News analysis and commentary from Phillip Carter -- now located at http://www.intel-dump.com

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Fmr. Sen. Cleland to the White House:
"Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."

TAPPED drew my attention today to a column by former-Senator Max Cleland which ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Iraq. At first glance, some might call this a facile comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. They would be wrong. A deeper look first reveals that Cleland has the credibility to say everything in this piece. He is a decorated Vietnam veteran who was grievously wounded in combat, and who rose to serve as administrator of the Veterans Administration. Cleland knows what war is all about, and he knows the human cost of war all too well. He also knows the strategic side of war, from his service in the U.S. Senate and current service on the independent 9/11 Commission. Suffice to say, Cleland has the c.v. to back up what he writes. And this essay doesn't read like your typical critique of the White House. Cleland takes on the White House, point by point, and explains why our policy in Iraq has run aground:

Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president. Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad. They could have learned some lessons:

• Don't underestimate the enemy. The enemy always has one option you cannot control. He always has the option to die. This is especially true if you are dealing with true believers and guerillas fighting for their version of reality, whether political or religious. They are what Tom Friedman of The New York Times calls the "non-deterrables." If those non-deterrables are already in their country, they will be able to wait you out until you go home.

• If the enemy adopts a "hit-and-run" strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but (as Walter Lippman once said about Vietnam) you can't win the war.

• If you adopt a strategy of not just pre-emptive strike but also pre-emptive war, you own the aftermath. You better plan for it. You better have an exit strategy because you cannot stay there indefinitely unless you make it the 51st state.

If you do stay an extended period of time, you then become an occupier, not a liberator. That feeds the enemy against you.

• If you adopt the strategy of pre-emptive war, your intelligence must be not just "darn good," as the president has said; it must be "bulletproof," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the administration's was against Saddam Hussein. Anything short of that saps credibility.

• If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington.

• In a democracy, instead of truth being the first casualty in war, it should be the first cause of war. It is the only way the Congress and the American people can cope with getting through it. As credibility is strained, support for the war and support for the troops go downhill. Continued loss of credibility drains troop morale, the media become more suspicious, the public becomes more incredulous and Congress is reduced to hearings and investigations.

Instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, where all of the above happened, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense have gotten this country into a disaster in the desert.

Strong words from a strong-minded American who's been there, done that, and gotten the scars to prove it. I don't think that military service should be a prerequisite to political leadership. (For the record, the President served in the Texas Air National Guard and the SecDef served as a naval aviator on active duty and in the reserves.) But I do see a paucity of such experience in the White House and its command team -- as well as a lack of appreciation for the kinds of lessons that such experience brings. Sure, you can read about war and learn its impact from textbooks at the Kennedy School or Hoover Institute. But as one military historian wrote, the study of war by the uninitiated through books is like the study of sex by virgins with only pornography as their guide.

Much has been made in recent months about national service, and the extent to which our elites avoid national service -- particularly uniformed service. While I do not support conscription, I do think we need to do better as a society at voluntarily spreading the burden of military service. Our working class and middle class already do their part. The elite class does not. While doing some reading the other day, I came across this letter written by a general to a congressman during WWII about a conscript having adjustment problems. (Thanks to Andrew Olmsted) I think it expresses my point quite well.

27th Infantry Division
Office of the Commanding General
Fort Ord, California

27 February 1942

The Honorable Clinton P. Anderson, M.C.
House of Representatives

Dear Mr. Anderson:

. . . If doctors in the future are to have the privilege of practicing their profession, if archeologists are to investigate antiquity, if students are to have the privilege of taking degrees, and professors the privilege of teaching in their own way, somebody must march and fight and bleed and die and I know no reason why students, doctors, professors, and archeologists shouldn't do their share of it.

You say, "It strikes me as too bad to take that type of education and bury it in a rifle squad," as though there were something low or mean or servile being a member of a rifle squad and only morons and ditch diggers should be given such duty. I know of no place red blooded men of intelligence and initiative are more needed than in the rifle or weapons squad.

In this capacity, full recognition is given to the placing of men so that they may do the work most beneficial to the unit of which they are a part. Whenever men are needed for a particular duty, the record of all men having the required skills and qualifications are considered. I have examined the records of Private Lister and it is fairly complete. I know he holds the 100- yard dash and broad jump records in the Border Conference; that he was president of his fraternity; that his mother was born in Alabama and his father in Michigan; that his father lives at the Burlington Hotel in Washington and I suspect asked you to do what you could to get his son on other duty.

It is desirable that all men, regardless of their specialty, shall learn by doing; how hard it is to march with a pack for 20 miles; how to hold their own in bayonet combat; and how to respect the man who really takes it, namely the private in the rifle squad. . . .

Sincerely yours,

RALPH T. McPERNELL
Brig Gen, USA
Commanding

Sen. Cleland certainly understands what it means to be a private in a rifle squad. So do Wes Clark, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and Anthony Principi. American foreign policy might look a little wiser if we had more men like these in high office.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:01

 
Second military servicemember detained for Gitmo security violations

The AP reports (via the NY Times) that military officials have taken an Air Force serviceperson into custody for allegedly misusing classified information in connection with Guantanamo Bay. Details are very sketchy at this point, as they are in CPT Yee's case.

The man is being held in California on security-related matters, one Pentagon official said. Neither of two officials who spoke about the matter on condition of anonymity would say whether the Air Force investigation was linked to the arrest earlier this month of the Muslim military chaplain at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The military has classified many details about the prison camp and the detainees and has not identified any of the men being held there. Military officials have said the fight against terrorism could be hampered if terrorist groups got such information.

More to follow . . .

Update I: The AP adds some more details to its story (via the New York Times) about this second individual, who was actually arrested before CPT Yee. It's unclear whether the two men were working together, although it seems awfully coincidental if they weren't.

Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi is being held at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, facing 32 criminal charges, spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers said.

Al-Halabi worked as an Arabic language translator at the prison camp for al-Qaida and Taliban suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Shavers said. The Air Force enlisted man knew the Muslim chaplain at the prison arrested earlier this month, but it's unclear if the two arrests are linked, Shavers said.

The translator was arrested more than six weeks before the chaplain, Shavers said.

Al-Halabi is charged with nine counts related to espionage, three counts of aiding the enemy, 11 counts of disobeying a lawful order, and nine counts of making a false official statement.

Notes on the charges: Once again, espionage and aiding the enemy are capital offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The penalties for disobeying a lawful order and making a false official statement are comparitively light, but these sentences are cumulative in nature. I can only make a SWAG as to how these charges were chosen. The espionage and aiding the enemy counts go towards the overall plan. Each of the disobeying-an-order counts probably relates to a specific instance where the defendant did something wrong with a classified document. And if the defendant was required to sign some sort of log or register saying he had logged in documents, every signature would constitute a false official statement. A fact pattern like that could easily add up to the charges listed.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:01

 
CPT Yee's last interview

This morning's Miami Herald carries excerpts from a 30 Jul 03 interview with CPT Youssef Yee conducted at the Guantanamo Bay base where more than 600 detainees are currently being held by the American military. These statements don't seem as defensive as those made in CPT Yee's article in "The Wire", but they are nonetheless odd for an American military officer.

''As the chaplain, what I do is focus on what the person is doing here and now in the present, rather than what a person was fighting for in order to get here,'' Capt. Youseff Yee said in a July 30 interview at the base where the Army is holding about 660 terrorism suspects from 42 countries. "What I try to do is improve a person's situation or help them with their quality of life -- what can I do to help them deal with the situation that they're dealing with?''
* * *
In his interview with The Herald at the hut that served as a mosque for the handful of Muslim soldiers at the base, Yee declined to answer questions about his feelings toward the accused members of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

''It's not my job here to brand someone as guilty or innocent,'' he said. "I look at my role as to try to help that person in any way I can deal with the difficulties thy are experiencing. This is the purpose of the chaplain.''

Yee said he had spoken to every detainee over the course of the past year, but declined to address what he termed the ''justice aspect'' or reveal what detainees told him about their indefinite detention without charges.
* * *
''I'm there as a chaplain to listen with a sympathetic ear to any concerns they may have,'' Yee said. "In terms of indefiniteness, not looking at a specific complaint in general, I would encourage any detainee to be as patient as possible with his situation. Patience is a general encouragement of the Koran.''

In ministering to the needs of the detainees, Yee said his duties included meeting with any enemy combatant who requested time to talk with him in order to pass on a complaint or a need. Guards would enter the chaplain's request in a computer system that would generate a daily printout for him. He said typical requests included talking about issues, getting religious books or a different translation of the Koran, or getting prayer beads, prayer oils or a prayer cap from a stock he kept to distribute.

One of the improvements to detainee life he said he initiated was getting prepackaged meals to be given to detainees who wanted to fast so they could eat before sunrise and after sundown.

Legal note: As a matter of law, nearly all this evidence may be excluded from the trial as irrelevant, or as inadmissable character evidence. (See Rules 403 and 404 respectively in the Military Rules of Evidence, found in part III of the Manual for Courts Martial.) All this character evidence may not be relevant at all to the issues before the military jury in CPT Yee's case. And even if it is relevant, the risk of prejudice or confusion may be too great, thus warranting its exclusion. Unless CPT Yee puts his character at issue, it will be a tough fight to get this stuff in evidence. The military prosecutors will need to show, just as they would in federal court, that this evidence is somehow relevant to CPT Yee's intent or state of mind, and that its probative value outweighs its prejudice. That will be a very tough case to make.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:31

 
Ex-spinster joins CNN to provide spin analysis

Victoria Clarke, widely regarded as one of the better Pentagon press secretaries in recent years, has accepted a position with CNN that may put her across the airwaves from her former colleagues. (See NYT report here) In addition to managing the press after Sept. 11, Clarke is credited with helping to craft and stage-manage the public persona of Don Rumsfeld, as well as developing the "embedding" program for journalists in the second Gulf War.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:07

 
Analysis of CPT Yee and the potential for a treason charge

Matt at Stop the Bleating has done substantial research into the history of America's treason law (uniquely codified in our Constitution), and has some thoughts today on how that law might apply to CPT Yee's case. As of yet, treason has not been listed in any story as a charge that CPT Yee may face. Nonetheless, I think the issues Matt identifies may be applicable to the other charges (e.g. espionage, aiding the enemy) that CPT Yee has been held over on.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:02

 
About face!
Hackworth gives green light to Wes Clark's campaign

Col. David Hackworth once called Gen. Wesley Clark a "perfumed prince", a derogatory term for a senior officer more concerned with appearances and politics than with muddy boots soldiering. In a column today, Col. Hackworth reverses course abruptly, giving Clark a pretty strong endorsement as the kind of general you'd want to have as Commander-in-Chief.

No doubt he’s made his share of enemies. He doesn’t suffer fools easily and wouldn’t have allowed the dilettantes who convinced Dubya to do Iraq to even cut the White House lawn. So he should prepare for a fair amount of dart-throwing from detractors he’s ripped into during the past three decades.

Hey, I am one of those: I took a swing at Clark during the Kosovo campaign when I thought he screwed up the operation, and I called him a “Perfumed Prince.” Only years later did I discover from his book and other research that I was wrong – the blame should have been worn by British timidity and William Cohen, U.S. SecDef at the time.

At the interview, Clark came along without the standard platoon of handlers and treated the little folks who poured the coffee and served the bacon and eggs with exactly the same respect and consideration he gave the biggies in the dining room like my colleague Larry King and Bob Tisch, the Regency Hotel’s owner. An appealing common touch.

But if he wins the election, don’t expect an Andrew Jackson field-soldier type. Clark’s an intellectual, and his military career is more like Ike’s – that of a staff guy and a brilliant high-level commander. Can he make tough decisions? Bet on it. Just like Ike did during his eight hard but prosperous years as president.

Analysis: Hack's an "opinion leader" in the military community, to use a phrase I learned in college. His weekly column gets circulated widely by e-mail, and often gets picked up by major newspapers. Hack is a bona fide war hero from Korea and Vietnam -- and his three books have earned him a great deal of prestige among soldiers and veterans. A lot of folks may see this as a signal to embrace Clark as the best pro-military candidate for 2004 -- to include the incumbent. This endorsement is very, very important for a man who hopes to sell himself as a veteran to the American public.

On the other than, this endorsement may provoke even more hostility towards Clark among military establishment types. Clark already has the reputation as an iconclastic intellectual who left others in his dust on the way to the top. Hack provokes a pretty violent reaction from many in the defense community, and his endorsement of Clark may make Clark seem like a more threatening candidate; someone who might really shake things up in the Pentagon. If that's the case, we can expect to see a barrage of character attacks on Gen. Clark in the near future. More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:16

 
Panel releases report on US Air Force Academy scandal

The New York Times reports that an independent panel has issued its report on the sexual assault scandal which has rocked the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. The verdict isn't good for the youngest service academy, which comes as no surprise to those who have watched this case. (The full text of the report is available here from the Pentagon.) The most serious allegations concern the leadership of the Air Force Academy and the Air Force, who may have disregarded reports of sexual abuse at the academy for quite some time.

The commission also said that in an attempt "to shield Air Force Headquarters from public criticism," the Air Force's general counsel had largely ignored this history of official neglect when he reported on rape at the academy earlier this year.

The blistering report released here by the commission, led by former Representative Tillie Fowler, the Florida Republican, said sexual assault had been a problem at the Air Force Academy throughout the last decade, and possibly since women were first admitted in 1976.

The findings came as something of a surprise to victims' advocates, many of whom had initially criticized the panel's makeup as biased against women in the military, prompting the resignation of one member and the former director even before the panel began its work. Its members were appointed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Citing repeated warnings from the Air Force surgeon general and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee, the commission concluded that, "Since at least 1993, the highest levels of Air Force leadership have known of serious sexual misconduct problems at the academy," but failed to take effective action. Instead, it made fitful and limited attempts to investigate the issue, but quickly dropped them, the commission's report said.

Quick prediction: This report will torpedo the pending nomination of James Roche to be the Secretary of the Army. He was tapped to take over the Army after Secretary Rumsfeld fired former-Army Sec. Tom White. But now, it looks like his nomination will get wrapped around the axle of this issue. Why? For starters, a fair number of Congressmen have a bone to pick with the Pentagon on other issues, and this nomination will provide a convenient battleground. But more importantly, the buck has to stop somewhere for this Air Force Academy scandal, and the Secretary of the Air Force seems like the appropriate civilian official to hold accountable.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:09

 
Wes Clark meets the press
Can this soldier crawl through the mud that's about to be thrown his way?

After declaring his candidacy last week for President, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark has begun the long, hard, punishing campaign which may ultimately take him to the White House. Scores of profiles have surfaced of Wes Clark in the last few days, including stories in the NY Times, Washington Post (including this one and this one), LA Times, Newsweek, Slate, and the Atlantic Monthly. Most of these stories say essentially the same thing: Wes Clark was a brilliant "water walker" who shot to the top of the military (with some resentment from peers and superiors), and who ably led the war in Kosovo despite disagreements with just about everyone involved at the senior levels of NATO and the U.S. government. Consider this excerpt from Vernon Loeb's story in The Post.

Supporters and detractors agree on this much: The retired general is immensely talented, possessed of a keen strategic sensibility and the kind of gold-plated military credentials that could make him a formidable candidate in the Democratic race for president.

Clark's intense, emotional personality and his aggressive -- some say abrasive -- command style are likely to be the focus of intense scrutiny as he takes on the biggest challenge of a peripatetic career almost defined by the pursuit of challenge -- a run for the presidency in which his national security credentials will figure large in his potential appeal.
* * *
But Clark's hard-charging style, his penchant for dealing directly with the White House and his ceaseless agitation for ground forces during the Kosovo conflict -- over the wishes of Defense Secretary William S. Cohen -- caught up with him a month after the end of the war. In July 2000, while dining with the president of Lithuania in London, Clark was called by Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who curtly informed him that Cohen had decided to ease him out of his NATO command. The call stunned Clark. It meant he would have to leave his NATO post three months earlier than scheduled and without a year's extension, which he had expected.

Clark had clashes outside the administration as well. In the war's immediate aftermath, when a contingent of Russian troops moved quickly into Kosovo and occupied the airfield at Pristina, the provincial capital, a British officer, Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, refused a direct order from Clark to block the runway so the Russians could not fly in reinforcements.

Clark, who believed additional Russian troops could have led to a confrontation with NATO and possibly jeopardized the nascent allied peacekeeping mission, insisted. But Jackson stood firm, believing the Russians were isolated at the airfield and did not represent a threat. "Sir, I'm not starting World War III for you," Jackson replied.
* * *
Clark's many supporters inside and outside the military dispute the contention voiced by critics that his ambition and drive to come out on top made him untrustworthy in the eyes of his peers.

"I have watched him at close range for 35 years, in which I have looked at the allegation, and I found it totally unsupported," said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who taught with Clark at West Point in the 1970s. "That's not to say he isn't ambitious and quick. He is probably among the top five most talented I've met in my life. I think he is a national treasure who has a lot to offer the country."

McCaffrey acknowledges that Clark was not the most popular four-star general in the Army leadership. "This is no insult to Army culture, a culture I love and admire," McCaffrey said, "but he was way too bright, way too articulate, way too good looking and perceived to be way too wired to fit in with our culture. He was not one of the good ol' boys."

