Tag: Libya
Quandaries
Max Boot asks:
Does the Press Have Better Intel than the White House?
The answer is yes, in particular in Benghazi, for the reasons Boot cites. The press has people on the ground. Both the State Department and intel officers from Benghazi were evacuated immediately after the September 11 attack on the consulate, according to press reports.
What difference does that make?
Eyes and ears on the ground are vital to accurate intelligence. Once upon a time, I was in the office of the Italian prime minister’s diplomatic adviser when a call for me from the White House situation room interrupted our chat. They wanted to know what was going on at Fiumicino airport, because they had a report of AK47 firing nearby. I asked the diplomatic advisor, who knew nothing about it and called the intelligence service. Yes, they said, some dufus who had bought an automatic weapon decided to enjoy target practice at his farm, which happened to be on the final approach to a Fiumicino runway.
I don’t really know how the White House got wind of this in the first place, but if I had to guess it was probably sigint (signals intelligence). Highly reliable in and of itself, sigint doesn’t always tell you what is actually happening and its significance. The sit room clearly imagined it was more menacing than a gun enthusiast enjoying his latest acquisition. You need eyes and ears on the ground, or in front of the Benghazi consulate, to really understand the situation.
The press is better informed than the intelligence community in many circumstances because it takes greater risks. Journalists move towards the sound of gunfire. Diplomats and intel officers do not. My friend Kurt Schork, dean of American war reporters in his day, was killed in Sierra Leone when he followed the sound of gunfire into an ambush. The press does not evacuate its people readily. Even when it does, it maintains stringers who continue to report. The results show all too clearly in the statistics: a lot more journalists are killed in conflict zones these days than diplomats or intelligence officers.
Of course the press also makes a lot of mistakes in what it reports, and social media reports from conflict zones can be both highly informative and difficult to interpret, not to mention misleading. Having people on the ground is not a guarantee of accuracy, only a healthy check on fallacious interpretation.
The problem is that we move our government officials away from risk en masse in a quixotic effort to reduce risks to zero. It is absurd that FBI agents were apparently not allowed for weeks to visit the Benghazi consulate to collect evidence. Benghazi is relatively friendly turf. I’m not guessing–I’ve been there (without personal protection other than anonymity) twice since Qaddafi fell. Would Chris Stevens have been safer to walk out to the street and melt into the night than to seek refuge in a supposed safe haven in which he apparently suffocated to death? We can certainly put a couple of anonymous FBI agents on the ground in Benghazi quietly for a day or two, moving them low profile with some Libyan protection. But we hesitate, because we don’t want to risk the embarrassment of another incident, no matter how small the risk. Put yourself in President Obama’s size 11s.
There is an additional problem. Highly classified material is valued highly in the bureaucracy. It takes time to reach the top. The President’s daily intel brief does not include a lot of “open source” material (that’s material from the press, blogs, Twitter or other generally available media). UN Ambassador Susan Rice apparently had ample classified intelligence material telling her that the attack on the consulate originated from a demonstration against the Innocence of Muslims video, which had already generated problems in Cairo earlier in the day. She would not be alone in the government in believing the highly classified stuff rather than the New York Times. The CIA reportedly prepared her talking points but decided later on that the initial report was erroneous.
There are a lot of quandaries here: should we maximize the safety of our people, or take greater risks in order to keep eyes and ears on the ground? do we do as good a job as we should in integrating “open source” material with highly classified intelligence? how quickly should intelligence estimates move up the chain of command? should we communicate what we think we know about an incident to the American people, or should we hold back until we are sure what happened?
But let’s be clear: there is no absolute safety, no perfect intelligence, no error-free transmission of information and no absolute certainty. We are not likely to know the complete story until publication of the Accountability Review Board’s report, if then. Tonight’s presidential debate is not the time or place to shed light on who or what caused the tragedy.
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Hoisted by his own petard
There is no doubt Mitt Romney was injured last night by a device (that’s more or less what a petard is: an explosive device to breach a wall) he intended to use against Barack Obama. The Governor’s claim that the President had not labelled the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans a terrorist act for 14 days was quickly fact-checked and found untrue on the spot.
The question is why this claim had any currency at all. It has been circulating now for weeks and was false all along. Why does the supposedly liberal media repeat ad infinitum a claim that it took only seconds to invalidate?
