Tag: news

“Don’t trust liars—especially about matters of war and peace,” writes Vox‘s Matthew Yglesias. “Today’s a day,” The Atlantic‘s David Frum posits, “when the most untruthful administration in US history will wish its statements could be believed.”

It is appropriate, necessary, yet insufficient to remember that government lying is bad, that government lying about war is particularly bad, and that Donald Trump is one of the most bizarrely promiscuous liars ever seen in American political life. Insufficient, because laying the blame on one particular administration, or even one major political party, too often becomes a de facto credulousness about the war-related veracity of other administrations.

The truth, which literally hurts, is that every administration lies about war, particularly (though not only) about its reasons for initiating deadly force. It was literally only last month that The Washington Post‘s “Afghanistan Papers” project detailed how America’s longest war has been a nearly two-decade festival of deadly bullshit. How many times are we going to accept on-the-record U.S. military quotes like “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible”?

Too many times, I’m afraid. We enable the machinery of our own bamboozlement with our often partisan-based trust in the protectors of the flag.

Readers with long memories will surely note that David Frum wrote President George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in January 2002, linking Iran, North Korea, and especially Iraq in a rhetorical if not quite actual network of bad-guy regimes threatening to do the U.S. harm. “I was to provide a justification for war,” Frum recalled in his memoir. The justification was…misleading.

It was also damaging in a way that relates directly to this week’s escalation with Iran. Ryan Crocker, then the deputy chief of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, met the next day with a lead Iranian government official, who said (according to Crocker’s memory, as recounted in a must-read 2013 New Yorker profile of Qasem Soleimani), “You completely damaged me….Suleimani is in a tearing rage. He feels compromised.” More, from The New Yorker‘s Dexter Filkins:

The negotiator told Crocker that, at great political risk, Suleimani had been contemplating a complete reëvaluation of the United States, saying, “Maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.” The Axis of Evil speech brought the meetings to an end. Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive. Recalling that time, Crocker shook his head. “We were just that close,” he said. “One word in one speech changed history.”

You don’t have to accept that alternate history to understand that war propaganda can have all sorts of unforeseen consequences, as can the wars themselves. That may seem obvious to the point of tautology, but people accept this stuff again and again.

Like under our previous president. “We knew,” Barack Obama said on March 28, 2011, “that…if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen….Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

We know now that the congressionally unauthorized, U.S.-led regime-change war in Libya was not, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly bragged on the presidential campaign trail, “smart power at its best.” It was one of the major causes of Middle Eastern instability and misery over the past decade. But what we’ve forgotten, because our political discourse is cripplingly trivial, is that Obama’s bar-lowering justication was hysterical.

“This policy,” concluded a detailed and damning post-facto report by the British House of Commons, “was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the [allies] failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.”

Western intelligence agencies, the report found, “could not verify the actual threat to civilians posed by the Gaddafi regime [and] selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi’s rhetoric at face value….[S]trategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”

American administrations going to war routinely exaggerate threats, Hitlerize enemies, euphemize foreign casualties, and bend tales of U.S. heroism beyond all human recognition, as any spelunkings down the rabbit holes of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman will reveal. The world has never seen an arsenal as powerful as ours, and Lord Acton had a point about that power stuff.

The purpose of bringing up past treacheries is not to sink into an enervating nihilism, or intellectually facile whataboutism, or even what the kids now sneer at as “both-sidesism.” America is not Iran; Trump is not Obama; a drone strike is not the Iraq War.

But the fog of war, the temptations of power, the quickening heartbeat of fight-or-flight patriotism—these are, or at least should be, advertisements for human fallibility, for our stubborn inability to recognize certain patterns, particularly in the way each of us thinks. And it should make us more reluctant to give the commanders more authority.

Instead, too many people turn off their brains once the battle bugle calls. “Decisive shock therapy to revive the American spirit would surely come with a U.S. invasion of Iraq,” current White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow wrote for National Review in 2002. “The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization.” Or not.

