Members of Congress and their staff racked up almost $15 million worth of foreign travel in 2009, but Congress didn’t have to pay the tab.
Under a Korean War-era law governing Congressional foreign travel, Congress doesn’t pay for its own trips abroad, and there is no apparent limit on what the government can spend for Members’ hotels, taxicabs and room service.
When a Congressional committee holds a field hearing in Wisconsin or a Member of Congress flies to a conference in Arkansas with a few staff members, those travel costs are paid for out of the annual budgets of either the committee’s or the Member’s office.
But when a Congressional delegation travels overseas, the accommodations are made by the State Department and billed back to a government account that automatically refills itself and has no spending limit attached.
The travel account dates back to a 1950s law that allowed the U.S. government to hold excess “foreign currency” in accounts around the world and use those balances to pay on-the-ground expenses of visiting Congressional delegations.
For years, the Treasury Department used revenues from sales of grain abroad or the income from foreign assistance loans to pay for Congressional travel, but in 1977 the U.S. comptroller general ruled that practice out of bounds.
So Congress amended the provision in 1978 to establish that “whenever local currencies owned by the United States are not otherwise available” to pay for local travel costs, “the Treasury shall purchase such local currencies as may be necessary for such purposes, using any funds in the treasury not otherwise appropriated.”
Translation: The government can use whatever funds it has lying around to pay the travel costs of Congressional delegations overseas.
This language creates two conditions that are rare in federal budgeting. First, it establishes a “permanent appropriation,” meaning Congress does not have to approve spending for its own travel each year, as it does for other Congressional budget items such as office supplies and salaries. Second, the program has no dollar limit. The language authorizes the government to spend whatever it needs to cover the cost of Congressional foreign travel, so Members of Congress never have to ask whether there is enough money left for the next trip they plan to take.
Discovering exactly what has been spent out of the account is almost impossible.
Congress regularly publishes in the Congressional Record reports of “foreign currencies and U.S. dollars utilized” for foreign travel. Last year, according to a Roll Call tally of those reports, House committees reported about $8.7 million in travel expenses, and the Senate reported a little more than $5 million in 2009.
But Roll Call was unable to find any government agency that would verify expenditures from the account or provide accounting records for prior years.
According to Congressional staff and State Department employees, the system operates this way: The Speaker of the House, the chairman of a committee, or the Majority or Minority Leader of the Senate approves a Congressional trip and asks the State Department to arrange it. The State Department makes the arrangements and bills the Congressional travel accounts — one Senate, one House — maintained by the Treasury.
If the delegation is traveling on a military airplane, the Defense Department pays those costs out of its own budget. Roll Call reported last year that the military maintains a fleet of about 375 airplanes that are used for VIP travel — including Congressional travel — and according to military records, these aircraft can cost as much as $20,000 per hour to operate. When a Congressional delegation travels in military aircraft, the cost of the travel is not included in the public disclosures.
When a CODEL uses commercial aircraft, the State Department pays for commercial travel and bills those costs to the same Congressional travel accounts, sources told Roll Call.
Several State Department sources said that other expenses that may be billed to the “foreign currency” accounts include overtime for embassy staff in the host country who work extra hours or weekends to accommodate the travelers; emergency prepaid cell phones for the travelers, programmed with local contact numbers; baggage handling fees; and extra conference rooms in the host hotel for delegation members to use as meeting space or a “control room.”
Members of a traveling Congressional delegation also receive a per diem to cover expenses, and this money also comes from the “foreign currency” fund.
The Wall Street Journal reported in March that per diems can be as much as $250 per traveler per day, and most Members simply pocket the cash or use it to go shopping for personal items.
At the end of March, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee and the House Office of Congressional Ethics alleging that “members may be illegally pocketing taxpayer funds” and requesting an investigation of the management of per diems.
Congress does not keep track of how much is spent out of the “foreign currency” accounts.
The Congressional Research Service has no record of studying the costs of Congressional foreign travel, and the Government Accountability Office has issued no reports on the matter since the mid-1980s.