Part of the problem is that the Administration muddled its own message with ambiguous statements that came after the President’s Rose Garden reference to the attack as an act of terror. Vice President Biden and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have cited intelligence reporting as the basis for the suggestion that the attack was related to a demonstration against the “Innocence of Muslims” video. Anyone who has dealt with raw intelligence reports can easily imagine that this–and possibly several other explanations–were offered up in the aftermath of the incident. Human intelligence (humint) sources are only too anxious to earn their keep when an incident occurs by offering their own version. With the CIA station in Benghazi cleaned out, it would have been difficult to make contact and verify information from sources that are often unreliable.
Another part of the problem is the media’s obvious effort to bend over backwards to avoid the charge that it has a liberal bias. These charges from the right have had a palpable impact, causing what Sarah Palin calls the “lamestream” media to hesitate when faced with right-wing bluster. If you think you are being objective, any claim of bias will make you think twice. Fox News, which does not pretend to be objective, has no problem with Jon Stewart’s nightly assaults on its veracity.
I was surprised by the President’s mild reaction to Romney’s false claim. He continued seated and uttered what I took to be a mild grunt when the moderator confirmed the falsehood. But of course a black man in America has to be careful about showing too much anger. It would not have been well received in parts of the electorate.
Will Romney’s mistake/lie/exaggeration/mistatement affect the election outcome? I doubt it. Those who like him will write it off as a mistake. Those who don’t will be confirmed in their distaste. Those who haven’t made up their minds will wonder why anyone would think it important compared to all the serious policy issues at stake.
Nevertheless, hoisted by his own petard.
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The wrong way
As my appearance on Up with Chris Hayes yesterday has generated some nasty comments, I thought I might review the most neuralgic point: the function of Marine security guards at U.S. embassies and consulates. Here is the Marine Embassy Security Group’s own statement of its mission:
The primary mission of the Marine Security Guard (MSG) is to provide internal security at designated U.S. diplomatic and consular facilities in order to prevent the compromise of classified material vital to the national security of the United States.
Yes, in a crisis the Marine guards will act to protect a U.S. diplomatic facility from attack. But they are not equipped, trained or staffed to respond to an assault of the type that apparently occurred on September 11 in Benghazi. That’s why the Embassy was asking for more specialized teams (for Tripoli, not Benghazi).
The primary responsibility for protection of diplomatic facilities lies with the “host” government, in this case Libya. That’s the problem: the new Libyan regime is still lacks the means.
We’ll have to wait for the Accountability Review Board Tom Pickering is chairing to know where responsibility for the incident lies. That’s why I was careful on TV and peacefare not to imply that the murder of our personnel was due to this, that or the other failure. It is simply too early to make that judgment. I have, however, cited ample reason for the U.S. government to know that there was a serious threat in Benghazi, so those who accuse me of letting the Obama administration off the hook should understand that their vituperation and scatological suggestions are not just unwelcome, but reciprocated.
The notion that the only way to respond to a serious threat in Benghazi was deployment of Marines is simply wrong. It doesn’t matter at all that the Embassy in Paris, where the threats are different, has Marine guards. Here are the obstacles to using Marines in Benghazi:
- You need the permission of the host government, which is unlikely to have been forthcoming (they’ve been resisting even private contractors).
- The number of Marines trained for diplomatic security is limited, so sending them to Benghazi requires that you judge the threat there to be greater than the threat in Kabul, Baghdad, Cairo and a few dozen other places.
- You have to believe they are the best force to meet the threat, which given their mission statement (and associated preparation for it) is ridiculous.
Anonymity and unpredictability are the best defenses for most of our diplomats. An ambassador has difficulty achieving either. Libyan guards properly trained and equipped are a far better option for close personal protection and external defense of a diplomatic compound, because Americans have a hard time “reading” the street and understanding what is going on there. But Libyan guards of that type did not yet exist in Tripoli and Benghazi. It is ironic, and sad, that Ambassador Stevens apparently died in a building that was considered a safe haven. That should cast serious doubt on the all too heavy reliance on fortresses to protect our diplomats.
But given the reaction in Congress and the CYA approach of most bureaucracies, I’d be willing to bet that this incident leads us to further harden our fortresses, reduce our movements and eliminate anonymity by requiring even lower-ranking diplomats to use personal security details. That is the wrong way to go.
For those who wish me ill because I say these things: I have lived and worked as a U.S. official both with and without extensive personal protection (Italian in my case, as I spent about eight months in Rome as Charge’ d’affaires ad interim after the election of Bill Clinton) and Embassy Marine guards. I have also traveled and worked in conflict zones like Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, both with and without personal protection details. Each to his own, but I personally prefer the low-profile, unpredictable movements, anonymous approach to security, when it is possible. Those who tweeted that they wish me in Benghazi without personal protection and U.S. embassy guards are calling for throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch: that’s exactly how I’ve enjoyed Benghazi on two visits since the revolution and would gladly go back any day, so long as I thought I could maintain a low profile, anonymous approach to my own security.
