Washington's China Debate Is About Caricature, Not Reality

U.S. News & World Report  2011-10-7 Recent posts on the National Interest's website offer divergent yet refreshingly sober-minded assessments of China's growing assertiveness in Asia. Bruce Gilley, an assistant professor of political science at Portland State University, argues that a red tide of nationalism within the increasingly modern Chinese military, to say nothing of the country's netroots, makes some kind of conflict with the West likely. Gilley expects Xi Jinping, the senior apparatchik who is expected to become China's president within the next few years, will side with the military in response to challenges at home and abroad and is not prone to conciliation with the U.S. or Asia.

Read the entire post on the U.S. News & World Report website.

U.S.'s Diminishing Influence in the Middle East

U.S. News & World Report  2001-9-29 You can't lose what you never had.

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The Danger of China Myopia in Washington

U.S. News & World Report  2011-9-22 On Monday I attended a lecture given by John Mearsheimer, the eminent political scientist and foreign affairs specialist. It was hosted by a group called the Committee for the Republic, which stands in plucky opposition to American empire. It was held at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Victorian manor just off Washington's Dupont Circle, and it was attended by about a hundred concerned citizens, including businessmen, lawyers, journalists, and activists.

Read the entire post on the U.S. News & World Report website.

In Arab Spring, Foreign Militaries Make Unreliable Partners

U.S. News & World Report 2011-9-14 Earlier this month in The Nation, blogger Robert Dreyfuss contributed to the magazine's superb meditation on the Arab Awakening with a look at how the Obama White House responded to the popular revolt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. As opposition to Mubarak reached its crescendo in February, according to Dreyfuss, senior White House aides frantically urged military leaders in Cairo to relieve themselves of him.

Read the entire post on the U.S. News & World Report website.

Why a U.S. War With China May Be Inevitable

U.S. News & World Report Unwittingly no doubt, the Pentagon is marking the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by repeating one of the mistakes that provoked The Big One in the first place.

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Stephen Glain on US Militarism

The Browser 2011-6-11 American presidents may not want to send troops into battle or militarise foreign policy but, in the end, most of them do. The author and journalist explains how this happens, and why it’s not even the military that's to blame.

I was reading the Foreign Policy excerpt of your book, about the huge imbalance between the civil and the military arms of the US government. For example, the Pentagon has more lawyers than the State Department has diplomats.

It also has more band members than the State Department has diplomats. That’s become so clichéd I decided to use lawyers instead.

Also, while people are talking about cutting social security, the Pentagon exceeds its budget by $300bn.

Yes, and has repeatedly failed to account, every year, for hundreds of billions of dollars – sometimes even more than a trillion dollars in expenditures.

These are important points, but ones at which a lot of people just shrug their shoulders…

I was surprised, in the past, that when I sat down to drinks with friends and talked about this, it failed to resonate. Now I’m out hitting the talk shows and there does seem to be something of a response, but I think that’s largely symptomatic of the economic condition the country is now mired in.

I was wondering what made you feel outraged enough about the situation to write a book about it. Was it your experience as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Asia and the Middle East?

What compelled me to write about this process of foreign policy militarisation was seeing the enormous amount of military resources that the US has established overseas, sometimes, literally, in my backyard. For example, when I was in Korea, I had an apartment not far from the main army base in Itaewon in Seoul. Then I went to Japan, where the US also has an enormous presence. Before that I was in Hong Kong, and every now and then the ships would come in for liberty call. It was a slow process. My tenure overseas coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before that, I had accepted the Cold War orthodoxy, that these military commitments on the part of the US were necessary in order to contain the Soviet bear. After it imploded, it took me several years of reporting about arms sales to allies, about joint development programmes, of seeing these incredibly intrusive bases, for me to understand the paradox of maintaining these huge deployments in the absence of a clear threat. It gradually became clear to me that this was not only a craving for dominion, but dominion for its own sake.

Then, when I went to the Middle East, I encountered a somewhat different iteration of it. But it was obvious that to the average person anywhere in the world, if they were going to meet an American, it was increasingly likely that they would be wearing a military uniform. To Americans that’s not necessarily disturbing, because we’re blessed with an incredibly professional, highly educated, highly trained, highly motivated military, which we don’t see as a threat. But if you’re Korean or Japanese, or if you’re European, chances are you have a different perception of what a military bureaucracy is capable of doing. So I knew that we were sending a potentially negative signal in not just maintaining our Cold War military bureaucracies, but intensifying them worldwide. That’s really what informed my decision to proceed with this book.

I should also point out that I grew up near Camp Pendleton, which is the largest US marine base in the world, and most of my friends were the children of active duty marine officers. So I grew up with an enormous amount of respect for them and what they were doing. I never bought into this notion that there is something malign or pernicious about the military. It’s more about the way civilians in Washington are abusing the military and its people, like these kids now doing their third or fourth tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The first book you’ve chosen is David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which dates from 1972. The reviews describe it as “the epic true story of how America got involved in Vietnam” or “the Iliad of America’s doomed involvement in Vietnam”. It really does sound like one of those books that everyone should read.

I read this book when I was living in Asia, and it was my first memorable encounter with investigative journalism in the service of creating a historical narrative. It’s a book that is not only very compelling, and staggering in its scope and its conclusions, but the perfect example of a revisionist history. It was contrary to everything I thought I knew about the events that it accounted for, which was basically the Kennedy years and early Johnson administration and how they dealt with Vietnam. It also introduced me to the personalities who are not well known to most Americans, but who became, as a result of Halberstam’s telling, real heroes to me. These are the China experts who worked for the US State Department, who were in China in the 1940s and 1950s. They worked with both the communist Chinese and the nationalist Chinese and cabled back, very courageously, that the nationalists were corrupt and that though the communists were communist, they had a greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people and therefore we should work with them. For me, reading this in my late 20s/early 30s was quite a revelation, and it’s why I hold the book very close to my heart. Rereading it when researching my own book, State vs. Defense, was a real pleasure, because I was reading it with the benefit of 20 years of experience as a correspondent.

What light does it shed on US militarism, specifically?

It shows how a president, however reluctant to engage militarily or to militarise foreign policy, finds himself getting swept along by events or political imperatives that he can’t control. Kennedy did not want to escalate the US presence in Vietnam – he was very clear on that score. But he was concerned that if he did not make some kind of gesture – perhaps by sending slightly less than half what the generals were insisting he send – he would be portrayed as being soft on communism, and that that would compromise some of his other initiatives, like civil rights. It’s interesting how every time the US had a crisis on its hands, or a foreign policy challenge, the heads of state were reluctant to get involved, but gave way to political pressure, usually from the right. That pressure was either well intentioned and sincere or simply a political tactic to put the president on the defensive. Obviously this was not the case with the most recent President Bush’s rush to war, which was very much his own inspiration.

What about Obama? He’s also remained more involved in foreign wars than I would have expected from his comments on the campaign trail.

On the campaign trail he said Afghanistan was the good war. He may have believed that. He almost certainly understood that he would have a better chance to be elected if he established his credibility as someone who is prepared to intensify the conflict in Afghanistan. It’s another specimen of how this pressure works, just a more subtle one.

Let’s go on to House of War by James Carroll. This is about the Pentagon, but it’s a personal take: Carroll’s father was a general.

Yes, and this gives it an intimacy which other books of this genre don’t necessarily have. He does a great job of twinning his own experiences and memories with the towering personalities of the Cold War, like Curtis LeMay. LeMay figures very heavily in my book, because he is the ultimate militarist who was also in the military. In my book I am very careful to point out that most of the militarism that goes on in Washington is done by civilians, because we still have a civilian-led military. The book is very well written – it’s a very uninhibited account of what it was like for him growing up and, through his father, being part of the Pentagon bureaucracy. It’s very subversive. I read it before I was serious about writing the book that would ultimately become State vs. Defense, and I thought to myself, “Why should I write a book about foreign policy militarisation when Carroll has done such a great job of doing it?”

You say it’s subversive. Give me an example.

He’s talking about LeMay, and it has to do with the Gaither_Report, which President Eisenhower commissioned, in part to protect his own right flank from anti-communist hawks in Congress. We’re talking about Eisenhower here, the hero of Normandy! So he commissioned an investigation into accusations that America had fallen behind in missile production. Carroll takes us into the room where some members of the committee are interviewing LeMay. They say, “Here’s your scenario. You just received an urgent message that Soviet bombers have flown past the distant early-warning line in Canada, and they’re about to launch an attack. How many bombers can you get off the ground before they come under attack themselves?”

And LeMay says, “None, because it is my policy to maintain my own intelligence sources. The minute I think the Soviets have scrambled I am going to retaliate pre-emptively.” Which of course would be a great act of insubordination. It’s not the military that orders attacks, it’s the president of the United States. I was struck by just how cavalier this individual was when it came to something so vital and what it said about the system, that it could produce someone who would act so rashly.

So in your book are you very anti-Donald Rumsfeld?

Yes, my book is quite harsh on Rumsfeld, because he was the architect of Iraq and he’s a perfect example of a militarist who was a civilian, when he was in the process of militarising US policy after 9/11.

And like LeMay, very cavalier?

Cavalier and contemptuous of the people around him. It was appalling the way he humiliated his own generals. He would wire-brush subordinates if their reports were not up to his liking. That’s one of the leitmotifs of my book. Every time that there is a president or a secretary of defence or a senior official who is driving the country towards war against a perceived threat, there is always someone in the bureaucracy – whether it’s a diplomat or a military attaché, or a spymaster – sitting in an embassy where the perceived threat is apparently emerging, saying, “No, this is not a major threat and we should not be getting involved in this.” That’s when you see the disconnect between how the world is and how Washington perceives it. Rumsfeld’s perception of the world was completely at odds with the way it was, and unfortunately that is a myopia that is way too common in this town [Washington DC]. It’s one of the reasons why the US keeps getting into conflicts and quagmires that it could have avoided had it just listened to its area experts. That’s a theme that resonates in The Best and the Brightest, and Legacy of Ashes, which is the next book on the list.

And in this regard, things didn’t improve much between Vietnam and the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

I was in Washington writing a book when 9/11 happened. I was personally stunned at the level of ignorance about the Middle East, the complete misinterpretation of what the attacks were all about, and the extent to which it was a willful ignorance, spread largely by domestic politics. That just became a barrier to any kind of thoughtful inquiry as to what the attacks meant, and more importantly, how to respond to them.

