THINGS ARE LOOKING UP

Say what? You can't be serious. Don't you read the papers or watch TV? Isn’t Washington still dysfunctional? Aren’t the two parties still miles apart on the big ticket issues? Aren't 13 million Americans still unemployed? Isn't there war or mayhem wherever you look?

 Yes, all of the above is still true in whole or in part. But I'd like to suggest that if you look at the facts a little more closely, you might conclude that some important things are in fact changing for the better.

Persistent unemployment is still at the top of the worry list. But in late January 2013 the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment fell to its lowest point in five years.

In the same month, housing starts – the same sector that brought the economy to its knees in 2008 –  were up 8.1%, 36.9% over December 2011, according to the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, another trend indicator, is at a six-year high. What makes this particularly interesting is that the stock market’s performance reflects investor confidence in future prospects, rather like the Las Vegas crap tables, more than it reflects factual events.

For the all-important energy sector, the International Energy Agency projects that the US will replace Saudi Arabia as the world's premier oil and gas producer within the next four years.

At least temporarily reducing government gridlock, the Republican Party has postponed the threat of a second fiscal cliff by kicking the debt ceiling down the road until May, in a retreat from the earlier threat to shut down the government if necessary to have their way. A price will still be demanded by conservatives in the form of drastic tax reductions and program cuts. What is new is the sound of at least some ice braking in the protracted political freeze.  Ironically, the US budget deficit has actually been shrinking at the fastest pace than at any time since World War II, according to investors.com.

After a decade of handwringing and breast-beating about the so-called “decline” in strength, influence, and relevance of the US in world affairs, accompanied by numerous public opinion polls showing a majority fearing a worse future for their children, a USA Today/Gallup poll in late fall 2012 shows that a majority of Americans – 54% – now believes that they will be better off four years from now.

The above collection of data focuses on America’s economy and society. But a footnote has to ask: what about foreign wars, revolutions, Islamist militants, and the daunting but inescapable task of running down the jihadis who, led by Al Qaeda, have targeted the US? This is the primary agenda for the CIA and US Special Forces operations, backed by remote drone and other technology, including invisible but essential cyber defense. China will be a competitor and Russia a troublemaker, and Iran and North Korea potential nuclear outlaws. But what else is new? The threat remains as before, as does the commitment to prevail over terrorists.

Without minimizing the very real human and other costs of conflict, consider a little-noticed but larger reality:casualties from warfare are at a historic low.  Small wars, insurgencies, and barbaric behavior by tyrants are permanent feature of the global landscape, typically in regions in early stages of development, literacy, and peaceful democratic change.  In an earlier age such local explosions would never have made even the back page of Western newspapers. Today, competitive news outlets and deadline-driven journalists, commentators and pundits convey the impression of a planet aflame with war, when the opposite is true for the bigtime conflicts that used to routinely slaughter thousands.

Indeed, the scale of warfare has actually declined dramatically. Far fewer human beings are being killed today by military weaponry than in the past.  In his latest book, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker makes the point dramatically: "The decline in violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species."

Bad things are still happening and the future has a habit of being unpredictable. But the evidence seems to show an uneven but nevertheless  welcome and widespread trend:  things are looking up.

 

 

A New President's Old Foreign Crisis Agenda

When the recently elected president descends to the West Wing basement and takes his place at the head of the table in the Situation Room, the agenda will look depressingly like the one that was there before the election. If there were no crisis there would be no crisis management and, thus, no meeting of the National Security Council. Crisis drives the top command, which has little time for more leisurely consideration of longer-term strategic thinking and planning. This is the dilemma of a US that feels automatically involved and still looked to for leadership in an increasingly leaderless world. Here are a few samples of probable agenda items, along with some modest policy suggestions that have little chance of being taken seriously.

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN WARFARE

The US will apply what pressure it still possesses for a cease-fire.  But Israel, wounded by Iran-supplied Hamas rocket fire on its territory after taking out Hamas’ military leader, is poised to deliver a punitive retaliatory blow on the tiny enclave aimed at both punishment and deterrence. The dilemma is that the more comprehensive Israel’s military response, the more alienated the Arab world and its new and fragile regimes will become.

This bloody drama has been playing itself out for well over half a century. The essence of conflict is unchanged since the 1947 UN partition of the British Palestinian mandate. Generations of American mediators have broken their picks on the stone face of resentment in an Arab world of what it regards as a further extension of Western colonialism into "their" region. The Israelis for their part assert their historic rights while seeing all external threats through the lens of the Holocaust. It is hard to be optimistic. But the time has long since come for the US to lay on the table a draft map of a final territorial agreement between the sides, and stop hoping that somehow the parties will do this themselves. That action can at least form the basis for a more realistic discussion of concrete terms, which may never happen otherwise.

SYRIA

The US has struggled for months to find a role that doesn’t involve American boots on the ground or aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone. Unlike Libya, Syria is a linchpin of the Arab Middle East and a still-powerful state. No good options have appeared so far, particularly for a US that is weary of ambiguous incursions into the Middle East.

More effective help is needed to finally topple the genocidal Assad regime. A new opportunity may have opened by the newly-formed “National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.” One lesson learned in the bungled planning for invading Iraq in 2003 was that President George W. Bush’s close-to-unilateral action would have fared much better with a broad multilateral backing such as that organized by Bush’s father in 1991 in Kuwait. Given the refusal of Russia and China to vote for a UN-sanctioned intervention, it is time to form a new Coalition of the Willing, based on NATO, to tackle the thankless but vital task of securing a cease-fire and the beginnings of a post-Assad Syria.

IRAN
The suspected development of a nuclear weapons capability is what put Iran on the regular list. Israel’s redline warnings to Tehran portend a new Middle East war, this time uniting Shiite Iran with Sunni Arabia in solidarity against Israel and the US. The clock is ticking, and the prospects are dire if no diplomatic solution can be found.

US policy correctly considers preventing further nuclear weapons proliferation a high priority. But the costs of using force preemptively may outweigh the dangers of letting diplomacy run its uncertain course. One possibly promising approach may lie in a statement by Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak stating that Iran has delayed its ambition for nuclear weaponry and is converting some of its enriched uranium fuel rods to civilian use. The president’s diplomatic track should spell out more clearly the mutual benefits inherent in such an approach.

SOUTH CHINA SEAS

It is no accident that the crisis list begins with the Middle East in various forms. But the sharpening dispute over potentially oil-rich islands has already led to dangerous confrontations between China and Japan, threatening armed escalation. This conflict plays into other tensions arising in Chinese: Japanese relations, colored by memories of the cruel Japanese occupation of China in the 1930’s.

All one can say is that this is so 19th century. There are few signs of a peaceful solution. But I wonder if anyone in Washington even remembers something called the International Court of Justice. It seems unlikely, since it is never mentioned even though the United States helped establish the court in order to provide an impartial forum for resolving just such territorial and boundary disputes. The court did this some years ago in a conflict involving Atlantic fisheries, and sits there expensively ready to conduct an impartial analysis of conflicting claim and historic boundaries, hopefully rendering a judicious and impartial verdict that in a sane world would be accepted by the parties. For a country that preaches the rule of law, such a unique US initiative might astonish the rest of the world and give the US a renewed reputation for constructive leadership.

 

WHY IS AMERICA SO HARD TO GOVERN?

It is a cliché to describe Washington, the government, and above all the Congress as “dysfunctional.” William Butler Yeats’ 1919 words apply equally to today’s political discourse: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The details are all too familiar, and blame can be widely assigned. But the paralysis in Washington deserves a deeper level of scrutiny.

The current crisis centers on the Congress, which has failed to act decisively on the daunting agenda facing a country still mired in recession and in a sour mood reflected in public approval of Congress at around 16 percent. The House of Representatives won’t pass badly needed jobs or infrastructure bills; the US debt rating is still downgraded; once again there is no federal budget; and there is still no agreement on how to tackle the global energy crisis, restore America's competitivene edge, or reform a once-peerless educational system that now lags behind a dozen others. The 62 recently elected Tea Partiers can’t be blamed for everything. But they showcased dysfunction when they cut off their leader, House Speaker Boehner, at the knees and repudiated the “grand bargain” he and President Obama thought they had struck to solve the debt crisis. The political left was only slightly less culpable with its reluctance to seriously negotiate needed reform in entitlements to forestall future bankruptcy.

Senatorial behavior has not been much better. A new low was reached when Republican Minority Leader McConnell confronted the daunting national agenda by declaring the number one priority to be making President Obama a one-term president. The Senate has arranged to paralyze its own decision-making process by applying to virtually all other matters the once rarely used supermajority required to break filibusters. Every major matter now requires 60 votes instead of a simple majority.

The executive branch has also contributed to the dysfunction. The President squandered his first year by focusing on health care instead of the overwhelming crises of unemployment and financial meltdown. He also made a critical misjudgment in leaving action on his agenda to the Congress, which responded with inaction. And he has  joined the Congress in putting the future on hold during this unending election year.

