Rudi Giuliani claims: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.”
Apart from 9/11, who could argue?
This kind of comment is clearly squalid domestic politics.
But it also reflects something more troubling: a serial loss of proportion and sanity in the face of an Islamist enemy that is increasingly weak, fragmented and ineffective. Its as though there is an equivalence between a group of men who could successfully pull off 9/11 and a man who set fire to his underpants and failed.
It is surely better to react to the enemy for what it now is. Once capable of complex, mass casualty attacks that inflicted billions of dollars of damage, slaughtered thousands and torpedoed the Pentagon and brought down skyscrapers in Manhattan, the international terrorists have fallen on very hard times. We give them ‘free power’ if we still talk about them, as some are, as agents of the apocalypse. And by doing so, this increases the danger that if and when a bomber does get through, we (that is, the American-led West) react in ways that fundamentally hurt us and our free way of life. Peter Beinart has some sensible things to say on this:
‘Here’s a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed…
…even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators, people like Abdulmutallab, Fort Hood gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan and Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan American arrested last year for allegedly plotting to blow up buildings in New York.
These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they’re also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda’s new motto, according to New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, seems to be “If you can’t do the big attacks, do the small attacks.” Not exactly cause for celebration, but certainly not cause for the hysteria that has gripped Washington since Christmas Day.’
In case this sounds like a partisan post, its not. Alongside its serious failures, the Bush Administration has to get credit for helping to disrupt and weaken Al Qaeda, turning it into mostly a second-order threat. This has been helped by other things that have driven AQ’s demise, such as its own self-defeating behaviour.
But this is precisely the point: hawkish Republicans can’t easily have it both ways. If they take credit for the damage dealt to AQ over the past eight years, then they can’t turn around after a failed attack and talk as though the US is still as gravely endangered as it was in 2001.
States targeted by terrorists can’t perfectly safeguard and control airport security, or achieve any kind of absolute security. As for maximalist solutions and absolute campaigns to destroy Al Qaeda completely, such as Bruce Hoffman’s suggestion that the US decisively breaks the cycle of radicalisation, I await more details of an affordable, sustainable and realistic way of doing so without America falling back into the trap of making commitments that exceed its power. Is the most prudent goal, as Hoffman puts it, to leave AQ ‘utterly destroyed’, or is it to marginalise AQ as a nuisance, always with one eye on the limits of our power and our scarce resources?
While these questions are difficult, one thing is clear: we do have a lot of control over how we react. A little proportion and confidence might help to temper a heightened mentality of emergency, in case next time a terrorist does get lucky and countries are tempted to react in ways that inflict great self-harm. A sense of one’s resilience and endurance is valuable as an alternative to an exaggerated sense of one’s own fragility.
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You’ve hit a nerve, I think. It’s strange, isn’t it? Who would have thought that conservative America could relish so much portraying itself — at least implicitly — as fragile, downbeat, gloomy, and frightened. Isn’t that the job of us whining Europeans?
Oh, TR, you need to spend more time around conservative Americans! They always kvetch about their existence as if they’re Christians facing the lions in the Coliseum.
The cardinal reality, unfortunately, is this: Qaeda, regardless of the franchise or the lot working in toto, has come to realize that successful bombings against US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan or even terrible carnage outside of one of our embassies or against civilians of one of our allies get almost no play in the US media.
If they remain fixated on their grand strategy — removing the pillar of US support for their near enemies in the ME and South Asia and North Africa — then they must do more to get into the news cycle. In this regard, an unsuccessful attack digs a zillion times more news hole than, say, maiming a few American USAID contractors in Mauritania or several soldiers in Afghanistan.
Either that, or perhaps this is their bid to bring “total war” — or, at least, the total of what their networked bunch can do at the moment — against the US, waging their war on a media-saturated battlefield.
Much like the early Leninists, if one sat down with the Qaeda hierarchy they would say that they can’t engage in even a cursory effort at “total” war because their pinpricks are merely defensive in nature. Instead of class conflict, however, they might say that they envision a clash of theologies and moralities, and while they’ve taken some offensive actions even these were preemptive and small (Clausewitz would term this “a shield made up of well-directed blows”) and designed only to rally people across the lands of Islam to join them, a cause they have yet to embrace. In the Maoist sense, then, they haven’t reached that phase by which they might march on DC.
So, then, consider the latest fizzled nappy bomb to be a piece of a shield confected of well-directed blows, albeit one that didn’t exactly do much material damage (but, verily, psychological).
The irony, to me anyway, is that in the States the media are bat sh*t crazy over a Nigeria who probably couldn’t have brought the AIrbus down with him PETN diaper, largely overlooking the far more competent, diabolical plot against the CIA in AfPak.
