After more than three years of thought pieces, random asides, fun interviews, and general blogging, Bellum is closing up shop. Our “proceedings” are available on Amazon.com in the form of a Kindle book, Ordering Chaos. Mission Accomplished!

The site will remain fully functional. It has been a pleasure. We thank you for reading.

Rice = Kissinger (Photo: WEF)

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when it’s the season for vice presidential running mates, everybody looks like a vice presidential running mate. There is some evidence Condoleezza Rice could get the nod from Mitt Romney, but it’s pretty thin, and there’s a much stronger case to be made that she has something else in mind for her retirement: statesmanship.

Let’s review the evidence. She would not be the first former cabinet official to run for the vice presidential slot. Dick Cheney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Henry Wallace all held cabinet-level posts. Dr. Rice also rocked a speech at Romney’s fundraiser in Utah earlier this summer. The Romney campaign itself leaked that she was in the top rung of contenders. And finally, in an op-ed published yesterday by The Financial Times (and linked by the Drudge Report as “CONDI BREAKS SILENCE”), Dr. Rice played off Romney’s American exceptionalist rhetoric with the headline: “US must recall it is not just any country.”

That’s pretty much it.

On the other side of the ledger, Dr. Rice has repeatedly denied she has any interest whatsoever in running for this sort of office. The position she last held, Secretary of State, was once regarded as a stepping stone to the presidency — back in, say, 1845, when James Buchanan held the post. But in the modern age, the nation’s top diplomat has typically viewed the post as his or her last (excluding low-key roles on boards, commissions, etc.). Dean Acheson, Warren Christopher, George Shultz, and Madeleine Albright all settled into largely private lives after their service in Foggy Bottom.

But, then, what is Dr. Rice doing giving speeches? Writing op-eds? Attending fundraisers? Yes, these are things a vice presidential contender would be doing, but they’re also things the next Henry Kissinger would be doing.

Dr. Kissinger, like Dr. Rice, has a doctorate. Both are academics who had been published and read widely prior to entering government. Kissinger started as national security advisor to Richard Nixon before also assuming control of the State Department. Rice followed this pathway under George W. Bush, except she didn’t have the bravado to hold both positions at the same time. Kissinger retired from State in 1977 and published his first memoir in 1979; Rice retired from State in 2009 and published her first memoir in 2010.

The similarities extend further. Dr. Kissinger founded his international consultancy vehicle, Kissinger Associates, with former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft in 1982. Rice founded her own consultancy, RiceHadley, with former national security advisor Stephen Hadley in 2009. (Robert Gates later joined them.) Kissinger writes op-eds (over 50 since 2006), gives speeches, attends Republican fundaisers, serves on commissions, boards, and committees, and writes books. All of this helps to sharpen Kissinger’s mind, strengthen his brand, and satiate his appetite for foreign policy and national security, while largely keeping him out of the political partisan scene. In certain loony circles, he may remain a villain and a war criminal, but is more known today for being a statesman.

That, we submit, is the role to which Condoleezza Rice aspires.

Far from “abrupt,” Britain’s retreat from empire unfolded over the course of some three decades. Because the national leadership did not have a consistent or coherent plan for its imperial commitments, a cycle emerged: Britain would reaffirm a determination to maintain its military presence in a certain country and then reverse itself within a few years or even a few months after the political conditions changed or military risks became too great. This happened in Palestine, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere.

From 1945 to the 1970s, British troops found themselves deployed across the world in various capacities. Special forces, light infantry, the famed gurkhas, and other units waged intensive counterinsurgency operations in Malaya, Oman, Kenya, and Aden, now part of Yemen. They deployed to Borneo to fight the Indonesians, to Belize to deter the Guatemalans, and to Cyprus to quell Greek Cypriot guerrillas. (This is to say nothing of the campaigns in Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf War, and stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Read the whole thing here.

“We can talk to anyone and everyone you can think of”, he said proudly. “We can talk to everyone in our region. When you go into Iraq, we can, for instance, talk to every single individual group”, regardless of race and ethnicity. “Even if they don’t talk to each other, they talk to us.” Turkey has relations with the Israelis and with the Palestinians, and even within the Palestinian construction, between those in the West Bank and those in Gaza. “This gives us some special unique ability, really, to make our own contribution to regional peace and stability.”

Tan continued: “Even if we wanted to, we could not just distance ourselves from any of those issues, in terms of engagement. We need to engage with these problems.” In this context, engagement doesn’t necessarily mean intervention, the way two armed forces might engage each other on the battlefield. It refers to diplomatic contact, economic dealings, and other types of “softer” contact.

