The Third Debate: Politics is the Enemy of Strategy

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

The third debate introduced US citizens, and an international audience to a geographic variant of a staple political attack.

And, you know, Governor Romney, I’m glad that you agree that we have been successful in going after Al Qaida, but I have to tell you that, you know, your strategy previously has been one that has been all over the map and is not designed to keep Americans safe or to build on the opportunities that exist in the Middle East.

“All over the map” is flip-flopping in geopolitical argot. Yet discussion here was firmly anchored in the Middle East, and characterized by an unusual level of agreement. If there was one striking feature of the third debate, it was how little genuinely strategic places, and collective security interests, were even mentioned. No discussion of the European Union and the Euro currency crisis. No mention of India or Brazil, the other two BRICs getting cited only within the context of threat and trade discourse. No mention of climate change, nuclear weapon proliferation (beyond a passing comment on Nunn-Lugar), Indonesia and global health issues.Instead the debate remained largely mired in the Middle East – though Obama, to his credit, made mention of his ‘pivot to the Pacific’ towards the conclusion -, with some time later on China and trade, and, in the silliest expression of the night, a possibly US ‘divorce’ from Pakistan. (In keeping with past practice, the campaigns choose a weak US journalists to moderate, and the resultant level of questioning was an embarrassment to the profession).

The level of agreement between Obama and Romney on Israel, Iran and Syria does not serve the US public well. Students of US foreign policy will recall chapter (lesson) 3 in Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster: Politics is the Enemy of Strategy. The chapter concerns how US decision-making on Vietnam in 1964 was shaped by the interests of the Johnson presidential campaign of that year. Marketing a politically palatable position, Goldstein’s argues, was more important than developing a strategically sound one. Hard policy decision-making was postponed, deferred and delayed. The same can be said of current US policy on Israel and Iran (and possibly Syria). The US government has so intertwined itself with the current government of Israel that it has created the remarkable dangerous situation of letting Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political calculations inordinately determine US foreign policy in this region. Bipartisan consensus on Israel has created a dangerous myopia on how US national security interests are understood in the region, and beyond. So also on Iran. The current US policy position, a blanket refusal to accept Iran with a nuclear weapon, has important shades of grey (is this ‘nuclear capable’ or ‘nuclear armed,’ and what leader gets to define how the former in particular is determined). But, lets be clear, it commits the US to go to war against Iran should it decide to do what the United States, Israel and many other nuclear capable states have done before, namely develop nuclear weapons as a national security strategy. There is no Plan B here, no questioning of the premises of this incredibly dangerous policy. It needs to be stated clearly: preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb is not a vital national security interest of the United States (just as preventing a Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakastani, and North Korean bomb turned out to be something the US and others could live with because deterrence is a compelling factor in international affairs). But again there is group think on this question across the political spectrum, with some of Romney’s loose talk on this issue echoing Barry Goldwater’s position on Vietnam in 1964. In that election, the triumph of politics over strategic debate, and clear thinking, had tragic consequences. One cannot be confident that history won’t repeat itself after this election.

Posted in Current affairs, Geography, Iran, Israel, Obama, Rhetoric, Romney, the bomb, World political map | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

“Just give me the ball”

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

In his article entitled “Battle Plans: How Obama Won,” the New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza records the following exchange between Obama and a staffer over Obama’s strong performance in his first debate with John McCain:

After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

Obama showed up for the Hofstra University debate and played an outstanding game, strongly aggressive from the outset, coolly scoring points when it was his turn, and unruffled by barging ‘in-your-face’ tactics by his opponent. The debate was the most intense debate I’ve ever seen in a US Presidential election, and as a political junkie I’ve been watching them since I first landed on these shores in the time of Reagan. I’ve learnt over the years that who I’ve held as the winner is not whom the press and conventional wisdom deems the winner. Mondale was more coherent than Reagan, Dukakis more persuasive than Bush senior, Clinton better than Bush senior, Gore stronger than Bush junior and Kerry clearly superior to Bush’s performances in 2004. But the GOP politico professionals were very skilled at leveraging emotional impressions, unconscious observations, and extra-discursive mannerisms, to turn substantive defeat into affective victory. In the downscaled world where they wanted to play the “guy you’d like to have a beer with” should be president (in Bush junior’s case, hopefully drinking non-alcoholic beer).