Spokesmen for a half-dozen Congressional committees that have authorized foreign trips said that the State Department pays for all foreign travel.
A spokesman for the Senate Appropriations Committee said, “Overseas non-DOD funded Congressional travel is paid for through permanent and indefinite budget authority authorized in ... the International Security Assistance Act of 1978 and therefore does not require an annual appropriation.”
A Democratic leadership aide referred questions about the Congressional travel accounts to the Treasury Department and said, “The bottom line here is that these are taxpayer dollars and Members are required to disclose the costs of these trips so there is complete transparency on funds spent.”
The Treasury Department referred calls to the State Department, where officials said they did not know the source of the funds in the Congressional travel account.
The State Department also refused Roll Call’s request for a tally of how much has been spent out of the accounts over the past three years.
A 2007 State Department briefing for Congressional staff, obtained by Roll Call, says only that travel expenses “will be charged against specific congressional travel accounts held by the U.S. Treasury,” but it makes no mention of needing to check on available funds for travel.
WASHINGTON — Kazakhstan has agreed to let the United States fly troops and weapons over its territory, a deal that opens a direct and faster route over the North Pole for American forces and lethal equipment headed to Afghanistan.
Right now, troops and lethal material typically travel from the United States to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then fly south along the Arabian Gulf and up to Afghanistan via Pakistan — avoiding a more direct route over Iran, because Iran does not allow American military overflights. The new route over the North Pole to Bagram Air Base, the military’s main air hub in Afghanistan, will allow troops to fly direct from the United States in a little more than 12 hours.
The agreement was reached at a meeting Sunday in Washington between President Obama and President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, who is in Washington for a 47-nation summit meeting on nuclear security.. Officials said that the formal deal is not yet complete, but that the agreement of the Kazakh president to the overflights, which American military officials had long sought, was an important development in the Afghanistan war effort.
“The devil is the details, but this is obviously a great positive moment,” said Capt. Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for the United States Transportation Command, which oversees military transport logistics.
Michael McFaul, the senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff, told reporters in a conference call on Sunday that the deal would make transportation challenges less difficult for American commanders.
“This will save money; it will save time in terms of moving our troops and supplies into the theater,” he said.
Lethal supplies include not only weapons but also armored trucks designed to protect American forces from roadside bombs. Most non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan go over land or by sea.
BANGKOK — The chaos and bloodshed that erupted on Bangkok streets is a brutal reminder of the law of unintended consequences. The 2006 military coup that deposed the elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, and subsequent use of the courts to keep his allies out of power, have raised a specter more dangerous to entrenched interests than Thaksin ever was.
The longer this confrontation between red shirts and the military-backed government continues, the less important will be Thaksin’s own role as opposition leader-in-exile and the more powerful genuinely radical forces will become. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s departure is now likely, which should calm the situation in the short term, but some of the conditions for the rise of leftist demagoguery or Peronist-style rightist populism clearly exist. Thailand is in uncharted territory and analysis of the many past coups and confrontations provide little guide to the future.
Thaksin was an astute billionaire who abused the power that his party’s dominance in Parliament gave him. But his pro-poor spending won him popular support without being fiscally irresponsible or undermining Thailand’s tradition of open markets and private capital. Many of today’s class-warrior red shirts have scant regard for Thaksin but are riding on his supporters’ backs toward what they hope is more radical change than he espouses.
Once the red shirts were viewed by their opponents as a Thaksin-financed rabble of rural poor. But the evidence in recent days is that they enjoy the sympathy of large numbers of Bangkok’s own lower-income groups — taxi-drivers, street vendors, security guards and construction workers. Even those most inconvenienced by the demonstrations, the tens of thousands dependent on tourism and other disrupted businesses, are not all on the side of law and order.
The legacy of the demonstrations will be lasting. Even the military top brass is not sure of where it now stands, with some urging compromise on all sides to avoid more bloodshed, which would test the loyalty of the rank and file, many of whom are considered sympathetic to the red shirts. Other state institutions, notably the courts, have also come to be widely seen as politically motivated.
