RETHINKING SECURITY

In the midst of the ongoing fracas over GOP congressional officials’ attempt to undermine Obama’s Iran policy initiatives, Max Fisher made the observation that maybe Congress just isn’t that good at foreign policy after all. Other analysts warned that legislators were “bullying” the US back into another Iraq war,  and others hyperbolically denounce the insistence of GOP hawks that they sign off on the war against the Islamic State. In particular, Foreign Policy’s Micah Zenko, however, was far more puzzled than upset about Congress’s apparent desire for an open-ended war in Iraq juxtaposed with its fury over Obama’s initiative to make peace with Tehran: 

Funny when Congress weighs-in on FP:  Start open-ended airwar, no problem. Broker non-binding nonpro agreement, outrage.

Zenko, however, is by no means alone. Other critics have similarly slammed Congress, arguing that it acts as if Obama is no longer the president, and ridiculing GOP insistences that Obama must include a ground war plan in his strategy to defeat the Islamic State. To hear some critics, the opposition-dominated legislature is reckless, irresponsible, even potentially traitors against the state. There was, however, something quite fishy about this. Hadn’t the roles reversed, as we had seen this kind of fight before but in the opposite direction? 

The biggest problem with many of these criticisms, however, was their denigration of the legislature. The way it sounded, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for wondering if someone should be exercising, ahem, some oversight over that silly Congress before it really makes a mess of things! But it was not so long ago, however, that Zenko and many others had a different opinion about the executive branch and its use of power vs. the legislative branch. That, namely, the latter needed to reign in the former. Oversight was the name of the game, and Congress and the Senate apparently really needed to exercise sorely lacking control, opposition, and critical questioning when it came to an President that was about to drone, Navy SEAL, and air-war America into “endless war." 

What brave Americans could stand up to such a tyrant? Who would be the noble Brutus to Obama’s Caesar? The legislative branch, many critics said. Stepping back into the time machine to the height of the debates over ”America’s forever wars,“ we saw critics that were convinced that an executive branch, armed with allegedly novel drone and cyber technologies and special operations forces, was waging a war without limits in the dark. And it was up to the legislature to put the breaks on the "imperial” president before “dangerous” precedents were set and America’s military and paramilitary establishment completed its allegedly fast-moving transformation into an unaccountable praetorian guard.  

Remember, for example, the epic and troubling saga of the “secret wars” revealed within the pages of Confront and Conceal? Were you one of the many Washingtonians that picked up The Way of the Knife from a Kramerbooks shelf in Dupont? Perhaps you also may have argued that Congress was abdicating its solemn duties to weigh in on the Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) as it pertained to America’s creeping involvement in the war against the Islamic State. Maybe you, like I did, shared this excellent piece on the origin of the AUMF, but unlike me felt a tinge of nostalgia at the recounting of Congress’ scrutiny of war powers on other occasions. 

I don’t need to say much more to conjure up the mood of the times. It really was a different time and place. How did things change? A new terrorist group (ISIS), the near-complete collapse of the Iraqi military, and Iran pushing its weight in various civil wars makes a big difference in intellectual climate, I guess (I would also say that it feels a hell of a lot closer to 2016 elections, but that’s for another post). But bear with me as I continue my recounting of those good old days of natsec analysis. 

Yes, analysts did paint a dire picture. All seemed lost. The US was on the road to “endless war,” with both flesh and blood human SOF operators and tele-operated robotic killing machines leading the way. But all was not lost! It seemed like a war powers clash was looming that would pit an out-of-control, power-aggrandizing executive branch against a legislative branch determined to draw lines in the sand and re-assert control. The moment that many critics of the last few years of the counterterrorism wars had waited for so long for had dawned, and the drones would finally be grounded and the SEALs and JSOC units brought home. Except that wasn’t what happened at all, if the storm of angst the legislative reckoning stirred up is evidenced.  

Congress brought the oversight and acted to curb executive power. It did not do meekly, hesitantly, or half-measuredly. It did so in a blunt, aggressive, partisan, and risky manner, and it put Zenko and many of his peers in the odd position of recoiling at such an assertion of legislative will and demanding that this uppity and arrogant legislature sit down, shut up, learn its place, and let the grown-ups talk. The same entity that was supposedly going to provide oversight and reign in the CT wars, in other words, is now being publicly berated for its insolence in defying the President and roundly mocked for trying to sit at the Big Boys’ Table. What happened? Why the big contradiction? 

First, let’s note something that is very inconvenient to say right now about domestic politics and foreign policy: domestic politics can be foreign policy, and foreign policy can be domestic politics. Despite the mythologizing at play that casts the GOP move as somehow unique and unprecedented, Congress sometimes does challenge the executive on foreign policy and national security and challenge it by skirting the boundaries of Logan Act violations. But when it does, it isn’t usually in a form that looks as clean, pure, and “aw-shucks” idealistic and unobjectionable as the West Wing and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-esque dreams of many analysts. In short, Congress is populated by politicians who act in a partisan manner, whether they write open letters to Iranians or Latin American jefes in Nicaragua:  

The writers stress that they all oppose further money for rebel campaigns against the Sandinista Government. In a veiled reference to the Reagan Administration, the letter says that if the Sandinistas do hold genuine elections, those who are “supporting violence” against the Nicaraguan leaders would have “far greater difficulty winning support for their policies than they do today.”

In his retort, Representative Gingrich argues that the letter writers “step across the boundary from opposition to a policy, to undercutting that policy.”

He also notes that the members of Congress offer to discuss these issues with Mr. Ortega and the junta. In Mr. Gingrich’s view, “This clearly violates the executive branch’s exclusive prerogative of negotiating with a foreign government." 

The letter, by the way, was addressed "Dear Comandante.” And it was also dubbed a possible violation of the Logan Act and an imposition on the authority of the President. In fact, some argued (with some justifiable foundation) that the Dear Comandante files quite blatantly suggested some helpful advice for an adversarial foreign power in its dealings with the US (at the expense of a sitting President): 

As Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, we regret the fact that better relations do not exist between the United States and your country. We have been, and remain, opposed to U.S. support for military action directed against the people or government of Nicaragua. …..

If [genuine elections] were to occur, the prospects for peace and stability throughout Central America would be dramatically enhanced. Those responsible for supporting violence against your government, and for obstructing serious negotiations for broad political participation in El Salvador would have far greater difficulty winning support for their policies than they do today.

So let’s dispense with the pious outrage and willingness to label fellow Americans “traitors” for something many other fellow Americans seem to have regarded as perfectly acceptable: undermining a President’s foreign policy and speaking directly (and even giving advice) to a hostile foreign government. Apparently that kind of thing is far less taboo in national security politics than is popularly believed. 

Now, to be perfectly clear I resolutely oppose chicanery of this sort, regardless of the party and faction that performs it. But it would be dishonest not to observe empirically that many of our elected representatives have no such compunctions about trying to create their own foreign policies and throwing a monkey wrench into the President’s. And that the phrase “politics stops at the water’s edge,” historically speaking, is one of the many myths of American civic religion. Partisanship over foreign policy and national security is as throughly American as apple pie, Mom, the flag, and heart-attack inducing fast-food products. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that the legislative branch always is a backseat driver. In most things (especially when the President’s policy is politically popular), Congress would prefer to defer to the President. Indeed, as Joshua Foust has stated more times than necessary, one of the few things about the current President’s foreign policy that is wildly popular among bipartisan audiences for a long stretch of time was its counterterrorism and targeted killing efforts. Why would Congress, one wonders, mess with a politically popular program? Especially when doing so might directly involve Congress in the regulation of a murky, often haphazard covert operational program that they can always blame the President for should it ever go wrong? 