Pundits on the left and right, such as Paul Glastris and William Safire, have also jumped into the fray. The pundits see this candidacy in strategic terms, opining on what this move means for the Democratic party and larger body politic. The consensus seems to be that this will only help the Democratic party, especially if it sparks some serious debate over national security issues in that party's primary.

My prediction: Before Wes Clark reaches the White House, he'll have to low crawl through about 3,000 miles of mud. The military establishment will leak every negative detail of Clark's military performance to the press that's there to leak -- and some that aren't. These will include: his tendency towards personal tirades, his micromanagement of subordinates and abusive behavior towards subordinates, his precise job performance at key positions where he was under scrutiny, and anything else that can be spun by Clark's opponents. At some point, Clark will have to deal with that Ratko Mladic incident from the mid-1990s. (For the record, Clark met with him before his indictment for war crimes, just as he met with Slobodan Milosevic before his indictment. In both cases, these meetings produced tangible results for American foreign policy.) Democrats will fire HEAT rounds at Gen. Clark for his moderate views that may not sell well to key Democrat constituencies. Clark will respond with his wonkish side, and he will quickly formulate policies on all the important issues, but it may be too late by that point. And the press will soon stop swooning over Clark like a first date.

At that point, which I will call the "decisive point" of the campaign, Clark will have to retain the ability to raise money and raise issues. If he can, he has a chance; if he doesn't, he's toast. It's still too early to tell whether Clark will make it through this mud run, and I'll reserve judgment for now. But this will be the toughest fight of Clark's long and impressive career.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:30

 
More facts emerge about CPT Yee's case

Rowan Scarborough reports in this morning's Washington Times about the specific documents held by CPT Yee at the time of his arrest, and why the government was so concerned. At first glance, this looks like more than a technical violation of classified-documents rules.

A law-enforcement source said yesterday those papers included a list of detainees and the names of U.S. prison personnel at Guantanamo.

If al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terror network, were to learn the detainees' identities, it would provide valuable information on the whereabouts of operators who are missing. This information could then allow al Qaeda to change operating methods for fear the detainee provided such information to his American captors, the law- enforcement official said.

The Pentagon has refused news media requests to release the names of the 660 detainees for that very reason.

A list of American personnel at the base in the hands of terrorists could put them and their families in danger, the source told The Times. The source said there was a debate within the administration on whether to arrest Capt. Yee or keep him under surveillance.

The source declined to say which agency advocated the Sept. 10 arrest, but said the order came from "the highest levels."

"If the list of detainees got out, then you have a whole lot of al Qaeda cells go to ground," a senior Bush administration official said yesterday. This source said the Pentagon pushed to make the arrest and said the White House was involved in the decision.

The official said one document in Capt. Yee's possession was a drawing showing where certain prisoners and American personnel were located.

Analysis: There's another issue lurking in this story that I haven't seen any of the intelligence sources say in any of the major newspaper stories on CPT Yee. If this man sympathized with the enemy, and he counseled these detainees while they were going through the interrogation process, it's very likely that he hindered the interrogations in a substantial way. Interrogations depend on control, and a sense of total isolation on the part of the detainee. Any outside contact, particularly from someone with authority (as a military officer) and moral authority (as a Muslim cleric) would threaten the methods used by most military interrogators.

Consider this excerpt from the Declaration of U.S. Navy Commander Donald D. Woolfolk, given in the case of Yaser Hamdi to substantiate the government's case for holding him as an enemy combatant.

(FOUO) . . . When done effectively, interrogation provides information that likely could not be gleaned from any other source. Loss of this tool, in any respect, would undermine our nation’s intelligence gathering efforts, thus crippling the national security of the United States. The United States does not employ any corporal means of coercion to gain information from persons being interrogated. Rather, the United States has adopted a humane approach to interrogation that relies upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between detainees and the intelligence gathering staff assigned to that detainee. Over time, information is learned. The United States is now engaged in a robust program of interrogating individuals who have been identified as enemy combatants in the global War on Terrorism. This is because it is recognized that they unquestionably hold critical information that is crucial to our national security. A prime example of the effectiveness of this method of interrogation through dependency and trust can be found in the announcement this week of the U.S. Government’s disruption and detention of a U.S. citizen working in coordination with al Qaida to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States. Knowledge and disruption of this plot may not have occurred absent effective intelligence gathered through interrogation. [emphasis added]

(FOUO) Interrogation leading to the development of meaningful and useable intelligence is not static. The collection of intelligence is active and ongoing. As new intelligence information is derived from any source, the opportunity to learn additional information through interrogation is presented. We are now living in an age where our nation is engaged in international armed conflict, we face a foe that knows no borders and perceives all Americans, wherever they may be, as targets of opportunity. Under such circumstances the need to maintain the tightly controlled environment, which has been established to create dependency and trust by the detainee with his interrogator, is of paramount importance. Disruption of the interrogation environment, such as through access to a detainee by counsel, undermines this interrogation dynamic. Should this occur, a critical resource may be lost, resulting in a direct threat to national security. [emphasis added]

This statement was made to justify the seclusion of a detainee at the same brig that now holds CPT Yee, and to specifically prevent Hamdi from having access to legal counsel. The reasoning is the same. Allowing access to legal counsel would disturb the isolation and dependency necessary for successful interrogation -- interrogation which can yield details of plans to kill Americans. (Let's not forget what's at stake here) A sympathetic chaplain can also frustrate such interrogation efforts, and impede the collection of human intelligence from the detainees. That's not a good thing. We have allowed the detainees access to a Muslim chaplain out of humanity, and compliance with the Third Geneva Convention. But we cannot allow our chaplain -- an American military officer -- to impede the collection of intelligence because of his uncertain loyalties.

CPT Yee was in a critical position; he had unsupervised, unblocked, personal access to the detainees at a time when their isolation and dependency was critical. Knowingly or unknowingly, he may have given these detainees the will to fight our interrogators, to hold onto information a little longer that might be used to save American lives. If the facts are as alleged, then CPT Yee had about as large of an effect on the war on terrorism as can be imagined. While not as spectacular or bloody as the betrayal allegedly committed by SGT Hasan Akbar against his officers in the 101st, this betrayal is probably more deadly for all of us.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:56

 
Economic slump helps military recruiting

The New York Times reports this morning that the Army is poised to meet or exceed its recruiting goals for this fiscal, largely thanks to a depressed economy and other factors that help sell the military opportunity to young Americans.

All the armed services say they will meet or exceed their recruiting goals for the fiscal year ending on Sept. 30.

But many military personnel experts say the Army's efforts are most vulnerable over time because the Army recruits more active-duty and Reserve troops than all the other services combined — 73,800 active-duty and 26,400 Reserve soldiers this year — and it is now fielding about 90 percent of the 180,000 troops in Iraq and Kuwait.

"That's the driver, the economy," said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, the head of the Army Recruiting Command here, adding that the chaotic conditions in Iraq have yet to hurt recruiting.

Army recruiters have always offered educational benefits, job security and training skills to prospective soldiers. But recently they have been armed with more logistical support and a growing arsenal of financial incentives that look even more enticing in a down market.

The Army has raised signing bonuses to as much as $20,000 for badly needed positions like intelligence analysts. It has also increased college aid. And it has nearly doubled its advertising budget, to $227 million, in the last four years, shelving its 20-year-old "Be All You Can Be" slogan in favor of the "Army of One" campaign, aimed at Generation Y youths. It has ramped up a cyberrecruiting operation, with daily online chat rooms in English and Spanish. Next month it is rolling out a 15-month enlistment option (the current minimum length for a tour is two years) aimed at college students, an increasingly important target group.

This is good news. First, the all-volunteer military (and by extension, American society) depends on a steady stream of young Americans who are willing to step into the breach. Without such volunteers, the current force structure will fail, and America will have to resort to more coercive means (read: draft) to populate its military. As recent operations from Baghdad to Belgrade show, our professional military is worth keeping around.

One note on the economic opportunity aspect. I think that Mr. Schmitt overreported that story here, in a way that almost panders to people like Rep. Charlie Rangel who argue that the military disproportionately "targets" low-income youth and presses them into service as a form of indentured servitude. I think that argument gets it absolutely wrong. Giving economic opportunities to low-income communities should be a good thing for government to do. It seems ironic that some would criticize the military for providing that opportunity when they chastise other departments for failing to. Young Americans are joining the military to take advantage of the professional, personal, patriotic -- and economic -- opportunity. This is a good news story.

Unfortunately, the news is not all good. Later in his story, Mr. Schmitt reports that the Army Reserve and Army National Guard are having less success with their recruiting efforts.

Recruiting part-time Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops, who are typically older and have civilian jobs, presents mounting challenges. Military experts warn that recruiting and retaining these citizen soldiers will get more difficult as they are repeatedly called up to serve extended tours in Iraq or Afghanistan as military police, civil affairs specialists, water-purification experts and other jobs.

"How long people will continue to be deployed will ultimately have some effect on retention," said Frank Shaffery, deputy director of Army recruiting operations here. "We're concerned about it."

Those concerns grew this month when the Army announced that 20,000 Reserve and National Guard soldiers would stay in Iraq or Kuwait for as long as 12 months, extending their tours on the ground by several months.

Army National Guard officials said this week that the Guard would probably fall short of its goal of recruiting 62,000 soldiers this year. But because fewer Guard forces will leave this year than had been anticipated, the Guard still expects to maintain its overall troop level at 350,000.

There are lots of reasons why the reserves are struggling. For starters, the benefits packages aren't as good, so they don't have the same buying power in the market for young men and women. Second, the new enlistment options (2 years) are much more attractive to someone who's not fully sold on the military, but wants the benefits that active service brings. Third, joining the reserves today is an incredibly risky and uncertain proposition. In the old days, soldiers in the reserves wondered if they would be called up. Today, soldiers in the reserves wonder when they'll be called up -- and how many times, and if their employers will take them back (notwithstanding the USERRA), and whether their families will be there when they return.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:39

 
Captain Yee -- the author?

Timothy Goddard at The Flag of the World passes on a link to something that CPT Yee wrote for "The Wire" an in-house newsletter published for the Joint Task Force servicemembers and civilians at Guantanamo Bay. I think that Mr. Goddard's summary is on target: "For the most part, is no different from most of the "There's nothing to fear from true Islam, just that nutty stuff" articles that have come out so often in the past two years. This one, however, seems a good deal more defensive than most--not to the point that you'd notice anything weird about it unless you knew that he'd just been arrested for espionage, though." Here's an excerpt from what CPT Yee wrote:

September 11th, the pending war on Iraq, and our own day to day experiences of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo mission have all contributed to the picture many of us as Americans have painted about Islam and Muslims. And now, this universal religion of more than one billion followers worldwide is scrutinized by a population that has little knowledge of its basic tenets and practices. It is with a fearful eye that Islam and its worshippers are now being examined with the notion that they have become our nation's greatest enemy. However, a truly objective look makes it quite clear that Islam is really nothing to be afraid of at all. [emphasis added]
* * *
Yes, another terrorist attack or the possibility of hidden Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are enough to strike fear in the American people. But in reality, the majority of Muslims around the world from Indonesia to America are God-loving people. So why has it been so difficult for most in our society to distinguish these millions from the extreme fanatical minority? Why are we still afraid of Islam, the religion? Answer: lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with Islam and Muslims. In most cases, people have limited personal experiences with Muslims and know Islam only through references made towards Muslim extremism.

Analysis: Putting theological and political debates aside for a second, this is really interesting language to be coming from a U.S. Army chaplain -- regardless of faith. He may have legitimate points to make about Americans' attitudes towards Muslims, and the effect of our ignorance on our tactics and strategy. However, it appears odd to me that an Army chaplain would be the guy to make those arguments. He's part of the team, and not supposed to play the devil's advocate (in any sense).

I will put forth a theory now about why CPT Yee may have felt persecuted down at Gitmo, and why he may have written this article. This is a "SWAG" (military jargon for "super wild a**ed guess"), and not based on any independent reporting, but rather on my experience as an Military Police platoon leader and staff officer.

Guantanamo Bay is a prison. The soldiers there think of themselves as "us", and the detainees as "them". Nearly all of the detainees are Muslim. There is a natural tendency in situations like this to dehumanize the "them" population. That tendency is probably exacerbated by the nature of our war on terrorism, and the religious overtones of this conflict. It's even possible that commanders are encouraging such attitudes towards the detainees, and that such aggression has spilled over into open displays of animus, hatred, and anti-Muslim behavior. To the extent that CPT Yee represents the Muslim community in the military, he may be duty bound to speak up against such hostility, within the bounds of the command. He also may be obliged under DoD equal opportunity policy to take a leadership role in stopping such behavior. If that's the case, this article appears to be one effort towards that end.

That's just a guess. It certainly doesn't excuse the criminal acts he's accused of. But it might explain some of the things CPT Yee has been accused of, from speaking up on behalf of detainees to publishing this article. More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:10

 
Army chaplain arrested for espionage -- update & analysis

Giving credit where credit is due, The Washington Times is the paper that came through with the scoop on Captain Yee; I picked up on the AP version of the story that originally ran on their pages. I pulled up the Washington Times story, written by veteran Pentagon reporter Rowan Scarborough, to find the details as originally reported. Mr. Scarborough didn't disappoint -- he has a report tonight on the precise charges that Captain Yee is facing.

The Army has charged Capt. Yee with five offenses: sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. The Army may also charge him later with the more serious charge of treason, which under the Uniform Code of Military Justice could be punished by a maximum sentence of life.
* * *
Capt. Yee had almost unlimited private access to detainees as part of the Defense Department's program to provide the prisoners with religious counseling, as well as clothing and Islamic-approved meals. The law-enforcement source declined to say how much damage Capt. Yee may have inflicted on the U.S. war against Osama bin Laden's global terror network.

The source said the "highest levels" of government made the decision to arrest Capt. Yee, who had been kept under surveillance for some time.

The military's "convening authority" — the officer who would authorize criminal proceedings — is the commander of U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the prison at Guantanamo.

Analysis: Now I have some more facts on which to base my analysis. First, if you're interested in this case, I recommend reading a primer on the military justice system. The National Institute of Military Justice has a few good primers on its site, and I would also recommend this piece I wrote on the system from last year. Also, the Manual for Courts Martial that Captain Yee will be tried under is a good reference to have for this case. Finally, the actual articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice are codified in Title 10, and are good to have as references too.

Here are some general notes and points of analysis, in no particular order:

(1) The penalty for the crimes charged is death, according to the text of the articles under which Captain Yee is charged according to the Washington Times story. The Times reports that the maximum penalty as life, but they're wrong according to what the UCMJ says. These articles include: sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. No military court has imposed the death penalty for these charges since Private Slovik's case at the end of WWII. But I would not say that is an impossibility in this case, if the facts are as alleged.

(2) One legal question to be asked is whether these offenses were committed in wartime or not. If they were committed in wartime, the available penalties increase dramatically. It's fairly certain that we are currently in a state of armed conflict, if not a state of declared war, but this is a legal question that will certainly be asked in this case. The government will certainly argue that we are at war, and thus the higher penalties are available. Indeed, it's hard to see how you could have "aiding the enemy" if one were not at war. But again, this is a question of law for the military judge to resolve, and one that will probably be appealed to the intermediate appellate court and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

(3) Captain Yee will undoubtedly be pressured to plead guilty, in a quid pro quo where he gives information to the government in exchange for a life sentence. I imagine that he has already refused to plead guilty at this juncture, given the way the government is proceeding in this case.

(4) Military commissions v. military courts martial. I do not think we will see Captain Yee's case transferred to a military commission. For one, he is statutorily entitled to a general court martial on these charges as an American serviceman, and it would be very hard to overcome that in court. Second, the military system already has all the safeguards the Pentagon wants in a court -- protection of classified evidence, a jury of military officers, a secure setting, and defense attorneys with security clearances. I don't see any added value in a military commission here. Moreover, a high-profile trial (as this will be) will showcase the military justice system, which is generally regarded by experts as a fairer system than the federal criminal system.

(5) Unlawful command influence will be an issue in this case. Note this quote from the Washington Times story: "The source said the "highest levels" of government made the decision to arrest Capt. Yee, who had been kept under surveillance for some time." That means the decision to arrest Captain Yee came from 1600 Penn. Ave and the E-Ring of the Pentagon, and that prosecutorial decisions will likely have to be vetted in both places as well. Unfortunately, the UCMJ expressly prohibits command influence on the actual trial, and the actual decision to bring charges. The Commander of SouthCom will have to do his best to resist pressure from the President and SecDef here if he wants his verdict to stand. I guarantee that Captain Yee's defense counsel will raise this issue on appeal.

I plan to follow this story as it develops. More to follow...

See also the sites hosted by Donald Sensing and Winds of Change for some interesting commentary and links regarding Captain Yee. As I find more good links on the subject, I'll post them. I imagine we'll see a lot more reporting on this case than those of enemy combatants Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, because the depth of the betrayal is so great in Captain Yee's case (assuming the facts are as alleged).

