Gaslighting on Terrorism and Immigration

This weekend has seen a mass of confusion, protest, anger, and dismay at a hastily-constructed executive order that brought an immediate halt to certain kinds of immigration and travel, and an indefinite halt to others (specifically, refugees from Syria). People marched, court orders were issued (and apparently ignored), statements were made, contradicted, and clarified. Things are still far from certain as of the start of the week.

Lost in the shuffle of all of these important issues is an underlying reality: we as a nation have been effectively "gaslighted" on terrorism and immigration. The Trump forces have told the lie that we are unsafe and vulnerable to attack by terrorists traveling from overseas so often that we all now take it for granted - even Democratic Senators otherwise opposed to the executive order.

As a security studies scholar, let me put this in clear terms: there is not a shred of evidence that the United States is any more vulnerable to terrorist attacks from abroad than it ever has been, and plenty to suggest that we are safer than at any point in our history. There is also no way of defending the assertion that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat to the United States, or that it even ought to be on the list of top US national security priorities. We are afraid of terrorism only because we've been told we should be.

The easiest way to see the truth, of course, is to look at the statistics. Violence of any kind - never mind terrorist violence - doesn't even make the top 15 list of causes of death in the US, and has been in long-term secular decline (as have death rates in general). Any given American's odds of being killed or injured by a terrorist are almost infinitesimally small, and the odds of a terrorist attack of any kind happening on US soil on any given day - or even in any given month - are likewise extremely small. The list of things you are more likely to encounter than a terrorist is vast.

The few high-profile cases we've had in recent years (San Bernadino and, if you really want to stretch, Orlando) were committed by US citizens. The only recent case that might conceivably have been stopped by the rules recently put in place was a knife-wielding Somali at Ohio State, which while regrettable and tragic didn't lead to any loss of life (other than the attacker's) and which represented only the tiniest of dangers even to the people of Columbus, OH. Dylann Roof did more damage in South Carolina that this student did in Columbus.

The fact is that, of things that threaten Americans' lives and way of life, terrorism just doesn't make the list. It is, in reality, just not that important. Are we 100% free of terrorist risk? Of course not - and we never will be. There is no set of rules, no border restrictions, no "extreme vetting" procedures that will ever eliminate that risk. And at this point, the risk is so low that any efforts to improve procedures - however well-considered and well-implemented - will only lower the risk level by an almost immeasurably small amount. When you're that close to zero, it's hard to get closer.

Why, then, are so many Americans concerned about terrorism? Why are even Senate Democrats unwilling to question the underlying logic of Trump's executive order, which amounts to "desperate times call for desperate measures"? Because we have all been gaslit on this. The lie has been repeated so many times that it has become the truth.

This is not a problem that goes away with one administration, however disliked or incompetent. This is now baked into the system, the result of 15 years of steady drumbeats that long predate Trump and his people. No politician, Democrat or Republican, will challenge the conventional wisdom, and a great many of them will find it useful as cover to do what they want to do, whether it be restricting economic activity or discriminating against certain groups or simply getting reelected on the basis of blind fear. The "War on Terror" is, indeed, the never-ending war, because we have enshrined it on a pedestal in our heads.

I wish I could be less bleak about this, but I don't see a way forward. We have largely lost the capacity for hope in our politics, especially as concerns "national security" issues. 25 years ago we dreamed of a world in which we felt secure. Since then we have allowed our "leaders" to make sure that we will never feel secure again, whatever the real world is doing. As usual, Walt Kelly said it best: we have met the enemy, and He is Us.

A "New Cold War"? Let's Review the Basics...

There's been a lot of talk in the media in the last few days, as the Crimea crisis works its way towards a de facto annexation by Russia, about a "new Cold War" between Russia and the US. John McCain, eager to criticize Obama on almost anything, seems positively slavering over the prospect. But what McCain wants to call a "return to Realism" is anything but, and those journalists who want to make parallels between today's geopolitics and the Cold War need to go back to school.

While there were differing theories about the Cold War and what caused it, they boiled down in the end to an argument between three camps - the Classical Realists, the Neorealists, and the Hegemonic Stability Realists. Each saw the Cold War in a slightly different light:

- For Classical Realists (e.g. Hans Morgenthau), the Cold War was a struggle between two fairly evenly matched great powers, one of which liked things they way they were (a Status Quo power) and one of which wanted to change the world in its image (an Imperialist power). For Morgenthau, the conflict was a struggle for power driven not so much by the particular ideologies (communism vs. democracy) as by the underlying motivations. The US, in Morgenthau's view, was trying to defend the world largely as it was, while the Soviet Union wanted to topple that world and replace it with something else in its own image. This was a classic "aggressor-defender" model on the world stage, and a fairly persuasive argument to folks like George Kennan who were architects of US foreign policy in the 1950s.

