« September 2011 »

BBC News reports that Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the head of Egypt's National Transition Council (NTC) has announced the NTC goal to create a modern democratic government influenced by the teachings and example of Islam's founding religious and political leader, Mohammed:

In his first speech since moving to the capital from the NTC stronghold of Benghazi, Mr Jalil told some 10,000 supporters to avoid retribution attacks, adding that Libya's new leaders would not accept any extremist ideology.

"We are a Muslim nation, with a moderate Islam, and we will maintain that. You are with us and support us - you are our weapon against whoever tries to hijack the revolution," he said.

Mr Jalil, who served as Col Gaddafi's justice minister before joining the rebels when the uprising started, said women would play an active role in the new Libya, and thanked a number of nations - including France and Britain - for supporting the NTC.

But he also warned against secularism, envisaging a state "where sharia [Islamic law] is the main source for legislation".

His words, broadcast live on television, were met with rapturous applause, as fireworks illuminated the Tripoli waterfront.

Americans need to support and respect such movements toward democracy as long as they allow moderate and modern interpretations of sharia to compete for public support. Because Islam's founding father was a political and religious figure -- and he formalized many principles of governance and religion in the same moments -- it is unrealistic to think that endogenous self-determination movements in overwhelmingly Muslim countries will not be suffused with Islamic values and narratives.

But many of Mohammed's principles -- like political leaders' responsibilities to their constituents and the insistence on respect for minorities -- align easily with the democracy of the European Enlightenment. Others are less compatible, but open to interpretation and contestation and likely to modernize with the economies of the region. Now is a time for the West to wish the best to Libyans, show friendship, and support movements toward democracy and increased individual freedoms.

In a CNN interview with John King, Joe Biden "denied former Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that controversial interrogation techniques such as waterboarding... would help generate useful intelligence in the war against al Qaeda and other organizations."

""I've seen zero evidence that it works, and I think there's abundant evidence that it hurts us internationally. It hurts our security," Biden said."

Ali Soufan's book chronicling his insider account of the hunt for al Qaeda, The Black Banners, is now available.

Robert Baer, former CIA agent, describes it as "Superb. An education. And best book on al Qaeda out there, bar none."

Soufan discusses some of its contents on last nights's episode of 60 minutes.

And here's more from the New York Times review:

As we ramp up to a weekend that will flood our televisions and radiowaves with retrospective specials on the 9/11 attacks, America's opinion-makers are vying to define the meaning of those horrors and the decade since.

But instead of using this moment to reconstruct narratives affirming our successes and clarifying the many lessons we only learned through error, many among the opinion-making class have dug in their heels, cherry-picking from ten years of evidence to support whatever position on counterterrorism they staked out on September 12, 2001.

Commentators from the right continue to harp on the very simplistic logical fallacy that because there has not been a devastating attack since 9/11, EVERY aspect of the government's response was a success. They are nearly as eager to point out, too, that because the Obama administration has yet to renounce all of its predecessor's policies, it must have judged them all to be effective:
Charles Krauthammer propagates the fallacy with gusto:

10 years, no second attack (which everyone assumed would come within months). That testifies to the other great achievement of the decade: the defensive anti-terror apparatus hastily constructed from scratch after 9/11 by President Bush, and then continued by President Obama. Continued why? Because it worked.

In the last decade, our nation has certainly paid a price in the lives of the brave men and women who have defended us. But who would say, after 10 years, that it wasn't worth it to keep our nation safe?"

"reality and political opposition forced the [Obama] administration to return to many of its predecessor's core terrorism policies."

"A near absence of terrorist incidents in the United States since 9/11 points to the successes of the Bush Administration's counterterrorism measures that once stirred controversy but now have bipartisan acceptance."

"A decade beyond Sept. 11, the Bush Doctrine has been adopted by the Obama administration and vindicated by events."

