"I think that Vogue is always on the lookout for good-looking first ladies because they're a combination of power and beauty and elegance. That's what Vogue is about. And here was this woman who had never given an interview, who was extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore, qualified to be in Vogue." -- Joan Juliet Buck
Abu Muqawama
Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS. Abu Muqawama retains the right to delete comments that include words that incite violence; are predatory, hateful, or intended to intimidate or harass; or degrade people on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In summary, don't be a jerk.
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April 26, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 9:48am | 3 Comments
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April 25, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:03am | 5 Comments
This week's column in World Politics Review focuses on Bahrain. I am no specialist on the tiny island kingdom, but Bahrain is interesting to me as a regional specialist because it serves as a good case study for U.S. policy in the region. We can see, in one country, how difficult it is for U.S. policy makers to secure U.S. interests and how, in the Middle East, there are rarely any easy binary choices.
(Is Dan Drezner missing anything?)
P.S. For more analysis on Bahrain specifically, see @caidid on CNN.
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April 20, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 9:07am | 19 Comments
I have an op-ed on Bloomberg View on the way in which the profusion of camera phones and other new-ish technology has caught the U.S. military off-guard.
The proliferation of camera phones and social-media networks has caused problems for the U.S. military as an institution. Much of this has to do with the generational divide in understanding technology. Most of the men and women serving in the lower enlisted and company-grade officer ranks are what the defense expert Thomas Rid identifies as digital natives. They grew up with e-mail, Facebook and the Internet playing as much a part in their childhoods as Saturday morning cartoons did.
The senior ranks of the military, on the other hand, are populated by digital immigrants. E-mail is something they can remember using for the first time. As late as 2008, at a conference at the U.S. Army War College, Rid asked a collection of senior officers and civilian defense officials how many of them had a Facebook profile. Only four of about 50 people in the room raised their hands.
He then asked how many people had heard of Twitter, and only two people raised their hands. Today, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself has a lively Twitter feed -- but the generational divide remains.
Read the rest here. With respect to this latest incident in Afghanistan, I continue to think this represents a failure of leadership on the part of whichever officers and noncommissioned officers were supposed to be supervising these soldiers. But there is a bigger issue surrounding new technologies that the U.S. military hasn't quite wrapped its head around, and in part I blame the fact that the people setting policy are often those least likely to understand the technology itself.
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April 19, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 1:48pm | 3 Comments
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April 18, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 12:22pm | 10 Comments
I have written about the difference between capability and intent before, but in my World Politics Review column this week, I tackle the intelligence problems related to intent, which are normally much more difficult than those related to capability. Specifically, I tackle the (understandable) failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to determine whether or not Israel will attack Iran -- a failure that matches my own inability to do so.
My column was inspired by both a book I read and a conversation I had last week. On the way to and from my incredible, kick-ass hometown for a short trip, I read Bob Jervis's Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War. Jervis provided me with much of the framework through which I examined the problem. I then followed that book up with a lengthy lunch conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written extensively about what might be going through the heads of Israel's leaders regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program. I first fleshed out the thesis of my column over lunch and was grateful for the pointed questions he asked.
(Goldberg noted, though, that it is problematic to call Israel, as I do, "by far the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the end of World War II." I referenced and hyperlinked a report by the Congressional Research Service (.pdf) that itself noted Israel is "the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II." But Goldberg noted that South Korea or Germany have received a lot more overall aid when you count U.S. military posture, and he has a good point. My sense is that most U.S. Congressmen and Americans do not count this as aid. But maybe they should. Also, we have never actually gone to war for Israel -- no matter what some loons say -- but we have gone to war for South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others. That surely counts for something too, yes?)
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April 17, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 9:30am | 33 Comments
If it were up to me, I would get rid of all medals not related to valor or campaign-specific service. Most medals awarded for "service" -- from the Army Achievement Medal to the Meritorious Service Medal -- seem like trinkets most often given based on the rank of the awardee on completion of a duty assignment rather than any activity soldiers actually take pride in. Maybe I am wrong. But you see a lot of soldiers out there who look like someone has spilled fruit salad on their chests when in actuality they have merely been competent in the non-combat-related aspects of the military bureaucracy. If the Army really wanted to encourage a warrior ethos, why not scrap everything but those Army Commendation Medals, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, etc. given for valor under fire? After all, do you ever see Gen. Dempsey sporting his AAMs? Rarely.*
Anyway, discuss this amongst yourselves in the comments.