So, after a candidate that was a recovering alcoholic, the GOP now has one that doesn’t drink! In affect world, this creates ‘likeability’ problems. So an alternative strategy is to sell the candidate as a take charge ‘job creator’ who understands your problems and will aggressively move to fix them (on ‘day one’). Instead of an equal to watch football with, you get a superior, a patriarchal leader, a tad pushy and aggressive.

The GOP’s skill at affective spin was evident after the first debate, which provided lots of rich material. Obama was strong on substance and policy but lost on all affective criteria. So he needed to come back strong. And, since sports is more than a framing metaphor here but the experiential field for Obama (famously still playing competitive basketball at 51) and template for understanding for many of the viewing audience, it was ‘game on’ in Hofstra, and game metaphors de rigueur thereafter in the commentary.

Romney did well but Obama was better than him, the issue of Benghazi being a particularly powerful response.

For all its fascinating dimensions, this debate did have a gendered dimension that I think might grow in time. It was alpha male combat, an aggressive game played by both at a high intensity. While many may have found it compelling I expect some found the spectacle a bit ugly and repulsive. Not everyone likes competitive sports, and not everyone finds it enlightening to have two presidential figures debate like they did in New York. The degree to which that alternative affective reaction exists, a dis-identification that imagines alternative form of political debate, could condition whether we will see a woman president in the future. I hope it does.

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Diary: Lectures in Ireland and Istanbul

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

John O’Loughlin and I gave a lecture “Inside Eurasia’s De Facto States” at Dublin City University to students and faculty on the 28th of September 2012. Many thanks to Donnacha O’Beachain for organizing this well attended event. It was the first time I had ever visited this campus. Twas great to see so many Irish students interested in politics in the Caucasus and Moldova/PMR, and that such an interest can be pursued within Irish universities. It is quite a change from my time (not to mention that of JohnO who was introduced with amazement that he was part of the ‘class of 1969’ at UCD).

While in Ireland, I learned the terrible news that Neil Smith had died. His passing at a relatively young age is a major loss to the discipline of Geography. His biography of Isaiah Bowman is an outstanding piece of scholarship, one that justly deserved the awards it garnered. Like many geographers I have happy memories of Neil in social settings but also as an academic in intellectual exchange, beginning when he was at Columbia and then at Rutgers University. I was close with some graduate students of his while at Syracuse University in the eighties. He was a warm hearted man who gave generously of his time to younger scholars and inspired us all to critical thinking. I grieve for him, and I know many others, closer to him than I in recent years, are in pain too over his passing.

Thereafter I flew to Istanbul to participate in an International Congress to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balkan Wars: “Good Neighbourhood Relations in the Balkans.” Organized by the International Relations department at Hacettepe University in Ankara, this conference brought together 130 participants from 22 countries, most from the Balkans, to discuss the legacies of these wars. Valery Perry and I presented papers on Bosnia, mine on the 1990 elections and Valery’s on the dilemmas of constitutional change there. A big thanks to Muge Kinacioglu, her department and students for organizing such an ambitious conference, appropriately in YeniBosna in Istanbul.

On 6 October I also spoke on Critical Geopolitics and IR at the invitation of the Center for Global Studies of the Foundation for Sciences and Arts (Bilim ve Sanat Vakfi Kuresel Arstirmalar Merkezi). Many thanks Dr Mustafa Ozel for making this happen, and especially to Ozcan Sahin and Dr Murat Yesiltas for great hospitality during my visit (pictured). I was humbled by the generosity of my hosts in both instances, inspired by the intellectual vitality of Turkey’s young academics (Behlul Ozkan generously gave me a copy of his new Yale University Press book), and awed by the relentless expansion of Istanbul itself.

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One of Our Own

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

Last week our School, the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, lost one of our Ph D students in Afghanistan. Born in Egypt, Ragaei Abdelfattah was a naturalized American, devout Muslim and former master planner for Prince George’s County. Ragaei Abdelfattah was killed by a suicide bomber in eastern Konar province of Afghanistan, where he worked on building schools and hospitals as well as providing electricity as a USAID Foreign Service Officer. The attack also took the lives of three ISAF soldiers.
Ragaei entered the doctoral program (as a full-time student in Blacksburg) in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies in Fall 2003  to study planning and affordable housing. Earlier in his career he worked on international resort and eco-tourism development and on school development in Minneapolis.  As a doctoral student in SPIA and research assistant at the Center for Housing Research, directed by Dr Ted Kobel, he contributed to improving services to the chronically homeless, redevelopment planning, and affordable housing. I did not know Ragaei personally but he sounds the very antithesis of another urban planner from Egypt, Mohammad Atta.