Commentators from the left, meanwhile, have their own reasons for closely comparing the policies of Bush and Obama. (To avoid charges of drawing false equivalencies, I should note that the rhetorical flourishes of these commentators pale in comparison to the flights from logic coming from folks like Krauthammer and Yoo.)
Having spent the early part of the decade vigilantly defending civil liberties against real and counterproductive encroachments by an overzealous Bush administration, they show little hesitation in skewering Democrats for failing to enact the entire agenda they campaigned on.

Robert Wright, for example, writes of the whole counterproductive War on Terror :

"Certainly President Obama seems bent on sustaining it. In addition to authorizing the assassination of al-Awlaki (an American citizen, by the way, in theory guaranteed due process by our Constitution), the President has massively expanded drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he recently extended them to Somalia, even as they continue in Yemen."

"Quit doing the kinds of things that have made so many in the Muslim world hate the United States. Get our troops out of Muslim lands, stop firing drones into their countries."

"He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He failed to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, move terrorism trials out of military commissions to civilian courts, end extraordinary rendition, or prosecute Bush Administration officials who ordered torture. … In targeting Muslim cleric and accused Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki for assassination, he has affirmed Bush’s claim that the president can order the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, even outside any battlefield context. Overall, Obama’s record on executive power and civil liberties diverges little from that of his predecessor. In certain respects it is even worse…"

Continue reading "9/11 Coverage Round-Up: Left and Right get it Wrong: War on Terror is Over" »

John Yoo signs off his self-congratulatory 9/11 retrospective in the Wall Street Journal with this chestnut:

"In the last decade, our nation has certainly paid a price in the lives of the brave men and women who have defended us. But who would say, after 10 years, that it wasn't worth it to keep our nation safe?"

I don't know if it is better or worse that Yoo posed this conclusion as a rhetorical question. I guess -- given my understanding of what actually keeps our nation safe and what endangers it -- it would strike me as incredibly cavalier and tone-deaf either way.

But, to take Yoo's challenge, I will say, unequivocally, that the war-footing that sent us on a misadventure in Iraq, distracted special operations from the obliteration of al Qaeda in Tora Bora at a moment when their allies were convinced 9/11 (and the "far enemy" approach it aimed to advance) was a strategic blunder, precipitated the metastasization of al Qaeda into Iraq and beyond, killed at least tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, shamed the U.S. around the world, destabilized the region to the benefit of Iran, and placed us anywhere from 1-3 trillion dollars deeper in debt was not worth a single American life. And it certainly wasn't worth thousands of American lives, nor the physical and psychological maiming of tens of thousands more of our soldiers and their families.

Did we need to root out al Qaeda? Yes. But that's not what Yoo and friends did. They fertilized al Qaeda and spread its seeds throughout the Middle East and North Africa by "choosing war" (in Yoo's words). They chose the only way of dealing with al Qaeda - expansive war in the Middle East - that could have made them more relevant and popular after 9/11.

Without that chosen war, the decade would have looked quite different. A small special operations unit would have dispatched bin Laden and much of the rest of al Qaeda in Tora Bora. The CIA and JSOC would have increased their surgical and limited counterterrorism operations, containing any Hirabi groups seeking to emulate al Qaeda's approach. The internal debate in Muslim lands about how to incorporate Islamic traditions into their political systems would have stayed an internal debate, and eventually the Arab Spring would have swept Hussein out of power along with the other authoritarians in the region. We would be basically where we are now, without having squandered unnecessary blood, treasure, and good will.

But Yoo does not get any of that. As he argues:

Continue reading "Covering the 9/11 Coverage: John Yoo" »

In a fairly sedate apologia for George W. Bush's post 9/11 foreign policy appearing in Foreign Affairs, Melvyn Leffler writes:

"To extract actionable intelligence, it [the Bush Administration] resorted to detention, rendition, and, in a few cases, torture."

This formulation suggests both that 'actionable intelligence' was won using such tactics and that the administration 'resorted' to their use only after other tactics were tried and found wanting. But leaked and declassified accounts of interrogations featuring the 'torture' Leffler refers to suggest that neither of these propositions are true. Coercive techniques did not produce actionable intelligence, and they were used despite the superior efficacy of rapport-based techniques that generated far more intelligence with those very detainees.

