« The Bipartisan Assault on American Citizenship | Home | There's this Bridge That Connects Brooklyn and Manhattan . . . »
Another Take On The GSAVE
I have to say that I'm always skeptical of the theory that the Bush administration has turned a conceptual corner in foreign policy. There seem to me to have been too many false dawns. The Defense Department also seems like an unlikely location for the emergence of a more sophisticated understanding of transnational conflicts, and not just because Don Rumsfeld doesn't know what he's doing. No government agency has more institutional investment in a militarized, state-based conception of the world. At any rate, I thought I might share this communication from TNR's Spencer Ackerman on the subject:
This line -- GSAVE's focus is on transnational networks rather than on states
Advertisement
I remember seeing this assertion, but only now does the realization dawn that, for the Bush Administration, "international fora" = "terrorism".
Additionally, "strategy of the weak" sounds like Niedermeyer from Animal House.
August 3, 2005 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am puzzled by you way of framing the issues Matt. You seem to run two different issues together.
The question whether we should regard the whatever-it-is as a war or a struggle, is entirely separate from the question as to whether our main antogonists in the whatever-it is are states or non-state actors.
It is possible that it is a war against states;
it is possible that it is a struggle against states;
it is possible that it is a war against non-state actors;
it is possible that it is a struggle against non-state actors.
I see no evidence that the Bush administration is under any illusions that the enemy in the whatever-it-is is a fluid, transnational network of some kind. Certainly they have pursued many policies that seem aimed at infiltrating, financially crippling and rolling up that network.
What you may have in mind is the war in Iraq. You may see that war as evidence of the fact that the Bush administration is too heavily focussed on state sponsorship of terrorism.
But I simply don't believe that the administration chose to go to war against Iraq in order to target a major state sponsor of terror, any more than I beleive they went to war against Iraq to destroy a potentially dangerous possessor of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was not a significant sponsor of terror, and the administration knows this. Rather they went to war against Iraq because they viewed 9/11 as a golden opportunity to solve all their various Middle East headaches in one fell swoop, and knew they could enlist the public support needed to do it. Saddam was one of those headaches, for several reasons that have relatively little to do with terrorism. And he was the most vulnerable target. So he went first after Afghanistan.
What we should be concerned with is not whether the administration is capable of making a conceptual shift away from states toward transnational threats - they have already done that; but whether it is capable of making a conceptual shift away from war to something broader than war. We have seen that even to call the terrorist threat a "network" is to grant it a bit more solidity than it merits. What we seem to have in many places is simply a bunch of like-minded people, who read the same books, attend some of the same lectures, listen to the same audio tapes and visit the same web sites. As a result they tend to get worked up about the same things, and they are perfectly capable of initiating action on their own. To describe them as a network is like describing the national radio audience of Rush Limbaugh as a network. (This is not to say that the global terrorist threat does not contain important networks; but it is not comprised of one big network.)
To counter this threat, we really do need to understand that we are engaged in something far broader than a war. What I find intereting about this whole episode is that the Bush administration really did seem to be priming itself for, if not a major conceptual shift, at least a big public relations roll-out. Then they withdrew it. Why? Was it just a trial balloon?
I would note that the day the GSAVE story broke, a major organization of North American scholars, the Fiqh Council of North America, issued a formal fatwa, purportedly the first of its kind, against terrorism. It was issued in a very high-profile manner at the National Press Club. I would also note that the translation of "struggle" in Arabic is "jihad". I have wondered whether the "GSAVE" label was targeted more toward foreign audiences than US audiences - perhaps the notion was to enlist Muslim scholars in an effort to call Muslims to the "greater jihad", and turn them from violence.
My own suspicion is that the administration backed down from the change because they feared the international and domestic legal repercussions of calling off the "war".
August 3, 2005 3:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I commented on Ivo's piece separately, but you and Spencer raise some excellent points that go beneath the broad outlines of a shift in "grand strategy" reflected in the acronym controversy.
I agree that the Bush Admin remains far too wedded to state-centric approaches and far too allergic to productive and sustainable multilateral collaboration. The line he quotes from the National Defense Strategy is the very sentence, out of all the Admin's various "strategy" documents I've read over the past year or so, that I have found the most troubling.
The sentence is a distillation of the Cheney/Bolton/Feith-type thinking -- the point that brings the "national power" guys together with the neocons. But since "personnel is policy," it's clear that this mindset (at least in its most rabidly ideological form) is far less dominant than it used to be. That has also been clear in the changing rhethoric coming from DOD/NSC/State.
Obviously, the sentence was an internal victory in the bureaucratic wordsmithing wars. But how sustainable a victory is it if the actual policies are evolving gradually in another direction? Was it the "parting shot" of Feith and crew as they're being pushed out of the central decision-making loops?
I take your warning that GSAVE must be approached with caution. I do believe, however, there has been a considerable shift in both policy and message from a GWOT to a GSAVE approach, as I've written at the blog-that-shall-not-be-named for some number of months. Given the message discipline at the top of the Admin since at least January/February -- both "terrorists" and "war" had virtually disappeared from their vocabulary -- it's hard to imagine the White House has been absent from that shift.