When you say people completely misunderstood 9/11 what do you mean?

It’s still unfashionable to say this, but when George Bush addressed Congress he said the terrorists hate us not for what we do, but who we are, our democracy, our values, our way of life. But anybody who Googled Bin Laden would have seen that the first entry was his 1996 fatwa or declaration of war, against what he called the “Zionist crusader alliance”. That tells you right there that it’s not about American democracy, it’s about American policies. US support of Israel was one of those policies that so outraged Bin Laden. The other thing was the US residual force of troops in Saudi Arabia after Operation Desert Storm, which Bin Laden, like a lot of Muslims, regarded as an apostasy. And because it was the Saudi monarchy that abetted that deployment, that put the monarchy within his crosshairs as well. Ditto US support for secular dictators like Hosni Mubarak. You can argue about whether or not these policies are legitimate and in America’s interest. But to suggest that they somehow did not play a role in Bin Laden’s motivation was duplicitous. It created the environment where such a massive and misplaced military response to 9/11 could happen. A “War on Terror”: In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous. But it made something as reckless and disproportionate [as the American response to 9/11] possible and even fashionable. Because if they’re attacking our way of life, we have no choice but to resist.

So were you just horrified when they announced they were going into Iraq?

I’d spent a lot of time in Iraq, and I’d seen what the sanctions had done to these extraordinary people. I believed then, as I do now, that it was an absolutely inhumane thing to do, to punish 24 million Iraqis while enriching Saddam and the kleptocracy that had congealed around him. But when it became clear that the US was going to war in Iraq, it became obvious to me that it was not about the Iraqis. It was about remaking the Middle Eastern map in a way that would make Israel more comfortable. That was quite a revelation. I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that.

Did your next journalistic assignment involve Iraq?

Once my first book was completed I was hired by The Boston Globe. One of the things that I took on my own initiative was to cover how the White House was going to handle the post-conflict side of the Iraq war, the rebuilding. That’s when I got a pretty intimate look at how Rumsfeld was neglecting it, and how he was locking out the civilian side. He was obstructing NGOs from doing what they normally do in the run-up to a war, which is to try to pre-empt a refugee crisis and cholera outbreaks, and to make sure there is no deprivation. He pretty much kept the NGOs from doing their jobs. Also, I remember interviewing a former ambassador to Egypt, who informed me that he had just been tapped by Colin Powell to help assist in the shadow interim government, so it was going to be his job to oversee the foreign ministry. There were a couple of dozen of these people, all of whom had considerable Arab expertise. Within days it was announced that Rumsfeld had vetoed Powell’s team. It showed just how out of control this man was, but it was also just another example of Washington discrediting or neglecting the very people who know a lot about the parts of the world we profess to be a great national security concern.

This is partly a legacy of McCarthyism, I suppose. If you’re an expert on a country, then you can’t be trusted, because your allegiance might lie more with that country.

Yes, the idea of divided loyalties, or “gone local”. One thing I learned in researching my book is that you cannot exaggerate the damage that Joe McCarthy did to American statesmanship. Maybe if it hadn’t been him, it would have been something else. But his shadow still looms. Now it’s not communists, it’s Muslims.

So on to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, which is about the CIA. Let me read you a bit of the summary from the Publishers Weekly review: “Is the CIA a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes or a malevolent conspiracy to spread imperialism?” This book concludes that “it’s a bit of both, but mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions”.

Yes. This book reads like the Keystone Kops. It’s amazing how often the CIA just blundered, going from one screw-up to the next, despite having some very intelligent people. But I once listened to Tim Weiner giving an interview and he said something very profound. He said every president since it was created under Truman has abused the CIA. Too often it’s used to prove a presumed fact, a fact that has been created for domestic political purposes, and completely queers the pitch from the outset. If you’re not encouraging conclusions that may differ from your own presumptions then you’re fated to commit the mistakes of so many American presidents and heads of state everywhere. Also, while the CIA got it wrong on the Bay of Pigs, they also got it right sometimes. A perfect example of that is the US plot under Eisenhower to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Iranian prime minister. We’re still living with the legacy of that plot today. There was a station chief in Tehran who disputed John Foster Dulles’s notion that Mosaddegh was a Soviet stooge. He was not. He was neutral. There’s an example of the CIA calling it like it was. Ditto, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s war on Chilean president Allende. The CIA was saying, “No, this man is not a proxy of the Soviets. He’s popular, he’s legitimate, and we should not be seen as trying to undermine him.”

So is the book quite balanced?

I think it is. Tim Weiner covered the hell out of the CIA and the whole national security bureaucracy. It’s very well sourced. I have a friend who works for the CIA, and she said they were very good about providing him with as many documents as he requested, to the extent possible. They were just stunned at the scathing treatment he gave the CIA. But to his credit, he asked for the documents, he gave them a fair hearing, and then he rendered his verdict. I’m very sympathetic to his notion that the CIA is abused, just like the military is abused by civilians.

So on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: Did the CIA know there weren’t any?

From Weiner’s account, the CIA was not coming up with what Cheney wanted to hear. When the vice-president makes a special trip to Langley [CIA headquarters] to sit down with senior researchers and analysts and demands to know what they’ve got on WMD, that’s a perfect example of abusing the CIA. Even the most redoubtable agent can withstand only so much political pressure. So Cheney got what he wanted.

Let’s talk about your next choice, American Rasputin by David Milne.

This is a wonderful book. I came across it because I read a review and it became clear to me that Walter Rostow, the subject of the book, was a singular personality in the panoply of foreign policy militarisation. It’s a very good read. I believe it’s David Milne’s first book, and he just knocks it out of the park. He opens with this amazing anecdote about Robert McNamara. It was his last day in office as secretary of defence – he was going on to the World Bank, and he was already broken down emotionally because he realised that his legacy was going to be as dubious as it is. There was Walter Rostow, giving a briefing on how the US should intensify and accelerate the bombing runs in North Vietnam, and finally McNamara just stands up and says, “You’ve been telling us this for the last three years, and it hasn’t done a thing.” He uses all sorts of blue language and he finally collapses and begins to weep in the Oval Office, with the most powerful men in the world all assembled. It’s just a searing image, and he does a great job in crafting it and making it come to life.

But Rostow wasn’t a cynic, was he? He was an idealist who did a lot of damage, in the mould of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

Very much so. He ends up, indirectly, being responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of people. Milne does a great job of sketching out how an incredibly bright man can be such a dullard when it comes to the consequences of waging war without listening to people on the ground. For example, there’s one bit when he goes with General Westmoreland on a fact-finding tour to Vietnam. By the time they get to Honolulu, they had already decided to intensify the bombing. Before they got to Saigon, they had already rendered their verdict.

Your last book is Perils of Dominance

The author, Gareth Porter, makes some very interesting points, backed up by his source notes, that put things in a different perspective for me. For example, he points out how utterly weak the Soviet Union was, throughout much of the Cold War, relative to the US. And how defensive its posture was, relative to the US. How it lacked the technology and weaponry that could have allowed it to do the kinds of things that people like Curtis LeMay said the Soviets could do just by snapping their fingers. Again, he does a great job of showcasing the extent to which the Soviet threat was hyped. He also effectively debunks some of the other shibboleths of the Cold War, like the Sino-Soviet bloc. That’s a perfect example. At a time when Dulles is saying, “We’re locked in a mortal struggle with the Sino-Soviet bloc,” Porter shows that Mao and Stalin were hurling the most crude epithets at one another. If there was going to be a war at all, it wasn’t going to be between the US and the Sino-Soviet bloc, but between Russia and China.

You said at the beginning that you’re finding more resonance for your views. Are you optimistic about things becoming more balanced between civilian and military in future?

It’s hard to reverse a spending imbalance with a ratio of 12:1. For every $12 we spend on defence we spend $1 on diplomacy. There’s just no appetite in Congress to give the State Department the resources that they need, and, to be honest, the State Department is in need of an enormous amount of structural and institutional reform. I’ve had very thoughtful, worldly men in military uniform, say, “Look, we hear it loud and clear and we agree with you. We’re tired of having to shoulder the State Department’s burden, but they’re not up to it.” Which segues into another conversation, which is how do you fix the State Department in such a way that if you do give them more money, it won’t be wasted or allocated in an inefficient way.

What about the appetite in Congress for reducing spending on defence?

They’re cutting defence spending right now, but that’s because they don’t have the courage to go after our entitlement systems. Their hearts are not in it. They’re not doing it because they want to, they’re doing it because it’s the lesser of two evils. They’re talking about significant cuts, but they’re not talking about dismantling the American empire, because the vast majority of lawmakers would not acknowledge that we have an empire. There is something about these foreign deployments in Korea, Japan and Europe that is just so deeply entrenched. It’s not just American constituencies that have an interest in maintaining them, it’s also the host countries. They like having the US in their back pocket. They contribute to the economy, they’re the source of a huge black market. It would be politically difficult for them to kick the Americans out. They may take some serious whacks at the defence budget, but until they start talking seriously about dismantling these Cold War-era deployments, which are the foundation of the empire, I just don’t see any prospects for change.

If you were in power what would you do?

I would put our allies on notice that the days of unconditional US hegemony are numbered. We’re prepared to help you develop your own deterrent against whatever threats you face. I would tell NATO, you’re going to have to develop expeditionary capability without our help. We’ll help you, but in four years’ time we’re out the door. The other thing I would do is appoint our best Sinologists to figure out how we’re going to disentangle all of these claims and counterclaims to the strategic seaways of Asia, which have become such a touchstone for potential conflict between the US and China. Because I would hate to be the one to tell the mothers of America that their sons or daughters died defending Mischief Reef in the South China Sea from Chinese encroachment.

Given that America is so strong in soft power and winning hearts and minds – my Vietnamese history teacher at Harvard used to say that while America lost the war there, you could say it won the subsequent peace – that there would be more emphasis on non-military solutions to conflict.

You would think so. At a time when we’re facing a relentless challenger in the form of China, which, for now, is peaceful, you’d think we’d want to cultivate our diplomatic resources. You can’t win a war with China. It’s just madness to even consider it. But because the all-volunteer military in this country has been so successful, we’ve effectively segregated the military and the civilian realms. We don’t know what they do, we don’t know the sacrifices they’re making, but we appreciate that we don’t have to make similar sacrifices. So we give them all the money they need. They leave us alone, and we leave them alone. That’s a really pernicious legacy of this wildly successful professional military of ours.

