Bush Administration

Am I the only person who sees a parallel between the furor over the Scottish decision to release convicted Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and the heated debate over whether to investigate possible criminal misconduct during the Bush administration "torture regime?"

With respect to the former, many people are upset by the decision to release al-Megrahi -- who has terminal prostate cancer and only a few months to live -- because they do not think an act of mercy was warranted in his case. Fair enough; reasonable people can legitimately disagree about whether the dying man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing deserves any form of clemency. But the real anger stems from the suspicion that al-Megrahi's release was part of some larger deal, and that British officials traded the release for commercial or political advantages. In other words, opponents of the decision to release him are incensed because they believe government officials let broader political or business considerations interfere with an important issue of criminal justice.

Yet those who oppose an open-ended investigation into what the Bush administration did -- which might eventually lead to the prosecution of top officials -- are doing the same thing for which British officials are being criticized: they are saying that politics should outweigh the requirements of law and justice. In essence, they are saying that broader political considerations should trump the normal operations of the criminal justice system. Yet I suspect most of the people making this argument would be outraged if it turned out that the British government decided to release al Megrahi in part to cultivate Libyan business or secure other political advantages.  

For a country that claims to revere the "rule of law," this really isn't a hard issue conceptually. Attorney General Holder's task is to determine whether laws may have been broken, and whether an investigation of the alleged wrongdoing is warranted. Once that investigation has been conducted, he then has decide if he has a strong enough case to warrant prosecution. If he thinks he does, the case goes forward, and defendants get their day in court. Politics isn't supposed to have anything to do with this process (though a sensible prosecutor would probably be especially reluctant to bring a weak case against prominent senior officials). Finally, if any defendants are found guilty, the president could then step in and issue a pardon, if he felt that doing so was in the best interests of the nation.

Note that it is still possible to criticize and debate every aspect of this process, but not by invoking partisanship, political expediency, or the need to "look forward rather than backward." People can disagree about whether there is enough evidence of wrongdoing to warrant further investigation (though I think the recent revelations make it hard to make the case that there is simply no basis for a further investigation). If AG Holder decides to indict anyone, or if he declines to do so, people will undoubtedly disagree about what he should have done so based on the available evidence. And if the cases go to trial we can argue about them too. If the defendants are acquitted, people will say the case should never have been brought; if convicted, some will claim they were railroaded. If people are convicted and the president pardons them, no doubt there would be heated discussions about whether this was appropriate or not.

But the key point is that if you genuinely believe in the rule of law, you can't invoke political expediency as a guide to whether possible crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. And the fact that the Attorney-General has decided to go forward should be seen as very positive sign, because it shows that he is willing to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities even if it is politically inconvenient for the president who appointed him. I have no doubt that the president would prefer to "look forward," because an investigation and/or prosecution will drive both the CIA and the right-wing media types crazy and because he's got enough alligators to wrestle with already. But he also promised us that he would end the politicization of the Department of Justice that his predecessor practiced, and Holder's decision, however inconvenient for Obama, is a reassuring sign that there is still life in the U.S. Constitution.

Am I being -- shall we say, unrealistic -- to stress the rule of law as opposed to the naked exercise of political power? Hardly. Realists have a rather dim view of human nature, which is why we like legitimate, well-ordered governments in which laws and checks and balances exist to keep human frailties in check. The Founding Fathers had a lot of realist instincts, so they constructed a variety of essentially liberal institutions to try to address and contain our worst instincts. Domestic politics in a well-ordered society is a lot nicer than life in the international system, which conspicuously lacks strong institutions and where the rule of law is weak. And that's why we ought to defend the rule of law in this case (and others), and try hard to keep politics out of the discussion.

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I'm a bit puzzled by the flap over revelations that the Bush administration approved a secret CIA program to send assassination teams overseas to kill suspected al Qaeda leaders. I understand the concerns about the absence of Congressional oversight, but three aspects of the case strike me as odd.

First, although the Bush administration should be criticized for not informing Congress, this is one case where key officials seem to have realized that the proposed program wasn't really feasible and decided not to implement it. Because examples of competent national security decision-making by the Bush team were few and far-between, shouldn’t we give them a smidge of credit for NOT sending some unfortunate Jack Bauer on a foolish mission?

