Energy Policy: Al Gore at New York University

Two events in the summer of 2006 fueled the interest towards the creation of this blog. The first was Israel bombing and destroying South Lebanon’s infrastructure. They blew up roads, bridges, homes, hospitals and schools, leaving thousands homeless, as they were unable to weed out their enemy Hezbollah. What I saw was another military advancement by the West in the Middle East. The confrontation looked like the makings of World War III as the U.S. and its allies choose blunt military force once again to deal with the ‘Islamist threat’. Thank goodness Israel withdrew their troops. Unfortunately when they left the Israeli’s had advanced their goal of pushing back ‘20 years of development’ of Lebanese society.

While the Republican Party was busy making war, Al Gore wrote a book called “An Inconvenient Truth” which was turned into a documentary. The film is organized around his slide presentation about global warming. After watching the film I couldn’t believe this issue wasn’t getting more play in our media. There is an urgency surrounding the issue and a moral imperative to act in curbing corporate domination of the commons. Back in August Bush was still grabbing positive headlines for his defense of the Bush Doctrine as it was being used by Israel in Lebanon and his ‘stay the course in Iraq’ speeches at stumping grounds through out the United States.

Now that Global Warming issues are getting more traction in our national discussion and the Republican Party is on the defense for its leadership, the time is ripe for Democrats to send a strong message to guide us into this new era of globalization. It is time to propose policy on how to address the crisis of Global Warming. It is important to provide incentive to the corporate culture while transforming our economy to be more efficient and sustainable. A new era of global leadership must be ushered in as old global domination policies need to be cast out.

Gore’s presentation is compelling. As my friend Robert said recently after we went to see Gore speak at the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, “I can’t believe there isn’t something on the front pages everyday about Global Warming. People are more worried about what they are paying in taxes. Huge ice sheets are falling into the ocean, let’s focus on this!”

Last month, at New York University, Vice President Gore articulated his policy that would change the tide against the growing problem of global warming, plus he includes within this agenda a way to decrease payroll taxes. I have created an edited version below which includes bold highlights to skim the overall structure of his proposal. A link to the entire address is at the end of the post.

Al Gore Gives Policy Address at NYU on Solving the Climate Crisis
September 18, 2006

“A few days ago, scientists announced alarming new evidence of the rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap, continuing a trend of the past several years that now confronts us with the prospect that human activities, if unchecked in the next decade, could destroy one of the earth’s principle mechanisms for cooling itself. Scientific American introduces the lead article in its special issue this month with the following sentence: “The debate on global warming is over.”

Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several “tipping points” that could - within as little as 10 years - make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the earth’s atmosphere. Similarly, earlier this year, yet another team of scientists reported that the previous twelve months saw 32 glacial earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6 and 5.1 on the Richter scale - a disturbing sign that a massive destabilization may now be underway deep within the second largest accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice to raise sea level 20 feet worldwide if it broke up and slipped into the sea. Each passing day brings yet more evidence that we are now facing a planetary emergency - a climate crisis that demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn down the earth’s thermostat and avert catastrophe.

The serious debate over the climate crisis has now moved on to the question of how we can craft emergency solutions in order to avoid this catastrophic damage.

This debate over solutions has been slow to start in earnest not only because some of our leaders still find it more convenient to deny the reality of the crisis, but also because the hard truth for the rest of us is that the maximum that seems politically feasible still falls far short of the minimum that would be effective in solving the crisis.

My purpose is not to present a comprehensive and detailed blueprint - for that is a task for our democracy as a whole - but rather to try to shine some light on a pathway through this terra incognita that lies between where we are and where we need to go. Because, if we acknowledge candidly that what we need to do is beyond the limits of our current political capacities, that really is just another way of saying that we have to urgently expand the limits of what is politically possible.

Two weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together in our largest state, California, to pass legally binding sharp reductions in CO2 emissions. 295 American cities have now independently “ratified” and embraced CO2 reductions called for in the Kyoto Treaty. 85 conservative evangelical ministers publicly broke with the Bush-Cheney administration to call for bold action to solve the climate crisis. Business leaders in both political parties have taken significant steps to position their companies as leaders in this struggle and have adopted a policy that not only reduces CO2 but makes their companies zero carbon companies. Many of them have discovered a way to increase profits and productivity by eliminating their contributions to global warming pollution.

We have to insist on a higher level of honesty in America’s political dialogue.

Our children have a right to hold us to a higher standard when their future - indeed the future of all human civilization - is hanging in the balance. They deserve better than the spectacle of censorship of the best scientific evidence about the truth of our situation and harassment of honest scientists who are trying to warn us about the looming catastrophe.

We in the United States of America have a particularly important responsibility, after all, because the world still regards us - in spite of our recent moral lapses - as the natural leader of the community of nations. Simply put, in order for the world to respond urgently to the climate crisis, the United States must lead the way. No other nation can.

So, what would a responsible approach to the climate crisis look like if we had one in America?

1. We should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not.

2. A responsible approach to solving this crisis would also involve joining the rest of the global economy in playing by the rules of the world treaty that reduces global warming pollution by authorizing the trading of emissions within a global cap. At present, the global system for carbon emissions trading is embodied in the Kyoto Treaty. We should plan to accelerate its adoption and phase it in more quickly than is presently planned.

3. A responsible approach to solutions would avoid the mistake of trying to find a single magic “silver bullet” and recognize that the answer will involve what Bill McKibben has called “silver-buckshot” - numerous important solutions, all of which are hard, but no one of which is by itself the full answer for our problem.

One of the most productive approaches to the “multiple solutions” needed is a road-map designed by two Princeton professors, Rob Socolow and Steven Pacala, which breaks down the overall problem into more manageable parts. Socolow and Pacala have identified 15 or 20 building blocks (or “wedges”) that can be used to solve our problem effectively - even if we only use 7 or 8 of them. I am among the many who have found this approach useful as a way to structure a discussion of the choices before us.

There are already some solutions that seem to stand out as particularly promising:

A—Dramatic improvements in the efficiency with which we generate, transport and use energy will almost certainly prove to be the single biggest source of sharp reductions in global warming pollution. Many of the technologies on which we depend are actually so old that they are inherently far less efficient than newer technologies that we haven’t started using.

A i—One of the best examples is the internal combustion engine. When scientists calculate the energy content in BTUs of each gallon of gasoline used in a typical car, and then measure the amounts wasted in the car’s routine operation, they find that an incredible 90% of that energy is completely wasted.

A ii—Many older factories use obsolete processes that generate prodigious amounts of waste heat that actually has tremendous economic value. By redesigning their processes and capturing all of that waste, they can eliminate huge amounts of global warming pollution while saving billions of dollars at the same time.

When we introduce the right incentives for eliminating pollution and becoming more efficient, many businesses will begin to make greater use of computers and advanced monitoring systems to identify even more opportunities for savings.

B—We should develop a distributed electricity and liquid fuels distribution network that is less dependent on large coal-fired generating plants and vulnerable oil ports and refineries.

Small windmills and photovoltaic solar cells distributed widely throughout the electricity grid would sharply reduce CO2 emissions and at the same time increase our energy security. Likewise, widely dispersed ethanol and biodiesel production facilities would shift our transportation fuel stocks to renewable forms of energy while making us less dependent on and vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of expensive crude oil from the Persian Gulf, Venezuela and Nigeria, all of which are extremely unreliable sources upon which to base our future economic vitality. It would also make us less vulnerable to the impact of a category 5 hurricane hitting coastal refineries or to a terrorist attack on ports or key parts of our current energy infrastructure.

Just as a robust information economy was triggered by the introduction of the Internet, a dynamic new renewable energy economy can be stimulated by the development of an “electranet,” or smart grid, that allows individual homeowners and business-owners anywhere in America to use their own renewable sources of energy to sell electricity into the grid when they have a surplus and purchase it from the grid when they don’t. The same electranet could give homeowners and business-owners accurate and powerful tools with which to precisely measure how much energy they are using where and when, and identify opportunities for eliminating unnecessary costs and wasteful usage patterns.

C—We could further increase the value and efficiency of a distributed energy network by retooling our failing auto giants - GM and Ford - to require and assist them in switching to the manufacture of flex-fuel, plug-in, hybrid vehicles. The owners of such vehicles would have the ability to use electricity as a principle source of power and to supplement it by switching from gasoline to ethanol or biodiesel. This flexibility would give them incredible power in the marketplace for energy to push the entire system to much higher levels of efficiency and in the process sharply reduce global warming pollution.

It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick.

D—We should take bold steps to stop deforestation and extend the harvest cycle on timber to optimize the carbon sequestration that is most powerful and most efficient with older trees. On a worldwide basis, 2 and 1/2 trillion tons of the 10 trillion tons of CO2 emitted each year come from burning forests. So, better management of forests is one of the single most important strategies for solving the climate crisis.

E—Renewable energy
E1—Biomass-whether in the form of trees, switchgrass, or other sources-is one of the most important forms of renewable energy. And renewable sources make up one of the most promising building blocks for reducing carbon pollution.