As I tried to argue in one of those 9/11 anniversary columns some years ago, “If we are humble in the face of facts, and mindful of the unforeseen consequences that come with every grand plan, we might be more cautious about bending a sprawling nation’s resources and will in one direction or another.” That process necessarily begins by recognizing the limits of our own knowledge.

So no, don’t trust Donald Trump. Or Mike Pompeo. Or Mitch McConnell. And for God’s sake please don’t trust David Frum or Matthew Yglesias or Matt Welch either. America will continue being a bull in a china shop for as long as the body politic has more heft than humility. Those audacious enough to wield that awesome power, or to influence the wielding of it, will only begin to earn respect when they acknowledge the mountain of their own lies.

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In a provocative yet thoughtful manifesto, economist Tyler Cowen, a major figure in libertarian circles, offers a harsh assessment of his ideological confreres:

Having tracked the libertarian “movement” for much of my life, I believe it is now pretty much hollowed out, at least in terms of flow. One branch split off into Ron Paul-ism and less savory alt right directions, and another, more establishment branch remains out there in force but not really commanding new adherents.  For one thing, it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems, most significantly climate change. For another, smart people are on the internet, and the internet seems to encourage synthetic and eclectic views, at least among the smart and curious. Unlike the mass culture of the 1970s, it does not tend to breed “capital L Libertarianism.” On top of all that, the out-migration from narrowly libertarian views has been severe, most of all from educated women.

As an antidote, Cowen champions what he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism,” which holds that a large, growing government does not necessarily come at the expense of fundamental individual rights, pluralism, and the sort of economic growth that leads to continuously improved living standards. Most contemporary libertarians, he avers, believe that big government and freedom are fundamentally incompatible, to which he basically answers, Look upon Denmark and despair: “Denmark should in fact have a smaller government, but it is still one of the freer and more secure places in the world, at least for Danish citizens albeit not for everybody.”

In many ways, Cowen’s post condenses his recent book Stubborn Attachments, in which he argues politics should be organized around respect for individual rights and limited government; policies that encourage long-term, sustainable economic growth; and an acknowledgement that some problems (particularly climate change) need to be addressed at the state rather than individual level. You can listen to a podcast I did with him here or read a condensed interview with him here. It’s an excellent book that will challenge readers of all ideological persuasions. There’s a ton to disagree with in it, but it’s a bold, contrarian challenge to conventional libertarian attitudes, especially the idea that growth in government necessarily diminishes living standards.

I don’t intend this post as a point-by-point critique of Cowen’s manifesto, whose spirit is on-target but whose specifics are fundamentally mistaken. I think he’s right that the internet and the broader diffusion of knowledge encourages ideological eclecticism and the creation of something like mass personalization when it comes to ideology. But this doesn’t just work against “capital L Libertarianism.” It affects all ideological movements, and it helps explain why the divisions within groups all over the political spectrum (including the Democratic and Republican parties) are becoming ever sharper and harsher. Everywhere around us, coalitions are becoming more tenuous and smaller. (This is not a bad thing, by the way, any more than the creation of new Christian sects in 17th-century England was a bad thing.) Nancy Pelosi’s sharpest critics aren’t from across the aisle but on her own side of it. Such a flowering of niches is itself libertarian.

Cowen is also misguided in his call for increasing the size, scope, and spending of government. “Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion,” he writes, attributing such outcomes to “failures of state capacity”—both in terms of what the state can dictate and in terms of what it can spend. This is rather imprecise. Whatever your beliefs and preferences might be on a given issue, the scale (and cost) of addressing, say, climate change is massive compared to delivering basic education, and with the latter at least, there’s no reason to believe that more state control or dollars will create positive outcomes. More fundamentally, Cowen conflates libertarianism with political and partisan identities, affiliations, and outcomes. I think a better way is to define libertarian less as a noun or even a fixed, rigid political philosophy and more as an adjective or “an outlook that privileges things such as autonomy, open-mindedness, pluralism, tolerance, innovation, and voluntary cooperation over forced participation in as many parts of life as possible.” I’d argue that the libertarian movement is far more effective and appealing when it is cast in pre-political and certainly pre-partisan terms.