And also check out Jeff Quinton's notes at Backcountry Conservative, which includes some really good research into CPT Yee and various other issues in this case. Among other things, Quinton has a State Department story on CPT Yee, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer profile of CPT Yee, and a DoD press release discussing the Muslim clerics currently serving as American military chaplains.
posted by Phillip Carter at 20:00

 
U.S. Army Muslim chaplain in custody in connection with Gitmo

The AP reports that the American military has taken one of its own chaplains -- a Muslim -- into custody in connection with an investigation involving the men detained at Guantanamo Bay. Very few details are available at this time. No charges appear to have been filed, nor has there been an Art. 32 hearing, analogous to a grand jury hearing. It's not clear whether the military plans to press charges, or if federal prosecutors will do so, or even if Captain Yee is suspected of things he could be charged with.

Captain Crosson said Captain Yee was taken into custody at a naval station in Jacksonville. But he said he did not know where the chaplain was being held.

A senior law enforcement official, said that F.B.I. agents had confiscated classified documents Captain Yee was carrying and questioned him before he was handed over to the military.

Captain Yee is a Muslim chaplain who was assigned to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay in November 2002 as the Islamic adviser to the Joint Task Force commander, Captain Crosson said.

The base, in eastern Cuba, is overseen by the Southern Command, which is based in Miami. About 650 men from 43 countries are being held there, all of them accused of having links to the Qaeda terrorist network or Afghanistan's fallen Taliban regime.

Captain Yee, a Chinese-American who graduated from West Point in 1990, converted to Islam in college and became a chaplain after spending several years in the Army.

Wow... this has the potential to be a really big story. My first reaction is that "first reports are always wrong." I really need to see more information -- from official sources -- to understand what's going on here. If I had to guess, it would be that Captain Yee committed some infraction such as failing to properly secure classified documents, and that investigators picked him up for that fact alone. I'm very skeptical that this man -- a West Point grad and experienced Army officer -- would actually do what's implied here: give documents to a member of Al Qaeda interned at Gitmo. But anything's possible.

Update: Unfortunately, it looks like my earlier skepticism may have been misplaced. According to CNN, Captain Yee is alleged to have done a lot more than misplacing classified documents. If these allegations are true, he may indeed me guilty of treason or espionage -- depending on how you construe the elements of those crimes in the context of our undeclared war on terrorism.

. . . the documents included "diagrams of the cells and the facilities at Guantanamo [Bay, Cuba]" where about 600 al Qaeda and other "enemy combatants" are being held by the military.

Yee also was carrying lists of detainees being held there as well as lists of their interrogators, the source said.

In addition to the classified documents, Yee is "believed to have ties to [radical Muslims in the U.S.] that are now under investigation," the source said. He said he could not elaborate on the basis for that belief.

Although no charges have been filed, the U.S. military is "investigating whether [Yee] may have [been involved in] espionage or treason," the official said.

posted by Phillip Carter at 15:33

 
Lawsuit filed to challenge military recruiting at law schools

On the day the Supreme Court decided Lawrence v. Texas, I predicted that we would see a wave of challenges to the law precluding gays from openly serving in the military. The first of these appeared in U.S. District Court a few months ago, and was a direct challenge to one soldier's discharge. The second appeared yesterday, in a federal court in Newark, where a coalition of law professors has sued the Defense Department over its practice of recruiting on law school campuses. Specifically, the group argues that their First Amendment rights are being unduly burdened by the law which threatens schools with a withdrawal of federal funding if they refuse access to the military.

The suit says that every accredited American law school has adopted policies that bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that the schools have sought to apply these policies without making any exception for what the suit describes as "the military and its discriminatory policy regarding sexual orientation."

Some law schools barred military recruiters from entering their campuses. Others allowed them entry while arranging visits under conditions that set them apart from recruiters representing law firms and corporations whose practices the law schools do not consider discriminatory.

In 1995, Congress passed the Solomon amendment, named for its sponsor, Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon of New York, barring disbursement of money from the Departments of Defense, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Education and some other federal agencies to any college or university that obstructed campus recruiting by the military.

The suit filed yesterday argues that the Solomon amendment violates law schools' First Amendment rights to academic freedom.

"The plaintiffs are seeking to prohibit enforcement of the Solomon amendment," said Michael Chagares, chief of the civil division of the United States attorney's office in Newark. "We will contend that the Solomon amendment is constitutional and will seek to prohibit any limitation on its enforcement."

Analysis: I'm writing a longer piece on this, so I will reserve the bulk of my analysis for that piece. However, I think this lawsuit will fail because the Solomon Amendment itself and the law against gays in the military are two separate legal things. In theory, the Solomon Amendment would still exist without the policy on gays in the ranks, to combat general animus against the military on campuses. If some university kicked the military off because it just didn't like the service, or because it was opposed to the war in Iraq, the Solomon Amendment would still be triggered. Moreover, as a general rule, Congress can condition the funding it gives out for various purposes, even if those conditions place a burden on speech.

Ultimately, I think this case will lose. I started reporting on a story about this shortly after the Lawrence decision, and I talked with three universities' general counsel about the issue. Their feeling was that a challenge to the Solomon Amendment would fail because it would be impossible to argue that Lawrence somehow changed the constitutionality of the law -- they're separate issues. Also, the universities have mostly achieved an uneasy peace with respect to military recruiting on campus, and they're unwilling to disturb that. Finally, almost everyone recognizes the value of military recruiting for students -- particularly those with financial need (like me) who can use an ROTC scholarship or GI Bill funding to further their educational aspirations. If this lawsuit is successful, it will hurt students like me who took advantage of one of the greatest opportunities in American society: military service.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:58

 
JetBlue criticized for giving passenger information to defense contractor

The New York Times reports this morning that JetBlue, one of America's newest and most successful airlines, is in hot water for giving information about its passengers to a defense contractor working on a security system. The system itself is probably classified, and details are short in the story. But it appears to be a base-defense system, not an aviation security system, made by Torch Concepts. My best guess is that this information was used to run a program that looked for non-obvious relationships between passengers based on their names, addresses and social security numbers, among other data. Understandably, a number of passengers and civil liberties groups are upset by the disclosure.

JetBlue, a three-year-old discount airline, sent an e-mail message to passengers this week, conceding that it had made a mistake in providing the records last year to Torch Concepts, an Army contractor in Huntsville, Ala., for a research project on "airline passenger risk assessment."

"This was a mistake on our part and I know you and many of our customers feel betrayed by it," said David Neeleman, JetBlue's chief executive, in an e-mail message that the airline, based in New York, said was sent to about 150 passengers who had written in so far to complain.

Mr. Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, which has been a rare success in the airline industry and has prospered because of its reputation for low fares and consumer friendliness, insisted that none of the passenger information was shared with the government. "The sole set of data in Torch's possession has been destroyed," he wrote. "No government agency ever had access to it."

Privacy rights groups expressed astonishment that JetBlue had shared so much passenger information with a contractor, describing the privacy breach as among the most serious reported by any American company in recent years.

JetBlue's announcement comes at a time when many civil liberties groups are warning that privacy rights are becoming victims of the government's struggle against terrorism and the desire of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for quick access to customer information that has traditionally been closely held by corporations.

The airline said it had provided Torch Concepts with records on about five million individual itineraries, reflecting the travels of about 1.1 million passengers in 2001 and 2002. The records, it said, would have included the passengers' names, addresses and phone numbers but not credit card numbers or government identification numbers commonly collected from travelers like passport numbers.

A lawyer for Torch Concepts, Richard Marsden, said that the passenger records provided by JetBlue were destroyed by the contractor earlier this week after the existence of the project was reported by Wired News, a technology-news Web site. "It's all been destroyed in the last 24 hours," he said in a telephone interview.

Analysis: It would be all too easy to lump this in with the other actions of the Bush Administration in the war on terrorism, and to say that this is just one more example of our civil liberties being abused. Unfortunately, I don't think that's what's going on here. I think this is something far more subtle, and conversely, something far less threatening to our civil liberties. Moreover, it's happening every day. If you don't think that your credit card company, your bank, your lenders, and others are using data about you to make risk decisions, you're wrong. They're sharing information all the time, often without your explicit knowledge. That itself may be a bad thing. But I think it's unfair to single JetBlue out for something that's common industry practice.

I think it's a little odd that this information would be used for a base defense system instead of an aviation security experiment. But the value of the research appears to be quite high, if you take the findings of Torch Concepts at face value. And in the larger context of the war on terrorism, I think studies like this need to be conducted, if we are to learn how to look for non-obvious relationships in large patterns of data. Programs like Total Information Awareness and CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) do require us to give information to private and public officials who will then use that information. But, these programs may make us physically more secure if they can find the relevant pieces of information to help intelligence analysts put together the dots to find terrorists. I, for one, am willing to make the trade of information security for physical security, particularly when I've already given this data to my credit card companies and the government.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:40

 
Congratulations to Mickey Kaus for this flattering profile in today's Los Angeles Times. The writer liked KausFiles so much, he even imitated Mickey's style for the article, writing in short punchy paragraphs with bolded headlines.

Query: What is it about the Westside of Los Angeles that spawns so many high-profile bloggers? Mickey, Virginia Postrel, Mark Kleiman, ArmedLiberal (Winds of Change), Eugene Volokh, this author, and others all live or work in this part of L.A. My knee-jerk answer is that it's the heart of liberal intelligentsia on the West Coast, but that can't be the answer because we're not all liberals.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:29

 
Which came first -- the expert or the blog?

Congratulations to bloggers Eugene Volokh and Howard Bashman for their appearances in today's lead New York Times article titled "Experts Say Court Panel Is Less Likely to Delay California Vote". Of course, both are brilliant legal thinkers in their own right, and their expertise came long before their weblogs. Eugene is one of America's leading First Amendment law scholars, and he's uniquely qualified to comment on the recall as a Constitutional Law professor and someone who's clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski (on the 11-judge panel) and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (who may ultimately decide the case). Howard is also uniquely qualified, as an experienced appellate lawyer who's also clerked for the 3rd Circuit. So at least in these two bloggers' case, the expert came before the weblog.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:24

 
A few good books

Over the next several months, we will start to see a stunning array of books arrive on the shelves from journalists who were embedded with units in the second Gulf War. This was a foreseeable result of putting so many ambitious reporters in the thick of the action with an exclusive view of their part of the war. One of the first books already looks like something I'm going to read: The March Up: Taking Baghdad With The 1st Marine Division, by F.J. "Bing" West and Ray L. Smith. The Washington Post's review of the book was enough to pique my interest:

Sixteen years after an infamous televised exchange between Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace over whether or not it would be acceptable for a journalist to warn soldiers from his own country about an imminent ambush, Smith and West were simply and flatly covering their own guys: They were Marines, reporting on Marines. The result doesn't look the way journalism tends to look. Having extensive combat experience, Smith and West -- but especially Smith -- didn't hesitate to shout orders and give tactical advice to the Marines they were covering. At one point, Smith intervened in an argument between officers who were planning a defensive position, offering a calming gesture so they could focus and continue. Smith also offered to stand watch in a combat zone so the Marines could get some sleep, an exchange that opens the book. After the pair spotted a heavy weapon in a village during a flyover in a military helicopter, Smith carried back the coordinates to a Marine commander so the weapon could be destroyed. And so on: There apparently is, in fact, no such thing as a former Marine.

And yet for all the transparent lack of objectivity, for all their refusals to strike a journalist's blank face and neutral pose, Smith and West deliver a balanced and unblinking account that will certainly become one of the standard texts on the second Gulf War. They approached the Marines with clear and open respect but didn't hesitate to write critically; they saw combat and the terrain over which it occurs with trained and experienced eyes, and wrote sharply observed accounts of what they saw. They were not "objective" -- merely knowledgeable, intellectually curious and rigorously honest.

Being accepted on the battlefield as Marines among Marines, Smith and West were given rare access -- and a great deal of very direct help -- in observing different units and battles. They borrowed military radios and night-vision goggles, were simply given an SUV captured from an Iraqi general, and were granted armed escorts when they needed to travel through dangerous terrain. As a result, this book is a sort of microscope-telescope hybrid, moving seamlessly through many levels: Here is the division commander's view of the fight, the regiment commander's view, the battalion commander's view, the company commander's view -- and the corporal's view, slugging it out on the ground at the head of a fire team.

In addition to this book, look for one from Army Times reporter Sean Naylor on Operation Anaconda, which should come out later this year. Sean won a major journalism award for his reporting from Afghanistan, and I imagine his book will be even better. Also look for something from Evan Wright, who traveled with a Marine Corps reconnaissance platoon and wrote an outstanding 3-part series on the ordeal for Rolling Stone.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:52

 
Signs of a thaw between Washington and the world

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has an op-ed in today's New York Times which effectively reverses his country's opposition to American operations in Iraq -- and pledges German support for the nation-building mission there. The move comes in anticipation of a UN General Assembly meeting in New York, where Schroder is expected to meet with President Bush. One official described the warmer statements from Washington and Berlin towards each other as a "mating dance" in anticipation of that meeting. Still, the promise of German troops and support for the Iraq mission is incredible.

It is true that Germany and the United States disagreed on how best to deal with Saddam Hussein's regime. There is no point in continuing this debate. We should now look toward the future. We must work together to win the peace. The United Nations must play a central role. The international community has a key interest in ensuring that stability and democracy are established as quickly as possible in Iraq. The international mission needs greater legitimacy in order to accelerate the process leading to a government acting on its own authority in Iraq.

In addition to its current military involvement in Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere, Germany is willing to provide humanitarian aid, to assist in the civilian and economic reconstruction of Iraq and to train Iraqi security forces.

When we gather in New York next week for the United Nations General Assembly, we will underline that Germany and the United States are linked by a profound friendship based on common experiences and values. For Germans, the 2003 general assembly is very special. It was exactly 30 years ago that Germany was admitted to the United Nations, a milestone in our postwar history. Back then, Germans were still forced to live in two states, divided by a wall and a dangerous border. Today, Germany is united.

We Germans will not forget how the United States helped and supported us in rebuilding and reuniting our country. That Germany is living today in a peaceful, prosperous and secure Europe is thanks in no small measure to America's friendship, farsightedness and political determination.

Analysis: Clearly, Chancellor Schroder is pulling President Bush's schnitzel out of the fire. He's also making a major power play on the world stage, and I think he's going to be successful in establishing himself as a pragmatist who's willing to put differences aside to do the right thing. On the tactical and operational level, this contribution will make a huge difference. America's own Army (as well as the Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office) admits that it cannot sustain the mission in Iraq beyond 2004 without external support. Generals from Barry McCaffrey to Wes Clark have all said that doing so would break the force, and create another hollow Army like that of the post-Vietnam 1970s. In essence, German troops are coming to save the American army too. But that's what allies are for, and we should be grateful.

(One footnote: European armies tend to be very good at this kind of thing, and we should welcome NATO forces whenever we have a peacekeeping/nation-building mission)

Across town on another op-ed page, Secretary of State Colin Powell writes in the Wall Street Journal that we still stay in Iraq as long as it takes to get the job done. Secretary Powell's essay comes on the heels of a visit he made to Iraq, and of all the President's men, I think he has the most credibility to make the arguments he does. This is exactly the argument the White House needs to make on Iraq, and I think that Secretary Powell is the right man to make this case to the American people and the world.

Iraq has come very far, but serious problems remain, starting with security. American commanders and troops told me of the many threats they face--from leftover loyalists who want to return Iraq to the dark days of Saddam, from criminals who were set loose on Iraqi society when Saddam emptied the jails and, increasingly, from outside terrorists who have come to Iraq to open a new front in their campaign against the civilized world. But our commanders also briefed me on their plan for meeting these security threats, and it is a good one.

We also need to complete the renewal of Iraq's electrical grid, its water treatment facilities and its other infrastructure, which were run down and destroyed during the years of Saddam's misrule. Here, too, we are making progress. Electric generation now averages 75% of prewar levels, and that figure is rising. Telephone service is being restored to hundreds of thousands of customers. Dilapidated water and sewage treatment facilities are being modernized. But it will take time and money to finish the job.

Indeed, that's Iraq in a nutshell. With our support, the Iraqis have made great progress. But it will take time and money to finish the job. President Bush has asked Congress for $20 billion to help rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. Next month, the international community will meet in Madrid to pledge additional assistance for Iraqi reconstruction. With these funds, and our continued help, I know the Iraqis will take great strides in rebuilding their battered country.

How long will we stay in Iraq? We will stay as long as it takes to turn full responsibility for governing Iraq over to a capable and democratically elected Iraqi administration. Only a government elected under a democratic constitution can take full responsibility and enjoy full legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people and the world.

posted by Phillip Carter at 08:39

 
Can you hear me now?

It's not just a bad cell phone commercial anymore -- it's the mantra of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq under L. Paul Bremer III, according to Fred Kaplan at Slate. The inability to communicate, caused by problems with rebuilding the phone infrastructure and building the cell phone infrastructure, has American officials in Baghdad at their wits' end. On top of the normal problems you'd expect with this effort, add in some serious disconnects with the way the contracts were awarded, including separate contracts for a Coalition Provisional Authority system and an Army system -- that don't talk to each other. In the end, you have a recipe for pure chaos, as Mr. Kaplan aptly points out.

According to a Defense Department official, if someone working for the U.S. occupation authority needed to talk with a battalion commander, there was no way to make direct contact. He or she had to call a desk officer back in the Pentagon, who would jot down the message and call the commander himself. If the commander wanted to reply to the message, the same desk officer would jot down the response and call back the occupation authority.