Turkish engagement, though, is not “out of a sort of an ambitious type of policy or perspective”, he added, “but because of the fact that if we do not engage with those problems, or if we are not proactive in responding to certain challenges, before those problems blow up in real terms, then we are the party which feels the heat, no one else.”

Read the rest here.

Everybody assumes it’s just a question of Israeli political will. There is something to that, since any operation would be extremely high-risk and we know that the Israelis value their servicemen’s lives extremely highly; after all, they traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for a single IDF soldier.

But every sensible analysis of a putative strike comes down to flight path, logistics, and the probability of mission success. Overflight rights are tricky (and actually do matter in the real world), the logistics are near impossible (with Israel’s lack of aerial refueling capability), and the probability of mission success is extremely low (given Iran’s air defenses and the dispersed nature of its nuclear program).

The U.S. Army Command and General Staff College’s decision in 1983 to grant their own Marshall Award to a young captain named David Petraeus has since proven remarkably prescient. The Washington Post’s resident sage, Walter Pincus, asked this past summer, “Which Petraeus will arrive at the CIA: The officer or the gentleman?” Like so many others, Pincus missed the real heart of the story. Langley and the Pentagon will always be joined at the hip, regardless of who is in charge at the CIA. The better question is whether the Petraeus is the last of Marshall’s generation or the first member of a new generation. If the latter, what fundamental belief about America’s role in the world will bind that new generation?

Afghan commandos, a budding force. (Defenselink)

The death of Osama bin Laden has given those against the war in Afghanistan renewed vigor in their push to withdraw all American forces from the country. In addition to driving al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts into Pakistan, the United States has knocked off their heretofore invincible leader and financial patron.

Having sufficiently crippled al-Qaeda, the Americans can load up the MRAPS and leave the future of the country to be fought over in the snake pit of Afghan politics. These two reasons (the relocation of al-Qaeda and the internal character of the conflict) are sufficient cause for, as Leslie Gelb puts it in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal , the United States to declare “Mission Accomplished” and head home.

However, Mr. Gelb and the advocates of immediate withdrawal are guilty of a strategic misunderstanding of America’s reasons for invading Afghanistan. This failure is based on a misunderstanding of the original strategy put forth by the Bush administration in the nascent stages of the War on Terror. The withdrawal partisans understand this strategy to be “defeat al-Qaeda.” This is part of the strategy, but as President Bush and senior administration officials have said, the pre-eminent strategy was to prevent another attack on the scale of 9/11.

The best way to accomplish this objective in the most complete fashion possible is to eliminate the safe-havens from which attacks on the American homeland can be planned. Indeed, bringing security and the rule of law to Yemen, Somalia, and the Congo would be quite the accomplishment, and, despite all its wealth and the capabilities of its armed and diplomatic services, the United States cannot undertake nation-building operations wherever there is anarchy in the world. However, Afghanistan (and the northwestern tribal regions of Pakistan) is the pre-eminent region of concern at present because that is from where the most deadly attacks against the United States have originated. If the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, there is nothing to stop Ayman al-Zawahiri and his minions from traipsing across the Afghan-Pakistani border and waging war against the Afghan National Government and, more ominously, on the thousands of Afghans who threw their lot in with Americans who promised them a chance at self-determination. The “war on terror” is justifiably called “the long war,” and there is no guarantee that Afghanistan will be the last American nation-building adventure.

To accomplish this goal, it is not sufficient to drive al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and play “whack-a-mole” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, using Predator drones in lieu of a mallet. Only a functioning Afghan government and a capable Afghan National Army can provide the security and rule of law necessary to prevent al-Qaeda and the Taliban from re-establishing themselves as a force capable of ruling Afghanistan.

There is no doubt that this mission will be costly in terms of time, treasure, and, sadly, lives. However, eliminating the sanctuaries from which attacks on American soil can be launched is paramount and we must vigorously pursue this mission. Mowing the weeds of terrorism is not sufficient to accomplish this task. We must sow salt in the Earth, as the Romans did after a conquest, to ensure that the weeds will not grow again.

Photo credit: Sgt. Daniel P. Shook, US Army

Dr. Mitchell Reiss

Mitchell Reiss has worked in foreign policy for decades. He served as the director of policy planning at the State Department under Colin Powell, as Special Envoy for the Northern Ireland Peace Process from 2003 to 2007, and as an advisor to Governor Mitt Romney on national security issues during the 2008 campaign. Now the president of Washington College, situated comfortably in small-town Maryland just over an hour from the nation’s capital, Dr. Reiss granted Bellum an interview in his office in late April.