Interview by Sophie Roell

The Politics of American Militarism

The Atlantic Monthly  2011-9-2

Reviewed by Johsua Foust.

Most Americans would be shocked to learn that something like 95 percent of the foreign affairs budget of the federal government is devoted to the military. National security accounts for about twenty percent of the entire federal budget, but the public seems to have an altogether different perspective: According to a ahref="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/01/cnn-poll-americans-flunk-budget-iq-test/">CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted in March of this year, Americans think foreign affairs make up forty percent of the budget, with thirty percent of the budget devoted to the military and the remaining ten percent devoted to foreign aid. Despite the high numbers given the military, the militarism built into the federal budget seems to spark very little concern.

It's no surprise that the average Americans doesn't realize how little we really spend on foreign assistance, or even how much we spent on the military. Foreign aid is a little under one percent of the federal budget, but the public discourse focuses on it so much it's easy to assume it takes up far more of our resources than it does. Similarly, the stupendous cost of the military--with its millions of employees and soldiers, 761 foreign bases, and thousands of U.S.-based facilities--simply doesn't compute with the public. Further, the military has a built-in constituency: supporting the soldiers is a patriotic duty; advocating on behalf civilians in foreign policy, like the State Department's Foreign Service Officers, is at best enabling limp-wristed decadence.

It is precisely that imbalance between the military and civilian parts of America's foreign policy that is the subject of Stephen Glain's new bookState vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire. "American militarism," he writes, "is unique for its civilian provenance." It didn't come at the point of a gun, or with the military formally declaring its control of the government. This militarism is no conspiracy, but is rather a natural consequence of "a uniquely American impulse to choose force over statesmanship."

Glain certainly makes for a compelling argument. The history he charts, which begins in 1947 and ends with the George W. Bush presidency, is extensive and well sourced. The popular perception that Bush was uniquely wrong to abdicate his foreign policy decisions to the military is simply not borne out by our own history. From almost the moment World War II ended, the military has exercised an outsized influence on foreign policy.

At the same time, the State Department is no hapless victim. While I understand Glain's desire to explain American militarism, he does not emphasize enough that the State Department's terrible leadership is as much to blame for the controlling prominence of the Defense Department as anything else. This happened almost regardless of the party in the White House. In the early 1960s, for example, Secretary of State Dean Rusk deliberately sought to remove Foreign Service Officers who rejected the Domino Theory, the idea that a wave of monolithic communism was sweeping across Southeast Asia. Rusk held on to provably false ideas of Maoist China as "a colonial Russian government" (which he proclaimed in 1951 and never rejected), and steadily removed the State Department officials and employees who used their deep knowledge of Asian politics to reject the anti-communist hyperventilation that had gripped Washington.

In many ways, the process Glain describes reminds me of how, post-2001, the Bush administration deliberately ignored its own regional experts when crafting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Glain is certainly correct to note that this is a systemic problem, the State Department isn't exactly a good alternative to the military's overpowering presence in foreign policy. Even so, the military's gradual assumption of normally civilian roles in foreign policy has had disastrous consequences, and Glain deserves tremendous credit for arguing it so forcefully.

During the long run-up in 2002 to the invasion of Iraq, the State Department assembled the Future of Iraq Project, which assembled hundreds of experts and expatriates to plan how to handle the collapse of Iraq's government and society. The militarists in the Bush Whitehouse chose instead to hand responsibility for Iraqi reconstruction to the Department of Defense. When Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who ran the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, requested members of the Future of Iraq Project help him plan, Secretary Rumsfeld rejected it. The Iraqis would greet American might with roses, Dick Cheney famously said. There was no need for civilians to plan for much.

In Afghanistan, too, it was remarkable to see the government's long rejection of expertise in favor of militarism. Even today, the think tanks with the most access and media presence get that way through ablind advocacy of militarism, and in many cases an explicit rejection of knowledge. Advocating for a less intrusive or proactive military presence is simply not part of the discourse.

In 2003, the Pentagon looked at Afghanistan and decided it needed to be developed. Rather than reaching out to the civilians who are good at such things--not just NGOs but USAID and the State Department--they instead chose to create unique militarized reconstruction teams called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

PRTs inspired a wave of opposition from traditional relief groups. Since they were originally created, relief agencies have reacted strongly against the use of the military to perform non-military tasks.  Soon after, the Taliban did too: In 2004, the relief group Doctors Without Borders dramatically halted all its operations after five of its workers were slaughtered. In a statement, the group blamed not only intransigence on the part of the government in Kabul, but also the deliberate blurring of lines between military and relief work. They're not alone: Oxfam have become outspoken critics of the militarization of aid, as have scholars who focus on the topic. Even today, when they have re-established their presence in Afghanistan, Doctors Without Borders goes to elaborate lengths to highlight their refusal to participate in any military-funded activity.

The shift in military policy that fomented this militarization is remarkable, and is the consequence of the militarization of foreign policy Glain charts.

State vs. Defense is part of a growing body of literature on the military's evolving role in foreign policy decision-making. One of the best explorations about this is Washington Post reporter Dana Priest's 2004 book, The Mission. While well conceived and written (I loved it, in fact), Priest really only covers the 1990s and the first year or two of the Bush administration. Earlier this year, Wall Street Journal reporter Nathan Hodge wrote another book about the militarization of foreign policy, Armed Humanitarians. While I alsoliked that book, he too focused on very recent history.

Glain, in contrast, is much more comprehensive. By examining the impulse to default to the military as an artifact of American politics, rather than a recent evolution driven by confusion in the post-Cold War world, Glain brings much-needed insight into how, for the rest of the world, we really are a nation of soldiers (even if very few of us ever wear a uniform). It is only by understanding that history that we will have any hope of ever changing it.

Nation Conversations: Roane Carey and Stephen Glain on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

The Nation 2011-8-26 Click here to listen.

Fault Lines in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

The Nation 2011-8-26 Mohammed Habib lives in a suburb of Cairo just beyond the ring of tenement housing that is closing in on the city like a noose. His flat is small but well kept, with great towers of stacked books erected from the floor and tables.

This has been Habib’s place of self-imposed exile since he and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood lost a struggle for control of the Islamist group eighteen months ago. It was generally assumed that Habib, as the then-deputy chairman, would be elected chairman when Mohammed Akef, who had held the post for six years, announced he was stepping down. When the vote was held in January 2010, however, Habib was upset by Mohammed Badie, a conservative and relatively obscure member of the Brotherhood’s governing council, known as the Guidance Bureau. Delivering his acceptance speech, according to Habib, Badie referred affectionately to Egypt’s then-dictator Hosni Mubarak as “the father of Egypt,” and he implied the Brotherhood would accept a dynastic transfer of power to Mubarak’s son Gamal. Not long after that, several Badie allies were released from prison after long periods of detention.

Badie’s remarks, to say nothing of the election results, were a surprise to pretty much everyone but Habib. “Four months before the election,” he told me, “I received information through leads within the group that Badie would be the next Supreme Guide. I believe there was an agreement between Badie and his supporters and the government. The rest of us were strongly opposed to Gamal Mubarak and his succession.”

Predictably, Brotherhood leaders deny such a deal was made, though talk of an agreement has circulated within the group. “It’s been mentioned,” said a rank-and-file member who requested anonymity so as to avoid reprimand. “An official on the Guidance Bureau told me. And while I’d rather not believe in such a thing, it may contain a bit of truth.”

I met with Habib in June. Until then, he had kept his account of the transition largely to himself. So much had happened since February, however, when Mubarak and his ruling circle were ousted in a popular revolt, that he decided to come forward in interviews and with writings of his own. National elections have been scheduled for November, and the Ikhwan, as the Muslim Brotherhood is known in Arabic, is expected to win a plurality of seats in Parliament. Almost overnight Egypt, once the wellspring of Arab politics and culture before it was rendered mute by a half-century of one-party rule, has been transformed into a fragile young democracy. At the center of this whirlwind is the Ikhwan, one of Egypt’s oldest political movements, one that has survived decades of persecution by resisting and accommodating sequential fashions of autocracy, from monarchy to secular dictatorship. Now freed along with the rest of the country, and seemingly within reach of unprecedented power, the Brotherhood faces the prospect of implosion. Though it can now openly organize and contest elections, that same process is deepening longstanding fault lines within the group that threaten its dissolution.

“The Ikhwan is behaving as if the entire political system is in its grip,” Habib said. “In fact, there are fissures, and they may be to the very core. There is concern among the younger members that the leadership does not understand what’s going on around it. But their opinions are being cast aside, just as they were under Mubarak.”

Fractures within the Brotherhood are nothing new. Since its founding in 1928 by revivalist Hassan al-Banna, the Ikhwan has been home to competing visions of Islam and the group’s role in Egyptian society. The impulse among some leaders to engage in politics and revolution, both peaceful and violent, rather than confine themselves to proselytizing and social work has at times threatened to destroy the group. A failed bid in October 1954 by a Brotherhood faction to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the fierce secularist who led Egypt throughout the 1950s and ’60s, ended with mass arrests of Ikhwanists and the torture of the plot’s alleged leaders, including radical author and Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb. (Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was a Qutb disciple.)

Schismatics aside, the Brotherhood has remained whole largely by entering into tactical ententes with the state and nurturing social networks that are the basis of its political muscle. If Banna was a rebel—he lashed out against what he regarded as Cairo’s corrupt political elites, neo-imperialism and Zionism, and the social salons that were Westernizing Egypt and Islam—he was conflicted about the use of violence even when deployed against the country’s British occupiers. “Revolution is not part of the Brotherhood’s ideology,” said Habib. “Even Hassan al-Banna never spoke of it. The objective has always been to reform the system from within, not to replace it with a new one.”

