In an FT interview the outgoing Counter-Terror Coordinator for the EU, Gijs de Vries, stated clearly that he believes that torture and other human rights violations committed by the U.S. and supported by its allies have made Europe less safe:
“Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, military commissions and CIA renditions have undermined the credibility of the U.S. and its partners” he said.
Gijs de Vries also noted that: “We have to stop today’s terrorists and we must also prevent tomorrow’s terrorists being radicalised.”
He urged the U.S. to return to the human rights mainstream – at least in part – because of the security ramifications.

So now we have a hard nosed counter-terror operator saying torture and other breaches of international law harm our security….will this help change the discourse stateside?

Although it is less than a decade old the New America Foundation  in Washington, DC has a deserved reputation  for promoting new ideas and for helping reveal what is really going on with our government. It did so back in 2005 when Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, (USA-Ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell, both when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State, said in a speech at the Foundation that Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world. In decidedly unambiguous words, Wilkerson said, “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.”

Yesterday, the Foundation did another public service when it held a conference on the future of U.S.-Iran relations. Held, ironically enough at the Dirksen (former senator who was an early hawk on the Vietnam war) Senate Office Bldg. the first panel was Ruse or Opportunity? The Provenance of Iran’s Spring 2003 Negotiations Offer.  The panelists were Flynt Leverett, a Foundation Senior Fellow and a former senior director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council  and Col. Wilkerson. (more…)

It would seem odd for this blog not to mention the agreement in the Six Party Talks to close the North Korean nuclear reactor at Yongbyon (covered in all of the major newspapers, but for the basic story, see the New York Times). But I find it difficult to get excited about this announcement, so I have little to say other than it’s “big news” — a point event compared to the daily feed of bombing announcements in Iraq, for example.

We’ve announced agreements with North Korea before, only to discover that the Korean language text differed from the English or Chinese text, so there was never a real agreement at all. Or as we found with the 1994 Agreed Framework (which seems quite similar in basic outlines to this new deal), perhaps neither side intends to follow through on its commitment (in the 1990s / early 2000s, the North Koreans continued their nuclear program despite the Agreed Framework, while the U.S., Korea, and Japan failed to deliver the heavy fuel oil or to build the “proliferation-safe” nuclear reactors that we promised to build under the Agreed Framework). Ultimately, this agreement is just a document that neither side has much ability to enforce; we’re in nearly the same situation we were in yesterday, where we can harangue each other at diplomatic conferences, but neither side has much compellance capability.

Dan Drezner posted some interesting commentary on yet another roadblock: the U.S. Congress might not agree to implement the deal, although Dan sees reason to believe that the Democrats might favor implementing something that looks a lot like the deal that a Democratic president negotiated in 1994. In his academic work, Dan has suggested that aid payments to adversaries are likely to elicit real policy change more often than we might think — more often than they might elicit real policy change from our friends. Perhaps so. This North Korea case might be a real test of the bribery side of economic statecraft (more generously called “linkage” by advocates): have we offered a big enough bribe to convince North Korea to make a real change to its national security policy? Such a bribe ought to be really big — but maybe we’ve found one that’s big enough. Or maybe they’ll just take the money and reneg. I’m no optimist on this one.

Brian Vogt posted a good graphic the other day (at least by the standards of our blog, where I don’t contribute graphics at all) on Iraqi public support for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. I’m less interested in that sort of poll than he is, both because I’m skeptical that the poll numbers mean anything — even more skeptical of polling techniques in Iraq than in the U.S. — and also because I don’t think that Iraqi opinion should influence U.S. policy very much, because U.S. policy should be based on the American national interest.

Of course, I think the U.S. should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in short order, and if potential political allies want reason that we should withdraw because of Iraqi opinion, I would be happy to cooperate with those allies to achieve my desired political result.

But it’s also worth thinking about what’s going on in the poll that Brian cites. I don’t think it’s surprising that both the Sunnis and the Shiites want the U.S. to leave while the Kurds want us to stay. Things are relatively good for the Kurds right now, so they want minimal change in the status quo. The Sunnis and the Shiites both have problems with the current situation, and both exaggerate their prospects to do better once the U.S. leaves. The Shiites think the U.S. forces them to pay attention to the Sunnis, whom they beat in the elections and whom they believe they could beat on the battlefield through sheer force of numbers. Meanwhile, the Sunnis (if you accept the polls) believe that they constitute 50% of the population of Iraq, so they think they could win the ensuing war — in fact, they believe that the only reason that they haven’t won already is that the U.S. props up the Shiites. Those inconsistent beliefs explain the on-going sectarian civil war and why only a U.S. withdrawal (whether or not it leads to post-withdrawal escalation of violence) can end the fighting.

Meanwhile, Marc Lynch (aka Abu Aardvark) has posted some interesting notes on a broader poll of Arab public opinion in six countries (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates). For those who worry about a global “war of ideas” these days, things don’t seem to be going well for the United States. Again, I wouldn’t read much into these results, but I thought the cite was interesting.

The talk shows focused on another aspect of Iraq this weekend; a classified report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General on the work of Doug Feith and the Office of Special Plans. See the Newsweek story on this here. A summary of the classified report concludes that “the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers,” and “was inappropriately performing Intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the Intelligence Community.”

Naturally, as every blogger in the world instantly realized, this report produced innumerable headlines, all being a variant on “Feith based intelligence.” So what did Mr. Feith and critics and supporters have to say?

Over at CNN’s Late Edition Feith remains defiant:

DOUGLAS FEITH, FORMER UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE: What the inspector general is criticizing is the fact that people in the Pentagon criticized the quality of the CIA intelligence. And the inspector general, I think wrongly, says that the criticism of intelligence was intelligence work, and it was inappropriate for non- intelligence people to do that.
 