*The first medal I ever received was an AAM for writing good press releases at U.S. Army ROTC Advanced Camp in the summer of 2000. True story. I got a medal for that. And I then had to explain all that to anyone who asked about it. Folks, I did not feel like a warrior. I felt like a clown.
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April 13, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 9:56am | 21 Comments
1. I do not know why we continue to be surprised that initial reporting and statements on the raid to kill Osama bin Laden were innacurate. It will be a long time -- maybe even decades -- before the facts of the raid fully see the light of day. As far as journalistic accounts are concerned, I have no reason to doubt the reporting of my friend Nick Schmidle and others, but bear in mind Mark Bowden wrote his original award-winning articles on "Blackhawk Down" four years after the event. And in the case of Abbottabad, we're talking about a highly sensitive special operation that was and necessarily remains cloaked in secrecy. So caveat lector, as always.
2. I spent yesterday with the students at Girls Preparatory School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my mother has taught for over two decades. I was really impressed by the intelligence and intellectual curiosity of the girls, which served as a nice antidote to the Tennessee state legislature's war on science. My family farm is about five miles from where John Scopes went on trial in 1925, and I would have thought we Tennesseans had come a long way since then. Most folks in my hometown with whom I spoke, to be fair, seemed depressed about the fact that we are the country's laughing stock again and spoke of their desire for the legislature to focus on issues that matter. Personally, I am just happy that Henry Mencken is dead and can't weigh in on the matter.
If it's any consolation, though, the sponsor of the so-called Monkey Bill is an alumnus and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Baylor School. My alma mater, the McCallie School, taught me that intellectual life can live in harmony with a strong faith in Christ. McCallie has accordingly produced statesmen, captains of industry, war heroes, and some of our nation's leading public intellectuals. Our bitter rivals, meanwhile, can take now take pride in the war its alumni wage against ... the scientific method.*
3. Speaking of intellectuals, my old friend and professor Peter Stallybrass recently sent me an old article of his titled "The Mystery of Walking" from the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I recommend this article to all literary-minded infantrymen out there. It is delightful.
*Problematically, Pat Robertson also went to my alma mater, but in deference to our rivals, I am not allowing trivia like "facts" or "exculpatory evidence" to get in the way of my arguments today.
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April 11, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:32am | 13 Comments
I am a strong critic of the U.S. Army and the way in which it has struggled to explain how it best serves the security needs of the nation beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we must give credit where it is due, and the way in which our all-volunteer U.S. Army has maintained its health and integrity through a decade of war is nothing short of remarkable. It is a testament to the men and women who serve in the institution, and they are the subject of my latest column for World Politics Review:
Six out of seven soldiers and Army civilians, [a new study] reveals, trust their senior leaders to make the right decisions for the Army, and 90 percent of those surveyed remain willing to put the Army’s needs above their own. Whereas the soldiers who fought in Vietnam considered themselves amateurs and conscripts, 98 percent of the soldiers in the Army today consider themselves professional fighting men and women. As such, those who serve in the U.S. Army today are in no danger of losing their pride, heart or soul. And based on personal observations from the field, I can report the U.S. Army is today more combat effective than it was when I myself first led a light infantry platoon in Afghanistan in 2002.
The Army still has real problems, which I get into, but the larger questions in my mind revolve around the social contract between the all-volunteer military and the people it serves:
[The] American people should be asking other questions about the costs of having asked so few to bear such a heavy burden for so long. For example, will the way in which the Army has weathered a decade of war make U.S. policymakers more likely to deploy ground forces to combat elsewhere? Do the American people have a moral responsibility to share the costs of wars in which a relatively tiny percentage of the public has served?
Read the rest here.
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April 6, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:39am | 6 Comments
Anne Barnard -- whose husband wrote a very solid book on Hizballah
last year -- has herself written a very solid article on Hizballah and Syria in today's New York Times:
Deprived of Hamas’s political cover, Hezbollah has been accused of sectarian hatred, and has been its target as well. Syrian rebels have burned the Hezbollah flag, claimed that its snipers are killing civilians in Syria, and named their brigades after historic warriors who defeated Shiites in Islam’s early schismatic battles. Early on, some analysts thought that if a Sunni government would arise in Damascus it might support Hezbollah against Israel. But now, says Michael Wahid Hanna of the Century Foundation, Hezbollah may have missed a chance to hedge its bets. ...
Hezbollah seems in no danger of losing its most hard-core supporters. But some of its loyalists have questions.
In the Sidon cafe, the health worker declared that Syrians, with free education and medical care, had no reason to rebel. Her friend, a Shiite from Hezbollah’s heartland in southern Lebanon, disagreed. “They have things,” she said, “but they are fighting for their rights.” ...
