An Opportunity Wasted in US-Cuba Relations

Following US-Cuban affairs after Fidel Castro's incapacitation is kind of like watching a tennis match. On the left side of the court, sporting olive drab green shorts and matching headband, Raul Castro. On the right side of the court, wearing denim shorts and a cowboy hat, George W. Bush.

First, the serve. When Raul took over as Interim President there was much speculation from policy wonks and the press regarding the fate of US-Cuba relations. The ball is now in play and Bush is the first to return it over the net. Sensibly, US government officials quickly tried to extinguish such speculation by stating, in effect, that US policy opposes dictatorship in Cuba regardless if it is wielded by Fidel or Raul.

Cuba answers. In a major speech on July 26, Raul concedes that some of the Cuban government's past policies have failed and it appears that he is offering a small olive branch to the US. The ball, now back in the US side of the net, is answered with a strong back hand by President Bush. On Wednesday, in a major Cuban policy speech given from the State Department, President Bush maintains the hard line by indicating the embargo will remain in place and calling Cuba a "tropical gulag." Nice.

But wait.... What's this? Raul runs to the net and volleys. Just hours after Bush's speech, Cuba broadcasts half of it on national TV! And Granma, the Cuban government's newspaper, publishes edited transcripts that included some of Bush's best zingers (here is a copy of the speech with the text not published by Granma crossed out). Unprecedented.

The US now stumbles. According to the Miami Herald, Department of State officials declined to comment on the Cuban broadcast and release of transcripts of Bush's speech. To be fair, what could they say? Surely they can't encourage such hopeful behavior by the Cuban regime. To do so would be a slippery slope for this administration. At worst it may lead to the beginning of a thaw in relations between the two governments, at best it gives the appearance that the Bush hard line is softening. Either result will only open Bush to attacks from his base and serve to alienate the Cuba policy hawks that he so openly aligned himself with during the speech.

Gut check time. Just as the ball appears to be heading towards it's second bounce on Bush's court, the Administration reaches back and slams it towards the opponent. On Monday, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a jailed Cuban dissident, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet. Match point. Take your olive branch and shove it.

The next set in this match will start in 2009, when the US is under new management.

(Editorial Note: Here's hoping that Dr. Biscet's medal brings some luster back to the award. The medal was disgraced when, in 2004, it was presented to Paul Bremmer, Gen. Tommy Franks, and George Tenet--three of the four people most responsible for the debacle in Iraq).

More on Anthropologists and War

Sorry for the long absence. This weekend the NYT published an op-ed by an anthropologist who takes the view that his profession's backlash against helping the military in Iraq and Afghanistan is short-sided. His common-sense position is that anthropologists working for the military are not identifying who soldiers should kill or imprison but are instead providing high-speed cultural awareness training to the troops. Nothing earth shattering here as all of this is backed by the few accounts emerging from anthropologists in the theaters of war.


The op-ed further argues that working with the military is good for the profession because it opens doors that would allow it to become increasingly relevant in policy making. Yes.

Another Short Break

Well, last week was exceedingly hectic at work and it left me with little energy to blog. This week is a little better, but my time in front of the computer at nights will be limited. So, I will take another short break from blogging and hope to re-engage next week.

People That Don't Deserve Respect

Six years after 18 American soldiers and anywhere from 700 to 1,500 Somalis were killed in a running battle in the streets of Mogadishu, I was sitting in a graduate classroom listening to a professor talk about national security policy and the conduct of war. One of my classmates was a US Army Lieutenant Colonel who, during that fateful day in Mogadishu, October 3, 1993, was the battalion operations officer for the 3rd Ranger Battalion, one of the principal units involved in that fight.

In response to a question from the professor about the Battle of Mogadishu, this young LTC said, regretfully, "we didn't know what made the Somalis tick. We didn't know their culture."

