Michael Scheuer: Osama Bin Laden

Michael Scheuer, a former CIA head of the that monitored Bin Laden, recent opined on the distribution of Al Qaeda media: However, Scheuer said it is unlikely there is much hand-carrying of tapes anymore. For the first few years following the 9/11 attacks, tapes from al-Zawahiri and bin Laden were physically delivered to Al-Jazeera TV or other Mideast broadcast outlets, but more recently the tapes have been seen mostly on the Al-Shabab website. Scheuer said the electronic transmission of messages makes it much more secure for the al Qaeda leaders. "A tape made in Peshawar (Pakistan) can be sent electronically through Sweden and onto Bolivia before appearing on a website," said Scheuer. This was from a feature on CNN in November of 2010; you can find that full story here. See also: Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

Jonathan Schell: The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (American Empire Project)

Regarding the START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Jonathan Schell recently told Democracy Now this: Well, it’s sort of garden-variety, moderate, sensible, minimal arms control. I think of it as arms control maintenance. It does basically two things that have been going on for the last 30 years or 40 years, really since Richard Nixon inaugurated arms control in 1972. And that is, it shaves the arsenals a little bit, a couple of hundred warheads, also reduces the number of delivery vehicles that are allowed. And maybe more important than that, it reintroduces inspections, which have lapsed with the lapse of the START treaty, the old START treaty. So this is what’s been going on for 40 years in arms control, and it pushes it along in a kind of minimal way. It’s a little bit like paying the mortgage on your house. You know, if you pay your mortgage, it’s not a big deal. But if you don’t, the consequences could be pretty dire. And that’s pretty much the way I look at this. [...] The best way to deal with that is to roll back the technology as a whole. And that’s really where Obama’s commitment to move to a world free of nuclear weapons comes in, because the very same steps that you would take to actually eliminate nuclear weapons are the very ones that you would take to keep that technology from spreading into other hands. In other words, you’d get it under control, you would actually liquidate it so it didn’t exist. That would be an important step. And then you—so you’d solve really the two problems with one stroke. See that full transcript here. You can also download the podcast of this Democracy Now show, here. See also: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

George Friedman: The Next Decade: Where We've Been... and Where We're Going

In September, 2010, the author opined within the context of an NPR story on U.S. foreign policies and the Obama Administration; James Traub writes: George Friedman, head of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, recently wrote that "the most significant effect of 9/11" was that "the United States became obsessed with a single region." He concedes that this was inevitable in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Today, though, he argues, it is necessary to ask: "What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?" Friedman shares the Afghanistan Study Group's skepticism about the consequences of military failure there, but he also makes the cold-blooded assertion that "the United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States." Kibitzers like Friedman, or me, don't have to deal with U.S. public opinion, of course. Another terrorist attack would make it even harder than it already is for Obama to advance a post-post-9/11 strategy. And I don't think Friedman is right in claiming that, for example, Russia exploited U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East to attack Georgia in 2008. But there are undeniably grave costs to that preoccupation, and not only in blood and treasure. Doubling down in Afghanistan has further ratcheted up the public sense of menace — they'll attack us here if we don't stop them there — while the failure to make headway has deepened public cynicism about America's capacity to shape a better world. Obama has adopted from Bush the premise that the United States must find a way to tame the Islamic world, though he has tried to go about it in a very different way. But though this may be true in the long run, in the short run it has turned out to be a thankless task. Read that full NPR story here.

Michael Mandelbaum, U.S. Deficits, and a "Frugal Superpower"

Foreign Affairs recently interviewed Michael Mandelbaum. He was introduced this way:

Partisan squabbling on U.S. spending priorities continued following the release of the White House's deficit-reduction commission report on December 1. Some Democratic lawmakers lamented proposed cuts to entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security and an increase in the retirement age from 67 to 69, while Republican lawmakers objected to suggested tax increases and cuts to military spending. Though the report is unlikely to garner political agreement on needed cuts, says SAIS foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum, it drives home the message that "everybody will have to take a hit." Mandelbaum, author of the book The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era, says an inevitable result of deficit reductions for U.S. foreign policy will be fewer U.S. interventions abroad. Still, he stresses the need for continued military presence in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. U.S. presence in East Asia is especially vital to economic growth, says Mandelbaum, since U.S. naval forces protect international trade routes. He says the greatest threat likely to emerge from a reduced U.S. presence abroad is Iran, which could attempt to "control the supplies of oil on which the global economy depends."

See the full interview here. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted the author as well; here is his "unpopular" notion:

“The U.S. could improve by weakening its adversaries by reducing revenues they receive to make trouble,” Mandelbaum said. “The way to do that is to raise the price of gasoline through a gasoline tax. It’s one way to compensate for the fiscal problems.” He said that while he realizes this is probably one of the most unpopular policy proposals in the U.S., he hopes to see this policy transpire through a “backdoor” through proposed carbon taxes in current deficit reduction proposals.

See that WSJ piece here. The author was recently on NPR's Weekend Edition as well. See the webpage for that feature story on U.S. deficits here. On the NPR webpage, you'll see this about the author:

According to Haass, a Chinese banker could be more of a threat than China's military. It's not that experts are worried that China will take America's place, though. "There's nobody else to take our place," says Michael Mandelbaum, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "China is certainly becoming richer and will become more powerful and will become more influential in East Asia, but I don't see China becoming a global power or assuming the kind of global responsibilities that the U.S. bears anytime soon," Mandelbaum says. But the U.S. also won't be able to play the kind of role it has in the past, as Mandelbaum points out in his latest book, The Frugal Superpower. "I believe the kinds of military interventions that the U.S. has conducted over the last two decades — in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan — are going to be discontinued. Because those military interventions, although initiated under two administrations for differing reasons, they all landed us with the expensive, difficult and frustrating task of nation-building."

"Richard Holbrooke: Kennedy Democrat The savior of Sarajevo believed that American power should be used for good." from the Wall Street Journal by FOUAD AJAMI

Richard Holbrooke, who died this week at age 69, loved epigraphs. They are strewn all over his writings—poems and passages from Euripides, W.H. Auden, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, the diplomatist and historian Harold Nicolson. An epigraph from Herman Melville turns up early in Holbrooke's remarkable chronicle of his experience in the Balkans, "To End a War" (1998). "With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." Holbrooke lived the life of his choice, driven by that itch. The Holbrooke story could have ended in the Mekong Delta, where as a young man he served as "pacification adviser." He could have perished, as three of his colleagues traveling with him did, in the summer of 1995, on the treacherous Mount Igman road to Sarajevo. Mr. Ajami is a professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

See that article here. The other day, the Dutch newspaper, DeVerdieping Trouw wrote this [a translation from its original dutch:

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993 he returned to government and government, first as ambassador to Germany and then in Washington as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. In 1996, Holbrooke at his own request relieved from that post because he wanted to spend more time on his marriage to writer Kati Marton, his third wife. He married her in 1995, the year of 'Dayton'. About his role as architect of the peace treaty he wrote the book "To End a War." In the aftermath claimed the former political leader of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, the ICTY last year that Holbrooke him in exchange for his departure from politics was promised immunity from prosecution. The diplomat denied that strongly.

See that Dutch article, here. See also: No Man's Land, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia