Larison on Iraq:

Eunomia » What If The War Is For Nothing?

but one of the last things fledgling democracies in countries with a history of authoritarianism need is a massively oversized military and security apparatus.

Me, on Afghanistan:BernardFinel.com » The $10 Taliban Rears His Head

But it does make me wonder what in the world we’re doing to Afghan society, when we seem to be engaged in a process of so militarizing their society to create a hybrid military-economic elite that was almost certainly be a durable threat to any sort of representative government.

I’ll begin with quotes from two prominent bloggers:

Obama sabotages himself with fake “pragmatism” – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Democrats generally and Obama specifically have spent years telling the country that Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies were lawless, immoral, inept and counter-productive. Yet the minute there’s a controversy over Obama’s Terrorism policy, his first justification is: we’re only doing what Bush and Cheney did. He can’t stand on his own two feet and forcefully justify civilian trials or Mirandizing Terrorist suspects; he has to take refuge in the fact that Bush also did it — as though that proves it’s the right thing to do, because Bush/Cheney is the Standard-Bearer of Toughness on Terrorism. If you’re going to embrace the core Bush/Cheney model on Terrorism and point to what they did as though that’s the guide for how things should be done — and if you’re going to run to them for refuge and protection — and if you’re going to reverse yourself and capitulate at slightest sign of political pressure (FISA, detainee photos, civilian trials) — is it really any surprise that people will begin to conclude that Bush and Cheney had things basically right and that Democrats are”weak” (not because of specific policies, but because of their fear of arguing for and sticking with their own positions).

And a take from Sully blaming this on imported “Clintonism” via Rahm:

Creeping Clintonism; Or How Rahm Is A Scaredy-Cat – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Emanuel has a reputation for feistiness and God knows I’m not one to throw stones in my own glass House. But behind the thuggishness is a pathological fear of the right….But more disturbing is his classic Clintonian refusal to stand up against the Cheneyite right on critical matters such as national security and American values. No wonder he is so beloved of the Cheneyite rump now installed by Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post.

Look, I really don’t know what to make of all of this.  In an earlier blog post I took issue with Michael Cohen’s characterization of Obama as been essentially trapped by the “mess” Bush left behind.  My own take is that, “On several of these issues, Obama could have affirmatively chosen to break with his predecessor without needing any additional funding or authorities from Congress.  Obama isn’t trapped by Bush’s policies, he has chosen instead to endorse a surprisingly large number of them.”

But perhaps it is worth being more systematic about all of this.  Here are the interpretations as I see them:

(1) We need to differentiate between Bush 2001-2004 and Bush 2004-2008.  By his second term, Bush had begun to back off many of the worst excesses of his Administration.  They had stopped waterboarding, had sought statutory authority for increased domestic surveillance, and had begun to work with the courts on issues of habeus corpus for Gitmo detainees.  Bush had also largely put to bed the clownish cowboy act — “bring ‘em on” — that so rightly infuriated reasonable people.  So, when Obama criticized Bush, he was really criticizing a Bush Administration that was already moving toward sanity and had begun to purge the worst excesses of Cheneyism.  As a consequence, there was not that much to change, and what Obama was promising was essentially not to return to the Panic Years immediately after 9/11.  This is plausible.

(2) Obama was being horribly cynical throughout.  He had no real objection to Bush’s policies, but realized that the path of the nomination would be smoother if he pandered to the progressives on many of their concerns about Bush’s national security policies.  I consider this interpretation unlikely.

(3) Obama genuinely intended to change Bush’s policies — on permanent detention, civil trials, state secrets, etc — but once in office was privy to new information that caused him to change his mind.  I have no way to assess this argument, except to note that I’ve never been much convinced by arguments which begin “if you could see what I can see.”  The reality is that, historically, there are surprisingly few cases where this sort of argument is borne out once documents are declassified, and my own (very limited admittedly) contact with classified material have always left me distinctly unimpressed.  But look, it is possible that there was an informational aspect to Obama becoming apparently more comfortable with the Bush approach to national security than he suggested on the campaign trail.

(4) Obama genuinely intended to change Bush’s policies, but decided it was just too damn hard for political reasons.  All presidents have to make choices, and it conceivable that Obama decided to prioritize the economic stimulus and health care over confronting and overturning Bush-era decisions on national security.  This strikes me as quite plausible, though I think it is short-sighted because it essentially means ceding the high ground on national security which itself is politically risky.  In short, this sort of prioritization risks turning into a lose-lose situation.