The Brotherhood allied with Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, in his battles with leftists, only to turn against him along with other Islamist groups once he recognized Israel in 1979. (Sadat’s assassination in 1981 was the work of a handful of rogue Ikhwan members and other radical Islamists, along with colluding military officers.) The Brotherhood’s relations with Mubarak were equally volatile; the two sides shared an uneasy truce during the 1990s, when the regime fought a low-level civil war with militant organizations like Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. In 2005, however, when Brotherhood candidates won the largest opposition bloc in parliamentary elections—they were allowed to campaign only as independents—Mubarak unleashed an extrajudicial assault on the group, detaining and torturing members under emergency security measures in place since Sadat’s assassination. In 2008 the government modified the Constitution to prohibit independent candidates from running for Parliament, a move clearly aimed at the Ikhwan. For good measure, it arrested thousands of its members, many of whom were tried in military courts.

It was largely in response to Mubarak’s iron hand, quietly abetted by the Bush administration and the US Congress, that the more conservative Ikhwan members became disillusioned with Akef and his policy of engaging non-Islamist dissidents in opposition to the regime. Younger members, however, pushed for more aggressive outreach to the secular world, not unlike the way Banna had challenged the religious hierarchy of his day. In a November 2008 interview, a 20-year-old Brotherhood member named Mohammed Adel told me of a growing restlessness among the youth cadres, some of whom were working with secular movements to unseat Mubarak through peaceful means. A website designer, Adel said he and a handful of young dissidents had launched an alternative to the Brotherhood’s official website, one that featured a page soliciting constructive criticism of the group. It was a hit among the Ikhwan’s youth, but the leadership ordered it removed.

“There are no dissenting ideas within the Ikhwan,” Adel told me in a coffee shop just off Tahrir Square, where thousands of demonstrators would later stage the peaceful rebellion that led to Mubarak’s eviction. “There are younger members who want to deviate from the old guard’s ways, to work with other political streams and to take action in the streets with the language of renewal, the language of the young. You also have young people who want representation in the leadership, but they have none.”

Adel, who was raised as an Ikhwanist in a family filled with them, said he participated in a day of peaceful protest launched by oppositionists in the spring of 2008. The April 6 Youth Movement, as it is known, was organized on Facebook and had particular appeal among Egypt’s angry and unemployed youth. Many young Brotherhood members joined in the demonstration in defiance of their elders’ objections. Three years later, they would do so again, with far more conclusive results.

The Ikhwan leadership was famously slow to involve itself in the anti-Mubarak rebellion that began in Tahrir Square on January 25. Even as their young brethren, in tandem with secularists and Coptic Christians, manned the barricades that kept regime thugs from clearing the area, senior Brotherhood members were loath to join a movement that was antithetical to the Ikhwan’s near-sacred embrace of gradualism. Only when it was clear Mubarak was on his way out, say dissident Ikhwanists, did Badie and other group elders officially endorse the movement. Even worse, critics say, it broke ranks with a coalition of opposition leaders by negotiating with Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief and unofficial chamberlain, who briefly became Egypt’s de facto head of state after the president stepped down.

When the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) established a transitional government in response to popular demands for order in the chaotic aftermath of Mubarak’s departure, it entered into a tacit partnership with senior Brotherhood leaders to restore order. At the time, military leaders told reporters that it was only natural that it would leverage the group’s sizable network to clear the streets. That has not stopped a drumbeat of speculation that the two sides had cut a less prosaic deal: in exchange for the release from prison of Ikhwan members, it was argued, the leadership would keep silent about the military’s preponderant and profoundly undemocratic role in Egyptian industry, from textile milling to the tourism trade, just as it had agreed to support a dynastic transfer of presidential power eighteen months earlier. “They brokered a deal,” said an industrialist with close ties to the military who spoke on the strictest condition of anonymity. “The army said we’ll get your guys out of jail so long as you don’t challenge the new regime at a time of great instability.”

Elijah Zarwan, the Egyptian representative of the International Crisis Group, said the evidence of Ikhwan–military complicity is empirical. “It’s no great secret,” he said. “Just look at the facts. From the military’s side, they got the Muslim Brotherhood’s vast network to take people off the streets when there was no alternative. It was a way to end the bloodshed. So what did the Brotherhood get? They got their members out of prison, a political party that is allowed to campaign in the open and direct involvement in the drafting of the post-Mubarak Constitution.” Whether the agreement extends to the military’s economic interests remains to be seen, however. (Interestingly, one of the Ikhwanists released from prison after serving just more than half of a seven-year sentence was Khairet al-Shater, one of the Brotherhood’s most influential members and, according to a member of the youth league, the most forceful voice in opposition to its demands for a greater say in the group’s internal affairs.)

The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party is by far the most capable political machine in Egypt’s young democracy, given the estimated 600,000 Ikhwanists at its disposal, though it has gradually estranged itself from the very movement that made this possible. It has boycotted several demonstrations and revolutionary councils, including the May 7 National Conference, in which more than 1,000 delegates from parties and movements called for more aggressive democratic reform. It has opposed calls for a constitution to be written ahead of the fall elections, on the grounds that this clashes with the results of a March referendum, in which 77 percent of voters preferred that balloting be held as soon as possible. Such an outcome was welcomed by the Brotherhood, which is far better organized than its secular rivals.

Not long after Mubarak’s overthrow, the Ikhwan demanded that Coptic Christians, who constitute about 10 percent of Egypt’s population, and women be prohibited from running for president, and it has condemned as “sinners” those who have demonstrated against the SCAF. It has also entered into an alliance with a proliferation of Salafi (fundamentalist Islamist) groups, including at least one Salafi political party, which would all but guarantee an Islamist majority in Parliament should its compact prevail in the upcoming ballot. In July tens of thousands of largely Salafi activists jammed Tahrir Square in a compelling show of force, effectively Islamizing a parcel of Cairo known to the world as an idyll of ecumenicalism. Mocking the secularist chants of “Christian, Muslim, we’re all Egyptians” that had echoed throughout the square during the rebellion, these protesters bellowed “Islamic, Islamic, neither secular nor liberal.” The secular demonstrations, which had been promoted as a display of national unity, were overwhelmed by Islamist voices, particularly Salafi demands for strict adherence to Sharia law.

Under Mubarak, Salafis worshiped largely underground, and their growing clout has caught many observers by surprise. Now in a spoiler role in the upcoming elections, they could undermine as well as enhance the Ikhwan’s prospects. Just as liberal splittists may peel away votes from the Brotherhood’s left, Salafis may cherry-pick them from its right. “We got rid of Mubarak,” Sheik Mohammed Farahat, a leading Salafi sheik, told me over dinner in a Cairo cafe that, interestingly, served beer and wine. “Now anyone who fights us will lose. There has been no compromise with my Coptic friends, but there is no problem so long as they don’t cross the constants of Sharia.” It was a remark both disingenuous and chilling, implying as it did that Islamists, and not secularists, did the heavy lifting that deposed Mubarak, and that the only good Coptic is a supine one.

What of the Ikhwan? “We all follow the same principles, only we follow the texts literally,” said Farahat. “The Ikhwan tends to maneuver politically; it is very Machiavellian. Either way, the past era of secular liberalism is over.”

In an interview, Ikwhan spokesman Mohamed Saad el-Katatni dismissed talk of secret deals and accommodation between the group and the state, either under the SCAF or the ancien régime. The Brotherhood, he said, had always been opposed to the dynastic elevation of Gamal Mubarak as president. While he was unaware of any remarks by Badie that characterized Hosni Mubarak as a national patriarch, he said, “They may have been made in the spirit of our culture of respect for elder leaders, devoid of political content.” Far from negotiating with Omar Suleiman unilaterally, he said, the Ikhwan did so in a public meeting “on terms that included all political forces.” The National Conference, said Katatni, was an attempt to undermine the results of the March referendum. “Our policy is the will of the people, even if it is contrary to our own preference,” he said. “We have no plans to dominate Parliament.”

The day before my interview with Katatni, the Ikhwan expelled Dr. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, one of the Brotherhood’s most respected members, for refusing to relinquish his independent presidential campaign. The leadership had declared the presidency off-limits to its members to ease public anxiety about its ambitions, and Fotouh’s renegade bid had revealed a deep split within the Ikhwan at its most senior levels. According to Katatni, the last time such a high-ranking member had been dismissed from the Brotherhood was in 1954, in the aftermath of the attempt on Nasser’s life.

Fotouh, who also served as the general secretary of the Arab Medical Association, has been a stalwart and pioneering proponent of ecumenicalism, liberal governance and a progressive Muslim Brotherhood. In a June interview with the New York Times, he declared that “people must have a free will.” He expressed support for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and he insisted there was nothing incompatible between Western values and his interpretation of Islam. When I met Fotouh several years ago, he presciently implied that the weight of democracy would splinter Ikhwan solidarity. “The Muslim Brotherhood has a vision to interact with society, but you also have people who are narrow-minded,” he said. “There is greater awareness among the young, and they can make a difference in free elections. Otherwise, there will be an explosion.”

Many among the Brotherhood’s youth regard Fotouh as a mentor, and his banishment only hardened their resentment of the old guard. As news of Fotouh’s dismissal broke, Islam Lotfy, a 33-year-old lawyer, and a circle of fellow Ikhwanists were preparing to launch their own party in response to the Brotherhood’s refusal to consider their demands for more activist and inclusive expression. On a humid night in June, Lotfy told me the decision to break with the Ikhwan was taken only after attempts at negotiation had failed. “Our vision was heard but ignored,” he told me. “People were helping us project our beliefs, not only in Cairo but [Brotherhood] leaders in London, Kuwait and Palestine. But the leadership is undemocratic, and it will not allow us to reach out to other groups, period.”

The new party, which will contest the fall elections under the name Egyptian Current, was unveiled a few days later. Among its 5,000 members are some 200 dissident Brotherhood adherents, according to Lotfy. He described Egyptian Current not as secular—the word has been demagogued in post-Mubarak Egypt, just as it has in some right-wing quarters in the United States—but “pragmatic and nonideological.” He would just as much take advice from a Marxist as he would from a capitalist, he said, if it was found to be the most practical.

Lotfy said he expected to share Fotouh’s fate as a defector, and within days of our meeting he and four other Egyptian Current leaders were indeed expelled from the Brotherhood. The old guard, he told me, “cannot comprehend that we need to reach the people. In the Ikhwan literature there is no space for revolution in Islam. It is not in their culture, and now they’re in a dilemma. This is a revolution, and they don’t know how to interact with it.”

