It is a good thing that that Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, never tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Judging by her recent actions it appears she would never be able to say the oath of enlistment with a straight face. I mean the part where one swears to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, which includes little things like subsequent amendments, such as those in the Bill of Rights.

What I refer to is when she and Bill Kristol, via their “Keep America Safe“ campaign, accused nine lawyers in the Justice Department, who had represented Guantanamo detainees of being the “al-Qaida Seven,” of working in the “Department of Jihad,” Perhaps Cheney and Kristol are simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that gets them on a talk show. After all, the right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, in so doing they trample underfoot other Constitutional rights that benefit all of us.

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Ordinary Americans are, by and large, pragmatists about legal matters.  They tend to favor legal outcomes that deftly balance competing considerations.  Outcomes that achieve this balance do not do a disservice to broad swaths of people but instead aim to enhance or at the minimum preserve meaningful social policies.  Pragmatism about law, in other words, is really a product of thinking clearly about what the law is for:  the law serves the American people, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, the currently constituted Supreme Court, led by that fearless foe of pragmatism, John G. Roberts, does not care that most Americans loathe the notion that judges ought to carry out their duties without the interests of the citizenry in mind.  Constitutional law, as Roberts himself is keen to emphasize, has nothing to do with sound public policy and should not be tempered by any moral or social concerns, however relevant they may seem to the electorate.  Constitutional law is a free-floating, self-sustaining set of rules that answers to no one, not even the American public.

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Last week well-known neoconservative Robert Kagan had a column in the Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine that argued that bipartisanship in foreign policy was alive and well in the Obama administration.  Although, I agree with Kagan’s central argument, I have issues with his rationale about why this came about and his prescriptions for the future.

Kagan writes,

Unnoticed amid the wailing about “broken government,” a broad bipartisan consensus is emerging in one unlikely area: foreign policy. On Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran — the most expensive and potentially dangerous foreign challenges facing the United States — little separates the Obama administration from most Republican leaders in and out of Congress.

Indeed, the fact that President Obama and many Republicans generally agree on the way forward in these major foreign policy challenges – despite sometimes sharp rhetoric to the contrary from both sides – is quite an achievement.  Or perhaps these bipartisan achievements appear noteworthy more so because the debate on domestic issues such as health care and the economy has become so caustic.

Why did this happen?  Kagan argues that it’s because Democrats now have the responsibility of governing and can’t just be critics.  That’s part of it.  The other part, though, is that the second term of the Bush administration was actually much more centrist than the first. This was in response to the dramatic overreach of the first term.  So, on many of the big issues, there was already much more consensus moving forward.

So, many conclude, in foreign policy, what’s the difference between having a Democrat or a Republican in charge?  I can’t say exactly how John McCain would have governed.  Perhaps the outcomes on these three big issues would have been similar.  My argument, however, is that it’s not just the outcomes that we should examine.  We also need to examine process.   In foreign policy, the process by which one reaches a policy decision is quite important and has tremendous ramifications for how the U.S. public and the world perceives that policy. (more…)

Recently, Dr. Victor Asal and Dr. R. Karl Rethemeyer from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy located at the University of Albany, State University of New York presented their ongoing research project, Big Allied and Dangerous: The Behavior of Terrorist Organizations (BAAD).  The project, funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, based at the University of Maryland, focuses on creating and maintaining a comprehensive database of terrorist organizational characteristics.  Currently, there is a plethora of event data (attacks) but very little data on the organizations that use violence themselves.  Understanding attacks is important in order to identify trends but understanding the organizations that commit the attacks has the greatest potential for the intelligence community.

The database has the potential to empirically demonstrate which characteristics and relationships make terrorist organizations lethal and effective at achieving its desired goals. The information could help inform homeland security, defense, and the intelligence communities on resource management decisions.  The findings may also offer a second opinion based on statistics as an additional layer of analysis in addition to the contributions of Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), which are widely used to develop policy.

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It’s a brave new world out there, but I don’t think it is the one Aldous Huxley had in mind when he wrote his famed book in 1932.

What Huxley gave us was a frightening vision of the future. And in one sense, though not the one Huxley was writing about, that vision is becoming reality. I refer to the expanding role of robots in war.

The most visible aspect of this is the use of aerial drones such as targeting Al Qaeda militants with Predator drone strikes. Predictably, some places, such as the Weekly Standard, think this fine and dandy, and worry only that we do not use them more for which they criticize President Obama. That is ironic as the President has authorized more drone attacks in the first year of his term in office than Bush did in his entire presidency.

But war is inherently unpredictable. One of the few ways we have of restraining its destructiveness is by having military personnel perform their duties in a framework of carefully wrought, time tested framework grounded in civic-military and ethical considerations. While pilots may sometimes be egomaniacal Top Guns they at least spend some time thinking about these things. But what happens when the man operating a Predator is just another technician, no different from any other journeyman such as an electrician or plumber? What happens when the use of deadly force is just another day at the office?

Boston Globe columnist H.D.S. Greenway noted that before 9/11, the CIA hesitated to strike bin Laden’s farm in Afghanistan because women and children might be killed. But as the war drags on the rules of engagement, rules against targeted assassination, whom to kill and not kill, have slipped, as they invariably do in all wars. (more…)

Last week the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations released a new report that called on the U.S. to better engage religious communities in the conduct of its foreign policy.  Although foreign policy analysts frequently acknowledge the integral role of religion in conflicts and peacemaking around the world, the reality is that too often religious communities are not engaged in U.S. policy decisions.   Last Tuesday task force members met with Obama administration representatives to present the findings of the report.  If heeded by this administration, this advice could, in the long run, substantially strengthen our hand in achieving our national security goals.  This report’s prescriptions are particularly applicable to how the United States deals with madrassas in the Muslim world.

The report states

Religion has been a major force in the daily lives of individuals and communities for millennia. Yet recent data show that the salience of religion is on the rise the world over. Once considered a “private” matter by Western policymakers, religion is now playing an increasingly influential role—both positive and negative—in the public sphere on many different levels….. What is needed is an informed and coherent framework that allows actors within and outside government to better understand and respond to religiously inspired actors and events in a way that supports those doing good, while isolating those that invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion.

This inability to fully understand religion and the role it plays in international relations has been characteristic of both Democratic and Republican administrations.  When speaking of her 2006 book, the Mighty and the Almighty, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said,

As a practitioner of foreign policy, I certainly come from the generation of people who used to say, “X problem is complicated enough. Let’s not bring God and religion into it.” But through my being in office, and as I explored the subject much further in writing “The Mighty and the Almighty,” I really thought that the opposite is true. In order to effectively conduct foreign policy today, you have to understand the role of God and religion.

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