A Hezbollah party member said that government shelling had killed many civilians, but it was justified because the victims had let the rebels use their houses “as bunkers.” Israel used a similar argument, which Hezbollah condemned, to defend its bombing of Hezbollah neighborhoods in 2006.
In addition to this article, those with access to scholarly journals will want to read Bilal Saab's review of Nick Blanford's excellent book
in this issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. (No link, alas.)
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April 5, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:29am | 11 Comments
Reuters reports that the U.S. intelligence community is worked up about the potential that Hizballah could attack U.S. civilians in the United States in the event of an attack on Iran:
There is a big difference between capability and intent, obviously. It would not be in the interests of Hizballah to attack U.S. civilian targets on the U.S. mainland. That would be incredibly dumb, actually, and would carry with it potentially catastrophic consequences for Hizballah's constituency. I write more about Hizballah's calculations regarding an attack on Iran here in case anyone is interested, and I think my analysis from last week remains sound.
That having been said, let's get real for a moment: there is an argument to be made, of course, that Iran might underestimate what a U.S. response to an attack would be. After all, Iran played a big role in killing at least 1,000 U.S. servicemen in Iraq, continues to support the insurgency in Afghanistan, and has carried out failed attacks on Israeli targets elsewhere. The response by both the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration before that has been to ... well, not do a hell of a lot.
That's just one interpretation of Iranian thinking, though. Another interpretation would be to look at stuff like Stuxnet, the assassination of scientists, and crippling sanctions as an aggressive U.S.-led campaign against the people of Iran.
And that's the trouble with perception and misperception in international politics. It's tough to know how the other guy sees the same things you do. Someone should write a book about this
...
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April 4, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:33am | 23 Comments
The U.S. occupation of Australia has begun. U.S. officials claim the occupation has nothing to do with the behavior of China, leading defense analysts to conclude this has more to do with helping Australia counter the well-publicized scourge of baby-stealing dingos down under. The problem with this kind of dingo-centric "strategy" -- can you even call it that, or is it just a collection of tactics? -- is that it's hard to see how the U.S. Marine Corps will maintain its core competencies while in Australia. I have made a careful study of the U.S. Marine Corps from 1942 to 1945, and based on that study, I have concluded that amphibious landings are really the heart and soul of the Corps. The history of the U.S. Marine Corps from 1775-1941 and from 1946-present is also quite interesting and may well have included some other stuff, to include counter-dingo operations, but it is largely irrelevant as far as Marine culture and doctrine are concerned. No, amphibious operations are the only thing that really matters, which is why I am also concerned the costly deployment of Marines to Australia will endanger the long-term health of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, without which the U.S. Marine Corps would surely decide to turn in their uniforms and weapons, grow out their hair and take up hemp farming in Idaho.
There are other things that trouble me about this deployment. How many cultural advisors, for example, have these Marines deployed with? How many Marines in each platoon speak the local language or have any training in the tribes and customs of the Australians? How many Marines know that an "Australian" is what you call a native, whereas an "Australiani" is the local unit of currency? (I predict that ten years from now, it will still be possible for esteemed professors of international relations at Harvard to get these two terms confused in the pages of the New York Times.) I understand that U.S. Marines believe "Fosters" is the Australian word for beer, but I worry that few of them know that it is also the Australian word for "cat urine."
Finally, it may make sense today to limit the U.S. mission in Australia to a struggle to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the dingo menace. But inevitably, U.S. Marines will be drawn into adjudicating the petty internal rivalries of Australia. Without a proper understanding of Australia's culture or troubled history, U.S. Marines will create winners and losers among the population, which will eventually tire of our heavy-handedness. Equally inevitably, well-meaning U.S. Marines will offend Australians by asking awkward questions, like, "Why are all your rugby players from Fiji?"
Australia is a land populated by criminals, which is why Alexander the Great stopped well short of there. (Alexander the Great understood defense in depth.) The British Empire has been humiliated in Australia time and time again, and there is no reason to imagine that we Americans will have any more luck. I fear we are embarking on another fool's errand.
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April 4, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:01am | 4 Comments
I have a new column in World Politics Review arguing that most criticisms of President Obama on Iraq miss the mark.
Most recently, GOP critics of the Obama administration have been quick to fault the White House for withdrawing U.S. troops at the end of 2011. But the incessant, myopic focus of many Republicans on America’s military means is wrong-headed and ignores where the administration has actually fallen short in Iraq.
If you're going to criticize the administration, I argue, you're better off criticizing the administration for enabling the sectarian re-polarization of the country. Read the entire article here.