“This is a more difficult job than the ones I’ve held in government,” he said without hesitation. He described a jam-packed day that included several on-campus events — the first at 7 o’clock in the morning, the last at 5 o’clock in the evening — and then a panel discussion in Washington. The students, faculty, donors, parents, and local community present a formidable “array of constituencies that you have to be mindful of,” he explained, and unlike in government, where very few positions don’t have you reporting directly up a chain of command, as a college president “you are the final line of authority.”

It is commonplace in Washington to hear policymakers complaining about the “tyranny of the inbox,” the day-to-day duties that crowd out one’s ability to deal with macro-level issues that, while important in the long-run, aren’t particularly pressing on any given day. This has led some, like Henry Kissinger, to say that policymakers need to do all of their learning before they come to Washington, because they simply won’t have time for that once they arrive.

“You invest a lot in the bank, and then you draw from it,” Dr. Reiss said. “The urgent crowds out the important.” There are exceptions, of course — Policy Planning at the State Department, J-5 at the Pentagon, and other more ad hoc groups — but in general “it’s very difficult to carve out time to think about big issues and how you might want to deal with them.”

The policy scene, where these big issues are often discussed, is incredibly polarized. “Partly,” Dr. Reiss suggested, “that reflects how complicated some of these issues are.” Popular culture enjoys labeling people as “white hats” or “black hats,” and policy positions as “reasonable” or “extreme,” but “the reality is that a lot of these issues are really, really difficult.”

And so it was to these big issues that we turned.

The Grand Old Party

In recent years, many commentators have described a “civil war” in the Republican Party. A so-called “internationalist” wing of the party, including Senator Richard Lugar, led the way on New START ratification over severe opposition from another wing, led by Senator Jon Kyl. The party is split on Afghanistan, Libya, and cutting the defense budget, to say nothing of the many clashes on domestic issues.

“All of these different voices and strains within the party are bubbling up,” Dr. Reiss suggested, “but I don’t think they are anything new.” During the Cold War the coalition was held together by a common enemy, the Soviet Union and international communism. “What’s lacking now is a unifying theme.”

It is the lack of this theme that leads to the partisan friction on various policy issues. Some have “an understandable skepticism” about treaty commitments; others suffer from “war fatigue” over Iraq and Afghanistan, and the general “lack of leadership from the White House” on both these wars. There is also “spillover from the Tea Party focus on fiscal restraint,” including calls to bring the troops home.

“I’m not sure that there should be a common unifying theme in terms of identifying an enemy or a hostile force,” Dr. Reiss added. “Some of my colleagues in the party see China in that light,” but, he suggested, that is more of a choice “we get to help shape” than an inevitable outcome. “I don’t see China occupying the space that the Soviet Union did. I don’t see Russia occupying the space that the Soviet Union did.”

“Academics get tenure if they come up with grand unifying themes,” he said, “and to say that the world is messy and that we’ve got to do stuff on an ad hoc basis doesn’t get you tenure.” Unfortunately, he added, “that’s not a rallying cry. ‘It’s Complicated’ isn’t going to be on a bumper sticker any time soon.”

American Exceptionalism

Few concepts in political discourse are more difficult to articulate universally than the notion that the United States has a special purpose in the world. Where did this purpose come from? How long have we had it? Can we lose it?

Dr. Reiss argued that we have to “disaggregate the different elements of American exceptionalism.” First, there is the fact that we are exceptional due to our economic, military and diplomatic strength. Second, there are the policy consequences that follow from that fact. The United States is “the most powerful country on the face of the planet, and hopefully we will remain so for many, many years to come.”

“But it’s not preordained that we will always remain exceptional,” he continued. “One of the tasks for every generation is to make those decisions that will perpetuate our strength, our values, and our interests. We are facing one of those times right now…We are exceptional but I believe that is because of really intelligent decisions and national conversations that we’ve had over the past two-plus centuries.”

American exceptionalism is a fact; it’s the consequences that divide us. Dr. Reiss suggested that Democrats believe “that America is inexorably declining, and therefore the job of any administration is to manage that decline as gracefully as possible.” Republicans don’t accept the premise of decline. Unlike other countries that have faced decline in the past, due to resource constraints and insurmountable demographic issues, “we get to determine our future.”

The Presidency

Dr. Reiss was measured in his evaluation of the Obama presidency. “I was probably a little more patient than some of my Republican Party colleagues,” believing that the president simply “deserved some time” to get up to speed and acclimated to his new executive role, he explained.