We hit them with drone missiles, and they hit back with a human missile of their own.
hey Thomas,
lol
I wouldn’t put it simply in the conservative camp, or indeed just see it as an American thing. If a 9/11 scale attack happened in Australia, I think we would face similar temptations, though not obviously with the same options as the superpower.
But there is a strain of thought in US politics, and not just on the right, that is given to seeing the US as a fragile experiment, forever on the brink of being taken down by insidious enemies. Some of those enemies are real. But its the way the christmas bomber is talked about as though he succeeded that is striking.
While my intent is not to defend any political party, or the hawkish, dovish, or other members therein, I just want to point out that individuals can have it both ways. Damaging AQ does not suggest that AQ is incapable of any further attack. It simply means that it is less capable of striking at will. An attack involving less planning and fewer individuals could perpetrate just as much damage as 9/11 if biological weapons were used, rather than aircraft. Is that threat significantly lower?
Just to be clear, I am as unimpressed as you are with Bruce Hoffman’s latest op-ed.
schmedlap,
that’s a good counter-argument.
but as Beinart says, damaging AQ may not suggest that it is incapable of further attack, but it does significantly make it harder to inflict complex big ones.
on your biological weapons point: I would stand to be corrected by those with more technical knowledge here, but wouldn’t the acquisition and use of such weapons actually take quite a bit of doing?
No idea. That’s why I posed the question about whether the threat is lower.
“…but wouldn’t the acquisition and use of such weapons actually take quite a bit of doing?”
The answer is “yes.” Similar to any other kind of terrorist threat, if all you want to do is get some ricin and attack a single individual, it doesn’t take much in terms of knowledge or resources. While that is technically a “BW” incident, it isn’t a mass casualty event. If you want a true mass casualty event (hundreds to thousands infected), it will take a substantial amount of BW agent (depending on what you want, anthrax, smallpox, tularemia), and if you want a pure agent and a good, tested delivery system, you are talking significant resources and trials before being able to carry it out.
And as with every terrorist event, the more complex it gets, the more people are involved, and the easier it is to expose and stop.
btw because I’m a lazy lazy man, I might just duck out of joining in more discussion here, as right now I’m not quite up to the ‘post-then-defend-your-argument’ mode of blogging. but KOW readers, please do jump in.
Can’t any of you see that conservatism is lifeless? it is dead. Conservatism represents the effeminate side of the majority.
It is a losers grouping and will ultimately lead to slavery of the majority if it is adhered to.
Drive a stake through its walking-dead heart.
The Republican Party is dead too. It is run by an Obama stooge.
The only way to defeat Obama;\’s Marxist/Black Supremacy regime is to form a right wing party which they, the racists, will call racist!. A party which they, the Marxists, will call fascist (All anti communists are called fascist by the reds, they only tolerate the weak and stupid conservatives as opposition).
If you have the guts to not cower, feel guilty, or be terrified when called a racist or fascist, then become part of a strong new right wing party of total ruthlessness. All conservatives need not apply!
If not, to hell with you! You are part of the enemy, just as conservatives are.
This site is entitled “Kings of War.” But all I see are queens of ignorant rhetoric laced by corsets of cowardice. They sap yap, but you can tell that they will not organize and will not ever be part of a collective which is struggling against tyranny.
Their flag is a snake. A snake that crawls under rocks when it gets too hot. A snake that is always alone. A snake that dies alone. A snake that hasn’t a clue about political warfare and prefers the comfort of their fat bodies and television minds. In other words a snake is a ghost. Their flag is yellow too! I will tread on you.
I wave the bonny blue flag that bears a single star. White not red or yellow.
I don’t even understand what that means. Seriously, you’re comment was so ridiculous and confusing that I have no idea what it actually means.
Politicians of EITHER domestic political party here in the States will make contradictory, or frankly silly, statements from time to time. The horror! :)
Well, human beings are contradictory – aren’t they? – and fallible and confuse themselves and others, at times on purpose and at times inadvertantly. Even very good politicians with excellent track records in areas such as, say, crime?
What seems to be squalid domestic politics is really free men and free women arguing over how they should live. It gets ugly, sure, but I don’t see how freedom can be any other way. I don’t know why I feel the need to state the obvious. Bad blog comment habit! Please disregard if so inclined!
Threats are perceived differently by different audiences and if you divorce the above from a certain context, then I think, it becomes hard to see why they are perceived differently. It’s easy to say, “oh, come now, calm down, the threat is not that great and it’s been degraded,” but to a person who lives a fairly normal life in the US, travels a bit by air – really wants only to be left alone – and is in the midst of a great political debate about the size and scope of government and the quality of that governance, then the threats posed are viewed differently. You see, we’ve spent a lot of money on Homeland Security and the like and I think some of what you are seeing (in the general public anyway) is a kind of disgust at perceived poor governance. The security threats perceptions take place within that larger emotional “space”. I’m not defending the reactions, but rather, trying to understand them. We’re human, remember? Not automatons.