Enough Thais have been shocked by the score of recent deaths that compromise will most likely win out in a society where politics is more opportunistic than ideological. The Thai economy is built more on small farms and businesses rather than great estates or industrial combines. But compromise will have to recognize the rising expectations of low-income groups, not only for more equitable income distribution, but also for greater political representation.
Expectations have been fed by Thaksin’s rhetoric and by Thailand’s lively media. Economic fundamentals too now favor the poor. After three decades of low birth rates, Thailand has little growth in its workforce, so the bargaining power of lower-income groups is increasing. Bangkok’s middle class now has to rely on maids from Myanmar to cook and clean. Income distribution is actually no worse than the average in developing Asia — and better than in neighboring countries like Malaysia and China. Moreover, the Thai economy has been growing steadily. But in Thailand’s open and homogenous society expectations have been growing faster. They must now be satisfied.
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Seeing is not believing: Mexican drug cartels using "cloned" Border Patrol vehicles to smuggle drugs into the United States, DHS warns . . . The Mole People: Subterranean beat cops defend against terror attacks in Gotham's intricate underground mass transit network . . . Good old days: Once a "proud, independent" agency but now folded into DHS, CBP "ain't what it used to be -- and that ain't good," maven maintains. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
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Aviation security is far from cheap, Bruce Kennedy affirms in Daily Finance, observing, e.g., that scrambling an F-16 to shadow a potentially imperiled airliner costs $7,500 per hour. The creation of a federal airport security service after 9/11 “came with a massive conflict of interest: TSA serves as both the aviation-security regulator and the provider of key security. Who’s watching the watchmen?” a Washington Times op-ed observes. Cultural, political and legal differences must be set aside to heighten global aviation security, Agence France-Presse hears DHS’s Janet Napolitano urging African aviation ministers in Nigeria on Sunday.
Going to extremes: The Hutaree militia “is only one among a number of separatist, terrorist and hate groups that view police as their No. 1 target for attack,” Madeleine Gruen observes in a Baltimore Sun op-ed — as The New York Daily News’ Rocco Parascandola and Joe Kemp say MS-13 may have issued a hit on the NYPD. Two members of the Michigan militia charged with plotting to assassinate law-enforcers are ex-servicemen, Newsweek notes — and recall the controversy excited last spring when a DHS report on right-wing extremists referenced just such a nexus. “Liberal MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow will host an April 19 special on Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 act of terrorism and how it ‘puts into perspective the threat posed by anti-government extremism,’” NewsBusters’ Scott Whitlock reprovingly relates.
Close air support: “The case of the Qatari diplomat at least establishes the principle that egregious behavior justifies authorities being able to use their judgment to deter potential terrorists,” a Wall Street Journal columnist comments. Next time you fly, “avoid the temptation to fall into the usual pattern of griping. Remember that these pesky procedures are really a small price to pay,” Orlando’s Central Florida Future enjoins. “It’s rude when a distracted or lazy person holds up the [checkpoint] line, but it’s also rude to roll your eyes, let out exaggerated sighs, etc. Your being a jerk won’t make the line move any faster,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette admonishes.
Coming and going: Chilling new details about the foiled al Qaeda plot to blow up Gotham’s busiest subways have emerged as a fourth suspect was quietly arrested in Pakistan, The N.Y. Daily News also learns. “One need only travel through Grand Central Station at any time to recognize the enormity of the risk. A suicide attack . . . involving a simple explosive or chemical-biological agent would be catastrophic,” a Boston Herald columnist comments. As Canada prepares to host two majorglobal events this summer, the Mounties are hoping the trucking industry can play a role in assisting security by reporting any irregular activity, Today’s Trucking tells. Days after murdered rancher Robert Krentz was buried, “his family and others are still waiting for troops to be deployed to the border,” The Arizona Daily Star leads.
