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Issues in Intelligence

A superlative exploration of the challenges faced by the United States intelligence community, by the New York Times (registration required, check www.bugmenot.com for usernames and passwords).

Compartmentalization of information, technical tools that are pitifully behind the state of the art, an inability to recognize the importance of open source information – all of those flaws were ones I recognized in a previous job that touched upon the intelligence world. The proposed solutions – Intelink wikis, blogs, enabling Google-like search prioritization via link counts – sound like valid solutions. The greatest impediment to such improvements is cultural; the security bureaucracy surrounding official U.S. government secrets is moribund, hide-bound, and recalcitrant. They exist to ensure nothing will slip from their control, and the idea of doing so deliberately is more terrifying than words can convey, no matter the benefits such openness would accrue to national security. The article understated this issue with one sentence near the end: For all the complaints about hardware, the challenges are only in part about technology. They are also about political will and institutional culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change.

The way to attack that challenge is to replace the series of Executive Orders that underlie secrecy rules with legislation centralizing everything from standards about levels of classification to granting security clearances. The biggest failure of the Intelligence Reform Act was that they didn't address this issue. Perhaps retirement and personnel attrition will begin to change the attitudes of the security bureaucracy, but in over a decade of professional experience, I haven't seen an inch of progress.


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Post-Election Thoughts

Although I usually find myself disinterested or actively put off by Congressional politics, the aftermath of last week's election has been fascinating. I was hoping that Republicans could maintain control over the Senate, although that hope didn't allow me to vote for Virginia's Republican candidate for Senator, the embarrassing George Allen, who self-destructed in the last months of the campaign. I also felt I couldn't vote for eventual victor Jim Webb, so for the first time, I went Independent Green. Why must Virginia field such unappealing candidates? Back when Oliver North battled Chuck Robb, I was grateful that Marshall Coleman ran as an independent candidate and provided a choice I could endorse. With Webb's victory, the Senate went to the Democrats and a reorganization of party leadership began.

Senator Trent Lott's resurrection as Minority Whip was analyzed by some as an indication that the Republican party is serious about getting business done with the Democratic majority. Lott's remarks four years ago endorsing segregation were appalling, yet every politician has skeletons in their closet. And the mood of the country could shift towards Republicans if the Democrats are seen as obstructionist or unable to accomplish their few campaign promises. Lott's skills in developing compromise solutions to tough issues and building consensus support could be invaluable in the coming term, so long as he truly regrets the message behind his blunder, not just its results.

The more fascinating story was in the House of Representatives, with Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi's unsuccessful quest to elevate Rep. John Murtha to the post of Majority Leader. Murtha's reputation is as besmirched as they come – pork barrel spending, cozy ties to lobbyists and industry, and a damning 1980 video where Murtha half-heartedly rejects Abscam bribes yet leaves the window open for future graft ("I want to deal with you guys awhile before I make any transactions at all, period. After we've done some business, well, then I might change my mind. ... I'm going to tell you this. If anybody can do it – I'm not B.S.-ing you fellows – I can get it done my way. There's no question about it."). Given that many of the electorate expressed dissatisfaction with the ethics of the previous Republican-led Congress, and that the Democrats beat the reform drum as one of their main campaign planks, Pelosi's conduct appears inexplicable and harmful to her future efforts.

Murtha famously called for a withdrawal from Iraq before other members of his party took up the anti-war cause, so it's possible that Pelosi felt his position on that contentious issue would outweigh his sketchy reputation. However, her efforts to tie plum committee positions to support for Murtha has alienated her fellow Democratic Representatives and bodes poorly for her leadership style.

My questions at this point involve the reactions of the Democratic faithful – are they paying attention to this scintillating drama? How do they weigh the relative importance of Iraq versus corruption with regard to Murtha? And now that Murtha's been defeated by Steny Hoyer of Maryland, will Pelosi be damaged by the fallout? If the faithful decide she's compromised, or the vast swathe of moderate American voters is taken aback, the Presidential and Congressional elections in 2008 could prove this shift in power to be an anomaly.