Second, for those who are outraged to learn that the United States was planning to assassinate suspected terrorists leader, please explain to me the difference between sending in an assassination team to kill a suspected al Qaeda member, and sending a Predator or Reaper drone into some remote area to do the same thing? The target is just as dead no matter what instrument is used, and as we have already seen on several occasions, the risk to innocent civilians and the danger of various forms of blowback is probably greater when the U.S. uses unmanned drones. Moreover, both responses are essentially extra-judicial executions: the potential targets are suspected of being "enemy combatants" but that hasn't been proven and U.S. intelligence has mis-identified a number of alleged "terrorists" in the past. And then ask yourself how Americans would react if some other country were doing the same thing on U.S. soil.   

So if you're troubled by the idea that the United States was preparing to send hit squads into some foreign country, you ought to be equally troubled by our current policy of taking terrorist suspects out from the air. But I don’t get the impression that the latter program bothers very many people here in the United States, and certainly not the leadership in either party.  As Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) remarked following the recent revelations, "The Predator strikes have been successful, and I was pleased to see the Obama administration continue them ... This [covert assassination program] was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective."

Thucydides had it right: "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." The strong also try to convince everyone that they are also more virtuous, even when the evidence for the latter claim is dubious. And on that note, the Times today also has a piece on U.S. air tactics in Afghanistan that reads like a press release straight from CentCom HQ. It reports that the United States is now conducting a "kinder, gentler" air cover policy, in order to avoid civilian casualties. I hope that's true, but I also hope someone remembers this piece the next time we hit a village by mistake.

One last point: the fact that the CIA concluded that the assassination program was unworkable suggests that there is a very large gap between the image of covert action portrayed in American pop culture and the reality on the ground. If you watch 24, Mission Impossible, the various Bourne movies, or even lighter fare like Ocean's 11, they depict a world where smart and exceedingly well-trained experts, equipped with a lot of cool high-tech gadgetry, can perform extraordinary feats of derring-do in far-flung locations. They also portray a world where the U.S. government has enormous real-time surveillance capabilities, vast and swift analytical capacities, and a well-trained set of agents ready to send virtually anywhere to go after virtually anyone (even if someone like Jason Bourne keeps outwitting them).  

If you watched enough of these movies, and didn’t have any other sources of information, it would be easy to believe all sorts of crazy ideas about black helicopters and other loony conspiracies. And it makes me wonder: do such productions lead viewers in the U.S. and abroad to exaggerate what the United States is actually capable of doing? If so, then Americans may expect too much from their national security apparatus, and foreign populations may be too inclined to blame events on nefarious American interference.  

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I didn't agree with all of President Obama's speech yesterday (notably his rejection of a investigatory commission and his endorsement of open-ended "preventive detention"), but what a relief it is to watch an American president appeal to our sense of reason instead of our sense of fear.  

The best thing one can say about Cheney's performance is that it was given by an ex-Vice President. Others have dissected the various lies and distortions that filled his speech (what did one expect?), I would only add that there is a track record here. 9/11 occurred on Cheney’s watch, and he helped lead us into two losing wars, at a cost of thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands wounded, and over a trillion dollars spent, mostly in ways that have improved the strategic position of, oops, ... Iran. Plus, he gets partial credit for an unprecedented decline in America's global image and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. At this point, taking Cheney's recommendations on any issue of public policy is like getting investment help from Bernie Madoff, marital counseling from Donald Trump, or advice on economic development from Robert Mugabe.

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On the torture memos: I’m not a lawyer, but I think I understand the political calculations that led Obama to say that his administration would not be prosecuting individuals for their role in this loathsome episode. He understood that this could reach very far up in the Bush administration, and that beginning a legal process would be divisive and cost him some swing votes he thinks he’ll need on other issues. So the principals in the Bush administration torture regime may end up with a free pass, at least in terms of criminal prosecution. But I have three thoughts:

First, a lot of countries (including the United States) have expended considerable diplomatic effort to hold people like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic or Liberia’s Charles Taylor accountable for their crimes. Apparently Obama feels that this principle can be jettisoned when it might be politically expedient to do so. At a minimum, we ought to remember this incident the next time we get upset that some other country is declining to prosecute a former leader, turning a blind eye to some other ruler's depredations (think Robert Mugabe), or cutting a deal with some warlord or terrorist leader.  Maybe they were making pragmatic calculations too, and we holier-than-thou Americans ought to be a bit less judgmental. 