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March 30, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 12:08pm | 9 Comments
Let me wade into the debate over whether academic journals are relevant to policy professionals in international relations. Dan Nexon kicked things off with an angry lament on the state of his field. James Joyner then weighed in with respect to what he saw as the irrelevance of scholarly journals. And finally Dan Drezner voiced a full-throated defense of academic political science journals.
I work at a think tank that produces policy papers for both a general audience as well as professionals in the national security community -- to include policy-makers in both the executive and legislative branches. Part of my job, as I see it, is to bridge the gap between theory and praxis. I have to be familiar with and understand the relevant literature in my areas of study -- principally, Middle East Studies and Strategic Studies -- and translate the ideas and observations in that literature into language that policy professionals will understand.
I do not expect most policy professionals -- especially those working in time-intensive positions in the National Security Staff, the Pentagon, or the Congress -- to read the latest academic literature. If those people find the time in their busy schedules to read just one article from Foreign Affairs or Survival each week, that is great, frankly, because most of them barely have time enough to get through the Early Bird each morning.
I do think many of the articles that are in political science journals would elude the policy professionals who are actually running the government but whose education probably ended with a master's degree from a public policy school or, more likely, a law degree. I am skeptical of a lot of the statistical work being done in Middle East Studies for substantive reasons*, but in addition, the math-heavy work featured in a lot of journals raises the bar of admission for potential readers. So academics hoping to be policy relevant should consider publishing their work in various media. Try boiling down the main concepts in your latest APSR article, for example, into an op-ed or blog post. Or, better yet, an article in Foreign Affairs.
I know great young scholars who largely shy away from blogging or publishing more "popular" work because they believe their academic colleagues will take them less seriously. That may be true, but you have to decide whether or not you value climbing the rungs of the academic ladder or affecting policy in Washington. I've clearly made my own choice but certainly don't begrudge anyone who chooses another path. (Just don't complain how no one in the policy world ever listens to your great ideas.**)
Nonetheless, in case anyone is interested, these are the journals I dutifully scan for articles, listed in the order I typically read them. I realize these are not all the journals I could be reading, but these are the ones I make time for in a schedule that features a lot of stuff begging to be read.
Peer-Reviewed
- International Security
- The International Journal of Middle East Studies
- The American Political Science Review
- Perspectives on Politics
Non-Peer-Reviewed
- Foreign Affairs
- Survival
- The National Interest
*The Arabic-speaking world is a particularly data-poor environment, generally speaking, and the iron law of quantitative analysis (or any analysis, for that matter) is that garbage in = garbage out.
**One more thing that annoys me: when academic scholars bust on us policy scholars for getting predictions wrong. Look, I would love to work in a data-perfect environment or pick and choose my research questions based on where the data was richest. Scholars working in academia have the luxury of doing that. Bully for them. But do you know who doesn't have that luxury? Policy makers. Policy makers have to make very difficult decisions in an environment in which the data is often very poor and where the options available are not terribly clear in terms of their costs or benefits. That's also the environment in which most think tank policy scholars work. When I do my analysis, I try to do it with some degree of rigor and to make my assumptions explicit. But I'm going to get some things wrong. To pick but one example, I argued, based on an order of battle analysis and reporting on the Free Libyan forces, that an assault on Tripoli would take months. I was wrong -- probably because I did not have very good reporting on the morale or performance of the Qadhdhafi forces. As long as I stay in this line of work, I'm going to continue to get stuff wrong, too. It's a hazard of the profession. My only goal is to do work that makes sense methodologically and reflects a bona fide attempt to grapple with the key issues. Now pick your TI-84 back up off the floor and get out of my office.
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March 29, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 5:03pm | 5 Comments
Raymond "Galrahn" Pritchett argued as much on his maritime strategy blog today:
I truly believe the think tank community in Washington DC is one reason why the US Army has so much influence right now in the Pentagon. About 70% of the defense analysts in think tanks that focus on defense issues are veterans of the US Army, and it has been like that since around the time of Gulf War I.
It is probably a coincidence the Army has been fighting a land war in Asia for over a decade, and the Army has been fighting a second land war in Asia for almost a decade. Probably. And it is also probably a coincidence that the US Navy has been shrinking during that same time period.In response to the figure cited by Pritchett, my research intern and I went through the following think tanks and scanned their security-related research programs for veterans: the American Enterprise Institute (0!), the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (9), the Center for a New American Security (7), the Center for American Progress (2), the Council on Foreign Relations (2), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (10), the Brookings Institute (1), the Heritage Foundation (4), the Institute for the Study of War (4), and the Atlantic Council (4).