As a moderate myself, I'm hoping that Congress is able to compromise on domestic issues and that newly nominated Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is able to capitalize on his time with the Iraq Study Group will allow him to adjust U.S. defense policy in a way that stabilizes the volatile situation in the Persian Gulf.

And as ever, I'm wishing that both political parties could be better than they are.

Any way you slice it, the next two years will be momentous ones for American domestic politics and foreign policy.

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No Peace Dividend

I'd been skeptical of the conclusions drawn in this report ("The Human Security Report 2005"), which were publicized at the end of 2005. For one thing, the excerpts I read didn't seem to take certain types of violence into account - terrorism, insurrection, etc. For another, the methodology described seemed less than rigorous. Fred Kaplan has delved into these issues in an article on Slate. It's good reading, and elaborates on the perils of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete or narrow sets of data.

Conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have not gone away, although Latin America has certainly gotten more stable since the end of the Soviet Union. Even there, though, there are rivalries and competing interests that make military action a possibility today. The Balkans are more stable than they were in the early and mid-1990s. Asia has not seen war for a while, but North Korea's precarious economic situation and the multitudes squabbling over possession of the Spratly Islands could change that at any time.

I've been pondering writing about Iran's nuclear ambitions in the context of their larger ballistic missile and WMD programs. Watch this space.

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On Iraq

I'd been mulling over thoughts about the situation in Iraq, but then a friend linked to this piece by Joseph Lieberman and now I don't have to.

Our Troops Must Stay: America can't abandon 27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists.


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Sixteen Years

Sixteen years tomorrow. I can still recall sitting at the foot of my parents bed, watching their TV and sobbing at the sight of East and West Berliners celebrating together, a glorious scrum that didn’t care about anything other than being able to touch their sundered countrymen. I was sixteen then, and now another lifetime has passed yet the emotions can be felt again at a mere reminder. Over forty years of separation, the grand experiment of communism demonstrated to be an absolute failure. When given the choice, the citizens who were supposed to be equal, supposed to be the owners of industry and agriculture, decided that the messiness and the abundance of capitalism was a far better way to live. Democratic capitalism: the combination of representative government and free-market economics, based on the primacy of the individual over the group. Not that capitalism is without fault, but that it is superior to any other system that humans have imagined. Self-interest drives the betterment of individuals, spurs them to achieve great things, amass fortunes, spend money to fuel the cycle again and again. Consumerism, yes. But wouldn’t you rather have overwhelming choice than none?

It was a victory of ideas. Timothy Garton Ash writes about ruling elites in The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague:

Yet none of this would have stopped them if they had still been convinced of their right to rule. The third, and perhaps ultimately decisive factor [in the overthrow of communism] is that characteristic of revolutionary situations described by Alexis de Tocqueville more than a century ago: the ruling elite’s loss of belief in its own right to rule. A few kids went on the streets and threw a few words. The police beat them. The kids said: You have no right to beat us! And the rulers, the high and mighty, replied, in effect: Yes, we have no right to beat you. We have no right to preserve our rule by force. The end no longer justifies the means!

In fact the ruling elites, and their armed servants, distinguished themselves by their comprehensive unreadiness to stand up in any way for the things in which they had so long claimed to believe, and their almost indecent haste to embrace the things they had so long denounced as ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’.

Ideas have power. Ideas drive change, perception, life as we know it. Without a framework with which to view the world, stimuli would overwhelm us in a chaotic rush of sensation. Concepts. Paradigms. Models. They can be false, they can be proved misguided and wrong, and yet their power persists with some. Francis Fukuyama wrote soon after the fall of communism that it heralded the “end of history” since liberal democracy was the only viable system of government. Sadly, the events of September 11, 2001 proved him wrong – Islamic fundamentalism has raised the banner of challenge to all Western civilization.