Second, does our failure to prosecute open the door to other efforts to do so? A number of states (France, Canada, Belgium, Spain, etc.) have incorporated a principle of “universal jurisdiction” into their own domestic legal systems, when dealing with genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity (including torture). This principle can be invoked when the home country of the alleged perpetrator is "unwilling or unable to prosecute"  Earlier reports suggesting that Spanish officials were going to indict six former Bush administration officials eventually led Spain's attorney general to say that U.S. courts would be the proper venue, but Obama has now made it clear that this isn't going to happen. I don’t know what the practical implications might be, but if I were Dick Cheney or David Addington, I wouldn’t be planning a summer vacation in Spain.

Third, for those of you who think that power is of declining relevance in world politics and that normative and legal standards are becoming increasingly important, I'd just point out that the various officials who sanctioned these abuses would be in a lot more trouble if they came from a  weak and vulnerable state, as opposed to a global power like the United States. Not only does power corrupt, but it allows people who sanction torture to get away with it, albeit at some considerable cost to America's image and reputation. Those reputational costs will be borne by all Americans, who ought to be furious at the crimes that were committed in their name.

By Michael Desch

I was at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas this week at the invitation of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, which prepares majors to become the next generation of leaders for the Army, to participate on panel on Civil-Military Relations, not surprisingly an important component of the CGSC curriculum. 

The theme of the panel came from noted military historian Richard Kohn's recent piece "Coming Soon: A Crisis in Civil-Military Relations." Some readers may recall that Kohn created quite a stir in 1994 with a provocatively titled piece in The National Interest "Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil Military Relations," in which he argued that an increasingly Republican officer corps was becoming less amenable to civilian control, particularly under Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Of course, there was lots of evidence for his thesis during the Clinton administration, including the furor about allowing gays to serve openly in the military and the intense debates about humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere. Exhibit A was then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell who, even before Clinton took office, wrote pieces for The New York Times and Foreign Affairs explaining why civilian politicians made generals nervous when they pushed to use military force outside of the strictures of his eponymously named doctrine.

Many people thought that after Clinton, who one Air Force general had publicly referred to as his "pot-smoking, draft-dodging, skirt-chasing Commander-in-Chief," the new Bush administration, which campaigned on the promise to the military that "help is on the way," would enjoy a new era of civil-military harmony.

What they failed to see was that behind the overtly pro-military rhetoric of the Bush campaign, many of the key figures in the new administration's defense team actually harbored mixed feelings about the American armed forces. Beginning his second tour as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had apparently come to believe that left to its own devices the U.S. military was incapable of making the organization and doctrinal changes necessary to modernize itself so as to take advantage of what he and other visionaries anticipated would be a revolution in military affairs. Thus, he made it his mission to drag the military kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, and stepped on a lot of toes in the process.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives blamed military realists like Colin Powell for dragging their feet in the face of the Clinton administration's humanitarian interventions in the 1990s, and they no doubt understood that same impulse would lead many military officers to be skeptical of their global crusade for regime change. 

Reflecting the more general schizophrenia of the American public who patriotically affixed magnetic "support our troops" yellow ribbons to their gas guzzling SUVs, many on the Bush national security team similarly combined noisy pro-military rhetoric with wariness, sometimes bordering upon contempt, for actual military expertise. Nothing epitomized this better than Wolfowitz's brusque dismissal of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's suggestion that we would need a couple of hundred thousand troops for stability and support operations in Iraq as "wildly off the mark."  

By the fall of 2003, the mounting insurgency in Iraq had made it clear that Shinseki's estimate had not been so far off the mark after all. Indeed, six prominent retired generals would subsequently call for Rumsfeld's resignation over his mishandling of the war. This lead the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to conclude that rebuilding the relationship of trust and confidence between the military and civilian leaders was an urgent task. Kohn, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers, Naval War College Professor Mackubin Owens, and I debated my take on this period in a subsequent exchange in Foreign Affairs.

In his most recent piece, Kohn points to four continuing issues that could make the relationship between the U.S. military and the new Obama administration tense. These include: the messy end games in Iraq and Afghanistan, a growing mismatch between defense spending and a federal budget being stretched in too many other directions, the challenge of transforming the nation's armed forces to meet future great power challenges while simultaneously fighting a global counterinsurgency war on a number of fronts today, and the recrudescence of polarizing social issues like the status of open homosexuals in the military and the aggressive proselytizing of Evangelical Christians in uniform. Without adroit leadership from the Obama Administration, and a willingness among senior military leaders to assume a more submissive posture, Kohn fears another breakdown in their relationship.