We did not count active-duty military fellows and only looked for people with military service in their official biographies. So I'm sure we missed a few people. We also did not look through the federally funded research centers like Rand or the Institute for Defense Analyses. So this is a decidedly non-scientific exercise. Galrahn's assertion just piqued my interest.
The results of our informal survey, though, show 18 veterans of the U.S. Army, 11 veterans of the U.S. Navy, 10 veterans of the U.S. Air Force, three veterans of the U.S. Marine Corps, and one lone Coast Guard veteran currently working on defense policy issues. Even allowing for the fact that our survey was unscientific and that Galrahn is a product of the Arkansas public schools system, 43% is not "about 70%." The service break-down of veterans working on defense policy issues in think tanks does, though, seem to roughly correspond to the respective numbers of active duty officers in each service: U.S. Army (39.3% of all active-duty officers), U.S. Navy (22.8%), U.S. Air Force (28.7%), U.S. Marine Corps (9.2%), and U.S. Coast Guard (3.6%).
Based on our initial research, we can advance the following hypothesis: there is no think tank conspiracy against the U.S. Navy.
Regarding the focus on ground forces over the past decade, Galrahn has probably inverted his causal relationship: are think tanks focused on issues related to the ground forces because we have been in two ground wars for the past decade, or have we been in two ground wars for a decade because think tanks focus on the ground forces? I think the former is a lot more likely than the latter.
Further complicating Galrahn's tin-foil musings is the fact that -- aside from the whole "the U.S. Army has so much influence right now in the Pentagon" thing, which Ray Odierno and Lloyd Austin U.S. Army officers everyone in the Pentagon will find hilarious -- our most recent report on the future defense budget has made our own U.S. Army veterans personnae non gratae in the Dept. of the Army. Led by LTG (Ret.) David Barno (USMA '76), our team argued that if you're going to cut the budget for a service, you should cut the budget of the U.S. Army. You'll need the U.S. Navy and Air Force, our report argued, to meet the future security challenges in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.
[I tease Galrahn because his Razorbacks beat up on my Volunteers each fall, but his blog is seriously great. Check it out here.]
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March 28, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:10am | 6 Comments
What does Hizballah have in common with the United States aside from a love of paintball?
Hizballah, like the United States, would be caught up in a conflict between Iran and Israel. And like the United States, it has a lot of reasons for wanting to avoid a conflict right now.
That's the subject of my column in this week's World Politics Review, which you can read here.
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March 27, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 5:15pm | 64 Comments
As those of you who follow my Twitter feed know, I have been drawn into a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Will McCants about whether or not one can be a "terrorism expert." Greenwald's position, as articulated on his blog:
I had a somewhat lengthy debate on Twitter last night about the Awlaki assassination with several people often identified as “Terrorism experts” — such as Will McCants and Aaron Zelin — and they and others (such as Andrew Exum and Robert Farley) objected rather vigorously when I said I found the entire concept of “Terrorism expert” to be invalid, as it is a honorific typically assigned due to ideology and interests served rather than actual expertise. This is exactly what I meant: in U.S. political and media discourse, Terrorism means little more than: that which America’s Enemies du Jour (generally Muslim Enemies) do to it, but not what America and its allies do to anyone. Terrorism is not a real concept in which one develops “expertise”; it is, and from its introduction into world affairs always has been, a term of propaganda designed to legitimize violence by some actors while delegitimizing very similar violence by others. See the interview I conducted a couple of years ago with Remi Brulin of NYU for more on that.
Annoyingly, Greenwald has a point in both his post and in his earlier tweets. The study of "terrorism" in the United States over the past decade has been shaped by the American experience on September 11th of 2001, and when Americans speak of terrorism in the popular discourse, as Greenwald noted in a tweet, the word is often short-hand for Islamist terrorism. Travel to the United Kingdom, by contrast, and a "terrorism expert" may have done his or her field work in Northern Ireland. Travel to Spain, and an expert may have done his or her work in the Basque country. Thomas Hegghammer has written more eloquently than I about the way in which the study of both terrorism and jihadi groups has evolved in the United States after 2001, and it's only natural that the study of terrorism will be distorted by the local experience of the country or region in which the research is conducted.
