WisPolitics.com reports that Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle (D) plans to take more than $20 million out of the state’s REAL ID account and transfer it into the state’s general fund.
Wisconsin Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R) objects:
When I shepherded the REAL ID bill through Congress 3 years ago, it was in response to one of the key recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, that ‘fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft.’ As we saw in 2001, in the hands of a terrorist, a valid ID accepted for travel in the US can be just as dangerous as a missile or bomb.
Congressman Sensenbrenner is correct to claim responsibility for REAL ID, but less accurate in other parts of his statement. The 9/11 Commission’s ‘key’ recommendation wasn’t key. (Indeed, Congress’ effort to follow the Commission’s recommendation was repealed by REAL ID.)
Nobody - not the 9/11 Commission, not Congressman Sensenbrenner, not Stewart Baker, nor anyone else - can explain the proximity between false ID and terrorist attacks, or how REAL ID cost-effectively secures the country against any threat.
Wisconsin’s governor has issued a mighty well-placed snub to the creator of the “Sensenbrenner tax.”
Steve Clemons posts a heartening little video of Bush père’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft responding to Steve’s question “What do you think about Cuba?” It’s a rare occasion for foreign policy folks to take heart and ponder whether the forces of reality may not be making progress on some issues, at least:
Inspired by the promotional brochure I recently came across, I’ve taken a look at L-1 Identity Solutions in a new Cato TechKnowledge. Though it has better options, L-1 and its new acquisition, Digimarc ID Systems, seem likely to continue lobbying for the REAL ID Act. My concluding line: “A corporate lobbying operation can do as much harm to liberty as any government agency or official.”
Yesterday - Sunday, May 11, 2008 - was the statutory deadline for state compliance with the REAL ID Act. Not a single state has begun issuing nationally standardized IDs as called for by the law. Nor are they putting driver information into nationally accessible databases.
Matthew Blake of the Washington Independent has a solid recap of the situation.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a legal permanent resident who was arrested because he shared a common name with a suspected illegal immigrant. It illustrated how the E-Verify program would foul things for legal workers, a prominent subject of this paper.
Here’s another story of legal permanent resident mistreatment. This illustrates how overblown terror fears can cloud officials’ judgments and foul things for . . . well, everyone.
It seems that a woman in Florida asked her relatives in Monterrey, Mexico to ship her the birth certificates of two relatives who want to apply for their Mexican passports at the consulate in South Miami. At the behest of U.S. Customs and Border Security, the envelope is being held by the United Parcel Service in Louisville, Kentucky until she identifies herself further.
Asked to explain, a CBP spokeswoman in Washington asserted the U.S. government’s right to examine everything entering or exiting the country and said, “Identity documents are of concern to CBP because of their potential use by terrorists.”
This is a terrific example of poorly generated suspicion. In our paper on predictive data mining, Jeff Jonas and I wrote about how suspicion is properly generated in the absence of specific leads: “[T]here must be a pattern that fits terrorism planning . . . and the actions of investigated persons must fit that pattern while not fitting any common pattern of lawful behavior.”
As to whether Bush is a recruiting tool for terrorists–who cares? Al Qaeda was recruiting before Bush was in office and they will continue to do so after he’s gone. The important thing is that we keep killing those recruits. Eventually, one side will give up.
Do they edit this stuff before putting it up? By this logic, why don’t we airdrop a bunch of copies of Penthouse Letters into the Kabaa? After all, al Qaeda will continue recruiting whether we do it or not. Or maybe we could declare war on all of Islam. After all, al Qaeda was recruiting before we declared it. Or maybe we could send Senator McCain’s “moral compass and spiritual guide” onto al Hurra to tell Muslims that “America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.” After all, it’s not like al Qaeda’s not recruiting today.
Over at The American Conservative blog, Jim Antle points out that Rep. Walter Jones, an antiwar Republican incumbent, as well as another antiwar Republican, B.J. Lawson, won big in last night’s North Carolina primary.