BLITZER: But in this case, they were right and you were wrong.
 
FEITH: No, they were not right.
 
BLITZER: There was no connection that the 9-11 Commission could come up with to show there was a deliberate prewar operable connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
 
FEITH: Which nobody ever claims. I mean, it shows how much misinformation there is, even somebody as well-informed as you is informed on the point.

 

(more…)

“One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way…This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law.” Russian President Putin at a Munich Security Conference.

A few different thoughts/questions came to mind when I read the stories about Putin’s speech:

I was not shocked by this move and the fact that he has so easily out flanked the U.S. Administration. After all, he has been running downhill since President Bush looked into his heart and saw a good man.

However this speech did make me wonder – again – how a U.S. Administration stacked with so many Russia analysts could flub U.S.-Russia relations so badly?

After all it takes some doing to mangle your own foreign policy to such a degree that an authoritarian former KGB member and human rights violator feels comfortable getting on his soap box and lecturing you about international law knowing that he will not be laughed out of the room.

I wondered what reaction we would get from the White House and did not have to wait long as it engaged via Gordon Johndroe, the press secretary for the National Security Council:

“We expect to continue co-operation with Russia in areas important to the international community such as counter-terrorism and reducing the spread and threat of weapons of mass destruction”
What is wrong with this response?
For me the MASSIVE hole in the response is that human rights are not a component of the equation. Our own post 9/11 counter terror policies have been so deeply flawed that we are unable to rebut Putin’s speech by referencing his own breeches of international law. We are unable to easily oppose highly questionable actions from the Russians (among others) because of our own illegal actions. Adding insult to injury we speak about a shared counter terror agenda with Russia knowing that they have destroyed Chechnya in recent years.

I have already written more than I planned, so I will leave you with this question.

What has the Administration gained from turning a blind eye to massive human rights violations by Russia in recent years?

I’ve been struck recently about how we tend to look at the conflict in Iraq in terms of what we (the United States) wants versus what the Iraqi public wants.  I think that this point of view has certainly received insufficient attention. 

As we all know, the United States went into Iraq for a variety of reasons.  The reason presented most recently by the Bush administration is that our purpose in Iraq is to provide democracy for a country which had been subjected to the rule of an evil tyrant.  In this sense we’re told that we’re in Iraq on a goodwill mission.  Many would call this the warped idealist approach (or neocon) approach which argues that we can transform the world, if necessary, through military means. 

Of course, that’s not sufficient for many Americans.  So, our president says that we must stay in Iraq because if we don’t it will become a haven for terrorists, who in the long run will certainly attack us just as they did on 9/11.  This is the realist self interested approach to foreign policy.  Even if you don’t care about the long term welfare of the Iraqis who we are supposedly helping, you should at least care about your own well being.  (more…)

During the past few months, I have heard foreign policy insiders in Washington worrying that Americans are “overlearning” the lessons of Iraq. I confess I have no idea what this means.

Iraq is the greatest foreign policy blunder in recent American history. At least as significant as the disastrous decision to intervene militarily in Vietnam, and, I believe, ultimately even more significant in terms of the harm that will come to U.S. national security.

It is essential, therefore, that we learn something from this whole affair, and that we are prepared to apply what we learn to our policies going forward. In a paper to be published next week by the Cato Institute, my colleague Ted Galen Carpenter concludes: “Above all, U.S. policymakers need to absorb the larger lesson of the Iraq debacle. Launching an elective war in pursuit of a nation-building chimera was an act of folly. It is a folly they should vow never to repeat in any other country.” I wholly endorse Ted’s conclusion.

Does this represent an “overlearning” of the Iraq debacle? It depends upon what we know, and what we think we know, about the legitimacy and effectiveness of U.S. military intervention abroad.

(more…)

“I don’t think 20,000 more troops is Democratic, I don’t think 20,000 troops is Republican. I think it’s stupid.” Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz – the Chairman of VoteVets.org. The group has been running some very hard hitting ads – you probably saw them during the Superbowl.

These guys deserve to be heard.

While the Iraq catastrophe is clearly the Administration’s single most significant post 9/11 foreign policy error, it is not the only one. Breaches of international law, lack of cooperation with allies and a general disregard for established norms of government to government behavior have marked the Administration’s foreign policy for the past 51/2 years.

In the counter-terror arena, these errors are gaining more visibility and rapidly fraying core U.S. strategic relationships with the Canadians, Germans, Italians and Australians at both a public and leadership level.

In Canada, Italy and Germany concerns are being fueled by the public airing of the “rendition” scandal. The public in each of these countries now knows that the CIA was responsible for kidnapping individuals (often citizens) and flying them to human rights abusing countries (such as Syria and Egypt) to be tortured.

Italian and German prosecutors are seeking to arrest members of the CIA involved in two of the more high profile kidnappings. In Canada the government has formally apologized and moved to compensate a Canadian citizen innocent of any crime who was brutally tortured in Syria after he was rendered by the U.S.

Additionally in Australia, the case of David Hicks, an Australian being held at Guantanamo is rapidly becoming a key issue for the electorate.

All of these cases show that the willful disregard for international law and established norms neither provides useful information nor strengthens the U.S. position in the global battle of ideas. In fact such actions undermine the reputation of the U.S. as a supporter of democracy and human rights while simultaneously making life very hard for governments that wish to be visible supporters in the fight against Al Qaeda.

It will be interesting to see if a Presidential candidate from either party is willing to make a “return to international law” a key plank in his or her foreign policy platform.