But before I get side-tracked, let me break my response to Greenwald into two arguments. First, let us very briefly review the state of the literature in the study of terrorism and coercive violence. Greenwald is correct that "terrorism" has a pejorative connotation in the popular discourse. In the scholarly literature, though, terrorism has always meant something along the lines of "the threat or use of physical coercion, primarily against noncombatants, especially civilians, to create fear in order to achieve various political objectives." (O'Neill, 2005) Greenwald makes it seem as if states are never mentioned as terrorist actors, but there is a lot of literature on the use of coercive violence by states and state terrorism. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Schelling (1966); Mitchell, Stohl, Carleton and Lopez (1986); Kalyvas (2006); and Biddle and Friedman (2008). (I'm sure readers of this blog can think of literally dozens more examples. Please do so in the comments section.)
The literature on terrorism and terrorist groups did not spring forth on September 12, 2001. Researchers at my alma mater and elsewhere had been writing about the phenomena of terrorism and groups who use terror tactics for decades. Sometimes these researchers were doing case studies on Islamist or Palestinian groups. Sometimes they were doing case studies on Irish (PIRA) or German (RAF) groups. And sometimes they were comparing and contrasting varied groups. Walter Laqueur originally published this book, for example,
in 1977. Bruce Hoffman published this book in 1999. I'm pretty sure those two guys are terrorism experts without the scare quotes.
Second, let me consider the case of my friend Will McCants, who Greenwald very much picked on in his Twitter feed along with Aaron Zelin (who I do not know well but who seems really smart in his own right). Greenwald is correct that the decade after the September 11th attacks created all kinds of incentives for self-proclaimed terrorism "experts" to rise to the fore, hawking their "expertise" and opinions on both the consulting market as well as in the mainstream media. Too often, this expertise has been ignorant or barely concealed Islamophobia. Ironically, though, one of the scholars who has done the most to condemn what he calls "CT hucksters" is Will McCants. Will is one of the more rigorously credentialed scholars studying violent Islamist extremist groups as well as being one of the most careful. Will fell into a study of terrorism after doing a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. He had no initial academic training in strategic studies or military affairs as far as I know, but his Arabic and understanding of the intellectual currents of political Islam made him ideal to work on al-Qaeda as a case study. And just like I started a dissertation on Hizballah with a background in Middle Eastern Studies and boned up on the theories related to small wars and insurgencies as I went along, so too did Will with respect to terrorism as a phenomenon. At the end of the day, Will is best described as an Arabist, perhaps, but if he is not a bona fide terrorism expert as well -- again, no scare quotes necessary this time -- I don't know who is.
What irked me most about Greenwald's tweets and post is that he is disparaging an entire class of very reputable scholars with the allegation that the only people taken seriously as terrorism experts in the United States are taken seriously because of some media gate-keeper's ideological bias -- and not because of their study of specific terrorist groups and a phenemenon that has a deep body of peer-reviewed literature dedicated to it. Greenwald is attempting to limit and discipline the discourse in his own way. He is signaling to his readers that no true expertise on terrorism as a phenomenon exists and that those who write about it are hopelessly ideologically compromised in principio. That strikes me as close-minded intellectual bullying.
If you're going to bully people, bully the bad guys. And if you're going to make blanket judgments about entire fields of study but are not yourself an expert in that field of study, have a little humility when you do so. After all, you don't see me telling Glenn Greenwald what's what about due process or Constitutional law, do you?
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March 23, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 5:26pm | 10 Comments
There are three kinds of potential employers in Washington, DC:
- Those who would never hire me because I play paintball with terrorists.
- Those who would hire me in spite of the fact that I play paintball with terrorists.
- Those who would hire me because I play paintball with terrorists.
I am so glad I work for #3. Please read Mitch Prothero's epic tale of the time four journalists and one think tank researcher challenged Hizballah to a game of paintball. And won.
This is probably the only time I will ever be featured in Vice, unless I am someday a Don't, so I am enjoying my brief moment of cool. I apologize in advance for my language.
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March 21, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:45am | 13 Comments
My column in the World Politics Review this week is full of depressing observations on NATO:
[The] Libya intervention demonstrated that the militaries of non-U.S. NATO nations have not invested in an appropriate amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms or in in-flight refueling capabilities. Virtually all of the targeting and air tasking orders were provided by the United States, which also had to provide much of the ammunition once the allies simply ran out. In addition, a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute notes that up to 85 percent of the fuel for the air campaign in Libya was provided by the U.S. Air Force.
Read more here.
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March 20, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 2:31pm | 4 Comments
I spent all last week in Poland, where I delivered lectures here, here and here. (I want to thank the wonderful folks at both the Polish Institute for International Affairs as well as the U.S. embassy in Warsaw for hosting me.) Much to both my delight and chagrin, though, a gentleman in one of my audiences told me that I needed to blog more, and he is right. I have not stewarded this blog very well over the past few months. (Which is partly why I am bringing on co-bloggers soon.)