(5) Obama genuinely intended to change Bush’s policies, but it was just too damn hard for institutional and/or personnel reasons.  There are a lot of institutional challenges with confronting Bush-era excesses.  It would have meant conflict with minimally much of the intelligence community, but also potentially with the DoD.  More than that, when your core national security team is comprised of Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, and James Jones, you have something close to the antithesis of firebreathers.  These are all people who could be reliably counted on to urge caution.  As hard as it would have been to really reverse Bush on major issues, or to at least rebuild public rationales on free-standing foundations, these were not the people to do it.

Obama may yet come around.  He seems to have an instinctive aversion to conflict, but when pushed into a corner fights back rather than surrender.  His fight on health care reform, after many months of dickering and hoping for reasonable consensus would emerge, may yet become a model for national security issues.  I think he genuinely does not understand the idiotic push to eliminate the civil trials option for instance, and so Obama thinks that it he just gives it a little time, reason will reassert itself.  But it won’t.  Once the right-wingers get themselves worked up into a froth about “death panels” or the “Al Qaeda 7,” they can’t be talked down.  They are not just posturing.  People like Marc Thiessen really believe in torture, and if Obama doesn’t, sooner or later he’s going to have to take a stand.  The problem is that the more he backs down, the more aggressive and confident the “Cheneyite rump” becomes. 

In the end, reason won’t prevail without a fight.  But to win that fight, Obama is going to have to be willing to engage and he may very well need to bring in some new national security voices that are willing to throw down.

McChrystal eyes securing Kandahar – CNN.com

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan vowed that coalition forces “are absolutely going to secure Kandahar,” as security efforts expand in the country’s south.
….
The push to secure Kandahar from what McChrystal calls a “menacing Taliban presence” is part of a larger counterinsurgency effort in the country’s south, started last month in Marjah in southern Helmand province.

Long a bastion of pro-Taliban sentiment and awash with the opium used to fund the insurgency, the Marjah region has been known as the heroin breadbasket of Afghanistan and as a place where the Taliban had set up a shadow government.

I seem to have underestimated Gen. McChrystal. I thought he really had bought into the whole population-centric COIN model. But what he is doing right now is actually pursuing what seems to be a much more strategically sound concept. Instead of clear-hold-build for key population centers, he seems to be adopting a strategy that is focused on denying victory to the insurgents by sequentially displacing them from their strongholds. He is, in short, undermining THEIR clear-hold-build strategy.

Now, if that is all he is doing, it is obviously doomed to failure since all this does is set up a whack-a-mole dynamic, but if coupled with a robust negotiation effort — one that reaches up to relatively senior levels — you create the possibility for significant defections from the insurgency. And while I would be happy to defer to others with more ground knowledge, my impression of Afghan society is that endemic warfare at least over the past 30 years has made this sort of defection a common and acceptable behavior.

Though he probably won’t say it out of fear of offending to power pop-centric COIN lobby in the United States, it looks to me increasingly as if McChrystal has adopted a clear enemy-centric COIN model. And if that is the case, the force ratios — flawed as they are in any case — become largely irrelevant.

Has the White House Surrendered on Terror Trials? – Politics – The Atlantic

The question: is the White House really going to give up, to essentially allow Congress to force them to use military commissions? Why aren’t they fighting back? When Republicans tried to graft the issue on the recent intelligence authorization bill in the House, Democrats had the gumption to fight it off, and called the GOP’s bluff.
….
Right now every single wavering Democrat on the Hill is saying to themselves, “Why on Earth should I take a tough vote on this if the White House isn’t even going to try and fight?”

Really, I don’t understand Obama on this issue.  I don’t know if he’ll ultimately back down, or whether the news last week represents some sort of trial balloon.  But the idea of never trying a terrorist on U.S. soil, or at least never trying one who was once held abroad, or whatever the hell the underlying principle is behind the braying on the right, is just crazy.

There are a ton of problem with military tribunals, ably explained by my colleague Justin Rubin in an essay here: In Support of a Civilian Trial: United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Should Not be a Test Case.

Giving up on a civilian trial for KSM is bad from a legal perspective — the military tribunals are untested and unreliable for a case like this.

