Tag Archives: defense policy

5 questions every presidential candidate should answer: Terrorism Edition

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That’s the title of Michael Rubin’s article over at AEIdeas. Non-presidential candidate Hines essays some answers below.

1. How do you define terrorism? Terrorism is the use of mass killings, particularly of innocents, and associated destruction for the immediate purpose of causing terror in the hearts and minds of the target nation’s population. The intermediate and long range purpose is the use of that terror to cause the nation’s government—directly or by divorcing the population from the government through the former’s loss of faith in government—to accept in toto the terrorists’ demands.

2. Do you believe terrorism to be primarily motivated by grievance or ideology? Yes. Terrorists have an ideology—see Daesh, al Qaeda, Boko Haram for current examples, the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhoff Gang for earlier examples—and they use the excuse of grievance to articulate their ideology. Daesh, for instance, espouses a very strict and harsh version of an ideology they center on Islam, with anyone who disagrees with them apostates and subject to killing on sight. Their grievance is that they’re oppressed and unable to press their ideology freely.

3. What is the theological component to terrorism? The question proceeds from a quasi-false premise. Terrorism is evil. Full stop. Quasi-false because while there are secular philosophies and ideologies that see very grave error, it’s primarily religion that has the concept of straight-up evil. In the end, though, there is no real theological component to terrorism; terrorism is outside of religion.

4. Should terrorism be treated as a criminal matter or a military threat? Yes. There are individual acts of terrorism, like the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. These are isolated incidents, and they’re properly treated as the fundamentally criminal acts that they are.

However, when terrorism is practiced as a matter of policy by a nation-state or a polity organized along networked lines, it becomes a state of war and a military matter. While the tools of law enforcement might be helpful here, those are in this context merely tools, and they must be used alongside and subordinate to military tools.

5. What countries do you believe are state sponsors of terrorism today? Any country that harbors terrorist organization(s) (note that a nation that has terrorist organization(s) within them but that is attempting to do something about that is not harboring them) is such a sponsor, as are nations that support terrorist entities and/or engage in terrorism themselves. Such nations include Russia, Iran, the Palestinian Authority (post-merger with Hamas), Turkey, Syria, northern Korea, Qatar, Venezuela, Cuba.

Journalistic…Naiveté

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Throughout the long negotiations over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, President Hassan Rouhani has withstood scathing criticism from hard-liners at home by sticking to his case that a deal with his country’s longtime enemies will bring peace and prosperity.

So the political stakes are high for the moderate president as talks enter their homestretch toward a June deadline.

If he succeeds in sealing an agreement, Iran could see much-hoped-for relief from withering sanctions that are dragging down the economy at a time when the OPEC producer is trying to ride out a severe slump in oil prices.

This AP article goes on in this vein, touting the economic benefits to Iran, and so the political benefits to Rouhani, of “sealing an agreement.”

This is naïve. Success in “sealing an agreement” means Iran gets its nuclear weapon. Full stop. Economic and political benefits in the near term are purely side effects. Political benefits in the longer term are nuclear Iranian domination of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel.

So, unfortunately, is Dubai-based political analyst Theodore Karasik naïve.

Rouhani was elected on, promoted and supported the idea that he would help the Iranian economy recover. And of course the nuclear agreement is tied to that because of the sanction. If there is no nuclear deal, the presidency will go back to a more ultraconservative leader—under a nuclear Iran[.]

Iran remains under, has been under for quite some years, ultraconservative leadership. The mullahs, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are in charge. Their global face, Rouhani, is just smoother about it than Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

What the AP (and, apparently, Karasik) constantly miss in this is that getting the weapon is the purpose of these “negotiations,” and the drive for the weapon is to satisfy Iran’s goal of wiping Israel from the map and beyond that of emphasizing that regional domination. The mullahs, after all, are less Islamic than they are political descendants of Cyrus, Darius, and the Xerxes. (A longer term side effect is the ability to arm Iran’s terrorist allies, don’t forget.)