Heads, Congress can ride the President’s coattails or at the very minimum get out of his way when he has public support and momentum at his back. Tails, Congress can yell “YOU HAD ONE JOB!” and castigate him for those oh-so-obviously wrong policies they did nothing whatsoever to curtail. If you are a Congresscritter, this is a win-win situation for you. So why would you go out of your way to exercise oversight, especially if it meant picking a fight with the President? 

One possible answer is that you have dramatic policy differences with the President. It is no secret that many within the GOP are vehemently opposed to the President’s Iran policy, and view it quite literally as a deal with the devil. One is more likely to see a policy as an executive power grab (as the GOP signatories to the Iran letter have incorrectly argued) if the alleged power grab/overreach concerns a policy choice they deeply and bitterly disagree with. While epically shoddy by the standards of national security law experts, it is not as if the Iran letter signatories’ outrage over supposed executive overreach is really that much more ill-informed than the legal stylings of drone and counterterrorism opponents regarding the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). 

Perhaps one might observe that neither actually understand the relevant law and regulatory institutions in question and simply have an deep-seated policy preference that must by default cast the policy choice they oppose as thoroughly illegitimate. Another possibility is that – *gasp* – the politicians in Congress see an opening and are trying to play to what they perceive as voter ambivalence and negative feelings regarding the Iran deal. Not as idealistic of a motivation I guess, but still “accountability” in action! 

When it comes to the war against the Islamic State and the AUMF, Congress has finally stepped up and seems hell-bent on holding the administration to the fire about its war plans: 

HASC Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, echoing a slew of Republican senators, wants specifics on the Obama administration strategy for defeating the violent Sunni group. 

“Over the past year, the developments in CentCom have been troubling. The rise of [Islamic State], questions about the future security situation in Afghanistan, the government of Yemen’s fall to Iranian backed rebels, and the prospect of a deal ratifying Iran as a threshold nuclear power all have created serious stress on our strategic position and on our alliances,” Thornberry said in a version of his hearing opening statement released Monday evening.

“Any notion that the US could pivot away from the Mid East toward other regions has proven to be naïve at best,” he said. “Part of the challenge here is the absence of a comprehensive strategy across the Middle East. The limited approach that the president has taken has left instability and weak, or failed, states from Libya to Yemen.”

Thornberry wants to hear about “a comprehensive strategy, or at least the foundations of a strategy, which will help provide a roadmap toward a more stable Middle East led by responsible actors.”

A Congressman, and the chairman of an important legislative body at that, demanding a clear strategy? Sounds like oversight in action! And nor is Congress the only body asking the tough questions about the executive’s war-making in Iraq. Sen. Orrin Hatch lobbed this scathing criticism recently: 

“And here we have the president coming up with this — I think it’s utterly stupid — proposal,” Hatch told KSL News Radio. “And he’s binding the next president also with really stupid language.” “Any president worth his or her salt is going to ask for as much authority as they can get, so at least the ISIS people know that he has the authority to come in on them anyway he wants to.” ….

"Most importantly, the president should be asking for an authorization that would not impose any artificial and any unnecessary limitations such as those based on time, geography and type of force that could interfere with our strategic objectives of defeating the Islamic State,” he said.

“What he’s doing is tying his own hands, and stupidly tying his own hands,” he said. “I mean my goodness, talk about telegraphing weakness. That’s what he’s doing.

To be sure, not all of the opposition has come from hawks unhappy about limitations in the Obama administration’s war plans. But that’s really sideways to the underlying point at hand here. Regardless of who is holding the administration to account and what they want, analysts like Zenko – logically speaking – should be jumping for joy. 

Finally, that unaccountable, imperial, power-grabbing chief executive is getting some oversight and accountability, right? Especially on matters as serious and grave as how to handle an adversarial state’s nuclear program and what scope of war powers to give the President as the existing AUMF continues its decay and the executive looks as if he might commit America to an entirely new front in the ongoing counterterrorism wars. This is exactly what dovish critics of ”find, fix, finish, and exploit“ have been wishing for, so they should be happy. 

Instead, Zenko and others have reacted with shock and horror.  Indeed, Zenko carps that: 

Wish GOP Senators were as interested debating and challenging who the US bombs, as they are with who US negotiates with.

But Mr. Zenko, they are! Just not, I think, in the way you would like. If oversight, challenge, and asking the tough questions is the desired goal, then the likes of Thornberry and Hatch are doing so and with great vigor and gusto. It’s a flat-out misrepresentation to say that GOP senators (and congressmen) lack the passion of opposition and single-mindedness of purpose in "debating and challenging who the US bombs” that they bring to their furor over “who the US negotiates with." 

This whole sorry affair exposes the real problem: critics of US defense and security policy conflate "oversight” with Congress and the Senate agreeing with their policy preferences. But oversight is……just…..oversight. There is no inherent normative value to oversight, unless you think that any challenge that issues from the legislature to the executive branch is inherently a good thing in at least some shape or form. Moreover, oversight is also not equivalent to adversarial oversight.

Refusing to exercise detailed oversight, and saying “we’re going to put the ball in your court but blame you if you fail” is a kind of oversight, even if it may seem like a negation of oversight. The folks on Capitol Hill still authorize the monies to keep the wars – covert or not – going. It is not as if the legislature is a rubber stamp. As we are now seeing, your elected representatives can make life quite difficult for Obama should they decide to. But this is, according to many critics that previously desired oversight, somehow a problem. 

Either the legislature has the wisdom, insight, and duty to meaningfully exercise oversight – even if it means doing so in a way that critics find objectionable – or the President should be unencumbered to confront, conceal, drone, craft the ISIS war policy, and negotiate with Iran.  Critics cannot have it both ways, and has been a fascinating journey to watch so many that desired that the legislative branch take a more hands-on role in regulating and rolling back the executive in national security suddenly declare the body they invested with such hopes utterly and completely unfit to do so. 

It is interesting how neatly this encapsulates so many bad cliches about terrorism and armed conflict: 

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said on MSNBC that the U.S. cannot “kill our way out” of the war against ISIS, bringing up job creation as a long-term solution to stopping the terror army.

“We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them, so are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them, we cannot kill our way out of this war,” Harf said. “We need, in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs.”

“We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies, so they can have job opportunities for these people.”

So here we have, in no real order: 

• The strange denial of the core role of a violent bargaining process in determining conflict outcomes and the way that actors conceptualize their chances of success and failure. Killing is the coin of the realm in conflict, and though policy and strategy must guide it war consists of the organized taking of human life by those that have otherwise failed to peacefully resolve their differences. 
• Poverty and lack of economic opportunity causes terrorism! Err, no. Research in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests a prominent role for youth employment and the production of high-quality terrorism, larger studies still seem to suggest otherwise. 
• We can stop the terrorists by improving governance in the states that produce them! But only after we propose an essay contest dedicated to the former leader of a country that is only slightly less backward than ISIS in its view of religion, the state, gender relations, and punishment and muzzle the only authority that issues regular reports on how well the US has helped with Afghan governance! 

In particular what is most galling is the way this press conference denies the centrality of violence to conflict while – empirical evidence and recent conflicts be damned – overpromising when it comes to both the potential effects of one nonviolent remedy (economic improvement) and US capacity to implement another (governance and institutional reform of states that breed terrorists). When we add the studied denial of religious and ideological influence, it suggests some fundamental problems with how we are approaching the nature of the security challenges the US is currently facing. 

Unsurprisingly, the phrase “root cause” was a clue about all of this. The problematic aspect of “root cause” explanation is both in its identification of root cause (which tend to bland, generic, and often either empirically dicey or outright wrong) and the denial of root cause and motivation when it goes against our preferred view of the world and what motivates the people that we fight. 