For a thorough debunking of the meme Leffler casually propagates, see this.

In their 9/11 piece "Ten Years On," the Economist writes:

"…the Bush Administration rode roughshod over cherished civil liberties. Congress, the courts, and a new president eventually pushed back, but not all the way."

This is only partially correct, and misses the point.

The courts did push back on the Bush Administration's designs for Military Commissions, forcing the tribunals to approximate more closely the traditional criminal courts of the American Constitution. And President Obama did issue an Executive Order banning the use of 'enhanced' interrogation tactics often described as torture. But most of the retreat from Bush's rights-abusing policies was initiated by the security establishment itself because the policies did not work.

The FBI, TSA, and ICE walked back from ethnic profiling policies because they caught no terrorists and alienated potentially useful collaborators. The CIA ended the 'enhanced' interrogation program in favor of better-performing methods. And, for every military prosecutor arguing for increased prerogatives for themselves and decreased due process for terror suspects, a military defense attorney has been fighting to defend Article III Constitutional rights on the grounds that they make our legal system more effective and more legitimate.

The Congress, for its part, has done precious little on any of these fronts. It has provided episodic and toothless oversight of executive counterterrorism programs, has greenlighted ineffective security policies agencies have not even asked for, and has even prevented DoD and DoJ prosecutors -- against their preferences -- from transferring terror defendants to Article III Courts, waxing heroic about their responsibility to protect their constituencies from movie-plot attacks on the trial venues.

Washington lawyers and politicians did not end Bush's war on terror. Security officials did. And they ended it, because it didn't make Americans any safer.

Image from The Economist.com

Ross Douthat argues in the New York Times that "It's Still the 9/11 Era."

In an op-ed that almost reads as a glancing rebuttal to our Atlantic essay describing how the War on Terror ended, Douthat argues that we have not yet emerged from a 9/11 era defined by a martial approach to terrorism and a foreign policy promoting democracy in the Muslim world.

This formulation of the '9/11 era' is suspect on both accounts. First, a purely criminal justice approach to terrorism cannot be an essential criterion for judging the end of the 9/11 era. There are strong arguments suggesting we should use such an approach. But the United States has never been shy about using military force against dangerous threats. The Clinton Administration's missile strikes targeting Osama bin Laden -- to say nothing of its aggression against potentially dangerous domestic groups or America's long history of covert warfare against non-state actors -- suggests that extrajudicial killing of enemies is not a marker of the '9/11 era.'

As for his second criterion, democracy promotion in the Middle East: the United States invaded Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts. We invaded Iraq over ginned up fears that Saddam Hussein would transfer WMDs (he did not have) to terrorists (he was not connected to). In both cases, democracy promotion merely became necessary once vacuums of authority threatened to leave the territories lawless safe-havens for terrorists. That Obama uses the rhetoric of democracy promotion should not mark him as a '9/11 era' president any more than it would mark Kennedy, Roosevelt, Jefferson, Washington, or indeed every single American president in our history.

In any case, the substance and timbre of US counterterrorism policy have changed dramatically since the first two years of Bush's War on Terror. Ethnic profiling, 'enhanced' interrogation, preventative detention, and the aggressive stance of our military occupations have all been dialed back significantly as US security officials have recognized the wisdom in fostering cooperative relationships with the communities they contact while reserving their uses of force for selected surgical strikes.

Douthat could not have known this at the time he wrote, but his fear of a "possibly permanent military footprint in Iraq" also appears to be unfounded. As Fox News reported today, Obama and his Iraqi partners have tentatively agreed that only 3,000 US troops will stay on in Iraq as advisers after December 31st. Even if the number is jiggered up a bit by the end of the year, there is no arguing that our military operations in both countries have significantly shifted first from invasion to counterinsurgency, and now counterinsurgency to counterterrorism and institution building.

I might charitably agree with Douthat (a writer I often enjoy) that we are not entirely out of the woods yet. But, the forest is thinning significantly. We are well past the War on Terror and you can even make out the horizon enough to see the sun setting on his "9/11 era."