Collateral Damage

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In an era of antiseptic war, one fought with drones and precision weapons that limit to an amazing degree the collateral damage done by these limited strikes executed during very limited conflicts, we’ve gotten spoiled. We expect war generally to be antiseptic.

And our “leaders” in DC have gotten spoiled, too.

Several large-scale cyberattacks in recent months have prompted a number of lawmakers and policy makers to call for a more forceful response, including suggestions that the US engage in counterattacks that would disable or limit the culprits’ own networks.

But White House officials and some technology security experts remain skeptical that such “offensive” cyberattacks would work, saying they are concerned about the difficulty in targeting specific hackers without causing widespread spillover, among other things.

And so, in the face of this wide-open cyber war being waged against us, these White House officials and those “some others” insist that we do nothing, since what we would do would be imperfect and cause collateral damage.

…cybersecurity experts are mostly split on the merits of retaliation, with some saying it could distract companies from doing more to prevent breaches.

Because defense and offense cannot possibly be carried out simultaneously. Yeah.

Bob Gourley, late of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

Once the planners and everyone looks [into retaliation], it puts it on an escalation ladder we don’t want to be on. The first thing we need to do is protect our systems. Until we do that, we’re almost inviting them to attack, saying “Come on, take our stuff.”

Wait, what? You’re saying that after years of suffering cyberattacks from Russia, the People’s Republic of China, northern Korea, Iran, individuals, you still haven’t bothered to “protect our systems?” How does that work, exactly?

 

Certainly collateral damage should be limited to the extent possible, from both moral and efficiency perspectives. But this is war. Collateral damage is part of the messiness of war. If we let our fear of collateral damage paralyze us, we will lose the war, with catastrophic consequences to us, completely subsuming any collateral damage done us by this war.

It’s for those who sit in leadership chairs in DC to stop wasting their energy looking for excuses to do nothing and instead direct their energy to responding. Forcefully. As tidily as possible, but with recognition that there will be messes, sometimes big ones.

That response must include actually defending our systems, and it must include correcting this failure:

Businesses are largely prohibited by law from a practice known as “hack back,” which could either be done to punish a cyberthief or take back information that was stolen from any specific firm. That has left companies relying on the government’s response, which so far largely has come in the form of sanctions or criminal indictments.

Is Europe Folding?

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European Union foreign ministers, citing momentum behind a new peace initiative, on Monday delayed for a week the implementation of sanctions against a new group of individuals and companies in Russia and eastern Ukraine, EU officials said.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius is…hopeful:

Things are beginning—just beginning, we must be careful—to move.

Here’s how things are beginning to move: Russian-backed rebels have renewed their attacks with their objective of expanding their hold on Donetsk Oblast, and Russians and Russian-backed rebels have renewed their assault on Mariupol with the objective here to build a land bridge to Russian occupied Crimea.

In response to Congressional moves for the US—finally—to begin supplying even defensive arms to Ukraine,

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo pleaded with Washington to maintain “unity of action” with Europe.

The honorable gentleman from Spain has misspoken: he meant to say “unity of inaction.” While Ukraine burns.

No, the only peace initiative that has any legitimacy, the only peace agreement that can have any legitimacy, is one in which Russia withdraws from Ukraine. Completely.

Europe seems unwilling to do the things necessary to achieve that.

Their Minds Are Made Up

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Don’t confuse them with facts.

Congressmen John Lewis (D, GA), G.K. Butterfield (D, NC), and Earl Blumenauer (D, OR) have announced they’re going to skip out on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the full Congress on 3 March.

Never mind that this man on the scene might have some expertise about the Middle East and the threats posed by Islamic terrorists and by Iran. President Barack Obama has given them all the wisdom they need.

Blumenauer went so far as to say

I will refuse to be part of a reckless act of political grandstanding[.]

Because gathering actual facts independently of the Democrats’ approved analysis is political grandstanding.

This cowardice, or this arrogance—your call—is inexcusable by men who play a role in determining national policy.

Remember this in the 2016 elections in their districts.