Even if root cause explanations have some truth, they are also often a tall order to address. Assuming we might know, for example, turning the Middle East into Switzerland would be guaranteed to end the current iteration of terrorism once and for all. Would the US still have the capacity to do it? Given the tangle of economic, institutional, and political challenges involved the answer would be to not make the US ability to follow through with such a plan an assumption that you’d stake money on. Our capacity to do so at present, if judged by our performance at institutional reform of partner states in recent conflicts and our inability to exert leverage over allies whose behavior fuels terrorism, seems to be lacking. 

But most pernicious all is the way in which “root cause” explanations tiptoe around the question of combat. As Antulio Echevarria pointed out, wars over ideas are more of a tangible reality than the “war of ideas.” Yes, intellectual battles are indeed waged in coffee houses, universities, intellectual journals, and public debates. But if the “war of ideas” occurs at the same time as wars over ideas (such as, for example, the Thirty Years War or the United States Civil War), the latter ultimately may decide the former. 

Which brings us back to the subject of violent death and destruction. Yes, no one won a war by simply knocking off more of theirs than they take of ours. But this is also equivalent to saying that running a business isn’t solely about making money or politics isn’t solely about elections. At the end of the day, the test of battle sets the conditions for everything else. It is bad enough that we burden ourselves with the other cliches that Harf elucidated; it is depressing that she raises and then promptly dismisses the importance of what those risking on their lives on the air or the ground are seeking to achieve. The challenge is tough enough as is without such confusion. 

It is important to notice the way that representation decisions like these affect the predictions that the computational models will make. In particular, including more or less information in the cases’ relational structure can make significant changes in the calculated strength of an analogical correspondence, If we assume representations that are too sparse, we risk predicting that the analogy between this Persian Gulf war case and this WWII case would be highly ambiguous. 

For example, if Germany is mapped to Iraq, then we have correspondence between the relationship of invading (Germany/Ukraine and Iraq/Kuwait) and the relationship of contained-within (Ukraine/Grains and Kuwait/oil wells). If the Soviet Union is mapped instead to Iraq, then we have a correspondence between the relationship of destroying (Soviet Union/grains and Iraq/oil wells) and that of possession or ownership (Soviet Union/Grains and Iraq/oil wells). If only the relationships of invading, containment, destroying, and possession are included in the relational structure of these cases, then the comparative strength of either analogical interpretation would be the same. However, the analogy between these two cases is intuitively very strong, lacking the ambiguity that an impoverished representation would predict. The obvious mapping is that Iraq is like the Soviet Union, as their decision to destroy the Kuwaiti oil wells was analogous to when Stalin ordered the destruction of resources in the Ukraine. 

These cases are two examples of the exact same strategy. Instances of this abstract pattern of planning behavior are so prevalent in our culture that we’ve given the pattern a name, scorched earth policy, so that we could refer to it again and again in analogous cases, whether they appear in warfare or in completely different domains such as politics or business. To account for the comparative strength of this interpretation of the analogy over other possibilities, we must assume that the representations of these cases are much richer. When we consider the abstract similarities that are found in the planning that is done in these two cases, the correspondence between the two cases becomes clear. The agent that is doing the planning in these cases (Stalin/ Hussein) has some adversarial relationship with some other agent (Hitler/ Bush). This planning agent imagines a likely future where the adversary acquires possession of some resources (grain/oil) that are currently possessed by the planner. 

They imagine that the adversary will make use of these resources to further the pursuit of their adversarial plan (march on to Russia/ control the Middle East). They decide that the best plan is to do something (destroy grain/blow up oil wells) that will cause these resources to be destroyed, or to make it impossible that the adversary could make use of them, and to do so before the adversary gains possession. While the rich relational correspondence between these two military examples is described using natural language in the preceding paragraph, a corresponding mental representation language would necessarily include structures to refer to the adversarial relationship, the imagination of a likely future, the acquisition of resources, the expenditure of resources in an adversarial plan, the goal of disabling a resource, and the execution deadline.

 It is this collection of relationships that constitutes the representation of the strategy and which also makes a significant contribution to judgments of analogical similarity to every other case that describes an instance of this sort of strategic behavior.

Gordon, Andrew S. (2004-07-16). Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge (pp. 17-18). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

Merkel: 

I hope that we shall be able to solve [the Ukraine conflict] conflict by diplomatic means because I think by military means it cannot be solved,“ Merkel said through a translator.

Meanwhile in Ukraine: 

KIEV, Ukraine—Rebels backed by Russia launched a new offensive in recent weeks to provoke a fresh round of peace talks and broker more favorable truce terms, Ukraine said on Monday.

Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military, said that repeated attempts by the rebels to surround and storm the Ukrainian-held transport hub of Debaltseve were an attempt to gain leverage over Kiev in the negotiations.

“The political aim of capturing the bridgehead of Debaltseve is the desire of the militants’ Russian curators to force Ukraine to make concessions to the bandits and sign a truce with them on the Kremlin’s conditions,” he said at a briefing Monday.

Seems like someone forgot to tell the men attacking the bridgehead, Chancellor Merkel. The farce of this entire conversation is that the Ukraine crisis is driven precisely by military means for political ends. Military means such as Russian special operations forces operators and military intelligence, Russian regular forces, Russian artillery, Russian-backed separatists that pack the punch to go toe to toe with the Ukrainian government, etc. 

And all made possible by the fact that Moscow sits pretty behind a wall of nuclear missiles. 

"No military solution” or “no military means” = “I am unwilling to pay the cost (or take the risks) to achieve a political objective on my own terms.” Which is perfectly fine. Strategy follows policy, and if the policy cannot be realistically achieved by the military means available or the state in question does not believe it can achieve its desired aims at a cost acceptable to it, good on them. 

“No military solutions” is just one of the many euphemisms and half-truths in the political lexicon, a cousin of “surgical strike” and “exit strategy." 

The US has opted to pursue a strategy of control, with short-term objectives of containment and (some) rollback and a long term objective (it seems) of rolling back the Islamic State completely. But in doing so Washington is setting the state for the expansion of Iranian influence – and a backlash is beginning to emerge in Western policy circles. How to interpret this? 

In my piece with Nick Prime on control and US strategy in Iraq and Syria, many likely did not pay attention to our aside: 

If the Obama administration truly thought ISIL was the worst of the worst, they would be open to options that might more directly benefit the likes of Bashar al Assad or an expansionist Iran. Yet they would prefer that striking ISIL and other terror groups not benefit Assad.

More bluntly, how much does Washington want ISIL/ISIS/Daesh (I have opted to refer to it as the Islamic State here) stopped? How much would it be willing to trade off other priorities? 

This poses hard questions for Washington, questions that unfortunately are not getting responsible answers. Like it or not, the regional situation that US action in Iraq has in large part built makes US action against the Islamic State one step forward and one step back in terms of curtailing Iran. However, Washington does not get to rewind the clock – Iranian expansion post-2003 is a hard reality, as is the fact that American policymakers seem to be willing to put consideration of it on the back burner due to the political momentum behind striking the Islamic State. 

A (confusing) history of violence

The intra-regional, inter-state, and intra-state issues surrounding the war against the Islamic State are quite tangled. 

First, there is obviously the small matter of Iraqi local politics. The Islamic State was once a part of the motley group of murderous malcontents that followed one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as he cut a bloody swath through Iraq’s sectarian Sunni-Shiite civil war. It is conventional wisdom now that the sectarian bias and oppression of Iraq’s post-Surge government helped lay the seeds for IS’ meteoric rise, but that’s not quite all of the problems involved in the matter. 