The only sustainable role for the Brotherhood in a democracy, according to Lotfy and his comrades among the Ikhwan youth, is its traditional mission as a social network and charitable movement of a moderate religious character. In that sense, he suggested, the ejection of liberal-minded members like him and Fotouh is part of an organic return by the group to its roots. “It is of important value,” Lotfy told me, “but when it comes to politics, they should stop or reform themselves completely.” Another frustrated young Ikhwanist and Lotfy ally, Mohammed al-Gebba, put it this way: “The Brotherhood must either return to religious outreach and social work, with its members campaigning as members of other parties, or it will bring itself down within the next few years. Politics and outreach are not reconcilable. One compromises the other.”

Recently, a senior Brotherhood official announced that any Egyptian citizen should be eligible to run for president, an apparent easing of its earlier proscription against Copts and women, and it has entered into an alliance with its old rival, the secular Al Wafd Party. While such gestures could be interpreted as a nod to the center after months of overreaching, it is not at all certain the Ikhwan can sustain itself in a democracy as it struggles to prevail against the fissionable agents of election fever. Throughout the century-long history of the modern Middle East, no political movement has proved itself so resilient as the Muslim Brotherhood. The tools of governance are different from the tools of survival, however, and the Ikhwan’s inelastic old guard has already seriously damaged itself trying to wield both at the same time.

With Libya Victory, Obama Should Exit NATO

U.S News & World Report  2011-8-25 Why are we still in NATO?" I've fielded this question a half-dozen times over the last week while on radio talk shows promoting my book about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Listeners instinctively know, it seems, what our security fetishists in Washington do not: that America's resources at home are badly outstripped by security commitments abroad, particularly at a time of near recession and draconian spending cuts. When the subject comes up I want to turn the microphone on Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's secretary general, and let him explain to cash-strapped callers why job security is more important for alliance bureaucrats than it is for the people who are paying for this Cold War relic in the first place.

Read the entire post on the US News & World Report website.

Dining with a Sheik

The Investigative Fund  2011-8-25 Sheik Mohammed Farahat was waiting patiently for me when we met for dinner recently in downtown Cairo. He is a prominent Salafi cleric, which means he and his followers interpret Islam with a rather antique set of reference points. Specifically, they live and worship as they believe the Prophet Mohammed and his followers did during the formative years of Islam. The consequences of this are mixed: while the Muslim world during the Middle Ages was commendably tolerant and the epicenter of global commerce, it was also a brutal place with violent punishment for less than capital crimes such as adultery and theft.

Until my dinner with Farahat, I'd never come across a Salafi in a dozen years of reporting from Egypt. Egypt has no shortage of religious fundamentalists, including an architect or two of what would become Al Qaeda. But the Salafis are a different species entirely, more doctrinaire when it comes to social mores than the bourgeois Muslim Brotherhood, and emphatically opposed to the terrorism embraced by Al Qaeda and other radical groups. Their jihad, it seems, is to restore in their minds and communities what they believe is the purity and sanctity of Islam during its seventh-century genesis.

Since the eviction of dictator Hosni Mubarak in a non-violent coup seven months ago, Egypt's Salafis have enjoyed a spiritual as well as political revival. This was one of the more surprising byproducts of the uprising, as in principle Salafis confine themselves to religious study and generally eschew temporal affairs of state. Since the rebellion, however, several Salafi political parties have emerged and they are expected to field candidates in national elections in the fall. In late June, a demonstration promoted as a national unity rally was quickly overrun by tens of thousands of well-organized Salafis activists. Not only were secular protestors stunned by their numbers and discipline, they scandalized members of the entrenched Muslim Brotherhood, which is expected to garner a plurality of parliamentary seats in the upcoming elections. The comparably mainstream group had hoped to appeal to conservative voters by associating with Salafi leaders, only to alienate the vast Egyptian middle with the specter of bearded zealots in Tahrir Square, waving copies of the Koran and agitating for sharia law.

Until now a loose coalition of various congregations, political Salafism in Egypt is slowly cohering around clerics such as Magdi Hussein. In 2008, Hussein was arrested by Egyptian security forces for preaching in Israeli-blockaded Gaza after the crossing that links the Palestinian enclave and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula was briefly opened. Released after Mubarak's removal, he is now the leader of El Amal, the Islamic Labor Party.

Farahat himself is a Hussein acolyte. With Mubarak gone, he briefly considered launching his own party but instead joined El Amal. A well-known television personality, Farahat discusses religious affairs on two satellite channels financed by Saudi investors and he is frequently recognized on Cairo's busy streets. On his recommendation, we met on a temperate Friday evening in June at Felfela, a popular restaurant near Tahrir Square.

Farahat has the expansive charm typical of televangelists of all faiths and sects. With his long and thickly hennaed beard, intricately embroidered skullcap, and crisply starched and pressed dishdasha, he cut an elegant but conspicuous profile among Felfela's largely secular clientele. He took my hand and shook it vigorously, clearly relishing the chance to explain his faith to an infidel — and an American one at that.

"Islam is the only truly international religion," he began. "It is embraced by all the world and by all its minorities. Christianity espouses the killing of Jews, socialist ideology celebrates the group over the individual and capitalism does the opposite. Islam is equal across the board."

Fair enough, given Islam's Medieval ecumenicalism relative to Europe's. Advantage, Salafi.

Farahat then told me about the time he spent in Tahrir Square with thousands of fellow dissidents in defiance of Mubarak and his regime. He attended the protests daily throughout the eighteen-day siege, he said, sharing meals and stories of Mubarak's treachery with every spectrum of Egyptian humanity: Christians and atheists, rich and poor, young and old. "I was taken completely by surprise by this headless movement," he said. "Those who had been silent had risen together and when it was over it was a miracle."

But the revolution has given way to an increasingly opaque future. Political parties who lack the Islamists' social networks, a potent and highly deployable asset, are calling for postponement of the fall elections. The Salafis themselves have assumed a spoiler role; they may partner up with the Muslim Brotherhood — though the June demonstration clearly strained relations between the two groups — or they may remain independent and cherry-pick support from the Brotherhood's right flank.

"We all follow the same principles," Farahat said of the Salafis and the Ikhwan, as the Muslim Brotherhood is known in Arabic. "But whereas we follow the texts literally, the Ikhwan tends to maneuver politically. They are very Machiavellian, while we Salafis have not been smart about how we express our vision because we have been isolated."

Was isolation really the problem, I asked, or was it Salafism's  seventh-century answers for twenty-first century questions?

Salafis, Farahat assured me, were very much both in and of the post-modern world. He himself is a successful speculator in real estate and his daughter is an upwardly mobile executive in the information technology sector.

But what of the Salafis' extreme punishment for petty thievery, fraternizing among the sexes, and the drinking of alcohol? Would a Salafi Republic of Egypt render itself dry, thus all but bankrupting the tourism trade? (I had, by the way, checked my impulse to order a glass of Chablis with dinner. Wittingly or not, Farahat had chosen a restaurant that serves beer and wine.)

Farahat shook his head and smiled wryly. "There are things that are hadud or beyond debate," he said. "There is punishment for the sake of protecting the mind, such as the banning of alcohol, as well as constant things like family and honor. In this all religions agree. But you don't even begin to cut people's hands off for stealing until after a full inquiry into the felon's employment and financial situation can be held. If, for example, it can be proven that he could not find work and had no money and was forced to steal, his hand is spared. In the first 400 years of Islam, there were only ten such cases of hand chopping."

What of the ban on liquor? Why would westerners come to Egypt if they were forbidden to have a cocktail in their hotel bar and women were forced to cover themselves?

Again, the wry smile, uncluttered by doubt. "Islam is not against tourism," he said. "The foreigners who come here would be respected so long as they keep their alcohol concealed in their luggage and confine their drinking to their rooms. Otherwise, it's eighty lashes."

And the veil?

"Women must only reveal their faces and hands in order not to incite our shabab, or restless young men. Needless to say, there must be no public displays of affection either."

When you find yourself in a hole, so goes the old saying, stop digging. But deeper Farahat dug. Once in control of government, he said, Islamists would close down the international schools popular with Cairo's expatriate community and its well-to-do Egyptian families. "These schools have done nothing for us," he said. "Young people are being pulled into a culture that is not their own." Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, the country's foundation of economic stability for more than three decades, would be scrapped and a two-state solution to the Palestine question would be possible only if they were allowed an army of their own. "Otherwise, I will field an army of Mujaheddin," he said. "The solution will be imposed by force with five million volunteers." Egyptian Copts, the country's ancient Christian sect that accounts for ten percent of the population, would be allowed to co-exist with their Muslim compatriots "as long as they don't violate the constants of sharia law."

I asked for the bill. While we waited I asked Farahat to handicap the likely results of the upcoming election. In gathering his thoughts, he inhaled deeply and then exhaled, as if in preparation for a long-distance swim.

"In the end our government will be Islamist," he said finally. "The past era was one of secular liberalism and it was filled with nothing but crises."

Farahat may represent an important constituency in the nebulae of political persuasions now rotating around free Egypt, but I doubt it will prevail. For one thing, Salafi parochialism is very much at odds with Medieval Islam, which borrowed heavily from the Jews and Christians for its scripture, the Greeks for its philosophy, the Romans for its infrastructure, and the Persians and Chinese for its art and literature. To imply, as Farahat did, that the only good Christian is a prostrate one and to shut down centers of learning for their foreign provenance is profoundly un-Islamic, at least as Islam was practiced from the eighth century to the post-Ottoman era.

Some years ago, while eating breakfast at a hostel in Damascus, I watched on satellite television a retrospective of performances by Oum Kalthoum, the great Egyptian songstress who galvanized audiences worldwide throughout the mid-twentieth century. What struck me most about the broadcast, aside from Kalthoum herself, was the audience as it was occasionally panned by the camera. Of the thousands of attendees seated in what I assumed was the Cairo Opera House, not a single women was covered. Indeed, everyone was dressed in what seemed to be the latest fashions from Europe. Here was forensic proof of Egypt's native secularism, a tradition that predates the Islamist revival rooted in the Anglo-French partition of the Arab world after World War I. Free to express themselves in post-Mubarak Egypt, Farahat and his Salafi brethren would expel curiosity, empathy, irony, and aestheticism from the arsenal of human emotions that is the very foundation of Egyptian identity. And that is a lousy platform to run on.

The Investigative Fund is a project of The Nation Institute.