Although the Republican establishment in Washington seems to have sacrificed every other governing principle at the altar of reckless militarism, it appears that a contingent of Republican voters haven’t. Maybe Bill Kauffman is onto something…
The back page of the Week in Review section of yesterday’s NYT features a symposium on “How to See This Mission Accomplished,” in which the Times asked nine experts to address problems going forward in Iraq. Since at least five of the nine were enthusiastic backers of the war — and three work for the American Enterprise Institute — this is something like asking the captain of the Exxon Valdez* for his considered judgment on how best to conduct the cleanup. Hey NYT: next time, why not consult someone who got it right?
* Ironically enough, the Valdez’s Wikipedia entry places one “Able Seaman Robert Kagan” at the helm during the crash. They’re everywhere.
Joining the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives has endorsed S. 717, the Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007. This bill would reinstitute a negotiated rulemaking process regarding identity security that was established in the 9/11-Commission-inspired Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.
Last week, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) vetoed a transportation bill that included a provision objecting to the federal REAL ID Act. The bill would have required the federal government to pay 95 percent of the cost of issuing national IDs before Minnesota would participate. Claiming political machinations were afoot, Pawlenty said that he preferred “something more reasonable like 50 or 60 percent.” One wonders what principle of federalism, liberty, or privacy could possibly support his willingness to accept a 50% unfunded surveillance mandate.
A much clearer vision will be on display next week when Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) joins Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) here at the Cato Institute to discuss the REAL ID Act. South Carolina has barred itself from participating in the national ID system created by the Act, and Governor Sanford defiantly refused to ask the Department of Homeland Security for an extension of the compliance deadline earlier this year.
Senator Tester represents a state that has been similarlydefiant. He is an original cosponsor of legislation that would repeal the REAL ID Act and restore the identification security provisions of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act, which REAL ID repealed.
In its infinite wisdom, C-SPAN chose to commit this Hudson Institute panel to celluloid. Of course, I can’t get the dang video to work right, but I had the fortune to catch most of the panel last night on the teevee. Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Senor, and Peter Rodman got the old gang back together in an effort to pretend-examine What Went Wrong in Iraq.
The line that Feith advances is that we shouldn’t have done a, y’know, occupation. Wolfowitz supports this position, expressing amazement that “the term ‘occupation’ sticks with us today, even though the occupation ended in June 2004.” These are cute semantic games, but they’re an affront to reality. So Wolfowitz turns to this move, as reported by Eli Lake:
And I do think a real failure — I assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population.
This sends Abu Muqawama, the pseudonymous U.S. military veteran and proprietor of a popular counterinsurgency blog, into apoplexy. What’s a real shame is that Lake’s own question, which was excellent, didn’t elicit a serious response. Lake observed that even under close tutelage from the Americans, galling depredations had been committed by the ISF, such as torture conducted by the Ministry of Interior, etc. Why, then, if we had handed more control over sooner, wouldn’t we have expected much more of this kind of thing to have happened?
Feith’s response? I’m paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of “I just don’t think it would have.” So presumably under the Feith-Wolfowitz plan, we invade, grab Saddam, and then just turn the reins over to “external” Iraqi leader/charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his band of 700 supporters? Or perhaps Wolfowitz meant his remark as an “assume a can-opener” joke? Wolfowitz’s claim that “a real failure…was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough” begs the question How on Earth could we have just had enough committed Iraqi troops “early enough and fast enough”???
Wolfowitz then ups the ante with his claim that “nobody could have foreseen the insurgency,” an insurgency which he attributes almost entirely to Saddam Hussein. Reading from Feith’s new book, Wolfowitz agrees with Feith that neither of them saw “a CIA assessment stating that after their ouster, the Ba’athists would be able to organize, recruit for, finance, supply, and command and control an insurgency, let alone an alliance with foreign jihadists.” This is an absurd over-attribution of responsibility for the insurgency to that Most Unitary of Evils, Saddam Hussein. As for who could have predicted that the intractable confessional disputes may have caused problems, Feith and Wolfowitz may want to look up Paul Pillar.