E2­—Wind energy is already fully competitive as a mainstream source of electricity and will continue to grow in prominence and profitability.

E3—Solar photovoltaic energy is-according to researchers-much closer than it has ever been to a cost competitive breakthrough, as new nanotechnologies are being applied to dramatically enhance the efficiency with which solar cells produce electricity from sunlight-and as clever new designs for concentrating solar energy are used with new approaches such as Stirling engines that can bring costs sharply down.

F—Buildings-both commercial and residential-represent a larger source of global warming pollution than cars and trucks. But new architecture and design techniques are creating dramatic new opportunities for huge savings in energy use and global warming pollution. As an example of their potential, the American Institute of Architecture and the National Conference of Mayors have endorsed the “2030 Challenge,” asking the global architecture and building community to immediately transform building design to require that all new buildings and developments be designed to use one half the fossil fuel energy they would typically consume for each building type, and that all new buildings be carbon neutral by 2030, using zero fossil fuels to operate.

The rapid urbanization of the world’s population is leading to the prospective development of more new urban buildings in the next 35 years than have been constructed in all previous human history. This startling trend represents a tremendous opportunity for sharp reductions in global warming pollution through the use of intelligent architecture and design and stringent standards.

Here in the US the extra cost of efficiency improvements such as thicker insulation and more efficient window coatings have traditionally been shunned by builders and homebuyers alike because they add to the initial purchase price-even though these investments typically pay for themselves by reducing heating and cooling costs and then produce additional savings each month for the lifetime of the building. It should be possible to remove the purchase price barrier for such improvements through the use of innovative mortgage finance instruments that eliminate any additional increase in the purchase price by capturing the future income from the expected savings. We should create a Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association to market these new financial instruments and stimulate their use in the private sector by utilities, banks and homebuilders. This new “Connie Mae” (CNMA) could be a valuable instrument for reducing the pollution from new buildings.

G—Arguments against Nuclear proliferation. Many believe that a responsible approach to sharply reducing global warming pollution would involve a significant increase in the use of nuclear power plants as a substitute for coal-fired generators. While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity.

The main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger role in the world’s energy future is not the problem of waste disposal or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to terrorist attack. Let’s assume for the moment that all three of these problems can be solved. That still leaves two serious issues that are more difficult constraints. The first is economics; the current generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and only come in one size - extra large. In a time of great uncertainty over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in electricity demand - and that uncertainty causes them to strongly prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000 megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon.

Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in both Iran and North Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs. Moreover, proposals to separate the ownership of reactors from the ownership of the fuel supply process have met with stiff resistance from developing countries who want reactors. As a result of all these problems, I believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role.

H—Coal plus Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS)
The most important set of problems by that must be solved in charting solutions for the climate crisis have to do with coal, one of the dirtiest sources of energy that produces far more CO2 for each unit of energy output than oil or gas. Yet, coal is found in abundance in the United States, China, and many other places . Because the pollution from the burning of coal is currently excluded from the market calculations of what it costs, coal is presently the cheapest source of abundant energy. And its relative role is growing rapidly day by day.

Fortunately, there may be a way to capture the CO2 produced as coal as burned and sequester it safely to prevent it from adding to the climate crisis. It is not easy. This technique, known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is expensive and most users of coal have resisted the investments necessary to use it. However, when the cost of not using it is calculated, it becomes obvious that CCS will play a significant and growing role as one of the major building blocks of a solution to the climate crisis.

Interestingly, the most advanced and environmentally responsible project for capturing and sequestering CO2 is in one of the most forbidding locations for energy production anywhere in the world - in the Norwegian portions of the North Sea. Norway, as it turns out, has hefty CO2 taxes; and, even though there are many exceptions and exemptions, oil production is not one of them. As a result, the oil producers have found it quite economical and profitable to develop and use advanced CCS technologies in order to avoid the tax they would otherwise pay for the CO2 they would otherwise emit. The use of similar techniques could be required for coal-fired generating plants, and can be used in combination with advanced approaches like integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). Even with the most advanced techniques, however, the economics of carbon capture and sequestration will depend upon the availability of and proximity to safe deep storage reservoirs. Nevertheless, it is time to recognize that the phrase “clean coal technology” is devoid of meaning unless it means “zero carbon emissions” technology.

I—CO2 tax and the elimination of all payroll taxes
Even without brand new technologies, we already have everything we need to get started on a solution to this crisis. In a market economy like ours, however, every one of the solutions that I have discussed will be more effective and much easier to implement if we place a price on the CO2 pollution that is recognized in the marketplace. We need to summon the courage to use the right tools for this job.

For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all payroll taxes - including those for social security and unemployment compensation - and the replacement of that revenue in the form of pollution taxes - principally on CO2. The overall level of taxation would remain exactly the same. It would be, in other words, a revenue neutral tax swap. But, instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees, it would discourage business from producing more pollution.

Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence: we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.

And sure enough, when it’s not recognized in the marketplace, it does make it much easier for government, business, and all the rest of us to pretend that it doesn’t exist. But what we’re pretending doesn’t exist is the stuff that is destroying the habitability of the planet. We put 70 million tons of it into the atmosphere every 24 hours and the amount is increasing day by day. Penalizing pollution instead of penalizing employment will work to reduce that pollution.

When we place a more accurate value on the consequences of the choices we make, our choices get better. At present, when business has to pay more taxes in order to hire more people, it is discouraged from hiring more people. If we change that and discourage them from creating more pollution they will reduce their pollution. Our market economy can help us solve this problem if we send it the right signals and tell ourselves the truth about the economic impact of pollution.

This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue. It affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left vs. right; it is a question of right vs. wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours. What is motivating millions of Americans to think differently about solutions to the climate crisis is the growing realization that this challenge is bringing us unprecedented opportunity. I have spoken before about the way the Chinese express the concept of crisis. They use two symbols, the first of which - by itself - means danger. The second, in isolation, means opportunity. Put them together, and you get “crisis.” Our single word conveys the danger but doesn’t always communicate the presence of opportunity in every crisis. In this case, the opportunity presented by the climate crisis is not only the opportunity for new and better jobs, new technologies, new opportunities for profit, and a higher quality of life. It gives us an opportunity to experience something that few generations ever have the privilege of knowing: a common moral purpose compelling enough to lift us above our limitations and motivate us to set aside some of the bickering to which we as human beings are naturally vulnerable.

http://www.nyu.edu/community/gore.html

This Iraqi Life

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Prologue

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Today the blog comes to you in three acts…Three acts in honor of This American Life. So, to warn you, it would take a colossal effort to get through this entry in one sitting if you listen to all of the “This American Life” episodes. The Prologue covers the basics, yet the entire entry expresses the urgency that inspired this blog. So, please skim at your content, dwell where you will, and return if it so pleases you.

Ira Glass and his crew at This American Life has done a wonderful job of presenting even-handed fringe media—reporting that is not accountable to advertising dollars or corporate hierarchy. I’m sure their coverage looks outrageously liberal to many on the right side of our national spectrum yet I hear a real effort by their producers to present “This American Life” instead of “This Liberal Left Life”. There is a whole catalog of Iraq coverage that reveals a side of the war you won’t see in the main stream media. Here are a few that I highly recommend:

• “The Balloon Goes Up” Episode 235 = First Act-Bombs over Baghdad! Issam Shukri is an Iraqi man, living in Canada. He lived in Bagdad when it was bombed during the first gulf war. He talks with Ira about how scary it was when the ground started shaking and the streetlights suddenly blinked out, and how hard it was to explain to his three-year old son. (12 minutes)

• “What’s in a Number?” Episode 300 = About a year ago (October 2004, so it was two years ago), a study estimated the number of Iraqi casualties since the war began. It came up with a number – 100,000 dead – that was higher than any other estimate, and was mostly ignored. This week, Alex Blumberg revisits that study to look at the reality behind it. In Act One he reports that not only is the study probably accurate, but it says that most of the deaths were caused by Coalition forces (despite concerted efforts to avoid civilian casualties).

• “Habeas Schmabeas” Episode 310 = The right of habeas corpus has been a part of this country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means the government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the war on terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that the prisoners should not be covered by habeas – or even by the Geneva Conventions – because they’re the most fearsome terrorist enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

This American Life

If the Bush cadre would have stopped with Afghanistan and focused on the job there, they would have so much more support right now. It truly would be a different world. True, we would still have an assault on Habeus Corpus and the Geneva Conventions from the Republicans, yet United States power would be so much stronger right now.

Sometimes the United States needs to use the military, that’s why we have it, and after 9/11 an attack on the Talliban in Afghanistan still seems appropriate. Instead we had an abrupt shift of focus to a second military front, a display of arrogant American power that was ready to take on the world, and our leadership had to resort to deceit about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq to persuade the American people to go along with their plans. The only quantifiable result for the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to the Iraq War, after three and half years of U.S. occupation, is the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi’s. They are still waiting for a government that can provide them security.