Guilianis comment is, as you stated, pure political theater. Unfortunately such things are the reality of politics in this country. Its part of the larger partisan blame game that tends to obscure what we should be discussing.
The response of some Conservatives, which seems to be a combination of incoherent blabbering and arm flailing, shouldn’t be surprising though. Movement Conservatives (the demagogues of the right) have bought into a false “Clash of civilizations” narrative that puts the US front in center in the conflict against Islamists. This line of thought, which tends to engender just a little bit of paranoia and irrationality, seems to lead quite a few of these people to overstate any and all threats related to Islamists (Its basically a narrative that lends to a siege mentality in short).
The ‘fragile republic’ may sound twee, but is far from an accurate term for the USA.
The threat from global terrorists has been with us for a very long time, I recall the mainly Palestinian airliner hijackings in my youth and the pre-9/11 “siren” calls regarding use of WMD.
Who has inflated the threat from global terrorism? Yes, when successful such terrorist attacks are painful, a result far from being a ‘war’.
I follow much of David Kilcullen’s argument that GWOT inflated USA attention to those who are the ‘Accidental Guerilla(s)’ and pose little threat to the USA, the West and others.
Who has gained from this inflation? I am sure President Saleh of Yemen hopes he will, as did President Musharraf in Pakistan – who built up his conventional military and ignored the home-grown jihadists. Nearer to home are those who seek greater oversight of our daily lives – once called by President Eisenhower’s the military-industrial complex – now we have a far more powerful complex ready to sell a “fix”.
The current world terrorist coalition AQ does pose a threat, “near” and “far”. I do wonder has AQ gained more indirectly than directly from our panicked response. We fail all too easily to keep it in perspective.
For credibility purposes (I realize it will do no good with some posters) I preface my comment with the fact that I have never been a member of any political party. I readily admit to being a “conservative” in the sense of interpretation of the Constitution (originalist nor literalist) but surprisingly the last time it was checked by my doctor I do have a brain and according to the various machines, it appears to still be functioning. Thus I must say that some of the posters who equate conservatism with some mindless, automatons following the current “master” (depending on the degree of your bias insert Limbaugh or I suppose one of the talking heads on the ever evil Fox News or whatever your talking point tells you) need to do a bit more homework.
Anyway, edging a bit closer to the issues raised by the original post, let me just say that Rudi is an amateur compared to the strategy apparent in the current administration for identifying a “crisis,” “emergency,” “catastrophe” etc. (whether real, imagined or concocted) to then provide the needed segue for the next draconian and Constitutionally ultra vires program for its “progressive” agenda. I mean none other than Rahm Emanuel, His Chief of Staff, said it best: “You never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
This approach has a rich if disgusting history beginning in the 20th century that brought us such successful chapters in our history as Prohibition, the New Deal, War on Poverty and perhaps best of all the mass internment of US citizens of Japanese descent in WWII.
I agree with almost all your points. But what was wrong with the New Deal? Just curious.
A good deal of credible research in recent years has disclosed that much off the New Deal was actually counter productive to “fixing” the Great Depression and was more a function of the Progressive zeal for centralized governmental control. (for example see Professor Winkler’s Senate testimony from about a year ago:http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=1022a46e-33f1-4d4d-ac38-381541c0d2ff)
I also neglected to add in my non-exhaustive list of examples of America at its worst when reacting to “emergencies” many provisions of the Patriot Act and the ill-advised policies regarding POW status and treatment of detainees after 9/11 under the Bush Administration. The point is I believe that even in America, the “land of the free” etc., if the people are sufficiently scared, inflamed, worried etc. by the “emergency” portrayed (or even worse created) by the government, they are willing to accept even the most draconian policies ostensibly imposed to “protect” them.
This is a bit low for Giuliani. Blaming Obama for this is a bit like blaming Bush for Sept. 11. To the best of available knowledge Obama had no reason to think that this would happen, nor (again, to the best of my knowledge) any reason to think that the intelligence community and State couldn’t handle it. If he had campaigned on a platform of reforming intelligence then this would be somewhat justified, but he didn’t.
Which brings us to another point, wasn’t Bush supposed to have led an effort to reform intelligence so this didn’t happen again?
As to Rudi hitting below the belt, I would just say that it is (or should be) axiomatic, at least in national security matters, that the President as Commander in Chief, is in fact and law, ultimately and personally responsible for all the nation does or fails to do in terms of ensuring its security. This is the guiding principle of the military chain of command and should be no different for the CinC.