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A dangerous place
Yesterday’s circus in a House hearing on the killing of U.S. officials last month in Benghazi was barely over when news reached Washington that Al Qaeda had assassinated the Yemeni security chief at the U.S. embassy in Sanaa. No doubt these incidents will continue to provide grist for the American political mill, where candidate Romney is trying to pin blame on the Administration and portray America as besieged.
We are not besieged on most days, but we are at risk. The thousands of our fellow civilians who serve abroad cannot do what they are there to do without running risks. You can build fortress embassies, as we have in Baghdad, and provide personal security details. But nothing reduces the risks to zero.
Some of the security measures we take inhibit achievement of the mission. Andrew Exum tweeted to me this morning:
It’s what the military refers to as the false balance between the men and the mission. In the end, the mission must come 1st.
Diplomats and aid workers need to be out on the street talking with people, monitoring projects, taking the pulse of local communities, giving speeches, engaging with the press and civil society generally. Law enforcement officials need to be consulting closely with their police and interior ministry counterparts. There is no use in an embassy or consulate that incarcerates and warehouses our civilian presence abroad, which is what the euphemistically named “diplomatic security” part of the State Department likes to do.
We need to get smarter about how to protect our people, while recognizing that there are no risk-free formulas. Anonmity and changing daily patterns is a lot better protection for many diplomats than a personal security detail. Spreading our people out, and moving them around frequently, is a lot safer than concentrating them in one hardened place. Relying on properly trained and equipped local security forces is often better than using highly visible Americans, who become easy targets.
Our four colleagues in Benghazi were killed in a fortress-like facility guarded principally by Americans. They–or someone else–might suffer the same fate using the approach I am suggesting. We need to ensure that we don’t have more people abroad than we really need. We also need to make sure they are undertaking efforts that are worth the risk to life and limb that they necessarily entail.
Congress is likely to move in quite a different direction. It will provide more funding for higher and thicker walls, and more American protection, as it does from time to time. Then it cuts that funding after a few years of quiet, leaving the State Department with an enormous capital infrastructure but without the means to maintain it.
The pointy end of the diplomatic spear is a dangerous place. Let’s get smarter and more agile about wielding it.
PS: I stumbled on this after drafting the above. So I’m not alone in my devotion to the mission.
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Why riot?
You don’t have to be a foreign affairs expert to see that there are political reasons for the Innocence of Muslims-inspired protests around the Muslim world in what has been termed “the video incident.” America’s recent wars in predominantly Muslim countries have heightened tensions. U.S. support for Israel also contributes.
But this can’t be just about politics. The video offended Muslim sentiments. If these protests were really about politics, why were they not more widespread and why did they not take on a more explicitly political guise?
Americans find it difficult to understand the religious justification for these protests. Either they are reduced to cultural relativism (“things are different in the Muslim world”) 0r they wonder if Muslims are so weak in their faith that any offense to their prophet pushes them to mass violence. Neither produces interesting answers.
What Westerners fail to appreciate is the cultural milieu in which Islam originated and propagated. Islam emerged from a pre-existing oral tradition of poetry. The influence is apparent in the Holy Qur’an, which often reads like poetry:
Say, “I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind,
The Sovereign of mankind,
The God of mankind,
From the evil of the retreating whisperer –
Who whispers [evil] into the breasts of mankind –
From among the jinn [spirits] and mankind.” (Surat an-Nas 114)
Recitation of the Qur’an is art, and those with the Qur’an memorized are respected. In early Islam, that was the only way to experience the Qur’an. It is believed Muhammad was illiterate, so when he received the Qur’an from the Angel Gabriel he memorized it and taught it to his followers. The sunnah, or the large body that encompasses the words and actions of the Prophet and some of his close followers, was also initially memorized and passed along orally.
Memorization and oral transmission were the privileged modes of gaining and disseminating knowledge. How was it to be determined whose oral transmission was legitimate? What would be done if two people remembered something differently? In the case of the sunnah an incredibly complex system developed for evaluating the legitimacy of different ahadith (pieces of the sunnah, particular stories about things the Prophet said or did). Was it possible that a certain transmitter could have had contact with another in order to pass along a hadith? Did both transmitters live in the same era and were they known to have traveled in the same region?
The issue of legitimacy also brought into question each transmitter’s character. Ignoring other variables, one might trust what one transmitter said the Prophet did over another if the first had a reputation for honesty while the second was known to lie. The legitimacy of the information a transmitter passed along was intimately connected to the transmitter’s reputation: how honest he was, how often he prayed, whether his teachings were consistent. Character is vital to legitimacy in the Islamic tradition.