How has the United States treated the Iraq people since we began our occupation? How many are dead because of this war in Iraq? Is their anyone who is accountable for this debacle?

The first act is a passage from the New York Times Magazine called “What the War did Col. Sassaman”. The article depicts an intimate view of an Army unit commander in the early days of the insurgency in Iraq. It gives you a great answer to “why they hate us”, at least “why they hate us in Iraq.”

The second act looks at the number of those who have died in Iraq. The U.S. press is obsessed with counting the American dead, particularly the soldiers. What about the Iraqi’s? Why don’t we count their dead and mourn their loss on the nightly news? Don’t their lives matter as much as ours?

With all that is wrong with the Iraq war and as arrogant as the Republican leadership was in sending our troops off to war you would think that some of them would be noble enough to stand up and be held accountable. Nope. They say ‘stay the course’. Act Three is “Maj. General John Batiste’s testimony before Sen. Democratic Policy Committee”. This is the speech in which he states “our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities.”

I recommend reading the General’s entire speech yet I feel like giving away the punch line here:

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq. He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency. He violated fundamental principles of war, dismissed deliberate military planning, ignored the hard work to build the peace after the fall of Saddam Hussein, set the conditions for Abu Ghraib and other atrocities that further ignited the insurgency, disbanded Iraqi security force institutions when we needed them most, constrained our commanders with an overly restrictive de-Ba’athification policy, and failed to seriously resource the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces as our main effort.”

Does this leave the Republican led congress off the hook? The General continues:

“Through all of this, our Congressional oversight committees were all but silent and not asking the tough questions, as was done routinely during both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Our Congress shares responsibility for what is and is not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

An aggressive off-the-leash Executive Branch, a Congress bowing down to an Imperial Presidency, is bad democratic practice.

Joseph Nye, Jr. concludes, “Even when mistaken policies reduce our attractiveness, our ability to openly criticize and correct our mistakes makes us attractive to others at a deeper level.”

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Now we arrive at act one…
Act One: What the War did to Colonel Sassaman

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New York Times Magazine>
October 23,2005
Written by Dexter Filkins (edited moonshiner)

Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, unit commander for the United States Army in Iraq, commanded 800 soldiers in the heart of the insurgency ravaged Sunni Triangle. The events in this passage take place in October and November of 2003, seven months into the US occupation of Iraq.

“By this time the Iraqi insurgency was in full bloom. The holy month of Ramadan, beginning in October 2003, had coincided with a surge in attacks and American combat deaths. The insurgents were acting with greater sophistication every day, shooting down American helicopters, mortaring American bases, even firing rockets at Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary. In Samarra, the guerrillas had made so much mayhem that the American unit in charge of the town had abandoned its bases.

The emergence of the Iraqi insurgency stunned senior American commanders, who had planned for a short, sharp war against a uniformed army, with a bout of peacekeeping afterward. Now there was no peace to keep. In response, American officers ordered their soldiers to bring Iraq back under control. They urged their men to go after the enemy , and they authorized a range of aggressive tactics. On a visit form headquarters in Tikrit, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, ordered Sassaman and other officers simply to ‘‘increase lethality”. Sassaman, adored by Odierno for the zeal with which his men hunted down guerrillas, took the order to heart. He sent his men into the Sunni villages around Balad to kick down doors and detain their angry young men. When Sassaman spoke of sending his soldiers into Sammara, his eyes gleamed. “We are going to inflict extreme violence,” he said.

Sassaman had taken command of the Fourth Infantry Division’s 1-8 Battalion in June, and although, like most American officers, he had received virtually no training in building a new nation or conducting a guerilla war, he had quickly figured out what he needed to do: remake the area’s shattered institutions, jump-start the economy and implant a democracy, all while battling an insurgency that was growing more powerful by the day. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde out here,” Sassaman said at the time. “By day, we’re putting on a happy face. By night, we are hunting down and killing our enemies.”

When it came to nation-building or waging a counterinsurgency campaign, Sassaman was basically winging it. For starters, his men were spread incredibly thin. With roughly 800 soldiers, his battalion was responsible for nearly 300 square miles. There were Sunnis and Shiites, cities and farms, Sufis and Salafis. There were villages like Abu Hishma, that sheltered die-hard supporters of Hussein, and cities like Balad, where the survivors of Hussein’s regime wandered about as if just unstrapped from the torturer’s table, which some of them were.

There were no Army manuals on how to set up a local government in a country ruined by 30 years of terror ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQOEhXb6jlU ) , no maps for reading the expressions on the face of a Sunni sheik, no advice on handling the city engineer who was taking bribes to dole out electricity. “For a whole year,” Sassaman told me, “I was the warrior king.”

American money for public-works projects, so critical in showing good will and putting young men to work, came in bursts and then dried up. Projects began; projects stalled; Lt. Col. Laura Loftus, who commanded a combat engineer battalion in Dujail, a city just south of Sassaman’s area, recalled that when she arrived in July 2003, she found herself responsible for a city of 75,00 people in a state of complete physical and psychological collapse. Dujail was receiving four hours of electricity every third day, and half the town had no drinking water. Sewage drained through the streets. Thousands of Dujail’s people had been murdered or tortured by Hussein’s men. “It was a good thing I paid attention in high-school civics,” she told me. “There was no playbook.”

Over time, Sassaman found that virtually every aspect of his patch of Iraq had that yin-yang quality. Where the Shiites appreciated American efforts to quell the violence, Sunnis saw them as acts of war. While self-government took hold in Balad, in the Sunni areas there was cold apathy. In Abu Hishma, a Sunni village of about 7,000 the Americans were met with stares and obscene gestures; even the adults would run their fingers across their necks as the soldiers drove by. Slogans on the walls exhorted Iraqis to kill Americans. Crowds of young men would gather to throw rocks at American patrols. And then there were the armed attacks.

Sassaman directed most of his reconstruction money, nearly $4 million, to the Shiite areas for the simple reason that his men did not come under attack there. When the Americans entered Abu Jishma, it was seldom to build schools or roads; it was to patrol for insurgents and kick down doors.

I accompanied Sassaman and his men on one search through a Sunni village in October 2003, and I was able to witness the dynamic on my own. The searches seemed absolutely necessary, given the violence, but they seemed to be draining whatever good will the Sunnis had left for the Americans. In one dawn raid, soldiers from the 1-8 Battalion surrounded a house, kicked open its doors and stormed inside. They rousted 11 men from their beds, pulled them outside and forced them to squat on their haunches. Still inside, in the living room, a young woman stood with three small girls, probably her daughters, each with her hands high in the air. The Americans found no weapons. The Iraqi men squatted outside for half an hour. “I feel bad for these people, I really do,” Sgt. Eric Brown said that morning. “Its’ so hard to separate the good from the bad.”

On the night of Nov. 17, as one of the battalion’s patrols moved past Abu Hishma, a crowd of young Iraqis began taunting them. Seconds later, a team of insurgents fired a volley of rocket-propelled grenades directly at one of the Bradleys. One rocket-propelled grenade, or R.P.G., sailed directly into the chest of the driver, Staff Sgt. Dale Panchot. It nearly cut him in half.

The death of Panchot seemed to change everything for the battalion. Sassaman decided that the Sunni sheiks had broken the truce and that from that moment there would be no more deals. Building a democracy in places like Abu Hishma would have to take a back seat. The new priority would be killing insurgents and punishing anyone who supported them, even people who didn’t.

The day after Panchot was killed, Sassaman ordered his men to wrap Abu Hishma in barbed wire. American soldiers issued ID cards to all the men in the village between the ages of 17 and 65, and the soldiers put up checkpoints at the entrance to the town. Around the camp were signs threatening to shoot anyone who tried to enter or leave the town except in the approved way. The ID cards were in English only. “If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” Sassaman said, standing at the gate of the village as the Iraqis filed past. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.”

As a measure intended to persuade the Iraqis to cooperate, wrapping Abu Hishma in barbed wire was a disaster. As they lined up at the checkpoints, the Iraqis compared themselves with Palestinians, who are sometimes forced to undergo the same sort of security checks and whose humiliations are shown relentlessly on television screens across the Arab world. “It’s just like a prison now,” said Hajji Tamir Rabia, an old man in the village. “The Americans do night raids, come into our houses when the women are sleeping. We can’t fight them. We don’t have any weapons.” After Abu Hishma was wrapped in barbed wire, the attacks against the Americans dropped off, bit it was a victory bought at no small price. Much of the village felt humiliated and angry, hardly the conditions for future success. Sassaman’s reputation was sealed, as I discovered when I slipped past the guards and into the town. “When mothers put their children to bed at night, they tell them, ‘If you aren’t a good boy, colonel Sassaman is going to come and get you,’“ and old man in the village said.