State vs. Defense: An Interview with Stephen Glain

Small Wars Journal 2011-8-24 Building on the earlier works of Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules and Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, Stephen Glain’s State vs. Defense provides a thought provoking, compelling historical revision to United States Foreign Policy. Well researched, his findings demand consideration as we try to understand who we are, where we have been, and where we want to go in the future. His initial interviews sparked controversy at Foreign Policy and Salon, and we asked him to join the conversation at Small Wars Journal in order to talk through his specific thoughts and recommendations for our nation. Regardless of your individual views on the subject, I would ask that you consider Steve’s voice and critique. This book is high on my recommendation list. - Mike Few, SWJ editor.

Your book, State versus Defense, builds upon the concept that the United States, as the world’s only superpower, is an empire with a militarized foreign policy securing the periphery. What life experiences led you to this conclusion?

It’s hard to live in Asia and the Middle East, as I have as a journalist, and not be struck by the scope of the U.S. military’s presence overseas and the depth of its influence on American foreign policy. While in Asia, to cite just one example, I saw how the Pentagon worked behind the scenes during the 1997-1998 currency crisis to ensure a generous response by international institutions for the sake of its strategic allies. In the Arab world, U.S. embassies have become more fortress-like listening posts and flag billets than sources of diplomatic and cultural outreach. Now that the Pentagon has its own funding authority, it can sidestep the State Department in establishing close relations with foreign governments. Whether or not that is a good thing, there’s no denying that it further marginalizes the diplomatic side of the profile America projects abroad.

I might add that the notion of American empire and militarization is hardly notional for foreigners like the Okinawans, who for generations have dwelled alongside a sprawling Marine base, or among residents of South Korea’s Jeju island, who are challenging plans to build a major naval installation there ostensibly on America’s behalf. At the same time, the indulgence by Washington of autocrats who accommodate U.S. bases even as they bully their citizens at home - most recently in Bahrain, for example - fuels the assumption that American empire is not only real but malign.

In 1932, George Kennan, tasked with providing an analysis on the Soviet Union’s future, concluded that “the system falls to pieces.” You offer that Kennan hypothesized long before World War Two that the ideology of communism was not a real long-term threat to the United States. Moreover, your central argument involves the misinterpretation of George Kennan’s “The Long Telegram” as a spark for increased American involvement in other’s internal affairs. Was the threat of communism and the Cold War manufactured, and is it more accurate to state that in the 1950’s, this containment morphed from a realist, physical containment of Sovietism into Europe and the Middle East to a much more ideological containment of “Communism?”

James Forrestal, Truman’s Secretary of the Navy and a tragically deranged man, used to speak of communism as a cult. One could say the same thing about the obsession among U.S. security planners with the Soviet threat, which for the purpose of the U.S. and its allies was confined largely to Eastern Europe. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Washington embarked on a massive buildup of strategic weaponry at a time when it was clear from U-2 surveillance data that the Soviets had no corresponding capability. Its nuclear stockpiles were negligible and it’s intercontinental bombers either lacked the range needed for a returned mission against the continental U.S. or were too slow to evade its air defenses. Despite this, Air Force General Curtis LeMay quietly promoted the idea of a pre-emptive first strike against Soviet targets even as he indulged in alarmist warnings about American vulnerability, famously expressed as bomber and missile “gaps” between the two Cold War combatants. The discrepancies indeed existed but in America’s favor, as LeMay knew.

So the question becomes: did LeMay, a very smart man and one of America’s most effective field marshals, “manufacture” Cold War fears to enrich his service branch or because he sincerely believed it was in America’s interest to strangle the Soviet Union in its crib? Certainly LeMay rung generous outlays from Congress for his Strategic Air Command when the other services were bled white by Eisenhower’s New Look. He also pioneered the Pentagon tactic of wooing lawmakers from multiple states and districts with assembly contracts in pursuit of favored weapons programs. But the single-minded LeMay, the polar opposite of the nuanced, worldly Kennan, also believed passionately that what the Soviets lacked in strategic capability today they may develop tomorrow. And unlike Kennan, LeMay believed Moscow was more likely than Washington to use such power preemptively. As I argue in State vs. Defense, largely based on the Pentagon’s own declassified studies, just the opposite was true.

During the Cold War, United States intervened in varying degrees and mixed results throughout the world to include unconventional warfare to remove leaders in Guatemala, Cuba, and Iran, small wars in Vietnam and Korea, and advise and assist missions in El Salvador and the Philippines. The conventional notion is that these missions were necessary to promote democracy and capitalism abroad, and the neo-conservatives believe that these actions were a natural expansion of Manifest Destiny. You take a contrarian view suggesting that “imperial America was itself a needless extravagance.” What do you think our Founding Fathers would say of the Cold War, and how are our actions during this time period different than the initial American expansion through French, Spanish, Mexican, and Native American lands to the Pacific Ocean?

The Federalist Papers and George Washington’s farewell address are replete with cautions against the corrupting elements of a standing army, to say nothing of foreign expeditions and intrigues. Even twentieth-century American statesmen like George Marshall and Henry Stimson were opposed in principal to the maintenance of a peacetime army. (Marshall would grudgingly concede to conscription and the need for forward bases as the burden of containment.) Geostrategically, America is among the most blessed of nations, with two peaceful borders to its north and south and the world’s two largest oceans to its east and west. It enjoys an abundance of natural resources and a large domestic market. Nearly alone in the history of great power politics, it can strike anywhere in the world from its homeland with only minimal risk of a proportionate response. As Abraham Lincoln put it, an existential threat, were it to emerge, would most likely do so at home and not from “some transatlantic military giant [able] to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow.”

Nevertheless, our imperial jurisdiction was indeed extended well beyond America’s shores owing to a paranoiac-messianic complex that is equal parts James Forrestal and Paul Wolfowitz. There is an uninterrupted trajectory from the Truman Doctrine to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which makes it a core U.S. interest to pre-empt the emergence of a “peer-competitor”, and in State vs. Defense I try to illuminate the inflection points between them.

The title of your book immediately suggests a false choice between the State Department and the Defense Department, the pen or the sword. However, the history leading to increased military intervention is much more complicated and nuanced by many interdependent choices including dismantling State, USIA, and USAID at the fall of the Cold War. Is it more accurate to state that our current dilemma of using military power as the main arm of foreign policy is due to a lack of preparedness, forethought, and corresponding policy and strategy in the last twenty years?

Absolutely. Of the many personalities cast in State vs. Defense as militarists, only two of them - Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay - were of the military. Conversely, many of the flag officers who appear in the book, men like Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell and Anthony Zinni, distinguished themselves as great statesmen as well as field marshals. In many ways, the culprit behind American militarization is domestic politics and those who would use foreign policy as a means of settling parochial scores. Thus McCarthyism, having emasculated and demoralized the nation’s diplomatic core, left the country with no one to debunk the canard of a Sino-Soviet bloc, the irrational fear of which consumed security planners and red-baiters alike until as late as 1968, when Russian and Chinese troops were skirmishing along the Ussuri River.

Another enabler of militarization is the habitual failure among American leaders to listen to their area experts - diplomats, military attaches and spies - about the nature of threats perceived or concocted by political tribes in Washington. While researching the book I was struck at how often the White House, having neglected its eyes and ears on the ground, not only reached for the military option but in doing so foreclosed on opportunities for a lasting peace. This was certainly the case in the run-up to the Korean War, when the Truman administration rebuffed reconciliation efforts by Communist China for fear of arousing the powerful, pro-Nationalist China Lobby.

Nearly ten years ago, the United States was attacked by a handful of religious extremists representing a fringe terrorist group, Al Qaeda. Subsequently, we engaged in the punitive action of regime change in both Iraq and Afghanistan morphing into what Gian Gentile refers to as “armed nation-building” and others term modern counterinsurgency. How do you feel that the United States should have responded after 9/11, and what are the consequences of our most recent interventions?

For starters, President Bush should have explained the motivation behind the attack as laid out by Osama bin Laden himself in his 1996 fatwa against what he called the “Zionist-Crusader Alliance.” In it, Bin Laden clearly states that his war on United States is in response to its support of Israel, its deployment of some 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, its decade-long embargo on Iraq and its support of what he regarded as apostate Arab regimes. A statesmanlike response to the events of 9/11 would have been a candid admission that, yes, we were attacked for our policies, but they are the policies of this nation and no attack or threat of attack will make us waver in support of them.

Instead, the President disingenuously told Americans they had been struck as part of a global war to destroy their way of life. He also bizarrely associated Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil” and greatly overstated both their capacities and their intentions. By defining the 9/11 assault as the first shot in a third world war, rather than the opening of a new front in an old one, Bush created the culture of fear that would allow him to greatly enlarge our national security bureaucracy and wage war on several fronts at once, including his misadventure in Iraq. I fear that the needless invasion of that country and its disastrous aftermath created a new generation of anti-American jihadis just as Washington’s uninspired policies in the Middle East provoked Bin Laden.

Looking forward to China, our closest near-term security threat, Fareed Zakaria recently suggested that we are in the equivalent of economic Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that may deter future military conflicts. Do you agree with his analysis, and is the threat of China one that is overblown and could become a self-fulfilling prophesy?

China was not our largest creditor ten years ago and, most significantly, it is unlikely to be our largest creditor in ten years’ time. The Chinese know the U.S. dollar is a diminishing asset and it is likely to continue depreciating along with the credibility of our lawmakers in Washington. No doubt Beijing, like Wall Street, is gaming out ways of reducing its exposure to the dollar without destabilizing the world’s $4 trillion foreign exchange market. If there are only so many Swiss francs China can buy for dollars it can convert its reserves into tangible assets like real estate. Either way, we console ourselves with the MAD theory of Sino-U.S. economic relations at our peril.

Strategically, there is nothing in three thousand years of recorded history to suggest China will assert itself militarily worldwide, particularly given how successful it has been wooing resource-rich developing states through commercial means. China clearly regards itself as the once-and-future overlord of Asia, however, which puts it on a collision course with the Pentagon. Here, Washington and Beijing are talking past each other in a rather ominous way. The Americans say they welcome China’s peaceful ascent while refusing to concede its authority over the Asian littoral, to say nothing of its deep-water seaways. The Chinese, meanwhile, claim dominion over the South China Seas and other disputed waters while implying they expect nothing less than the kind of regional hegemony Washington carved out for itself in the Americas throughout the nineteenth century. Absent a vigorous diplomatic effort to reconcile these discordant positions, I fear some kind of Sino-American conflict is inevitable.

