the new civil-military clash

It's curious that the sharpest disagreements between civilian officials and the U.S. military leadership in recent years have not been over policy, such as how to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but over personnel or social policy. The southern-dominated services nominally accepted the integration of African-Americans in 1948, but slow-rolled the process into the 1970s. The male-only senior leadership grudgingly accepted women at the service academies in 1976 but long resisted opening most command positions to females. The Joint Chiefs of Staff willingly sided with conservative members of Congress to block openly gay people in uniform by imposing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law on the Pentagon. It took until 2010, and the astute maneuvering of Defense Secretary Gates, to get the chiefs on board with a change in policy.

Now we have a new clash over how to handle sexual assault. Members of Congress say that the evidence of impropriety is widespread and that assault victims often are punished for reporting incidents and the perpetrators get off because senior commanders value their military skills. Yesterday all of the service chiefs testified that they opposed letting special prosecutors, rather than officers in the chain of command, decide the issues. They argued that this would upset the authority commanders need for military operations.

I can see that the Chiefs' concerns might apply in some circumstances of combat, but it's hard to believe that the home-based peacetime forces would collapse under a different system. The best suggestion I saw coming out of the hearings was to see how other nations handle such matters. That's one of the ways that the Chiefs became convinced that gays could be accommodated, since the evidence from overseas was positive and the fears of commanders largely unfounded.

Unlike the situation with gays in 1993, the politics today makes military resistance a loser, so they had better figure out how to implement a heightened sensitivity to sexual assault problems.

missed opportunity at the NSC

President Obama is reported to be replacing his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, with UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who was probably not nominated to be Secretary of State because that post requires Senate confirmation while the White House job does not.

One of my longtime hopes has been that the NSA position be codified and empowered in law, an action that would require Senate confirmation. This idea has been strongly resisted by former advisers like Brent Scowcroft, who argue that it would deny presidents the right to choose their advisers. Nowadays they could add another objection: the hyperpartisanship over even nonpartisan national security jobs makes confirmation an uncertain, slow, and bitter process.

Nevertheless, I think presidents [who can seek advice from anyone, regardless of their official positions] would be more effective if their primary foreign policy person had the legal authority to get things done that involve more than one cabinet department. I would like the NSA to have the power to convene interagency groups, task them, and maybe even give them some limited money for activities. But no official can do that without the formal authority conveyed by Senate confirmation.

It's ironic -- and sad -- that the absence of Senate-confirmed officials at the NSC, in contrast to much of the rest of the Executive Office of the President, means there is no one to testify before Congress regarding the various National Security Strategy reports required from the President. Nor could nonconfirmed officials like Richard Holbrooke testify about their interagency policy efforts as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration missed its opportunity in the first term to seek legislation strengthening the NSC interagency process and is missing another opportunity now by continuing to centralize policy in the national security staff without centralizing authority in its leader.

responsible congressional action

That's almost an oxymoron, isn't it? Or at least a headline-grabbing surprise these days.

I am pleased to report that the House Armed Services Committee included several sensible foreign policy provisions in its defense authorization bill, approved yesterday.

-- Section 1041 establishes a procedure for Congress to be "promptly" notified of "sensitive military operations," defined as lethal or capture operations conducted by U.S. armed forces. There is already an informal notification process. This makes is statutory and regular.

-- Section 1042 demands a report on the "legal and policy considerations and approval processes" for determining targets of lethal operations.  This is reasonable, though I would have preferred a Hughes-Ryan type process requiring presidential determinations as well as notifications.


-- Section 1203 continues the Global Security Contingency Fund, a joint State-Defense enterprise.

-- Section 1211 cuts military aid to Pakistan by 10% and requires certification that Pakistan is allowing movement of supplies to and from Afghanistan and is cooperating on counterterrorism operations. This tough provision can be waived by the Secretary of Defense for "national security interests."

-- Section 1241 requires a report on U.S. military ability to respond to terrorist attacks in Africa and the Middle East. This is better than mandating the creation of a special force to deal with Benghazi-type situations.