Be all that as it may, I agree that the libertarian movement is stalled in some profound ways. A strong sense of forward momentum—what Cowen calls flow—among self-described libertarians has definitely gone missing in the past few years, especially when it comes to national politics (despite the strongest showing ever by a Libertarian presidential nominee in 2016). From the 1990s up through a good chunk of the ’00s, there was a general sense that libertarian attitudes, ideas, and policies were, if not ascendant, at least gaining mindshare, a reality that both energized libertarians and worried folks on the right and left. In late 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis and a massive growth of the federal government, Matt Welch and I announced the beginning of the “Libertarian Moment.” This, we said, was

an early rough draft version of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s glimmering “utopia of utopias.” Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky.

Our polemic, later expanded into the book The Declaration of Independents, was as much aspirational as descriptive, but it captured a sense that even as Washington was about to embark on a phenomenal growth spurt—continued and expanded by the Obama administration in all sorts of ways, from the creation of new entitlements to increases in regulation to expansions of surveillance—many aspects of our lives were improving. As conservatives and liberals went dark and apocalyptic in the face of the economic crisis and stalled-out wars and called for ever greater control over how we live and do business, libertarians brought an optimism, openness, and confidence about the future that suggested a different way forward. By the middle of 2014, The New York Times was even asking on the cover of its weekly magazine, “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?“

That question was loudly answered in the negative as the bizarre 2016 presidential season got underway and Donald Trump appeared on the horizon like Thanos, blocking out the sun and destroying all that lay before him. By early 2016, George Will was looking upon the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton and declaring that we were in fact not in a libertarian moment but an authoritarian one, regardless of which of those monsters ended up in the White House. In front of 2,000 people gathered for the Students for Liberty’s annual international conference, Will told Matt and me:

[Donald Trump] believes that government we have today is not big enough and that particularly the concentration of power not just in Washington but Washington power in the executive branch has not gone far enough….Today, 67 percent of the federal budget is transfer payments….The sky is dark with money going back and forth between client groups served by an administrative state that exists to do very little else but regulate the private sector and distribute income. Where’s the libertarian moment fit in here?

With the 2020 election season kicking into high gear, apocalypticism on all sides will only become more intense than it already is. Presidential campaigns especially engender the short-term, elections-are-everything partisan thinking that typically gets in the way of selling libertarian ideas, attitudes, and policies.

Cowen is, I think, mostly right that the libertarian movement is not “really commanding new adherents,” including among “educated women.” He might add ethnic and racial minorities, too, who have never been particularly strongly represented in the libertarian movement. And, increasingly, younger Americans, who are as likely to have a positive view of socialism as they are of capitalism.

Of course, as I write this, I can think of all sorts of ways that libertarian ideas, policies, and organizations actually speak directly to groups not traditionally thought of libertarian (I recently gave $100 to Feminists for Liberty, a group that bills itself as “anti-sexism & anti-statism, pro-markets & pro-choice.”) School choice, drug legalization, criminal justice reform, marriage equality, ending occupational licensing, liberalizing immigration, questioning military intervention, defending free expression—so much of what defines libertarian thinking has a natural constituency among audiences that we have yet to engage as successfully as we should. That sort of outreach, along with constant consideration of how libertarian ideas fit into an ever-changing world, is of course what Reason does on a daily basis.

All of us within the broadly defined libertarian movement need to do better. And in that sense at least, Cowen’s manifesto is a welcome spur to redoubling efforts.

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Things are moving quickly in the aftermath of yesterday’s surprise assassination of Qassim Suleimani, the longtime leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and key figure in the Iranian regime.

