Ross Douthat’s War on Theory
I have been following the reporting out of Egypt with the same interest as other onlookers, and I share their ignorance. I know very little about Egypt and do not feel competent to offer predictions, much less advocate for one or the other position on the questions posed to the United States by events in that country.
While the events themselves are exhilarating to watch, of equal interest to me has been the parade of American commentators who know nothing about Egypt but nonetheless have been providing copious commentary on the subject. I thought Andrew Exum’s lament on this phenomenon was particularly righteous. Watching cable news, Exum reports that he was:
absolutely stunned by the willingness of the show’s guests to opine about Egypt without having any actual experience in or expertise on Egypt or the broader Middle East. Is it really that tough to say, “Hey, that’s a great question, Joe, but I am not really the best guy to give the viewers at home a good answer?”
Instead, guest after guest — most of whom are specialists in or pundits on U.S. domestic politics — made these broad, ridiculously sweeping statements about the meaning and direction of the protests.
It is in this context that Ross Douthat continues his war against those who make their foreign policy theories explicit:
Ross Douthat | photo by Josh Haner/The New York Times
The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.
Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.
But history makes fools of us all…
Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.
The fact that theories are imperfect does not make them any less necessary. We take refuge in foreign policy theories because there is no alternative. As Ben Friedman pointed out in responding to Douthat previously, it is impossible to have foreign policies without foreign-policy theories. The same goes for economics, domestic politics, and a whole range of human behavior. People take (or oppose) various actions based on their expectations about what outcomes the actions will (or will not) produce. Whether people are conscious of it or not, our expectations are products of our theories. People disagree about which theories are good and which are bad, but we all have them.
Egyptian Government Attacks Egypt’s Internet
In response to civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. According to the blog post at the link just above, Egypt’s four main ISPs have cut off their connections to the outside world. Specifically, their “BGP routes were withdrawn.” The Border Gateway Protocol is what most Internet service providers use to establish routing between one another, so that Internet traffic flows among them.
An attack on BGP is one of few potential sources of global shock cited by an OECD report I noted here the other day. The report almost certainly imagined a technical attack by rogue actors but, assuming current reporting to be true, the source of this attack is a government exercising coercion over Internet service providers within its jursidiction. Nothing I pick up suggests that Egypt’s attack on its own Internet will have spillover effects, but it does suggest some important policy concerns.
The U.S. government has proposed both directly and indirectly to centralize control over U.S. Internet service providers. C|Net’s Declan McCullagh reports that an “Internet kill switch” proposal championed by by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) will be reintroduced in the new Congress very soon. The idea is to give “kill switch” authority to the government for use in responding to some kind of “cyberemergency.”
We see here that a government with “kill switch” power will use it when the “emergency” is a challenge to its authority. When done in good faith, flipping an Internet “kill switch” would be stupid and self-destructive, tantamount to an auto-immune reaction that compounds the damage from a cybersecurity incident. The more likely use of “kill switch” authority would be bad faith, as the Egyptian government illustrates, to suppress speech and assembly rights.
In the person of the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. government has also proposed to bring Internet service providers under a regulatory umbrella that it could then use for censorship or protest suppression in the future. On the TechLiberationFront blog, Larry Downes has recently completed a five-part analysis of the government’s regulatory plan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The intention of its proponents is in no way to give the government this kind of authority, but government power is not always used as intended, and there is plenty of scholarship to show that government agencies use their power to achieve goals that are non-statutory and even unconstitutional.
The D.C. area’s surfeit of recent weather caused the cancellation yesterday of a book event I was to participate in, discussing Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. I don’t know that he makes the case overwhelmingly, but Morozov argues that governments are ably using the Internet to stifle freedom movements.
Events going on here in the United States right now could position the U.S. government to exercise the kind of authority we might look down our noses at Egypt for practicing. The lesson from the Egypt story—what we know of it so far—is that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Did We Miss Out on the Bargain of the Century in Iraq?
Stuart Reid’s Twitter points to this Condi Rice discussion with Katie Couric in which the following exchange takes place over the decision to invade Iraq:
RICE: …I’m also, frankly, just very glad [Saddam Hussein is] out of power. Now, to be frank, we tried to take him out of power without going to war. We tried to take him out of power by — we got a report from an Arab state that shall remain nameless that he would take a billion dollars to lead — to leave. We said, deal. Right? (Laughter.) We tried to (find ?) him –
COURIC: Has that — has that been made public before?
RICE: Yeah, I — it may be in President Bush’s book. I’m not sure. I don’t remember. But we did. We said, if he’ll go, everybody’s happy.
A colleague intrepidly Googled this, and turned up this 2007 article in the Washington Post. The article reports that for a billion dollars and if allowed to “keep information on weapons of mass destruction,” Saddam Hussein told Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak that he would have been willing to go into exile. President Bush’s own book, per Secretary Rice’s mention, covers the matter in this way:
…Our last ditch hope was that Saddam would agree to go into exile. At one point, an offer from a Middle Eastern government to send Saddam to Belarus with $1 to $2 billion looked like it might gain traction. Instead, in one of his last acts, Saddam ordered the tongue of a dissident slashed out and left the man to bleed to death. The dictator of Iraq had made his decision. He chose war.
Lots of people like to make fun of President Bush’s prose style, but even for him (or his ghostwriter) this is pretty peculiar. First of all, it isn’t clear why “person who cuts off dissidents’ tongues and leaves them to bleed to death” is mutually exclusive with “person willing to take a billion or two dollars and go into exile.” Saying Saddam cut a dissident’s tongue out doesn’t necessarily bear on his willingness to take a payout and go into exile.
Second, it’s almost certain that this was pursued and didn’t go anywhere, but if there was anything approaching a realistic opportunity to make this happen, we really missed out on the bargain of the century here. You’re looking at something like 500%-1000% returns, not counting several thousand American and a-hundred-or-so-thousand Iraqi lives saved.
Thirdly: Belarus?
Victim in Egyptian Jail… Letters Will Help
From the FreeKareem.org website:
You can write to the Egyptian Ambassador to help his case. Please be polite and respectful.
More information available at www.FreeKareem.org. I wrote about the case in 2007 here and here.
Egypt Crosses Critical Line in the Arab Sands, Labels Hezbollah ‘Terrorist’
The designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist group by Egypt highlights a fault line developing in the Middle East over relations with Israel and the United States.
On the one hand, there are those who favor negotiations to resolve the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. These countries include, most prominently, Egypt and Jordan, which both have signed treaties with Israel. Saudi Arabia also has promoted a negotiated solution.
Iran and Hezbollah, on the other hand, have emphasized what they call “resistance,” which means the use of arms to wrest territory from Israel ‘s control. The admission by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, that one of the people Egypt arrested was supplying arms to Hamas on Hezbollah’s behalf indicates that Hezbollah’s “resistance” is not limited to Lebanese sovereign territory.
Although Egypt’s action is directed against Hezbollah (and, by extension, Iran), it also carries a warning for the United States and Israel. The “resistance” argument is gaining ground in the Middle East. If it is to be successfully countered, negotiations need to deliver something tangible for the Palestinians—and soon. Otherwise, the regional governments who favor negotiation will find their arguments undercut, which could not only jeopardize hopes for Middle East peace, but might also threaten their own stability.
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