Flotsam and Jetsom

At various times over the last year or so, I have started new posts on different topics, but never got around to finishing them. Most of these are now pretty dated, so I did not bother. But there were three I thought might be worth saving:

The Boumediene Decision (June 12, 2008)

So, the Gitomo "detainees" have a right to federal court review of their detentions and "trials" notwithstanding the fact that Congress passed and the President signed a law depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear such petitions. Thus spake Justice Kennedy (with the concurrence of Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg, of course), despite the oppostion of the President, Congress and 4/9ths of the Supreme Court.

I like the outcome, of course. Gitmo is an embarrassment and the sooner it gets closed, the better. But I must confess to misgivings about the decision on a number of fronts. For one thing, eight of the Supreme Court Justices are so solidly aligned in two blocs (Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg on one side and Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alioto on the other) that the Court has become a tribunal of one. For all practical purposes, Justice Kenedy IS the Supreme Court, and there seems little likelihood that this will change until someone dies or retires. It can't possibly be good to place so much unreviewable power in the hands of one man.

For another, while I like the idea of giving the detainees the rights we give even our confessed mass murderers and most depraved child molesters -- indeed the rights we gave the masterminds of the Third Reich and the holocaust. But for all that, I am troubled by the precedent. Are all prisoners of war (or at least those held in the US) entitled to challenge their detention in federla court. Srely not, but how do we draw the lines?

Lastly, and perhaps most broadly, I struggle -- as the justices themselves do -- with (a) what to call this conflict we are in (is it a war or a police action or something else) and (b) what the role of the Courts is in determining the fates of those caught up in whatever it is we are fighting.

The Future Of Iraq (September 12, 2007)

I have watched with some intereste but little surprise the testimony of Petreaus and Crocker on the "progress" in Iraq. Bottom line: There is some on the military side, although no one is sure that will outlast the American presence; there is none on the politiccal side, and no one is sure that will ever change; and for us to leave now would almost certainly cause a descent onto violence and warlordism similar to that which presaged the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. All that seemed to confirm my own sense of the situation: As much as we would like to, we are not getting out of Iraq any time soon.

But for how long?

According to the NPR story linked above, the following exchange (or something close to it) occurred yesterday between Petreaus and Biden:

Biden: "If the political situation is exactly the same in a year as it is today, would you recommend that we keep shedding the blood of our troops and spending our resources in an effort to help the Iraqis?"

Petreaus: "Well, Senator, I think that is a pretty large speculation . . . "

Biden: "I don't think it's speculation at all."

Petreaus: ". . . but if the situation in a year is exactly what it is tioday, then I think it would be hard to recommend that we keep trying."

According to the NY Times, though, the Iraqis (or at least some of them) think the American "occupiers" will need to stay a lot longer than a year:

Iraqis found themselves in a difficult position on Tuesday as they reflected on the report to Congress by Gen.David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. Although they say there is nothing they want more than to have American soldiers leave Iraq, they also say there is nothing they can afford less. . . .

In interviews four months ago, many Iraqis refused to say how long American troops should stay. Now, however, some say they want them here for a minimum of three years, and maybe even five years. Ms. Zubaidi said she thought five years would be the minimum, adding that the police and army needed to be remade to root out sectarianism.

How do we decide when to leave? The reason to stay is a fear that, if we leave Iraq will fall apart completely, degenerating into warlordism a la Somalia and pre-Taliban Iraq. That would be a ctastrophe from every perspective. But if there is no way to prevent that outcome except by staying for years and years, and perhaps not even then, what sense does in make to stay?

[Ed. Note: Fortunately, today, a year later, it looks now like we might actually be able to leave within a year or two without the consequences that looked so inevitable even a year ago. We'll never know until it happens, but at least there is hope].

Re-Remembering Kennan (July 31, 2007)

Apparently, George Kennan was not the father of the containment strategy pursued by the US throughout the Cold War. Yes, he did write the so-called "long telegram," which ultimately became the most famous of all Foreign Affairs articles, and yes that article did propose a containment strategy, but if Nicholas Thompson's Op-Ed piece in the NYT today is true, the containment policy that the US ultimately pursued was not at all the one Kennan recommended:

The article’s influence was grounded in a misunderstanding. Kennan didn’t make clear whether he intended containment to be primarily a political or military strategy. Despite the article’s ambiguity, everyone assumed the latter. The most important columnist of the time, Walter Lippmann, wrote a series of consecutive critical essays about the X article — later collected in a book that coined a phrase with its title, “The Cold War” — declaring that containment was a military doctrine and a bad one at that.

But in a letter to Lippmann that Kennan never mailed (most likely because his boss, Secretary of State George Marshall, had chastened him for causing a ruckus), Kennan explained that he didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.

The Soviets are making “first and foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and soundness of political life in the victim countries.”

Thompson goes on to argue, rightly I think, that "Kennan’s desired but never executed policy from 60 years ago offers profound wisdom for today:"

Kennan’s insight was that a long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing. Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.

Kennan’s insistence on a political strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the reverse.

A 21st-century rendering of X’s vision of containment would involve the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, an unambiguous renunciation of torture and an abandonment of the notion that our legal and moral norms don’t apply to the current struggle. Kennan believed we gave our opponents a propaganda victory each time we acted in a manner unfitting of our ideals.

“To avoid destruction,” Kennan concluded the X article, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”