These points represent just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, if Hudson had had somebody on the panel who did not fundamentally agree on the basic justice, prudence, and strategic genius behind the war, all of this could have been exposed as nonsense in front of the cameras. But that’s not how the game is played, I guess.
Dana Milbank, who reports on Washington as a visitor might report on the monkey house at a zoo, attended Doug Feith’s talk about his new book at CSIS last night and reports on the results. His title? “Iraq War Is Everyone Else’s Fault, Feith Explains.”
I’m no Milbank partisan, but when he’s on, he’s on.
The National Conference of State Legislatures wants the REAL ID Act gone. It supports S. 717, the Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007, which would repeal the REAL ID Act and reinstitute a negotiated rulemaking process on identity security that was established in the 9/11-Commission-inspired Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that an organization like this would reject a behemoth of a project like building a national ID and surveillance system. The NCSL isn’t a small-government organization, and it could just as well have lobbied for billions of dollars in funding.
Pawlenty has threatened to veto a major transportation bill because it includes language that would hamper Minnesota’s ability to comply with the [REAL ID Act].
Thursday the Government Accountability Office published a report that points out that the United States lacks a “comprehensive plan” that integrates “all elements of national power” to deal with problem of terrorism emanating from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The report exemplifies the cult of planning that enthralls U.S. foreign policy analysts — and not just because it uses the phrase “comprehensive plan” 47 times in 25 pages.
Democratic leaders can use the report to bash President Bush, which is presumably why they requested it. But most people will merely find it useless. It is, after all, the GAO’s shtick to issue bland reports like this one, which does little other than note a lack of coordinated planning and then recommend more coordinated planning. (The report does say, to be fair, that the United States has done too little to address the cause of terrorism in northwest Pakistan, which it identifies, with bizarre confidence, as a lack of economic development.) And no one, even at Cato, can really be against better planning and coordination of government agencies to combat terrorists. Seems harmless. So what’s the problem?
The report never considers the possibility that the great minds of Washington, D.C., however well coordinated, may not contain the solution to the problems in Pakistan’s northwest hinterlands. Planning, after all, isn’t power.
I have never been, I confess, to an inter-agency planning meeting, so I can’t rule out the possibility that they’re magic. Maybe the agency representatives perform coordinated rites that reveal the wisdom to solve any problem and the power to implement their insight.
Barring that, it might have been worth devoting a sentence or two in the report to the difficulty of planning the affairs of other people’s countries. The area in question, after all, is not only beyond the control of our government but beyond the control of Pakistan’s, which we also do not control. This is not an engineering problem, like a faulty bridge. This is a problem of Pakistani politics and geography. There is not a U.S. plan that can fix that, including an invasion plan.
Earlier this week, Matt Yglesias remarked at “the arrogance of the hawks” and expressed his frustration that
In response to 9/11, the hawks launched a war that’s killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden ever could, at the cost of over 1 trillion dollars; they’ve done nothing to impede nuclear proliferation, nothing to build democracies in the Middle East, failed to kill or capture al-Qaeda’s top leadership, made Hamas and Iran more powerful than ever before, and brought American prestige and influence to a new low ebb.
Now obviously a lot of the folks who adhere to the ideas that have brought all this about somehow think they’re right anyway. And fair enough; there’s just no accounting for some people. But the attitude of thoughtless, unreflective scorn that you see from the [Noah] Pollacks and [James] Kirchicks and [Michael] Goldfarbs of the world is like it comes from some weird alternative reality where their ideas have generally been deemed vindicated, rather than one where 178% of the public says we’re on the wrong track.
Today, Andrew Sullivan links to this video chronicling Douglas Feith’s contorted non-apologies and notes “one wonders whether anyone in the Bush establishment actually believes they ever made an error.”
In this vein, it’s worth wondering what things would look like if things had turned out basically the mirror image of what’s happened today…
An Iranian nuclear force would be small and inaccurate: a terror weapon, not a weapon of war to be used against an opponent able to respond in overwhelming force. Israel is not the target. So who is?
The short answer: The world oil market.