- Neorealists (Ken Waltz and his successors) agreed with the Classical Realists that the world was bipolar - that is, that the US and the USSR were fairly evenly matched, and that no other powers were anywhere close. But Waltz argued that, to a great extent, motive doesn't matter. You don't need one of the two bipolar superpowers to be Imperialist (or Revisionist, or whatever you want to call someone who wants to change the system); you just need for there to be two superpowers. That, in and of itself, will generate conflict largely through the Security Dilemma. Waltz' other insight was that, while this conflict flowed from the structure of the international system itself (never mind what the superpowers actually wanted, they were more or less destined to compete), a bipolar system also constrained that conflict to reasonably stable levels (i.e. no major wars). Indeed, as historian John Lewis Gaddis (a big fan of Waltz' work) latter put it, the problem was not explaining the Cold War but the "Long Peace" - how did we manage to go so long with no wars between the major powers? In Waltz' view, the Cold War was determined by the bipolar structure of the international system, which also kept it from getting too far out of hand.

- Hegemonic Stability Theorists (think Robert Gilpin) broke with both of these traditions and argued that the Cold War did not represent a period of bipolarity between two equal superpowers, but rather a competition between one Hegemonic power at the top of the heap (aka the US) and a Challenger (the USSR) which, while somewhat weaker, was trying to catch up and topple the Hegemon. This is not far off from Morgenthau's Status Quo/Imperialist categories, but Gilpin saw the power equation as more dynamic - that Hegemonic powers inevitably decline while Challengers tend to catch up and overtake them. This doesn't always happen, of course - sometimes the Challenger fails, as the USSR apparently did in 1991.

So if we want to be Realists about Russia (and, apparently, both prominent Republicans and journalists are just dying to wear that language), then the Cold War was either a bipolar struggle between two equal powers or a struggle between a hegemon and a challenger trying to unseat it. Depending on your flavor of Realism, motives either do or don't matter - take your pick.

Here's the problem - none of this applies to today's relationship with Russia. Any similarities are entirely superficial - the fundamental variables have all drastically changed. So talk of a new "Cold War" is not just premature - it's foolish. Consider:

- Today's Russia is not a superpower equal to the US. It's not even close. The Russian economy has shrunk drastically since its Soviet days, as has its military might and reach. The Russian army taking over Crimea is roughly like the US military invading Tijuana - it's right there, the locals are vastly overmatched, and there are no nearby counterbalancing powers. Morgenthau understood that power declines with distance; apparently McCain has forgotten that lesson. So recent events notwithstanding, we are not dealing with a bipolar world with power divided between the US and Russia. China and Europe are far larger things than Russia is.

- Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin's intentions, and whatever imperialist motives you want to attribute to the Russia psyche, they are not out to take over the world. At worst, Putin's Russia wants to reestablish the previous empire, which was slightly larger than Russia is now - and even that may not be in the cards. But whereas Stalin, Khrushchev, and even Brezhnev actively sought to overthrow of democracy in the West, Putin could care less about what kind of government runs Washington, London, or Berlin. He doesn't want to take over the world, just his corner of it. Which means that unlike the 1950s, there is no existential threat to the West - not that Russia has the power to pose such a threat in any case.

All of this, of course, is IR Theory 101. Russia would have to get a lot more powerful and (depending on your view) its motives would have to change drastically in order for there to be the potential of a new "Cold War". Absent those factors - which don't seem anywhere on the horizon - let's drop the silly historical comparisons and focus on what is. If you want to be a Realist in making US foreign policy, you need to deal with the real world of today.

The Power of Terrorism Isn't In the Terrorists

Terrorism, and responses to it, have been back in the news lately. Revelations of NSA data-gathering, fresh memories of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the winding down of US involvement in Afghanistan have all combined to put "The War on Terror" back on the radar screen, even if we don't use that term very much anymore.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about what I regard as one of the key questions - not "how much privacy are we giving up?" but "how much security are we getting for it?" The good folks at the Dayton Business Journal were nice enough to republish it as a guest blog column, which has probably expanded the readership significantly. No angry emails or eggs on my window yet, though.

That post sparked a discussion, unsurprisingly, about the balance between how much to "spend" (in dollars or privacy or what have you) in fighting terrorism and what it's "worth". That discussion made me realize that I had stopped a level short in my previous thinking - and that one reason for disagreements about counterterrorism measures is that people can fundamentally disagree about the "value" of terrorism.

In that earlier column, I wrote this:

We don't comb through emails or phone calls for evidence that people are going to commit murder, or sell drugs, or rob banks, or any number of other illegal and harmful activities. And our political system is unable to put even the mildest controls on firearms. So why do we accept this "logic" when it comes to terrorism?

It's easy to point out that we apply different standards to things that are roughly equal in objective facts. Many (not all, but many) Americans are willing to put up with measures to prevent deaths by terrorism that they wouldn't agree to in preventing other kinds of deaths - even other violent deaths. From an economists' point of view, of course, this is crazy - but then, most of the world looks crazy to economists.