After a time, the insurgents came to fear him more than they did the others. When Sassaman left Balad, the attacks would increase; when he returned, they would fall away. Once, when Sassaman was returning from a mission in Samarra, insurgents fired a single mortar round into his compound, as if to welcome him back. He responded by firing 28 155-millimeter artillery shells and 42 mortar rounds. He called in two airstrikes, one with a 500 pound bomb and the other with a 2,000 pound bomb. Later on, his men found a crater as deep as a swimming pool.

Yet the experience in Abu Hishma and the other Sunni towns posed a basic challenge for Sassaman’s men: apart from killing insurgents, how could the Americans ensure that their authority would be respected and that they would be obeyed in a place where they were so thoroughly hated.

The tactics employed by Sassaman’s men had been explicitly ordered or at least condoned by senior American officers, and many units in the Sunni Triangle were already using the same kind of tough-guy methods. The order to wrap Abu Jishma in barbed wire, for instance, was given by Col. Frederick Rudesheim, Sassaman’s immediate supervisor. Odierno signed off on the wrapping of Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, Awja. Destroying homes and detaining people as quasi hostages—those, too, were being condoned by American generals. At a news conference in November 2003, Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, acknowledged that he had authorized the destruction of homes thought to be used by insurgents.

The tough tactics employed by Sassaman’s battalion had their effect. Attacks in the Sunni villages like Abu Hishma, wrapped in barbed wire, dropped sharply. And his men succeeded in retaking Samara. Winning the long-term allegiance of the Iraqis in those areas was another matter, however. If many Iraqis in the Sunni Triangle were ever open to the American project—the Shiite cities like Balad excepted—very few of them are anymore. Majool Saadi Muhammad, 49, a tribal leader in Abu Hishma, said that he had harbored no strong feelings about the Americans when they arrived in April 2003 and was proud to have three sons serving in the new American-backed Iraqi Army. Then the raids began, and many of Abu Hishma’s young men were led away in hoods and cuffs. In early 2004, he said Sassaman led a raid on his house, kicking in the doors and leaving the place a shambles. “There is no explanation except to humiliate,” Muhammad told me. “I really hate them.”

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Here is the first intermission. Grab a snack…Act Two is about to begin...
Act Two: Counting the Dead

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The Department of Defense has identified 2,747 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. That is American Serviceman only. What about the Iraqi’s?

In the Prologue of this blog entry I pointed to Episode 300 on This American Life:

“What’s in a Number?”
This American Life

“Truth, Damn Truth, and Statistics. About two years ago, a John Hopkins University study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It came up with a number – 100,000 dead – that was higher than any other estimate, and was mostly ignored. Producer Alex Blumberg tells the remarkable story of what it took to find that number, why we should find it credible and why almost no one believed it.”

That report was made two years ago. Take a listen to hear how they counted the dead and why it is a credible number. Last week they published a new report, by the same people at John’s Hopkins and the Lancet, and the report shows a spike in the number who have died.

600,000 dead in Iraq.

The Times October 11, 2006

War and turmoil has cost 600,000 Iraqi lives, study finds
By Sam Knight, and James Hider in Baghdad

A new study by public health researchers estimates that up to 600,000 Iraqi people — nearly 1 in 40 — have died violently since the American-led invasion of the country in March 2003.

The estimate, which far exceeds figures compiled by the United Nations and the Iraqi Government, is the second made by a group of American and Italian researchers and used a sampling of nearly 2,000 households across Iraq to extrapolate a total number of violent deaths, be they caused by crime, the US-led coalition or sectarian strife.

The first report, issued in October 2004 by a team led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, estimated that 100,000 people had been killed in the first year of the war. The study was criticized for its narrow sample and wide margin of error.

The new study, published in the online edition of The Lancet, the British medical journal, also accepts a broad range of error, with its lead author, Gilbert Burnham, also of Johns Hopkins, saying the true figure could lie anywhere between 426,369 to 793,663.

It estimated that a total of 654,965 more Iraqis had died as a consequence of the war than “would have been expected in a non-conflict situation”. Of those, 601,000 it was said had died directly of violent causes, including gunfire, car bombs, air strikes and other explosions. The rest had suffered from a general decline in healthcare and sanitary standards due to failing water supplies, sewerage and electricity supply.

The survey drew swift and senior rebuttals. When asked about the study at a White House news conference, President George Bush said: “The methodology is pretty well discredited.”

He added: “I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and that troubles me, and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence.”

The researchers defended their methods, which replicate those used to estimate the death toll in humanitarian emergencies such as Darfur, claiming that studying the mortality rate of a sample of families across Iraq is at least as accurate as relying on casualty figures issued by morgues, hospitals and the Iraqi Government.

According to a report in today’s New York Times, the researchers maintain that their study reflects the larger breakdown of order across Iraq and reflects the turbulence outside Baghdad, which dominates press and official reports about the progress of the war.

“We found deaths all over the country,” Dr Burnham told the newspaper, adding that Baghdad was an area of medium violence compared to the provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin, north of the capital, and Anbar to the west, which all had higher death rates.

The study found that up to 15,000 people are dying violently every month in Iraq, a level that surpasses by far the most recent UN estimates.

Last month the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq said that 3,009 civilians had died violently in August, down from 3,590 in July, two of the worst months of the war so far. More than 5,000 of the deaths were reported in Baghdad.

The US military does not keep an official count of the civilian casualties in Iraq, but according to its latest report to Congress, around 120 Iraqis, including police officers and soldiers, died every day in August, a total of 3,600, up from 26 a day, or 800 per month, in 2004. The John Hopkins figures also tower over the running totals maintained by the Iraq Body Count, an independent group that monitors media reports to estimate the numbers of Iraqi dead. The group’s current total stands at 48,000.

The Iraqi Government, meanwhile, has sought to take control of the compilation of mortality statistics. Baghdad’s central morgue, until now the main source of information for violence in the capital, was prohibited from issuing its own information last month.

Today, Adel Mohsin, the Iraqi Deputy Health Minister, cast doubt on the estimate, saying: “I think it’s a bit exaggerated... I’d say we are now averaging about 2,000 to 3,000 maximum a month killed, which would be 36,000 a year.”

Mr Mohsin did say that 50,000 Iraqis could have lost their lives because of the parlous state of the country’s hospitals and infrastructure: “Obviously if we compare the standard of treatment to countries like the UK, we have lost a lot of people,” he said.

The authors of the Johns Hopkins study chose 1,849 families from 47 districts across Iraq — chosen for their geographical location and population size, rather than level of violence — and found that the death rate among the 12,801 people they studied was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people since the war began. That rate compared to an estimate of 5.5 per 1,000 under Saddam.

The researchers found that gunfire caused 56 per cent of the deaths directly attributable to violence, with air strikes and car bombs accounting for a further 13 to 14 per cent.

Commenting on the results, Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said: “The disaster that is the West’s current strategy in Iraq must be used as a constructive call to the international community to reconfigure its foreign policy around human security rather than national security, around health and well-being in addition to the protection of territorial boundaries and economic stability.”

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…we have come to the third act...
Act Three: Army Major General John R.S. Batiste (retired)

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USA: Maj. General John Batiste’s testimony before Sen. Democratic Policy Committee

September 25, 2006

My name is John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican.

Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation on the path to victory. There is no substitute for victory and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except “how to win.” He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq, or the human dimension of warfare. Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build “his plan,” which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace, and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency, which was an absolute certainty.

Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and capability required to impose security, crush a budding insurgency, and set the conditions for the rule of law in Iraq. We were undermanned from the beginning, lost an early opportunity to secure the country, and have yet to regain the initiative.

To compensate for the shortage of troops, commanders are routinely forced to manage shortages and shift coalition and Iraqi security forces from one contentious area to another in places like Baghdad, An Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah, and many others. This shifting of forces is generally successful in the short term, but the minute a mission is complete and troops are redeployed back to the region where they came from, insurgents reoccupy the vacuum and the cycle repeats itself. Troops returning to familiar territory find themselves fighting to reoccupy ground which was once secure. We are all witnessing this in Baghdad and the Al Anbar Province today. I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. This is no way to fight a counter-insurgency. Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan did not set our military up for success.

Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq. He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency. He violated fundamental principles of war, dismissed deliberate military planning, ignored the hard work to build the peace after the fall of Saddam Hussein, set the conditions for Abu Ghraib and other atrocities that further ignited the insurgency, disbanded Iraqi security force institutions when we needed them most, constrained our commanders with an overly restrictive de-Ba’athification policy, and failed to seriously resource the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces as our main effort.

He does not comprehend the human dimension of warfare. The mission in Iraq is all about breaking the cycle of violence and the hard work to change attitudes and give the Iraqi people alternatives to the insurgency. You cannot do this with precision bombs from 30,000 feet. This is tough, dangerous, and very personal work. Numbers of boots on the ground and hard-won relationships matter. What should have been a deliberate victory is now an uncertain and protracted challenge.

Secretary Rumsfeld built his team by systematically removing dissension. America went to war with “his plan” and to say that he listens to his generals is disingenuous. We are fighting with his strategy. He reduced force levels to unacceptable levels, micromanaged the war, and caused delays in the approval of troop requirements and the deployment process, which tied the hands of commanders while our troops were in contact with the enemy. At critical junctures, commanders were forced to focus on managing shortages rather than leading, planning, and anticipating opportunity.

