Foreign policy

Top ex-diplomats slam militarization of U.S. foreign policy

U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid assets have largely atrophied and must be quickly rebuilt by the new administration that takes office in January, according to a report released in Washington DC in October by former senior foreign service officers. While the Pentagon’s budget has risen to heights not seen since World War II, the State Department has seen its human and financial resources reduced 30-50 percent since the end of the Cold War. The report by the American Academy of Diplomacy (AAD) and the Henry L. Stimson Center calls for a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of diplomats and aid and development specialists recruited into the foreign service over the next five years. This would cost about $3 billion — approximately what the Pentagon spends every ten days on military operations in Iraq — over current budget estimates.

The vacuum created by the lack of diplomatic resources has translated into the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, warns the 26-page report, A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future. “Today, significant portions of the nation’s foreign affairs business simply are not accomplished,” it says. “The work migrates by default to the military that does have the necessary people and funding but neither sufficient experience nor knowledge. The ‘militarization’ of diplomacy exists and is accelerating.” The report asserts: “The status quo cannot continue without serious damage to our vital interests.”

As part of the fix, the report calls for the State Department to take over control from the Defense Department of nearly $800 million a year budgeted for several security assistance programs, including humanitarian aid, created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help friendly militaries prosecute the global war on terrorism.

“Our view is that the Secretary of State has and should have responsibility for assuring that all foreign and security assistance is carried out in accord with U.S. foreign policy, including setting overall policy, approving countries to receive assistance, and setting the budget for such assistance,” the report says. “It is important for the U.S. to ensure that its non-military international presence and engagement be carried out primarily by civilians, not by the military.”

The new report echoes the views of a growing number of non-governmental organizations and foreign policy experts that the Pentagon, simply by virtue of its enormous budget and its worldwide presence with nearly 800 overseas bases, has become far too dominant in policy making. Even Pentagon chief Robert Gates, a former senior intelligence officer, has complained about the imbalance between U.S. military and diplomatic resources. “Funding for non-military foreign affairs programs...remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military,” he declared in a much-discussed speech a year ago. “What is clear for me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.”

Gates has also noted ruefully that there are more people serving in military bands than in the entire State Department.

Despite his support, however, Gates’ views have not yet substantially altered the political equation in Congress, which has routinely approved or even increased the Bush administration’s budgetary requests for the Pentagon over the last eight years while casting a far more skeptical eye on requests for the State Department, which lacks a comparably broad-based constituency in the electorate and industry.

The Defense Department is slated to receive well over $527 billion for 2009 — not including at least $170 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — roughly 13 times more than the State Department’s budget of less than $40 billion. And in October, the Pentagon submitted a new projection for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than it had previously announced, according to Congressional Quarterly, beginning with an almost 10-percent increase in its 2010 budget to nearly $600 billion — again, not including war costs.

– edited from Inter Press Service, Oct. 15, 2008
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2008

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Terrorism is ‘blowback’ from U.S. foreign policy

Michael Scheuer, former chief of the Osama bin Laden unit of the CIA

In CIA jargon, the term “blowback” refers to the unintended negative consequences of U.S. covert operations against foreign nations and governments. The term was first used in a 1954 report on the CIA’s 1953 operation that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the elected head of state in Iran, and installed the Shah as dictator. The suicidal hijacker attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States were instances of blowback from American clandestine operations in Afghanistan. Following is a statement by Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned in 2004, given at the National Press Club in Washington DC, May 24, 2007, addressing this issue:

The only indispensable ally that Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and their allies have [is] U.S. foreign policy.

It is a patent absurdity on the part of the governing establishment of the United States to believe that the war we are engaged in at the moment has anything to do with our freedoms, our democracies, gender equality, or myself having a Budweiser after work in the evening. There’s nothing more absurd than that that you could imagine.

This war [in Iraq] has to do with our foreign policy and its impact in the Muslim world. Al Qaeda and its like ... have focused on U.S. foreign policy and they have found it a glue of cohesion, a glue of unity across the Islamic world, which is, as every other civilization on Earth, as diverse, as fractious as can be imagined — ethnically, linguistically, divisions between sects and within sects of religion.