What I didn't ask in that previous column is, why? What is there about terrorist violence that makes it weigh more heavily - makes it "worth more" in our cost/benefit calculations? There is no objective answer, of course - different people can and do assign different values to such things. A friend of mine suggested a logic I hadn't considered before:

Terrorism isn't like car accidents - it's an attack on the state and the community. I don't see it as a cost-benefit calculation like bike helmet laws - it's not about the death toll, it's about sovereignty. (emphasis added)

There is, of course, no way of making an appeal to facts to support this argument - it's an argument about values. In particular, it's an argument based on the proposition that the intent or motive behind the violence alters its value, aside from how much damage it causes or to whom.

Violence has long carried symbolic meaning apart from its practical value. It is precisely that point that terrorism is designed to exploit. Terrorist groups lack the ability to cause enough damage to matter in practical military or security terms. Assuming that most terrorist groups have a political goal - change US foreign policy, or bring down the US government, or something similar - they just don't have the firepower to accomplish that by attacking the thing they want to change.

So they attack symbolically and emotionally important targets, either out of a sense of frustration and catharsis (not expecting to really "win" but feeling better because they "struck back"), or in hopes of inducing a disproportionate counter-reaction that advances their cause. In 1957 Eric Frank Russell wrote the novel Wasp in which he elucidated exactly this theory of how terrorism works:

“In given conditions, action and reaction can be ridiculously out of proportion … One can obtain results monstrously in excess of the effort … Let’s consider [an] auto smash-up…. The driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and was buzzing around his face…. The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being, the wasp’s size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid. … Nevertheless, that wasp killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

Here's the thing about the power of terrorism and terrorists: it has almost nothing to do with them, and almost everything to do with us. The objectively small amounts of damage terrorists cause loom large in large part because we assign weight to them far in excess of their actual size. In short, terrorists have power because we give it to them.

Now, I readily grant that not all death is equal in meaning. Some death (say, from old age at 95 or 100) is regrettable but expected - even a marker of something to celebrate. Other deaths (say, traffic accidents) are tragic, and so we look for ways to prevent more while recognizing that the world is an inherently dangerous place. Death by intentional violence is in a different category - in cases where one human dies at the hand of another, the malice of the act matters and changes its meaning.

But from my point of view, death by violence is equally tragic whether it's at the hands of a Muslim bomber or a South Chicago gang member. The presence of political motives (or, more often, vague political rationalizations - were the Boston Bombers really trying to accomplish something?) is, for me, vastly overshadowed by the fact that some people were willing, even eager, to kill others. That, to me, is the greatest tragedy.

There isn't really a prescription at the end of this so much as an observation. Terrorists and the violence they commit have exactly as much power as we give them. If we impute greater meaning to violence done by Muslims acting in small groups than we do to violence done by racist or homophobic whites or urban gang members in similar numbers, then of course we will be willing to expend more resources on preventing the former than on the latter. That is, collectively, our choice to make. I hope we can extend our national conversation to this level, rather than relying on sound bites and loud politicians to define those choices for us.

The NSA, Spying, and the Important Question We Aren't Asking

There's a lot of conversation going around about the NSA and recent revelations regarding the US government's massive collection of data, both domestic and foreign. There is speculation about the leaker (Edward Snowdon, apparently a Booz Allen employee), about the nature of the data being gathered (metadata on phone calls through Verizon, plus various other sorts of things that may or may not be foreign in origin), and about the legality and constitutionality of these efforts.

Many have pointed out that this is hardly a new Obama administration thing, that the Bush administration did many of the same things under the PATRIOT Act - which, although this disappoints some liberals, has helped take some of the partisan sting out of things.

These are all good and important questions (except the partisanship thing, which is silliness as usual). And to some degree, this has revived a much larger question: how much privacy are we willing to give up in exchange for security? That's an age-old question of governance critical to any age.

What I find missing from the conversation, however, is the other half of that question. We are focused on the how much privacy are we willing to give up part. What we're not talking about - at least, I haven't seen it yet - is how much security do we get, or even how much security should we expect.

What we're talking about, of course, is security from terrorist attacks. Protecting Americans from terrorist attacks is a legitimate concern of government, just as protecting us from foreign invasion or local crime are. But because terrorism is fundamentally asymmetric, you have to spend massive amounts to get small increases in protection - and even then, it's not perfect. It's never going to be perfect.

A case in point is the Boston Marathon bombing just a few weeks ago. This attack was carried out by what appear to be a pair of rank amateurs. It is almost certain that they used email, cell phones, and other communications before and during their attack. Yet the existing surveillance apparatus - as massive as it apparently is - was not enough to stop two young guys with no experience from blowing up bombs that killed three and injured more than 250.* The net which the NSA and others have cast isn't foolproof.