While he gave President Obama decent marks for his handling of North Korea, relationships with our Asian allies, and the deepening of the relationship with India, Dr. Reiss expressed dissatisfaction with the White House’s handling of Libya, the diplomacy surrounding the Israel-Palestine issue, and the situation unfolding in Syria.

But more basically, he said, President Obama misunderstood something fundamental, believing that many of the problems the United States faced in the first decade of this century could be blamed on the Bush administration. “There were structural reasons,” Dr. Reiss argued, that transcended a single man or a single administration.

In April of this year, Bellum posted a series of “dispatches” from a woman allegedly named Amina Arraf, who we believed was living in Damascus. It increasingly appears that this was not the case. In fact, there are serious doubts as to her location and even identity, and many are suggesting her entire persona as an American-born Syrian blogging live from the revolution was an elaborate hoax. I apologize that she was not more thoroughly vetted. It will not happen again.

– Tristan Abbey, Senior Editor———————

The full list of her guest posts is as follows:

• Report from Damascus: Making Sense of Syria (April 19th, 2011)
• Report from Syria: Great Friday and Beyond (April 23rd, 2011)
• Damascus Dispatch: Report from Syria (April 25th, 2011)
• On the Ground in Damascus (April 28th, 2011)
• Staying Put in Damascus (April 28th, 2011)

These posts will be removed from our site.

The Honorable Michael B. Mukasey

Few can claim as much knowledge and experience in the intersection of national security and the law as Michael Mukasey. He served as Attorney General from November 2007 to January 2009 after spending 18 years on the bench as a federal judge in New York. Cases over which he presided included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the trial of Jose Padilla. He is now a partner at the Manhattan law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, and joined Bellum for an interview last March.

National security issues once consumed “easily thirty percent” of his job. Mukasey received a security briefing every day and once a week followed up that briefing with a meeting with President Bush on related matters. In addition, there were applications to the FISA Court, dealing with surveillance and wiretapping of suspected terrorists.

Today things are a little different. He exercises each morning, has breakfast, and comes into the law firm, but after that it varies. “I’ve done arbitrations, mediations…some travel, not a lot,” he said. “I manage to drag myself out of here around six o’clock in the evening, and take things home and work on them.” His portfolio includes internal corporate investigations, some conventional litigation, and offering clients “advice from 30,000 feet.”

“If I had any strengths as a judge, one of them was a low fascination threshold,” Mukasey said. “I get interested in what I do. I don’t lose interest simply because it’s in a smaller forum.”

Terror and the Law

One key question that has dominated policy discussions in Washington since September 11, 2001 — and even prior to that — is whether the campaign against al Qaeda is a matter for criminal justice or constitutes an actual war. For his part, Mukasey tends to ascribe to the latter view.

“I don’t regard the Attorney General as simply being on the crime side,” he argued. Limiting terrorist attacks to crimes is a mistake, in this view; they are also acts of war. “One of the things the Attorney General can do is to help clarify the distinction between where one leaves off and the other begins, or where they overlap.”

In terms of the larger war on terrorism, Mukasey is optimistic about the ultimate outcome. “We stuck out the Cold War and prevailed. We’ve stuck out a lot of things and prevailed. My own view is we’re going to stick this out and prevail, too.”

Mukasey is careful in his appraisal of the Obama administration’s view on these issues. “I think part of the problem is that there are a number of issues that we don’t like to deal with explicitly, and so we’ve dealt with them, in part, by denial,” he said. “Detention is one of them. I think we need a new amendment to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that will speak about detention, about who it is we’re really fighting — in addition to the enumerated organizations — and deal with some of the detention issues, so that we’ve got standards for keeping it in place.”

The Constitution and American Exceptionalism

That the Tea Party is a controversial movement is a truism. For avid readers, one of the more visible consequences of it is a plethora of recent books and renewed interest in the American founding.

“All in all,” Mukasey began, “it seems to me a very healthy thing for people to be interested in the Constitution.” For his part, he carries a copy of the document in his jacket wherever he goes, and is a supporter of the Federalist Society.

“I think it’s important that people understand and know what’s in there, and that they also know and understand that the people who wrote it were very practical men,” he added. “It’s not just a theoretical construct. It’s a very practical document and it’s got to be read that way.”

When asked about American exceptionalism, Mukasey’s response was quick and confident: the United States is an exceptional country.

“It’s the country that has provided the most freedom to the most people with the most prosperous result in the history of the world,” he said without hesitation. “Is it perfect? No. But it is certainly exceptional. And I don’t feel at all funny about saying that or diffident about it, and I don’t think anybody else should either.”