There is, as evidenced by the heavy participation of the Kurdish peshmerga and even the PKK, a significant Kurdish dimension to the current war against the Islamic State. Which has traditionally been something of a worry for Turkey and Iraq’s central government even if the latter successfully clinched an oil deal with the Kurds due to the need for a united front against the Islamic State. 

Meanwhile, in Syria the civil war helped generate much of the Islamic State’s current territorial gains and created a space for them to operate. So the civil war is now multi-sided: between Bashar Assad’s brutal regime, the Islamic State, various rebel groups and sub-groupings of rebel groups. 

Looming over all of this is Iran. Iran and Iranian proxies back Assad, Iran backs and directs groups currently shadowing Israel’s frontiers, and Iran backs key Iraqi militia and is going all-in to prevent Iraq from being taken over by the Islamic State or Sunni groups hostile to it. Iran and its proxies have invested significant blood and treasure in Iraq and Syria – its clients, if Assad’s casualty list is evidenced, have bled far more. 

However, Sunni Gulf States and others that view Iran as a threat are also both heavily engaged against the Islamic State and partially responsible for creating it – they, after all, funneled an enormous amount of both nonlethal and lethal support to their own proxies, helping create the chaos necessary for the Islamic State to rise.  They and Iran may be nominally “on the same side” when it comes to fighting the Islamic State, but this seems like more of a strange coincidence than cause for geopolitical cooperation and concert. 

American policy, strategy, and the problem of limited aims

Washington faces a hard problem. Having deposed Tehran’s opponent Saddam Hussein, they directly enabled the spread of Iranian power. Of course, at the time no one cared. The idea that Tehran could spread its tentacles farther out once it no longer faced the serious threat of Iran-Iraq War 2.0 never occurred to those hellbent on forcing Saddam out. As a result, Iranian covert ops units and special operations forces were emboldened and empowered and Iranian diplomats suddenly found themselves welcome in Baghdad’s halls of power. 

The Sunni Gulf states and Israel became very upset about this, and loudly and often counterproductively attempted to galvanize Washington into action to prevent a potential Iranian regional hegemon from arising. One potential theory of why certain powers may have been motivated to deploy Stuxnet despite the fact that it caused little to no significant long-term damage to the Iranian nuclear program is that doing something could have been a way of re-assuring anxious regional players and their publics that the situation was under control. Perhaps this might have created some political maneuver space where it was otherwise lacking. 

America also recoils at the savagery and impunity of the (Iran-backed) Assad regime, and few shed tears over the deaths of Iranian spies and soldiers and their minions in the Syrian war (a good deal of whom are implicated in actions against America and its regional allies). So on one hand, Washington would obviously prefer to retract Tehran’s power, kill its external operatives, and wreck its militias and other proxies. For a while, direct military action in Syria (or indirect support to anti-regime militias) was floated, with the idea that Assad must be forced one way or another to leave. This was justified along both humanitarian and realpolitik lines – we have a “responsibility to protect” Syrian civilians and we can kneecap Iran on the way there. Win-win situation, right? Wrong. 

Washington would also like to prevent al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other non-state Sunni bad guys from taking root in Iraq and Syria. The crux of the problem is that it is hard to see how the US can simultaneously accomplish one objective without putting the other on the back burner. The Islamic State is a revolutionary force and both Washington and Tehran must step into the role of reactionary gendarme stamping out the fire. Though not as directly and obviously as the decision to overthrow Hussein, fighting the Islamic State also indirectly helps Iran, its proxies, and its clients. 

And, to boot, as we have noted the US is both stingy about what means it will allocate to the Islamic State fight and picky about the optics of how it actions look to domestic, regional, and perhaps international audiences. The Sunni states and Israel will not look kindly on cooperation with Iran and overt support for Assad is politically toxic and morally upside-down. But at the same time the US also is not willing to devote the time, energy, and resources to completely isolating itself from any hint of even indirect Iranian benefit or American-Iranian comity. 

Dancing with ourselves? 

As usual, the road taken was the middle one – no matter how half-baked the idea may sound. The US would not exert itself to overthrow Assad, it would supply some rebel groups in Syria with enough arms to look passable to domestic audiences – but with so much caveats and constraints that the support was worse than useless. Here, the US took the balance of its desire to overthrow Assad with the domestic political consequences of a future terrorist incident being traced back to US support for rebels and was not willing to incur risk. Washington struck the Islamic State and other groups in Syria and consciously downplayed the inevitable benefit to the Assad regime. 

In Iraq appearing to dance with ourselves is proving to be far more difficult. Both the US and Iran deal with the Iraqi security services and sub-state fighters.  Both the US and Iran operate militarily in Iraq against the same target. Perhaps some coordination – or at the very minimum, deconfliction – is going on. But for reasons otherwise stated the US is not going to partner with Iran or cooperate; besides the bad optics the US (for good reason) does not trust Tehran enough to establish the links necessary for effective teamwork. Aside from Kerry’s throwaway remark that Iranian strikes against the Islamic State are “positive” (which is not, in and of itself, too objectionable – dead Islamic State fighters are dead Islamic State fighters), there is not much to indicate US-Iranian cooperation or rapprochement.  

It may very well be that some kind of amorphous “detente” is underway, but as Vali Nasr notes in the linked piece it is hard to see shifts in US-Iranian relations as anything but a temporary geostrategic alignment rather than an conscious policy. Again, it amounts at most simply to a informal (and likely to be broken) non-aggression agreement as both focus on killing Islamic State militants. Moreover, aside from fringe voices like the Leveretts and others, there is no groundswell whatsoever for a thaw in US-Iranian relations. Perhaps the Obama administration’s recent nuclear negotiations with Tehran are naive and ill-informed, but the same could be said of US talks with the Soviets during the 1970s. There’s a big difference between that and the “Nixon goes to China” frame that the Leveretts and others hope to further in DC policy debates. 

Any kind of US-Iranian cooperation or the prospect of thaw is downplayed; the only politically important item on the agenda right now that enjoys broad support is the war against the Islamic State. Various American officials have made the Islamic State into Public Enemy #1 and vowed in bellicose language to destroy it. That we do not believe it will be “destroyed” – at least right now – is beside the point for this discussion. What matters is that resources, political capital, and targeting decisions are being made based on that understanding. 

Putting Assad and Iran on the backburner 

Hence the US, as noted earlier, abandoned the goal of overthrowing Assad. How could it not do so, when its jets share the skies with Syrian government airplanes during operations against the Islamic State? The US also has put on the backburner the idea that it is going to prioritize rolling back Iranian influence over fighting the Islamic State. 

Quite naturally, this state of affairs has caused significant consternation among those that would like the US to exert an equal amount (and likely more) of energy against Iran and its proxies than the Islamic State. Israeli President Netanyahu’s last-ditch effort to galvanize American elite and public opinion against Iran is being panned even by longtime political supporters, supporters of the “responsibility to protect” in Syria are raging against the switch from overthrowing Assad to containing the jihad, and some weave fantastical tales of an imminent US-Iranian concert over Iraq. Again, while ad-hoc de-confliction and temporary alignments are undeniable, it is hard to believe that Iran really is viewed as a responsible and useful partner in the Middle East’s wars. 

Certainly, as Philip Smyth rightly argues, the growth of Iranian influence should be viewed with concern and Americans should not delude themselves into believing that the war will do anything but produce a bumper crop of anti-American killers obedient to Tehran from Syria to Iraq. But the outrage comes without real, actionable policy recommendations as to what the US can do differently in Iraq and Syria. 