And this is very much the point. We can spend billions upon billions of dollars, and disaffected 20-somethings will still be able to blow up bombs in public places. We're not going to get perfect security from terrorism - and in the broader context, terrorism is one of the least of dangers in our society anyway (well behind alcohol-induced car accidents, murders, suicides, industrial accidents - there's a host of things that kill more Americans).

So in order to answer the question about how much privacy we're willing to give up in exchange for security, we have to decide how much security do we expect? If the answer is "a reasonable amount, but we know it's never going to be perfect", then the massive data-gathering the government is engaged in is probably a significant overreach. We could obtain the same result with far less effort, and far more privacy.

The problem, of course, is that politicians don't do rational calculations - because we don't let them. Any politician can be vilified, anytime something goes wrong, for "not having done enough". Michael Dukakis was raked over the coals - and ultimately lost his bid for the White House - in part because one criminal was paroled and went on to commit a crime.

Real-world reality dictates that we accept some level of vulnerability, and some number of deaths, just as we accept a certain level of car accidents, homicides, and other things (all of which kill more of us than terrorists do). How many accidental gun deaths committed by children have occurred in the last month?

But political reality - on the singular issue of terrorism (but not road accidents, or gun violence) - says to the politician, you must leave no stone unturned, no action untaken. You must be able to say, "we did everything we possibly could."

As usual, this is not the fault of our politicians - it's our own fault. We don't apply this logic to other arenas in life, else we would be driving on roads with 25 mph speed limits everywhere (imagine the lives we would save!) We don't comb through emails or phone calls for evidence that people are going to commit murder, or sell drugs, or rob banks, or any number of other illegal and harmful activities. And our political system is unable to put even the mildest controls on firearms. So why do we accept this "logic" when it comes to terrorism?

The government will stop this sort of massive spying when politicians are punished for overreaching on privacy but NOT punished every time there is a terrorist incident somewhere. Until then, they will continue to respond to the incentives we give them. And as long as we fail to ask questions about the security side and focus only on privacy, our privacy will continue to erode - without improving our security one bit.



* I am discounting out of hand the argument, made on the fringes, that the Boston explosions were a "false flag" attack planted by the government. There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that this is the case, and no obvious motive or outcome for having done so.

A Rare Bipartisan Moment Over Drone Attacks

Last week saw a rare bit of political theater in Washington: an actual filibuster by a US Senator. Rand Paul (KY) took the floor and held it by speaking for some 13 hours to block confirmation of President Obama's nominee for CIA director.

The filibuster had little practical effect - other than reviving references to the Jimmy Stewart classic "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," it merely delayed confirmation by a day - but it did raise awareness of an issue: the administration's apparent stance that it has the legal right to kill American citizens, on American soil, with drone strikes if national security demands it.

This raised two interesting observations (at least, they're interesting to me...):

First, there was of course a social media buzz about Paul's grandstanding. Memes like these were common on FB throughout the day:

What was fascinating to me about the social media frenzy was that this same message was coming from both the right and the left. Tribes that usually have nothing but contempt for each other's positions - and who mock each other regularly as a matter of instinct - suddenly started singing in unison. I don't know if any of them noticed - I doubt it, given how little the most committed tribalists will listen to each other - but I found it fascinating nevertheless. If nothing else, this sends an interesting political message to the President: you've managed to piss off both sides on this one. Maybe it's time to back down.

Second, it is fascinating to me the extent to which the technology (armed predator drones) provided a red herring distraction on the entire debate (a taste of "squirrel sauce", as my friend Steve Saideman would put it). "Targeted killing" is a polite term for either "assassination" or "murder", depending on your taste, and the fact that it's done with one weapon over another seems largely irrelevant.

Imagine this thought experiment: what if Sen. Paul had gotten up and asked for the President to publicly declare that the administration has no legal right to assassinate American citizens, on American soil, without trial, using CIA snipers with rifles? Or with agents slipping poison into their coffee? The universal response would have been, "of course he can't do that". The violations of habeus corpus and other portions of the Constitution, not to mention Federal law, are numerous. So why does this become a "legitimate debate" when we change "sniper rifle" to "predator drone"?

Nearly a dozen years after 9/11/01, most Americans don't worry much about terrorism anymore - with good reason. Yet the political debates in Washington continue to be shaped (some might say mis-shaped) by this one event and our failure to come to terms with it. Perhaps the response of both the left and the right to this could start to move things back to some sense. In the meantime, we'll likely see more interesting political theater - which is always entertaining!

Why Religion in the Military Matters

Much has been written, both in the past and recently, about the spread of aggressive evangelical Christianity within the US military. As my colleague Steve Saideman has pointed out, the Air Force Academy has long been known as a less-than-tolerant environment. Now word comes that the problem may have spread to West Point, primary service academy for the US Army, as well.