A brief note about him in the Washington Post is here; on the Facebook page there is a SPIA obituary. See also the article by Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy.

Ragaei’s heartbreaking death underscores the tragic condition of US foreign policy in Afghanistan at this moment. He was part of the ‘civilian surge’ and the ‘development’ leg of the ‘defense and diplomacy’ triad that Hillary Clinton spoke of when she became Secretary of State. It is an admirable effort yet it is caught in the contradictions of counter-insurgency which requires (i) trusted and credible local government partners on the ground, and in the presidential palace in Kabul, and (ii) the sustained commitment of financial and military resources to ‘stabilize, hold, and transfer.’ The first condition is variable at best while the second condition is disappearing. What will be left, what will endure is uncertain.

From the various books that have appeared on foreign policy debates inside the Obama White House, it is clear that Obama took the time to carefully delimit his Afghanistan policy, initially rejecting the narrow counter-terrorism mission vision of Biden and others in favor of a more expansive COIN related ‘surge’ on both the military and civilian side. But he moved up the timescale for this to wind down, and that is now upon us. The US is leaving Afghanistan (or, more precisely, dramatically reducing its military footprint), and from a grand strategy perspective, that is a positive thing as no state should be committed to expending precious resources in strategically marginal places. Getting to the point where the US could re-define Afghanistan in these terms has taken time, and the fading of the trauma of 9-11.

Biden spoke in Blacksburg yesterday in a moving way about our own 17 April 2007 tragedy. He’s been through this himself and brings an authenticity that no one can match in situations like this (Jules Witcover’s biography on him is an enjoyable read). Long may he remain ‘unchained’ to speak his mind.

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Interview with News.Az

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

To mark the anniversary of the August 2008 war, the English language Azerbaijani web site News.Az conducted a series of interviews with various specialists on the Caucasus. There are interesting interviews with Lincoln Mitchell and Hans Gotbrod. My interview sought to draw attention to Ireland’s role as chair of OSCE this year and to how the Northern Ireland peace settlement offers some hope for addressing contested territorial sovereignty disputes.

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More on the Geographies of Violent Death

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

The events in Aurora this weekend re-awakened some horrible memories for those associated with Virginia Tech. In discussions on television and elsewhere, ‘Virginia Tech’ has unfortunately joined the litany of names of horrific acts of mass violence perpetrated by deranged individuals, the very name recalling the horror (and momentarily overriding all the other meanings it has in the public mind): “Columbine, Virginia Tech…..” (Observing the non-debate debate, the politicizing by decrying politicizing, the doubling down on denial — guns for everyone = safety not danger — has been interesting in that, more and more, these strategies, and ‘rights’ discourse, are being called out and deconstructed in public debate)

On the television we also see nightly scenes of horrific violent repression by the Syrian government of its own citizens. Less prominently covered but nevertheless also on BBC television at least is the M23 insurrection in eastern Congo that threatens to tear down the positive image Rwandan President Paul Kagame has long enjoyed in the West (he is listed on the Advisory Council for the 2011 World Development Report: Conflict, Security and Development, for example, along with some outstanding women like Madeleine Albright, Louise Arbour, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and other). And then there is Iraq where co-ordinated car bombs across the country on 23 July killed 116 people.

Both Aurora and the state-failing violence are spectacular kinetic forms of violence that attract considerable media interest. Less ‘big bang’ spectacular but nevertheless just as horrific is the violence Mexico has experienced over the last four years of the narco kingpin campaign of the outgoing government of Felipe Calderon, Indeed it is very spectacular in its own grizzly way. In a long chilling article New Yorker journalist William Finnegan recounts the elusive nature of the killings and the thoroughly corrupting nature of the drug production and transit industry. The events described therein are daily traumas inflected on a body politics that is long suffering, most especially poor and middle income residents of Mexico. With so much darkness close at hand and within, it is no wonder people seek escapism in stories of dark avengers. Tonight I’ll do the same.