In 1986, the US waged an undeclared proxy naval war to deter Iran from attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The US won of course and Iran lacked any effective riposte. This US operation played a decisive role in compelling Iran to accept peace in the Iran-Iraq war.
And it may have prompted Iranian leaders to decide: We need an effective counter-deterrent against the US. The US would have been much more reluctant to protect Kuwaiti tankers against a nuclear Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would act as a “Keep Out” sign to frighten the US away from a now truly Persian Gulf.
In other words, an atomic bomb would serve Iran’s hegemonic ambitions rather tha its apocalyptic fantasies. It is a useful weapon sought by rational people. That is precisely why it is dangerous and must be stopped.
Frum packs a lot of problems into a short piece. So Iran is going to use nuclear weapons to try to hold Arab oil from making its way onto world markets? Interesting. A few questions:
1) What do we think the Chinese may think about the resulting skyrocket in world oil prices? Japan? Frum paints the familiar image of a lonely US hanging by a thread to its oil lifeline in the Middle East. Things have changed a lot since 1986. What do we think the rest of the world may have to say about this business?
2) What target are the Iranians holding at risk in this scenario? Ras Tanura? Israel? Iraq? Who’s going to be threatened?
3) Who is going to believe that Iran will pull the trigger? If we believe, as Frum and I do, that Iran is run by “rational people” who are seeking nuclear weapons because they are “useful,” why would we believe that the Iranian regime would bring about its own end by using nuclear weapons against any of the above targets?
I see that the senator from Arizona feels confident enough in his own views on foreign policy to blurb ur-neocon Robert Kagan’s latest call to arms as ”a guide to the dangerous waters of 21st century geopolitics.”
Max Boot writes this today, discussing the competing currents of American foreign policy, militarized Wilsonianism and those who oppose it:
The opposing viewpoint—which denounces American “imperialism” and abjures the defense of liberty abroad—has an equally long history. It lists among its proponents not only modern-day neocon-bashers such as Michael Moore and Pat Buchanan, but also such illustrious predecessors as the “progressive” historians Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams and realpolitik thinkers like Hans Morgenthau and Walter Lippmann.
The narrative Elisabeth Bumiller and Larry Rohter are advancing is that Senator McCain has two different factions within his foreign policy advisory: dyed-in-the-wool war-loving neocons like Max Boot and Robert Kagan on the one hand, and on the other hand, “pragmatists” who are later described in the article as “realists,” best characterized by people like Henry Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Richard Armitage. According to Bumiller and Rohter, there are big differences between the two camps.
There are degrees of difference among these advisers, to be sure, but to imply that they represent fundamentally different camps is completely inaccurate. First off, there’s a big difference between academic realists, who overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq before it started, and most people who gallivant around the Beltway proclaiming themselves realists. (Beware, in particular, anyone who uses realist with a modifier, as in “idealistic realist.” Only accept the genuine article.) A huge majority of the Beltway foreign policy establishment–including every member except one of the “pragmatist” faction in the Times story–promoted the war and still have failed to grasp the reasons for its failure.
Bumiller and Rohter then roll out the one prominent figure within the DC foreign policy establishment who did oppose the war, Brent Scowcroft, Bush père’s national security adviser. They describe his opposition to the war and list him as a member of the realist camp within McCain’s advisory. But here’s the thing: If Bumiller and Rohter had dug around a bit, they could have discovered that McCain consigliere Randy Scheunemann, famous for his stalwart promotion of Iraqi charlatan Ahmed Chalabi (a topic that goes totally unexplored in the piece) told the New York Sun in 2006 that “I don’t think, given where John has been for the last four or five years on the Iraq war and foreign policy issues, anyone would mistake Scowcroft for a close adviser.”
Reading the Times piece, you’d believe that there are the war-crazed neocons on the one hand, and the prudent anti-war realists on the other hand. In reality, you have the war-crazed neocons on the one hand, and pro-war realists like Henry Kissinger (who is pro-war first and a realist second) on the other. They present Scowcroft, the one opponent of the war, in order to create the impression that there’s a difference of views on the question, but then fail to mention that he’s been dismissed as a peripheral figure by McCain’s closest foreign policy adviser.