This, some officers say, is why the U.S. authorities in Baghdad so often look like they don't know what they're doing—because they don't. Many of them are smart, talented, and eager. But they can't talk with the Army about security, they can't talk with Iraqi specialists about civil needs—in short, they can't find out what they need to find out—so, for far too much of their time, they sit, paralyzed and helpless.

The blame here cannot be laid on some interagency squabble between, say, the State Department and the Pentagon. Keep in mind: Bremer's office is a division of the Pentagon; he reports to Donald Rumsfeld. No, this particular foul-up falls in the same category of neglect as failing to send in military police, failing to secure power stations, failing to imagine that things might not go as planned.

Analysis: There are so many ways to frame this story; I'll just pick two. Wouldn't you think that communications would be a part of the plan for post-war Iraq? It's certainly a part of any war plan. Communications gets its own annex in an operations plan by Army doctrine, and every major staff from battalion to CENTCOM has a special section devoted to communications. When I deployed, our signal officers always had a plan for acquiring commercial cell phones, because they provided a convenient and useful non-secure mode of commo on the ground. I'm shocked we didn't have a good plan to do this for Iraq. So as Mr. Kaplan says, we clearly had a planning breakdown here -- just as we had a number of other planning breakdowns in Iraq.

There's another story here though. America's military has run on a peacetime budget since the end of the Cold War, with some minor hiccups for the Gulf War and supplemental funding that went to specific operations like Bosnia and Kosovo. Procurement budgets have been cut; R&D budgets have been cut; institutional bases have been cut -- nearly everything up to and including the fighting force has been trimmed. In peacetime, that's okay. You can manage a peacetime Army by the eaches, budgeting money and spare parts for each company-sized unit in order to keep the entire Army in the black. I clearly remember trying to buy spare tires for my HMMWVs as a young MP platoon leader and being told the money wasn't in the budget -- we'd just have to requisition them as we blew them.

War is different. You need excess parts at the lower levels of command to absorb the unexpected things that happen to equipment. Moreover, you can't allocate usage to vehicles and equipment the way you can in peacetime. In peacetime, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle is allocated 800 miles of driving per year -- to include all ranges, training exercises, and motor pool driving. That figure is chosen because of the cost associated with each mile driven, which translates into spare parts the Army must buy for every mile driven. The Army has Y number of Bradleys, and it can only afford to pay for the parts that 800 miles x Y Bradleys equals. Our Bradleys in Iraq have driven thousands of miles, literally ripping the Army's cost projections to shreds along with their tracks which now need replacement in record numbers. And that costs money. A lot of money.

Unfortunately, our defense industry has consolidated and reorganized during the last decade since the end of the Cold War. It can't efficiently rise to the occasion to produce large quantities of Bradley tracks in a hurry -- or HMMWV tires, or BA-5590 batteries, or anything else that the military needs quickly for Iraq. The defense industry can produce these things with time, and it can create new production lines, but it will cost a lot to do so. (The Economist had a great survey on the defence industry a few months ago, but I can't remember the exact cite) A major portion of the President's $87 billion funding request is set aside to pay for current operations needs like these. The Army Materiel Command is flat broke -- it can't come up with any more parts, or any more spares, to keep the Army in Iraq going. Any surplus capacity that remained in the force has been used up in Iraq.

So what does this have to do with cell phones? Not much. But there is a myth out there that America's military has everything it needs; that it operates with state-of-the-art equipment in every way; that it is overfunded in some way. Certainly, some elements (e.g. Special Forces) have the latest and coolest gadgets -- and they should. But the average unit in the active Army does more with less every day, and they don't get what they need when they need it until it's often too late. The reserves and National Guard do their jobs with even less. (My National Guard unit had FM communications systems that were older than me, and could not talk to their active duty counterparts.)

When the FY2005 National Defense Authorization Act comes to Congress, I think it's high time we asked tough questions about where the Pentagon is putting its money. Do we really need to spend all this money on future transformation right now, with so much of our force stuck in Iraq? Shouldn't we put more money into current operations, considering that we already have a 1-generation technology edge on our allies (e.g. Britain), let alone our enemies? $400 billion is a lot of money for defense, but it goes quickly when you spend $10 billion here and there for big programs like missile defense. I think we ought to spend more on our soldiers, sergeants and lieutenants, where the rubber meets the road.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:32

 
DOJ reveals number of times it's used Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act: 0

In what must be a stunning blow to the ACLU's publicity campaign against the USA Patriot Act, the Washington Post reported today that Sec. 215 of the Act has been used 0 times to obtain an order to search through "quote". This section of the act, which was signed into law on Oct. 26, 2001, has become the focal point of criticism from civil liberties advocates who say the Bush Administration has gone too far in pursuing security at the expense of liberty. The section has even provoked a strong response from America's librarians, who have gone so far as to destroy library records lest they fall into the Justice Department's hands.

"The number of times [the provision] has been used to date is zero," Ashcroft said in the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The disclosure is the latest volley in an escalating war of words between Ashcroft and his critics, which include civil liberties groups and some Democratic presidential candidates, who have condemned the Patriot Act as an attack on individual rights. Ashcroft is in the midst of a cross-country speaking tour aimed at shoring up support for the law, which has been the focus of more than 160 protest resolutions across the country.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a law approved six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, expands the government's power to obtain records from a wide range of businesses as part of a counterterrorism investigation, without notifying the subjects of the probe. The potential use of the provision in libraries has generated some of the strongest objections to the law.

In reversing his position, Ashcroft told Mueller that the value of disclosing the information outweighs the potential harm to national security. Justice officials have long resisted releasing the information, saying the threat of the provision's use poses a deterrent to potential terrorists.

"To date we have not been able to counter the troubling amount of public distortion and misinformation in connection with Section 215," Ashcroft wrote. "Consequently, I have determined that it is in the public interest and the best interest of law enforcement to declassify this information."

Ashcroft's disclosure does not address how investigators have used other parts of the sprawling Patriot legislation. Justice officials have indicated in previous responses to Congress that top-secret National Security Letters used by the FBI are a "more appropriate tool" for obtaining business records in many cases. Scores of such letters have been used since the Sept. 11 attacks, sources have said.

Analysis: First, let me state my skepticism up front. This may be a "leaked memo" in the great tradition of leaked Washington memoranda. The Justice Department is waging a campaign now to bolster the credibility of the Patriot Act, complete with a roadshow by AG John Ashcroft. It's possible -- even probable -- that this memo was leaked by DOJ in order to shape the debate on the issue. I don't think that DOJ would actually fabricate such a memo, but without reading it to evaluate its precise terms, I can't make a good evaluation of its authenticity, veracity, or credibility.

Second, the AG acknowledges that "other tools" have been used in the fight against terrorism, and that there has been no real need for the use of Sec. 215. Some of those other tools, such as the use of "enemy combatant" status in plea bargain negotiations, are indeed heavy-handed. I think there remains some legitimate room for criticism of the Justice Department on these issues.

That said, this is a major blow for the ACLU's campaign if it's true. Sec. 215 was written with broad language, and it does give the Justice Department a lot of power. The ACLU and others have played on Americans' fear that this power might be abused by prosecutors with ulterior motives. If it's true that this power has not been used, let alone abused, then this may reassure the American public. Some Americans may even change their opinion of the Bush Administration on the issue of civil liberties, and once again trust the Justice Department on these issues.

One last note: If nothing else, this shows the value of open discussion of these issues for both sides. The Justice Department gains from full disclosure here because the disclosure of Sec. 215 order statistics shows that it has not abused this power. The public gains by having this knowledge of precisely what its government is doing with respect to its Constitutional rights. Even the ACLU gains, by winning a larger battle over public access to information.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:22

 
Senior military officers push for withdrawal from Balkans
Does it make sense to take soldiers from Bosnia and Kosovo for Iraq?

The Financial Times of London reports today that a group of American military officers has made a concerted effort within the Pentagon to recommend an American exit from Bosnia and Kosovo. The move would free up some American combat power -- as well as "nation building" units like MPs and Civil Affairs -- for deployment to Iraq. But, FT reports that the move has run into tough opposition from those who see the Balkans as an American success story.

"The DoD [Department of Defense] wants out," said one former top Pentagon official. "It's driven by the joint staff and the army."

Although the army has made similar arguments in the past, officers are making headway. According to a senior Bush administration official, the current debate began as part of a thorough review of all US commitments abroad, which has gained more urgency as it became clear more than 100,000 US troops would remain in Iraq indefinitely.

"The Balkans have always been essentially a European challenge more than an American one," the administration official said. "Much of Europe seems bound and determined to leave Iraq as primarily an American challenge. Perhaps, therefore, a more clear-cut division of labour is in order."

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment. But sources said opposition from some Pentagon civilians, as well as state department officials, centres on the diplomatic impact of withdrawing, as well as whether European allies - particularly the French and Germans - can successfully take over operations.

Analysis: There are a lot of interwoven issues here, and I'll address just a few. First, the number of American troops is a finite number, and the deployment game is a zero-sum game where deployments to one place take away from the troops available to deploy somewhere else. That said, the Balkans missions do not require as much force structure as they once did, and the withdrawal from this mission will have a neglible impact on the forces available for Iraq -- even including MPs and Civil Affairs units. The Army could get a lot more out of streamlining its training and doctrine command.

Whatever gains that may be gotten from this proposal will be vastly outweighed by the political consequences of an American withdrawal from the Balkans. Europe -- and the world -- sees our intervention there as a success story; a case of American might being used for right. If we think we have diplomatic issues now with Europe, just wait 'til we pull a stunt like this. It would be short-sighted in the extreme.

Finally, let's not forget that one major sponsor of partisan guerilla warfare in the Balkans was Al Qaeda. Let's not forget that fundamentalist Muslim guerillas used Bosnia and Kosovo as another battlefield for their jihad in the 1990s, along with Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. To this day, the financial webs of Al Qaeda continue to include parts of the Balkans, and the channels for the movement of men, materiel and money continue to run through the Balkans. If we withdraw from the Balkans, we do so at our own peril.
posted by Phillip Carter at 10:20

 
DARPA faces the Congressional budget axe

After suffering the slings and arrows of Congressional oversight, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) appears to be headed for fiscal purgatory, according to Noah Shachtman at DefenseTech, and also in Wired News. Noah reports that the Senate's version of the Defense Authorization Act has serious cuts in store for DARPA, beyond even what was expected.

Some of the cuts to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were expected: Lawmakers have been trying for the better part of a year to excise the notoriously far-reaching Terrorism Information Awareness database program.

But others seem to have come out of regulatory left field. Widely hailed research into using the brain to control robotic limbs, and training the mind to function on little or no sleep, will come to an end if the Senate's version of the Defense Department Appropriations bill becomes law.

Noah quotes from a source with the Federation of American Scientists that DARPA may be paying the price for its advocacy of programs like Total Information Awareness. I'm sure that's the case. But we all may pay the price if DARPA's budget is slashed. The overwhelming majority of DARPA projects go nowhere -- but they do stimulate research in basic science and applied science areas that would otherwise not be funded. To some extent, we all benefit from this kind of scientific research, just as we benefit from basic science research done on the MIT or Berkeley campuses. For decades, DARPA has been one of the most vibrant federal agencies in existence with respect to innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. It has also spurred development in universities and the private sector through its creative ideas and funding grants. We will all suffer if this agency takes a big hit.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:00

 
The Citizen Soldier's Burden

Today's New York Times has an important story about the sacrifice being made by today's Army reservists in the war on terrorism. For some, that sacrifice has gotten to be too much, and they are contemplating the decision to leave the military altogether after their current mobilization ends.

. . . since the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Gorski, a staff sergeant with the 870th Military Police Company of the California National Guard, has spent 16 months away from home, first at an Army base in Tacoma, Wash., and most recently in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala. He is likely to spend eight more months in Iraq, and he has decided to leave the National Guard as soon as he can.

"It's just like being on active duty," he said in a telephone interview from Karbala, where 125 members of his company are stationed. "And there's a reason you get out of active duty. At the same time, you want to stay because of patriotism, so you join the National Guard or the reserves. All the guys are prepared for one deployment, especially in the wake of Sept. 11. But we've basically returned to active duty, and that's not what we're in for. It's too much to ask."

It is attitudes like Mr. Gorski's that have military officials deeply worried about an exodus from the state-based National Guards and the reserves of the nation's armed forces. Since 9/11, hundreds of thousands of citizen soldiers have been mobilized at a level thought to be the highest since World War II.

Those concerns grew last week when the Army announced that about 20,000 reservists and National Guard troops stationed in Iraq and Kuwait would likely have to serve a full year from the time they landed in those countries, extending their tours by several months.

"It's different from Desert Storm," said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Monroe Jr., the adjutant general, or commander, of the California National Guard, which has some 1,500 troops in Iraq. "Nobody was gone a year. Everyone went together and came home together. Now they have to think if they stay in, how many more times will they be mobilized? That's paramount on their minds, and that's never been paramount on their minds."

General Monroe, who was in Iraq over the weekend to see his troops there for the first time and spoke by telephone, added, "When I became adjutant general, I thought my biggest problem was going to be an earthquake. Nobody envisioned this."

Analysis: Having recently served in the California Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve, I can testify to this problem from first-hand experience. Mobilizations are not just decimating (reducing by 10%) the personnel strength of these units -- these mobilizations are rendering units absolutely combat ineffective. One battalion I'm familiar with mobilized in October 2001 for a one-year homeland security mission. It returned in October 2002, only to lose more than half its personnel who refused to reenlist or even attend drills anymore. The only soldiers who remain in the reserves tend to fall into three categories:

(1) Soldiers who are so close to retirement that they have too much vested to get out. This tends to include senior sergeants and officers in the rank of Major and above;
(2) Soldiers who work in the civilian world for the government, and are relatively immune from the civilian-job consequences of back-to-back mobilizations;
(3) Soldiers who just joined and have yet to receive the educational benefits or other benefits they joined the military for, or cannot leave because they are still serving their initial enlistment.

Those three groups include roughly 30-40% of the reserve force. The rest will probably decide to get out after their current mobilization ends, or when their current enlistment ends. This portends a crisis of readiness for America's reserves, particularly if the war on terrorism will require their services in the near future for another conflict or another tour in Iraq. The overwhelming majority of "nation building" force structure (Civil Affairs, Military Police, Medical, Logistics, etc) resides in the reserve component. Bottom Line: If we see an exodus of reservists in the next several months, we will also see a corresponding decline in our readiness to conduct nation-building missions around the world.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:54

 
Is Secretary Rumsfeld in political trouble?

Josh Marshall has been asking this question for a while, spurred by criticisms of the Pentagon over its planning for post-war Iraq and other important matters. Privately, some friends of mine in the Pentagon and surrounding defense community have speculated as to whether he'd be asked back for a second term in the E-Ring.

Now, Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb at the Washington Post pile on the same story, reporting that Rumsfeld's star may now be in decline. Mr. Ricks is often regarded as the dean of the Pentagon press corps, with Mr. Loeb as a senior faculty member. If they're reporting this, I think this story is a lot closer to conventional wisdom than many would think.

Having demanded full authority for overseeing the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, elbowing the State Department aside, Rumsfeld is being blamed by many in Congress and the military establishment for the problems facing the United States, which include mounting U.S. casualties and costs exceeding $1 billion a week.

Whatever else Rumsfeld achieves at the Pentagon, the outcome of the Iraq occupation will go a long way toward determining his legacy in this, his second stint as secretary of defense. It also will affect the political fortunes of President Bush, whose reelection bid could hinge on events in Iraq.

Rumsfeld's ability to weather his largest crisis will depend to a degree on his standing with three key constituencies: the White House, Congress and the military's officer corps. How he does with them will be shaped largely by whether security improves in Iraq, according to officials in the administration, Congress and the Pentagon.

At the moment, at least, Rumsfeld's standing among all three is mixed. White House officials said that Rumsfeld retains the full confidence of the president. But after a long winning streak, the Pentagon chief has begun to lose some policy battles, most notably when Bush decided to seek a new United Nations resolution on Iraq -- a course about which Rumsfeld has expressed reservations.

Rumsfeld's relations with the military have been strained since he returned to office. This is particularly true within the Army, which felt threatened by his modernization plans before the Sept. 11 attacks and where concern runs deep about the damage the Iraq occupation could do the service in the long run.

Rumsfeld appears to be losing ground most dramatically on Capitol Hill, where even some conservative Republicans are expressing concern about his handling of Iraq. "Winning the peace is a lot different than winning the war," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who counts himself as a strong Rumsfeld supporter but notes that not all his colleagues feel the same. "His bluntness comes across as arrogance, and he's made some enemies on Capitol Hill, probably because of style differences," said Graham, an Air Force veteran who serves on the Armed Services Committee.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the panel's chairman, struck a decidedly cool note when asked how Rumsfeld is doing. "Understandably we have some differences," he said Friday in a written response. "However, I consistently work with Secretary Rumsfeld to support the president and the men and women of the armed forces, and have a high regard for his integrity and forcefulness."