-- Section 1251 recites a lot of concerns about Syria, then offers "sense of Congress" language urging the President to "consider all courses of action to remove" President Assad from power.It also calls for "rigorous planning" to secure Syrian chemical weapons as well as "nonlethal aid" to the Syrian opposition. This is much more restrained than pro-interventionist calls for "no fly" zones and offensive military aid.

 Somewhat surprisingly, the committee made no attempt to revise the 2001 authorization of military force law that has been the basis for the operations in Afghanistan as well as drone operations and other military activities elsewhere.  Nor did the lawmakers add either reporting or other directive language on offensive cyber operations.

Obama's invitation to collaborate

There's a lot to talk about in the President's far-ranging speech on dealing with terrorists, including such matters as presidential war powers, drone policy, lethal targeting of Americans, Benghazi, Boston, and prosecution of leaks of classified information.  What I think is most promising is this:

Now, all these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact, in sometimes unintended ways, the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorism without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.

The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al-Qaida is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al-Qaida will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.

So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.

The 2001 law was consciously limited to those involved with the 9/11 attacks or linked to them. Something needs to be done to deal with continuing threats by groups that are not specifically associated with al Qaeda or only vaguely linked to them. The President  has opened the door for congressional involvement. That's good. I hope they get together and work out a reasonable system for handling these issues.

president 1, advisors 0

Accountability confers enormous power.  White House advisers may fight battles in their memoirs, but only the President is held accountable for presidential actions. Presidents also tend to be held accountable, at least by the political opposition, for actions of distant subordinates. [See Benghazi and Cincinnati IRS office for the latest examples.]

Fred Kaplan has a fine piece listing several important presidential decisions against the advice of his national security advisers, including Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, Reagan on "star wars," and G.W. Bush on the 2007 "surge" in Iraq. Obama's reluctance to get more deeply involved in Syria is just the latest example.

incompetence, not conspiracy

The IRS controversy over tax exempt organizations illustrates a point I often make about foreign policy: when you suspect a conspiracy, look first for incompetence. The Benghazi talking points emails revealed bureaucratic in-fighting, not a political coverup. The same appears true of the IRS.

The New York Times has a long piece showing how inundated the Cincinnati office was with requests to have 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 tax status, propelled not only by a Citizens United case allowing political groups but also by a small change in the law regarding purely charitable organizations that required some re-filings.

The overworked bureaucrats struggled to handle the paperwork -- and it was mostly on paper, making the process even messier. And they made politically embarrassing mistakes, for which two Bush-appointed offiicials have now paid with their jobs. I can understand the GOP yearning for scandals, but I wish they'd show a little mercy for the civil servants.

Another irony in this case is that the really suspect organizations that have huge political operations were able to avoid the backlog because they had clever tax lawyers helping them.

Furthermore, Tea Party groups did themselves no favors by filling out the applications in an amateurish manner, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the New York Times and columnist at TaxAnalysts.com David Cay Johnston. “It’s like applying for a mortgage,” Johnston told Salon. “If you write it out wrong, you’re going to get flagged. And there are examples of these groups saying they’re not political and then saying their goal is to influence legislation.”

Syria breaking up?

My mind has been elsewhere, figuring grades for students and seeing grandchildren. Now I discover that Emma Sky says Iraq is "spiraling out of control." And today the New York Times says Syria is on the verge of breaking up.

Two key quotes. From reporter Ben Hubbard:

Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon.

Instead, three Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.

And from a military analyst:

“The only real outcome I see in the next 5 to 10 years is a series of cantons that agree to tactical cease-fires because they are tired of the bloodletting,” said Mr. Holliday, the analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. “That trajectory is in place, with or without Assad.” 

No wonder the president has ruled out unilateral U.S. action.

"This is … an international problem," Obama said at a White House news conference with visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "It's not going to be something that the United States does by itself. And I don't think anybody in the region would think that U.S. unilateral actions … would bring about a better outcome."

I can't see how the supporters of U.S. intervention in this messy conflict could ever make this work in America's interests.