Washington simply cannot snap its fingers and magically wish away the reality of Iranian influence and power projection. Unfortunately the very Iraq War that many of those currently upset about Iranian power supported has created “facts on the ground” that will take an enormous amount of resources to reverse. Iran has a foothold and its deadliest rival is gone. Is the US going to publicly reprimand the Iraqi government when it states Iran is “helping” it beat back the Islamic State? 

If the US were willing to drop everything else it is doing and focus single-mindedly on rolling back both the Islamic State and Iran and its proxies and clients, perhaps this equation would be different. Of course, the US is not dropping everything else – we also see calls for the US to counter Russian aggression in Europe, pivot to the Pacific, hold the line in the Hindu Kush, and punish North Korea for allegedly hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment. And this is going on in the middle of a painful sequestration process that is exerting great strain on American military power. 

Hence the US does what it is willing to do in Iraq and Syria – not very much – and looks the other way if an air raid supports an Iranian-backed militia, client, or proxy. Denying R2P’s lost credibility in a last-ditch effort to prevent a policy reversal regarding Assad’s overthrow, fuming that Washington is not trying to simultaneously roll back Iran and the Islamic State, and other analytical responses do not help the situation. 

Unfortunately in political affairs there is a little something called “path dependence.” If Iranian power was politically and morally unacceptable, the time to have prevented it from re-emerging was prior to when the United States enabled its re-emergence by invading Iraq, deposing Hussein, and failing to prevent widespread insurgency, civil war, terrorism, and disorder. The consequence of this is that an “Islamic State Delenda Est” mentality can both make America and its allies safer – by wiping out bloodthirsty, al-Qaeda challenging killers and their Pol Pot-esque regime – and also simultaneously put us and our friends in greater danger by further enabling Tehran’s expansion of influence. 

But without a substantially enlarged mission concept, Washington cannot have it both ways.

Be careful what you wish for – or not 

There is no real lesson to be learned from this state of affairs beyond a generic “for the love of [insert your deity here] think it through before you attempt a major geopolitical re-alignment in a conflict-prone part of the world!” Which, of course, denies the reality that people can think it through and prize some things above others. To the Bush administration in 2002-2003, knocking over Hussein was more important than containing Iran. To the Obama administration in 2015, knocking over the Islamic State is more important than containing Iran. 

What do both situations have in common? There was an actual policy constituency in the US for overthrowing Hussein, contrary to the comforting myth that it was all just the Bush administration using black magic to cast a spell over the nation. Similarly, there is a strong consensus in favor of the current Obama administration move against the Islamic State. There is no giant groundswell for “fight the Islamic State but don’t forget to take the fight to Iran and the Assad regime too!” – putting the lie to the persistent myth of an all-powerful Israel Lobby. Similarly, R2P seems less like the fundamental re-definition of sovereignty Dan Trombly and I argued against years ago and more like a temporary bubble fueled by temporary circumstances and quickly undercut by its own manifest downsides in Libya and other locales. 

Whatever happens in Syria and Iraq – good or bad – is the result of strategy following policy (however amorphous and contradictory), not the absence of strategy. Strategy does not exist separate from policy, and policy is the result of politics. The politics of Iraq and Syria in 2015 point a certain direction, and analysis ought to acknowledge this first and foremost. 

The latest NYT: 

But as of this month, ask a question as seemingly straightforward as the number of Afghan soldiers and police officers in uniform, and the military coalition offers a singularly unrevealing answer: The information is now considered classified.

The American outlay for weapons and gear for Afghan forces? Classified. The cost of teaching Afghan soldiers to read and write? Even that is now a secret.

The military command’s explanation for making the change is that such information could endanger American and Afghan lives, even though the data had been released every quarter over the past six years, and Afghan officials do not consider the information secret.

To say that what amounts to the muzzling of SIGAR is disturbing would be a gross understatement. We have heard time and time again about how training, advisorship, aid, and reform are “non-kinetic” lines of effort in both limited and large-scale stabilization efforts abroad. As SIGAR has detailed, the actual results have been exceedingly unimpressive. 

In particular, the current iteration of American military involvement in Iraq was forced by the failure of American efforts to build an Iraqi force that could stand up and fight against a determined and aggressive opponent: 

The United States spent about $25 billion to train and equip Iraq’s security forces and provide installations for these forces from the start of the war until September 2012, according to a report by the special inspector general on Iraq. And Iraq has spent billions of dollars of its own money since then to acquire or order F-16 fighter jets, M-1 battle tanks, Apache helicopter gunships, Hellfire missiles and other weapons.  ….

The stunning collapse of Iraq’s army in a string of cities across the north reflects poor leadership, declining troop morale, broken equipment and a sharp decline in training since the last American advisers left the country in 2011, American military and intelligence officials said Thursday.

Four of Iraq’s 14 army divisions virtually abandoned their posts, stripped off their uniforms and fled when confronted in cities such as Mosul and Tikrit by militant groups, principally fighters aligned with the radical Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the officials said.

In light of the stunning failure that the collapse of the Iraqi forces represents, the last thing that the government ought to be doing is classifying the inputs and outputs regarding Afghan military training and assistance. Such a step makes it dramatically harder for outside analysts not invested in favorable public perception of these large-scale stabilization and assistance efforts to evaluate key components of American national security policy. It also is reminiscent of the Vietnam-era “five o'clock follies” in which Pentagon officials repeatedly and blatantly attempted to mislead an increasingly belligerent and skeptical press corps. 

It is difficult to overstate how deeply and thoroughly damaging classifying data and kneecapping SIGAR is to the credibility of security forces assistance, advising, counterinsurgency, and stabilization advocates. If the public is not to be trusted regarding key aggregate statistics regarding these matters, the public should reciprocate with automatic and extreme skepticism regarding claims about the efficacy of stabilization efforts and calls for future missions of this nature. 

The reason why many critics dislike American Sniper is rather simple. As I have said earlier, many critics want to see a movie that is essentially about American defeat. The movie has to be, in some way, a critique of the morals, sensibility, and efficacy of American foreign policy. In short, critics want war movies to be akin to how Japan regards its participation in World War II: guilt, shame, anger at the people in charge of the war, and a looming sense of futility. 

Sometimes this desire can manifest itself in – like most global war on terror movies – portentous and chin-stroking films that advance the political argument via the narrative backdoor (or, more often, trying and failing to do so). This reached its most absurd climax with Green Zone, a movie in which Matt Damon as buffed-up-operator goes Wikileaks on teh evil, evil neocons. Either the troops are vicious savages, victims, or in the case of Damon, mouthpieces for political sentiments otherwise voiced by Green Day albums. Either way, the politics of the war has to be (negatively) foregrounded, as seen in this review of Act of Valor: 

And the movie, which wants to make us recognize our obligations to the people who take enormous risks for us, does something rather dodgy in showing the SEALs in theaters other than the ones where we’re currently most engaged. The movie says it’s based on “real acts of valor,” and the clearest analogue is that to Petty Officer Michael Monsoor, a SEAL who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq to save his comrades, and who was awarded a Medal of Honor after his death. In Act of Valor, that same situation takes place but in a Mexican tunnel system controlled by a drug cartel. Choosing that scenario separates the audience from an important fact—rather than having that act of valor take place far from a war zone where we’re actually engaged lets the movie suggest that it will always be necessary for Marines to sacrifice themselves, rather than digging into the question of whether we could avoid circumstances that create more opportunities to put SEALs—and all soldiers—in extreme danger.

I agreed with one point of the review – the movie plays a double game by claiming to be true to life but nonetheless inventing a completely fictitious shootout on the Mexican border. But the larger point is completely wrong. 