Much of the criticism here is rightly directed at the Constitutional violation, and therefore the violation of soldiers' and officers' oaths to defend that Constitution, involved in aggressive proselytizing within the services. There is a bitter irony in a military working to defend freedoms for all Americans - including freedom of religion - yet squashing that same freedom within its own ranks.

But there is another, perhaps even more dangerous, consequence to the spread of a particular religious viewpoint within the armed forces. Different religious perspectives, even (perhaps especially) within Christianity, have very different views on the role of the military and the appropriateness of the use of force in general. Broadly speaking, the more a military becomes infused with a particular point of view, the more that point of view will come to shape its decisions, its directions, and the kinds of wars it will or won't fight.

This is particularly concerning when the viewpoint in question is the aggressive strain of evangelical Christianity that seems to have attracted so many adherents within the Air Force and Army. At issue here are more than views about salvation and the inherent infallibility of the Bible. This particular strain of Christianity has very definite views about war and the use of force. Some examples:

• The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in support of the Iraq War in 2003, specifically citing Romans 13 ("But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he [the governing authority] does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.")

• Pentacostal Publishing House, the publication arm of United Pentacostal Church International, has published Will Islam Rule the World? Will the Antichrist Be a Muslim?, a book which asks questions more rhetorical than analytical.

• Sarah Palin, an Assembly of God church member, famously said in a speech that the Iraq war was "a task that is from God," arguing that the invasion of Iraq was part of "God's plan".

Many similar examples can be found pertaining to Israel, the Muslim world, and Iran, just as a number of years ago similar preachers railed against "godless Communism" and the evils of the Soviet Union. I've no doubt that these folks are quite sincere in their views, and that their theology and their politics are logically linked.

I'm not interested in arguing whether these folks are right or wrong, either in their theology or their politics. But it is clear - from examples like these as well as from the widespread use by these and similar churches of "spiritual warfare" imagery - that this is a religious view with a particularly accepting, even embracing, stance towards the use of force as a foreign policy instrument. These are churches, in other words, perfectly happy to go to war (the real, not the spiritual, kind) if the cause is deemed to be "righteous".

Why does this matter? Because a military whose leaders are strongly influenced by this point of view is going to lean more assertively towards preemptive, preventive, and even aggressive wars. They will be quicker to support political leadership that, say, wants to attack Iran over its nuclear weapons program. They will be more accepting than the broader American public (since these are minority religious views within the US) of getting the US involved militarily in various spots around the world, in support of an agenda (e.g. Israel) that may be more theological than practical.

But doesn't the US military answer to elected civilian control? If they take orders from the government (as Romans 13 says they must), why does it matter what their own views are? While this is true, and an important component of our governing system, the military brass can still wield substantial influence over decisions of war and peace. They can do so in particular by setting the parameters of the possible and the impossible. If the US military is in favor of attacking Iran, they will draw up plans, acquire weapons, and train forces in support of that mission. If they're not in favor of such an attack, they can render it very difficult by not having those plans, those weapons, or that training in place.

The upshot here is that a military dominated by a theology that supports the aggressive use of force is, all other things being equal, more likely to end up actually using that force. That's a political decision being made for theological reasons - on the basis of theology not shared by most Americans. And that, even more than the Constitutional violations of oath-sworn officers, is a serious danger that must be addressed in America's standing military.

Lowering the Bar in Afghanistan

This week NATO has been holding a high-profile summit in Chicago. Usually, NATO meetings don't get a lot of attention in the US press, in part because they're often in Europe and in part because they often talk about things like interoperability and peacekeeping protocols in the Balkans that Americans don't care much about. For most Americans, NATO is just background noise most of the time.

But because the Afghan war is a NATO affair, and because this is an election year in which Americans are looking to see if Obama fulfills his promises with regards to that war, this year's summit suddenly looks important. Chicago is, of course, always a great place for protesters (1968, anyone?), which only adds to the drama.

All NATO countries agree that they need to "end" the war, within a reasonably short time frame - specifically, by 2014. So they have a plan to accomplish that goal - a plan largely driven (as usual) by the various members' domestic political and economic situations rather than the war itself. That domestic politics are driving foreign policy should surprise nobody - they almost always do.

But this particular plan, despite the high-minded rhetoric, isn't a plan to end the war at all. It's a plan to try to arrange conditions under which NATO countries can leave with a minimum of embarrassment. At the end of 2013, the conflict itself won't be over and the fighting will still be going on - we just won't be doing the fighting anymore.

Ending the war means ending the conflict - which at root means taking away either the motivation or the capability of the various anti-Karzai government forces to continue to fight. Motivation can only be addressed by reaching a settlement acceptable to all of the factions within Afghanistan, including the Taliban and the various warlords and drug lords populating the countryside. Whether a power-sharing arrangement exists (even in theory) that could satisfy all of those parties simultaneously is an open question, but the fact that there has been very little serious effort to pursue one - combined with the fairly extreme demands of some parts of the Taliban - suggests that this road is blocked. So much, then, for resolving the conflict by negotiated settlement.