Analysis: At the very least, one has to wonder about the SecDef's continued viability in light of concerns over Iraq. As early as May, I could read the tea leaves that we didn't have the requisite plan or resources in place to do the job we needed to. Had the SecDef chosen a different style of management, this may have been the fault of planners at the lower level, perhaps at CENTCOM. But the war plan for Iraq -- and its post-war progeny -- clearly came from the SecDef's planning cell and left the Pentagon with his personal imprimatur. The logical consequence of that fact is that the Secretary should bear the responsibility for any problems in the plan.

All plans change when they're executed, but this one was fatally flawed from the start for at least four reasons:
(1) It explicitly adopted assumptions that were incredibly optimistic about the way the Iraqi people would behave after "liberation" from the Hussein regime;
(2) The plan did not allocate any resources for the contingency that those assumptions may prove to be faulty, something the CIA had been advising the SecDef for the months leading up to the war;
(3) The SecDef's plan did not change enough to reflect the deletion of Turkey as a jumping-off point for the land campaign, and it did not include a way to effectively pacify the northern part of the country and the approach routes to Baghdad after the war. Had we gone in from Turkey, the 4th Infantry Division would have steamrolled right through the "Sunni Triangle" where we're having all these problems now. That change was never fully incorporated into the plan.
(4) The SecDef's campaign plan did not anticipate rapid success as well as it should have, and this caused a gap between the date of liberation and the date when the post-war plan was ready to be executed.

There were other flaws in the plan, but those flaws were generally corrected by outstanding execution on the ground by American men and women in uniform. These flaws could not be so easily corrected, because they resulted in political decisions (e.g. how many reservists to mobilize) that could not be fixed at the V Corps or CENTCOM level. Only the President and SecDef can make those determinations, and their plan was flawed from the start.

Does this rise to the level of resignation for the SecDef? I'm not smart enough to guess that, nor am I privy to the Washington beltway buzz on this issue to be able to speculate on what movers and shakers thought. But I do think he's becoming a political liability for the White House, just as the Attorney General has become. In 2002, the average American associated the SecDef with forthright press conferences about our progress in the war on terrorism. Now, I think the average American associates Secretary Rumsfeld with continuing carnage in Iraq.
posted by Phillip Carter at 14:18

 
A war on terrorism or a war on civil liberties?
Some question U.S. tactics in the law enforcement part of the fight against terrorism

Sunday's Los Angeles Times has an interesting story on its front page about the Holy Land Foundation, which has been effectively shut down by the State, Treasury and Justice Departments as an entity that provides financial support to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

The foundation's bank accounts are frozen by government edict. Its possessions, from computers to potted plants, have been locked away in government storerooms for nearly two years. The charity's sole activity is a lawsuit aimed at recovering $5 million in assets frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Federal judges have repeatedly upheld the government's authority to shut down Holy Land because of its suspected ties to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. At the same time, the Justice Department is targeting the charity in a criminal investigation that accelerated last month with a round of subpoenas ordering several former employees to appear before a Dallas grand jury.

"Every day," said Shukri Abu Baker, Holy Land's Palestinian American director, "I wake up thinking: 'Is this the day they will come to handcuff me?' "

Holy Land's public transformation from almsgiver to pariah reveals a charity whose deeds were blurred by associations with suspected militants.

Wracked by a decade of internal debate over how to deal with the charity, the U.S. government veered from inaction to crackdown. There have also been missteps. The Times has learned that a secret FBI application for surveillance connected to the Holy Land case was flawed and could prompt a new legal challenge.

The government's stance against Holy Land reflects the official view that Hamas operations inside the United States require the same level of scrutiny as Al Qaeda, even though the Palestinian faction has not been known to target American citizens. Hamas cultivates Palestinian popular support and deflects international criticism by blending welfare with violence — sending bomb-laden recruits against Israeli civilian targets while showering social aid on destitute refugees.

Holy Land's fate has become a key test of the Bush administration's expanded view of terrorism: that charities can pose a threat by funding legitimate programs used to provide cover for militants. Officials charge that Holy Land secretly aided Hamas by funneling donations to Palestinian schools, hospitals and other aid programs tied to the resistance group — and to stipends that nurtured the families of suicide bombers.

"We don't deny that a lot of their funds went for good works," said Juan C. Zarate, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for terrorism and violent crime. "But they helped an organization that had a larger agenda of fomenting terrorism."

Analysis: It's hard to know what the truth is in a situation like that of the Holy Land Foundation. On the one hand, both sides agree that Hamas provides legitimate social services for the Palestinian people. It only makes sense that moderate Arabs around the world would want to give money to that worthy cause. On the other hand, however, money is highly fungible. Giving money to Hamas is like giving money to a thug who also has a worthy family. You lose control over the money once it's given, so you don't know if it's going to buy weapons or food. And at the very least, if it goes to buy food it frees up money that may subsequently be used to buy weapons.

The key, from an American legal perspective, is to quash this kind of financial activity without restricting the rights of Americans to freely associate or express themselves as guaranteed by the First Amendment. The statute in question, 18 U.S.C. 2339b, has been attacked on the grounds that it chills speech and other forms of expression (e.g. giving money) that might be regarded as providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations. (See this lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights) There is some sort of line to be drawn between what is lawful and what is not, but that line is apt to be quite fuzzy. I trust our federal courts to draw the line, but many aren't so willing.

Ultimately, our efforts to dismantle the financial networks used by terrorists is every bit as important as our effort to find their weapons of mass destruction, or their leaders. Without such financial networks, these terrorists lose their global reach. Unfortunately, this aspect of the anti-terrorism fight is in jeopardy because the administration currently lacks credibility with a large part of the American public with respect to civil liberties. Pushing forward proposals (like this one) to enlarge administrative subpoena power is a bad way to rebuild that credibility. Instead, what's needed is an accounting. The American people need to know (among other things):

(a) What's being done by law enforcement in the war on terrorism, within reasonable bounds of operational security;
(b) How new powers are being used by law enforcement. If the matters themselves are too sensitive, such as FISA warrants, then perhaps a statistical summary of FISA warrants can be released along with some general explanation;
(c) A progress report on the war on terrorism. Again, it may not be possible to produce too detailed of a report for operational security reasons. However, an candid summary that's unclassified would still be worthwhile.

As with Iraq, the American public wants and needs to know our end state with respect to the legal war on terrorism. My friends and family members are quite willing to embrace some short-term actions by law enforcement, but they are not willing to start down an increasingly steep slippery slope to which there is no end. By themselves, these actions by the Justice Department generally don't frighten my friends or family members. But in the aggregate, they do frighten many people. What's needed is some sort of end state -- a point at which there will be no more balancing of liberty against security.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:59

 
Trimming the fat at the Pentagon
Should we cut missile defense to buy better body armor for our troops?

Fred Kaplan has an interesting piece in Slate about places where we could excise a little money from the burgeoning American defense budget. As the largest discretionary item in the federal budget, defense will swallow nearly $400 billion in FY2004, and considerably more when you factor in supplemental appropriations for Iraq and the war on terrorism. Kaplan suggests cutting a few weapons programs which have not cut the mustard:

The $87 billion supplemental for Iraq and Afghanistan is fairly straightforward: $32.3 billion for operations and maintenance, $18.5 billion for personnel, $1.9 billion for equipment, $5 billion for security, $15 billion for infrastructure, and so on. It's a bookkeeping calculation: If you want to continue the mission, that's what it costs; if you want to spend less, you have to downgrade the mission.

But there's plenty more in the military budget that does not have the slightest connection to any clear and present (or even murky and distant) danger.

When Congress passed the military budget last spring, nobody had any idea that "postwar" difficulties would boost it by $87 billion—more than one-fifth of its original, already hefty size. Nor did anyone project that the federal deficit would meanwhile expand to nearly half a trillion dollars. When your kid's in the hospital, your roof is leaking, and your salary's just been cut, you should probably put off plans to build a pool or buy a plasma-screen television. The military budget is in a similar state, and it only makes sense to reopen the books, set priorities, and slash those programs that can safely be deferred.

Analysis: The real problem with weapons programs it that their cost tends to balloon as they age. Retired Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney has done some brilliant work (see this data too) investigating weapons programs over the past 30 years, and his work indicates that every major weapons program winds up costing much more than we thought when we bought it. The reasons are simple. Defense contractors push a lot of their costs to the back end so that they can get the Pentagon to buy in when a project looks cheap. As the costs balloon, the contractors can file a claim for the costs, usually based on some sort of constructive change in the contract. The result is that large procurement programs have a deceptively small cost in the short-term, and a larger cost in the long-term, and an overall cost that's much higher than anticipated.

Clearly, we need some (or most) of these programs to field the military that fought so decisively in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. But the tough part is finding the right mix of programs, and balancing that against expenditures for personnel and current operations. I find it quite telling that the President's $87 billion request for Iraq includes a substantial purchase of body armor for American soldiers. My reporting indicates this will go to purchase individual sets of the newest body armor for all soldiers who will rotate through Iraq, and eventually for the entire Army and Marine Corps. I think this is a good thing, given the success this body armor had in Iraq. But I also think this body armor is something we should have bought a long time ago. The fact that we're buying it now tells me that we've spent far too much on long-term weapons procurement, and far too little on the short-term stuff our soldiers need.
posted by Phillip Carter at 13:09

 
Moussaoui one step closer to a military tribunal?

The Washington Post reports that U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema has given the U.S. government another order in the Moussaoui case to comply with her order allowing access to other terrorists the U.S. has in custody. Moussaoui is seeking access to Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, in accordance with the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses, in order to gather information which might be helpful to his defense. I think the defense theory is that Moussaoui was actually not a part of the Sept. 11 plan, and these two men can prove it.

Government officials filed no response yesterday, but indicated that they were likely to defy the order and refuse to produce the two witnesses -- identified by sources as former al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, a Saudi who allegedly served as paymaster to the Sept. 11 hijackers. Both are in custody and being questioned at an undisclosed location.

Brinkema is expected, if disobeyed, to sanction the government for its failure to produce not only Mohammed and Hawsawi but also Ramzi Binalshibh, another top al Qaeda operative. In January, Brinkema ruled that Moussaoui could depose Binalshibh.

Possible punishments range from dismissing the case against Moussaoui to striking the possibility of the death penalty. Prosecutors are expected to appeal any adverse ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

If they ultimately are ordered to produce the three al Qaeda operatives by the higher courts, government officials have said they would refuse. The case probably would be moved to a military tribunal, where Moussaoui would not have the right to interview the witnesses.

Analysis: If Judge Brinkema backs the government into a corner, I think they will remove this case to a tribunal. Few will shed a tear for Mr. Moussaoui if he's transferred to military custody, and it might even make the U.S. government look more legitimate in the sense that it's treating him like the other non-citizen terrorists it has in custody at Gitmo. (Of course, Moussaoui is a French citizen so there may be some diplomatic complications here)

But the real question is political: does the White House have the political capital (not to mention the chutzpah) to put a person in front of a military tribunal, given the heat they have taken for these trials and other issues (e.g. the USA PATRIOT Act). I don't think the White House wants that kind of lightning rod to be planted on its front lawn at this juncture (wouldn't be prudent). In fact, I think the likely fate for Mr. Moussaoui will be that of Mr. Hamdi and Mr. Padilla. An order will be signed designating him an enemy combatant, and that will be the end of it. No trial, at least not in the short term. No political risk, other than what's already been incurred for those other 'combatants'. This seems like the most likely course of action to me.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:00

 
Two great pieces in Slate to check out

Once again, Slate has two great pieces of writing in two areas I care a lot about: law and war. The first piece comes from Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's outstanding legal correspondent, who details some of the discussion over the USA PATRIOT Act. Ms. Lithwick correctly points out the fact that too few people debating the Patriot Act actually know the minutiae of the act, and she tries to correct that lack of knowledge with her four-part series.

Second, Fred Kaplan chimes in with a great piece on the President Bush's lost opportunities after Sept. 11. Another president might have remade the world... this one did not. There will surely be lots of once-over-the-world analysis of Sept. 11 in the next few days. I'll try to find the better pieces and link to them.
posted by Phillip Carter at 20:53

 
'Training the Brains Behind the Intelligence'

This creative headline will run above a very interesting story in Monday's Los Angeles Times on the FBI's efforts to train terrorism analysts at its academy in Quantico, Virginia. Among the most significant failures before Sept. 11 was the failure to train adequate numbers of intelligence analysts who could find the indicators of terrorism and put those indicators together into a coherent picture. (Other failures included the lack of cross-talk between offices and lack of communication with the intelligence community) Now, Richard Schmitt writes in the LA Times, things are getting better.

. . . these are different kinds of recruits. They will not become FBI field agents, who come to this campus 30 miles south of Washington to hone their shooting skills and engage in cops-and-robbers exercises at a mock village that looks transported from a Hollywood back lot.

Rather, these are analysts who try to outthink their adversaries, and their training is strictly in the classroom.

Analysts "do not do the glamorous things," said Patricia Boord, the FBI unit chief in charge of the College of Analytical Studies. "They do mostly intellectual exercises."

Teamwork, communication and sifting of data — connecting the dots — are at the heart of a transformation the FBI is trying to undergo.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon two years ago, the storied agency was exposed as inept and ill-prepared. Congress and the public clamored for change.

In response, the bureau is redeploying agents into counterterrorism and working more closely with the CIA and other intelligence rivals. And it is struggling to create a mind-set that thinks harder and learns more from what it knows.

The story goes onto discuss the nature of the training exercises being used by the FBI to train these analysts. (A lot gets left out, but you can understand the security reasons for why that's so) Just as America's military must transform itself to deal with the 4th Generation Warfare threat, so too must the rest of America's security apparatus -- its FBI, INS, judiciary, homeland security agency, state and local police, and many others. The FBI has built a legendary reputation for solving crimes and winning convictions, but that's not enough in the realm of terrorism. Now, the FBI has to get so good at inchoate investigations that it can prevent terrorism from happening -- that's a lot harder than catching the bad guys and trying them after the bomb goes off. The key to this transformation is intelligence. And if this story is indicative of a larger trend, I'd say the FBI is on the right track.
posted by Phillip Carter at 21:33

 
Powell: Iraq will cost more than we think

In what should come as no surprise, Secretary of State Colin Powell said today that America's mission in Iraq will cost billions more than projected -- or known -- today. Powell's statement comes as the administration heads to Capitol Hill in search of additional funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the global war on terrorism.

"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women," Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday. "Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation," he told CBS' "Face the Nation."

Bush was discussing Iraq and the terrorism fight in a nationally televised address from the White House on Sunday night.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the president believes the "cost of freedom and the cost of peace cannot be measured and that it is important that we put adequate resources to this task."
* * *
Rice declined to offer specifics on how much money would be needed. Congressional aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they would not be surprised if the amount the president requests is higher than the $60 billion to $80 billion figure that has been reported for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.

"I think it could be bigger than $80 billion," said a congressional aide, who is familiar with the president's work in refining how much to request from Congress. "I think the expectation is that it's going to be a very, very big number."

A second congressional aide said: "I'm thinking we're in the $70 billion to $80 billion range and I would lean to the higher end of that."

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Congress will approve the money needed to support U.S. troops, but lawmakers want the president to tell them what his "exit strategy" is from Iraq.

Analysis: Former-Army Chief of Staff Gordon R. Sullivan wrote a book titled "Hope is not a method," and that book title has become a mantra among America's military officers. That Secretary Powell would use the word "hopefully" in describing our chances of securing Iraq is not a good sign. Of all people, he understands the futility of hope as a planning method.

The real stakes here are much higher. The authorization and appropriations debate over Iraq is really a battle about who will control American foreign policy -- warmaking, diplomacy, nation-building, and everything else. Art. I and Art. II of the Constitution embody a tension between Congress and the President, and that tension has not been easily resolved for our Constitution's 213 year history. This tension typically plays out each other with the National Defense Authorization Act and its companion authorization bill, where Congress tells the President how to spend money on defense. Suffice to say, if something doesn't get funded, it generally doesn't get done -- especially where large weapons systems (e.g. missile defense) are concerned. The annual authorization bill also includes hundreds (or thousands) of small provisions which set policy for the military as a matter of federal law. Each year, this bill is the largest piece of legislation considered or passed by Congress.

The battle over funding for Iraq is obviously more important than a given year's annual authorization act. The lives of America's sons and daughters are at stake, as well as the direction of a mission that has the potential to influence our foreign policy for decades. Funding is the tool by which Congress exercises oversight of this mission. It would be easier if Congress could simply hold hearings on the wisdom or efficacy of Iraq. But that's not the way that oversight works -- funding is the hook on which the entire process hangs. The authority to fund (or defund) the mission is the leverage Congress has to ask the tough questions of the White House on Iraq:

- Why did we invade Iraq (if not for WMD), and did we accomplish the missions we set for the major combat phase of the war?
- What key tasks remain for our mission in Iraq (e.g. the capture of Saddam Hussein, restoration of electricity, holding of elections, etc)?
- What is our desired end state for Iraq?
- What are the criteria by which we will measure this end state? (And by extension, will these criteria determine our exit from Iraq?
- What is our plan for achieving this end state?