Some otherwise good citizens have also created dysfunction. The Tea Party is half right in its disgust with Washington’s performance, but it doesn’t seem to have learned that overturning the card table is not just another way of playing cards. The federal government is clearly bloated in places, and some functions could be performed more effectively by the states or private sector. But fixing that is not the same as mindless slashes across the board without fact-based analysis. The Tea Party is not the Taliban, but its non-negotiable demands and calls for using elective power to dismantle the federal government reject the American concept of governance.

There is an even deeper source of dysfunction that can make the system unworkable: America was designed by its 18th century founders to be hard to govern. The Constitution is a brilliant blueprint for a workable government in the late 18th century. The core of its architecture is a triad of parts designed to avoid return to tyranny by any one branch. The separation of powers requires a conscious effort to bypass it when action is needed.

The new Republic was beset by north-south racial tensions, controversial Supreme Court decisions, threats of New England secession, and a devastating civil war. But the federal government also fostered liberating revolutions in transportation such as canals and railroads, land-grant settlements and colleges producing the world's finest universities, and, in our era, a network of superhighways and a space program that transfixed the world. When all parts pulled together, miracles became possible. But sometimes the Congress blocked the President, while he in turn used executive power to bypass Congress; the Supreme Court reversed presidential actions; and at least one president (FDR) tried to pack the Court with potential sympathizers.

In a perfect world I might favor the parliamentary system, in which the winners of elections have a shot at launching the programs on which they were elected. But realistically, we will live in a system in which a very different political morality is required if we are to find a way out of the current impasse and toward cooperation to solve common problems. Elected representatives can and should represent the interests of their constituents and act on their own principles. But there are times when it is essential for the common public good to rise beyond that constraint and act in the larger national interest, objectively defined.

In 1774 the great English conservative Edmund Burke delivered a speech to the representatives to Parliament from the city of Bristol, England. In it he made the classic case for that philosophy as the highest duty of those elected to govern. It is worth quoting some of his words in the famous "Speech To The Electors At Bristol":

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament. If the local constituent should have an interest, or should form an hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the rest of the community, the member for that place ought to be as far, as any other, from any endeavour to give it effect.

This is the essence of statesmanship. More than anything else, its glaring absence lies at the heart of the current blockage in Washington. But if taken to heart by essentially decent and intelligent men and women in office, the American government could work as it is designed to work in a turbulent epoch that once again desperately needs a stable and strong America at its core.

The Intelligence Puzzle

The Pentagon has somewhere a threat list that ranks external threats to the national security of the United States. It also wargames those threats, asking hypothetically "what if" and "what then," with teams of officials simulating US and foreign decision-makers. The current short-term threat list is undoubtedly topped by Iran and the long-term one by China.

The first thing to be said is that neither of these threats is existential -- that is, they do not entail invasion or significant bombing by a foreign nation, although you would not know it from the hyperventilating candidates in the current primaries. But tactical threats of isolated yet lethal attacks by terrorists at home and overseas certainly do exist, and could become catastrophic if nuclear materials fall into the wrong hands.

How does the government analyze such security threats? The way all governments do: on the basis of assessments of capabilities and intentions. Technology has contributed mightily to good information about capabilities by enabling satellites with astonishingly high resolution to see everything down to human figures. But it makes no sense to act on assessments of capabilities alone. We know the capabilities of Great Britain, including its nuclear arsenal, but no one would put it on an American threat list As for the hostile nuclear would-be and the hostile already-is, we know quite a lot about the capabilities of North Korea. But we don’t really know where Iran stands on its suspected nuclear weapons building. Some new facilities may be deep underground where they can’t be seen by satellites (nor readily attacked). So Iranian capabilities are incompletely understood.

But even when capabilities are well known, the real puzzle concerns intentions: just what do Iran and China have in mind? Are the Iranian mullahs actually planning to build deliverable nuclear weapons, and if so, what do they plan to do with them? Will they to provoke the US by blocking the critically important Strait of Hormuz, which would surely start a war? As with North Korea, we just don’t know what’s going on in their minds.

China poses a different problem. While Iran makes no secret of its animosity and threats, China is and could remain both our economic competitor and environmental partner, and our prime Asian-Pacific strategic rival. Changes are possible in China’s economic policies, and seven of the top nine of its leadership positions have already transferred to a new generation. It’s also possible that these new leaders have no clear definition yet of their longer-term intentions, if any. Iranians may dream of restoring Persia’s Fourth Century BC empire. But for a rising China, the best historic analogy might be Prussia’s Bismarck, who unified a rising Germany to create an empire and, after minor conflicts with France and Austria, oversaw a balance of power policy that kept the European peace for decades until the first World War.

National Intelligence Estimates, classified and unclassified, contain judgments based on available knowledge of both capabilities and intentions. Enormous resources go into providing the raw intelligence. For example, the National Security Agency uses a huge budget to acquire electronic information about countries on the threat list, monitoring global electronic traffic for key words. But despite all this, our knowledge is murky. Is there anything more that can help us understand Iran's intentions in the short term and China's in the longer term? Is there anywhere else to look beyond conventional sources?

One answer can be found in the famous aphorism by Speaker Tip O'Neill that “all politics are local.” As in most authoritarian countries, policy in Iran and China is driven by the leaders’ determination to retain power, whatever the cost. We can also surmise that at least some Iranian and Chinese behavior can be attributed to generational change. The potential leadership in Iran and the emerging leadership in China are more savvy about the modern world than the bearded mullahs in Qum and the survivors of the great march in China. That fact alone may portend change.

History also helps supply a perspective. Jordan and Iraq were created in 1921, Israel was born in 1948, and a host of African states acquired identity in the decolonization period after World War II. By contrast, both Iran and China were great empires a couple of thousand years ago. National pride and memories of regional hegemony are hard to erase, even through the filters of Shia Islam and Communism. It is conventional wisdom that both aim to restore such hegemony. The challenge for the international community is to show that it understands this, even as it works to peacefully contain both ambitions.

Finally, can we learn something from patterns of culture that still define both societies? In Iran, as any visitor knows, there is a pervasive bazaar culture. When the vendor and the customer are deadlocked over price, the customer finally starts for the door, and the vendor protests, “Wait, wait, come back, we talk.” Is it only the proverbial rug merchants who bargain, or are Iran’s clerics playing a potentially deadly but promising bargaining game? Iran’s strategy in the current crisis may be a form of brinksmanship right up to the tipping point. If so, it will take strong nerves on the part of the US. But this scenario might be far better than the alternative.

Like Iran, China has a powerful culture that historically looms in the background of policy. Alongside the Confucian rule book is another one: the Sun Tzu handbook of military wisdom which, like Machiavelli’s cold-blooded prescriptions for his Florentine bosses, has long supplied guidance to Chinese (and other) military, particularly when faced with asymmetrical power. Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” dates from several centuries BC. While some dispute its authenticity, the axioms in this ancient treatise describe a good deal of Chinese military history. Here are some relevant ones: “All warfare is based on deception.” “If you are far from the enemy make him believe you are near.” ”Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.” “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu’s most provocative, deeply Chinese, maxim is this one: “It is the way of the world for the weak to defeat the strong.” And here are his millennia-old words for those who predicted a cakewalk in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran: “There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.”

When our intelligence professionals correctly figure out Iranian capabilities and Chinese intentions, they surely will have earned their keep.

A LOOK AHEAD THROUGH THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR

What follows may irritate some, so let me confess up-front that the following is written by a political independent who has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations, served Nixon on one of his presidential commissions, worked full-time for Carter's National Security Council, and was a naval officer during WW II.

IRAQ. First, a personal note. I was one who initially supported the attack on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction aimed at the United States plus links to al-Qaeda, not to mention National Security Advisor Rice’s scary fantasy of a mushroom cloud. It was probably the last time I trusted political evaluation of intelligence. And I deeply resented the shabby treatment of Secretary of State retired four-star general Colin Powell after he warned President Bush of post-invasion chaos, citing the Pottery Barn motto (“You break it, you own it”). Powell’s concerns were supported by other retired generals who know war. For his pains he was isolated, humiliated at the UN, and effectively dumped. As the Bush administration botched the post-invasion task, disillusionment was complete.

Painful as it is to look back, we should learn from Iraq war enthusiasts Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, President George W. Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney. They sold the longest and costliest modern war to the American people as a “cakewalk”, with intelligence about WMD that was a “slamdunk", and cost us, not $80 billion dollars, but close to one trillion, over 4,000 US lives, and thousands of maimed US troops ,along with a huge number of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians. We were further deceived when the war costs were kept off budget. It should be noted that none of the four ever experienced combat in war.

