we can do — and must do — is prepare for the inevitable rise of the next butcher state.

The question is whether we can survive a political regime that is hell-bent on bread, circuses, and surrender.

Cato’s Usual Casuistry on Matters of War and Peace

Cato Institute’s Tim Lynch addresses “Cheney’s Worldview.” Lynch’s comments reflect Cato’s worldview on foreign and defense policy, as I have come to know and disrespect it.

Lynch quotes the following passage from former VP Cheney’s recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute:

If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move [al-Qaeda], the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field.  And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along.  Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted.  In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

Lynch distorts twists Cheney’s words to suggest that Cheney is against open debate about such issues. Cheney, of course, means no such thing. He is against the evident outcome of that open debate, namely, a de facto presidential apology to the enemy (in the decision to close Guantanamo) and court decisions overruling the commander-in-chief’s constitutional execution of his duties.

It would be evident to anyone but a professional nay-sayer on matters of foreign and defense policy that the lack of resolve demonstrated by such decisions is harmful to our defense. The fact that you have a right to hold a stupid position — and to have it ratified by a pusillanimous president or an overreaching court — doesn’t make your position correct. That would be equivalent to saying “might makes right” — hardly a position one associates with Cato.

Lynch continues:

If the CIA told Cheney that it intercepted a message and learned that bin Laden wanted some of his men to climb Mount Everest as a propaganda ploy to somehow show the world that they can lord over the globe, one gets the feeling that  Cheney wouldn’t shrug at the report. Since that is what bin Laden hopes to achieve, the enemy objective must be thwarted! Quick, dispatch American GIs to the top of Everest and establish a post. Stay on the lookout for al-Qaeda and stop them no matter what!

One gets the feeling that Lynch is in the habit of contriving stupid things to attribute to those with whom he differs on policy issues.

Lynch then asks, “what about the costly nation-building exercise (pdf) in Iraq?  How long is that going to last?” I suspect that a day more than zero days would have been too long for Lynch, who (based on his approach to issues of war and peace) might well think that the U.S. should have stayed out of World War II.

There’s more:

In another passage, Cheney bristles at the notion that his “unpleasant” interrogation practices have been a recruitment tool for the enemy.  Cheney claims this theory ignores the fact that 9/11 happened before the torture memos were ever drafted and approved.  He observes that the terrorists have never “lacked for grievances against the United States.”  They’re evil, Cheney says, now let’s talk about something else.  The gist of Cheney’s argument — that no post 9/11 policy can ever be counterproductive — makes no sense.

The gist of Cheney’s argument is that our enemies don’t especially care what we do to them. They are fanatics, and are not to be deterred. That’s why they must be tracked down and killed — much too subtle an idea for Lynch and his ilk.

Finally:

Cheney’s controversial legacy will be debated for a long time.  And he’s smart enough to know that he may have very few defenders down the road, so he is wasting no time at all in making his own case.  The problem is that his case is weak and plenty of people can see it.

In the far more likely alternative, Cheney is trying to keep Obama and his fellow “post-Americans” from emulating Neville Chamberlain — who seems to be Cato’s role model on matters of war and peace.

Liberalism and Sovereignty

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek writes about liberalism:

One of the great tenets of liberalism — the true sort of liberalism, not the dirigiste ignorance that today, in English-speaking countries, flatters itself unjustifiably with that term — is that no human being is less worthy just because he or she is outside of a particular group. Any randomly chosen stranger from Cairo or Cancun has as much claim on my sympathies and my respect and my regard as does any randomly chosen person from Charlottesville or Chicago.

Boudreaux is correct in saying that what is now called “liberalism” is not liberalism; it is a virulent strain of statism. Boudreaux’s strain of old-fashioned or “classical” liberalism is nowadays called libertarianism. But Boudreaux is one of those holdouts who insists that he is a liberal. There is much error in libertarianism but it is on the side of the angels by comparison with the modern, left-statist jumble of dogmas that goes by the names “liberalism” and “progressivism”.

Returning to Boudreaux’s post: He also states a (truly) liberal value, namely, that respect for others should not depend on where they happen to live. But it is prudent to put more trust in those who have proven their affection and support for you, than it is to trust those not-so-close to you — whether they live next door, in the inner city, or in Timbuktu.

And that is where Boudreaux, most self-styled libertarians, and all pacifists go off the rails. As Boudreaux says later in the same post:

[L]iberalism rejects the notion that there is anything much special or compelling about political relationships. It is tribalistic, atavistic, to regard those who look more like you to be more worthy of your regard than are those who look less like you. It is tribalistic, atavistic, to regard those who speak your native tongue to be more worthy of your affection and concern than are those whose native tongues differ from yours.