It is terrible politics — it shows weekness and will only encourage further right-wing demagoguery.

And on the whole, it causes more national security problems than it cures — the effect is marginal, but on the whole treating AQ as common criminals is smarter than treating them as “warriors.”

The notion that this creates a security threat on U.S. is laughable.  I mean, to accept the notion that there is an increased security threat, you’d have to believe that AQ is not interested in striking us right now, and that as a result we should not provoke them by “painting a bulls-eye on lower Manhattan.”  Guess what?  There is already a bulls-eye there.  I know a lot of people missed it, but I have it on good authority that we were attacked in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, despite the fact that no high-profile terror trial was taking place there at the time.  Think about it.

Let me add finally, that at some point I’d like Obama to get a little fire in his belly and actually fight for something he believes in as a first recourse rather than a last one.  I know he wants to be post-partisan.  But post-partisan doesn’t mean being a patsy.  If I were crude, I’d urge him to “grow a pair.”  But since I’m not, I’ll instead suggest that the President make his case to the American public more forcefully.

Book review: ‘Courage and Consequence’ by Karl Rove – washingtonpost.com

Karl Rove’s partisan bloodlust flowered early. At age 9 — and already a political nerd — he became a spirited supporter of Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential smackdown against John F. Kennedy. So intense was his devotion that he landed a coveted Nixon bumper sticker and displayed it proudly on his bicycle basket — until a little girl in his neighborhood who favored JFK beat the stuffing out of him, bloodying his nose and ego.

Ummm… yeah… I guess that explains… something.  Strange to hold on to that all these years.

Opinion: It’s Still George Bush’s World – AOL News

Even more than a year after his inauguration, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy agenda is still largely devoted to fixing the messes he inherited from Bush. And that’s likely to continue to be the case for quite some time to come, unless Obama makes a more fundamental break with the failed policies of his predecessor.

I think Michael Cohen is being overly generous to Obama in this column.  The reality is that Obama is not “largely devoted to fixing the messes he inherited from Bush.”  Obama did indeed promise that is what he would do once in office, but the reality is that Obama is not so much fixing the messes as he is institutionalizing them.

I’ve hammered on this point many times in the past, most notable here: Bernard I. Finel: The Victory of the Neoconservatives, where I concluded:  

Obama’s apparent diagnosis of Bush’s foreign policy is not that it was wrongheaded — imperialistic and unachievable — but rather that it was implemented incompetently. Now with better public diplomacy and a retooled military, the policy of remaking the world in our own image — at the point of a gun if necessary — can proceed apace.

Largely for political reasons, this continuity tends to get ignored.  Good liberals like Cohen, eager to identify the best in Obama, tend to see Obama as trapped by the legacy of past mistakes.  That in short, Obama really wants to get away from a Bush-style foreign policy, but just can’t due to GOP obstructionism on things like Guantanamo and contingent challenges like the worsening situation in Afghanistan in early 2009.  Conservatives, by contrast, are mostly looking to score points by making Obama seem sort on terrorism and naive. 

But the reality is that there is probably more continuity between the Bush foreign policy and Obama’s foreign policy than we have seen since Nixon transitioned to Ford.  If you really walk through systematically all the presidential transitions since 1952, the level of continuity between Bush and Obama is quite exceptional.  The only other really close case might be Reagan to Bush (41), but heck Bush was Reagan’s VP.  Consider by contrast past party switches — Truman to Eisenhower, Eisenhower to Kennedy, Johnson to Nixon, Ford to Carter, Carter to Reagan, Bush (41) to Clinton, Clinton to Bush (43)  — I think one can make a quite compelling case that the continuity between Bush and Obama has been stronger than in any of those past cases.

Sure, there are some differences.  The Russia policy “reset” may yet turn out to be significant.  But where are the other differences?  We need to consider some of the key areas of foreign policy:

Afghanistan — a major escalation, but one using Bush’s favored generals and a doctrine of military occupation and societal transformation.  Indeed, Obama didn’t even wait for his reviews on Afghanistan to be complete before he loaded the dice by firing Gen. McKiernan and appointing Petraeus protege Gen. McChrystal in his place to bring an Iraq-style surge to Afghanistan.