First, “digging into the question” often = dictating an ideologically predetermined answer. In Green Zone, its clear what that answer is. Teh evil neocons are bad and straight shooting operator sacrificed for a lie. To translate into Doge-language: “wow such evil neocons very cooked intel much Darth Cheney so Bushitler amaze." 

One sees this in reverse from the Right in the Rambo films, which are paens to the conservative stab-in-the-back mythology that predominated post-Vietnam. Either way, "digging into the question” most of the time is so clumsy and ideologically loaded that it often means digging into a hole. You might get a clumsy “teh neocons and bushitler r bad yo” protest movie or a “the stuffed shirts and the hippies back home betrayed me” stabbed in the back film – neither of which are politically useful, intellectually honest, or good art. 

The movie isn’t really, in essence, about the Iraq War at all. 

Many critics outright ignore the significance of the fact that Chris Kyle is motivated to enlist not by 9/11 but by the 1998 embassy bombings that put al-Qaeda on the map. In the movie, Chris Kyle is not seen, at any point in the film, discussing the politics of the Iraq War, chewing out Michael Moore or anti-war protestors, or voicing any of the pro-war sentiments seen in the conservative milblogs I read during the high point of the Iraq War itself.

So the fact that he does not debate the politics of the Iraq War at all goes both ways. The movie is atemporal and critics give it more political substance than it actually has by using it to refight the Iraq War – the fact that that is taking place in Iraq is secondary. It could have easily have taken place in Afghanistan, the “good war” for many Iraq War critics. 

On the contrary, Kyle combines a big, fuzzy abstract patriotism with a very real and passionate hatred of al-Qaeda (AQI, was, after all, an al-Qaeda subset) and concern for the lives of the people he protected. Kyle is no simpleton, but his moral universe (as depicted in the film) does not have many shades of gray. Kyle’s take on the war is very simple – it was brutal, disturbing, and rough but he did what he had to do to protect other soldiers and serve America. He killed a lot of bad people. The end.

And, from a certain standpoint, Kyle isn’t obviously wrong either. President Obama is currently bombing an offshoot of AQI (the Islamic State in Iraq) in Iraq and Syria because he believes it poses a threat to the American homeland. Yes, believe it or not prior to ISIS’ rift with al-Qaeda it once was part of the larger organization. If Obama, an self-professed Iraq War opponent, believes AQI 2.0: The ISIS Remix is worth killing, is it reasonable to demand that movie version Kyle somehow believe that his mission of protecting his fellow Marines (and the folks back home) from AQI 1.0 is obviously flawed and illegitimate? Is it legitimate to demand that the movie didactically suggest to the audience that what Kyle did was pointless?

What did critics expect? The famously law professor-like Obama is spending your tax dollars to turn the child organization of Chris Kyle’s targets into JDAM target practice, so is it so obviously unreasonable to cheer as movie Kyle’s well-aimed shots kill enormous amounts of AQI 1.0 militants? Un-clutch the pearls; you are allowed to root for the hero of the movie. Is not the President that many critics elected twice merely doing what Chris Kyle did – shooting terrorists from a long range? 

But let’s get back to the main point: movie Kyle’s world is also in part unfamiliar to critics simply because he is not their preferred kind of hero. Ari Kohen is correct in noting Kyle is a certain type of aesthetic hero: the battlefield hero: 

[I]t might mean he’s a hero of a type — the battlefield hero — that makes many of us uncomfortable today. Many of the complaints about Kyle’s “heroism” sound to me like the complaints my students have about Achilles when they read the Iliad. He’s a jerk. He’s a mass murderer. His understanding of justice is embarrassingly simplistic. Kyle is, in all of these ways, very similar to Achilles. But Achilles is very clearly a hero, at least when we think about classical archetypes. He’s a battlefield hero… an elite killer…who kills based on his society’s understanding of what justice means.

As tiresome and ridiculous as the “sheeps, wolves, and sheepdogs” routine that Kyle’s father is depicted as reciting in the film is, it is necessary to show it for the audience to understand the character’s mindset. Movie version Kyle believes he is doing good and he doesn’t give too much second thought to it.

And quite frankly, Kyle’s comments about Iraqis that Kohen quotes are little different from how even so-called “Greatest Generation”-ers talked about the civilians and opponents they encountered in Asia and Europe. If you offer salutes to Grandpa every time you watch Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, you are a sanctimonious (and historically illiterate) hypocrite if you refuse to salute Kyle as well. 

While the movie does not actively denounce Kyle and his teammates’ sentiments, it also does not completely endorse them. 

Clint Eastwood is on record as having opposed the Iraq War, and is also well-known for his spate of films about the ultimately self-destroying nature of violence. If only Nixon could go to China, only Eastwood could make a rather subtly subversive Iraq War movie that could nonetheless become a rallying point for the rah-rah set: “only Clint Eastwood could make a movie about an Iraq War veteran and infuse it with doubts, mission anxiety and ruination. …. American Sniper is a superbly subtle critique made by an especially young 84-year-old.” And David Denby, no “America! F** Yeah!” guy, notes that American Sniper “is both a devastating war movie and a devastating antiwar movie, a subdued celebration of a warrior’s skill and a sorrowful lament over his alienation and misery. ….The movie, set during the Iraq War, has [a] troubled ambivalence about violence." 

Where this is most evident lies in the scenes of Kyle blundering his way into the homes of Iraqis, thundering questions and abuse at them while weapons are pointed in their faces. Kyle is also unable to protect an Iraqi and his son from being brutally killed by an insurgent known as The Butcher, illustrating the dilemma Iraqis faced between choosing two groups of people (Americans and insurgents) with life-or-death power over them and totalizing demands. Moreover, Kyle’s insurgent rival sniper is also hinted to be a family man, and at the very minimum is depicted to be a cool, calculating professional. 

But Eastwood only takes this so far. The chief horror of the Iraq war lies in what it does to Kyle, his men, and his marriage – something you could say about any war, if examined in enough detail. And for all of the tentative sympathy Eastwood extends to the Iraqis, an Iraqi family man nonetheless betrays Kyle and most of the Iraqis depicted are either victims or wave after wave of faceless insurgents Kyle guns down. And the movie’s political context is clear – Kyle believes he is protecting Americans and his teammates, and its not as if he suddenly has an epiphany at the end and signs a MoveOn.org "US Out of Iraq” petition or joins Cindy Sheehan on a picket line. 

And to that, I have a big, fat, “so what?" American Sniper is what most well-written war movies were like pre-Vietnam with a tinge of Eastwood’s favorite genre of the revisionist Western that he, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah did so much to popularize. Watch a movie like 12 O Clock Highfor a change and you won’t get the critique of Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter,Platoon, and other similar films. You won’t even get the postmodern bricolage of Inglorious Basterds. You will get a grim, character-based war film. Or, for example, see Eastwood’s own Letters from Iwo Jima, which is not a critique of the Imperial Japanese Army (an institution far more clearly in the wrong than the US military in Iraq) as much as an attempt to relay to American audiences that there were human beings on the other side of the beachhead during the brutal island-hopping subset of the Pacific campaign. 

Believe it or not, wars are not experienced by most participants as a series of Political Big Issue Statements. A casual read of many military memoirs will reveal more close-to-the-bone matters such as family, relationships and concern for fellow comrades, frustrations and bitterness with bureaucracy, a mixture of fear, loathing, and sometimes admiration for the opponent, and often crude and politically incorrect sentiments about opponents and noncombatants. When politics enters, it isn’t necessarily sophisticated or empirically accurate. It’s often black and white, fuzzy, or an afterthought altogether. 