I don’t know whether the Times is trying to make up for the Vicki Iseman story with this, but it makes John McCain look a lot less wedded to perpetual war than anybody who’s been paying attention could easily tell you.
Via Glenn Greenwald, a Rasmussen poll released yesterday indicates that support for withdrawing from Iraq has reached an all time high. 26% of Americans support leaving “immediately,” 39% want U.S. troops home within one year, not contingent on conditions, and 31% want to stay until “the mission is complete.” So 65% of Americans want US troops out of Iraq within–at the outer bound–one year. 31% support the McCain strategy of staying indefinitely.
Two main purposes of the Surge were, in the words of Thomas Donnelly, to “redefine the Washington narrative,” and as White House adviser Peter Feaver put things, to “develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor.” This can’t look too good for these folks. It speaks volumes, on the other hand, about the wisdom of the American people.
A friend and supporter of my work on REAL ID sent me a link to this WebMemo from the Heritage Foundation, entitled “All Aboard: Fifty States Now Compliant with Real ID.” I’m using the subject line of his email as the title of this post.
There certainly seems to be confusion in some quarters about REAL ID’s current status. Let’s take a brief look at how states stand in terms of compliance.
Because not a single state will comply with REAL ID on the statutory deadline, May 11th, the Department of Homeland Security has been giving out deadline extensions willy-nilly the last few months. It gave extensions just for the asking to states that have statutorily barred themselves from complying, for example.
Some states refused to even ask for extensions. When this happened, DHS quickly switched to issuing states extensions if the states were independently changing their driver’s licensing processes in ways that would meet any of the requirements of REAL ID. States like Montana and New Hampshire wrote to DHS expressing no intention to comply with the law, but stating what they had done on their own. These DHS interpreted as requests for extensions, and granted them.
When the governor of Maine last week finally sent DHS a letter stating his intention to submit legislation relating to REAL ID compliance, the DHS took that as a request for an extension and granted it. The Maine legislature will have to consider any such bills, of course. Maine’s is the legislature that was the first in the country to reject REAL ID.
Getting deadline extensions by hook and by crook out to all 50 states is a pretty long way from getting all 50 states to comply. The actual state of things is reflected well on this map, maintained at the ACLU-run Web site RealNightmare.org. It shows seven states still self-barred from complying, and many others protesting the law. An eighth - Idaho - recently saw legislation barring compliance with REAL ID move through the Senate and to the governor’s desk.
After DHS Secretary Chertoff’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week (at which he was apparently rebuked for “bullying” states on REAL ID compliance) he sat down with a group of bloggers to discuss things.
Congratulations are due the Secretary for making himself available in an open forum like this, especially because it allows us some insight into his thinking. It makes more clear why he and his colleague Stewart Baker feel a need to engage in so much REAL ID “myth-busting.” Though I have assumed their comprehension of the problems with REAL ID, perhaps I have been mistaken, as Secretary Chertoff does not exhibit a good sense of information technology or the information economy.
Here’s the myth that Secretary Chertoff purports to bust:
I had someone say to me today, “Well, when you have these REAL ID licenses with a machine-readable zone . . . it’s gonna be used to track people. People can skim it. And they can steal it. And then they can use it to follow you around.” Now this is a fantasy. This is just not true.
The Secretary overstates the argument and so shades into attacking a straw man, but the context is conversational. So let’s look at what the real argument is, and then at the Secretary’s responses. I touched on the question of tracking in my testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee:
There are machine-readable components like magnetic strips and bar codes on many licenses today. Their types, locations, designs, and the information they carry differs from state to state. For this reason, they are not used very often. If all identification cards and licenses were the same, there would be economies of scale in producing card readers, software, and databases to capture and use this information. Americans would inevitably be asked more and more often to produce a REAL ID card, and share the data from it, when they engaged in various governmental and commercial transactions.