What he was referring to was his unit's lack of "cultural intelligence" of Somalis. Had he understood their culture maybe he could have figured out ways to achieve his military objective without further deteriorating an already unstable situation. But because he lacked that cultural intelligence, the Rangers' mission in Somalia floundered for several months and reached its nadir in an 18 hour firefight that left thousands dead and many more wounded.

The role of "cultural intelligence" in warfighting has been on my mind ever since the defunct Arms Control Otaku pointed me to this blog by an anthropologist working with Army forces in Iraq. When I was an undergraduate I was keenly interested in anthropology and was, briefly, an anthropology major. Over the years I retained my interest in the field and was delighted to learn that the US military was going to incorporate anthropology in its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in a program called the Human Terrain System.

This is indeed great news because the skills and knowledge that anthropology will bring to the counterinsurgency table is expected to result in more intelligent application of military force and this will translate into less violence and a smarter approach to winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis and Afghans. In the end it will save lives, both American and Iraqi/Afghan, because it will embed "cultural intelligence" into the operations of military units. My old classmate's lament of not knowing "what made them tick" will hopefully now be a thing of the past.

Only an asshole would oppose this, no? I mean, who would want to deny the military this important tool that could lessen deaths and violence in war zones? Who would want to perpetuate the misery that Iraqis and Afghans are living in? Who wants to see more displaced Iraqis? More families shattered by the deaths of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, and wives? Well, it turns out anthropology is full of selfish assholes. Here's a quote from one of them, in a comment to a post in the Savage Minds blog:

One shouldn’t be discussing how to interrogate detainees; one should be discussing how to help detainees get free of detention. Likewise, anthropologists shouldn’t be working with the military; they should be working with Iraqis, Afghanis, and especially insurgents, to inform them ‘of’ the military. Isn’t this the obvious corollary to the pledge against assisting the counter-insurgency – namely, to support the insurgency itself? (And what prevents the public articulation of this support? A secret fear of detention, perhaps?) And this, in my opinion, is where the discussion should turn: how can anthropologists, or anyone for that matter, help the insurgents?

As far as I can tell there are three reasons why anthropologists turned out to be such assholes. First, they have a Code of Ethics that forbids them from harming the populations they study. Second, the field is dominated by Lefties of the highest order, those with a rigid intellect that equate working with the American military with supporting an "illegal war" and American "imperialism." (disclaimer: I really don't know the percentage of "lefties" working in the anthropology field, but I suspect there's a lot of them because of the preponderance of lefty comments I read from anthropologists and because they are mostly all academics).

These two reasons--the Code of Ethics and the Lefties--are intertwined. Their rigid intellect does not allow them to differentiate between doing good and doing bad in a combat operations. Their default assumption is that if you work with the military you are basically drafting hit lists and assassination orders and, thus, violating a professional Code of Ethics. In fact, anthropologists participating in the Human Terrain System are doing no such thing. Here's what anthropologist Marcus Griffin is doing in Iraq:

One example is assessing the impact of poor essential services such as sewage, water, electricity, and trash on the population’s willingness to provide aid and comfort to insurgents. Improve the quality of life of local residents by building their satisfaction with the Iraqi Government and they will likely be less willing to harbor insurgents. If they are denied comfort, they have less ability to fight. Less ability to fight means fewer bullets get shot and fewer bombs get dropped.

Read this NYT article for an example of what another anthropologist is doing in Afghanistan.

The third reason some anthropologists are pissed is concern that an association with the military will make their work more difficult. There may be some validity to this, but really, screw them. So, their work might become more difficult? Boo-hoo. Cry me a river. We are talking about saving lives and easing violence in war-torn countries for God's sake! Assholes.

Oh, and God forbid they provide a service to their country. A nation that has provided them the opportunity to get their Ph.D.s and sit in their precious Ivory Towers looking down their noses at all other Americans concerned with making things better in Iraq. Let them not get their prissy hands dirty trying to help their country solve a difficult problem that is killing thousands of American and Iraqi youths. Fucking Assholes.