The good news is that my commentary will now appear weekly in the World Politics Review. You can read my first column here, and subsequent columns will run each Wednesday. You should be able to get around the firewall for the WPR if you click through from this site, but let me know if you have any trouble.
I promise, though, to be a better blogger as the spring progresses.
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March 9, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 4:51pm | 9 Comments
I am not going to say anything about #KONY2012. Go here, here, or here for that. (Actually, I will say one thing: leave Carl Weathers out of this.)
But if you are looking to give to international charities that actually do something, try the HALO Trust, which has been active in Afghan de-mining efforts since 1988. It employs three expatriates in Afghanistan and thousands of actual Afghans. They do not have any fancy videos of which I am aware. They're too busy digging mines out of the dirt to make such videos.
That is all.
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February 22, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 12:23pm | 44 Comments
I have been busy teaching and writing of late, and the blog has been neglected. But when I have written on the blog, it has usually been to ask that we get serious about thinking through the feasibility of military options for Syria before we either argue for U.S. military intervention or abstain from direct involvement in the conflict. I have been proud, then, to have worked a little bit with Marc Lynch as he wrote this most recent policy paper for the Center for a New American Security (.pdf). Marc has done great work, and it's been rewarding to watch him think through the various options available to policy makers. Those screaming for military intervention should pay especially close attention to pp. 3-7.
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February 9, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:27pm | 38 Comments
As some of you may know, I have been shocked by the ease with which some in U.S. policy circles have begun to consider armed intervention in Syria. Many of these same people supported the military intervention in Libya, though few of them seem to have any intellectual interest in dealing with the awful mess that remains -- perhaps proving that when it comes to post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, most liberal interventionists are no better than most neoconservatives.
Since most analysts seem to have quickly realized that the establishment of safe havens or no-fly zones would be very difficult if not also quixotic, the new big idea is to arm the Free Syrian Army, which may or may not even be an actual thing. John McCain thinks this is a good idea, as does Elliott Abrams. Even Dan Drezner, who is usually a careful thinker about such things, is on the bandwagon.
My colleague Marc Lynch has a long post explaining why no, this is probably not a very good idea.
My question for those who support arming Syrian guerrilla groups was prompted by something Drezner wrote:
What’s going on inside of Syria is a civil war, and the government is clearly receiving ample support from both Russia and Iran. Arming the opposition at least evens the odds on the battlefield.
Really? Did Drezner or anyone else consult an actual order of battle before talking about "evening the odds?" According to the 2011 Military Balance, Syria has:
- 4,950 main battle tanks.
- 2,450 BMPs.
- 1,500 more armored personnel carriers.
- 3,440+ pieces of artillery.
- 600,000 men under arms in the active and reserve forces.
Now, for the sake of argument, let's say Syria can only field half of the above equipment and personnel due to maintenance issues and defections or whatever. We're still talking about a ridiculous amount of advanced weaponry. What arms, then, are we talking about giving these guerrilla groups? Nukes?
The balance in Libya was only tipped when NATO warplanes began "enforcing the no-fly zone" by destroying Libyan tanks and armored personnel carriers. (I know those things don't actually fly, but the only way you can be really sure they won't grow wings is by dropping a GBU-31 on top of them.) If a scheme to train and equip the Syrians is not matched with a similar effort to degrade the capabilities of the Syrian army, I fail to see how arming the rebel groups will even any odds.
That doesn't mean the rebels don't stand a chance -- they can always carry out a guerrlla campaign using raids, ambushes and IEDs. But it does mean that schemes to train and equip the rebel groups will be more about doing something that makes us feel better about ourselves rather than an act that seriously changes the game in Syria.
I could always be wrong, of course. I am not an expert on the disposition and composition of the Syrian army and have no insight into how it is holding up through this campaign. But a quick glance at the strength of the forces doesn't make me optimistic about either the rebel groups or any western attempts to arm them.
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February 3, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:15am | 23 Comments
Steven Cook, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Shadi Hamid and Dan Byman -- smart analysts whose work I always read and admire -- have all now argued we need to consider military intervention in Syria. The problem is, for me at least, "military intervention" at once means everything and nothing. On the one hand, the decision to use force to achieve a desired political end is momentous in and of itself. On the other hand, though, I cannot determine whether or not "military intervention" is a good or bad idea until I have some idea of what, precisely, is meant by the term. Analysts who argue either for or against military intervention have an obligation to sketch out the ways in which one could possibly intervene so that we can determine which ways, if any, make sense given the circumstances.