Yet it seems right to pause for a moment and remember the giddy joy of November 9, 1989, even if Ash describes it as a resumption of normal life:

Everyone has seen the joyful celebration in West Berlin, the vast crowds stopping the traffic on the Kurfurstendamm, Sekt corks popping, strangers tearfully embracing—the greatest street-party in the world. Yes, it was like that. But it was not only like that. Most of the estimated two million East Germans who flooded into West Berlin over the weekend simply walked the streets in quiet family groups, often with toddlers in pushchairs. They queued up at a bank to collect the 100 Deutschmarks ‘greeting money’ … offered to visiting East Germans by the West German Government, and they went, very cautiously, shopping. Generally they bought one or two small items, perhaps some fresh fruit, a Western newspaper, and toys for the children. Then, clasping their carrier-bags, they walked quietly back through the Wall, through the grey, deserted streets of East Berlin, home.

It is very difficult to describe the quality of this experience because what they actually did was so stunningly ordinary. … Berliners walked the streets of Berlin. What could be more normal? And yet, what could be more fantastic! ‘Twenty-eight years and ninety-one days,’ says one man in his late thirties strolling back up Friedrichstrasse. Twenty-eight years and ninety-one days since the building of the Wall. On that day, in August 1961, his parents had wanted to go to a late-night Western in a West Berlin cinema, but their eleven year old son had been too tired. In the early hours they woke to the sound of tanks. He had never been to West Berlin from that day to this. A taxi-driver asks me, with a sly smile: ‘How much is the ferry to England?’ The day before yesterday his question would have been unthinkable.

… Everyone looks the same as they make their way home—except for the tell-tale Western carrier-bag. But everyone is inwardly changed, changed utterly. ‘Now people are standing up straight,’ says a hotel porter. ‘They are speaking their minds. Even work is more fun. I think the sick will get up from their hospital beds.’ And it was in East rather than West Berlin that this weekend had the magic, pentecostal quality which I last experienced in Poland in autumn 1980. Ordinary men and women find their voice and their courage--Lebensmut, as the porter puts it. These are moments when you feel that somewhere an angel has opened his wings.

The point about Poland in 1980 is well taken. When I was at George Washington University, studying for my M.A., I had the privilege of speaking with a former CIA official. He spoke off the record about investments the United States government to fight communism throughout the 1980s. Millions spent on arms for the Contras in Nicaragua, or for the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Yet the best investment, he said, was spending $100,000 to buy printing presses for Solidarity. Printing presses, that classic means of spreading ideas. It took a decade for those ideas to percolate, and required new leadership in the Soviet Union that would not send in tanks at the first sign of discontent, but how vast a change was wrought by logic and thinking?

People younger than I have no conception of life during the Cold War. They hear tales of massive defense arsenals, of spies lurking in the shadows, and can’t understand why. I was born almost a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I can’t claim to have experienced the scariest times when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Yet the 1980s were fraught with their own fears and Eastern Europe had been ground under the Soviet heel three times when they tried to rebel before (Hungary 1956 – the Soviets. Czechoslovakia 1968 – Warsaw Pact. Poland 1980 – martial law). Communism fall? I might believe in it as a matter of faith, but then it happened, a miracle of the highest order.

The years since have had challenges of their own. Integrating formerly command economies into a system where private industry rules supreme. The hardship of depressions, of incipient absolutism in some cases. Yet by 2000 three former members of the Warsaw Pact had joined NATO. Other countries had been accepted for membership in the European Union. One day in 1993 I browsed through the fine china section at a department store. I saw some beautiful goblets and picked them up to find the price. And there was a sticker saying “made in Poland” – the first time I’d seen anything from the former Warsaw Pact offered for sale.

The world has changed. We should remember how much.

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September 11th and Iraq

An article in today’s Washington Post (Antiwar Activists Decry Media's Role in Promoting Pentagon Event), covers objections to news media support for a Department of Defense event “to remember the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and to support the troops in Iraq.” The article contained a quote from an anti-war activist: “Because they're promoting a lie, that the war in Iraq had anything to do with September 11."