For the true liberal, the human race is the human race.  The struggle is to cast off as much as possible primitive sentiments about “us” being different from “them.”

The problem with such sentiments is the implication that we have nothing more to fear from people of foreign lands than we have to fear from our own friends and neighbors. Yet, as Boudreaux himself acknowledges,

[t]he liberal is fully aware that such sentiments [about “us” being different from “them”] are rooted in humans’ evolved psychology, and so are not easily cast off.  But the liberal does his or her best to rise above those atavistic sentiments,

Yes, the Boudreaux-like liberal does strive to rise above such sentiments, but not everyone else makes the same effort, as Boudreaux admits. Therein lies the problem.

Americans, as a mostly undifferentiated mass, are disdained and hated by many foreigners. (Aside: Conservative Americans, whether “deplorable” or not, are hated as a mostly undifferentiated mass by leftists, who are extreme tribalists.) The disdain and hatred arise from a variety of sources, ranging from pseudo-intellectual snobbery to nationalistic rivalry to anti-Western fanaticism. When the hatred leads to aggression, that aggression is aimed at all Americans: liberal, “liberal,” conservative, libertarian, bellicose, pacifistic, tribal, or whatever.

Leftists like to deploy the slogan “We’re all in this together” to justify their economically and socially destructive schemes. But when it comes to defense against foreign aggression, Americans truly are “all in this together”. The bitter irony is that leftists are generally uninterested in that crucial aspect of togetherness.

The Framers of the Constitution, being both smart and realistic, “did ordain and establish” a new form of government “in Order to . . . provide for the common defence” (and a few other things). That is to say, the Framers recognized the importance of establishing the United States as a sovereign state for limited and specified purposes, while preserving the sovereignty of the several States and their inhabitants for all other purposes.

If Americans do not mutually defend themselves through the sovereign state which was established for that purpose, who will do so? That is the question which liberals (both true and false) often fail to ask. Instead, they tend to propound internationalism for its own sake. It is a mindless internationalism, one that often disdains America’s sovereignty, and the defense thereof.

One manifestation of mindless internationalism is “transnationalism”:

“Transnationalism” challenges the traditional American understanding that (in the summary, which I slightly adapt, of Duke law professor Curtis A. Bradley) “international and domestic law are distinct, [the United States] determines for itself [through its political branches] when and to what extent international law is incorporated into its legal system, and the status of international law in the domestic system is determined by domestic law.”Transnationalists aim in particular to use American courts to import international law to override the policies adopted through the processes of representative government. [Ed Whelan, “Harold Koh’s Transnationalism“, National Review (The Corner), April 6, 2009]

Mindless internationalism equates sovereignty with  jingoism, protectionism, militarism, and other deplorable “isms”. It ignores or denies the hard reality that Americans and their legitimate overseas interests are threatened by nationalistic rivalries and anti-Western fanaticism. “Transnationalism” is just a “soft” form of aggression; it would erode American values from the inside out, though American leftists hardly need any help from their foreign allies.

In the real world of powerful international rivals and determined, resourceful fanatics, the benefits afforded Americans by our (somewhat eroded) constitutional contract — most notably the enjoyment of civil liberties, the blessings of  free markets, and the protections of a common defense — are inseparable from and dependent upon the sovereignty of the United States.  To cede that sovereignty for the sake of mindless internationalism is to risk the complete loss of the benefits promised by the Constitution.

 

China Options?

Guest commentary by Postmodern Conservative.

Even conservatives are divided on how to deal with China. Most are agreed that it is ruled by an oppressive regime, but they often part ways on how to remedy that. Can China be coaxed along through burgeoning capitalism into accepting a de facto western economic and political order? Or is this just appeasement? According to China expert Lloyd Richardson in The Policy Review (in a book review that was recently forwarded to me), those who benefit most from the controlled capitalism of Bejing are a tiny minority of urban Chinese, not the broad masses in the countryside. Moreover, these Chinese yuppies are entirely beholden to the Communist Party for their tenuous position. Quoting James Mann’s book Soothing China, it is possible that in two or three decades “China will be wealthier, and the entrenched interests opposing democracy will probably be much stronger. By then China will be so thoroughly integrated into the world’s financial and diplomatic systems, because of its sheer commercial power, . . . there would be no international support for any movement to open up China’s political system.” In conclusion, there may be no easy answers. But it does not help that, in Richardson’s view, there has been no honest debate about China for decades.