Through all of this, our Congressional oversight committees were all but silent and not asking the tough questions, as was done routinely during both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Our Congress shares responsibility for what is and is not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our nation’s treasure in blood and dollars continues to be squandered under Secretary Rumsfeld’s leadership. Losing one American life due to incompetent war planning and preparation is absolutely unacceptable. The work to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime was a challenge, but it pales in comparison to the hard work required to build the peace. The detailed deliberate planning to finish the job in Iraq was not considered as Secretary Rumsfeld forbade military planners from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq. At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan. Our country and incredible military were not set up for success.

Our country has yet to mobilize for a protracted, long war. I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the Administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq. Secretary Rumsfeld failed to address the full range of requirements for this effort, and the result is one percent of the population shouldering the burdens, continued hemorrhaging of our national treasure in terms of blood and dollars, an Army and Marine Corps that will require tens of billions of dollars to reset after we withdraw from Iraq, the majority of our National Guard brigades no longer combat-ready, a Veterans Administration which is underfunded by over $3 billion, and America arguably less safe now than it was on September 11, 2001. If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents.

What do we do now? We are where we are, plagued by the mistakes of the past. Thankfully, we are Americans and with the right leadership, we can do anything.

First, the American people need to take charge through their elected officials. Secretary Rumsfeld and the Administration are fighting a war in secret that threatens our democratic values. This needs to stop right now, today.

Second, we must replace Secretary Rumsfeld and his entire inner circle. We deserve leaders whose judgment and instinct we can all trust.

Third, we must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge, which must include conveying the “what, why, and how long” to every American, rationing to finance the totality of what we are doing, and gearing up our industrial base in a serious manner. Mortgaging our future at the rate of $1.5 billion a week and financing our great Army and Marine Corps with supplemental legislation must stop. Americans will rally behind this important cause when the rationale is properly laid out.

Fourth, we must rethink our Iraq strategy. “More of the same” is not a strategy, nor is it working. This new strategy must include serious consideration of federalizing the country, other forms of Iraqi national conscription and incentives to modify behavior, and a clear focus on training and equipping the Iraqi security forces as “America’s main effort.”

Fifth, we must fix our inter-agency process to completely engage and synchronize all elements of America’s national power. Unity of effort is fundamental and we need one person in charge in Iraq who pulls the levers with all U.S. Government agencies responding with 110 percent effort.

Finally, we need to get serious about mending our relationships with allies and getting closer to our friends and enemies. America can not go this alone. All of this is possible, but we need leadership and responsible Congressional oversight to pull this off.

I challenge the American people to get informed and speak out. Remember that the Congress represents and works for the people. Congressional oversight committees have been strangely silent for too long, and our elected officials must step up to their responsibilities or be replaced. This is not about partisan politics, but rather what is good for our country.

Our November elections are crucial. Every American needs to understand the issues and cast his or her vote. I believe that one needs to vote for the candidate who understands the issues and who has the moral courage to do the harder right rather than the easier wrong. I for one will continue to speak out until there is accountability, until the American people establish momentum, and until our Congressional oversight committees kick into action. Victory in Iraq is fundamental and we cannot move forward until accountability is achieved. Thank you.

American Soft Power

Intel corporation is a better apparatus to fight the war on terror than the U.S. Army.

After making that assertion using the preferred language of the Republican leadership, I don’t want to call it a ‘war’ anymore. I want to message it a different way and The Intel World Ahead Program is precisely one message that gets the job done. The idea is that American Soft Power will do better fulfilling American foreign policy goals in the long run than blunt military force.

I got the idea for the above statement while working on some Case Studies for Pakistan, India, Jordan, and Turkey which are included in the The Intel World Ahead Program. The Intel World Ahead Program is a 1 billion dollar initiative by a ‘corporate citizen’ whose objective is to provide technological advancements for developing countries. The Program has three initiatives:

Accessibility - Providing the foundation for technology usage and ownership
Connectivity - Extending broadband Internet access to developing countries
Education - Preparing students for success in the global economy through programs, resources, and technology

The program can be accessed publicly here.

This is only one of many ways in which America uses its Soft Power. So what is Soft Power anyway? It is very much in line with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s recommendation “Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”

The actual phrase Soft Power was coined by Joseph Nye and it was introduced to me by my friend and colleague Darren Newton (aka D>Run). D>Run comments:

“Joseph Nye was Asst. Secretary of Defense under Clinton. He states the case, correctly, that American soft-power (cultural & economic capital as used in the Marshall Plan post WW2) is far more powerful than short term military force. It is a well reasoned refutation of everything the current administration is doing.

“Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria are both proponents of this view. Zakaria makes wonderfully contrarian statements in his weekly Newsweek column along these lines; such as positing that the real solution to Iran would be to open an embassy in Tehran and hand out a bunch of student visas.”

Many thanks to D>Run. His lead has led to copious rewards on the research front. For instance, one of my favorite resources is wikipedia:

Soft power is a term used in international relations theory to describe the ability of a political body, such as a state, to indirectly influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies through cultural or ideological means. The term was first coined by Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, who remains its most prominent proponent, in a 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. He further developed the concept in his 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. While its usefulness as a descriptive theory has not gone unchallenged, soft power has since entered popular political discourse as a way of distinguishing the subtle effects of culture, values and ideas on others’ behavior from more direct coercive measures, such as military action or economic incentives. In Nye’s words,

"The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks.’

Soft power, then, represents the third way of getting the outcomes you want. Soft power is contrasted with hard power, which has historically been the predominant realist measure of national power, through quantitative metrics such as population size, concrete military assets, or a nation’s Gross Domestic Product. But having such resources does not always produce the desired outcomes as the United States discovered in the Vietnam War. The resources from which soft power behavior is derived are culture (when it is attractive to others), values (when there is no hypocrisy in their application) and foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others). Unless these conditions are present, culture and ideas do not necessarily produce the attraction that is essential for soft power behavior. The extent of attraction can be measured by public opinion polls, by elite interviews, and case studies. Nye argues that soft power is more than influence, since influence can also rest on the hard power of threats or payments. And soft power is more than just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is an important part of it. It is also the ability to attract, and attraction often leads to acquiescence. ...

If I am persuaded to go along with your purposes without any explicit threat or exchange taking place—in short, if my behavior is determined by an observable but intangible attraction—soft power is at work. Soft power uses a different type of currency—not force, not money—to engender cooperation. It uses an attraction to shared values, and the justness and duty of contributing to the achievement of those values.”

The United States Army has discovered that if they are going to meet their objectives in the Middle East and other critical terrorist threat zones, they will need to employ something other than force to influence others. To see Soft Power at work within the context of our military, let’s look at an article:

The Wall Street Journal
“A General’s New Plan to Battle Radical Islam”
Saturday/Sunday, September 2-3, 2006 page A1.

“Top commander Gen. Abizaid uses soldiers to build health clinics and dig wells. But is it enough?”

“In the Fall of 2002, the U.S. military set up a task force here on the Horn of Africa to kill any al Qaeda fighters seeking refuge in the region. The base was crawling with elite special-operations teams, and an unmanned Predator plane armed with hellfire missiles sat ready on the runway.

“Today, the base houses 1,800 troops whose mission is to build health clinics, wells and schools in areas where Islamic extremists are active. The idea is to ease some of the suffering that leaves the locals susceptible to the radicals’ message, thus bolstering local governments, which will run the new facilities and get credit for the improvements.

“Behind the shift is Gen. John Abizaid—a 55-year-old of Lebanese descent and a fluent Arabic speaker—who leads U.S. forces in the Middle East. In May, the four-star Army general visited 17 Navy Seabees, or engineers, at work designing a school. ‘Those 17 Seabees doing their mission out there achieve as much for us as a battalion of infantry on the ground looking for bad guys,’ the general said.

“In an interview in Iraq later, he was even blunter about the limits of U.S. firepower. ‘Military power can gain us time…but that is about it,’ he said.

“It’s a striking comment from one of the country’s most influential generals, whose views are increasingly being echoed by President Bush. As head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Abizaid oversees the U.S. military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and the Mideast. He wields great military power, commanding more than 200,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, along with hundreds of warplanes and dozens of ships.

“But his view of the region is increasingly shaped by the inability of all that firepower to prevail against a violent strain of Islam seeking to expand its foothold. ‘The best way to contain al Qaeda is to increase the capacity of the regional powers to deal with it themselves.’

“Gen. Abizaid’s approach is part of a broader rethinking within the Bush administration of how to fight terrorism, driven in part by the failures of the past five years. One of its tenets is that change must take place gradually and be led by locals. The U.S. can provide help training and equipping indigenous counterterrorism forces to break up al Qaeda cells, Gen. Abizaid says. But bigger changes that address the root causes of terrorism in the region must take place over years, if not decades.