WHEN TO LEAVE IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. Some critics fear that “premature” withdrawal will endanger our objectives of leaving behind a democratic society in Iraq and a secure one in Afghanistan. They may be right that a new surge might give those goals a better chance. But the evidence, both historical and contemporary, suggests that a delay of three years, five years, or even ten may not make much difference. Whenever the US pulls out, the odds in Iraq are what you might expect for a society where Shia were always reviled by Sunnis and, with our invasion, vice versa. The three Ottoman provinces made into “Iraq” in London in 1921 are as likely to have a dictator again holding the country together as an entirely new model of governance imposed from the outside. The odds in Afghanistan, whenever the US withdraws, seem to me to favor recurrence of tribal conflict between Pashtuns and Northerners, along with resurgent Taliban extremism and a weak and corrupt central government. We hope that US efforts at transformative change in both countries will take hold. But they could also vanish like footprint s in the sand. The US military has done its best in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The rest, as always, is up to the natives.

IRAN. Iran is not North Korea, which no American really understands. Rather than being a hermetically sealed dictatorship, Iran has a majority younger generation that is facile with social networks and well aware of the Arab Awakening. The mullahs rule with an uneven fist, but a direct attack on Iran is likely to unite the people. If Iran commits suicide by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the US is certain to forcibly reopen it. But the paramount basis for policy is that Iran probably has a secret nuclear weapons program, according to the International UN Atomic Energy Agency. Republican contenders Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum have engaged in competitive machismo about who would most unflinchingly go to war with Iran if it did not discontinue its suspected nuclear weapons program. Like the four most influential Iraq war promoters cited earlier, these three don’t appear to have experienced anything that might be called military combat. Big trouble lies ahead if a serious war plan on Iran develops in 2012 before all diplomatic and other non-war options have been thoroughly explored.

Considering the costs, a smart US administration will double down on efforts to reach, inform, persuade, bribe, sabotage, and subvert the program, up to and including covert Special Forces and drone operations. Extreme persuasion worked earlier to end Libya’s weapons program; imagine the situation today if we had not persuaded Quaddaffi to give up his nuclear program. If Iran proceeds to build a weapon, or is only a screwdriver turn away, Israel is likely to ignore US cautions and try to blast Iran’s nuclear facilities the way it did with Saddam’s Osirak reactor in 1982, but on a far larger scale. If the worst can be averted, think of an “Islamic Awakening” in Iran that begins to rescue that lovely country.

GOVERNANCE. President Barack Obama wasted the one year available to presidents for real change by giving primacy to a controversial universal health care plan that overshadowed efforts to deal with inherited crises of rising unemployment and financial meltdown. In his first term his promised efforts to compromise with Congress proved futile, first against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s injunction to give primacy to making Obama a one-term president (how’s that for responsible leadership and patriotism at a time of overwhelming national problems begging for solution). After 2010 Tea Party-dominated House Republicans brought to major issues a Taliban-like non-negotiable agenda that allowed for none of the give and take at the heart of the democratic process. The result was serial paralysis.

The US system intentionally makes governance hard. The (unwritten) British constitution is aimed at making it possible to govern, while the US constitution is aimed at keeping King George III from coming back. The Tea Partiers who knowingly kept the United States government from functioning were once a legitimate protest movement. But they failed to comprehend their responsibility to govern, bringing to life a saying by Brazilian revolutionary Francisco Juliano: “To agitate is beautiful; to organize is difficult.” If these 80 or so Tea-Partiers are re-elected, we can look forward to the continued dysfunction of the federal government as a global laughingstock. But a strongly recovering economy may find the Tea Party a historical footnote.

Maybe President Obama doesn’t deserve re-election, assuming a believable opponent. But I find him a moral, intelligent, and patriotic guy. The right-wing extremists who savagely slimed and defamed his personal character and beliefs should have their mouths washed out with soap.

SERIOUS EDUCATION. Several candidates in the Republican primary debates have demonstrated ignorance of some facts they should have mastered in grade school. (I should correct that; Mrs. Bachmann's endless recital of non-facts as well as Herman Cain’s and Rick Perry's empty memory cards bring to mind the Josh Billings saying that “the trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”) But the blame should also fall on the American educational system, which seems to be producing, along with the bright achievers, an inordinate number of uneducated people. Those who brag about the US being Number One are right when it comes to military power -- and to the country's still inhrent promise -- but wrong about where we now stand educationally and overall in relation to fast-rising competitors like China, India, and Brazil. (For some figures, see my blog posting entitled "Is the US in Decline?"). If we don’t finally get serious about this in 2012we can forget about maintaining a long-term competitive economy.

INESCAPABLY, CHINA. Efforts to manage competitive but peaceful relations with China are crucial to our national security and well-being. I think President Obama and his team get high grades for managing this tricky relationship as well as that with equally unpredictable Moscow. It is vital that whoever wins in November continue these efforts while, as always, keeping our powder dry.

And a Happy New Year to all.

ARE WE HEADING FOR A NEW ISOLATIONISM?

The Premise
The US is anything but isolated in the new world of globalized economies, finance, markets, communications, and ideas. It obviously can’t lock the front door as it did in the 1920’s when foreign trade was a small fraction of total GDP, compared with today’s 12 percent for exports and 17 percent for imports. It would be a 21st century isolationism. But my answer is nevertheless a qualified yes.

Two-thirds of Americans are fed up with the drawn-out and ambiguous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The defense and foreign aid budgets face cuts. A recent poll of returnees shows strong preferences for less foreign military involvement. In the overheated electoral season, foreign policy is a footnote, but in one recent debate among Republican candidates, Libertarian Ron Paul said that the US had no business intervening around the world and should concentrate on rebuilding this country. The audience broke into a cheer that topped all other noises of the evening. The evidence is still fragmentary. But it suggests a turning away from optional military interventions that become costly and fail to attain their purpose, leaving people frustrated and disillusioned.

The History
In the early days of the Republic when the US was dependent on foreign trade, George Washington’s farewell address suggested that it was possible to be militarily isolationist without being isolated. The US stayed aloof from World War I until German U-boats attacked US shipping. It entered the war in 1917 in a euphoric and reformist mood, but the carnage was horrendous. Idealistic hopes were dimmed by the Allies’ cynicism at the 1919 Paris peace conference, and extinguished by the Senate’s rejection of President Wilson’s transformed world order. For a generation the US turned its back on the crumbling peace and its own blueprints for international cooperation like an international court. Until the mid-1930’s, threats from Hitler were not obvious. Isolation and
isolationism happily coexisted.

Disputed military interventions have been the “wars of choice” Richard Haass distinguished from “wars of necessity.” World War II was a “war of necessity”, as the threat became existential, and the Pearl Harbor attack a loud wake-up call. Thanks to the nationalist fervor unleashed in Indochina by Japan’s ejection of European colonialism, intervention in the Vietnam War by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson became complex and eventually unmanageable. “Victory” proved elusive, US goals became murky, costs soared, and American society fractured as popular support disappeared. For the next generation, public sentiment opposed any American effort to intervene in distant aggressions, police civil wars, suppress murderous tyrannies, export democracy, or forcibly “nation-build.”

In the 1990’s a new generation belatedly and reluctantly launched military operations in strife-torn Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo under an evolving UN doctrine of humanitarian “responsibility to protect.” But the Somali operation turned toxic, and the others remained problematic.

9/11 was a game-changer. America’s 2001 attack on al-Qaeda’s springboard, Afghanistan, was widely supported until President Bush diverted attention to Iraq. The bitter reality of tribal and religious conflict ended the US dream of quick, cheap success in both places. The Afghan war follows the pattern that led to past US drop-out periods.

The Forecast
Predictions are hazardous. We Americans are noted for historical amnesia, and American history is cyclical. A new isolationist mood would vanish with a direct attack like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Tough choices would still arise from an assaul on Israel, Iran production of a deliverable nuclear weapon, or an al-Qaeda attack on the US that is again mounted in a country with a return address. But operations against terrorists will rely on low-visibility Special Forces and technology such as drone aircraft. Targeted small-scale operations such as the dispatch of 100 Special Forces to Central Africa in the fall of 2011 will take the place of boots on the ground. US intervention in critical but not vital places will increasingly depend on coalitions of the willing (as has already happened in Libya) and, it can be hoped, upgraded use of “smart power” other that military.

Some Americans will be inconsolable about refraining from military crusades. But they should consider the words of Germany’s ”Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck who, when asked if he wanted war, is said to have replied, “Certainly not, what I want is victory.”

Elders of the World, Unite!

When I joined the ranks of not-as-young-as-I-used-to-be, I experienced a series of shocks. It must have been the same, only worse, for newly disabled people who found an unintentionally but jarringly hostile physical world out there. It might be worth unpacking some of the hazards confronting the Republic of the Elderly to explain what I’m talking about.

Here are a few examples of the difficulties with which folks with impaired vision and/or mobility contend every day:

1. Let’s start with an easy one. The best foodie sources for elders sell fairly good precooked meals. They are refrigerated and can be tonight’s dinner or stuck in a freezer for later. They all have cooking or heating instructions. But the specialty stores I know print cooking instructions in exactly the same tiny typeface as the list of ingredients, which are usually minuscule. There is normally label room allowing a slightly larger typeface for a couple of lines of heating tips. I have complained, but corporate management seems indifferent to the problems of its older clientele.