The connection between the legitimacy of the content and the character of the content’s originator or transmitter implies that criticism of the latter calls the former into question. If a transmitter is not of high moral standing, there are implications for whether the ahadith he transmitted are considered legitimate. Insulting the Prophet, the original transmitter, calls into question his message, or all of Islam.
In the Shi’i tradition a religious leader’s character is very important, especially in a Muslim’s choice of Ayatollah. Because of the occultation of the last imam, Ayatollahs are selected to demonstrate how a Muslim should live her life until the last imam returns. The importance of an Ayatollah modeling good character is captured in the title given to a well-respected Ayatollah, marja-e-taqlid, which translates as “source of emulation.”
This is strange from the Judeo-Christian perspective, which privileges text. Jews are exigent about error-free copying of the Torah. Western culture worries about plagiarism. Improperly expropriating text undermines an author’s credibility and may call into question everything she has written. We have little need to worry about an author’s character to decide whether a text is valid or not.
It is therefore not surprising that the Judeo-Christian tradition includes insulting, teasing, or at least recognizing the faults of religious leaders without it negatively reflecting on their mission. In the Jewish tradition, many of the prophets are far from moral perfection, but their character flaws do not affect the sanctity of their purpose. Most Christians had a good laugh at the late-night TV jokes about Jesus’ possible wife. The ancient Greeks often mocked the gods.
There is of course no justification for the killings associated with the recent demonstrations. But the importance of transmitters in preserving the Islamic tradition provides some insight into the anger a number of Muslims are feeling around the world, an anger that so many in the West cannot begin to understand.
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George W. Bush’s playbook
I can do no better in summing up Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech today than he does himself in the penultimate sentence:
The 21st century can and must be an American century. It began with terror, war, and economic calamity. It is our duty to steer it onto the path of freedom, peace, and prosperity.
Here’s the problem: the terror, war and economic calamity Romney refers to occurred not on Barack Obama’s watch, but on George W. Bush’s. And Governor Romney’s foreign policy prescriptions, like many of his domestic policy prescriptions, are drawn from George W. Bush’s playbook.
The few innovations in Romney’s speech at Virginia Military Institute today are hardly worth mentioning. He wants to see the Syrian revolutionaries get more arms, in particular anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, but he fails to say how he will prevent these from being used against us, except to say that those who receive them will have to share our values. That should fix everything in the arms bazaars of the Middle East.
He says he will support a two-state solution for peace between Palestine and Israel. Nice to see him return to the mainstream from the extremist wings of Israeli and American politics, which is where he was during the “47%” fund-raising dinner in Florida when he suggested we would kick the can down the road and maybe skip the two-state solution altogether. Trouble is, the people he pitched that line to are supporting his campaign with fat checks. He says there will be no daylight between America and Israel, which is code for saying that the Jewish settlements will continue to expand, since that is what Netanyahu’s Israel wants. I fail to understand an American presidential candidate who outsources U.S. policy on the Palestinians to Israel.
In Libya he’ll track down the killers of our personnel, which is exactly what Obama promises to do. I’d just be curious how those 15 Navy ships he plans to build each year will help in the effort.
He pledges to condition aid to Egypt but makes the conditions both vague and easy to meet: build democratic institutions and maintain the peace treaty with Israel. There are lots of problems with President Morsy’s Egypt, but you won’t be able to hang him for either of those offenses, yet.
In Afghanistan, he calls the withdrawal the president has pledged a retreat but makes it clear he is not proposing anything very different.
Then there is this on foreign assistance:
I will make further reforms to our foreign assistance to create incentives for good governance, free enterprise, and greater trade, in the Middle East and beyond. I will organize all assistance efforts in the greater Middle East under one official with responsibility and accountability to prioritize efforts and produce results. I will rally our friends and allies to match our generosity with theirs.
The trouble here is that the Ryan budget guts the foreign affairs budget, including foreign assistance. There won’t be any American generosity to be matched with theirs if Romney is elected. This is where Romney departs definitively from Obama and shows his reliance on George W.’s playbook.
I hasten to add that I’d be all for organizing our assistance efforts in the greater Middle East under one official. That would be a good idea.
One last issue: with all this overload of American values as the basis for our foreign policy, I’m curious what Romney plans to do about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco and other less than fully democratic friends in the region? They get no mention in this speech, but of course they really can’t be mentioned in a speech that gives unequivocal backing to both our friends and our values. What would Romney do when there is a choice between the two? Keep silent would be a good guess.
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