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Powerless in DC

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

Washington DC has been through an eventful few weeks, and the action is not all at the White House, Supreme Court and in Congress. A ‘microburst’ weather storm left many residents without power on the 21st of June (including our home) and, as many news viewers know, a derecho rolled across the eastern seaboard late on the 29th, leaving millions without power and thousands with extensive damage to their property. Since then Washington DC has been under an unforgiving sun, with ten straight 95 degree days, possibly topped today by an all time record high temperature (the previous high for this day was only set two years ago). We lost power not right away but after I had filled the fridge and invited a group of friends over to watch the Euro2012 final. We lost power at half-time and got it back 30 hours later after most things had spoiled in the fridge.

The frequency with which Washington DC looses power has always struck me as revealing of the limits of the US’s sense of modernity. It is now a very old modernity and the evidence that it is coping badly with the now predictable technoscientific challenges of global risk society is incontrovertible. The US desperately needs infrastructural investment and to refit itself for the new climate regime of extreme weather. (Even a local resident conservative, albeit a Canadian, agrees). US workers and firms could use the work. But are the dots being connected in Congress? No, instead the preferred stimulus this fall is an avalanche of special interest money into the political system to try to buy the presidency and the new Congress. Ordinary Americans are hot and bothered these days, but those special interest dollars will work hard to convince them its the other political guy’s fault. Time for some winds of change in the ‘capital of the free world,’ or just some darn wind to cool us off.

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Geographies of Massacres

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

A government under severe pressure from rebels unleashes violence that results in a massacre of families, women and children especially. This is the horror scene we’ve seen for the last few weeks in international affairs. But its is hardly confined to Syria. Two days ago in Logar province in Afghanistan, a NATO airstrike killed an estimated 18 civilians. It was hardly the first such incident. Death from the sky by a NATO missile is different from close quarter killing by a government sponsored militia, but that is little consolation to the dead. The same day, a Taliban suicide bomber murdered at least twenty street traders and civilians in Kandahar.

The massacre in Houla was also truly sickening, and immediately reminded me of the Racak massacre in Kosovo that was an important event in triggering the eventual NATO war against Serbia in 1999. It is interesting how the notion of a ‘tipping point’ has been evoked by media commentators (the latest being in the Financial Times) in its wake. The horror spectacles of massacres have always been used to mobilize and polarize. Think back to the woodcuts of religious massacres in the seventeenth century, and graphic horror stories about pregnant women and babies ripped from bellies. My old college friend from Ireland Vincent Carey curated an excellent exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library on the theme of Tolerance and Intolerance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of years ago which touched on the historic formula for the presentation of massacres.

The point of the FT article is that images of this massacre — and now we hear there is another — are deepening the now evidently bloody struggle in Syria between a predatory state, and its apparatus of repression, and multiple localized structures of resistance and counter-force violence. The term ‘civil war’ is used more frequently but it appears to me to be imprecise. This is a regime versus opposition struggle that unfortunately, as a result of the widespread use of violence, appears to have become a localized ethnic security dilemma. Were men from neighboring Alawite villages involved in the attack on Houla?

Witnesses say the Shabiha gathered near the water plant and the military depot nearby, before moving to the villages of Foulah and Qabou, two of four villages of the Allawite sect that surround the exclusively Sunni town of Houla.

Answering this question will tell us how ethnicized this has become and what ‘civil war’ means in this context. BBC Reporter Paul Wood argued last week that the killing is family targeted revenge killing and not all out sectarian killing, but conceded that it is slipping towards the latter.

Houla appears unlikely to be a tipping point in the diplomacy for now. Russia sees Syria as a client regime and sells it a lot of weaponry. It is not unfamiliar with the use of bloody close quarter methods to suppress revolts. The Obama administration appears to have concluded that it cannot afford to go ‘unilateral’ on this sickening affair, and is waiting, or going the extra diplomatic mile to see if it can persuade the Russians to come around, and gather in an ad hoc crisis-specific Contact Group which could support some sort of ‘humanitarian’ intervention (an ‘humanitarian zone’ supported by coercive power, with Turkish troops on the ground and NATO airplanes in the sky?). Also this is an election year and there are only downside risks in this, though I suspect folks inside the administration like Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton and probably Obama himself find this tragic in the extreme.