2. Those of us who spend time online must contend with the fact that Internet presentations are often conducted in a light pastel color, with links brought up in another light pastel shade, making the text so dim that it is close to unreadable for people with low vision. The site designers and coders may well include bright young people I taught at MIT. But how come they haven’t made their cool websites more readable for those of us with less-than-perfect vision?

3. TV dramas also present a problem. Some of my favorite sources of mindless violence -- like “NCIS,” “MI-5,” and “Masterpiece Mystery” – seem to shoot many of their scenes in the dark. Whether shot at night, or in cellars, or in other unlighted venues, many scenes are close to invisible to people like me.

4. Steps leading up into stores and restaurants often lack railings. I find that oldsters’ greatest concern is the danger of a fall, and they need something to hang onto. Here again, management seems unaware of the risks to people like their own parents or grandparents, not to mention lawsuits.

5. In my supermarket many desirable items are on the bottom shelf, requiring somehow bending in half or lying on the floor to check it out. Also, some older folks are on a low-sodium regime. It is a monumental pain to search through hundreds of cans, bottles, etc. to pick out the low-sodium versions. Has no one thought of providing a special section or at least shelf?

6. And have you ever wrestled with the little plastic triangles that have to be brought into mathematically precise conjunction in order to open a pill bottle, and which in my case often requires a chisel and hammer, leaving the floor strewn with pills?

The vendors concerned will, of course, be unmoved by the whining of an ordinary senior citizen. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, commerce is not missionary work. My impression is that the current marketing style of commercial America was set a couple of decades ago with a marketing strategy based on the fact that the demographic to target was the 15 to 24 crowd. That may be true for a while longer, but corporate America had better wake up to the fact that US demographics are changing. The 2010 Census projected that by 2025 – 14 years away – there will be 80% more elderly citizens, while the percentages of workers and kids will be up by only 16%. These trends are not completely new. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans 65 and older grew 15.1%, while the percentage of under-18’s grew only 2%.

The marketing manager today should tell her team that the changing demographics call for another look at business models and profit centers. With a few well-advertised improvements to make life easier for elders, businesses will make more money, and their bonus will be a special corner in Commerce Heaven reserved for people who do well by doing good for the elders of the world.

SYRIA IS DIFFERENT

As with Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain, we can’t predict the outcome of current Syrian turmoil. The Syrian uprising has many of the characteristics of the region-wide Arab Spring. Censorship is keeping out the independent press, but some Syrian human rights activists believe they can overthrow the brutal rule of the Assad family, and many are martyring themselves in the cause. People everywhere want personal freedom, and Syrians are no exception. Half the population is under the age of 19.

Having said that, what set Syria apart from its often dictatorial but incompetent and corrupt Arab neighbors was its evolution as a genuine police state regime that repressed and murdered its own people en masse with unparalleled ferocity. Yes, Egypt had a brutal internal security apparatus that tortured and disappeared hundreds of protestors over the Mubarak decades of authoritarian rule. The same was true of other autocratic Arab rulers, whether kings or presidents, all of whom were committed to hanging onto power that was acquired by either force or crooked elections. But none came close to the regime of Hafez-al-Assad.

Before the Iraq war, there were not one but two tough guys on the Arab block. The first was Iraq under Saddam Hussein, whose tyrannical regime not only committed genocide on Iraq’s marsh Shi’ites and on independence-seeking Kurds, but also launched wars of aggression again Iran and Kuwait. The other was Syria which, besides brutal internal repression, became the transmission belt for Iranian arms shipments to Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which were designated terrorist groups by Washington, committed to the elimination of Israel.

Syria’s earlier history was not all that different from that of its neighbors, except perhaps for a historic memory of long-disappeared empire, still simulated by deep interference in Lebanon until Syrian troops were withdrawn under UN pressure in 2006. Syria had been a French mandate under the League of Nations and in 1946 became, at least in name, a “parliamentary republic” that was thrown into turmoil with a succession of military coups. In 1958 Syria joined with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic – a point of relevance to my story. In 1961 they split, and in 1971 power was seized by an officer named Hafaz al-Assad, a member of the minority Alawite sect and of the socialist Ba’ath party. Like some other dictators, Assad brought a measure of stability that later morphed into Soviet-like repression. Initially an organizer and reformer of a quarrelsome and disorganized state, he had made Syria the only Arab country except Iraq that could accurately be called a police state.. His later style of rule included famously slaughtering between 20,000 and 40,000 Sunni citizens in the city of Hama in 1982 to break an uprising

In 2000 Hafez al-Assad died and was succeeded by his son Bashar, who had been a practicing ophthalmologist in London. There was some hope that Bashar would loosen some of the restraints strangling the people of Syria. But in the current uprising he has evidently followed his father’s footsteps. He has made some seemingly conciliatory gestures, but his forces have also killed at least 1,400 civilian demonstrators and wounding or seizing thousands of others. The fact that he was elected president in a referendum confirms that elections alone do not a democracy make.

I do not claim much first-hand knowledge other than a bizarre episode that took place in the 1970’s and remains etched in my mind as an indelible picture of one more police state capable of inhuman behavior, one which even to an official guest had the same stink as Cold War Moscow. It went like this. I was on a State-Department-sponsored speaking tour of the Gulf states and about to depart Kuwait for Bahrain when I was suddenly rerouted to Damascus. US-Syrian relations, always tense, had been on a roller coaster: Relations had been broken in both 1957 and 1967, and restored in 1974. There been no cultural exchange, no American ballet companies or cans of Orson Welles films (always a huge hit abroad), and certainly no MIT professor pontificating about international relations -- in short, none of the usual US cultural hustle.

I'm still not clear why the American embassy and the Syrian government decided that my availability provided a useful renewed effort to communicate informally. The US side seemed to be confident that an independent scholar would at least not say things requiring closing the embassy again. From the Syrian point of view, my guess is that there was a mixture of curiosity and a region-wide belief that I was probably a CIA agent, always more interesting to the spymasters than a long-winded scholar..

As it happens, I arrived in Damascus at an extraordinary moment in contemporary Syrian history. Hafez had launched his army in a war against the PLO forces in Lebanon, both sides using military equipment provided by Moscow. A reception on my arrival was well attended but, no surprise, I found no one prepared to discuss their war on their Palestinian partners. I was staying at the residence of public affairs officer (later Ambassador) Kenton Keith. The next morning, after a brisk tennis game, I took a rest prior to giving my speech to the invited elites at the major downtown hotel. In the meantime, the Egyptian and Saudi foreign ministers had arrived to offer their services as mediators. Soviet President Kosygin had also flown in, and I learned later that he was not allowed to leave the airport the entire time he was in Damascus. Just to complete the cast of characters on this day of war, I almost bumped into Ugandan mass murderer Idi Amin in the Umayyad Mosque later that day.

While resting on my bed and going over my lecture notes, I suddenly heard mounting screams outside the window. At least 1,000 young Syrians ran by, shouting denunciations of Syria’s recent partner Egypt and stopping to firebomb the Egyptian embassy next door, which almost blew me off the bed. Obviously Damascus had no need for Central Casting when it came to hiring extras for a domestic drama. Censorship was total, and word of both the state of war and the fire-bombing of an ally failed to make any of the international press (of which there were – and are today --few allowed in the country).

The ambassador and I set forth for the luncheon meeting, convinced that no one would actually show up in light of the events that must be overwhelming Damascus. On the contrary the whole guest list showed up – deputy ministers, department heads, University rectors, generals, newspaper editors. They acknowledged that their country was at war by launching a massive assault on the bar. I gave my speech, but as I got deeper into US Middle East policy I asked Ambassador Dick Murphy to join me. The two of us tried our best to explain the United States of America to a group of semi-inebriated brass of a country that had just attacked an ally. I repeat, tough guy on the block.

It’s fair to ask why, if the Syrian government is exterminating civilian protestors big time, the Libyan treatment should not be applied – no-fly zone, suppression of attacks on civilian-killing Syrian vehicles, and demands for President Assad to return to practice ophthalmology. Isn’t that hypocrisy? Washington has imposed some sanctions, which are rarely game-changers. Actually, US policy can’t claim even partial purity over the years, given the support it provided to many an Arab dictatorship in the name of stability and reliable oil supply. Today there is a better understanding of the costs of propping up dictatorial regimes. But the fact is no one is prepared to take on Syria, whatever its crimes against humanity and whatever the avowed UN doctrine of “responsibility to protect.” There is already fatigue with the Libyan intervention and its failure so far to eliminate Quadaffi. So the answer is yes, picking and choosing where to apply the activist pro-democracy doctrine and where to turn a blind eye may be called hypocrisy.