Despite the pessimistic tone of Kohn's article, he was surprisingly up-beat at our panel. The root of this optimism was his belief that both the senior military leadership and the Obama administration are eager to reestablish better relations after the acrimony of the last sixteen years. 

Kohn was impressed with Obama's pragmatism on this front: The new President  had taken steps to cover his flank by appointing a number of retired senior officers to his cabinet and other high-level positions, including General James Jones as National Security Advisor, General Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence. 

Also, Kohn thought that Obama's decision to keep on Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense was an astute move, not only given the secretary's success in rebuilding the bridges to the military that his predecessor burned, but also because having a Republican in this position will make it hard for Republicans to criticize Obama's draw-down in Iraq or conduct of the war in Afghanistan. 

Finally, at the purely atmospheric level, he commended the Obama for striking the right cord in dealing with the troops, sending the First Lady on her first official trip to visit Ft. Bragg and shying away from rekindling the military culture wars by taking a lower key approach to such hot-button issues as rescinding the gay ban.

I agree with Kohn that both President Obama and the current military leadership have so far taken positive steps to try to heal the civil-military rupture. But I have an even simpler explanation for the apparent change in atmospherics: After the last eight years of the Bush administration's meddling in, and mismanagement of, military affairs, even a Democrat doesn't look too bad these days to our men and women in uniform. That's at least one thing for which we can thank the last administration.

If you want to get the soldiers' take on our panel, see their blog. 

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Remember Al Qaeda?  In his article “Long Wars and Long Telegrams: Containing Al Qaeda," which is forthcoming in the British journal International Affairs, Australian historian and Kings College scholar Patrick Porter applies Kennan-esque realism to the campaign against jihadi terrorism. Porter argues that Al Qaeda is showing signs of being a self-defeating adversary, beset by internal pathologies and increasingly unpopular in the very societies it seeks to mobilize against the West. In his view, a patient, containment-like approach that encourages these divisions and avoids self-inflicted wounds provides a better blueprint for the counter-terrorism effort than the ill-conceived excesses adopted by the Bush administration. I’ll post a link when it’s available online, but here’s the money quote:

"A containment strategy places a ceiling on the threat while awaiting its eventual internal collapse. Against this, it allows more time to jihadists, possibly on a generational timescale, for further atrocities. But a hyperactive strategy of ‘rollback’ risks the more likely outcomes of financial haemorrhage, the erosion of constitutional liberties and the inflaming of other world crises. Consider this in blunt policy terms. An Al-Qaeda at large, trying full-time to stay alive, pursued by an ever-growing set of enemies, even with the remote chance that it inflicts a terrible blow, is less dangerous than wars with Iran or Pakistan, an emptied treasury or a shredded constitution. Trading off time and conceding longevity to the enemy for the sake of lowering the war’s costs is worth it. This is because Al-Qaeda’s capacity to hurt America is less than America’s capacity to hurt itself.  The ‘war on terror’ is a war declared on a tactical method rather than an identifiable group, for cosmic rather than achievable goals, with little grasp of ends, ways and means or weighing of vital versus peripheral interests.”

For my immediate post-9/11 thoughts on this same subject, take a look at this admittedly dated piece. I got some things wrong (i.e., I was too ambitious about Afghanistan, too willing to coddle governments in places like Pakistan, and too confident that the U.S. would act smartly), but the Bush administration mostly did the exact opposite of what I suggested and we all know how that turned out. 

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered a predictably unhelpful response to President Barack Obama's conciliatory message to the Muslim world last week. Ahmadinejad's answer: first the United States has to "apologize" for its opposition to Iran's nuclear program and for a host of other transgressions.

I've got news for him: we've already done so -- at least in part -- and he's not going to get another apology any time soon. Obama may be hoping for a fresh start with Tehran, but he is not going to start the process by apologizing for anything. And he's certainly not going to take any steps that might bolster Ahmadinejad's popularity between now and the Iranian presidential election in June.

Yet Ahmadinejad's statement does raise a broader question: should states apologize at all, even when they've done something they regret?

You might think that realists wouldn't put much stock in apologies; aren't they just meaningless "cheap talk?" Don't realists worry more about balances of power and conflicts of interest, and don't they emphasize that international politics is a rough business where states routinely do nasty things to weaker parties? Given that world-view, what's the point of saying you're sorry?