In the future, in lieu of a return to isolationism, what foreign policy would you recommend to the President? Should the United States continue to promote and foster democracy and capitalism abroad, and what is the appropriate mixture of soft and hard power should we apply? Furthermore, what organizational changes must State and USAID make in order to become efficient and effective?

The conceit that developed nations should graft their governing cultures and values onto developing ones went out with France’s mission civilisatrice and even that did not succeed much beyond cuisine. In allowing our political and economic systems to become corrupt and dissolute, our soft power has gone flabby and our hard power has become omnipresent, the source of a geopolitical welfare state. Washington should devolve the responsibilities of its security commitments in Europe and East Asia to its allies there. That means withdrawing combat divisions from abroad and reintegrating them with their units back home. It should invest heavily in its stateside training facilities such as the Marines’ Air Ground Combat Center at Twenty-Nine Palms (with accommodations for accompanied tours), and it should engage in regular transpacific exercises in support of its allies in Asia.

Washington must also know that China, as the world’s second-largest economy with three millennia of history as a regional power, will seek to impose its own Monroe Doctrine in Asia and it must acknowledge its limits in opposing this. Attempts to “contain” China would result in a decidedly asymmetrical contest that would exhaust America’s already depleted accounts but which Beijing could sustain at relatively low cost to itself. To preempt such a conflict, the White House should appoint a multi-agency negotiating team to resolve the thicket of competing maritime claims in the West Pacific and East Asia that make the region a tinderbox for conflict.

Domestically, the White House should accommodate the State Department’s request for several thousand new Foreign Service Officers in relief of a diplomatic core that is under-funded and overwhelmed. The number of its diplomats and support staff is only ten percent greater than what it was a quarter century ago, when there were twenty-four fewer countries in the world and U.S. interests were concentrated in Europe and Northeast Asia. At any one time, a third of U.S.-based Foreign Service jobs are vacant, twelve percent of its overseas positions are unmanned, and its ratio of unaccompanied tours has risen to a fifth of the total. Foreign language proficiency, a core competency of the service, has languished due to funding gaps. Salaries have been slashed, and stingy retirement benefits have undercut retentions rates.

At the same time, the State Department and USAID should undergo its own Goldwater-Nichols-like reformation, the touchstone of which would be the creation of diplomatic fiefs symmetrical with the Pentagon’s overseas combatant commands. Until the State Department’s senior-most officials have regional representation and authority on par with their four-star counterparts, interagency cooperation will remain illusory and the State Department will continue to be marginalized in the foreign policy-making process.

Finally, as it considers the geopolitical shift from a unipolar to multipolar world, the White House should solicit and respect the analyses of its area experts unimpeded by political pressures from Capitol Hill. When the opinions of veteran diplomats and seasoned intelligence officers must compete with those in the petty echo-chambers of Washington, it creates space for the kind of ruinous expeditions that have all but replaced statesmanship at the mantle of American leadership.

Author Q&A: Book Club, U.S. News & World Report

U.S. News & World Report 2011-8-19 Click here to read the interview

Author interview: Maureen Cavanaugh, KPBS radio

KPBS Midday Edition, 2011-8-18 Click here to listen

It's Time for the Pentagon to Get Realistic About Its Budget

 After a decade of throwing money at the Pentagon—its budget has grown at an annualized rate of about 6 percent a year over the last 10 years—it now appears the nation's defense budget is on the deficit-chopping block. Given the epic waste associated with our national security accounts, a scandal that Congress routinely abets by demanding the military purchase needless weapons for assembly in districts back home, it is high time the Pentagon establish realistic spending priorities and budget accordingly.

Read the entire post on the US News & World Report website.

Author interview: Ian Masters, syndicated host

Background Briefing  2011-8-18 Click here to listen

The Empire at Dusk

ForeignPolicy.com 2011-8-17 In its scramble to avoid another legislative gang war over the nation's debt ceiling, Washington is preparing to shake down the Defense Department in the name of deficit reduction. While budget cutters preoccupy themselves with line-item expenditures, they overlook the Pentagon's biggest cost center: empire. The burden of global hegemony, the commitment to project force across every strategic waterway, air corridor, and land bridge, has exhausted the U.S. military and will be even harder to sustain as budget cuts force strategists and logisticians to do more with less. A national discussion about the logic of maintaining huge forward bases, to say nothing of their financial and human costs, is long overdue.

American relations with the world, and increasingly America's security policy at home, have become thoroughly and all but irreparably militarized. The culprits are not the nation's military leaders, though they can be aggressive and cunning interagency operators, but civilian elites who have seen to it that the nation is engaged in a self-perpetuating cycle of low-grade conflict. They have been hiding in plain sight, hyping threats and exaggerating the capabilities and resources of adversaries. They have convinced a plurality of citizens that their best guarantee of security is not peace but war, and they did so with the help of a supine or complicit Congress. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidents have ordered troops into battle 22 times, compared with 14 times during the Cold War. Not once did they appeal to lawmakers for a declaration of war.

The legacy of American militarism is a national security complex that thrives on fraud, falsehood, and deception. In the 1950s, Americans were told the Soviets had not only the means to destroy the United States but the desire to do so. In reality, Moscow lacked the former and so gave little thought to the latter, while Washington squandered billions of dollars on needless weaponry. Time and again, U.S. presidents weaponized their response to challenges overseas to protect them from charges of appeasement from the right. Habitually, their administrations misinterpreted events -- from Russia's Bolshevik revolution to the September 11 attacks -- to disastrous effect. In each case, expert advice was overlooked, ignored, or concealed, while in others, threats were manufactured as chips in petty political wagers. The fraudulent bomber and missile gaps and the Gulf of Tonkin incident did as much to injure U.S. interests overseas as did the notion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them preemptively.

Only a country so rich in resources and blessed by favorable geography could afford such malfeasance. America has been spared foreign invasion for more than 200 years and it can expect to remain inviolate for centuries to come. Yet each year, it spends enough money on national security to match the economic output of Indonesia -- with money borrowed largely from China, a country with which it is preparing for conflict. It insists on its right to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against such countries as North Korea and Iran -- oafish, bankrupt regimes that seek a complement of atomic bombs because they are surrounded by countries with bunkers full of them. America guarantees its friends and allies a place under its security umbrella even if their interests, particularly in the Middle East, diverge markedly from its own. In Europe, NATO remains a feudal confederation of armed forces with no raison d'être save to lend sanction to America's far-flung military enterprises. In Asia, South Korea, the world's 15th-largest economy, remains critically dependent on U.S. forces as a deterrent against its isolated, impoverished northern neighbor, while Japan wallows in a twilight world of middle-class prosperity and political ennui, content to slowly diminish as an American vassal.

In ancient times, empires exacted tribute from their dependencies. In the age of American hegemony, just the opposite is the case. In return for the global commons, the United States bankrolls a geopolitical welfare state that allows some of its largest beneficiaries to neglect their basic responsibilities as sovereign states and allies. A national debate over the economic and moral costs of this exchange is noteworthy for its absence. Segregated from the military and its burdens, with no reason to fear the consequences of war for themselves or their loved ones, a great majority of Americans are easily manipulated into backing a militarized response to challenges more suited to diplomacy. The purpose of hegemony is to preempt potential threats rather than respond to a clear and present danger. As voters are unlikely to support such a policy on its merits, hegemonists resort to gross exaggerations of speculative rivals, be they Russia and China or geopolitical runts such as North Korea and Iran.

The price of this deception is vast. If the Pentagon were a corporation, it would be the largest in the world as well as the most sloppily run. Its procurement budget, at a staggering $107 billion in 2010, expands even as the number of deployable warplanes, combat ships, and troops diminishes. To entice lawmakers into approving costly weapons programs, the Pentagon dangles the prospect of jobs in the states and districts of key lawmakers, a costly way of manufacturing but an astute political maneuver. Waste, inefficiency, and political patronage, no stranger to military-legislative affairs, get more lavish by the year. In April 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that 95 major Pentagon projects exceeded their original budgets by a total of nearly $300 billion. A year later, it concluded that nothing had changed. In 2009, lawmakers larded the Pentagon's annual budget proposal with nearly $5 billion in programs and weapons it did not request. With arms factories scattered like feeding troughs nationwide, America has become the equivalent of a company town with the Pentagon as primary employer. The making of war, or at least the preparation for it, has become a money center, a business line --- a racket, as Marine general and Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler put it nearly a century ago.

Though the Pentagon did not ask for empire, neither did it shirk from its calling. From 2001 to 2010, the baseline defense budget grew at an inflation-adjusted rate of 6 percent a year, to more than double its pre-September 11 size. Like interlocking threads in a great tapestry, no one really knows where the military's preserve begins and where it ends. Pentagon financial statements have been all but unauditable since 1991, the year it began submitting its accounts to Congress. In an October 2009 report, the Defense Department's Inspector General exposed more than a dozen "significant deficiencies" in Pentagon balance sheets from fiscal years 2004 to 2008. Mining opaque audit trails and murky contracting systems, the report uncovered more than $1 trillion in unsupported account entries. In September 2010, the Senate Finance Committee issued a report that slammed the Pentagon's "total lack of fiscal accountability" for "leaving huge sums of the taxpayers' money vulnerable to fraud and outright theft."

Even as defense officials and warfighters acknowledge that America's adversaries cannot be defeated with armed might alone, the Pentagon still has more lawyers than the State Department does diplomats. Washington's foreign aid budget routinely comes under assault by Congress as overly generous when in fact the United States is among the most miserly of countries when it comes to overseas assistance. The White House has called for 2,200 new Foreign Service officers for the State Department and USAID -- a drop in the bucket given the mismatch between the nation's resources and its commitments overseas. The number of State Department diplomats and support staff is only 10 percent greater than what it was a quarter century ago, when there were 24 fewer countries in the world and U.S. interests were concentrated in Europe and northeast Asia. The Pentagon, in contrast, has 1.5 million active-duty military personnel, an equal number of reservists and National Guardsmen, and 790,000 civilian employees. Moreover, unlike the U.S. military, which bases a fifth of its personnel overseas, nearly three-quarters of America's diplomatic corps are posted abroad. At any one time, a third of U.S.-based Foreign Service jobs are vacant, while 12 percent of the overseas positions, not including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are unmanned. Foreign language proficiency, a core competency of the service, has languished due to funding gaps. Salaries have been slashed, and stingy retirement benefits have undercut retention rates.