Short Break

A confluence of events prevents me from bloging this week. Hope to get back in the saddle next week.

PW Singer's Hair is on Fire: On Blackwater and Private Military Companies

A Salon.com article by PW Singer on the problem of Private Military Companies such as Blackwater forced my hand. I had been meaning to blog about this topic since news of the Sept. 16 incident involving Blackwater came to light. The article provided the prompting I needed.

Let me say at the outset that the article was very good and I generally agree with his main point--the US Government has a significant dependence on private contractors--and some of his more minor points, like the inherent conflict between the motivations of private contractors and the mission of the armed forces in Iraq. But Singer lacks nuance, his analysis is incomplete, and his conclusions are shaky.

One example is this paragraph:

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation's wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.

Private military contractors have harmed some counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. This is quite different than what Singer suggests. The real culprits here are not the contractors but the US Government and US Military leadership, largely because they failed to develop an adequate counterinsurgency strategy until just this year--four years into the war! Blaming military contractors for the counterinsurgency problems in Iraq is just misplaced blame.

Further, private military contractors have helped the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq significantly because, quite frankly, there are not enough forces to do everything that needs to be done. If you think the war is going bad now, you could only imagine how bad it would be if there were no military contractors in Iraq.

Who would transport military supplies around Iraq? Who would train Iraqi units? Who would translate for line units conducting patrols? How would our intelligence agencies get enough interrogators and analysts? How would our diplomats, spies, and other non-military US Government personnel travel around the country if they didn't have contractor-provided security?

To do all of these things without military contractors means that US military forces would have to take on these missions in much greater capacities than what they do know. This means that there would be fewer forces to do the core mission: clearing neighborhoods of insurgents and terrorists, holding the neighborhoods until Iraqi forces can relieve US forces, and moving on to the next neighborhood.

Admittedly, contractors like some Blackwater operators have not helped the hearts and minds campaign in some areas of Iraq. This was evident to me when I was over there and I witnessed first hand some of their very aggressive tactics. They are also a pain in the ass of military commanders who are responsible for areas in which Blackwater operates, but they also provide valuable services that need to be done. Singer, it seems, recognizes this without admitting it when he talks of government dependency on private military contractors.

There are other parts of his article that are off base, such the whole "Abrams Doctrine" discussion (irrelevant because different force structures of the post-Vietnam and the present-day Armies make this "doctrine" unworkable), his callousness when talking about contractor deaths, and his persistent insinuations that military contractors are somehow to blame for the lack of counterinsurgency success.

Here's one paragraph indicative of Singer's misplaced blame:

Basically, the bigger the bases, the more fast-food franchises, the more salsa dance lessons -- and the more money the firms make, while wrapping themselves in the flag. But while bigger bases may yield more money for stockholders, they disconnect a force from the local populace and send a message of a long-term occupation, both major negatives in a counterinsurgency. Moreover, it puts more convoys on the roads, angering the Iraqis and creating more potential targets for insurgents. "It's misguided luxury ... Somebody's risking their life to deliver that luxury," Hammes says, adding, "Fewer vehicles on the road creates less tension with the locals, because they get tired of these high-speed convoys running them off the road."

In this passage Singer correctly diagnoses the counterinsurgency problem of big bases (disconnect the force from the local populace...message of long-term occupation), but he conveniently ignores that such issues associated with military basing are strategic and lay solely within the domain of military planners. Thus, this problem is exclusively the fault of the US military and civilian leaders, not the contractors. The contractors will build and sustain to the contract specifications. It's up to the military to decide how big and how secure and how comfortable they want the bases to be.