The Pentagon has approved plans to send 3,000 more troops to the region. But the debate over the next steps must now shift to Congress, as the Constitution demands. Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) has announced plans to introduce a war powers resolution in the Senate, forcing a debate over whether the U.S. should go to war with Iran or place limits on Trump’s ability to engage in hostilities.

Unfortunately, some members of Congress have failed so far to live up to the expectations that come with their office. The constitutional role of elected officials is not to cheerlead a major escalation of a nearly 17-year-old conflict; it is to consider what is in the best interest of the American people. But many GOP lawmakers preferred to cheerlead, often comparing Suleimani’s assassination to the killings of terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden.

FICTION: Trump ordered the assasination of a foreign “General” and as a result has placed us on the brink of war.

FACT: Soleimani was an active enemy combatant, more dangerous than evil men such as Bin Laden & Baghdadi & who operated without regard for the law of war

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 3, 2020

Ben Sasse: “General Soleimani is dead because he was an evil bastard who murdered Americans”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 3, 2020

This is dangerously faulty logic. Whatever you think of extrajudicial killings of nonstate terrorists, what the United States did Thursday night is an entirely different matter. Terror cells and militias can sometimes be weakened or even destroyed by taking out top leaders. Soleimani is a high-ranking official within the Iranian military, which is not going to collapse because he’s been eliminated.

As for assassinating “evil bastard[s] who murdered Americans”: If you do that without regard for circumstances or consequences, you aren’t pursuing a doctrine that will promote peace or security. It can as easily encourage more attacks against Americans.

Some Democrats haven’t been great on these issues either. Consider Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), who rushed to Twitter moments after the news of Suleimani’s death broke to ask some big questions: “did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?” Those are, indeed, exactly the types of questions a member of Congress should be grappling with today and in the days to come. But Murphy loses considerable credit because he had, just days earlier, criticized the Trump administration for failing to respond with more force after the U.S. embassy in Baghdad came under attack from an Iranian-backed militia.

It’s certainly fair for any member of Congress (or any American) to criticize the president’s actions, but “Whatever Trump is doing, I want the opposite” is neither a thoughtful nor a useful attempt at fixing America’s flawed foreign policy.

Just as neither party has a monopoly on stupid reactions to Suleimani’s killing, the serious responses have been transpartisan as well:

If we are to go to war w/ Iran the Constitution dictates that we declare war. A war without a Congressional declaration is a recipe for feckless intermittent eruptions of violence w/ no clear mission for our soldiers. Our young men and women in the armed services deserve better.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 3, 2020

Lets be clear.

In 2002, Congress voted to give President Bush the power to go to war in Iraq.

Three weeks ago, our Congress let our nation down again by failing to stand up against a war in Iran. /2 https://t.co/k0V5bninkr

— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) January 3, 2020

There’s a reason our Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war: Every American may be intimately affected by a violent conflict. Soleimani was evil. But our system demands consent for war from the people, acting through their representatives and senators in Congress.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 3, 2020

While it is tempting to view the domestic political reactions to Suleimani’s assassination as a typical partisan game, something more important is also happening here. The executive branch has had free reign—under presidents from both major parties—to engage in a destructive, ill-concieved “War on Terror” that has destabilized the Middle East and caused massive human suffering. Since 9/11, more than 500,000 people have been killed in conflicts across the Middle East and Central Asia, and most of them weren’t terrorists.

Now the United States has committed an act of war against yet another country. The threat of open warfare with Iran is now greater than at any time in recent history. The risk now facing Americans—military personnel and civilians—in Iraq and elsewhere is real, as the State Department made clear this morning when it advised all Americans in Iraq to get the hell out as soon as possible. And we may see yet more erosion of Congress’ ability to control when the country goes to war. Any politician using Thursday’s attack merely to score political points should not be taken seriously.