It may also be called cold realism, taking on only that which will have popular support and the cooperation of allies and the UN, as in Libya. In a perfect world there might be a stand-by police force ready to punish violations. That isn’t our world and is not likely to be in the foreseeable future. So I suggest that we live with this reality and be glad America can occasionally do the right thing morally as well as strategically.

Harvard Class of 1941 in 3 centuries

The Class of 1941 has an amazing resume. Our class lived through three totally different worlds, and in a sense at least touched three centuries. I will be discussing the larger global scene, but keep in mind the revolutionary changes in science and technology, high-energy physics, communications, bioengineering, medicine, warfare – changes our grandparents never even considered and our parents’ science fiction only speculated about.

How do we bridge three centuries? Well, we were born into a world full of remnants of the 19th century --including our parents. The existing international system had lasted over 1,000 years, and the culture was only beginning to change away from the Victorian past.

The 19th century featured rising and falling states, some of which were assertive in the traditional ancient model, such as Germany, Japan, and of course the United States, which pushed its way into the top tier with the Great White Fleet – the first assertion of America’s growing power and new global ambitions. War was a zero-sum game in which winners would dominate and crush losers. Germany's new assertiveness under Bismarck and eventually Hitler was in fact described by Thucydides when he wrote of the Athenians that they came into the world to take no rest and give no rest to others. All the players in the great international game had return addresses. The Class of 1941 was witness to and part of the explosive ending of an age and beginning of a new one. Many of us in uniform lived and died in the battle. We were both witnesses and eventually participants when the old geopolitics brought ruin to millions and hope to the world for a better way of doing things.

Out of that World War II wreckage came the second great storyline of our time in which our class lived – the Cold War. Communism was an ideology, but it took a giant step toward Hell with a bang. The North Korean communist government invaded South Korea with the blessing of both the Soviet Union and Communist China, and again the world changed for a half-century. For me, working in the State Department to help establish the United Nations and help manage the leftover conflicts, June 24, 1950 was a blazing red signal that we were in a dangerous new world order. Yes, the Soviet takeovers in Eastern Europe had been an earlier signal, but the weapons so far had been diplomatic. With a major war in Korea, our world overnight transformed its geometry of great powers into bi-polar, with only two that could be called superpowers.

It was a scary time. The Class of 1941 will remember when our children practiced meaningless nuclear protection by getting under the school desks, and when we followed JFK’s advice to build fallout shelters. It's not generally known that the first possible nuclear confrontation, however small-scale, involved possible hot pursuit of Soviet military aircraft across the border into Soviet airspace, with unforeseen consequences.

During the next 39 years, when the Class of 1941 was ascending the ladders of life and work, the new map would show two dominant powers and a whole bunch of bit players leaning on (or blackmailing) one or the other of the two nuclear giants for support. In return, the US government found itself backing some rather unsavory leaders because they were useful in the larger conflict. (Remember that FDR once said that he realized some of our allies were SOBs "but they're our SOBs.”) An eventually outsized nuclear arms race began between the US and the Soviet Union to the point where deliverable warheads in the thousands would be capable of pretty much ending life on earth. Fortunately, arms control began to be negotiated. Some of the stimulation came from a joint Harvard-MIT arms control seminar, co-chaired by future Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling and myself, that met throughout the 1960’s and into the 1970’s. Virtually everyone involved in this issue in Washington and Cambridge eventually took part. Although the theorizing about nuclear war began to sound like a lunatic version of Thomas Aquinas, some of the key ideas made their way into policy.

In the final years of the Cold War, during the 1980’s, there was still the danger of mutual misperception that could lead to catastrophe for everyone. In early 1980 I found the Soviets depressed at Reagan's victory and privately fearful about their own security. Meanwhile, some Washington hawks were warning against a Soviet nuclear attack. Then, in turn, a US buildup was assessed In Moscow to be part of possible US preparations for an attack on the USSR – precisely the scenario of mutual misperceptions that the whole arms-control effort had sought to avert. By the late 1980’s it was clear that the Soviet Union was crumbling: no food in the shops, disaffected bureaucrats, senior officials saying "the young don't trust us, we lied to them." But there were still some in Washington warning against a. Soviet attack. (Although I was there in various capacities eight times during that final 20 years, I was unaware of the secret crisis planning on both sides.)

In 1989, the Class of 1941 was beginning to enjoy, or at least contemplate, retirement. But once again, as the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union was dismantled, the global picture suddenly changed dramatically. Our century number three actually began in 2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Or perhaps it really began a decade later in Cairo’s Tahir Square. Long suppressed forces were released, most recently in the Middle East with the so-called Arab Awakening/Arab Spring. The outcomes are still uncertain, but the Middle East will never be the same again for Americans. Once more the world is multi-polar and in flux. China has surpassed Japan as economic giant number two, and India is close behind, along with other rising powers such as Brazil. In a system dominated by globalization, the competition is intensely economic rather than military. Many of the key actors, both legitimate and terrorist, are not states and, in some cases, have no return addresses. The US is engaged in the painful process of reassessing long-held policy premises. Yes, the Class of 1941 has a long and fascinating resume.

Two relevant footnotes. First, one of the new techniques – social networking – was an unexpected game-changer in the Middle East uprisings. The newly dominant role of networks such as Facebook and Twitter turn out to be crucial mobilizers for a popular revolution. Second, the chattering classes are concerned that the US is in decline, an assertion that can be argued both ways. Like much else, the answer depends as much on attitude and belief as it does on statistical metrics, as I argued in an earlier blog post. In the meantime I recommend keeping in mind that old 19th century maxim that "God looks after drunks, little children, and the United States of America."

Some Quick Reactions to a Mission Actually Accomplished

Perhaps surprisingly, the strongest impression on me was the gathering that night of young Americans outside the White House, complete with American flags, national anthem, and a sense of shared celebration at a demon finally conquered. It may not be unfair to imagine this happening in Western Europe, considering the ritual street mobs, often violent, of young anarchists, disaffected students, complainers about cuts in funding for education, pensions etc, all in the very heart of the welfare state with the cushiest set of paid vacations, working hours, and other perks.


How explain this? The words from our national seal -- e pluribus unum (one out of many) -- ran through my head and I suddenly had an uptick of optimism about this country despite its deep problems. Some of our newly-minted political fanatics consider compromise with political infidels a dirty word – American Taliban in my private vocabulary. I don’t want them to teach anyone in my family the workings of democracy whose give and take produced that splendid scene on Pennsylvania Avenue.


Is this the end of jihad? Of course not. Al Quaeda has decentralized and outsourced to local franchises in Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, and elsewhere, and the snake can do evil despite being headless. The point is that Bin Laden’s lunatic dream of restoring the Islamic Caliphates and getting society back to the 7th century is completely out of synch with the Arab Awakening whose demands feature not the 7th but the 21st century. Their drive toward power already shows signs of the pervasive anti-Americanism that wants an American education and communications technology, but conflates the paramount (and pro-Israeli) US with the roster of Western powers who ruled over them and then supported their greedy and often merciless tyrants.


Anyway, three cheers for an effective national security apparatus and this extraordinary triumph.
--

"Liberal Intervention" vs "National Interest"?

“I don’t think the US should use its military force except when we are attacked or directly threatened.”
“The US has a moral responsibility to help when a crazy dictator is machine-gunning his own people”

The issues being debated in the Libyan conflict are the “what?” and the “how?” – mission, means, tactics,is it a civil war, is al Quada burrowing among the rebels? But behind the headlines lies a longer-running American debate about the “why?” In shorthand, a policy of ”realism” has battled a policy based on “idealism” for almost as long as the life of this republic. "Realists" argue that the US should commit its military forces abroad only when the nation is directly attacked or threatened. "Idealists" claim a moral imperative to act against official inhumanity, preferably without using force, but if necessary using it even when the US is not attacked or directly threatened, and has no concrete stake in the outcome.

On March 28 President Obama explained the US action, asserting that “acting on behalf of what’s right” is where US interests and values converge. The following analysis tries to unpack the strategic debate that hangs over the battlefield. In one form or another it has been a basis for defining the national interest through much of American history.

As early as 1808, John Quincy Adams warned against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Early 20th century isolationism was an exaggerated and ultimately discredited expression of realism’s assessment of the national interest. In the mid-twentieth century the foundational realist approach to national interest was expounded by three brilliant men – George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Reinhold Niebuhr – who were enormously influential theorists of the position that, however much the heart may be touched by inhumanity, the head tells us to stay our hand unless attacked. An extreme version was supplied by an Englishman, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Gray, who famously said that Britain had neither friends nor enemies, only interests. All were doubtless influenced by a 15th century Florentine palace adviser named Niccolo Machiavelli.