Whatever their opinions about the war, audiences used to enjoy watching movies about these kinds of people. Because they can relate to them more than walking, talking, mouthpieces for liberal antiwar critics that ritually denounce Richard Perle and Dick Cheney stand-ins every half hour of the movie. Almost every single Iraq War movie has been an enormous financial failure. But a nation that nonetheless is still remarkably ambivalent and divided about the war itself nonetheless managed to make the makers of American Sniper quite rich, if the box office gross from the last two weekend alone is evidenced. Maybe that has to do with American audiences wanting a well-made war film, not Michael Moore redux or an high-end art movie. 

To be sure, there are legitimate critiques of the film. Alex Horton, for example, is correct that the movie is not a "voice of the grunt” tale – it is,  regrettably, yet another film about an elite specialist in a time when we are saturated with too many of them. Amy Nicholson also correctly notes that Kyle himself is not a reliable narrator and had a penchant for self-mythologizing – the film avoids any discussion of this. Nicholson also correctly observes that the core of the film is mostly fiction and that the real-life Kyle might have found the fictional one largely neutered by Eastwood’s desire to fit him into an somewhat familiar archetype. The film also, for all of its pretensions to realism, indulges in Jason Bourne-like theatrics after the audience gets tired of sniping. Finally, it would help if the movie had Iraqis that were more n-dimensional (although  few seem to make this demand of Vietnam War or World War II films). 

I opposed the Iraq War in high school and college, and my own interest in defense matters stems powerfully from my loathing for the war and its architects. I have changed my mind about many things since 2003-2004, but the fact that going into Iraq was a mistake (and that the Bush administration made the mistake in a catastrophically horrific and immoral manner) is not one of them. Yet I somehow was able to sit through a little under 2.5 hours of Chris Kyle blowing away AQI and talking in glowing terms about his team and mission without having my feelings hurt. It is a shame more people cannot do the same.

The bottom line is this: if you need a war film to pander to your ideological bias for you to enjoy it, American Sniper is obviously not for you. One wonders, in fact, how many that have applauded Eastwood for extending humanity and courtesy to non-Americans in Letters from Iwo Jima now denounce him for making an Iraq War movie that has the gall to deliver a picture of Kyle as he evidently wanted others to believe him to be: a soldier that fought for what he thought he was right and the men alongside him. 

It’s true that this isn’t – by a long shot – the defining Iraq War movie. But there never will be an defining Iraq War movie. All wars have a variety of stories – and the military themselves are just one small subset. Movies like In the Loop and Team America: World Police, ruthlessly fillet the tangled ideological contradictions behind the Iraq war and the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in general. Syriana depicts, with admirable complexity, the political, financial, diplomatic, and sociological relationships behind the GWOT (despite an overly Chomsky-esque finale). Gunner Palace depicts the worsening situation in 2003-2004 Iraq that belied outright lies the Bush administration peddled about what was going on. 

In this vein, American Sniper is a well-made traditional war movie about a elite soldier that shoots a lot of bad people, doesn’t ponder (onscreen) the war’s policy, strategy, and tactics, and is haunted despite believing he did the right thing. If Chris Kyle (and American Sniper) were Hamlet-like in indecisiveness and doubt about war, he wouldn’t be Chris Kyle. Whatever the war’s politics, and whatever the problems with the veracity of Kyle’s memoir, certainly more than a few Americans and Iraqis are alive thanks to him. If acknowledging this – and watching a movie that celebrates this – offends you, grow up and deal with it. 

Recent Daily Beast piece on “when normal is deadly” has a damning graf:

The average western consumer is operating with a broad set of assumptions that form the backdrop for their worldview. This backdrop, which is supposed to remain fixed, unchanged, includes beautiful images of a sophisticated, peaceful Paris, right alongside ugly images of a chaotic Nigeria. When it is disturbed, however—when what is normal is disrupted, especially violently—well, then, we have news.

It is not considered normal for a bunch of French cartoonists to be shot up in their own offices. Millions of us can relate much more easily to this sort of horror than yet another attack on yet another village in yet another African country.

There are many reasons why this is so. But one of them is that many of the people currently angry about the Boko Haram attack’s lack of coverage contribute to the problem actively by constantly waving their hands and loudly screaming “PLEASE PAY ATTENTION! SOMETHING REALLY HORRIBLE IS GOING ON IN AFRICA!” Africans will never be – in their eyes – anything except helpless suffering victims.  When the public inures itself to this endless parade of horribles, NGOs merely up the ante by finding something even more horrible – if you weren’t shocked by horrific civil war, you will be shocked by the fact that children are forced to fight in it. And so and so on.

Finally, is the problem really lack of Western attention? Or is it the fact that the Nigerian government is so irresponsible and faithless to its own people that Boko Haram may rampage at will without fear of punishment? You decide:

The hard truth is that #BringBackOurGirls did not compel the government to return the girls any more than #JeSuisCharlie has compelled French society to protect all forms of speech. Instead, in the span of the now 277 days since the girls were abducted, the Nigerian government managed to falsely claim the kidnapped girls were released, arrest protest leaders and simply refuse help to find the girls. Jonathan managed to accuse the angry families and their supporters of engaging in “psychological terrorism” after they canceled a public relations meeting with him. In a rather fantastic flourish of incompetence, the military in October claimed to have negotiated a cease-fire with Boko Haram and the imminent release of the girls; Boko Haram’s leader instead released a video calling the claims a “lie” and said that the girls had already been married off. In December, reports indicated that Nigeria’s government canceled the U.S. training of a battalion to combat Boko Haram, after the United States declined to give the corruption-stricken military (that has had trouble avoiding human rights abuses) attack helicopters. Simply put, the Nigerian government and leadership squandered the many positive opportunities that could have arisen after #BringBackOurGirls.

Funnel your anger at a government that stands idly by as its people are slaughtered, not your average Joe or Jane too lazy to balance multiple competing hashtags in their internal slacktivism priority scheme. 

From a recent piece by an Army officer befuddled by the recent wave of conscription commentary:

Bridgeland, who never served a day in uniform, is propagandizing, but his utopian language is not as atypical as one would hope. …Utopianism and vagueness are not all that these articles have in common. A disproportionate number of them emanate from Harvard University — Luxenberg is a Harvard grad student, and Bridgeland a Harvard grad. James Fallows is also a Harvard man, and tiresomely annotates every Harvard alumnus in his article (other schools get no such treatment). Harvardians’ arms-length embrace of the draft has become something of a joke. …Fallows is the greatest sinner. In a 1975 article that was both honestly arrogant and honestly regretful, he recalled escaping the draft by lying to draft examiners in Boston during the Vietnam War. He then watched the “white proles of Boston… walk through the examination lines like so many cattle off to the slaughter.” The idea that duty might animate such animals seems inconceivable to him. Or maybe, he can only recognize duty if it is mandated.

Chickenhawkery is the calling card of many of these articles. The fact that so many Americans are not in the military is the cause of not only frivolous wars but virtually every social ill contemplatable. It is easy to be bellicose when you face no risk, these analysts argue. 

Yet there is something strangely recursive about the idea of a chickenhawk populace being coerced to carry a rifle by those who never have done so, flouted the draft when they had the opportunity, and even denigrated the value of service itself. In essence, the TL:DR seems to be “I have no idea what it is like to be a violent instrument of the state, but I’m going to force you to do it anyway.”

History tells us much about the challenges of actually making an conscript force fight. Who would envy the difficult task of a scared young small-unit leader afraid of being fragged in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle by a bunch of angry, drugged-up conscripts that would rather kill their own commanders than fight (or be killed by) the enemy? But this really isn’t the issue.