Here's another similar passage:

The formula for failure isn't hard to calculate. An Iraqi is driving in Baghdad, on his way to work. A convoy of black-tinted SUVs comes down the highway at him, driving in his lane, but in the wrong direction. They are honking their horns at the oncoming traffic and firing machine gun bursts into the road, in front of any vehicle that gets too close. The Iraqi veers to the side of the road. As the SUVs drive by, Western-looking men in sunglasses point machine guns at him. Over the course of the day, that Iraqi civilian might tell X people about how "the Americans almost killed me today, and all I was doing was trying to get to work." Y is the number of other people that convoy ran off the road on its run that day. Z is the number of convoys in Iraq that day. Multiply X times Y times Z times 365, and you have the mathematical equation of how to lose a counterinsurgency within a year.

Again, there are many ways to lose a counterinsurgency and while the aggressive driving techniques do contribute to ill feelings towards Americans this is hardly the reason why we would lose a counterinsurgency (disclaimer: I have ridden in convoys that employed very aggressive driving tactics, but our security personnel doing the driving where Iraqis, not Americans). Some better reasons would be the failure to establish security immediately following the fall of Baghdad, or the failure to secure the borders, or the disbanding of the Iraqi military, or the piss-poor post-conflict planning.

One of the things I was worried about when the shooting incident happened was that military contractors were going to be scapegoated. Blackwater is, in fact, the perfect scapegoat. Not only are they offensively aggressive and have a cowboy reputation, they also afford the Iraqi government and the US military an opportunity to deflect the spotlight for the quagmire that is Iraq. I am not defending their aggressive tactics and, as I stated earlier, I believe that they have been bad for some aspects of our fight in Iraq, but they should not be thrown under the bus either.

While the military contractors should be held accountable for crimes and civilian deaths, ultimate blame for the consequences of the use of contractors falls upon the US Government. The downsizing of the military following Desert Storm and maintained by the Clinton and Bush administrations left the Services and bureaucracies little choice but to use contractors in virtually every capacity. At the same time, the government also failed to develop clear policies, regulations, and laws to manage and control the activities of the contractors, resulting the gray area in which they now operate.

Exploring Iran's Intent in Latin America: A Theory

With Ahmadinejad's visit to Bolivia last week, Iran began to exploit a foothold it gained in Latin America. This foothold was provided largely by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who sees in Iran not only a comrade in his quixotic crusade against the United States, but also a source of inspiration in matters of defiance and defense.

For Iran, Venezuela's adoration is not reciprocal. It's my sense that Iran's interests in Latin America have more to do with not being isolated than with any bilateral relation it may have in the region. This means that its relations with Venezuela or Bolivia or any other country in the region are not as important as simply having those close relations.

This is a time when Iran is facing increasing international pressure over it's covert nuclear weapons program. Its long-time friends in the UN Security Council, Russia and China, have already expressed their displeasure with Iran. Indeed, Russia has even withheld cooperation on a previously-signed nuclear agreement (one that initially had nothing to do with the current nuclear standoff). France, a country that resisted resisting Iran, has now become, with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, a friend of the US position and one of the more vociferous countries in the anti-Iran coalition-of-the-willing. And while US operations in Afghanistan and Iran have unfettered Iran geopolitically, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt are now more attuned than ever to a perceived threat from Tehran. No doubt a perception encouraged by the American sale of $20 billion dollars worth of arms to many of those countries; an attempt to lay the groundwork for a bulwark against potential Iranian temptations, such as the peninsula's oil fields or a Shi'a dominance.

And even in international finance, Iran is feeling the pinch.

With international isolation increasing, Iran is looking to Chavez to deliver like minded countries and help create a coalition-of-the-defiant, as it were. The principle aim for Tehran is to cultivate UN General Assembly votes in opposition to the nuclear nonproliferation interests of the US and its allies. Bolivia is the first stop. Next on Ahmadinejad's geopolitical itinerary is Nicaragua and, possibly, Ecuador. These countries may be a little bit harder to sell as their leaders have demonstrated less reactionary anti-Americanism than Bolivia's Morales, but be certain that Chavez will lean on them heavily

Of course, it's too soon to tell if Iran's strategy will bear fruit. I doubt it, but if nothing else, it will certainly be interesting to watch future developments.