But perhaps I am wrong. A fascinating article on Obama’s drone assassination program in the New York Times provides real insight into how ‘just war’ doctrine appears to be justifying Obama’s policy on this. So also is a policy of ‘no innocents next to terrorists’ that justifies the killing of everyone in the radius of a known terrorist target.

For a ground level view see also the excellent Frontline documentary on Al Qaeda in Yemen.

What do we call this disposition and attitude? ‘Realism,’ hardheadedness’ or (always a safe bet with Obama) ‘pragmatism’ ? ‘Responsibility to protect’ meets responsibility to ‘take the shot’? Grim, grim stuff.

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Orientalism and War

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

A new edited volume, Orientalism and War, edited by Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, will appear soon published by Columbia/Hurst. Asked to blurb it, I took some time to read the chapters, some of which I found to be intellectually rich and effective in conveying the racist underpinnings of many wars. I was somewhat skeptical of the framing of the project because I have long found Ahmed’s critique of Said’s notion of Orientalism pretty persuasive. The concept partakes of that which it seeks to critique, inciting totalizing and moralized binaries at the same time as it tries to problematize them (imperial/anti-imperial being a particularly a seductive one). Some of the essays, those that skip blithely (as Said does) over hundreds of years of history and different contexts to make similar meta-points, succumb somewhat to this. Others are intellectually stimulating and well written, developing important points on voice, vision and gendered violence. Outing ‘Orientialism’ as a project can led to writing that is polemical and morally self-righteous, a condition avoided here for the most part though one could argue that there is a degree of self-affirming group think at work. To the editor’s credit, they enlisted Patrick Porter whose book Military Orientalism was published by Hirst in 2011 to write the Afterword (I have not read this work; here’s a H Net review). This Afterword is provocative in challenging some implicit assumptions in the essays that have gone before, most especially in a sometimes too easy homogenizing of cultures of knowing/positioning ‘the East.’ What is ‘imperial’ and not is also more complex than it appears. Its a good ending for the book, a call for more reflexivity and modesty in critique.

By pure chance, I managed to see a fantastic documentary that was very apropos of the subject, called Killer Subs in Pearl Harbor. It traces the search for a fifth Japanese midget submarine (unknown to this point and technological marvels, from the East!) that was involved in the attack in December 1941, and reveals a remarkable level of co-operation between US and Japanese academics. There is also a touching sequence in which a veteran of the Japanese imperial army dives with the sub search and upon its discovery shows modern day photos of relatives to the two dead Japanese mariners entombed within it. The degree to which the US Navy cooperates with the subsequent honoring of their memory is also remarkable, bearing in mind that they were part of a mission that killed thousands of Americans and launched the US into World War II. Studies of war and orientalism, in my opinion, are best approached through precise cases for that allows appreciation of the conjunctural and moral dilemmas that attend the subject.

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Mladic Goes on Trial

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Dr Gerard Toal

In early September 2004 I flew to the Hague for an academic conference from Istanbul (where I remember watching the horror at Beslan unfold on BBC TV). I took a day off from the conference to visit the ICTY court house. I ended up spending the day watching the trial of Slododan Milosevic with about five other people in the public gallery which was behind a plexiglass partition from the court room. It felt like one was watching theatre in a fish bowl. A Greek American, James Jatras, was testifying on Milosevic’s behalf, a gentleman who once worked for a group called the US Senate Republican Policy Committee on Capitol Hill. He also worked as an aide to former Senator Larry Craig (R-ID). What he articulated was a ‘clash of civilizations’ argument, with a clear Orthodoxy versus Islam dimension.

I am recalling this visit today because General Ratko Mladic has just gone on trial at the same building I visited. Michael Dobbs is blogging on the trial and has recorded a series of video interviews with survivors outside this building. It is disquieting viewing. One, on the one hand, is happy for these victims that they have had a ‘day in court’ with the person with command responsibility for the crimes they experienced and suffered. On the other hand, their horror is re-awakened and overwhelms them and us. No human being should have had to suffer like their much younger selves (minus 20 years) did. Violence can occur in an instant yet its impact, for those that survive its trauma, lasts a lifetime.

I hope, for all concerned, that this trial proceeds in a manner that is rigorous in establishing facts and controlled in its limitation of infantile behavior by Mladic. How sadly ironic it is that a few of the children his forces once brutalized get to view him as an old man behaving in a child-like manner. For a report on the first day see Julian Borger’s account in The Guardian.

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