With the exception of Luxenberg, the vast majority of those writing “we need to go back to the days of mass mobilization” have never been mobilized and do not face a serious risk of being mobilized. The problem of “skin in the game” in a modern, complex liberal capitalist democracy is essentially one computer scientists might recognize as infinite recursion. As in, do the people calling for skin in the game have skin in the game? And a natural retort in turn might be whether or not the people asking if conscription advocates have skin in the game themselves have skin in the game. 

Recursive chickenhawkery, unlike a good recursive algorithm, lacks a “base case” — computer science jargon for a stopping point. In theory, we might recurse into progressively deeper and deeper nestings of chickenhawkery and never reach a productive endpoint. 

Recursive chickenhawkery illustrates the fallacy behind the whole discussion quite nicely. There is no way that risk will ever be equally distributed absent an extreme circumstance in which “the hard hand of war” could touch everyone — soldier, civilian, and leader — alike. But even when the British marched on Washington, our leadership did not take up rifle to fight them to the last man. Unsurprisingly, they ran for their lives while the enemy put the seat of our democracy to the torch. Womp womp womp. Chickenhawk America indeed. Nor does it follow that a situation in which risk and punishment is distributed is necessarily socially optimal either.

Now, the bitter irony of all of this is that there may be one way of actually creating a deterrent to frivolous war. But I doubt draft advocates that like to quote Piketty could stomach what it would take:

Caverley’s argument is deceptively simple. He starts from the same premises as democratic optimists, namely that electoral accountability ensures leaders enact policies preferred by the average citizen, and that the average citizen is reluctant to pay the costs of war. What it adds, though, is a little political economy. Specifically, Caverley argues that economic inequality, coupled with progressive taxation, ensures that the median voter pays less than her fair share of the costs of war—at least the financial component thereof. Given that democratic states tend to substitute capital for labor wherever possible, especially if they have relatively high levels of inequality, that’s not as much of a qualification as you might think. Put simply, democratic states—particularly those with relatively high levels of economic inequality—have reduced the median voter’s effective cost of war, and this encourages militarism and aggression on a scale that can be quite reckless and tragic. In the US and Israel, lower levels of household income/consumption are associated with higher levels of support for the use of force/lower levels of support for offering concessions. Yet there is no clear association between household income/consumption and self-reported threat perception. If the poor and middle class demand more aggression, it’s not because they believe the world to be more dangerous than their wealthier counterparts do.

There is also an argument to be made that American financial irreponsibility concerning war has a negative effect on the global economy. If we assume that this argument is at least more credible of an explanation for foreign policy adventurism than lack of conscription (and the preponderance of evidence cited justifies such an inference), then the policy solution would be to force the median voter to pay up when we go to war. But the political optics of such a solution are horrendous. Instead of the classically populist idea of forcing the elites to join up (Luxenberg’s solution), we would instead force those who are already being squeezed by the decline of the middle class to finance war.

Which brings us to the last and strangest part of recursive chickenhawkery: its historical illiteracy about the very reasons why our legislature commands the power of the purse when it comes to our wars. In the bad old days of dynastic Europe, monarchs could go to war over small beans dynastic monarchial things and finance it by ruthlessly and aggressively taxing their people. A major cause of the French Revolution was popular anger over the state’s taxation and finance problems — and the financial costs of French military adventures were a major contributor.

Conscription advocates often paint a picture of conscription as a kind of failsafe mechanism, triggering riots and protests when Joe or Jane America’s son is sent off to fight in a far-away war. This, as I have previously explained, is a rather grotesque misreading of the actual nature of public sentiment about key cases like Vietnam. But not to fear: let me tell you what actually would probably get the masses to revolt against overly bellicose leaders.

When thuggish tax collectors are at your door to force you to give up what little is left over from student loans, living costs, and credit card debt to finance war in Bumf***istan, you’ll want to take to the streets to throw a Molotov cocktail and scream “liberty, equality, fraternity!” Heck, you might even 3D-print a guillotine or two and send a few heads rolling. If there’s one thing we know from America’s violent industrial-era history, it’s that extreme material deprivation tends to induce political violence and corresponding fear among elites.

Now, this is just a thought experiment. Further investigation would be needed to actually determine what kind of financial measures would be needed as a war deterrent. But in the abstract it certainly seems more likely to solve the recursive chickenhawkery problem than mass conscription. The fact that all but one of the many conscription advocates (the Don Quixote-like Rep. Charles Rangel) do not seriously consider it says everything we need to know about the seriousness of the debate over war, responsibility, and service in 21st century America.

You could do the right thing. But you might end up beheaded live on al-Jazeera, your head sawed off by an failed rapper turned jihadist while cable tv personalities and social media gawk over your demise. Would you still do the right thing? And if you did, how many other people would you honestly estimate would follow you?

In the movies, “I am Spartacus”-esque moments are dime-a-dozen. But do you really want to die? Or, more specifically, do you really want to be killed or see your co-workers killed in front of you? And what if you were told that you would not only be killed, but that your peers would kinda-sorta suggest that you were asking for it?

The purpose for this preamble is to lay the ground for Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’ point that the Charlie Hebdo attacks are merely the latest in a series of successful attempts to create an extremist heckler’s veto over the press:

Other publications got the message. Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, immediately increased its security. Spanish publication El Pais, skittish in the wake of the Paris attack, evacuated its offices after the delivery of a suspicious package. The Internet has been littered with tepid denunciations of the attack that simultaneously condemn Charlie Hebdo for publishing controversial material. Prominent publications reporting on the attack have sent extraordinarily mixed messages by blurring or else refusing to show some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons when reporting the story.

Not only this, but prominent publications will contort themselves into knots to justify it:

As previously noted, the Times has a history of publishing artwork and cartoons that have offended both Jews and Christians. See their coverage of “Piss Christ” in 1999, which very much offended the Catholic League; an Iranian exhibition of “anti-Jewish art” in 2006; and an Iranian cartoonist’s “anti-Jewish caricatures” in 2010. So, at least up until Dean Baquet’s tenure as executive editor, which began last year, the Times’ policy against “gratuitous insult” did not preclude offensive religious images. …Baquet’s argument, if I’m reading him correctly, is that a cartoonish depiction of Mohammed is more offensive, categorically, than a cartoon that depicts, say, anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews trying to fabricate a Holocaust that, per the cartoonist, never took place.

The tempting thing would be to damn media outlets that buckle under as wimps or cowards and link to a slain Charlie Hebdo editor’s John Wayne-esque quote that he would rather “die on [his] feet than live on [his] knees.” But this would be ridiculous. So what if X or Y is an coward? Most people don’t want to die and will do anything in their power to avoid it. And falling on your sword seems even more pointless when it seems that no one else will join you. Collective action problems Are A Thing and this is never more true when your life is on the line.

Furthermore, it is not as if news organizations are resourced in the same manner as the military (which is structurally designed to maintain operations despite the certainty of suffering losses). As with the similarly moronic “diplomacy is dangerous” mantra post-Benghazi, expecting organizations without redundancy and capacity for taking losses to be brave is bizarre and illogical. No one is expendable, but some organizations assume routine losses and replace them and others simply cannot.

In general, unless you create some kind of stronger structural incentive, people will be cowards (on both individual and organizational levels) and that is perfectly fine. If everyone could be heroic we would have no need for the concept of a hero in the first place. The only way to make people face the risk of violent death in the absence of a solution for the collective action problem is the Soviet method of putting a machine gun team in the rear to shoot anyone who gets cold feet before the attack is completed.

Whatever your opinion about the sophistication of the Charlie Hebdo attack, the effects are deadly serious. It may be satisfying to condemn journalists as cowards from afar, but it won’t lead to anyone being any braver in the face of extremist violence.