Ways and means: White House authorization for assassinating a U.S.-born imam “raises an important legal question: Is it legal in the war on terror for the United States to target an American citizen?” The Christian Science Monitor’s Gordon Lubold muses. The director of NYU’s Center on Law and Security tells The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman that you can’t just revoke citizenship and, anyway, assassination of the Yemen-based cleric is a looming national security blunder. “In an effort to soften the playing field in their favor, terrorist, separatist, and hate groups will continue targeting police,” The Counterterrorism Blog’s Madeleine Gruen maintains. “Was the reaction to an Arab diplomat’s ill-timed smoke break aboard a flight to Denver overkill, unnecessarily alarming the entire country, inconveniencing passengers and squandering the taxpayers’ money?” The New York Times’ Scott Shane poses.
Talking terror: With mounting evidence of the role of women in terrorist operations, “it is essential that counterterrorism experts not rely on outdated racial and gender profiles to protect Americans,” Joyce Davis advises in a Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News op-ed. “When it comes to terrorism, men and women have much in common,” ABC News’ Patrik Jonsson adds. That the 168 deaths in Oklahoma City “were the result of Americans killing Americans in the name of America has made the incident in some ways harder for the nation to process than 9/11 and the less-complicated enemy, al Qaeda, The Observer’s Ed Vulliamy explores. Obama administration plans “to expel certain religiously charged words, such as ‘Islamic extremism’ . . . is a mistake that only adds ambiguity to the fight against global terrorists,” The Grand Junction (Colo.) Daily Sentinel editorializes. “If we continue to find words to obfuscate the threat, we will lose the capacity to address it,” Alan Caruba similarly inveighs for Right Side News.
Courts and rights: A court ruling has revealed that a convicted Ohio terrorist had ties to an al Qaeda suspect who met with some of the 9/11 hijackers, AP relates. Police fabricated evidence to incriminate five Americans facing trial in Pakistan on terror charges, lawyers representing the men will argue in court this week, ANI informs. President George W. Bush and senior officials covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to Guantanamo because they feared that releasing them would harm the broader war on terror, The Times of London says it has learned. “The thing that first strikes you about Guantanamo Bay’s “Camp Justice” is what an extraordinary effort was made to create something that never needed to exist,” The Seminal, relatedly, leads.
With little fanfare, the Defense Department has announced a revolution in military strategy--a transformation in global outlook and combat tactics whose only true precedent is the equally momentous turnaround engineered by Defense SecretaryRobert McNamara during the Kennedy administration. Then, as now, an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon's attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of "future Afghanistans."
When Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961, the Defense Department was governed by a military "posture" that emphasized nuclear war and massive tank battles on the plains of Europe. Sensing that the main theater of competition between the superpowers had shifted to proxy warfare in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Kennedy ordered McNamara to undertake a massive enhancement of US capabilities for what were then called "brush-fire wars" in the Third World. The president also authorized a vast expansion of the Special Forces--then a small and obscure Army unit intended for partisan operations behind Soviet lines in Eastern Europe--and gave them responsibility for promoting the newly fashionable concept of counterinsurgency.
"Subversive insurgency is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression," Kennedy said at West Point in 1962. "It requires in those situations where we must counter it...a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of training."
Kennedy's fierce patronage of counterinsurgency doctrine led to expanded US involvement in Southeast Asia and ultimately to the unmitigated disaster of Vietnam. In the wake of the war there, the US military largely abandoned its interest in counterinsurgency, fearing the specter of Che Guevara's 1967 call for "two, three, many Vietnams." Instead, it chose to focus on a renewed cold war in Europe and later, under the first President Bush, conventional combat against "rogue" states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea--basically recycling tactics developed for combat against Soviet forces. Although promising to modernize this posture after 9/11, the second President Bush merely grafted his "global war on terror" onto the rogue-state approach, choosing to invade Iraq rather than invent a new strategy aimed at radical Islamist insurgencies.