“‘We tend to be very impatient and want democracy to form tomorrow,’ he says. But ‘reform paced too quickly can have unintended consequences.’

“Gen. Abizaid says his approach calls for a ‘long war, because it will take a long time for reform to take place.’”

Why are we calling it a war? Because the military is doing the Peace Corps’ job? If we would spend $100 billion annually on the Peace Corps and call it a “Peace on Terrorism” wouldn’t that communicate the ideals of U.S. culture better than hellfire missiles?

The United States calls it a “War on Terror” because of the Republican leadership has a myopic, unilaterist, Cold War approach to the world which is sapping up our Soft Power—our ability to compel the rest of the world to follow our guidance.

In this trumped up “War on Terror”, our core leaders are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice and looking at their background will tell us why our foreign policy is “War on Terror”:
• President Bush who is a failed Texas oil business man who got his political reputation because he is the son of the former director of the CIA who graduated to President on the coat tails of Ronald Reagan
• Vice-President Cheney who was the former Secretary of Defense, who then became CEO of Halliburton in his time off between the Pentagon and the White House
• A two time Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld has been publicly called incompetent by a top General in Iraq and a member of his own staff has publicly admitted that they deliberately manipulated data to create false talking points on WMD’s which supported a preemptive strike against Iraq
• The first Secretary of State, Powell was a former General who was the top Chief for George H. Bush. Powell had big ideas of turning the U.S. into the biggest bully of global street fights.
• Powell was replaced by the second Secretary of State, Rice served on the board of directors for the Chevron Corporation, was promoted from her post as National Security Advisor after she was unable to act upon the brief “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.”, the daily intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush a month before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The declassified intelligence report said the FBI had detected “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” You would think that a brief with that title would send up some red flags with any administration, especially since the previous administration under President Clinton fired 75 cruise missiles worth 1 million dollars apiece at Osama bin Laden. She did nothing to protect us and got promoted. Bush did nothing to protect us and the American public re-elected him.

We call it a “War on Terror” so the United States can keep dolling out billions of dollars on contracts to company’s like Halliburton, a company assisting the U.S. build 14 permanent bases in Iraq, instead of giving the State Department billions of dollars, as General Abizaid suggests, who might “teach locals ways to open their societies that don’t threaten them.”

We call it a “War on Terror” so the government can justify half of our open tax expenditure to be spent on the military.

Joseph Nye comments, “in Jordan and Pakistan, a 2004 poll shows that more people are attracted to Osama bin Laden than to George Bush.

“Democratic values can be attractive and thus help to produce soft power, but not when they are imposed at gunpoint.”

One of the heaviest costs of the Iraq War has been the loss of America’s reputation worldwide, writes Nye. The image of America as an arrogant, global bully is increasingly commonplace around the world. The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison have exacerbated this negative perception of the US, and contributed to the decline of America’s ‘soft power’. For decades after WWII, Nye argues, America’s soft power proved instrumental in influencing human rights policies and attracting people around the world to democracy. Yet the US now spends a minimal amount of its budget on soft power programs, allotting a mere $150 million a year to public diplomacy in the Islamic world. “There is something wrong with our priorities,” Nye writes, “when the world’s leading country in the information age is doing such a poor job of getting its message out.” Nevertheless, Nye continues, the US’s reputation will ultimately survive the negative press of horrors such as Abu Ghraib, as its democratic system demands that the individuals who committed and permitted these wrongs be brought to justice. “Even when mistaken policies reduce our attractiveness, our ability to openly criticize and correct our mistakes makes us attractive to others at a deeper level,” Nye concludes.

Sunday, Oct 15th: Iraq Update

Keeping an eye on the ball in Iraq while the State Department is absorbed in North Korea. There are three articles below.

The first is about a UK General who has publicly stated and defended the following statements:

Britain should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems,” he told the Mail.

“I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them…

The second article is “Iraqi Parliament Passes Federalism Bill”. This is the path suggested by Joe Bidden and refused by the Republican leadership. The point here is that it is neither the Democrats choice or the Republicans choice on what the Iraqi people do. The choice is up to the Iraqi people.

The third ”Iraqis call for five-man junta to end the anarchy”. This is not a bill that has passed so this in not Iraqi policy. However, it gives you a taste of the sitution in Iraq. “IRAQ’S fragile democracy, weakened by mounting chaos and a rapidly rising death toll, is being challenged by calls for the formation of a hardline ‘government of national salvation’.”

This is inline with Ian Bremmer’s thesis “When a state suddenly becomes unstable, its citizens may demand a restoration of stability at the expense of all meaningful reform.” The Bush Doctrine is ineffective because you can not force massive amounts of reform on a people. Too much reform all at once forces a country into the unstable depths of the J Curve, much like Iraq is now.

(1 of 3) First Article of Three: Army chief urges troop pullout

Fri Oct 13, 2006 12:38 PM ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-10-13T163839Z_01_GEO743062_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-2

By Deborah Haynes and Peter Graff

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s army chief said his troops should be withdrawn from Iraq soon as their presence was making security worse, in bluntly worded comments seized upon by opponents of the U.S.-led invasion three years ago.

Chief of the General Staff Richard Dannatt told the Daily Mail newspaper that post-war planning for the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was “poor” and the presence of troops there was hurting British security globally.

The remarks, extraordinary from such a senior serving officer, could have political fallout on both sides of the Atlantic. The war has damaged the standing of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and is a major issue for U.S. President George W. Bush’s allies in congressional elections next month.

Although in later interviews Dannatt denied any split with Blair, he may have added to the storm by warning that overstretching the British army in Iraq could “break it”.

Britain should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems,” he told the Mail.

“I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them,” he said.

“I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning.”

Blair told a news conference in Scotland later on Friday that having read the newspaper interview and transcripts of remarks Dannatt made to radio and television stations there was no division between them.

“What he is saying about wanting the British forces out of Iraq is precisely the same as we are all saying,” Blair said. “Our strategy is to withdraw from Iraq when the job is done.”

“The reason that we have been able to give up two provinces now to Iraqi control is precisely because the job has been done there,” he added, noting that Basra was still not secure which was why British forces remained in place.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said after reviewing transcripts of Dannatt’s interviews, “The comment was taken out of context and his general point was that, you know, when your work is done you hand over authority to the Iraqis.”

“The Iraqis have said that they want continued presence, and they have also made it clear that when they think that they are going to be capable of assuming full control for various areas, they are eager and willing to do so,” Snow said.

POLITICAL STORM

Iraq government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said U.S. and British troops were still needed.

“The Iraqi government and the Iraqi people don’t want foreign troops to stay in Iraq indefinitely. But we believe the British and Americans are playing a positive role in Iraq and that their presence is necessary to control the security issue.”

But Dannatt’s remarks were seized upon by anti-war campaigners. Reg Keys, whose son died in Iraq, said: “Here you have an officer, at last, who is prepared to speak how it is, and not be a mouthpiece for the delusions of a prime minister.”

In Basra, where most of Britain’s 7,200 troops are based, locals told Reuters they agreed it was time for them to go.

“In the last three years, people started to look at these troops in a different way. They simply hate these troops,” said school teacher Fatima Ahmed, 35.

A British military source in Basra said Dannatt’s comments referred to Maysan province -- one of two regions controlled by British forces. He said co-operation with local residents was better in Basra region.

Asked if Dannatt’s comments had hurt troop morale, he said: “He is a popular man. He is a soldier’s soldier and he tells things the way they are.”

Hours after Dannatt’s interview appeared, he made radio and television appearances to calm the political storm. He said his remarks were taken out of context but he did not deny them.

“It was never my intention to have this hoo ha, which people have thoroughly enjoyed overnight, trying to suggest there is a chasm between myself and the prime minister,” he told BBC radio.

British troops were targets in some places, but were beneficial in others, he said and insisted he was not proposing an immediate withdrawal. “I’m a soldier. We don’t do surrender ... We’re going to see this through,” he said.

But he added: “I’ve got an army to look after which is going to be successful in current operations. But I want an army in five years time and 10 years time. Don’t let’s break it on this one. Lets keep an eye on time.”

Britain has launched a large new operation in Afghanistan this year, and commanders have acknowledged that they had hoped they could reduce their force in Iraq faster.

Generals have said they now hope to cut their force in Iraq in half by the middle of next year. They have turned over control of two of the four provinces they patrol to Iraqis.

In Iraq on Thursday, a bomb in a police station in Hilla killed a police colonel and five others. The bodies of 14 construction workers were found in an orchard near a town 40 km (25 miles) north of Baghdad. One policeman and eight insurgents were reported killed in clashes in Mosul.

(2 of 3) Second Article of Three: Iraqi Parliament Passes Federalism Bill

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; 11:47 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The Shiite-dominated parliament Wednesday passed a law allowing the formation of federal regions in Iraq, despite opposition from Sunni lawmakers and some Shiites who say it will dismember the country and fuel sectarian violence.