As for your suggestion that He did not campaign on reforming the intelligence community, I suppose the first issue is to define what is meant by “campaigning.” In any event, even a cursory review of the campaign reflects a rather consistent thread of continuing concern about the efficacy of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and in particular the actual effectiveness of inter-agency intelligence sharing and analysis.
See for example His Homeland Security platform from His campaign website:
“Improve Intelligence Capacity and Protect Civil Liberties
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Improve Information Sharing and Analysis: Barack Obama will improve our intelligence system by creating a senior position to coordinate domestic intelligence gathering; establishing a grant program to support thousands more state and local level intelligence analysts and increasing our capacity to share intelligence across all levels of government.
#
Give Real Authority to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board: Created by Congress and recommended by the 9/11 Commission, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board needs to be substantially reformed and empowered to safeguard against an erosion in American civil liberties. As president, Barack Obama will support efforts to strengthen the Board with subpoena powers and reporting responsibilities, will give the Board a robust mandate designed to protect American civil liberties and will demand transparency from the Board to ensure accountability.
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Strengthen Institutions to Fight Terrorism: Overseas, Barack Obama will establish a Shared Security Partnership Program to invest $5 billion over three years to improve cooperation between U.S. and foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This program will include information sharing, as well as funding for training, operations, border security, anti-corruption programs, technology, and the targeting of terrorist financing.”
See also none other than Mother Jones for more details as to what His campaign was doing regarding intelligence reform:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/09/spies-who-love-obama
While there were of course efforts by GWB to “reform” our intelligence community and process, this has been true to one degree or another ever since the Church Commission in the mid 1970′s. My own belief is that given the dynamic nature of “intelligence,” every President owes the nation his or her best efforts at continually seeking to improve “it.”
For responsibility, that might be the theory but in practice it seems to me that every single leader tries to duck blame. Military, civilian, Republican, Democrat, I don’t think that there was a single major American leader in my lifetime who has taken full responsibility for some crisis.
On continual reform, that’s actually an interesting way to put it. I could rebut it with the argument that too much interference will result in chaos, but I personally feel that the intelligence community never did get enough reform to create a functioning, central, civilian controlled intelligence agency. I’m not sure if I want every president to try to alter the government organizations, but I would like a president to do more with these particular ones.
I don’t deny the political reality of what you say but I still think our expectations for our presidents should be high, even if not often realistic.
By continual reform, I agree that there is a very fine line that separates it from “meddling” or “tinkering” but within reasonable limits, I think the kaizen approach is appropriate for government bureaucracies if we can keep them from creating sub-bureaucracies for continual improvement!
hey all,
quick point of clarification: the post is not intended to be a narrow assault on conservatives, but on hawks of any stripe who have a disproportionate vision of the threat and America’s response.
Indeed, conservative realists are some of the most forthright critics of things like threat inflation and the pursuit of total security at any price.
Well, that begs an obvious question. Why bother?
Again not to put too fine a point on our posts that are often done quickly, but I would modify your point about “hawks” to include “doves” (I realize these are rather “weaselly” terms in that we have not defined them) since some of the same negative fallout can occur when the “disproportionate vision of the threat and America’s response” is a result of the pollyannaish thinking that often characterizes the world view of “doves.”
That’s kind of what I was getting at. If the point was to “assault” a group of unnamed people who are crudely assigned one ill-defined label, as if they are all of one view, then what are we to take away from this? That straw men are bad people?
It seems more than sufficient to say that the AQ threat is diminished and responses formulated in reaction to public concern over the pocket-rocket bomber will be of questionable merit. That is what I take away from this piece – and I agree with it. I don’t understand the motivation behind singling out one ill-defined group over another, especially if it is not even clear who they are.
Bogeymen, just like idols, can be all things to all people. Lumping together anyone whom we disagree with under the umbrella of “hawks” is about as useful and productive as calling all our adversaries “terrorists.”
Schmedlap,
it is not a straw man to suggest that there are hawkish public figures, such as Giuliani and Hoffmann, who have a disproportionate vision of the threat and what America’s response should be. Maybe ‘alarmists’ would be a better description. Anyway, it seemed worth a post.
But this kind of blogging exchange gets a bit old, doesn’t it?
“But this kind of blogging exchange gets a bit old, doesn’t it?”
Perhaps, but it nevertheless affords some of us (at least from my American perspective) an opportunity to “vent” outside of the PC-speak that sadly has supplanted a great deal of the true intellectual inquiry and discourse one would expect at institutions of higher learning.
Indeed, AQ can only muster small attacks during these times but they affect and frighten many. And the US government whether led by a Democrat or a Republican must do something to prevent these terroristic attacks. But the question still remains, what should be the most appropriate and effective action?