There is no Islam; there is [sic] no Muslims; there is just the Muslim world. And the cohesion that bin Laden has given it stems from the impact of our policies, simply six in number:

1. Our ability, until recently at least, to control the price of oil and make it acceptable to Western consumers;

2. Our unqualified support for Israel;

3. Our presence on the Arabian Peninsula;

4. Our military presence in Muslim countries [in] places like Yemen and Saudi Arabia, but now including Iraq and Afghanistan;

5. Our support for governments that are viewed across the Islamic world as oppressing Muslims — Russia and Chechnya in the North Caucasus, India in Kashmir, the genocide by inundation of the Chinese in western China;

6. And perhaps most painfully of all for America is our 50 years of support for Arab police states and tyrannies.

There is within the movement of Al Qaeda and the Islamists a large measure of liberation sentiment. And Muslims, especially in the Arab world, have been governed by dictators who installed generals and absolute monarchs since World War II. And we have supported, nurtured and protected them.

In response to a question on the situation in Afghanistan, Mr. Scheuer stated the following:

The President was sold a bill of goods by George Tenet and the CIA — that a few dozen intel guys, a few hundred Special Forces, and truckloads of money could win the day. What happened is what’s happened ever since Alexander the Great, three centuries before Christ: the cities fell quickly, which we mistook for victory. Three years later, the Taliban has regrouped, and there’s a strong insurgency. We paid a great price for demonizing the Taliban. We saw them as evil because they didn’t let women work, but that’s largely irrelevant in Afghanistan. They provided nationwide law and order for the first time in 25 years; we destroyed that and haven’t replaced it. They’re remembered in Afghanistan for their harsh, theocratic rule, but remembered more for the security they provided. In the end, we’ll lose and leave. The idea that we can control Afghanistan with 22,000 soldiers, most of whom are indifferent to the task, is far-fetched. The Soviets couldn’t do it with 150,000 soldiers and utter brutality.

~ Michael Scheuer is the author of “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.”

– PeaceMeal, May/June 2008

Friendship formula for world peace

by Dan Sisk

Having a birthday during Lent is bad enough, but growing up in a family of five brothers and four sisters is like answering to a whole team of junior executives. Eventually, even my baby sister rose above me in the management chain, leaving me with the post of family irritant, which I pursued with ardor. As I grew, the words of my big brothers and sisters seemed dry and tedious, and they passed like tumbleweeds on the wind seeking some other fence to roll against.Maturity has given me more respect for the wisdom of my siblings. Fatherhood tends to force that. And empathy, too: My sons have trampled many perfectly good suggestions under foot, often with glee.

It occurs to me that my family’s dynamics aren’t all that different from the way nations interact. I often think of countries that have spent their modern lives in the shadow of big brother America. Constantly gazing across the oceans for approval, they’ve longed to win our acceptance. The same dream often burned in their hearts as they stood in awe, a dream of equality and friendship. But it can be a pitiful dream.

Lately, the dream seems to have decayed to rivalry and anger. Possibly miffed by our muscle-flexing, our unwanted advice or our self-interest, the membership of Uncle Sam’s fan club dwindles while detractors run out of name tags. But why should we care?

Behind our pride, we try to understand what went wrong. Like anyone losing the trust and respect of admirers, we secretly dig for a root cause, but the answer towers overhead.

Though the attack on Pearl Harbor seized and rattled us, we endured and overcame. The universal ideals and principles handed down to us prevailed again, fortifying us even more.

Now, fear has a dogged grip and we can’t shake it off. As a result, we’ve lost our self-respect and confidence. Glued to the threat level, we bounce from panic to panic like pinballs, then escape to TVs where others navigate realities that conveniently avoid our own. Meanwhile, our former admirers scoff at our disarray and see little value in a superpower afraid of its own shadow.

When waylaid by stress and uncertainty, two choices remain: curl up into a ball or reclaim the rock you once stood upon and build again. For us, the rock embodies the timeless principles so astutely compiled by our forefathers years ago. Today, the message still has relevance; the champion just got a bit flabby.

Unfortunately, a successful approach eludes us. Do we force it with guns and bombs and house-to-house searches? Or do we bribe our way in by funding nations where religious tolerance means freedom to attend state-run services?

Our founders must have forgotten to jot down the specifics. Either that or they’re all too obvious.

All this brings me back to the family business, or what’s left of it. Oh, the team’s still there, for the most part, but at some point along the line, the firm reorganized. While life distracted us, we were re-engineered, refocused, and reassigned. Now we’re, well, just a bunch of people who share adventure, happiness, sadness and power tools. In a word, friends.

Together, in our own way, we grope our way forward, sitting down together from to time to encourage, compare notes or just take a load off.

The answers I’ve gathered along my own meandering path serve well. Though many questions remain, one thing is clear to all of us: We don’t need big brothers anymore, but we’ll always need friends.

Maybe that’s what the world needs, too.

Dan Sisk, Richland, is a manager in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His article was published in the Tri-City (Wash.) Herald on 25 March 2007.

– PeaceMeal, March/April 2007