Thursday's New York Times features an Op-Ed piece by neo-con and noted "thinker" Max Boot -- a lengthy screed so filled with egregious nonsense that I could not refrain from responding to it point by point.
It is entitled "Send the State Department to War"
In terms of "fair use" policies, I no doubt am stepping across the line here, but in this case, I hope those in charge of the DK power levers will grant me some slack.
Herewith, Max's text and my responses below the jump:
The State Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed assignments” since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
First Max, it’s fascinating how readily and easily you are ready to tell someone else to jump into the middle of a battle zone to carry out your pipe dreams. Not surprising though. You and your buddies have been stellar chickenhawks ever since your war started.
You also refer to complaints that diplomats weren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Might I point out that the “diplomats” in advance of the war of lies your noble leader launched to get us into Iraq, spent huge amounts of time working on a plan for dealing with the aftermath of that war…the Iraq Plan. Trouble was, ready as they were to “pull their weight” by carrying out those detailed plans, your then Defense Secretary and Vice President threw all those plans into the trash. (This despite the fact that it was later clear that the consequences of that war had been well identified in their planning process and that the proposed programs designed for implementation could have done much to avoid the chaos in which Iraq now finds itself.)
Instead the geniuses among you created the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Paul Bremer, who then proceeded to make a series of truly awful decisions, (not the least of which was disbanding the Iraqi army and awarding all reconstruction work in the country to well-connected contractors, many of them now facing charges of massive corruption, instead of employing Iraqis and putting them back to work.) Acting against all sound advice, Bremer alone helped set in motion the insurgency we have today. Worse yet, instead of calling upon diplomats to carry the weight, Bremer turned to the use of the children of loyal Republicans to run the CPA and we can see how well that worked out.
However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone.
While maintaining military power remains important, even more crucial goals are aiding moderate Muslims, countering enemy propaganda, promoting economic growth, flexing our political and diplomatic muscles to achieve vital objectives peacefully, gathering intelligence, promoting international cooperation, and building the rule of law in ungoverned lands.
Yes…we need to “reorient the department.” Gee that is noble sounding Max. You did get one thing straight when you said – “….few counerinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone,” but damned if I can see where you are following your own advice. Your “reorientation” of the State Department has in part involved a systematic refusal to utilize diplomacy to help attack the root causes of terrorism in the Middle East. You have repeatedly marginalized diplomacy in favor of continued military muscle. Today, the vaunted concept of the “Coalition of the Willing” is a hideously hollow joke.
The government developed expertise in many of these areas during the cold war, but those skills were lost as budgets were slashed and jobs eliminated during the “peace dividend” decade of the 1990s. Because civilian capacity has been so anemic, an undue burden has fallen on the military — something that soldiers understandably resent.
Ah Max…I was wondering how long it would be before you began blaming the Clinton administration for the problems facing us today. You first point to “…crucial goals… aiding moderate Muslims, countering enemy propaganda, promoting economic growth, flexing our political and diplomatic muscles to achieve vital objectives peacefully, gathering intelligence, promoting international cooperation, and building the rule of law in ungoverned lands.” But then you turn and moan that the expertise neededto carry out those tasks was lost in the 1990’s and that civilian capacity to do so has become so anemic that too much of the work has fallen on the military.
Uh Max….how to put this politely, but you are a complete horse’s hindquarters. First, much as you loathe Bill (and Hillary by association), the fact is that Clinton was one of the most popular US Presidents in modern times and not just here at home, but overseas as well. He talked with foreign leaders, he used diplomacy and he built coalitions. Most of all his administration, as it departed office in 2000, left your noble leaders with ample warnings that they needed to focus on Bin Laden and terrorism. Instead those leaders ignored those warnings totally until 9/11 and within 48 hours after that event were launching plans to invade Iraq.
And after lying massively to the American public and the world to justify that action, they launched their war using a military force which was too small by half for the critical post-victory task of securing the peace in Iraq. And it has stayed that way ever since. And the results have been disaster after disaster from the torture prisons at Abu Ghraib to the spread of the insurgency, and the crippling of the nation’s long-term military readiness and indeed its safety in the world.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recognizes the problem and has tried to reorient the State Department. She has, among other steps, moved diplomats out of Western Europe and into the developing world, set up a “war room” where Arabic-speaking diplomats can address the Middle Eastern press, and fostered a clumsily named Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to plan for nation-building assignments.