Did Iraq’s leadership, did Saddam Hussein, meet with Osama bin Laden and help plan the September 11th attacks? No. However, Saddam’s hostile regime was directly responsible for the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, one of al Qaeda’s spurs to action. Iraq also continued to rouse Iran’s defensive impulses, causing further build-up of weapons in the region. And Iraq did flout United Nations sanctions to cooperate with weapons inspection teams, as well as international norms prohibiting assassination of national leaders. Iraq was a problem that was not going away prior to September 11th. Instead, leading nations around the world were allowing Iraq to slide back into civilized society, through their inaction over Iraq’s continued and escalating defiance of post-Gulf War rules.

After September 11th, the Bush administration decided to unseat the Taliban in Afghanistan – a worthy cause for reasons other than disrupting al Qaeda operations. Since the Taliban took power in the mid-1990s, they had systematically laid waste to human rights, especially with regard to women, and irreplaceable cultural artifacts. They were barbarians, and it is to the world’s shame that inertia allowed their rule to continue as long as it did. But Afghanistan is only one piece of the Middle East puzzle, a larger problem that involves numerous countries, authoritarian regimes, religious influences, economic stagnation, and the need to educate and employ a restless populace. For years, America was content to support the Saudi monarchy so long as oil continued to flow. That the house of Saud needed to hand over their mosques to Sunni fundamentalists to make the deal palatable was none of our concern. Until two towers collapsed, a wing of the Pentagon crumbled, and a plane’s wreckage burned in a Pennsylvania field.

Of course oil is the basis of American interests in the region. Were it not for oil, the fuel that drives the world economy, the Middle East would hold our attention as much as sub-Saharan Africa, which is to say not much at all. But a geological roll of the dice gifted the area with vital resources, and as preeminent nation in the world, the United States must ensure continued access to oil. To do that, a broader American strategy was put into place, one that could address both the growth of Islamic dissidents, the pool where al Qaeda finds recruits, and also the delicate political-military balance of the region.

Looking at the region after the fall of the Taliban, the next major nexus point was obviously Iraq. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in 1990, had used chemical weapons on minority Kurds in the late 1980s, had invaded Iran early in the decade, leading to years of warfare and attrition. Negotiations had proven fruitless due to lack Iraqi cooperation – there was no information to indicate that the regime wanted to change internally, and their past history of evading arms control restrictions and creating illegal networks to funnel weapons into the country meant that any proclamation about disarmament was eyed with skepticism.

Given the horrid way the Ba’athist regime treated the Iraqi population, I cannot regret that they were overthrown. That insurgents and malcontents from the former elites proceeded to institute guerilla war was not unexpected, and better planning could certainly have minimized some of the post-invasion bombings and other disturbances. But now that the U.S. is involved in the country, sponsor of a new democratic government, we cannot afford to pull out before stability is achieved. Were we to do so, then the Osama bin Laden’s and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s of the world would sweep in and create another Taliban-era Afghanistan, a place where religious fundamentalists could plot their next attack on the degenerate West.

The war in Iraq definitely had something to do with September 11 – those attacks were America’s wake up call that the status quo in the Middle East could not be permitted to continue.

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Karl Rove

Honestly? I agree with his recent statements on democratic behavior after the attacks of September 11th. I remember thinking, that horrible day, how glad I was that Al Gore wasn't President, based on Clinton's ineffectiveness where attacks on the United States was concerned. And as the year progressed, I became even more convinced that George W. Bush's policy was correct. Had Gore been President, the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan, and al-Qa'ida would live within their borders to attack Western interests with impunity.

Which is not to say that the Bush administrations policies haven't been problematic at times. But I cannot support those who feel that peace at all costs is a valid course of action.

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Conspiracy Theories

I don't believe in them, most of the time.

http://www.slate.com/id/2121212/

Conspiracy Theories

If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll love the Downing Street Memo.
By Christopher Hitchens

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