Now we have President Obama and his domineering Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, both of whom have criticized the Pentagon's emphasis on conventional combat at the expense of low-intensity warfare. Iraq, Obama has said, was the "wrong" war, a distraction from the more urgent task of defeating Al Qaeda and its network of allies, including the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. To rectify this strategic bungling, as he sees it, Obama has been redeploying combat resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. But this is just the beginning of his grand vision: Obama seeks to fashion a new military posture that shifts the emphasis from conventional combat to brush-fire wars and counterinsurgency.
"The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan," Obama declared at West Point on December 1. "Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." To prevail in these contests, "we'll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where Al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold--whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere--they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships."
Clearly, this is a long-term strategy with far-reaching implications. Even if Obama brings some forces back from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, as he has pledged, US troops are likely to be engaged there (some perhaps in a covert mode) and in a number of other hot spots--"two, three, many Afghanistans," to put Che's dictum into contemporary parlance.
This strategy, first enunciated in a series of speeches by Obama and Gates, has been given formal character in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon's Congressionally mandated overhaul of strategy. Released on February 1, the QDR is expected to guide military planning over the next four years and to govern the Pentagon's budget priorities.
Like earlier Pentagon reviews, the 2010 QDR begins by reaffirming America's stature as a global power with global responsibilities--a burden no other country can shoulder. "The strength and influence of the United States are deeply intertwined with the fate of the broader international system," the document asserts. "The U.S. military must therefore be prepared to support broad national goals of promoting stability in key regions, providing assistance to nations in need, and promoting the common good."
But while this globalist mission has remained unchanged for many decades, the nature of the threats confronted by American forces has changed dramatically. "The United States faces a complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate," the QDR indicates. "The rise of new powers, the growing influence of non-state actors, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and other destructive enabling technologies...pose profound challenges to international order."
The United States also faces a danger not unlike that envisioned by Kennedy in 1961: the emergence of radical insurgencies in the corrupt and decaying nations of the developing world. "The changing international system will continue to put pressure on the modern state system, likely increasing the frequency and severity of the challenges associated with chronically fragile states," the QDR notes. "These states are often catalysts for the growth of radicalism and extremism."
In this environment, America's traditional advantages in conventional conflict--what the QDR calls "large-scale force-on-force warfare"--can no longer guarantee success. Instead, the US military must be prepared to prevail in any number of conceivable combat scenarios and employ the same sort of novel warfighting tactics as those used by America's rivals and adversaries. Our principal objective, the QDR affirms, is "ensuring that US forces are flexible and adaptable so that they can confront the full range of challenges that could emerge from a complex and dynamic security environment."
Within this mandate, no priority is given greater weight than the task of preparing for an unending series of counterinsurgency campaigns in remote corners of the developing world. "The wars we are fighting today and assessments of the future security environment together demand that the United States retain and enhance a whole-of-government capability to succeed in large-scale counterinsurgency (COIN), stability, and counterterrorism (CT) operations in environments ranging from densely populated urban areas and mega-cities, to remote mountains, deserts, jungles, and littoral regions," the QDR explains.
The language used here is instructive--both in the degree to which it reveals current Pentagon thinking and the ways it echoes Kennedy's outlook. "Stability operations, large-scale counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism operations are not niche challenges or the responsibility of a single Military Department, but rather require a portfolio of capabilities as well as sufficient capacity from across America's Armed Forces," the QDR states. "Nor are these type of operations a transitory or anomalous phenomenon in the security landscape. On the contrary, we must expect that for the indefinite future, violent extremist groups, with or without state sponsorship, will continue to foment instability and challenge U.S. and allied interests." As a result, "U.S. forces will need to maintain a high level of competency in this mission area for decades to come." (Emphasis added.)
As the QDR makes plain, this will require substantial retooling of military capabilities. In place of "large-scale force-on-force warfare," the Pentagon must be configured to fight many small-scale conflicts in dissimilar locations on several continents at once. This requires that forces be equipped for counterinsurgency-type operations: helicopters, small arms, body armor, night-vision devices, mine-resistant vehicles, aerial gunships, surveillance drones and the like. Some of this material has already been provided to forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the entire military will have to be re-equipped.