In turn, others will capitalize on the information collected in state databases and harvested using REAL ID cards. Speaking to the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee last week, Anne Collins, the Registrar of Motor Vehicles for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts said, “If you build it they will come.” Massed personal information will be an irresistible attraction to the Department of Homeland Security and many other governmental entities, who will dip into data about us for an endless variety of purposes.
This is not an argument that the currently proposed REAL ID license would be read surreptitiously, as might happen with an RFID-chipped card. (The Secretary says that REAL ID currently does not require RFID, but neglects to mention that the “Enhanced Driver’s License,” which satisfies REAL ID, has one.) The argument is that a great deal more data about us will be collected.
This will include “meta-data” - information about the collection of information, such as time, place, purpose, collecting entity, and so on. Combined identity data and meta-data form footprints about our comings and goings. These footprints, collected in interoperable databases, combine to form tracks.
Perhaps it’s a complicated argument, but it’s a coherent one: REAL ID would lead to tracking of law-abiding Americans.
Nothing the Secretary says conveys that he’s aware of meta-data or actual data collection processes. He says that the machine-readable zone (or MRZ) is “nothing more than the information on the face of the license. I already have a reader for the license - it’s called my eye - and I can read what’s on your license. So therefore there’s nothing I’m going to get out of the MRZ that I can’t get from the face of the license.”
Alas, even this isn’t quite true. The regulation prescribes certain minimum data elements for the MRZ, but doesn’t restrict the use of others, and it doesn’t require states to restrict the content of the MRZ to only what is on the face of the license. The MRZ could lead to tracking of people and their activities based on their race, for example, a data element many states currently include in their MRZs. Despite receiving comments concerned with this during the rulemaking process - oh, and in congressional testimony - DHS declined to prohibit including race in the MRZ of REAL IDs.
Card readers are not just little electric eyeballs. They record information in digital form. This means that identical copies of these records are easy to store, easy to compile, easy to transfer, and easy to reuse. Collecting information in digital form is materially different from collecting information in analog form. Most people who work with technology know that implicitly. To be credible on identification technology issues, one must know this and acknowledge its significance.
Finally, the Secretary says that the DHS is not going to create a lot of databases using REAL ID. That may be his intention, but he’s in office for about ten more months. And whether DHS creates them or not, databases of information harvested using REAL ID would likely be available to DHS.
It is very hard to design information technology systems that do not collect and retain information. The current secretary’s personal opinion about databases just isn’t good evidence of whether or not there will be databases of information about the comings and goings of law-abiding Americans. Chances are very good if REAL ID is implemented that there will be.
The Orange County Register has an editorial on the REAL ID Act this morning that captures the issues magnificently. Among other gems:
The big trouble is that there’s no evidence that this Draconian act, even if fully implemented, would be more than a minor inconvenience for a determined terrorist. But having all that information – including copies of birth certificates and Social Security cards – available in one database would make an irresistible target for identity thieves. And it would be a major inconvenience for millions of innocent Americans and a major expense for state governments – meaning taxpayers.
The Register’s conclusion? Congress should “bite the bullet and repeal this useless, intrusive, money-wasting law.”
My recent op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor argues that the US objective in Afghanistan – preventing the creation of terrorist havens – does not require that Afghanistan become a peaceful, centralized state. I say that’s good news because it’s beyond us to build one. Absent this goal, the push for a surge of US or NATO forces in Afghanistan makes less sense.
I want to add couple points here that I couldn’t fit into the op-ed.
American leaders have lately been telling Europeans to make a bigger commitment to Afghanistan, even though the war is becoming unpopular in much of Europe. For instance, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a speech at a conference in Munich in February where he explained the terrorist threat to the Europeans to get them to send more troops to Afghanistan. He did not say how counter-insurgency in Afghanistan serves counter-terrorism in Pakistan, which is where the terrorists in the region who should concern Europeans mostly live. At least in the short term, 55,000 thousand western soldiers across the border seem more likely to inflame Pakistani extremism than to suppress it.