The only other choice is to take away the capabilities of the anti-Karzai forces. But this, too, is a strategy with a poor track record. The US and its NATO allies have been there in force for 10 years - recently, with a "surge" of extra forces. Despite concerted and significant efforts, there has been little progress in ending the war by beating the other side(s) into submission. The Soviets, with much less regard for human life than we have, tried for 10 years to do the same in the 1980s and failed. Military force can probably prevent a Taliban victory, but it cannot take away the Taliban's ability to continue to fight.

So what is the goal of this new plan? To have Afghan government forces capable of continuing the fight on their own by the end of 2013. I haven't seen the word used yet, but this feels an awful lot like "Vietnamization" redux. We've acknowledged that the war is essentially stalemated - neither side can escalate to victory at an acceptable cost. But the stalemate doesn't hurt either side enough to want to make painful compromises - either that, or some (or all) sides don't believe negotiations would produce a solution.

Either way, the Obama administration is in as untenable a position as the Nixon administration was in 1972. The American public wants out - not to the point that hundreds of thousands have marched on Washington yet, but the political and fiscal constraints are significant. Continuing the war promises no hope of changing anything for the next 10 years. But there's no way in the near term (or even the medium term) to produce an outcome significantly different from the status quo.

So the only rational strategy is cut your losses and leave, papering over the departure with words about "peace with honor" or "a plan to responsibly wind down the war". If Obama wins a second term, he may face a Saigon 1975 moment if the Taliban overrun Kabul and reassert control over the center of the country. Or that point may come later - if at all. The country may just limp along through another 10 or 20 years of internecine civil war, while continuing to serve as a base for drug lords and potential terrorists.

I don't have much criticism for what NATO is trying to do right now - they're in a difficult (if not impossible) solution. As much as we wanted to believe in 2001 that we could remake Afghanistan so that it never again be a haven for terrorists, that may be beyond our reach - a desperate hope generated from the grief and shock of 9/11. What we have gotten instead is yet another lesson in the limits of power.

Just don't call it "ending the war" or "conflict resolution". If we're honest, we'll call it what it is - leaving.

Real Security is Hard; 100% Security is Impossible

Sometimes, the targets are too easy. We've heard stories for years of problems with the security screening network in the US; now comes this:

LA Airport TSA Screeners 'ran drug ring'

To calm a frightened public in 2001 and 2002, Americans were told that the "new" TSA and DHS would guarantee our safety. But there are no guarantees. TSA jobs are, by all accounts, frequently unpleasant and not all that well-paid. Oversight can be lax (no pun intended here). When that happens, you're bound to get things like this. And if you can bribe someone to smuggle drugs through, what else would they smuggle for money?

Too, there's the problem of "fighting the last war". In this case, we have poured billions upon billions into securing the air traffic network. Why? Because 9/11 involved airplanes, and because it looks like it might be doable. But the two largest terrorist attacks/attempts on US soil prior to 9/11 both involved rental trucks (one directed at the World Trade Center, no less) - did we go after the rental truck industry? Then there are boats, problematic border crossings, and all the rest of it.

The fact is that terrorism is all about asymmetry, which makes guaranteed security impossible. Moreover, in the grand scheme of things terrorism ranks far behind murder, traffic accidents, and any number of health issues as a threat to American lives. Yes, it's more economically disruptive - to a point. But those disruptions are incredibly rare - indeed, vanishingly so in recent years.

For the most part, terrorism isn't much on the public radar these days. The presidential candidates have other things to talk about that are more attuned to Americans' concerns. And it isn't that we don't need some kind of response to terror threats, just as we need systems for dealing with natural disasters, auto accidents, murders, and a host of other problems. Here's hoping that this year's president campaign doesn't wander into the silly territory of pandering, wherein candidates promise us complete immunity from terrorists. Because there ain't no such thing.

Why I Am a Self-Defense Pacifist

I spend a lot of time thinking, writing, and teaching about conflict. Much of the writing and teaching has been about the use of force - our polite academic term for violence or, more bluntly, killing other people. I think that at some level, you can't spend that much time thinking about this topic without developing a personal philosophy - because to study violence is to confront the question, when would I be willing to use violence?

Some years ago, I was struck by this quote from Elbert Hubbard, an American writer in the late 19th & early 20th centuries who died when the Lusitania went down:

“So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.” 

Political scientists sometimes define government as the thing that holds "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force", but that's never true for two reasons. First, very few governments prohibit force in direct self-defense. And second, "legitimate" is a circular claim: if a government does it, it's legitimate, because "legitimate" and "legal" are generally synonyms. And who stops the government from illegitimate actions? When has a government ever admitted to illegitimacy? 