A broader problem here, as I was discussing with both Adam Elkus and Robert Caruso, is that regional specialists rarely understand military capabilities and options well enough to make an argument for or against, and those who understand military capabilities and options rarely understand the regional dynamics well enough to make an argument for or against. It is important, in that context, for scholars to work collaboratively to complement areas of expertise.
Along these lines, Marc Lynch is working on an analysis piece for CNAS that I hope will go some way toward addressing specific ways in which the United States could intervene militarily in Syria to better determine which options, if any, are worth attempting. This kind of analysis takes time but is, I think, ultimately the more responsible way to go about making these arguments.
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February 1, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:58am | 8 Comments
Last night's CNAS 5th anniversary celebration was a tremendous amount of fun. Although the precedings were off-the-record, I don't think I'm breaking any rules by confirming numerous reports that Gen. Marty Dempsey called out this blog a number of times, wryly noting the way I've given him a hard time for his reading list and for his Pentagonese.
It says a lot about the health of the United States and about civil-military relations that the most powerful military officer in the country is willing to have a good-natured back-and-forth with a blogger who has criticized him. (That's not the case, for example, in Egypt, the recipient of $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid, where the military leadership is so lacking in confidence that it throws critical bloggers in jail.) The United States has the most powerful military in the world, and it sends a strong message to military officers in other countries when our officers hold themselves accountable to the people they serve. (And have a sense of good Irish humor about it in the process.)
It also says a lot about Twitter and other new media that @Martin_Dempsey noted I rather liked his speech at Duke and is willing to use social media to have a conversation with the public. A few months ago, I marvelled at a back-and-forth between former senior State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter and George Washington University student Dan Trombly on the Responsibility to Protect. How cool, I thought. Any medium that facilitates egalitarian conversations between generals and bloggers on the one hand and between the former head of policy planning and an international relations student on the other hand is pretty darn amazing.
I felt really blessed last night to work at a place like CNAS. But I also felt blessed to live in this kind of country -- and at a time when technology is democratizing the public discourse to an extent never seen before.
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January 31, 2012 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 2:57pm | 12 Comments
I have been busy for the past several days and have neglected the blog. I had meant to cross-post this Victoria Fontan offering, for example, on Carl Prine's blog but will instead link to it here and recommend you all read it.
I also want to give some space for a guest post from Joel Smith and Mike Stinetorf*, who work on our "Joining Forces" initiative here at CNAS. As these two guys have worked on issues related to active-duty servicemen veterans, they have run up against the question of what, exactly, we should call veterans of these recent campaigns and want some feedback from this blog's readership. Take it away, guys.
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The U.S. military mission in Iraq is over and the war in Afghanistan (our involvement, anyway) is scheduled to end in 2014. As we transition out of the longest war in U.S. history, it is clear many questions remain, including the legacy of those who are serving during this period. What is not clear, however, is what we should call these individuals.
What do we call “the other 1%?” Is there an appropriate term for those who currently serve?
The most obvious place to look would be to the military itself. But, in an institution that prides itself on using more than its fair share of jargon, the military has a plethora of terms to describe its people: service members, service men and women, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coasties, uniformed personnel, warriors, wounded warriors, warfighters, troops, grunts, officers, NCOs, commanders and the list goes on. Throw in a little civilian vernacular, and you get terms such as “hero.”
The media uses these terms interchangeably, often without knowing their meanings. “Troops” is perhaps the most over-used of them all; it seems neither the American public nor the media know the true meaning of the word, which refers to Army enlisted. There is an on-going debate regarding the usage of the term “hero;” the President used it (as well as “troops” and “men and women in uniform”) in his most recent State of the Union address. “Warrior” is also not a word that meets with common understanding or approval, and some in uniform do not believe they are warriors.
When we talk about the military community at large, what do we call the OEF/OIF era service member? Is “service member” sufficient and accurate albeit a bit bulky? Is “hero” an inclusive term or reserved for those who have performed extraordinary acts in uniform? Who or what is a “warfighter,” or a “warrior?” Do we differentiate between those who participate in combat and those who serve in other ways during a time of war? Is there an accurate word that journalists and historians can and should use to get it right?
As we attempt to understand this era and these wars, addressing these basic questions should be done with dignity, respect and perhaps above all else, accuracy.
*Joel is the son of a chaplain in the U.S. Army and has the good sense to date a girl from East Tennessee. Mike served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq and recently graduated from Dartmouth College. He was played by this dude on television.