Defense policy — Obama retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense (!), and has allowed strategic planning in the Department, including the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to be built on Bush’s 2008 National Defense Strategy.  No surprise that in broad outlines the department is continuing in the direction set in the late Bush Administration.

War on terror — A change in terminology, true.  But in terms of policy, we’ve seen almost complete continuity.  Obama has escalated airstrikes in Pakistan, but even that was just building on a trend from the end of the Bush Administration.

Civil-Military relations — Obama has continued the Bush direction of turning much of the national security establishment over to retired military officers.  Retired Admiral Dennis Blair is Director of National Intelligence.  Gen. James Jones is National Security Advisor.  Retired General Karl Eikenberry is U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan.  He’s allowed Gen. Stanley McChrystal to intervene in the policy process at numerous points — from the creation of a lobbying effort in the United States (his “strategic assessment” team) to open criticism of the Vice President.

Rule of law — Obama has essentially ruled out holding anyone accountable for numerous violations of U.S. law under the Bush Administration.  And Obama continues to claim the power to detain individuals indefinitely without charge and to order targeted killings with no transparency or recourse.

On several of these issues, Obama could have affirmatively chosen to break with his predecessor without needing any additional funding or authorities from Congress.  Obama isn’t trapped by Bush’s policies, he has chosen instead to endorse a surprisingly large number of them.  Now it is possible that Bush’s policies are indeed wiser than many of us thought or realized at the time, but let’s not let Obama off the hook.  Whether we like it or not, a bloated defense budget, an imperial world view, and the accretion of executive power are not just legacies of President George W. Bush, but rather are the essence of Obama’s foreign policy orientation.

Virginia attorney general to colleges: End gay protections – washingtonpost.com

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II has urged the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school that their boards of visitors had no legal authority to adopt such statements.

This is a fascinating situation.  I would have assumed that state (or federal) law would establish minimum anti-discrimination protections, but it did not occur to me that they also established maximum protections.  One would think that, indeed, colleges through their boards of governors could choose to extend anti-discrimination measures.  It seems odd otherwise.  Are localities also barred from more rigorous standards? 

I get the politics of it.  Virginia has a pretty conservative core, and as long as you are willing to write off Northern Virginia, the political logic of playing to the base with anti-tax, anti-gay, pro-gun extremism must be appealing.  But wow, I mean, actively trying to gut anti-discrimination policies adopted by institutions within the state is one heck of an example of government activism trying to control behavior.

As part of a long — and frankly tedious — response to Jeffrey Goldberg about Sully’s alledge anti-Semitism, he unleashes this gem of a paragraph:

The Much-Delayed Response To Goldblog – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

But the turn in the last few years disturbs me; and the Gaza war horrified me, as Gitmo horrified me. It doesn’t mean I regard Israel or America as the equivalent of Hamas or al Qaeda. It means I hold Western values with a white-knuckled grip – because I fear what happens when we abandon them, and lose our way in a guerrilla war with no end and no limits. I think Israel has lost its way in this moral maze at times and so has America. And I believe that in this necessary war on Jihadist terrorism, our core values matter. I want to win this war, for the sake of freedom, individual dignity, and peace. I do not want to win by becoming some ghastly echo of what we are fighting against, or in such a way that the difference between barbarism and civilization becomes the way in which we torture and abuse human beings, not that we are torturing or abusing them in the first place. Does that make me a vitriolic America-basher?

Liz Cheney and Marc Thiessen would indeed accuse him of that.  Of course, they are ignorant and evil individuals.  Just foul little propagandists. 

Ultimately, this is all about “why we fight.”  The reason the struggle against AQ and similar movements is important is they genuinely represent a movement to destroy civilization as we know it.  But the goal is not just “victory” whatever the hell that means.  The goal is the protection of our way of life.  Of our freedoms.  Of our institutions.  So, when people like Cheney and Thiessen would like us to destroy the rule of law and essentially overturn the Constitution by turning the President into an elected monarch with the power to detain and torture and kill solely on his prerogative, I push back.  Because “winning” like that is not a victory at all. 

And anyway, it isn’t even necessary.  We don’t need to destroy the Constitution to beat al Qaeda — who are, in the final analysis, a small group of fanatics with insane aspirations and yet the capacity to do little more launch the occasional terror attack.  As much as I’d like to prevent even those, the counter-terrorism mission just doesn’t justify the extremes we’ve contemplated and implemented.