Such efforts, however, are unlikely to succeed because they run counter to centuries of State Department tradition that emphasizes liaison work with established governments rather than creating governments from scratch or communicating with foreign citizens over the heads of their leaders.
Max…I personally sat in a Congressional hearing recently and listened as Ms. Rice spent over two hours weasling and dissembling and expressing huge amounts of “concern” as she was questioned about a wide array of State Department messes. They ranged from the Blackwater whitewash by her own department, to a Baghdad-based office supposedly focused on investigating Iraqi governmental corruption, which was so hopelessly organized that one section wasn’t talking to the other - it had had four leaders in less than a year and the current one was a paralegal. Meanwhile, reports by independent investigators have confirmed that the Iraq police force and virtually every government office are so riddled with sectarian leadership and corruption that they are completely incapable of carrying out their functions or rebuilding the country. Even if we were winning militarily in Iraq, there is no political structure in place to rebuild the nation. We have helped foment a flat out civil war.
Modern management theory holds that small, tightly focused organizations are likely to be more effective than large conglomerates that try to do a million different things. If we apply that insight to the State Department, it would make sense to undo some ruinous consolidations that occurred after the cold war, when the United States Agency for International Development was placed within the State Department’s sphere of influence and the United States Information Agency was folded into the department outright. No wonder our capacities in nation-building and strategic communications have withered — their practitioners are second-class citizens behind traditional foreign service officers.
The information and development agencies should be made independent again, and their resources expanded. The Agency for International Development, in particular, has seen a precipitous decline in personnel. In the 1960s, it had 1,900 officers in South Vietnam alone. Today it has only 1,200 to cover the entire world, forcing it to rely mainly on contractors. If we expand its ranks, it could become our lead nation-building agency, sort of a global FEMA, marshaling the kind of resources that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oh please Max….AID has been a target of the GOP since it was first created. Yes its work is needed and no it isn’t perfect, but the Republicans have always favored the sword over the plowshare. Even as you write this crap, your president is busy vetoing virtually every non military appropriation bill he can, claiming we need to trim budgets. This from the man who has driven national debt to new historic levels and fought a massively costly war while giving huge tax cuts to the wealthiest of its citizens. Today, the US dollar is so weak that European models are demanding to be paid in Euros and other countries are having to scramble to protect their own currencies from manipulation.
To buttress the growing corps of government reconstruction experts, we should have civilian reservists on call who could be summoned by the Agency for International Development in an emergency like military reservists. They could bring expertise in municipal administration, sewage treatment, banking, electricity generation, and countless other disciplines needed to rebuild a war-torn country. President Bush endorsed this notion in his last State of the Union address, but too little has been done to turn it into reality.
On this one Max, I won’t waste much time. By now you should know that just because President Bush endorses something, it almost never means he really means it or expects anything to happen as a result. Remember going to the moon or No Child Left Behind? The GOP is great with words, but policy and programs are for wimps – especially when your long term goal is to cripple most non-military parts of the government in order to reduce or eliminate any efforts at oversight or regulation.
One of the most important shortages we have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan is in experienced police officers who can train local counterparts. Much of the job has fallen on the military police, whose troops are too few in number, and on civilian contractors, who are of uneven quality. We need to fill the vacuum by creating a federal constabulary force — a uniformed counterpart to the F.B.I. that, like the Italian carabinieri, could be deployed abroad.
Its efforts could be supplemented by municipal policemen if we pass a law allowing the federal government to call up local police officers without loss of pay or seniority and to compensate hometown police departments for their absence. Along with these police officers, we need a deployable corps of lawyers, judges and prison guards who could set up functioning legal and penal systems abroad.
Max, Max, Max……this all sounds so wonderful on paper….so creative, so inspiring. Fact is, there isn’t a chance in hell it would ever be implemented and even if it were, our government right now is so riddled with incompetence and corruption there is no chance it would ever succeed. Not to mention that one of the biggest problems we face right now is that in the Middle East, we are seen as invaders, imposers, insensitive louts and after their oil. We have no clout, no trust, no support.
Even with increased participation from civilian branches of government, the armed forces will still have a major role to play in what President Bush calls the “Long War.” But not necessarily a kinetic role. If we can train and advise foreign militaries, they can fight our battles for us. This model was demonstrated as long ago as the 1950s when Edward Lansdale and other advisers helped the Philippines put down a Marxist uprising, and has been repeated more recently in Somalia and the Philippines.