Also required will be increased military aid and training (provided by growing cadres of Special Forces) for the military and police forces of embattled governments in fraying Third World states.
"Terrorist groups seek to evade security forces by exploiting ungoverned and under-governed areas as safe havens from which to recruit, indoctrinate, and train fighters," the QDR notes. "Where appropriate, U.S. forces will work with the military forces of partner nations to strengthen their capacity for internal security.... For reasons of political legitimacy as well as sheer economic necessity, there is no substitute for professional, motivated local security forces protecting populations threatened by insurgents and terrorists in their midst."
Except for a slight modernization of terminology, these are exactly the words used by Kennedy to justify the deployment of thousands of counterinsurgency "advisers" in Vietnam, plus hundreds more in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The danger is that America's "partner nations" are not capable of deploying "professional, motivated" forces, so US soldiers will be compelled to shoulder an ever-increasing share of the burden. As proved true in Vietnam--and as is being repeated today in Afghanistan--this will likely be the case when the local army and police are viewed by the majority of the population as tools of a corrupt and unresponsive government.
What should be cause for alarm is that despite the worrisome picture in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is determined to export this model to other areas, many for the first time, including Africa. "The need to assist fragile, post-conflict states, such as Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, and failed states such as Somalia, and transnational problems, including extremism, piracy, illegal fishing, and narcotics trafficking, pose significant challenges," the document notes. "America's efforts will hinge on partnering with African states, other international allies and partners, and regional and sub-regional security organizations to conduct capacity-building and peacekeeping operations, prevent terrorism, and address humanitarian crises."
The United States is already assisting the Ugandan government in its seemingly futile efforts to eradicate the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal guerrilla group with no discernible ideology, as well as the Somali government in its (equally futile) campaign to rid Mogadishu of Al Shabab, a militant Islamic group linked to Al Qaeda. It is likely that advisory teams from the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, are engaged in similar operations in North Africa and the Sahel. (The CJTF-HOA is the combat arm of the US Africa Command, a multiservice headquarters organization established by Bush in 2008 and given expanded responsibilities since then by Obama.)
The Pentagon is also supporting counterinsurgency operations in Colombia, the Philippines and Yemen, among other countries. Typically, these operations entail deploying training and advisory teams, providing arms and intelligence information, and employing (often covert) specialized combat units. According to the QDR, "U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst." Again, one must ask, Just how deeply is the United States involved? Where is this leading? What happens when the "host-country counterparts" prove unequal to the task?
The worry that this will lead to an endless series of Vietnam- or Afghanistan-like counterinsurgencies is further heightened by the QDR's call for increased reliance on social scientists to better comprehend the perplexing social and cultural realities of these faraway places. Under its Minerva Initiative, the Defense Department is seeking "the intellectual capital necessary to meet the challenges of operating in a changing and complex environment." For those whose memory stretches back far enough, this will recall the infamous Project Camelot, a Vietnam-era Army effort to secure academic assistance in assessing public attitudes in Third World countries for counterinsurgency purposes.
The greatest risk in all this, of course, is that the military will become bogged down in a constellation of grueling, low-level wars. This is the prospect of "imperial over-stretch" spoken of by Yale historian Paul Kennedy in his 1987 classic, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. It is also, says Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World, the scenario we must avoid if the United States is to escape the fate of the British Empire and other failed imperiums. "Britain's strategic blunder was to spend decades--time and money, energy and attention--on vain attempts to stabilize peripheral places on the map," Zakaria wrote in 2008. "The United States could easily fall into a similar imperial trap."