American embassies loom imperiously over the skylines of the world's capital cities, barricaded against terrorist attacks and estranged from their hosts. They engender resentment from without and a siege mentality from within. Thanks to the gutting of State Department and foreign aid budgets by Senator Jesse Helms, followed by the disastrously militant politics of President George W. Bush, America's diplomats and aid workers are undermanned and overwhelmed. Absent an aggressive restructuring of America's civilian aid and diplomatic agencies, their dependence on, and submission to, the military will only intensify. An early draft of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon's long-term threat assessment, put its civilian counterparts on notice. A key provision that demanded the Pentagon's "unprecedented say over U.S. security assistance programs" was softened to the wordy but more diplomatic: "Years of war have proven how important it is for America's civilian agencies to possess the resources and authorities needed to operate alongside the U.S. Armed Forces during complex contingencies at home and abroad." In other words, civilians must be harnessed in the service of military objectives in unstable regions or post-conflict areas, rather than focus on their core mission of nurturing U.S. diplomatic interests and reducing poverty. Or, as a source close to the QDR drafting process put it, "It is clear from the deleted parts that what DOD is saying about security assistance is: ‘We want in on the whole shebang.'"

Such is the state of disequilibrium between America's civilian and military resources as it enters the post, post-Cold War world. The years that followed the end of the Soviet era were but a prelude to what will be a far more enduring shift in the topography of geopolitical affairs. For the first time in two decades, U.S. hegemony will demand a price. The transaction Washington has kept with its allies -- generous subsidies in exchange for "full spectrum" control -- will be subject to competing claims. In theory at least, this should bid up the value of nonmilitary methods of protecting U.S. interests overseas. The aforementioned QDR, however, suggests otherwise. It makes numerous and repeated references to the centrality of "access," a catchword for the U.S. military's ability to operate unimpeded anywhere in the world. It identifies as a new and enduring threat "states armed with advanced anti-access capabilities and/or nuclear weapons," a veiled reference to the evolution of China as a regional power and the kind of peer competitor that Washington has made a policy of preempting. The looming rivalry between Beijing and Washington has already replaced Islamic extremism as the main preoccupation of U.S. security planners, the same way al Qaeda filled the void left by the departed Soviet Union on the Pentagon's revolving rotisserie of existential threats. Just as Washington militarized the Cold War and its response to the September 11 attacks, so too is it militarizing its relations with China.

In 2001, the Defense Department produced a study called "Asia 2025," which identified China as a "persistent competitor of the United States," bent on "foreign military adventurism." A U.S. base realignment plan made public in 2004 called for a new chain of bases to be erected in Central Asia and the Middle East, in part to box in China. A 2008 deal between the United States and India that would allow New Delhi to greatly expand its nuclear weapons capability was established very much with China, their mutual rival, in mind. At the same time, the Pentagon is well into a multiyear effort to transform its military base on Guam into its primary hub for operations in the Pacific. While the QDR drily refers to "the Guam buildup" as a means to "deter and defeat" regional aggressors, John Pike of the Washington, D.C. based Globalsecurity.org has speculated that the Pentagon wants to "run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015."

In March 2011, Inside the Navy reported how the U.S. government was deep in the planning stages of a major military buildup in Asia. In response, China is expanding its fleet of diesel-powered subs at a base on Hainan Island and is developing the capacity to attack and destroy satellites as well as aircraft carriers. It has also laid a provocative marker down on a cluster of islands in the South China Sea that are the subject of a simmering territorial row between it and Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan, and Indonesia. In 2010, Beijing identified the South China Sea as a "core interest," a term it previously applied only to Tibet and Taiwan, a move that was seized upon in Washington as a de facto declaration of sovereignty over the region and an augur of Chinese bullying to come. If a Sino-American war is inevitable, it is now generally assumed that a hotly contested South China Sea may be its epicenter.

There is nothing inevitable about an American war with China, however, and even Chinese security planners believe the U.S.-Chinese rivalry will be economic, rather than military, in character. There is, however, an emerging rhythm to Sino-U.S. affairs: The Pentagon, still clinging to the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, reflexively interprets an emerging regional power or political movement as a strategic threat. It gathers allies and punishes neutrals in an undeclared policy to isolate it. Defense analysts exaggerate the threat's military might while discounting the historical factors that inform and motivate it. Politicians in Washington convene hearings and, briefed as to the nation's ill-preparedness, demand an immediate military buildup. Pundits condemn the commander in chief for being soft on America's adversaries even as diplomats and intelligence experts overseas assure the White House that the danger is largely in the minds of those peddling it back home. Such admonitions, however, are obscured or ignored in what is now a key election-year issue. Surveillance is met with countersurveillance. Heightened alert status provokes the same. An incident occurs, either by accident or by design.

It is war.

Author interview: Morning Joe, MSNBC

Morning Joe, MSNBC 2011-8-16 Click here to listen

The Pentagon's new China war plan

Despite budget woes, the military is preparing for a conflict with our biggest rival -- and we should be worried.

This summer, despite America’s continuing financial crisis, the Pentagon is effectively considering trading two military quagmires for the possibility of a third. Reducing its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan as it refocuses on Asia, Washington is not so much withdrawing forces from the Persian Gulf as it is redeploying them for a prospective war with its largest creditor, China.

According to the defense trade press, Pentagon officials are seeking ways to adapt a concept known as AirSea Battle specifically for China, debunking rote claims from Washington that it has no plans to thwart its emerging Asian rival. A recent article in Inside the Pentagon reported that a small group of U.S. Navy officers known as the China Integration Team "is hard at work applying the lessons of [AirSea Battle] to a potential conflict with China."

AirSea Battle, developed in the early 1990s and most recently codified in a 2009 Navy-Air Force classified memo, is a vehicle for conforming U.S. military power to address asymmetrical threats in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf -- code for China and Iran. (This alone raises a crucial point: If the U.S. has had nothing but trouble with asymmetrical warfare for the last 45 years, why should a war with China, or Iran for that matter, be any different?) It complements the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a government white paper that precluded the rise of any "peer competitor" that might challenge U.S. dominance worldwide. The Planning Guidance is the Pentagon’s writ for control of what defense planners call "the global commons," a euphemism for the seaways, land bridges and air corridors that are the arteries of international commerce. For a foreign power to challenge this American dominion is to effectively declare war on the United States, and that is exactly what China appears to be doing in the South China Sea, a resource-rich and highly contested waterway in Southeast Asia.

It was in this spirit that Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Jim Amos, at a dinner hosted by the Center for a New American Security in late May, remarked that the wars in the Persian Gulf were denying Washington the resources it needed to cope with an increasingly assertive China. "We’d like to turn that around," he said. "I don't think we're there to [the extent] we need to be." In his candor, Amos became the latest U.S. military leader to speak about his service’s plans following the Afghanistan drawdown.

A U.S. mobilization in Asia is well underway, in faith with a spring 2001 Pentagon study called "Asia 2025," which identified China as a "persistent competitor of the United States," bent on "foreign military adventurism." Three years later, the U.S. government went public with a plan that called for a new chain of bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, in part to box in the People’s Republic. Similarly, the nuclear energy cooperation deal signed by the U.S. and India in 2008 was an obvious containment maneuver aimed at Beijing. In late March, press reports detailed a major buildup of American forces in Asia, including increased naval deployments and expansive cooperation with partner countries. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is forging ahead with a multi-year effort to transform Guam into its primary hub in the Pacific, an initiative so vast that John Pike of the Washington, D.C.-based GlobalSecurity.org has speculated that Washington wants to "run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015."

Unlike America’s allies in Asia and Europe, however, China is not about to outsource its national security obligations to a foreign power, particularly when it comes to the South China Sea. There more than ever, and not without reason, Beijing identifies the U.S. not as a strategic partner but as an outright threat. In 2007, when China destroyed one of its weather satellites with a ballistic missile, it served as a warning to Washington after the ramming six years earlier of a U.S. spy plane by a Chinese fighter jet off the coast of Hainan Island. Though the crisis that followed was defused diplomatically, it was interpreted by some in Washington as vindication of the throaty Asia 2025. In fact, the clash followed a dramatic rise in the frequency of U.S. overflights in the area during the twilight of the Clinton years, which triggered a demarche from Beijing that slipped through the cracks of the transition to the Bush administration. The Hainan incident, as affair is known, was the inevitable outcome of a highly intrusive American surveillance regime.

In addition to China, Vietnam, Brunei, Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines all have competing claims on several clusters of South China Sea islands. Rather than intervening with quiet diplomacy to untangle this incendiary thicket, the U.S. has starkly sided against Beijing. In March 2010, when a Chinese official was quoted by Japanese media as identifying the region as a "core interest" of Chinese sovereignty, the White House retaliated by declaring that freedom of maritime navigation is a U.S. "national interest." As it turns out, according to the China scholars Nong Hong and Wenran Jiang, writing in the July 1 edition of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation’s China bulletin, the core interest to which the official referred was “the peaceful resolution” of the disputes in question. Despite this, the White House refuses to climb down. Two weeks ago, three U.S. Navy ships paid call on Vietnam, China’s ancient antagonist, for a weeklong joint exercise at a time of strained relations between Beijing and Hanoi, prompting a formal protest from the Chinese. In Manila last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointedly assured her hosts that the U.S. would honor its mutual defense pact with the Philippines and sell it new weaponry on discounted terms.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has encountered the practical limits of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance. In its story about AirSea Battle and the China Integration Team, Inside the Pentagon revealed an oblique, if profound insight from Andrew Krepinevich, the highly regarded head of Washington’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. China, he said, is clearly jousting for control of the Western Pacific and "we have to decide whether we’re going to compete or not. If we’re not, then we have to be willing to accept the shift in the military balance." Otherwise, "the question is how to compete effectively."

Here is a noble appeal for Washington to match its commitments with the resources needed to sustain them, the absence of which has fueled the debt crisis that nearly reduced the United States to a mendicant state. Such are the crippling costs of a defense policy that makes global hegemony a mindless imperative.

S&P Credit Downgrade Shows American Un-Exceptionalism

So how's that "American exceptionalism" thing working out for ya? Read the entire post on the US News & World Report website.