The Sunni coalition in parliament and two Shiite parties tried to prevent a vote on a bill by boycotting Wednesday’s session to keep the 275-seat body from reaching the necessary 50 percent quorum.

But the quorum was reached with 140 lawmakers, who voted on each of the bill’s some 200 articles individually, passing them all unanimously.

The law includes a provision that regions cannot be formed for another 18 months, a concession to Sunni concerns.

The federalism law sets up a system for allowing provinces to join together into autonomous regions that would hold considerable self-rule powers, a right given to them under the constitution adopted last year in a national referendum.

Some Shiites want to create an autonomous zone in their heartland in the south, much like the self-ruling Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

But Sunni Arabs deeply oppose the federalism measures, fearing it will divide Iraq into sectarian mini-states, giving Shiite and Kurds control over oil riches in the south and north, and leaving Sunnis in an impoverished central zone without resources. Some Shiite parties - including the faction of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - also oppose the measures for nationalist reasons.

Critics also have warned that moves for federalism could fuel Shiite-Sunni violence.

“This is the beginning of the plan to divide Iraq,” said Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Sunni National Accordance Front, which boycotted the vote along with al-Sadr’s party and the Shiite Fadila party.

“We had hoped that the problems of sectarian violence be resolved. We hope there won’t be an increase in violence,” al-Dulaimi said.

The head of the Shiite coalition that dominates parliament, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, praised passage of the bill and denounced Sunni opposition to federalism.

He said the law would be a “factor of unity in the face of the enemies of Iraq _ Baathists, Saddamists, criminals and Takfiris (Islamic radicals) .... who rejected federalism, just like before, when they rejected the constitution.” Sunni Arabs largely voted against the constitution passed in 2005 because it outlined the federal system.

The law outlines a process for forming regions, requiring any province considering joining a region to hold a referendum, if a third of the provincial legislators request it.

In September, the Sunni parties agreed to allow the bill to be presented to parliament for a vote after reaching a deal with Shiite lawmakers that the law would not come into effect for 18 months and that a committee would be formed to consider constitutional changes sought by the Sunnis.

Still, the Sunnis tried to prevent the vote Wednesday, and Shiite parties accused them of breaking the agreement. During the voting, some lawmakers demanded that the provision putting off regions for 18 months be removed from the law to allow their formation immediately.

But in the end, the 18-month delay was grudgingly passed.

“We do not want to betray the agreement like (the Sunnis) did,” Hadi al-Amiri, from the Shiite Badr Organization party, argued before the lawmakers.

Al-Hakim said the Shiite parties were ready to create two regions from the nine mainly Shiite provinces of southern Iraq.


(3 of 3) Second Article of Three: Iraqis call for five-man junta to end the anarchy
The Sunday Times October 15, 2006

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2404311,00.html

Marie Colvin

IRAQ’S fragile democracy, weakened by mounting chaos and a rapidly rising death toll, is being challenged by calls for the formation of a hardline “government of national salvation”.

The proposal, which is being widely discussed in political and intelligence circles in Baghdad, is to replace the Shi’ite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, with a regime capable of imposing order and confronting the sectarian militias leading the country to the brink of civil war. Dr Saleh al-Mutlak, a prominent Sunni politician, travelled to Arab capitals last week seeking support for the replacement of the present government with a group of five strongmen who would impose martial law and either dissolve parliament or halt its participation in day-to-day government.

Other Iraqis dismissed the idea that a unilateral change in the leadership would be desirable or even possible. “The only person who can undertake a coup in Iraq now is General George Casey (the US commander) and I don’t think the Americans are inclined to go in that direction,” said Ahmed Chalabi, head of a rival political party.

Any suspension of the democratic process would be regarded as a severe blow to American and British policy.

The establishment of democracy has been its cornerstone and successful elections in December last year were hailed as a cause for optimism. However, Anthony Cordesman, an influential expert on Iraq at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said there was a “very real possibility” that Maliki could be toppled in the coming months.

“Nobody in Iraq has the military power to mount a traditional coup, but there could be a change in government, done in a backroom, which could see a general brought in to run the ministry of defence or the interior,” Cordesman said.

“It could be regarded as a more legitimate government than the present one as long it doesn’t favour one faction.”

This weekend Mutlak, who leads the Iraqi National Dialogue Front, the fifth largest political group in the national assembly, vowed to press ahead with his plans.. “We think Iraq is now in a tragic state,” he said.

“Maliki must step down. He has done nothing up to now. Hundreds of Iraqis are being killed almost daily and thousands are being removed from their homes in sectarian purges, and he takes no action.”

The main focus of a new regime, Mutlak said, would be to bring security back to Iraq by “cleaning out” the ministries of defence and the interior, widely seen as having been infiltrated by sectarian militias. He said he had the support of four other parties including al-Fadila, a Shi’ite party based in Basra.

Mutlak’s proposal is evidence of increasing frustration with Maliki who has failed to stop violence and to revive the economy.

Last week Iraqi officials estimated that up to 100 people, mostly civilians, were being murdered every day.

Yesterday’s grim reports included the discovery of seven headless bodies north of Baghdad. They were among 17 Shi’ite construction workers kidnapped last Thursday, apparently in retaliation for the burning of three Sunnis the previous day.

North Korea: Episode Two, Bush Doctrine Dry Docked

Welcome back to our North Korean soap box opera. Boy howdy has it erupted! It’s daunting really to think about covering these events in one blog entry. In fact, it can’t. For one, are we really sure if the detonation was actually nuclear. How could you really begin to calculate the threat until you know what potential harm the DPRK packs? This weeks events could signal anything ranging from an effort by Kim Jong-Il to cling to any kind of international importance by feigning nuclear capability thus swinging the attention Iran has been grabbing with their nuclear program back to the Korean peninsula or the North Koreans are on the brink of possessing a nuclear arsenal capable of striking Seattle, Washington. Second, there is so much international political posturing going on, it’s difficult to parse the politics from the policy.

Today, since I’ve been blessed with a day off, I’m going to do my best to filter this weeks North Korean news cycle and ground it in the context of this blog. First off, a Neocon approach to this situation is a poor choice and isn’t even on the international bargaining table. The Bush Doctrine has been dry docked by the very leadership who glorified its necessity only a few years ago. Second, the presence of the DPRK and Kim Jong-Il, is very much a globalist story that is necessary to engage.

U.S. national security depends on a stable North Korea. This, friends, is what a true nuclear threat looks like and guess what, no form of U.S. unilateral action is going to swing North Korea into a stable, open society. The threat of nuclear attack by a nation-state’s ballistic missile is sluggishly telegraphed because it takes so damn long to develop one and a state can not fully conceal their rocket tests nor their nuclear test blasts. This is why Bush threatening the United States in the Fall and Winter of 2002-2003 with the immediate threat of an Iraq nuclear attack was gross hyperbole.

The two Korea’s are still legally at war. It was not wise, some commentators have called it adolescent, when George Bush called the DPRK a key element of an ‘Axis of Evil’. The rhetoric of military aggression may have felt good to puff up the chest of a nation recently shook by 9/11. Yet, the swaggering display of arrogance Bush has languished in since calling out his enemies of choice has created heightened international tensions.

Ian Bremmer comments: “Another reason Pyongyang will never verifiably renounce its nuclear program is that the men who rule North Korea believe it is their only absolute guarantee against a U.S. invasion. No treaty was ever officially signed between the two Koreas ending the Korean War. For Americans, that’s a footnote of history. For North Koreans, its a central fact of life. Pyonyang was spooked when Geroge W. Bush included North Korea as part of an ‘axis of evil’ in his 2002 State of the Union Address. And when bombs began falling on Baghdad the following year, the regime saw its worst nightmare in living color. The DPRK will never voluntarily renounce its nuclear weapons program because it fears the Bush administration intends to topple statues of the Great Leader in Pyongyang.”

Remember that 1/5 to 1/3 of the DPRK’s GDP goes towards maintaining its military which includes 1 million soldiers massed along the 38th parallel.

The Bush administration has polarized the issue with North Korea, as they have done with Iran, making it all that more important for those countries to act quickly and defensively in their self interest due to our political military pressure.

The U.S. and the North Koreans are in a diplomatic log jam. The Bush Doctrine is absolutely useless in this case nor are our leaders looking to implement their preferred ideological treatment. Since this blog was created to speak out against the Bush administration and the Republican party’s handling of foreign affairs over the last six years, let’s restate that ideological treatment:

“The ‘first objective’ of U.S. defense strategy was ‘to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.’ Achieving this objective required that the United States ‘prevent any hostile power from dominating a region’ of strategic significance. America’s new mission would be to convince allies and enemies alike ‘that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.’”

Options range from “taking preemptive military action to head off a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack to ‘punishing’ or ‘threatening punishment of’ aggressors ‘through a variety of means,’ including strikes against weapons-manufacturing facilities.”