Holy Sweet Jesus Max…..can you imagine opening the newspaper in any foreign country tomorrow morning and seeing this statement : “If we can train and advise foreign militaries, they can fight our battles for us?” I can’t think of a single thing you have said that is more guaranteed to totally destroy what little, if any, trust and stature America has left in the world. Oh...and by the way, you may have been so busy writing this nonsense that you missed the bombing yesterday in the Philippine parliament or the fact that in Somalia, they're busy hijacking international vessels 200 miles and more off their own coastline. Maybe you could find some better examples.
Yet, important as it is, the United States military has not put enough emphasis on training and promoting experts in foreign military assistance. Such duty has traditionally been seen as a hindrance to promotion, which has made it tough to attract the best officers.
Lt. Col. John Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, has suggested setting up an “adviser corps” of 20,000 soldiers. His idea would make advisory service not a career detour but a career in itself, equal, at least in theory, to infantry, armor and other traditional specialties. Some advisers, in turn, could be deployed as part of the “country team” at American embassies — something that happened routinely in the 1950s and ’60s but has since fallen into disuse.
Along with pushing advisory expertise, the armed forces also need to promote linguistic and cultural knowledge. Such skills are to be found primarily in Foreign Area Officers, but that is another career field whose practitioners are traditionally expected to commit career suicide. The military needs to increase the ranks of Foreign Area Officers and to provide more rewards for their much-needed service. We will have a hard time prevailing in today’s war as long as fewer than one-half of 1 percent of all service members have any grasp of Arabic.
Even while expanding governmental capacity, we also need to improve coordination among various branches of government, and between the government and nongovernmental and international organizations. That type of unified action has been in short supply in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to nonstop complaints about how broken the “interagency” process has become.
James R. Locher, a former Congressional aide who helped draft the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act that brought greater coordination among the different branches of the military, is now leading a nonpartisan consortium of Washington policy and research groups that is trying to devise legislation to enhance the “unity of effort” among different branches of the government. Ideas under consideration include forcing civilian bureaucrats to serve a “joint tour” in a different agency and creating regional diplomatic coordinators who would marshal civilian agencies in the same way that the Pentagon’s Central Command and Pacific Command coordinate military units abroad. A partial prototype of this concept may be tested with the Defense Department’s new Africa Command, which is going to have a larger civilian component than the other combat commands.
Mr. Locher’s goal is to write a bill that would update the legendary National Security Act of 1947, which created the bureaucratic instruments (the C.I.A., Defense Department, National Security Council and the like) used to win the cold war. He hopes to have legislation ready in time for a new president in 2009. That’s an ambitious objective, but it’s one worth striving for if we’re going to adjust to the post-9/11 era of American foreign policy.
Some will no doubt object that to build up these capacities will encourage reckless “imperialism” or “militarism.” But improving our abilities in nation-building, strategic communications, security advising and related disciplines will actually lessen the chances that we will need to mount a major military intervention such as the one in Iraq. Our goal should be not just to deal with the aftermath of wars (Phase IV, in military parlance) but to solve problems before they grow into full-blown wars. In other words, to win Phase Zero.
I have to confess Max….I’m running out of steam here. You have so many truly awful ideas that I’m just out of energy and time. But to take just one item from your remaining babble, let’s look at the idea of “enhancing the unity of effort among different branches of government.”
Your own leader appointed a "War Czar" to "better coordinate the government in the war on terror." Heard anything from him since then? You see, right now, those different branches are increasingly being run by folks whose only qualification is having drunk so much kool aid their skin has turned color. Beyond that they don’t know how to administer and have no interest in doing so. They are there to assure ideological adherence and hopefully make some extra bucks on the side. These agencies are also riddled with folks blindly loyal to the Vice President, who clearly considers the agencies and all of Congress the enemy. He has about as much interest in their “enhancing their unity of effort” as he does in serving a term as VP under Hillary Clinton.
Right now Max, the nation is simply holding on….praying that we can get from here to November, 2008 as quickly as possible and that the damage done between now and then won’t totally overwhelm us in terms of $100 a barrel oil, total loss of diplomatic influence, a military collapse, an economic meltdown fueled by sub-prime mortgages, or worst of all, you and your idiot philosphers suddenly getting us into a war with Iran.
Please go home Max, shut the door, turn off your computer, stop thinking and stop telling the rest of us what to do. You have already nearly killed us in the process and we’re just plain sick of you and your brilliant ideas.