This hectoring demonstrates the trouble with NATO. Back when NATO had a clear purpose, to defend Western Europe from the Soviets, it made sense to ask the Europeans to do more. The Europeans had an incentive to avoid military spending; to free ride. That was OK with Americans at the start of the Cold War, when we were eager to spark European economic growth as a bulwark against Communism. Once Western Europe got rich, we told them to ante up, in part via publications like the Allied Contribution of the Common Defense.
Most American policy-makers believe that we remain in that Cold War relationship; that our allies are free-riding to a shared goal. But, as Stanley Kober has observed, threat perceptions have diverged, and many Europeans, rather than appreciating our wars, dispute their efficacy. Europeans seem more inclined than Americans to wonder whether the war in Afghanistan is making them safer. By asserting a common cause without providing one, NATO clouds this reality. It deludes us into thinking that our efforts are a favor that the Europeans ought to return.
It has become popular to worry that Afghanistan will destroy NATO. That would be no great loss. Today, the principle effect of NATO and its eastward expansion is to antagonize Russia. The benefit that justifies this antipathy is unclear. How do the military responsibilities that the US has so casually accepted in recent years — to defend Estonia, for example, against Russia — serve US interests? This guarantee, if it’s believed, seems likely to encourage the war it defends against by provoking moral hazard; as the defense we provide our new allies frees them to offend Russia.
The thesis that the prospect of NATO membership spreads liberal values or institutions is plausible, but I’m not convinced. Nor is it clear that NATO matters much in signing up allies for wars. It’s possible we got a few more contributions in Afghanistan by virtue of the alliance, but I doubt it mattered much. The countries that went probably did so because they believed in the mission, not because they are in NATO.
Despite its strategic obsolescence, NATO has proven politically useful on both sides of the Atlantic. However hollow, NATO will survive. What we might lose in Afghanistan are misconceptions about its usefulness.
The foreign-policy blog buzz of the day is probably the story, linked by Blake Hounshell at FP, and by Noah Shachtman at Wired, about al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri’s online Q and A recently. Apparently, according to Blake’s excerpts, it’s tough out there for a jihadi:
The general tenor of the questions is sharply critical, so let me boil down the questioners’ main beefs here:
Al Qaeda talks a big game, but never attacks Israel (but we have killed plenty of Jews, Zawahiri responds)
Al Qaeda isn’t doing anything to overthrow the Egyptian regime (it ain’t easy, Zawahiri pleads, but it is inevitable)
Al Qaeda slaughters innocent Muslims (only if they get in the way)
Al Qaeda is too harsh on Hamas (just the leaders who have sold out sharia law, not the “mujahedin”)
Al Qaeda is rumored to be dealing with Iran (a charge Zawahiri has responded to before with a non-denial denial)
Influential clerics and ideologues have denounced al Qaeda (Zawahiri takes great pains to paint two in particular, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the subject of “Egypt’s Contrite Commander” from FP’s current issue, as Zionist-Crusader stooges)
It’s good to know that these bastards are having at least as tough a time with public diplomacy as we are. Apparently sowing mayhem and blowing up wedding parties is a bad PR move. Meanwhile, Noah Shachtman highlights Mr. al Zawahiri’s thoughts on Iran, whom, if you were listening to John McCain or the Weekly Standard on this stuff, you may have thought was an old pal of aQ:
The dispute between America and Iran is a real dispute based on the struggle over areas of influence, and the possibility of America striking Iran is a real possibility. As for what might happen in the region, I can only say that major changes will occur in the region, and the situation will be in the interest of the Mujahideen if the war saps both of them. If, however, one of them emerges victorious, its influence will intensify and fierce battles will begin between it and the Mujahideen, except that the Jihadi awakening currently under way and the degeneration state of affairs of the invaders in Afghanistan and Iraq will make it impossible for Iran or America to become the sole decision-maker in the region. (emphasis mine)
This sounds an awful lot like the old “why don’t you and him go fight?” strategy to me. Doesn’t seem like you’d be too inclined to push Iran to the brink of war with the United States if you were really working hand-in-glove with Tehran like some have been insinuating.