This policy was good enough to get the Iraq war started and to justify half of our open tax expenditures to be spent on the military. However it has failed terribly at moving Iraq from the left side of the J-curve to the right side of the J-curve. Who has paid the biggest price for this bad policy in Iraq? The Iraqi people to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives lost without any kind of prospect for a stable government solidifying in the near future.

Since we are truly talking about nuclear weapon proliferation on the Korean peninsula, this makes this a global issue of utmost importance. So let’s reposit the policy this blog supports: “The countries on the right side of the J curve have a collective political, economic, and security interests on working together to help move left-side states through instability to the right side of the curve. But they must recognize that the most powerful agents for constructive, sustainable change in any society are the people who live within it.”.

If there is one country that has the political leverage to act decisively or even unilaterally, it’s China. China is the only country with warm diplomatic ties with Pyonyang and the Chinese are reluctant to intervene. They are even reluctant to pass sanctions against North Korea through the U.N. Security Council. A failed North Korean state means a refugee crisis for China so they will try to prop up North Korea as much as they can through policy. The Chinese government has enough people to care for with a current mainland population of 1.3 billion, with the population of China projected to be 1.4 billion in 2010 and 1.6 Billion in 2020. An extra 22 million North Korean’s is a weight they do not want to bare so they will allow Kim Jong-Il to keep that responsibility.


The three countries that are most threatened by North Korea are South Korea, Japan and China with Russia thrown into the regional mix. What’s at risk? One of two major pressures influence the situation. North Korea collapsing creating a humanitarian crisis in the region plus a tremor to the international financial markets is a real fear. If this happens, their entire weapons cache is vulnerable to non-nation-state entity’s. Or, a near bankrupt North Korea adding a nuclear arsenal to their already extensive military establishment also adds a nuclear export to help bolster.

The U.S. objective in the short term is to contain the North Korean military arsenal and in the long term we must open up the North Korean culture so that it will eventually lead to regime change from within. We must compel the regional players China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to work with us in achieving these goals.

How do you open a North Korean society so that the people who are cared for by the state don’t suffer tremendously? How do you aid North Korea without funding their military? How does the United States engage the situation while leaving its entire military package at home? Quite a challenging mix.

The Capacity to Compel

Let’s begin with the ending:

“There was not ‘one more river to cross’ but ‘countless problems stretching into the future.’ ... Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”

Secretary of State on Secretary of State action! Today! In the New York Times!

Sunday mornings are New York Times Book Review mornings in many households. If you are fortunate enough to get the Sunday Times delivered to your front stoop it’s a house call in pajama’s and the NYTBR is going to break down the freshest selections of today’s hardworking wordsmiths.

Today the NYTBR has the special contribution of former Secretary of State Kissenger, reviewing a book “Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War,” which goes on for 800 pages, by Robert L. Beisner.

Kissenger starts off “Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history. Robert L. Beisner…sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure, cites a scholar who, with meticulous pedantry, discovered that during the four years — 1949-53 — that Acheson served as secretary of state, Republicans made 1,268 antagonistic statements about him on the Senate floor and only seven favorable ones (one wonders for what).”

The first paragraph of the wikipedia entry on Dean Acheson’s goes like this:

“Dean Gooderham Acheson (April 11, 1893 – October 12, 1971) was a prominent lawyer whose career included many stints in United States government service, culminating as United States Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman. In these various capacities he played a central role in the creation of many important institutions including Lend Lease, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, together with the early organizations that later became the European Union and the World Trade Organization. He presided over United States diplomacy during several important crises of the early Cold War, including the Korean War.”

Ahh. History. And an important kind of history for this blog. Kissenger sets the stage with Acheson as a misunderstood Statesman, beaten up in congress through bi-partisan political mudslinging, only to become a ‘role model’ and an ‘icon’ to those who took up his office after him. Acheson was a pioneer. He “served during the transition when America emerged as a world power and enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, the scale of government was as yet relatively small, and Washington was still a comparatively provincial city.”

The rest of this entry is the continuation Henry Kissenger’s commentary, with bold text inserted:

“When Acheson became secretary of state, America had only just started its journey toward global involvement. Africa was still colonial; Britain was predominant in much of the Middle East; Indian democracy was only two years old; Germany and Japan were still occupied countries. The debate was not over aspirations to hegemony but over whether the nation should engage itself internationally at all, never mind permanently. It was appropriate that Acheson entitled his memoirs ‘Present at the Creation.’”

“The position of secretary of state is potentially the most fulfilling in the government short of the presidency. Its scope is global; ultimately it rests on almost philosophical assumptions as to the nature of world order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest. Lacking such a conceptual framework, incoherence looms in the face of the daily task of redefining America’s relationship to the world via the thousands of messages from nearly 200 diplomatic posts and the constant flow of communication from the Executive Department — all this against the backdrop of Congressional liaison and press inquiry.”

“Acheson served as under secretary of state and then as secretary during the period when a people that had known no direct continuing threat to its security since the early days of the Republic had to be brought to recognize that its permanent participation in the world was indispensable for peace and security. Inevitably this realization was painful and slow in coming, if indeed it has been fully achieved to this day. This is why Acheson was assailed from both political sides, by those insisting on an end to involvement through total victory over the threat and, on the other side, by those who thought there was no threat to begin with, or at least none that required Acheson’s militant response.

In this maelstrom, Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of any secretary of state:(1) the identification of the challenge; (2) the development of a strategy to deal with it; (3) organizing and motivating the bureaucracy in the State Department and in other agencies; (4) persuading the American public; and (5) conducting American diplomacy toward other countries. These tasks require the closest collaboration between the president and the secretary of state; secretaries of state who seek to base their influence on the prerogatives of the office invariably become marginalized. Presidents cannot be constrained by administrative flowcharts; for a secretary of state to be effective, he or she has to get into the president’s head, so to speak. This is why Acheson made it a point to see Truman almost every day they were in town together and why their friendship was so crucial to the achievements of the Truman years.

No secretary can fulfill all these tasks with equal skill — though Acheson came closer than any other of the modern period. His overriding challenge was to define a conceptual framework on which to base America’s involvement in global affairs. Beisner, a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, describes this process in detail and with special emphasis on Acheson’s growing debate with George Kennan. Acheson turned Kennan’s seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” into the operating principle of American foreign policy. He interpreted it to mean that the task of foreign policy was to create situations of strength around the Soviet periphery to deter any temptation for aggression. Negotiation with the Soviet Union was to be deferred until these situations of strength had come into being; any attempt to begin diplomacy prematurely would undermine the primary task.

Acheson’s overriding priority, in the years immediately following World War II, was to restore Western Europe and create an Atlantic community to resist what then appeared as the Soviet colossus. He built the structure that sustained democracy during the cold war, with the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and the return of Germany and Japan to the community of nations. But Acheson was less precise about the role of diplomacy in this process once the architectural phase was completed.

Kennan represented the other strand of American thinking. He rejected what he considered the militarization of his own views, inaugurating a debate that has not ended to this day. Acheson implicitly believed that situations of strength would be self-enforcing, and he played down the importance of diplomatic engagement with the adversary. Kennan raised the question of how to gain Soviet acquiescence in the process and urged negotiation, even while the ultimate structure was being built. Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement. How to merge the two strands so that military force and diplomacy are mutually supportive and so that national strategy becomes a seamless web is the essence of a continuing national controversy.

Beisner shows how the failure to do so with respect to the Korean War was the cause of the single greatest error of Acheson’s tenure: initially, the placing of Korea publicly outside the American defense perimeter (though this was conventional wisdom at the time) and, later, the inability, after the United States crossed the 38th parallel, to correlate military operations with some achievable diplomatic objectives.

For someone like myself, who knew Acheson, Beisner’s portrait does not always capture the vividness of his personality, which emerges too much as a list of eccentricities. Acheson’s relationship with the Nixon White House, and to President Nixon himself, is too cavalierly dismissed as the result of ego and an old man’s vanity. As a participant in all these meetings, I considered that relationship an example of Acheson’s generosity of spirit. Nixon had made essentially unforgivable attacks on Acheson during his 1952 campaign for vice president. But when he reached out to Acheson, it was received with the consideration Acheson felt he owed to the office, as a form of duty to the country. Acheson dealt with the issues Nixon put before him thoughtfully, precisely, without any attempt at flattery, in pursuit of his conception of national service and, unlike some other outside advisers, without offering advice that had not been solicited.

Acheson emerges from the Beisner book as the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period in the sweep of his design, his ability to implement it, the extraordinary associates with whom he surrounded himself and the nobility of his personal conduct. He was impatient with relativists who sought surcease from the complexity of decisions by postulating the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. His values were absolute, but he knew also that statesmen are judged by history beyond contemporary debates, and this requires a willingness to achieve great goals in stages, each of which is probably imperfect by absolute standards.

This was the theme of an Acheson speech at the War College in August 1951: “There was not ‘one more river to cross’ but ‘countless problems stretching into the future.’ ... Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”

The importance of that perception has not changed with the passage of time.

Henry A. Kissinger served as secretary of state from Sept. 22, 1973, to Jan. 20, 1977. He is chairman of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.