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“You have to make this work! It’s only legal if it works!” yells a CIA functionary overseeing the torture of prisoners in overseas black sites.

She’s yelling at the two smarmy psychologists who came to the CIA to design and encourage the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—torture—on the men the CIA had secreted away after the September 11 attacks. The psychologists had insisted these measures would result in the CIA learning new actionable intelligence to help keep Americans safe from new terror attacks. It wasn’t working.

It seems unlikely that an actual CIA leader would yell something so on-the-nose, but this is The Report, a Hollywood attempt to dramatize not just the CIA torture that took place under President George W. Bush but the concealment of these tactics (from Congress and Bush himself), the fight by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate what happened, and ultimately the Obama administration’s failure to hold anybody to account for some truly terrible behavior.

The name of the movie is actually The Torture Report, but the word “torture” is cleverly redacted to indicate the secrecy level. The torture is not redacted from the movie, though; all of it (including waterboarding and a forced enema) is re-enacted in vivid flashbacks. The protagonist—investigator Daniel Jones, portrayed by Adam Driver—attempts to determine what happened at these CIA sites, why, and what laws might have been broken in the process.

The investigation itself (which was supported at first by almost the entire Senate Intelligence Committee only to see it become a partisan battleground during Obama’s presidency) represents only half the movie. The other half is the massive struggle to try to get any of the information into the hands of the public. We see how the CIA attempted to block its release and even engaged in illegal surveillance against the Senate staff, then accused the staffers of hacking into the computer system of America’s spy agency.

The movie’s available now on Amazon Prime. It’s a good time to watch it, given the American drone strike that just took out Iranian military leader Qassim Suleimani. As information about the torture became public knowledge, the government’s defenders insisted that this unauthorized and brutal behavior helped protect Americans and provided valuable actionable intelligence. But Jones’ investigation showed that the torture failed to provide the CIA with any intelligence it didn’t already have or was able to access by other means, a conclusion that was also reached by the CIA itself in an internal report (known as the Panetta Report after former CIA Director Leon Panetta). The investigation showed that many of the detainees the CIA tortured shouldn’t have been taken in the first place and didn’t even have useful information to share.

In hindsight, we can see that none of this helped stabilize the Middle East in any substantial way. We are most certainly not safer as a country as a result of the CIA’s torture methods. One lesson of The Report is that people in positions of power have a vested interest in telling us that whatever brutal actions they back will help keep America safe, even if that’s not really true.

And to be clear here, this is not a #Resistance movie. While The Report accurately portrays Senate Democrats as leaders who kept the investigation going, it also makes clear that the Obama administration is one of the forces working against them. Ted Levine plays former CIA Director John Brennan as a cocky and obnoxious jerk who seems interested only in protecting the CIA from criticism. Brennan, who tried to get Jones fired and possibly even charged with a crime, is unmistakably presented as a villain; his current critiques of the Trump administration do not shield him from criticism.

The film’s handling of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), by a no-nonsense Annette Bening, is also interesting. The Report does not shy away from Feinstein’s authoritarian streak. She declares at one point in the movie that she believes whistleblower Edward Snowden is a traitor, and she later mentions her support for Obama’s secret drone warfare (newly relevant after Thursday’s assassination). Nobody challenges her views, unfortunately, but the movie also pivots from giving her the big anti-torture speech at the end to showing an actual clip of deceased Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) giving a speech on the Senate floor opposing the use of torture by the CIA.

The Report ends on the dour real-world reminder that there’s been no real punishment of the people involved in the decision to torture detainees—or even for the CIA staff who illegally snooped on Jones’ work. The current director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, oversaw one of the black sites in Thailand where waterboarding occurred. Brennan is now a television news regular as an intelligence analyst and expert. Advisors who push the country in harsh and violent directions rarely pay a price when they’re wrong. Keep that in mind as these same voices insist that whatever violence the Trump administration has in mind for Iran will make our country and the Middle East safer.

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