The Constitution empowers the President as commander-in-chief of the military, and it gives him plenary power in the area of foreign policy. But it gives Congress the power to raise and maintain the military, as well as the power to fund the military. Presidents typically criticize Congress for asking these kinds of questions, and for letting partisanship infect foreign policy. The Bush White House will likely say that Congressional probing is hindering our ability to persevere in Iraq. If Congress delays its funding decisions in order to hold hearings, the screaming from the White House will get even louder. That's unfortunate. The Framers intended this tension when they wrote our Constitution. If they were looking at this debate over funding for Iraq, I think they'd be quite proud that their system of checks and balances worked exactly the way they intended.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:02

 
Security v. mission accomplishment -- a really hard tradeoff

Today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a great article by Greg Jaffe and Chris Cooper about the tradeoffs being made by commanders on the ground in Iraq between site security and other missions. In the aftermath of deadly car bombings, many have called for the deployment of U.S. soldiers as security around key sites -- police stations, large mosques, government centers, power stations, et cetera. As we have a finite number of soldiers on the ground, the dedication of U.S. troops to these sites takes away from the available pool of soldiers who can conduct offensive missions.

Careful to say they are not short of troops now, commanders conceded that they are under ever-greater pressure to siphon off troops for defense, as civilians, foreign governments and U.S. politicians clamor for better security. While a United Nations resolution just offered by the U.S. may lead to an agreement to bring foreign reinforcements to Iraq, the Pentagon is concerned the wait may be long.

Quick relief from the U.N. appears unlikely. Thursday, both French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder dismissed the U.S.'s proposed U.N. resolution as inadequate. Mr. Chirac said that while his government is "naturally ready to study" the resolution, he said it was "quite far removed from what we believe is the priority objective, which is the transfer of political responsibility to an Iraqi government as quickly as possible." Mr. Schroeder opposed the idea that the U.S. -- not the U.N. -- should oversee political developments in Iraq.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez warned Thursday that international forces would be needed to help tackle looming security threats, such as Iranian fighters or possible conflict between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslims. "If a militia or an internal conflict of some nature were to erupt ... that would be an additional security challenge out there that I do not have sufficient forces for," Gen. Sanchez said. "There are security challenges that are looming in the future that will require additional forces, and those are issues that with the coalition, and with time, can be resolved," he said.

Analysis: I can tell you from experience that this is a really tough balancing act. On the one hand, you have critical sites and high-value assets that must be protected. Some of these are Iraqi sites; others belong to the U.S. But if you leave these unprotected, it's almost a sure thing that the enemy will attack them. And if you lose these things (e.g. U.S. command post), you risk a major tactical or operational setback. So you have to dedicate the assets to protecting these sites.

On the other hand, you can't win a counter-insurgency fight by playing good defense. The way to win a guerilla war is to go on offense -- to gather intelligence, find the enemy, hunt them down, and capture or kill them. If you devote too many troops to this mission, you take away from your ability to prosecute the offensive part of the fight. Commanders and planners are trained to evaluate the operational risk entailed in both courses of action, and it's a safe bet that this balance is being looked at daily to make sure we get it right.

To add another level of complexity, there's a paradox in anti-terrorism planning which goes like this: The more you protect the hard targets, the more you have to worry about the soft targets. Our enemy is not stupid. Al Qaeda has typically chosen its targets after careful reconnaissance designed to determine the vulnerability of their intended target. If we protect something they want to hit, they'll either change methods or change targets. Our jihadist enemies may want to become martyrs, but they don't want to fail in their attacks.

So how do we strike this balance? As always, it's easier said than done. The most important thing is to gather, analyze and produce good intelligence to aid the commander in making these tradeoffs. The second most important thing is to have sufficient resources on the ground so you don't have to guard too few things in order to leave yourself some offensive capability. And the third thing is to constantly reevaluate these decisions in light of new threat information. I think we're doing these things, save some residual concerns about having enough troops in Iraq to do everything we need to do.
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:14

 
America's 'grief corps'

Think you have a tough job? Think again. Today's Washington Post has a sobering article on the military officers and NCOs who have one of the toughest jobs in America: casualty notification. There's not much I can say here, except that I have enormous respect for these men and women who personally notify every family of every casualty no matter what the cause. This function exists in war and peace, yet since Sept. 11, it has escalated into quite a large task for America's military.

More troops are dying in Iraq and more families are requesting funerals at Fort Myer than Winborne's 10-person staff can handle. The shortage in the Army's bereavement corps is so acute that her department has started actively recruiting new casualty notification officers and casualty assistance officers -- CNOs and CAOs, the men and women who do some of the grimmest work of war, unheralded and far from the battlefields.

The notification officers have a one-time job: They deliver the bad news and the secretary of the Army's condolences. Then, within a day, the casualty assistance officers take over and spend as long as a year working with the deceased's immediate family, sometimes functioning as stand-ins. On the first visit, the CAO delivers the $6,000 "death gratuity" check. The officers walk a fine line with grieving families, taking kids out for Happy Meals and filling out tax returns but never allowing themselves to get too close.

CAOs are expected to continue with their day jobs but make the family's concerns their first priority. They take care of the funeral arrangements, the transportation costs, the casket selection, the printing of memorial cards, the endless paperwork -- as much as the family wants them to do.

"It's the hardest job there is," says [Army Capt. Rita] Winborne, 37.

posted by Phillip Carter at 07:47

 
Screaming Eagles work hard to rebuild Iraq

The New York Times has an interesting article today on the progress made by the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. The article piqued my interest because I've worked with Col. Linnington before, and his name and unit is featured prominently in the piece. But as I read down, I found some interesting things in this piece -- signs that we may be doing good things in Iraq despite the plans coming out of the Pentagon.

Col. Michael Linnington's brigade fought its way across Iraq. But one of his most unusual missions took place in this remote northwestern corner of the country.

His orders were simple — to work out agreement between local sheiks and Iraqi customs officials to restore trade with Syria. What was unusual was that the decision had been initiated not by the State Department or civilian administrators in Baghdad, but by Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the Army's 101st Airborne Division and the dominant political figure in Mosul and the surrounding areas in northern Iraq.

Three months later, there is a steady stream of cross-border traffic, and the modest fees that the division set for entering Iraq — $10 per car, $20 per truck — have raised revenue for expanded customs forces and other projects in the region.

A five-day trip through the 101st Division's large area of operation showed that American military, not the civilian-led occupation authority based in Baghdad, are the driving force in the region's political and economic reconstruction.

So what else is new? Field commanders, junior officers and sergeants are taking the initiative to make things work in Iraq, despite the best efforts at the top to frustrate their efforts. That has been true for decades, if not centuries. I doubt you'll find any of these actions by the 101st in a CENTCOM or JCS operational plan. Captains, majors and colonels figured it out on the ground.

Still, it doesn't surprise me that our military is taking the lead role in Iraq. That tracks a larger trend around the world, which Dana Priest effectively laid out in her book The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military. Essentially, the military has muscled out other U.S. governmental agency by force of its resources, size, rapid deployment capability, and ability to operate in a tense environment. At some point, down the road, we may see more USAID and State Department leadership in Iraq. But for now, it's natural to expect that DoD would take the lead role. Luckily, our men and women in these units are flexible and innovative enough to act as soldier/diplomat/policeman/politician/advisor -- whatever the situation may require. Now it's up to us to give them the resources (troops, money, equipment, international support) they need to do the job right.
posted by Phillip Carter at 07:45

 
The post-modern presidency of George W. Bush

Josh Marshall has this provocative essay in the September issue of the Washington Monthly on President Bush, and the argument that he epitomizes the idea of what a post-modern president would be. The piece is a little theoretical for a guy with my public school education, but it makes a very interesting point about this presidency that I hadn't considered yet. Here's the part that I thought said it all:

The president and his aides don't speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it. As astute observers such as National Journal's Jonathan Rauch have recently noted, George W. Bush campaigned as a moderate, but has governed with the most radical agenda of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the aim of most of Bush's policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago. On the domestic front, that has meant major tax cuts forcing sharp reductions in resources for future government activism, combined with privatization of as many government functions as possible. Abroad, Bush has pursued an expansive and militarized unilateralism aimed at cutting the U.S. free from entangling alliances and international treaty obligations so as to maximize freedom of maneuver for American power in a Hobbesian world.

Yet this is not an agenda that the bulk of the American electorate ever endorsed. Indeed, poll after poll suggest that Bush's policy agenda is not particularly popular. What the public wants is its problems solved: terrorists thwarted, jobs created, prescription drugs made affordable, the environment protected. Almost all of Bush's deceptions have been deployed when he has tried to pass off his preexisting agenda items as solutions to particular problems with which, for the most part, they have no real connection. That's when the unverifiable assertion comes in handy. Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions--tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower--that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future. In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration's main obstacle has been the experts themselves--the economists who didn't trust the budget projections, the generals who didn't buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts--a task that comes particularly easy to the revisionists who drive Bush administration policy. They tend to see experts as guardians of the status quo, who seek to block any and all change, no matter how necessary, and whose views are influenced and corrupted by the agendas and mindsets of their agencies. Like orthodox Marxists who pick apart mainstream economics and anthropology as the creations of 'bourgeois ideology' or Frenchified academic post-modernists who 'deconstruct' knowledge in a similar fashion, revisionist ideologues seek to expose "the facts" as nothing more than the spin of experts blinded by their own unacknowledged biases. The Bush administration's betes noir aren't patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, but establishmentarianism, big-government liberalism, and what they see as pervasive foreign policy namby-pambyism. For them, ignoring the experts and their 'facts' is not only necessary to advance their agenda, but a virtuous effort in the service of a higher cause.

This piece is sure to spark criticism from the neo-con media on the right, such as the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, just as Mr. Marshall's piece in March 2003 ("Practice to Deceive") did. But while such criticism is inevitable, it's probably also a waste of energy. Mr. Marshall's critique seems spot-on to me. Any salvos launched at Mr. Marshall from the White House will simply prove his point.
posted by Phillip Carter at 22:03

 
WP reports on the soldiers wounded in Iraq
Until now, the wounded toll went largely unreported by the major media and the Pentagon

Until now, there has been lots of reporting on those killed in Iraq, but little reporting on soldiers wounded in Iraq. Much of this owes to advances in body armor and battlefield medicine (also covered) which have transformed many wounds that would've been fatal in previous wars into injuries. However, Vernon Loeb reports in today's Washington Post that the numbers of wounded have actually been quite high -- and that thousands of Americans have returned home from Iraq as a result of wounds suffered in action.

The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues news releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.

The rising number and quickening pace of soldiers being wounded on the battlefield have been overshadowed by the number of troops killed since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations May 1. But alongside those Americans killed in action, an even greater toll of battlefield wounded continues unabated, with an increasing number being injured through small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, remote-controlled mines and what the Pentagon refers to as "improvised explosive devices."

Indeed, the number of troops wounded in action in Iraq is now more than twice that of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The total increased more than 35 percent in August -- with an average of almost 10 troops a day injured last month.
* * *
Pentagon officials point to advances in military medicine as one of the reasons behind the large number of wounded soldiers; many lives are being saved on the battlefield that in past conflicts would have been lost. But the rising number of casualties also reflects the resistance that U.S. forces continue to meet nearly five months after Hussein was ousted from power.

Although Central Command keeps a running total of the wounded, it releases the number only when asked -- making the combat injuries of U.S. troops in Iraq one of the untold stories of the war.

With no fanfare and almost no public notice, giant C-17 transport jets arrive virtually every night at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, on medical evacuation missions. Since the war began, more than 6,000 service members have been flown back to the United States. The number includes the 1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received non-hostile injuries in vehicle accidents and other mishaps, and thousands who became physically or mentally ill.

I'm no fan of body-count journalism, and I don't think we should make policies exclusively on the basis of projected casualties. (See this note from last week) But I do think it's important to take this into consideration. I also think it's important to be sensitive to the new generation of veterans who will soon rejoin American society. Some will be wounded on the outside; many will be scarred on the inside. The searing experience of battle will change them all in some way, great or small. America has a terrible record (save notable exceptions like the GI Bill) of greeting its returning veterans from war, and our thousands of homeless veterans attest to that fact. We must do better with this generation, and do what is necessary to help these men and women when they come home.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:06

 
Former Army secretary blasts administration on Iraq

Robert Burns, the Pentagon beat reporter for the Associated Press, reports that former-Secretary of the Army (and retired 1-star general) Tom White has a few choice words in his new book for the White House over its handling of Iraq. White was forced by Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld (and possibly the White House) to resign after a series of high-profile clashes between the Army and SecDef over various issues. His uniformed counterpart, Gen. Eric Shinseki, was also forced out by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Now, Tom White writes that the Bush Administration made serious errors in its pre-war planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"Clearly the view that the war to `liberate' Iraq would instantly produce a pro-United States citizenry ready for economic and political rebirth ignored the harsh realities on the ground," White wrote in a preface to "Reconstructing Eden," which is to be published Thursday.

In a letter to news organizations announcing the book's release, White was even tougher on the administration. "Unbelievably, American lives are being lost daily," he wrote. White said the administration lacks a cohesive, integrated plan to stabilize and rebuild the country.

"We did not conduct the war this way and we should not continue rebuilding the country in a haphazard manner," he wrote. "The result will be a financial disaster, more lives lost, chaos in Iraq and squandered American goodwill."

White, who as a civilian service secretary was not in the military chain of command, served as Army secretary from May 2001 to May 2003. He clashed with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on a number of issues, including the service's plan for the Crusader artillery system, which Rumsfeld viewed as too heavy and cumbersome for the lighter, more agile Army he envisioned.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, said that as a matter of policy the department does not comment on books. He acknowledged that U.S. occupation authorities in Baghdad face severe problems with security in Iraq but believe they are on track toward success.

In the book, White noted the postwar spasms of violence in Iraq.

"It is quite clear in the immediate aftermath of hostilities that the plan for winning the peace is totally inadequate," he wrote.

White wrote that the administration's Iraq policy "threatens to turn what was a major military victory into a potential humanitarian, political and economic disaster." The administration's "anemic attempts at nation building" will be viewed with disdain by other countries, he said.

Analysis: This may be Monday-morning quarterbacking, but it's extremely well-informed Monday-morning quarterbacking by a man who's thrown a few footballs in his time. Secretary White, had he stayed in uniform, probably would've made it all the way up to 4-star rank. As Secretary of the Army, he was widely considered one of the most popular service secretaries in recent memory -- at least within the ranks. And he was a part of the pre-war planning process in the Pentagon until his departure in May 2003, so he knows what he's talking about -- much more than this author. If Tom White thinks we screwed up the post-war planning, and failed to devote adequate resources to the problem, he's basing that opinion on a lot more evidence than any other writers I've read lately.

That said, this story has the potential to create serious civil-military problems for the Bush Administration and America -- especially if retired-Gen. Shinseki decides to speak up as well. Acrimony between uniformed leaders and civilian political leaders is nothing new, either for America or any other nation. (See the history provided by Eliot Cohen in his book Supreme Command) But this flare-up presents a Constitutional crisis of sorts, where the President's very credibility on nuts & bolts military decision is being called into question some of his highest ranking military officials. This criticism is bolstered by the experiential gap between President Bush and Secretary White. Art. II of the Constitution designates the President as Commander-in-Chief of our military, but it does not confer automatic credibility on him in the area of national security policy. President Clinton found this out the hard way with his initial efforts to integrate gays in the military, and it cost him good civil-military relations for the length of his presidency. Now we have a situation which may be worse. President Bush isn't being criticized here for his social policies for the military -- he's being criticized for his decisions sending the military into harm's way by the very military leaders who helped supervise and implement those orders for the Army. In terms of Constitutional crises, this does not rise to the level of Cooper v. Aaron or the Nixon tapes, but it's not a good thing either.

No way out? Fortunately, the President can escape this Catch-22 situation. (And no, he doesn't need to enlist in the Army to close the experience gap with Tom White.) What he does need to do is open his national-security decisionmaking process to smart folks like Tom White and Eric Shinseki. This should be easy for a president who prides himself on being a MBA-type -- someone who succeeds by surrounding himself with exceedingly smart people.

If I had to pin the fault on one aspect of the post-war planning, it was the "group think" that pervaded the White House, National Security Council and Pentagon during the process. Clearly, the plan was based on certain assumptions about the post-war situation, and those assumptions turned out to be wrong. We were not greeted as liberators, and we have become the target of hatred for both Shiite and Sunni Muslims. No "Plan B" was created or effectively resourced, and when our planning assumptions proved faulty, it was too late to spin up a Plan B. In a perfect world, we would've deployed enough of a force package to Kuwait to stage for Plan B if necessary -- but we did not. We assumed a tremendous amount of risk by building a plan on a fixed set of assumptions and fighting that plan despite indications that we would face an insurgency after the war. The best way to mitigate this kind of planning risk is to broaden the planning process and build multiple courses of actions (COAs) which account for each probable set of assumptions.

Luckily, there is no shortage of planners on the Joint Staff to conduct such contingency planning. Nor is there any shortage of civilian experts with security clearances to do this kind of planning for RAND or another think tank. All that's required is a willingness among the denizens of the E-Ring and West Wing to consider ideas from the outside, and to act on them.

Update: James Webb -- former Navy Secretary, decorated Vietnam Vet, and author -- also has some words for the Bush Administration on Iraq.

"I am very troubled by the fact that we went into Iraq and very troubled about how we're going to get out of Iraq,'' Webb said Thursday to about 200 naval officers, veterans and civilians at the Radisson Hotel Norfolk. The lecture was sponsored by the Hampton Roads Naval Museum and the Naval War College Foundation.