Every government defines its wars as legitimate, regardless of how they are entered into (when is the last time the US Congress declared war per the Constitution?), how they are conducted (Abu Ghraib? Afghanistan? My Lai is apparently not so far behind as we would like), or how much support they do or don't have from the public. Governments have always used force in patently illegitimate ways - think of the internment camps for Japanese-Americans in World War II. This isn't going to change.

And because governments set this example, others will follow it. The latest headline-grabbing case is Anders Breivik in Norway. His claim is that he was acting as a patriot, to protect the "legitimate" claims of the "Norwegian nation" against a government that had sold his nation out. He insists that he was justified, and that he would do it again if given the chance.

Very appropriately, we want to put both his argument and his actions beyond the pale. The moral high ground, it seems, is easily found here. But it's harder to claim that ground when we condemn the killing of civilians in some contexts and condone it in others. Our willingness to erode a host of protections - one recent example being a legal opinion within the White House that it would be OK to kill a US citizen abroad without trial - in the name of "security" just blurs the line further. As Gandhi reminded us,

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

The more different justifications we come up with for killing, the more individuals and governments will find ways to twist those justifications to perverted ends. I do not believe we are likely to get a societal consensus on who we think should be killed and why - but at the very least, I wish more people would seriously confront the question.

The confusion, the blurring of lines, the stretched justifications for me cry out for a simpler answer. I do see legitimacy in using violence to fend off an attack, provided you are actually being attacked. Pre-emptive violence against those who might attack later, or retributive violence against those who did something bad before, or violence against metaphorical attacks against "honor" or "purity" - all of these open a door to very dark places time and again. Instead of contributing to the problem, let's draw a line where we can all see it and agree upon it - and let's hold ourselves and our representatives to that line. If we want to lay claim to being a civilized and peaceful people, the way we want to understand those words, it's the least we can do.

Syria's Grim Truth; Our Peter Parker Complex

My friend and co-author Steve Saideman has published an excellent piece on Syria, titled "Why the Violence Will Go On". On his own blogspace, he was even more blunt: "Hope is not a plan but we have no plan". Steve is a better conflict scholar than I, and he's spot on here: everything we know about civil wars and violent conflict inside states indicates that, Kofi Annan's efforts aside, things will get worse before they get better. Jawboning doesn't end wars, and that's about all we've seen or are likely to see in the foreseeable future.

This will lead, and had already led, to a certain amount of hand-wringing in the US and Europe. I've written previously about the tendency for politicians to always want to be seen doing something. And I've no doubt that Mitt Romney will at some point give a speech about how ineffectual Obama's "Syria policy" is - the implication being that if he (Romney) were President, he would have this whole Syria mess straightened out in no time.

We have this debate, of course, every time some conflict gets big and visible enough to be on CNN. There was Lybia last year, and Kosovo before that, and Bosnia before that, and Somalia before that (and again recently), and so on.

Part of the "do something" force is undoubtedly tied to humanitarian instincts, which is why conflicts where the suffering can be seen on TV are more likely to get policy attention than those that are out of sight. But a big part of it is the "Peter Parker Principle" of US foreign policy - the core, largely unexamined, notion that "with great power comes great responsibility".

This principle is at the heart of American internationalism for the last 60 years. It is a unifying theme - one thing that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on (the debates tend to be about tactics, not priorities). And like most unifying themes it stands unquestioned, even unexamined, nearly all of the time. Which is almost certainly not a good thing.

There are two questions that should be raised about the Peter Parker Principle. I don't have definitive answers to either, and the answers may depend on context - but they should at least be asked:

1) Do we in fact have the power to do what we think should be done? Just because we have "great power" does not make the US omnipotent - just as saying "If we can put a man on the moon, we can ..." is a logical fallacy. Some things are not doable with any amount of power; others cannot be done at a cost we are willing to bear. Applied to Syria, this is a very serious question: stopping the violence in the short run is likely to cost more than anyone is willing to pay, while creating a stable and peaceful regime that respects the rights of all Syrians in the long run is probably beyond the power of anybody except the Syrians themselves.

2) What is the extent of our moral obligation to try to help others? Devotees of Peter Parker policy often use the analogy of the drowning child; if you could save a drowning child, wouldn't you? Of course you would - because that's a choice made in isolation, without consequence for anything else. But resources spent trying to solve problem A cannot be used to address problem B. In a world where there are more problems than resources, how do we prioritize? On the basis of lives saved? (If so, what was the point of the Iraq war, which killed massive numbers of Iraqis? Whose lives matter?) On the basis of economic interest to us? (Why, then, Afghanistan?) Or do we simply respond to things in a knee-jerk fashion as they come up - in which case, why pretend that there's a coherent policy behind this at all?