The opposing school of thought took modern shape when President Woodrow Wilson’s justification for war was defense of democracy. Human rights as a policy driver in the Carter administration marked a changing equation, and by the 1990’s the US intervened to stem official outrages in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – but looked away from the far greater carnage in Rwanda (for which President Clinton later publicly apologized). Belated US intervention produced mixed results in the genocidal Balkan wars, and a humiliating failure in Somalia. Realists deplored Clinton’s use of force for humanitarian purposes as well as doing so through the irrelevant UN. (In 2000 Condeleeza Rice, forecasting President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, blew off the “international community” as a phantom. Later, as Secretary of State, she never failed to invoke the international community in her speeches.) Iraq neither attacked nor, it turned out, threatened the US when Washington launched the 2003 war (official lies led me to initially support the use of force). The concept of “responsibility to protect” in case of genocide and war crimes within national borders, hitherto sacrosanct, was formally adopted by the UN in 2005. On occasion itt was supported by President George W. Bush as well as President Obama.

In fact, all conservatives are not necessarily realists, nor all liberals unadulterated idealists. One columnist dubbed the Libyan action “liberal intervention,” yet it was supported by former Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain as well as by neoconservatives, who have their own Middle East agenda. Defense Secretary Gates seemed to support his president’s policy while still saying that Libya was not a “vital interest”. Republican Senator Lugar agreed, but went further to conclude that it was thus not justified. A pure realist position would reject US involvement in wars of choice rather than wars of necessity.

But having established humanitarian intervention as policy, what about Bahrain and Yemen, not to mention Syria, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, and Congo, all places where governments are murdering their citizens? Are we being hypocritical? The answer is that we can’t be everywhere, given limits on both resources and public patience. There are places like Bahrain, with a major US naval base, where vital US interests will trump responbility to protect. The multilateral urge can be left, it is argued, to the African Union.

Vital national interests must first mean defending and responding to attacks on the United States. But US major interests arguably include two fundamental values that define America as a nation and keep it exceptional. The first is our core ideology, neither realist nor idealist but universal, captured in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words in the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The second is protection of the helpless when they are being slaughtered by tyrants. The US pioneered the concept of collective security under the UN Security Council and though it has as many failures as successes, it is particularly applicable ro egregious governmental brutality in a time of evolving regional leadership under the banner of human rights and humanitarian protection. We should look at it as another small step toward a more effective multilateral community, of which America remains an indispensable contributor.

IN LIBYA JUST DO IT

There is something wrong with the debate about whether the United States should intervene in Libya. Reported Pentagon opposition to a no-flight zone made it sound as if they see any US involvement as a World War II operation, requiring new air bases, facilities for multiple refueling tanker aircraft, massive suppressive fire on all Libyan air bases, etc.

These doubtlessly reflect an understandable mood of "no more Iraq's or Afghanistan's". As a one-time naval officer and lifetime student and practitioner of national security issues, I applaud Defense Secretary Gates’ doctrine urging just that. Libyan oil is certainly in the picture. But no one except perhaps the ruling Libyan sociopath is interpreting help to defenseless civilians as a new armed, democracy-exporting, nation-building war by the West.

The policy quandaries have resulted in a month-long paralysis and hand-wringing by the United States, as well as the UN and NATO, both of which require US leadership.The President’s month in the Situation Room that so far has produced a completely rhetorical defense of civilians being bombed and machine-gunned by their own government is unworthy of him, The late Harlan Cleveland described what he called "hardening of the categories'. So if a Libyan coastal no-flight zone and covert help to the embattled rebels does not fit the vast and ominous model advanced by the bureaucracy, what category that is temporary, offshore, largely symbolic but potentially game-changing, does fit?

The Libyan scene bears no resemblance to the great wars of history. It is more like a massive mugging by a freakish but iron-clawed ruler who got super-rich thanks to everyone's addiction to oil. Libya is as large as Alaska. but it is 90 percent desert, and is concentrated along a coast convenient to a naval flotilla and other assets of our half-trillion dollar a year (not counting Iraq and Afghanistan) military establishment and $80 billion intelligence apparatus.

US national security has, for better or worse, always had a moral component. A pair of moral elements belong in thinking about US intervention. Both grew out of failures to act in the face of criminal governmental assaults on helpless civilian populations. One was a belated public apology by President Bill Clinton in 1998 for the disgraceful way the United States and others averted their gaze as hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered. The other theoretically transformed international relations when a United Nations summit in 2005 approved a doctrine of "responsibility to protect" that legalized hitherto forbidden interference in the internal affairs of a state in conditions of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity.

There are times when the most powerful and influential nation in the world needs to act on the basis of both national interest and national values, which converge in the Libyan case. The advice of counselors is carefully considered, but under the Constitution the president makes the decisions. Ideally, the international community -- the UN and NATO -- on our insistence authorize an immediate operation that demoralizes the pilots and mercenaries doing the slaughtering, and sends an unmistakable message of overwhelming over-the-horizon strength. If they fail to act, form a coalition of the willing, and just do it.

NO-FLY IN LIBYA -- NOW

In Rwanda in 1994, when an estimated 800,000 men women and children were being viciously slaughtered by the Hutu, United Nations, the international community, and "the leader of the free world." all wrung their hands, issued impassioned statements, and passed resolutions -- and did nothing to stem the genocide. In 1998 President Clinton apologized profusely for inaction. Some thought it could never happen again. It's happening again in Libya, where the mad dog egomaniac, who has run the country for 40 years of tyranny has launched his Air Force to bomb and strafe peaceful protesters against his tyrannical rule. His planes and helicopters are again in the air.

In the face of governmental mass murder on the streets of Tripoli the UN Security Council has unanimously passed a condemnatory resolution, and President Obama has denounced the murderous behavior of Mr. Qaddafi. But once again, both did – exactly nothing. Yes, the fairy with several hundred US citizens had not yet left Libya because of bad weather, and there was a case for waiting until they were safely beyond Libyan territorial waters before actually doing something other than rhetorically. But this time, it should not be a replay of Rwanda. The president should call for an immediate emergency UN Security Council session and demand an immediate authorization of a no-fly zone above Tripoli along the lines of the US-UK-French no-fly enforcement over Iraq following the 1991 removal of Saddam Hussein’ invasion forces from Kuwait

Some of us have, over the years, fruitlessly advocated more life- and cost-saving preventive action rather than retroactively cleaning up the messes and internationally forbidden crimes that have already taken place. Granted, this runs against the conservative culture of the decision-making community and diplomacy in general, as well as straying from well-established juridical principles that do not recognize crimes until they have actually taken place (sensibly modified in the case of hatching terrorist plots). Preventive action has had a recent rebirth, at least in theory. It is past time for a coalition or if necessary the United States alone to actually prevent more mass killings from the air in Libya. This is likely to be among the contingency plans under discussion in Washington. If the president decides to act now and do the right thing, he may be blocked by arguments from Navy and Air Force that not enough time, forces him to look not available etc. I hope he agrees that he has every right to expect immediate compliance from our multi-trillion dollar defense establishment.

EGYPT AND AMERICAN VALUES

With the electrifying news of President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, the pin has been put back in the Egyptian grenade. Change is now possible and should be welcomed. But it’s worth remembering that in a worrying sense, the Mubarak regime continues even without Mubarak. Maybe that will change in an Act Two, as imagined in President Obama’s inspiring statement of February 11. One thing that must change is the state of emergency that has allowed the Egyptian people to be abused without redress. It must change for both American and Egyptian reasons. There is no escaping the fact that new Egyptian leader Suleiman was Mubarak’s intelligence chief, earlier accused of torture, and recently quoted as blaming the demonstrations on foreigners. The other new leader, the army, played the role of wizard of OZ, exercising power behind the curtain, but tends to be politically neutral, owns major industries, is committed to order, and doubtless oversaw Mubarak’s ouster. Can it tolerate a liberal populist government?.

Before the transformative denouement, US policy confused others with uncertainties and flip-flops. We can sympathize with the struggle to combine US strategic interests with efforts to teleguide the upheaval in constructive directions – constitutional reform, unrigged elections, and eventually a rule of law. But US policy can be brought into much sharper focus by expanding the campaign to end Egypt’s 30-year state of emergency law that made possible arbitrary seizure, brutal incarceration, torture, and sometimes disappearance and official murder.

Why prioritize that issue?As both a political scientist and former government official, I have dealt for years with large abstractions like democracy, elections, conflict management, and the rest of the policy apparatus. But in the Egyptian drama, even from afar a familiar smell issued from police stations and detention centers.-- the stink of human fear felt by people with an idea, a complaint, a dream for the future, or a journalist's notebook, people who felt naked and vulnerable in the face of arbitrary abuses. The Egyptian climate, according to the few reports by victims,has been no different from the pervasive smell of fear one saw in Chiang Kai-shek's China, during eight visits to the Soviet Union, and lecturing in Ceausescu's Romania, pre-democratic Korea and Indonesia, and other police states -- all tyrannies that sickeningly abused their citizens for thinking, speaking, writing, assembling.

A traditional American aversion to such abuse (including abuse by US agents) takes specific shape in a core US policy that is not only right but popular. Vice President Joe Biden’s February 8 call on the Cairo leadership to end the 30 year state of emergency that made Egypt an oppressive police state was the most unequivocal American message yet. It called for lifting the law that legitimized arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. President Obama was wise to pick up that theme and share it with an Egypt-wide audience.