The United States should quickly get the United Nations involved in administering and patrolling the country, he said.

"We need to get out of there before the mistake we made gets worse,'' said Webb, a Marine Corps veteran.
* * *
Bob Briner, a retired Navy captain from Virginia Beach, said he appreciated Webb's observations.

"What I like about Webb is that he's been there, he knows what he's talking about,'' he said.

Yes he does.

Update: The Washington Post reported on Friday that retired Gen. Anthony Zinni has joined the chorus of really smart and experienced military leaders who think we may be in trouble in Iraq. Clearly, I lack the experience and knowledge of men like James Webb and Anthony Zinni -- the latter of whom is regarded as the intellectual father of the modern "CINC". (Washington Post writer Dana Priest described Zinni as an American proconsul because of the way he presided over American interests in the Middle East when he was CINC of CENTCOM.) Of course, neither man is particularly beholden to the White House. Webb is more of a Reagan Republican, and Zinni is Colin Powell's man.

But is Josh Marshall right -- is this a sign that Rumsfeld is on his way out?
posted by Phillip Carter at 17:38

 
A few recommendations...

I'll be away from my laptop until Monday evening, so I thought I would recommend a few weblogs which have caught my eye in the last few weeks. Enjoy!

War and Piece -- War and Piece is written by Laura Rozen, a journalist who reports on national security and foreign policy issues from Washington, D.C.

Jusiper -- a center-left weblog that looks like an edgier version of TAPPED and the Washington Monthly. Good reporting and analysis from the left side of the aisle; I suspect this will be a really good site to watch for the 2004 election.

Darren Kaplan -- Thoughts on foreign policy and other issues from an attorney who lives in New York.

Priorities & Frivolities -- a great site run by a soon-to-be student at Harvard's Kennedy School. Sometimes it covers baseball; mostly it covers politics.

Fedlawyerguy.org -- A great weblog on all the administrative law and federal agency stuff that wonks like me find really interesting. This is about the nuts & bolts of government, and it's really good.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:37

 
AFA Scandal: Winds of Change has a good collection on the sexual assault scandal which continues to unfold at the U.S. Air Force Academy. It appears that Gen. John Rosa, the new USAFA commanding general, is making an effort to clean house. Whether he can make a dent on the entrenched culture there remains to be seen. (Thanks to Oxblog for the tip)
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:29

 
A legal obligation to police Iraq?

Eugene Volokh comments on a blog post arguing that America has a legal obligation to police Iraq under the Geneva Convention, and that our failure to protect Iraqis from other Iraqis may amount to a war crime. This argument could give rise to some sort of legal recourse against American authorities for "letting" Friday's car bombing happen in Najaf.

I agree with Eugene's analysis under the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, as well as his distinction between negative and positive obligations. We certainly have an obligation to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and to abstain from killing non-combatants to the extent that's military practicable. However, whether we have an affirmative obligation to protect Iraqis is really a moot point. As Eugene points out, we have compelling political and military reasons for stabilizing the situation there, and those interests are what will control U.S. behavior in Iraq.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:26

 
Car bomb kills leading Muslim cleric and at least 90 other persons in Iraq

The New York Times reports (along with nearly every media organization) that a major car bomb exploded today in Najaf, killing more than 90 persons. One of the fatalities was Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, a relatively moderate Shiite cleric who had shown some willingness to work with American officials in recent weeks and months.

The explosion occurred moments after the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, had left the site, which houses the tomb of Imam Ali and is considered the holiest shrine in Shiite Islam.

Ayatollah al-Hakim was an important Shiite ally of the American occupying force and his death will likely undermine the coalition's efforts to build stability in Iraq.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, which also injured at least 140 people, according to a doctor running the emergency room a the city's teaching hospital.

American officials, speaking about previous violence in Najaf, have said that attacks that harm Shiites are probably the work of other Shiites, while attacks aimed directly at the coalition forces or intended to foment anger toward the coalition are probably the work of Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein.

Quick Analysis: Like the UN car bombing, this is pure terrorism. It is violence with a political purpose, intended for an audience beyond the victims. The purpose here is to intimidate the Americans and Iraqis, and to contribute to a larger sense of bedlam that might force us to abandon our Iraqi endeavor. The question for our side is: will we let it?
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:51

 
ROTC enrollment on the rise

The Washington Post reports that college students across America are joining the military's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in increasingly larger numbers than before. In percentage terms, these increases are even outpacing recruiting for enlisting personnel, which have hovered just above recruiting target numbers for the last few years.

Across the state and country, other colleges have reported increased interest and enrollment in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Last academic year, Army ROTC enrollment at Maryland colleges and universities went up 20 percent, from 466 the year before to 560. The numbers nationwide grew 3 percent, from 29,818 to 30,824, during the same time.

Cadet Wayne Logan, 18, believes the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had something to do with the increases. He recently signed up for ROTC this fall at Bowie State.

"It was kind of a wake-up call that we're not untouchable," said Logan, who lives in the District. "Everybody can't be a doctor, and somebody needs to protect the United States."
* * *
Recruiters point to other reasons their ranks have grown, namely a bigger push to recruit, new tools such as the Internet and e-mail, a bad economy and better financial incentives.

"My sense was that the events validated a choice that many of the people had already made to join ROTC," said Paul Kotakis, national spokesman for the Army ROTC.

Ann Easterling, spokeswoman for the Air Force ROTC, agreed. Last academic year, the Air Force experienced a 22 percent increase, from 14,308 cadets the previous year to 17,513. The Navy's program grew slightly during that time, from 5,831 to 6,068, a 4 percent increase.

Analysis: I think this a great thing. Military service is not for everyone, but I believe that every American ought to serve his or her nation in some way -- whether in the military, foreign service, Peace Corps, as a school teacher, or in some other needed capacity. I joined the military because I felt it was the best opportunity for me to serve, mature, and lead a diverse group of Americans -- and the military kept its end of the bargain for me.

I think there are at least three trends at work here. The confluence of these factors -- more than any one alone -- has led to this surge in ROTC enrollment.

1. The Economy. Like it or not, the American economy is still not doing well. Recruiters still come to campus to recruit new B.A. and B.S. holders, but not in the same numbers they did in the late 1990s -- and certainly not with the same lucrative offers. ROTC offers a steady job with decent pay and great benefits after college. I don't think you can discount this lure for the military, particularly among working class and middle class students.

1.a. The Economy II - College Costs. The cost of higher education has risen dramatically in the last 10-15 years, particularly at public institutions that used to be relatively inexpensive (or even free) for in-state residents. Much of this owes to the counter-cyclical nature of state budgets, which are tied to income and consumption taxes that do poorly in bad economic times, and squeeze state services like higher education. (See this Wall Street Journal article on the trend in California) In a bad economy, college fees rise as administrators try to balance their budgets on the backs of students. Parents can't afford to offset these increases as they could in a good economy, forcing a student to either work or borrow money. An ROTC scholarship looks awfully attractive to a college student in this predicament.

2. The War on Terrorism. I think it's safe to say that the Sept. 11 attacks made many Americans look inside themselves to their own patriotism, and led many to look for ways to express that patriotism. The military has benefitted in some small measure from this. Recruiting numbers have not skyrocketed as they did in December 1941, but they have gone up. Some of this may owe to economic factors in the larger population, but I think these ROTC students are joining for more than just financial reasons. I've given a class to UCLA's Army ROTC seniors during the last 2 years, and my impression is that they're going out into the force with a purpose -- not just a bottom-line mentality.

3. Worldwide Deployments - Relevance and Opportunities. At a more practical level, the war on terrorism has given the military new relevance and new opportunities. For a young lieutenant (or ensign) just graduated from college, this means real opportunities to serve abroad in harm's way where the nation depends on him or her to get the job done. That's a far cry from the peacetime military, which often revolves around paperwork, PowerPoint, and chickensh*t. The prospects for a new military officer are far more exciting today than they were for me in 1997, notwithstanding the Balkans mission then. I think this has a positive effect on recruiting as well.

Bottom Line: The all volunteer force can only work when successive generations of American men and women make the choice to enter the military -- to personall step into the breach and place themselves in harm's way. In particular, our military depends on young citizens graduating from college to make this choice -- forgoing possible riches in the private sector for a few years while they serve their nation. Unfortunately, the burden of service (as officers and enlisted personnel) has mostly been borne by America's working and middle class. This article didn't discuss the equitable issues of military service, and the current distribution of ROTC students by socioeconomic class. But this is certainly a concern of mine, and something I hope to see reported in the future.
posted by Phillip Carter at 15:46

 
Will Wes Clark run? Can he win?

Amy Sullivan writes in the Washington Monthly that the answer is "maybe" -- but it all depends on Gen. (retired) Clark. It could all depend on one other man from Arkansas who's also a Rhodes Scholar, and for whom Clark worked a few years ago.

Clark just might get the biggest endorsement of them all. In a June interview, former President Bill Clinton told the Associated Press that he has been impressed by every aspect of Clark's career and uttered these magic words: "I believe Wes, if he runs, would make a valuable contribution because he understands America's security challenges and domestic priorities. I believe he would make a good president." The statement has been judged by many political observers to be a non-endorsement endorsement, and a signal to Democratic donors and consultants to wait for Clark.

I wouldn't want to handicap the Democrat race just yet, and I'm not part of any betting pools either. But if you had to pick a long-shot horse to take the cup, it'd have to be Clark. The Washington Monthly is known as an opinion leader inside the Beltway -- especially among Democrats. If Clark can get enough buzz, and if he decides to run, he may well have a shot.

Update: Thursday's New York Times reports that Wes Clark is leaning towards declaring himself a candidate -- but is still conducting his reconnaissance.

It's safe to say he wants to run," said a longtime friend who has had frequent political conversations with General Clark. "But he approaches this like a military man. He wants to know, Can I win the battle? He doesn't want to have a situation where he could embarrass himself, but I'm absolutely certain he wants to run."

Whether he does, his friends said, will be determined by his instincts and a firm assessment of Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, whose early success has come in part through criticism of White House strategies in Iraq that are every bit as strong as General Clark's.

While General Clark has consistently maintained that he has not yet made up his mind, his friends said a major obstacle has been cleared — family approval. They said his wife, Gert, who had initially expressed reservations, now favors his running.

"He is going to do it," said another of General Clark's friends. "He's just going back and forth as to when" to announce.

In an interview from his office in Little Rock, Ark., General Clark said today that he intended to announce his decision whether he would run in two weeks or so.

And the race gets more interesting. . .
posted by Phillip Carter at 12:01

 
On casualty and body counts

The New York Times reports that American deaths in Iraq since May 1 (the day President Bush declared an end to major combat operations) now exceed Americans deaths during the actual "war" phase of the war. (sic) According to the AP's tally, 138 American soldiers died during major combat operations, a number which was surpassed on Tuesday when this story was written.

After a bomb killed a soldier this morning on a highway northwest of Baghdad, the death toll since the end of major combat operations exceeded the number killed during the war, according to the Pentagon. The soldier was the 139th member of the armed services to die since the formal declaration of the end of major combat operations. During the war in March and April, 138 died.

Two soldiers were also wounded by the explosion, caused by a homemade bomb. The soldiers were near the town of Habbaniya, in a support convoy traveling on the major highway linking Baghdad with western Iraq and Jordan.

Later in the day, another soldier became the 140th to die since May 1, when he was hit by a car as he was changing a tire on his vehicle on the road near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, military officials said.

Of the 138 soldiers who died during the war, most died in combat. The Pentagon classified 116 of the deaths as "hostile" and the remaining 22 as "nonhostile," a category that includes deaths due to illness and noncombat accidents.

Since May 1, most of the deaths have been in the nonhostile category — a total of 78, including the roadside accident today. The remaining 62 deaths were in combat situations like the bomb attack.

Analysis: Presumably, this story is supposed to make us pause and reflect on the cost of our Iraqi endeavor, much as the Vietnam Memorial gives us pause every time we see it. The human cost of this war has been high, both in terms of our dead and our wounded -- a number which is largely unreported by the media and the military. We should pause when we see stories like this to reflect on our reasons for waging war. President Bush made the case yesterday that our cause was worth this cost in blood, and I think he made a good case. But this is a judgment that every American should make, based on the best available evidence from all sides.

However, I do not think that death makes a good metric of success in war -- or nation building -- for at least three reasons. First, focusing on death as your metric of success gears every effort towards producing death, or avoiding it. That strategy is not necessarily consistent with our goals in Iraq, especially today. On the inflicting side, we do not want to inflict maximum casualties on a population that we are trying to win over. On the avoiding side, too much emphasis on casualty avoidance and force protection can frustrate a commander who is trying to accomplish his/her mission. Here's a hypo to explain how this works:

You're a logistics battalion commander with an attached Military Police platoon for security. The MP platoon has 10 HMMWVs with crew-served weapons, organized in 3 squads. Ordinarily, you choose to second one squad with each critical convoy as an escort, allowing for a moderate amount of security. But now you're driven less by mission accomplishment and more by casualty avoidance and force protection. Now you want to escort every convoy, not just the critical ones, and you want to do so with more firepower. So you send out two squads of escorts with every convoy, effectively reducing the number of convoys you can send and exhausting the MPs.

That's just one example of how casualty-avoidance can infect the thinking and planning of a ground commander. I'm the first one to say that our soldiers are our most precious resource -- the heart and soul of our combat power. But we can't afford to let casualty avoidance dictate our tactics or strategy. In the long run, this will subordinate our mission to our avoidance of casualties, and ultimately result in failure.

Second, focusing on death as your metric of success reduces warfare to an attrition-based slugmatch where the winner is the one with the least casualties -- in relative or absolute terms. That's essentially how Napoleon waged war in the early 19th Century with his levee en masse, and it's also how we fought the Civil War. It's not the way we want to fight now, in the 21st Century, with an all-volunteer force that is long on technology and short on manpower. We have substituted capital for labor across our military force, and we simply can't absorb the same casualty counts as we could have in WWII and Vietnam. Moreover, our enemy can afford to lose more people, because he's fighting a guerilla war of national liberation and casualties only fuel his cause. We don't want to get dragged into an attrition fight here. (For more on this, see DNI's library on 4th Generation Warfare)

Finally, death makes a lousy metric of success because it aligns poorly with tactical, operational and strategic objectives. This was illustrated quite clearly in Vietnam, where we inflicted thousands (perhaps millions) of deaths on the North Vietnamese -- but ultimately lost the war. Our objectives in the war did not include the wholesale infliction of death on the Iraqi people, and our objectives today in the nation-building phase certainly don't either. Killing Iraqis won't help us win their hearts and minds. Paradoxically, their view is that killing Americans may liberate their nation from our occupation (see, e.g., Somalia). But if we focus too much on our U.S. casualties, then we will unavoidably resort to using Iraqi casualties as a metric of comparison. I don't think that's a road we want to go down.
posted by Phillip Carter at 11:41

 
Cooler heads appear to prevail in India

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported on its International Page this morning that the Indian government has taken a measured response to Tuesday's bombing in Mumbai which killed more than 50 persons. While blaming Muslim groups for the bombing, India stopped short of officially criticizing the Pakistani government for its alleged sponsorship of Muslim insurgents in India. That diplomatic self-censorship may be a sign that cooler heads have prevailed within India's government, and that this latest bombing will not derail the continuing diplomacy between the two nations.

. . . New Delhi's apparent reluctance to blame Islamabad itself for Monday's bombings, as it has after previous terrorist attacks, signaled to many political analysts that India and Pakistan will persevere in their recent attempts at détente. Indeed, officials from the two countries are to meet Wednesday in Islamabad to discuss resuming direct air services.

"I'm cautiously optimistic that the peace process will continue," said Uday Bhaskar, deputy director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. "Over the past six to eight months, so many initiatives have been launched that it will be difficult to go back to square one."

India and Pakistan nearly went to war last year, after Islamic militants attacked India's Parliament in December 2001 and, six months later, assaulted an Indian Army camp in Kashmir. Mr. Vajpayee's government accused the Pakistani government of directly supporting the militants, an allegation Islamabad denied. But in April this year, the Indian prime minister announced that his government would attempt "one last" initiative for peace with Pakistan, an effort that has focused mainly on resuming business and cultural exchanges.

posted by Phillip Carter at 09:45

 
Patriot Act forces investment firms to become nosier

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported this morning that firms offering mutual funds and other investments have started gathering more information about their clients in order to satisfy parts of the USA Patriot Act and Treasury regulations promulgated under its authority. I blogged about this some time ago, when USAA asked me to verify my identity despite my having an account with them for several years when I tried to open a mutual fund. Now, the Journal reports that this has become the norm for mutual fund firms and others in the industry, with some important secondary and tertiary consequences.

Starting Oct. 1, mutual-fund firms won't be allowed to open new accounts without first collecting personal data from investors not always gathered previously. Fund companies also must verify each new customer's identity promptly after opening an account. While some firms already check facts like these, these rules go a step further.

Investors who supply incorrect information that can't be corrected quickly could find their fund accounts closed or their activity in those accounts limited under the rules. Firms also will be required to compare the names of new account holders with lists of suspected terrorists and terrorist organizations.