The reality, of course, is that policy is generally determined by a combination of forces, many of them narrowly self-interested, pushing and pulling on the policy apparatus of the US government. We very much want there to be a conversation about "the National Interest", but we don't get one - haven't had one for at least 20 years or more. Instead, we get policy by sound bite - and for Americans, the Peter Parker philosophy seems to work pretty well. It's a powerful illusion that makes us feel good about ourselves - that we are both powerful and caring.

I don't know what the "policy response" will be to Syria - though I agree with Steve that it's not likely to do much good anytime soon. I think Syria poses yet another problem where our power to affect the outcome is limited at best, and our moral obligation is murky at best. Would that we could find a way to get our politicians to understand that life isn't as clean as Marvel comics.

"Normal" Fears and the Asymmetry of Terrorism

I heard about the rash of bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh for the first time yesterday. This is a little surprising, in that I still have family in Pittsburgh, but none are associated with Pitt. I don't often hear the Cathedral of Learning - Pitt's 42-story grand tower - referred to on the radio, so it caught my ear.

What's perhaps a little more surprising is that this has been going on since mid-February - nearly two months. To date, there have been well over 50 bomb threats resulting in building closures. This is a massive level of disruption, all the more remarkable in that it has involved no actual bombs.

There are, I think, a couple of lessons here. First, if your objective is to disrupt normal systems and engender a certain level of fear, that is remarkably easy to do. Occasionally a high school kid pulls something like this to get out of an exam; he is almost invariably caught within days, if not hours. This has been going on for weeks, and the full resources of the FBI have as yet turned up nothing.

This illustrates a key point that a lot of experts make about terrorism: its inherently asymmetric nature. Whoever is doing this is armed only with a laptop and knowledge of how to stay undetected. Granted, disrupting a large university is not the same as blowing up a major landmark. But what if you did this to the ten largest universities in the country? Or to a series of government offices, or the major businesses in a metropolitan area? The potential is clearly there for significant disruption at nearly zero cost. Which is precisely why "terrorism" (an extremely broad category) is so popular as a means for the less powerful to fight against the more powerful.

Second, I find it at least a bit remarkable that it's taken nearly two months for this to show up on the radar screen. I suppose the fact that no actual bombs have gone off has something to do with that - there is no "bleeding" to "lead" the headlines here. But does this say something about our having come to terms with a "new normal" of security precautions? It used to be that a bomb threat campaign of this magnitude would be national news. Now it just rates an article in the Chronicle? I don't know whether that's good, bad, or indifferent - though much of what we see as "news" is surely less significant than this.

I don't have any conclusions here. I do feel for the Pitt students & faculty - for them, this is a major, life-disrupting problem. Let's hope - given that hope is all we have - that this particular problem doesn't spread itself farther than it already has.

Perspective on Questions of National Security

I first got interested in international politics in the mid-1980s. Back then, the Cold War was the question in international relations. This was partly because we were Americans, and the Soviets were our chief concern, and this caused us to overlook all sorts of other issues going on around the world (poverty and development, growing environmental problems, regional conflicts) that weren't related to the Cold War rivalry. But it was also because the question at the center of the Cold War was fundamental: the survival of the human race or its extinction in a nuclear war.

It seems almost quaint now, but the IR field back then was dominated by the question of interstate war and the logic of nuclear deterrence and escalation. We argued about arms control and deterrent force structures and the nature of crises because we had the feeling that if leaders got any of these things wrong, we could all die. And we weren't wrong about that - it was true.

I just redrafted the syllabus for my international conflict class the other day - a course I've been teaching, in one form or another, for 15 years. Like everything else, academic fashions change alongside broader social concerns. Nobody writes about nuclear war, or even interstate war, much anymore. There's a lot about terrorism, and conflicts over resources, and refugees, and a host of other things. In a sense, that's as it should be - although I do have to remind my students that the nuclear weapons are still there in abundance, even if we don't do duck-and-cover drills anymore.

What I find more interesting than the change in scholarship, however, is the lack of change among politicians. In this election year, presidential candidates have been falling over each other in an outbidding effort to be the "tough guy" who can handle the life-threatening crisis of the day. Their chief concern? Iran.

Iran? Seriously? Although the level of rhetoric that accompanies these thundering speeches about how Iran threatens the stability of the world is little changed from the rhetoric 40 years ago about the Soviets, it no longer makes sense. The fate of the human race does not hang in the balance. A conflict with Iran - even a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel, the worst scenario being discussed - would be an epic tragedy, but would not come close to threatening life across the planet as we know it. It's not that there aren't high stakes here - they're just not nearly as high as they used to be.

So the next time you hear some politician shouting about the "greatest foreign policy crisis of this generation" or some other such nonsense, pause for a moment. Hit the mute button. And recall that there was a time, not so long ago, when the threats were a heck of a lot more serious. Then turn the sound back on and continue laughing at the unintended comedy show of politicians who have lost all perspective.