US Middle East policies are delicately balanced, for good and bad reasons., and quiet diplomacy often goes unappreciated on the Egyptian or any other public. Until the Obama February 11 statement, it left the impression of an unsympathetic America. The Middle East future will belong to a younger generation that is fed up with an oppressive status quo, Internet-savvy, and unemployed thanks to grossly mismanaged economies. Human rights policy is one way to address that weakness. The US handles human rights concerns as a subtext to the big-ticket political, economic, and security issues. American politicians like to proclaim “American values” but these are often unspecified. There is in fact one clear value that directly affects the human person. It is the only value with unequivocal moral content. It is the right to civilized treatment by those in charge. It belongs at the top rather than at the fringe of American priorities when a tyranny is confronted by a fed-up citizenry.

As a practical matter, Washington would be doing well by doing good if it continually insists on an end to official abuses. For an American president to proclaim this as the litmus test for a civilized country is admittedly interference in internal affairs. But it would be supported by 305 million Americans, and would help clear up our ambivalent image in a new era of popular rejection of tyranny.

IS AMERICA IN DECLINE?

Will America overreach and fall by the wayside as ambitious newcomers overtake it, the way the Barbarians overcame a declining Rome, Bismarck’s Germany pulled up alongside Britain and France in the late 19th century, and a bumptious America in the early 20th century elbowed its way to the top table, dramatized with the world tour of the Great White Fleet? An American president leaving a G-20 summit empty-handed in late 2010 will confirm to many that the United States is losing its post-World War II position of global influence and leadership.

Yale historian Paul Kennedy, writing a couple of decades ago about the rise and fall of great powers, advanced the thesis of “imperial overstretch,” where one power after another fell under the weight of costly military adventures alongside mounting deficits at home. Twenty years later he is still what jargon-lovers call a declinist. The quarrel Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has with Kennedy is not his implication of American decline, but whether it would take place all of a sudden or in a leisurely fashion.

Historians are not the only ones with this gloomy perspective. According to a 2010 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, two-thirds of Americans polled see the US in decline, with a worse future for their children. What a contrast with the classic American view, summed up by anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, that “America’s Golden Age has always been in the future.”

There are no agreed metrics for deciding whether or not our nation is in decline. Those who boast that "we’re number one" have in mind our military power; the US is the only nation capable of conducting worldwide military operations, with a defense budget twice the size of the next ten largest national defense budgets combined. Or they may be comforted by the fact that the US remains the greatest economic power in terms of GDP, while also consuming a quarter of the world's petroleum (and outpolluting all other polluters).

The celebratory self-image lies deep in the American psyche. From its inception the US was defined by its leaders, poets, and clerics as morally singular, using phrases such as “God’s American Israel,” “the new Jerusalem,” “a city on a hill,” “the glorious renovator of the world,” and “the last solemn experiment of humanity.” Unsurprisingly, some other nations felt culturally and morally superior: Consider France with its mission civilizatrice, Iran with its 2,500 year-old Persian conquests, Britain’s songs about ruling the waves, and China’s mandate from heaven.

What is declining, aside from the self-confidence of Americans? Some data points help sketch the picture. The starting premise is that in a world increasingly interdependent, technology-based, and wired (or, more accurately, wirelessed), the nation with the best educated population is the nation best prepared for the complex challenges ahead. There should always be a place for the humanities and classics. But when it comes to competition for leadership and influence, science and math win the day. As the humorist Ring Lardner noted, the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong – but that's the way to place your bets.

Where does the US stand on the educational scoreboard? A study by the National Academy of Sciences produced some devastating statistics that would startle the “we’re number one” trumpeters. Here are the US rankings:

· Global innovation-based competitiveness: 6
· Rate of change over the last decade: 40
· Percent of 25- to 30-year-olds who have graduated from high school: 11
· College completion rate: 16
· Broadband Internet access: 22
· Life expectancy at birth: 24
· Quality of K-12 science and math education: 48

In 2010, Newsweek magazine undertook an ambitious study in collaboration with research and academic institutions, aimed at identifying the “best” countries. Among populous nations, the US was ranked number 2 on quality of life and number 1 on economic dynamism. But it did not make the top ten in either education or overall ranking of high-income countries. The final US ranking was number 11.

The end of the recession may change our pessimistic mood, but it won’t change the fact of flagging competitiveness. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering declinist Paul Kennedy’s list of America’s tremendous advantages compared to other great powers, such as demographics, land-to-people ratio, raw materials, research universities, laboratories, and a flexible work force. I might add a steady though inadequate inflow of foreign brainpower. If our slump is temporary, the policy question is how to mobilize our assets to make America successful again.

In the late 1950's the Cold War was unfolding in a threatening fashion, and the atmosphere was darkened by Soviet successes in the race to outer space. Sputnik I had successfully achieved a low earth orbit, while early American attempts were producing humiliating misfires, U-turns, and flaming plunges back to earth. The malaise would be reversed only when President John F. Kennedy reinvigorated the national spirit with soaring rhetoric announcing the goal of a moon landing by the end of the decade, and its actual achievement in 1969.

In the same period I left the State Department to join the MIT Center for International Studies. One of my new colleagues at MIT was a lively and charismatic Russian émigré named Alexander Karol who was working on a study of Soviet education in science and technology. Alex Karol’s scholarly book on Soviet science and engineering education was headed for academic reviews, but suddenly appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times book review section. Schools everywhere took a fresh look at their teaching of science and math, as some are doing now, and the educational system was at least temporarily transformed.

It is certain that other powers – China, India, Brazil – will inevitably rise, generating a fierce competition. (As International Herald Tribune editor Fareed Zakaria wrote, the rise of the rest does not mean the US is necessarily through.) Yes, the US could remain stuck in political gridlock and declining growth, and essential federal support for research and innovation could fatally dry up. The squabbling political class is failing in its responsibilities, and some mass media only make things worse. For me, the bottom line is that, whatever its defects and problems, America has enormous latent assets, including its peoples’ unparalleled spirit of enterprise and independence, noted as long ago as 1831 by Alexis deToqueville. That spirit built a great nation that came from elsewhere to conquer a wilderness and make it thrive. It became a place where initiative, innovation, and education were synonymous with the word America; today, whatever our doldrums, foreigners of all stripes still compete for acceptance at American universities.

As in the 1950’s, it may again take a crisis or worse to shake us up sufficiently to strengthen American commercial, technological, and political innovation and drive. In the new Great Game of the 21st century, the US will need a fresh brand of imaginative and persuasive leadership to become a prime player. One possible scenario is a country that, in the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks, experiences national humiliation and diminished power. But another scenario is imaginable for a nation that once again mobilizes to remain a paramount power, and once again is uniquely placed to share the lead in the management of a safer and more cooperative world.

Musings on the Afghanistan Dilemma

What follows is one observer’s attempt to get his arms around this worrisome dilemma for the United States (as well as for Afghans). I’ll recap briefly the relevant history, look at our current policy conundrum, and ask how this war fits into the larger American narrative.

Afghanistan is a mountainous country slightly smaller than Texas, with six potentially interfering abutters, a population of about 25 million (70 percent of them illiterate), and a deeply traditional tribal culture. Around half are ethnic Pashtuns who dominate the governing councils and spill across the Pakistan border to their fellow tribesmen, who constitute Pakistan’s second largest ethnic group. The chief minorities of Hazeras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks formed the Northern Alliance that helped defeat the Taliban in Round One 2001, and live in provinces headed by independent tribal chiefs and warlords. Eighty-four percent of Afghans are Sunni Muslims. They have been at war for over 30 years. There is evidence that Pakistan’s military intelligence service has secretly aided the Taliban as part of Pakistan’s broader strategic interest in curbing India’s Afghan ambitions.

It is common knowledge that Afghanistan has chewed up and spit out one invader after another, starting with Alexander the Great and the Greeks 2,300 years ago. The dismal fate of foreign occupiers runs through 19th century with British attempts to clear a pathway to India, and Tsarist Russian efforts to reach warm water ports. In modern times, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to keep their friends in power, but were finally driven out by fierce Afghan resistance, fueled by US dollars and ground-to-air Stinger missiles delivered to the mujahedin guerillas through Saudi Arabian channels. The irony is the transformation of many US-supported mujahedin into today’s Taliban enemy. The forbidding terrain has influenced Afghan history, but so has the fact that Afghans have traditionally made their own military hardware in a home-based cottage industry. If some are not good soldiers under US guidance, it’s not because they don't have a reputation as fierce fighters.