The changes are required by rules to prevent money-laundering that were adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department as part of the USA Patriot Act approved by Congress in 2001. The rules, on which regulators gave their final guidelines earlier this month, follow a volley of other Patriot Act rules enacted last year. Those regulations required funds to review customer accounts with balances of $5,000 or more for suspicious trades.

The Oct. 1 customer-identification standards for funds -- like similar rules in the works for other financial firms such as brokerage firms and credit-card companies -- could be felt in consumers' wallets. Government and consultant estimates of the cost for the industry to update systems and train staffers to handle these procedures total more than $100 million in the first year and could exceed $200 million. Spending in future years could total nearly as much, all of which could increase fund expenses for investors.

There also may be logistical problems over providing more data when customers open accounts. "Investors might have to jump through a few more hoops," says Laura Chasney, associate legal counsel at T. Rowe Price Group Inc. "They should expect a few more calls."

Analysis: Title III of the Patriot Act contains a variety of provisions relating to financial crimes. Presumably, gathering the identities of investors will help prevent the use of sham accounts by terrorists, and enable us to connect terrorists and their money more effectively. Unfortunately, this is one area where dismantling terrorists' finances may have a direct impact on all of us. Just as we've learned to cope with more security at the airports, we must now learn to cope with more security in our financial system.

At the end of the day, this latter category of security is very important. If we can take down Al Qaeda's financial network, we can hobble the organization. Without its global network and ability to move money, men and materiel around the world, Al Qaeda will be reduced to a group of thugs with regional reach.

Update: I found my earlier post on this subject from Feb. 11, which I wrote after getting an alarming message from my bank that they needed to verify my identity before opening a mutual fund account. Sec. 326 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56) is the provision which requires this verification -- here's part of the text:

SEC. 326. VERIFICATION OF IDENTIFICATION.

(a) IN GENERAL- Section 5318 of title 31, United States Code, as amended by this title, is amended by adding at the end the following:

(l) IDENTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF ACCOUNTHOLDERS-

(1) IN GENERAL- Subject to the requirements of this subsection, the Secretary of the Treasury shall prescribe regulations setting forth the minimum standards for financial institutions and their customers regarding the identity of the customer that shall apply in connection with the opening of an account at a financial institution.

(2) MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS- The regulations shall, at a minimum, require financial institutions to implement, and customers (after being given adequate notice) to comply with, reasonable procedures for--
`(A) verifying the identity of any person seeking to open an account to the extent reasonable and practicable;
`(B) maintaining records of the information used to verify a person's identity, including name, address, and other identifying information; and
`(C) consulting lists of known or suspected terrorists or terrorist organizations provided to the financial institution by any government agency to determine whether a person seeking to open an account appears on any such list.

posted by Phillip Carter at 13:02

 
Twin blasts hit Bombay, killing at least 45

A pair of car bombs exploded in Bombay on Monday, killing at least 45 persons and wounding scores more. The news comes at a time of great tension between India and Pakistan -- two nuclear nations capable of dragging the world into a third world war. No group has yet taken responsibility, according to the New York Times, and Indian officials were reticent to blame the usual suspects. Nonetheless, it appears this blast may have been the work of Muslim insurgents, who may have been working with a Pakistan-based terrorist organization.

No one has taken responsibility for the blasts, and it was unclear how the bombs were detonated. Suburban Bombay, whose official name is now Mumbai, has been the site of five explosions — two on buses, two at markets and one in a train — in the last eight months that have killed a total of 15 people. The most recent was in July.

Officials have blamed the Students Islamic Movement of India for the attacks, saying the group operated in conjunction with the Pakistan-based Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Both groups are banned in India. The Bombay police commissioner, R. S. Sharma, said on Monday night that law enforcement authorities suspected that so-called jihadi groups were also responsible for the blasts, although he offered no specific evidence for that assertion.

The blasts come during a period of an easing of hostility between India and Pakistan. The lull has enabled them to take small steps toward rapprochement in recent months. For now, at least, the blasts seem to have done nothing to undermine that.

Indian officials, who have often blamed Pakistan in the past for terrorist acts in India, did not do so after the incidents, and Pakistan condemned the blasts as "acts of terrorism."

Analysis: I'm no expert on the India-Pakistan conflict, and I won't speculate on the facts of this event. However, I would like to point out an fact that should be obvious to most. This is clearly an attempt to derail whatever diplomacy is occuring between India and Pakistan. When I heard Gen. Pervez Musharraf talk in Los Angeles last month, he seemed quite adamant about pursuing peace. I think both nations recognize that they ought to peacefully resolves disputes such as the Kashmir problem and their water problems. (See these essays by RAND expert Chris Fair in The Atlantic Monthly on the region) The use of bombings like this to derail diplomacy is a common tactic used by terrorists. It has been used in India, Israel, Sri Lanka, Ireland, and elsewhere. The goal is to force those who might worry about security into opposing whatever diplomatic entreaties are being negotiated. Often, it works. It takes tough leadership and resolute diplomacy to ensure these tactics fail.

One further note: this conflict is probably not getting the media coverage it deserves. Until an American military officer e-mailed me from India to flag my attention, this event flew under my radar too. The New York Times had it on its home page yesterday; it has since fallen off. The Washington Post ran the story on page A7. The LA Times did not give it top billing either. Only the NYT covered the event from Bombay; the other two papers covered it from New Delhi. Contrast this to the way we treated the recent suicide bombing of a bus in Israel. If we want to have India and/or Pakistan as our allies in our global war on terrorism, we probably need to pay more attention to this conflict. Not to mention the obvious implications for a guerilla war between two of the world's largest nations with nuclear arms...

Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, several years before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, that sympathy was often a function of proximity. He used the example of a man who cut his finger, and felt more pain than he did upon learning that a thousand Chinese men had perished in a disaster. This was almost certainly true in the 18th Century, when Smith wrote, and I think it's true today. But in our increasingly interconnected world, we must learn to appreciate the pain and suffering of our global neighbors. Events in Mumbai can affect us in the United States. Threats to our security will increasingly come from failed states such as Iraq and Afghanistan, not states like the Soviet Union, and we must develop a sense of global situational awareness to understand this.

Update: I blogged this note before reading my print edition of the Wall Street Journal, so I did not give credit where it was due. (Lesson learned: read the Journal earlier in the morning) The Wall Street Journal led with this story at the top of its news summary column on the front page, and reported on the bombing from the actual scene of the attack in Mumbai. Pretty good article too.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:10

 
Top U.S. official for North Korea resigns

The New York Times reports tonight (for tomorrow's paper) that the State Department's top diplomat for North Korea has resigned. This news comes just before the start of 6-way talks between North Korea, the U.S. and four other nations. Suffice to say, this is an awkward time for such a personnel change.

The State Department confirmed the departure of Jack Pritchard, the special envoy for negotiations with North Korea, but denied that he had been forced out. Mr. Pritchard's departure signals disarray in the administration's posture toward that country, experts outside the State Department said. It comes at a critical moment as the United States attempts to rally North Korea's neighbors to persuade the country to drop its efforts to reprocess spent fuel rods for weapons.

Mr. Pritchard's resignation on Friday points to a division in the administration over how best to handle the isolated, unpredictable and highly militarized government of Kim Jong Il nearly eight months after the North expelled foreign inspectors, the experts said.

Mr. Pritchard, who has had long experience in talks with the North, including a stint on President Clinton's National Security Council, is identified with a more conciliatory stance toward the North. He long advocated a carrot-and-stick approach, with incentives to North Korea for good behavior.

But a more confrontational position, favored at the White House and expressed by John R. Bolton, the under secretary for arms control at the State Department, gained ground in recent weeks, and at least one Republican senator complained to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell about Mr. Pritchard's approach.

Analysis: This is a bad time to approach North Korea with different voices. The best analogy I can think of here is from The Godfather, where Sonny Corleone speaks out of turn at a meeting and jeopardizes the family. You never want to show dissent or fracture when dealing with the North Koreans. Now would be a very good time to reaffirm U.S. policy towards the Korean peninsula -- with one voice -- and to clearly designate our point man (or woman) on this issue.

I had a long talk with a friend of mine who's an old infantryman and law school classmate. Between us, we have a few years of service in Korea, where we inhaled deeply whenever we saw headlines like this one. We both agree that North Korea is causing trouble right now because we have committed so much of our combat power to Iraq. The North Koreans did this in 1998 when we rattled our sabers in the desert, and they did it during Kosovo in 1999 as well. The NKs think they can squeeze concessions out of the U.S. right now because we have so little combat power to shift to the Korean peninsula. The Army still has nearly every one of its combat brigades committed to Iraq, or on a deployment plan to go there. Short of calling up the National Guard as we did in 1950, we'd be hard pressed to oppose any major event on the Korean peninsula with ground forces.

Strategically speaking, we have assumed a tremendous amount of risk in the world by committing so much of our combined military capacity to Iraq. At this moment, we lack the flexibility to commit to new missions like Liberia, or reinforce old missions like Korea, or even do continuing exercises like Bright Star. This completely alters our foreign policy calculus, in terms of what we can and cannot do. Our enemies know this too. At this juncture, the most prudent course of action is probably to contain North Korea however we can, lest we allow them to exploit the risk we have created by devoting so much of our blood and treasure to Iraq. More to follow.
posted by Phillip Carter at 19:40

 
Weblogs and politics

Cory Doctorow has this essay in the Boston Globe about the influence of weblogs on politics, and what he perceives to be a sea change in the interaction between information and politics. Among other things, the online version of the column includes "best of" lists from Joe Conason, Mickey Kaus, and Josh Marshall. It's probably worth a read just for those three lists, which I should use to update my blogroll.
posted by Phillip Carter at 08:15

 
Tomb of the unknown citizen

The New York Times reports today on a macabre -- but fitting -- tribute to the thousands of persons who died at the World Trade Center. Despite the best DNA technology available, medical personnel were unable to identify thousands of remains left in the rubble of the complex. Rather than preserve these offsite, or inter them somewhere sterile, the decision appears to have been made to create a tomb for these unknown remains on the site of the World Trade Center.

In its memorial design competition, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation required every entry to include a suitable space to store the remains. The contestants were not required to actually design the storage — that will be done later. There were 5,200 design entries from 62 countries; a winner is to be selected this fall.

The memorial will not just store unidentified remains. It will also house remains that have not been collected by victims' relatives. Families, not surprisingly, have reacted in many different ways to news of a positive identification of a relative's remains, which sometimes are made up of dozens — perhaps hundreds — of pieces. Relatives are given the choice of being notified when the first identification is made, or at any point over the course of the investigation. Some buried or cremated the first remains, only to face the task of dealing with remains identified later.
* * *
The medical examiner's office continues to identify remains, officials said, but most of them are from victims who have already been identified. The preservation process for all uncollected remains will be complete long before the memorial is built. The remains will stay with the medical examiner's office until a final resting site at the memorial is completed.

posted by Phillip Carter at 07:55

 
A four-letter word for France

Wine. Get your mind out of the gutter. Though I'm a native Californian and a devoted consumer of California wines, I also enjoy French wines when I can get my hands on a good one. (Not too often on a grad student's budget)

Two articles in the New York Times give me reason to celebrate. The first article says that the deadly heat wave sweeping Europe may be creating the best wine vintage in half a century. Vintners and other experts are ecstatic about the 2003 grapes -- being picked early now.

Vintners are busy with an early vendange, the annual grape harvest that normally does not start until mid-September. As a rule, hot summers and early harvests produce great wines, winemakers say.

"It is the earliest harvest since 1893," said Bernard Hervet, who runs Bouchard Père et Fils in Burgundy. Mr. Hervet said that his vineyards began harvesting grapes for its Beaune-Grèves Vigne de l'Enfant Jésus wine this week and that he expected to start harvesting farther north in Chablis on Aug. 25, the earliest date for that region on record.

To reach maturity, grapes require a long stretch of hot dry weather. Without it, they end up with too little sugar and too much acid to make a great wine. But an excessively hot summer like this one increases the sugar content grapes need for fermentation, particularly in temperate regions like Western Europe. Winemakers are expecting this year's grapes to produce wines with a slightly higher alcohol content that could make them last for decades.

Outstanding! I've been told there's a wine futures market, and I imagine it's wild with speculation right now about the prospects for the 2003 vintage. The second article discusses some of the latest research on the French population's health, and posits that red wine may be to blame for the so-called "French paradox" -- why the French eat so poorly, stay so thin, and live so long.

Biologists have found a class of chemicals that they hope will make people live longer by activating an ancient survival reflex. One of the chemicals, a natural substance known as resveratrol, is found in red wines, particularly those made in cooler climates like that of New York.

The finding could help explain the so-called French paradox, the fact that the French live as long as anyone else despite consuming fatty foods deemed threatening to the heart.

Besides the wine connection, the finding has the attraction of stemming from fundamental research in the biology of aging. However, the new chemicals have not yet been tested even in mice, let alone people, and even if they worked in humans, it would be many years before any drug based on the new findings became available.

The possible benefits could be significant. The chemicals are designed to mimic the effect of a very low-calorie diet, which is known to lengthen the life span of rodents. Scientists involved in the research say that human life spans could be extended by 30 percent if humans respond to the chemicals in the same way as rats and mice do to low calories. Even someone who started at age 50 to take one of the new chemicals could expect to gain an extra 10 years of life, said Dr. Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the pioneers of the new research.

Great! One more reason to drink red wine. Thankfully, this research applies to all red wine, not just French red wine, that contain the right chemical mix. So I can enjoy my Californian petite syrahs (e.g. Bogle and Stag's Leap) and cabernets (Carmenet and Plumpjack) with the knowledge that they're helping my heart. Now I just need to mimic the French by making red wine a normal part of my diet. Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem.
posted by Phillip Carter at 18:18

 
An interview with one of America's leading Al Qaeda experts

Josh Marshall has posted an excellent interview with Peter Bergen at TalkingPointsMemo. Bergen is a journalist too, and he has authored one of the three best books on Al Qaeda and contemporary multinational terrorism that I've read: Holy War, Inc. (The other two must-have books are Countering the New Terrorism and Inside Al Qaeda) Bergen is one of the few journalists to have personally interviewed Osama Bin Laden, and his research on the Al Qaeda organization is first-rate. I think his expert opinions on the organization -- and its activities in Iraq and Afghanistan -- are as good as any out there. Here's an exceprt from the second part:

BERGEN: . . . We did a very smart thing in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and Mullah Omar made a calculation that we would be drawn into a Soviet-style invasion. They would respond with guerilla warfare. They would have some tactical successes in that warfare, and a strategic success that the United States would be reviled around the Muslim world for its brutal occupation of Afghanistan.

That didn't happen, obviously, and there are only 300 Americans in the whole, on the ground. That was very smart. Obviously, the US and British occupation of Iraq is different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in many many ways -- not least of which is that Soviets killed a million Afghans and made five million of them refugees. Obviously that hasn't happened in Iraq. But there are some similarities in the following way: We are occupying in large numbers in thick spaces and we are doing that in the middle of the Middle East. And it seems that we're going to be there indefinitely. It seems that way, according to the Iraqis and to everybody else. Obviously we're in a period of guerilla warfare, these kind of high-profile terrorist attacks. You know, that's the future. I mean al Qaida is not going to get off this little exercise. Obviously the United States is not about to change its policy in Iraq. So I think, given those two facts, we're going to see more of what we saw at the United Nations Headquarters in the future. I mean this is just the beginning, I think.

TPM: I think I saw an interview you did on CNN in which you discussed the the question of who, if there are foreign fighters in Iraq now, who are they? And I think you had said that a lot of them seemed to be Saudis who'd actually come in through Syria. Whatever details you have -- who are these people? Where are they coming from? Are governments assisting in bringing these people in?

BERGEN: I don't think governments are assisting in bringing these people in at all. Because if you think about, Syria has been quite cooperative in the war on terrorism, Jordan has fallen all over itself. That's one of the reasons the Jordanian embassy was attacked. Kuwait, don't have to explain that. But judging from what US counter-terrorism officials say and what Saad al Fagih says they're predominantly Saudi, which makes sense. Saudis were predominantly the people in Afghanistan, and the major group of people at Guantanamo Bay are Saudis. So that all kind of coheres. Some Kuwatis, and I would imagine a sprinkling of other nationalities, although I haven't heard any other than the Saudis and Kuwatis--that's all I've heard about. Now you know, if Zarqawi is in Iraq--although apparently he might be in Iran. So maybe there are some Jordanians, I don't know. But it doesn't sound like people from the Philippines are coming to Iraq, as it were, and coming to Afghanistan.

TPM: They would stand out?

BERGEN: They'd stand out. And also maybe it's just a matter of time. After all, this whole thing is a relatively recent phenomenon. I mean it seems to me that these volunteers, as it were, jihadist volunteers, either came directly before the war, during the war, or even more so after the war. The Saudi volunteers especially have come in the last few months. But I think this is all totally predictable. I don't see this as being a surprise.

The first part of the interview is available here on TalkingPointsMemo, and it's also worth a read. The nature of the insurgency in Iraq appears a lot like previous insurgencies in other parts of the world -- most notably Afghanistan. I think we should pay careful attention to the thoughts of experts like Peter Bergen, Brian Jenkins, Bruce Hoffman, and Rohan Gunaratna. They know this threat very well, and their historical insight will help us craft a successful strategy this time around.
posted by Phillip Carter at 09:32