Center for a New American Security

1. Jane Mayer's lengthy article in the New Yorker on the National Security Agency should be required reading within defense policy circles because it raises so many good questions about domestic spying, classification, and how we prosecute leakers. I like Mayer's reporting a lot, as I've made clear in the past, so I'll only pause to take issue with one thing in her article: I have a tough time having any degree of sympathy for those who leak classified information -- even when that information exposes a problem in or abuses of the system. And I think Mayer intends for us to pity her protagonist, who is being prosecuted for feeding information to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. (The protagonist claims none of the information he leaked was classified, though it was cut-and-pasted from SECRET documents.) I found myself nodding along with the guy who told Mayer, "To his credit, he tried to raise these issues, and, to an extent, they were dealt with. But who died and left him in charge?" Exactly right: the system breaks down when every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane gets to decide what gets released to the media and what does not. Unsurprisingly, journalists have a more sympathetic view toward those people who feed them scoops than do those whose jobs and lives are made harder by their colleagues leaking information.

2. Egypt: Why Are the Churches Burning? by Yasmine El-Rashidi in the New York Review of Books.

3. Kim Dozier on the Osama bin Laden raid. Kim is much admired within the special operations community, and her excellent sources and contacts inform this great article, which incorporates inside information (and leaks) without compromising OPSEC ...

4. ... but John Kenney gets the real scoop on the raid, interviewing several SEALs and printing their testimonies.

5. Confessions of a Vulcan: Dov Zakheim explains how the Bush Administration screwed up Afghanistan.

6. Finally, the Modern Library has re-issued Shelby Foote's Civil War Trilogy with a series of introductory essays. The first essay, by Jon Meacham, correctly places Foote within a very specific social and literary context in central Mississippi in the early 20th Century and notes the influence of the salon of William Alexander Percy. My scarily erudite paternal grandfather, actually, grew up in the exact same time and place, and it was a crazy one: on the one hand, it was in some ways a Third World country, yet on the other hand, it managed to produce a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Twentieth Century's men of letters. (And women, of course, because you can't forget Eudora!) Having only read the section on the Gettysburg Campaign previously, I started the first volume of the series last night and had trouble putting it down.

So Google chooses today to celebrate the achievements of a brutal totalitarian regime (that one of its founders fled!) instead of the 150th anniversary of the war that freed the slaves and unified the United States of America. Super.

Reading Grant's memoirs, it's hard -- even for a Southerner -- not to admire the cold-blooded competence of William Tecumseh Sherman. But then...

What Sherman finally decided on was the annihilation of the city ­itself—an instructive example, as it were, for other Southern cities; or if you will, an act of terrorism. Earlier he had warned Atlantans to "prepare for my coming." In his written orders he couched the warning in terms of obliterating everything of military value, but, as in so many other places his army visited, the reality was ­destruction of the town by fire—the 19th century's version of carpet-bombing.

 

This kind of devastation was ­relatively unprecedented for ­Sherman's time; the burning and sacking of cities had more or less gone out of fashion as the customs of "civilized" warfare had generally foreclosed the molesting of civilians.

 

Sherman defied this sense of ­military restraint almost from the ­beginning; in fact, his earliest ­pyromaniacal urges in connection with Southerners and their property seem to have developed in 1862, while he was in charge of the ­recently captured city of Memphis. There, in retaliation for Confederates shooting at Union steamboats from the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, Sherman ordered the torching of all towns, villages, farms and homes for 15 miles up and down the river. ...

 

It is hard to reconcile the peculiar psychology of Sherman's military ­tactics with the fact that these were his fellow Americans whose homes were being burned—mostly women, children and old men, at that. For ­despite all his hard-bitten ­declarations against the Confederacy and its supporters, Sherman, in his private correspondence, often made a point of expressing an abiding ­fondness for the South and the Southern people.

 

With his victory at Atlanta, ­Sherman solidified himself as an American hero—in the North, at least—and ensured what Lincoln's ally Sen. Zachary Chandler called "the most extraordinary change in publick opinion here that ever was known." The South's hopes to exploit Northern discontent and wring a ­"political victory" from the war ­vanished.

 

Eventually, Sherman's scorched-earth tactics validated a new ­standard for military operations—the notion of "hard war" or "total war," in which civilians were no longer treated as innocent bystanders and their property became fair game. This policy was incorporated, ­improved and refined over the ­ensuing decades, reaching its most pitiless apogee at Hiroshima in 1945.

Abu Muqawama's friend and colleague Bech has taken issue with the assertion that yesterday's events in Lebanon can be described as "civil war." (See the third comment in this post.) Hizbollah, he argues, had clear and limited objectives it was seeking to accomplish. They were also very careful in who they targeted and disarmed. But how do social scientists define civil war? Two leading scholars of conflict -- James Fearon of Stanford and Stathis Kalyvas of Yale -- define civil war as, respectively:

"violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies" ("Iraq's Civil War," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007)

"armed conflict within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities" (The Logic of Violence in Civil War)

Now yesterday's violence -- and the ongoing clashes -- in Lebanon certainly fit both of those descriptions. But both of those definitions are pretty broad, prompting one of this blog's readers to define civil war along the lines of pornography -- we know it when we see it. Along the same lines, as Fearon notes, political scientists sometimes use the threshold of 1,000 dead to determine whether or not it's a civil war. (Only a dozen or so were killed in yesterday's fighting, right?) This figure strikes Abu Muqawama as completely arbitrary, perhaps underlining just how difficult it is to determine whether or not fighting merits description as a "civil war."

What Abu Muqawama does know is that neither Hizbollah's limited political objectives nor the skill with which they accomplished those objectives have anything to do with whether or not their actions yesterday can be described as civil war. (Sorry, Bech.) We assume most state and non-state actors who seek to achieve a political aim through violence -- which Hizbollah did yesterday, successfully -- are pursuing limited goals. And as the Clausewitz running through that last sentence typed hits Abu Muqawama on the top of his head, he comes to the conclusion that a) yesterday was war as it was an act of force designed to achieve a political end and that b) since it took place within Lebanon's boundaries it constitutes a civil war.

Thoughts and disagreements? That's why we have the comments section.

Update: Nicholas reports from de Prague (by the HSBC, in Hamra) that Sukleen is out picking up trash and normalcy seems to have returned to the neighborhood. Any other first-hand reports are welcome. Meanwhile, a quick glimpse at headlines from rival perspectives: as-Safir asks "What's Next?" following yesterday's fighting while L'Orient-Le Jour talks of yesterday's victory for Hizbollah as Pyrrhic.