The whiplash-inducing presidential smack-down of GSAVE earlier this week is a reflection of a political marketing problem that's big and growing bigger for the Admin. As I wrote yesterday, they've stuck themselves out on a limb, for lots of political reasons -- most important the need to stage-manage a gradual withdrawal from the Iraq mess. They've got an old tired brand that doesn't fit with the reality of either their (shifting) objectives or their (evolving) policy approaches. But they're going to have the devil of a time changing the brand, given their dependence on the hard-core GWOT fans when times get bad for the White House.
The big issue Spencer points to, which is not receiving adequate attention IMHO, is WHO is going to be responsible for executing a lot of this GSAVE strategy. As he points out, Feith and many others in OSD are assuming the US military is going to be tasked (or task itself) with a lot of the "operations other than war" we normally think as being within the balliwick of State, Negroponte/CIA, USAID, or even the Peace Corps. These unstated assumptions are being woven through force restructuring plans (including both overseas and domestic base closings) and military transformation programs. But sometimes the restructuring and transformation agendas turn out to be the tails wagging the strategic dog, producing a pretty incoherent mess. (I'd put Rumsfeld's attachment to "lily pads" in that category.)
Another closely-related issue is that the "failed states" problem isn't being addressed coherently. And nobody but traditional foreign-policy-establishment-types (e.g. CSIS, CFR) seems to be interested in the interagency coordination function set up at State under Carlos Pascual for post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction. (See new report from the CFR taskforce on "post-conflicts" -- chaired by Scowcroft & Berger -- on "post-conflicts.") Finally, how do the Bush Admin's plans relate (if at all) to the positions being taken by the Admin on various UN-reform issues, from peacekeeping/Peace Commission proposals to restructuring the Human Rights mechanisms to the debates on sovereignty and intervention in local conflicts such as Dafur.
Bottom line -- the first step in refashioning the US strategy is to get rid of the GWOT mindset and some of the policies the US pursued initially that have turned into dead-ends. This is well underway despite Bush's political imperative to retain the brand, and we should encourage that shift.
The next step is to tackle the places where the emerging GSAVE strategy, whatever label it's operating under, remains incoherent or is moving in the wrong directions. It's not that the branding debates aren't important politically. But from a policy formulation standpoint, we've got to be able to keep distinct, in our own brains, the branding issues from the substance.
August 3, 2005 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
To make a long story short, however, it strikes me as expressing a worldview that's wholly and irrationally committed to a state-centric worldview and utterly unprepared to comprehend the nature of transnational threats.
Huh?
Matthew's statement is incoherent. The assertion from the 2005 National Defense Strategy says nothing at all that relates to states or non-state actors. Is this is what is meant by a "reality-based" viewpoint? Making things up out of whole cloth?
August 3, 2005 4:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, man, this sounds dangerous. Gotta confront international fora and judicial processes with all firepower at our disposal, including those nuclear bunker-busters, if necessary. But hopefully house-to-house searches, extraordinary renditions and mild torture techniques will be enough to stop judicial processes and that fora thing.
August 4, 2005 3:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, for "strategy of the weak" I thought that the White House has been reading James Scott's "Weapons of the Weak", but using it as a "handbook for the strong"!
But the line from the strategy is chilling:
I shudder not simply the equation of international fora (those dangereous terrorist-equivalents at Davos every year!) and judicial processes (watch out for the Hague) with terrorism...though that is bizarre enough.
My deeper concern, though, is that both fora and especially judicial process are precisely institutions for mediating conflict, producing mutually acceptable outcomes, and ensuring that justice receives its due in the course of any individual's or nation's actions.
The view in the Administration's stated policy, in contrast, displays a sort of Clausewitz-on-his-head insistence that all seeming machineries of order and compromise are really just parts of war-fighting: "international courts and diplomacy are merely the continuation of warfare in a different way" (vs. Clausewitz's "war is the continuation of diplomacy by different means"). THAT is scary...and entirely consistent with the "Mayberry Machiavelli" attitude that "domestic policy is merely the continuation of election strategy by different means" attitude we associate with Rove et al.
Taking this attitude (as the outcome is starting to suggest) is likely to lead to self-fulfilling results. After all, if one's negotiating partners (who include not just 'allies' but people we view as rivals and even enemies, viz. Korea) are persuaded that the United States will instrumentalize all possible mediating institutions as "continuations of warfare", those institutions cannot carry out their actual functions to stabilize and mediate...so that everything DOES become warfare. (I'm not naive: everyone always tries to spin/use every possible venue to advance their _interests_, of course--but that is different from considering them the equivalent to terrorism!)
August 4, 2005 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
It seems Karen and Don forgot to ask the boss!
From the NYT this morning (Thursday):
"President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."
August 4, 2005 7:00 AM | Reply | Permalink