Splintered by a civil war when the Soviets left in 1991, by 2001 the country was under the unforgiving rule of the Taliban. Fanatical Muslim extremists like Al Qaeda, and less apocalyptically the Taliban fight to rid the country of infidels and install Islamic law (Sharia) in its most merciless form involving punishment for civil crimes by beheadings and stoning to death, and denial of education and work to women. “Taliban” means student. Indeed, some Taliban have been students in madrassas -- religious schools in Pakistan that teach the Koran and are financed by religiously extreme Wahabi followers in Saudi Arabia.

The US wouldn't be anywhere near Afghanistan if it were not for 9/11. President Bush correctly ruled that we would not only go after terrorists such as Al Qaeda, but would also go after states that harbor them. We invaded Afghanistan and within months made short work of the Taliban, which went into hiding at least temporarily. It's possible that if the US had stayed to complete the peaceful transformation of the country history might have been different. But for four years the US neglected Afghanistan in favor of a mammoth detour into Iraq. It was apparent by 2009 that a war that had lasted eight years was not being won. The Taliban challenge was back and the current situation is as daunting for the US as any since Vietnam. The new US president’s meticulous policy review (accompanied by ferocious arguments between military and civilians, according to Bob Woodward’s new book) produced a new surge, and something like 100,000 US and 30,000 NATO troops will soon be in place, a number more than adequate to defeat any army Afghanistan could field.

The fact, which is becoming generic around the world, is that there is no such army. Instead, there is a bunch of Western-hating bad guys covered with beards and religious fervor, operating not on battlefields but out of family homes and other populated places where a US strike, however justified, inevitably produces collateral damage and civilian casualties. The coalition attacks then become a national issue, further reducing tolerance for the American presence. General David Petraeus selflessly stepped down from command of US operations in the entire region to take on the Afghan command when General McChrystal lost his professional inhibitions.

General Petraeus is operating a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy for which he literally wrote the book back in the Army’s Fort Leavenworth think tank. In an extraordinary guidance document to all US and NATO forces issued August 1, he set forth a brilliant litany of do’s and don’ts that in tolerable circumstances could succeed in helping and wooing Afghans. The trouble is that COIN needs to partner with a government in which the people have trust, and there doesn’t appear to be much of that in Kabul.

Deals can be made with tribal elders and regional chieftains, and even with some Taliban mid-level mercenaries. But creating local centers of successful governance and development is problematic in a country where there is little confidence in or even contact with the central government. A particularly damaging obstacle is that President Karzai, despite reassuring rhetoric, is widely believed to tolerate corruption. He reportedly stole the presidential election, and the recent parliamentary election appears to reflect the worst of the pervasive culture of corruption. Karzai’s top aide was removed for corruption but restored on Karzai’s command (and also revealed to be on the CIA payroll), and his brother reputedly partners with drug lords in a country responsible for the world's number one supply of heroin from opium poppies. All in all, I can’t help recalling the legend that, just before World War I, the Kaiser sent Count von Ludendorff to Vienna to check out Germany’s great Austro-Hungarian ally, Emperor Franz Josef. Ludendorff reported back: “Your majesty, we are wedded to a corpse.”

A hearts and minds strategy might still help win a war, but not without a partner who wants reform at least as much as we do. Al Qaeda seems to have been forced to decentralize, with a core of some 400 holed up in Pakistan’s northwest border fastness. At the same time, the security situation on the ground has been getting worse. The Taliban is killing aid workers, whose organizations report that security is worse than any time since 2001. The war is increasingly unpopular at home, with over 62 percent turning thumbs down in recent polls. But the agonizing dilemma for the US is the potential danger in abandoning the country to a possible replay of 9/11 after the US leaves. Not surprisingly, in light of all the uncertainties, US goals keep shrinking (as they did in Vietnam). They began with the fanciful dream of creating an American-style democracy, but are now reduced to leaving behind a relatively stable government and better-trained army. The US is committed to start withdrawing combat forces next July, although that date is wiggling at the military's insistence that the rate be "condition-based." It is not surprising that Afghan leaders are reported to be seeking deals with the Taliban.

It is worth pondering the quandary that the US creates for itself when it takes on a war of choice rather than necessity, as defined in a recent book by Richard Haass. US wars of choice have often gone badly as Americans have lost interest and turned negative. Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, formulated three essential conditions for successful US military interventions: overwhelming force, an exit strategy, and the support of the American people. None of these seems to apply in Afghanistan. On the other hand, General Petraeus is cautiously optimistic about the outcome if we hang in there until the local forces are fully capable of national defense and effective policing. The outcome obviously hangs in the balance, and if I had to give the odds of success, I would put them at 50-50.

Time was that the United States was a model for others. But one wonders when we will learn the repeated lesson about trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun on feudal, tribal societies, and failed states. The US needs to remain able to deter aggression and defend itself and its allies. But the time has come to rebalance resource allocations that fund a military establishment many times greater than the next twelve powers while starving diplomatic and other effective tools of influence and soft power. One can only hope that our luck will hold up, perhaps boosted by the old 19th-century maxim that God looks after drunks, little children, and the United States of America.

TEA TIME?

Another Tea Party candidate (Ken Buck in Colorado) recently joined Nevada’s Sharron Angle in beating out the Republican establishment candidate in a primary election. Is this a trend? A potential game-changer? No one knows. But it’s a reason for busy outsiders to look a little more closely at this extraordinary -- yet curiously familiar – movement..

Even before mid-term electoral politics began to heat up, the Tea Party movement was becoming more openly partisan. The head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Jon Cornyn welcomed as “our nominees” six Tea Party-backed candidates, Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann got twenty three fellow Republicans to join the new Tea Party Caucus, and the “Tea Party Express” was reportedly created by Republican fund-raisers. A CBS poll reported Tea Party members as more middle class, better educated, and wealthier than the average American, while another poll showed them nine tenths white and considerably older and more conservative. The unifying theme is small and preferably impotent government – a sort of sketchy “Libertarianism Light”. Members who show up at rallies appear to be normal disaffected Americans.

Mainstream media have tended to portray a darker side. Rarely specific on policy, Tea Party sound bites like “take America back,” can have a racist undertone. Tea Party leaders have asked the Oklahoma legislature to create a new volunteer militia that would counter “federal infringement on state sovereignty”. Nevada Tea Partier Senate Republican candidate Sharron Angle has called for changing Security in unspecified ways, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, getting out of the United Nations, and exposing the international conspiracy behind fluoridation of public water. More disturbing in the climate of populist rage, Angle called for applying “Second Amendment remedies” if Congress doesn’t shape up, with the first step to “take Harry Reid out”. In the same vein, Tea Party darling Sarah Palin called on her followers to “reload.” Both later tried to wiggle away from their incendiary remarks. But if stupidity is not an indictable offense, isn’t incitement to assassination?

These are all only glimpses. The movement’s structure is murky and its leadership fluid, so outsiders are like Plato’s cave dwellers, seeing only shadows of external events.

But history supplies some perspective. The Tea Party is hardly the first American anti-government movement. In the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, debt-ridden armed farmers tried to shut down the courts. In the 1790 Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, farmers burdened by taxes attacked federal agents. The Know-Nothing Party of the 1850’s was a middle class populist attack on immigration. A hundred years later, anti-government protesters, calling income taxes illegitimate, engaged in tax evasion and scattered violence. By the 1970’s, a new Posse Comitatus, reviving the 1878 Act, urged vigilante justice to protest unlawful, tyrannical government. Its successor Liberty Amendment Committee got nine state legislatures to ask Congress to send their tax-repeal Amend0ment to the states for ratification.

Opening a wider lens, if the (unwritten) British constitution was designed to enable government to function in good times and bad, the U.S. Constitution was designed to keep King George III from coming back. Accordingly, the Constitution explicitly limited the power of the federal government, leaving the rest to the states. Historian Joseph Ellis painted a vivid picture of the popular mood of that day: “The dominant intellectual legacy of the Revolution . . . depicted any energetic expression of governmental authority as an alien force that all responsible citizens sought to repudiate and, if possible, overthrow".”

Sadly for the political fundamentalists, the reality is that now, two hundred and twenty one years later, the nation can function only if the Constitution is regarded as living rather than literally and figuratively frozen. Tea Partiers are right that the federal government has gone far beyond its original parameters to create a limited welfare state never contemplated in 1789. But the Constitution is not a mutual suicide pact, and whoever gets elected cannot long sustain a policy of little or no central government. The worlds of innovation, technology, communication, weaponry, commerce, and finance have changed beyond recognition -- changes underlying much of the populist unease (“I’m all for progress, what I can’t stand is change”). The Constitution’s commerce clause (in dispute again today) confirmed even in 1789 that only a central government can supply services required across state lines (now 50) not to mention an outside world of around 200 nations.

The Tea Party may further tilt the mid-term election to the right, although conservative splits could breathe new life into Democratic death row inmates. But when prosperity finally returns, much of its energy will be drained. Meanwhile Tea Partiers might ponder the words of Brazilian revolutionary Francisco Juliao: “To agitate is beautiful, to organize is difficult.” It’s hard to see the Tea Party movement having longer legs than earlier populist outbreaks.