In fact, even realists think being willing to apologize sometimes matters. But as Dartmouth's Jennifer Lind argues in her book Sorry States: Apologies in World Politics, the act of apology can be tricky too, and can easily backfire.

There are at least three good reasons for states to apologize when they have behaved badly towards others.

First, apologizing to those you have wronged is an acknowledgement of their equal status; it is a recognition that they are of sufficient stature to deserve an expression of regret. Refusing to apologize sends the message that you think the wronged party is too insignificant to warrant any contrition. To do so betrays contempt for the party we have wronged, and treating someone with contempt is bound to fuel a desire for revenge.

Second, far from being "cheap talk," apologies can be a costly signal that conveys a genuine and sincere desire for a new relationship. Why? Because apologizing to a former adversary is politically risky, and only leaders who are genuinely sorry would be willing to run the risks and bear the costs.  When a state acknowledges responsibility and expresses regret, it also opens itself up to demands for compensation or various forms of sanction and it may even lend legitimacy to opponents who then try to take advantage of the admission. The fact that there can be genuine costs to an apology explains why mere words still carry genuine meaning to the wronged party.

Third, apologizing tells others that no matter what we may have done in the past, we understand where the boundaries of acceptable conduct lie. If a country commits a heinous act and then refuses to apologize for it, others have reason to question whether its leaders are even aware that they have crossed a moral boundary. When someone shows no understanding of where the lines are, there is every reason to think they would cross them again without a second thought. To take an obvious example, had Germany failed to acknowledge the Holocaust and to openly apologize for it, people everywhere would have reason to think that Germans might easily do something similar again. The same logic explains why Pope Benedict's decision to reverse the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying priest is troubling; if the Vatican thinks Holocaust-denial is a minor matter that should take a back seat to the unity of the church, what does that tell us about the priority it places on crimes against humanity?

Even for realists, therefore, apologies can be a necessary tool of diplomacy. Apologizing for past mistakes is sometimes the best -- maybe the only -- way to wipe the slate clean and provide others with some basis for giving a country a second chance. Being a great power may mean that you never have to say you're sorry, but sometimes it is still a good idea.

But not always. Lind's book also shows that the question of apologies is more complicated than the simple picture I just sketched. She points out that states sometimes reconcile in the absence of an official apology -- as France and Germany did after World War II -- especially when former rivals realize that they have powerful strategic reasons to bury the hatchet and move on. Moreover, sometimes the act of extending an apology triggers a domestic backlash that undercuts the very leaders who are trying to promoting reconciliation, reinforcing existing suspicions and frustrating efforts to build a new relationship.  In order to balance these conflicting imperatives, states may be better off eschewing efforts to "name and shame" and relying on less accusatory forms of remembrance and regret, such as memorials to victims (on both sides), international commissions to advise on the writing of textbooks and other educational materials, and joint scholarly programs designed to address sensitive historical events.

With respect to the United States and Iran, this is good advice. To build a new relationship, both sides will have to come to terms with the various hostile acts that each has committed over the past fifty-plus years. But no Iranian leader is likely to apologize to the "Great Satan" and no U.S. president could go beyond past expressions of regret without risking a backlash here at home. A better path is to emphasize the interests that the United States and Iran do have in common -- such as a shared desire for a stable and unified Iraq, and a growing concern about the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan -- while addressing the obvious points of contention (e.g., Iran's nuclear program). If we can make progress on the concrete diplomatic issues, we can also begin unofficial efforts to understand how and why U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorated in the past. American and Iranian scholars could usefully explore these issues through academic exchanges and then disseminate their findings more broadly, allowing each society to learn from past mistakes but without demanding humiliating expressions of regret that neither is likely to get.

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President Bush defended his presidency yesterday by noting that "America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil."

Depending on your definition of "terrorism," this claim is about as accurate as his claims about Iraqi WMD. See here or here. And it's worth remembering that the only major foreign terrorist attack on American soil in our history occurred on Bush's watch, and anti-American terrorist groups have conducted major attacks in Jordan, Indonesia, Spain, and a number of other countries since 9/11. I think the Bush administration did some smart things after 9/11 (such as ousting al Qaeda from its safe haven in Afghanistan) and I'm glad that we haven't suffered another attack, but the fact there hasn't been any large-scale foreign terrorist attack on American soil is an insufficient criterion for judging the "war on terror," not to mention an entire presidency.