The Pentagon's renewed commitment to counterinsurgency and low-intensity warfare will also require a substantial investment in new hardware at a time when the country faces a record deficit, further eroding its long-term vitality. To obtain the added funds he deems necessary, Gates has asked for an $18 billion increase in the Pentagon's base budget for the 2011 fiscal year, raising total spending to $549 billion (which does not include combat costs in Iraq and Afghanistan). To gain additional financing for these projects, he has been willing to sacrifice some big-ticket items intended for major conventional wars, such as the F-22 jet fighter (discontinued in 2009).
Gates calls this shift in emphasis "rebalancing," and it is said to be the guiding principle of the new Pentagon budget. "Rebalancing our forces in support of these strategic priorities means that US forces must be flexible and adaptable to confront the full range of plausible challenges," Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, one of the QDR's principal authors, told a Pentagon press briefing on February 1. "To underwrite this flexibility...we need more and better enabling capabilities...like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, rotary-wing aircraft, language skills and so forth."
The danger here is that Congress--prodded by powerful interests in the military-industrial complex--will approve the specialized counterinsurgency equipment sought by Gates and Flournoy, as well as an array of costly, super-sophisticated weapons designed to fight a full-scale war with some future, Soviet-like "peer" competitor. Under these circumstances, the Pentagon budget will continue to grow.
The Obama-Gates strategy thus entails a double peril. On the one hand, it risks involvement in an endless series of wars, wearing down the military and turning more and more non-Westerners against the United States--exactly the outcome envisioned by Che in his famous 1967 dictum. On the other hand, the "rebalancing" sought by Gates could lead to higher spending on low-intensity hardware while failing to curb investment in high-end weaponry, thereby producing ever-increasing military budgets, a growing national deficit and persistent economic paralysis. In the worst case, both outcomes will occur, dooming the United States to retreat, humiliation and penury.
There is no reason to doubt that Obama and Gates believe they are acting in the nation's--and the world's--best interest by advocating a strategy of global counterinsurgency. Such a strategy could conceivably prevent Al Qaeda from gaining a temporary foothold in some "ungovernable area" on the fringe of the Islamic world. But it will not eliminate the conditions that give rise to Islamist extremism, nor will it ensure lasting peace. The Pentagon's new strategy can only lead, in the end, to a world of increased anti-Americanism and violence.
About Michael T. Klare
Michael T. Klare, Nation defense correspondent, is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
As a student during the 1980s, I gave the "European Union" section in the library a wide berth. The pall of soporific technocracy that hung over it made the adjacent shelves of books on law and political science enticing by comparison. A lot more has been written on the EU since then, most of it perpetuating that same "mortal dullness," to borrow a phrase from the historian Perry Anderson. Dullness, on the other hand, is one charge no one has ever levied at Anderson, whose new book, The New Old World, is as insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors. Given Anderson's long and intimate engagement with Europe, both as an editor of the New Left Review and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books for the past two decades, one looks forward to what one gets--a bracing assault from somewhere on the left on the conventional Europieties, and new perspectives on the evolution, and likely future trajectory, of one of the most important political and cultural experiments of our time.
Anderson states the fundamental analytical difficulty of his project at the outset. Europe appears to be an "impossible object," constantly slipping among three quite distinct literatures. There are histories of the postwar continent, mostly written in the shadow of the cold war and paying little attention to the European Union; there is the vast outpouring of works, popular and scholarly, focusing not on Europe per se but on this or that European country. (The EU may be a polity of sorts, but the political and intellectual energies of most Europeans still flow at the national level.) Finally, there is what we might call professional EUrology: a series of interventions, chiefly by legal scholars and political scientists, on the technicalities of the integration process and its institutions. Given the amnesiac quality of much of this last in particular, Anderson's ability to move fluently among the three literatures, and above all to evaluate the EU as an ideology, is necessary and timely.
Anderson takes as his starting point a series of reflections on the work of the historian Alan Milward, who in The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51 (1984), The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) and The Frontiers of National Sovereignty (1993) demonstrated the degree to which the politics of the nation-state remained vital in explaining the postwar drive toward European integration. Milward's argument was that the revival of democracy in the nation-states of Western Europe, shaken by the experience of occupation and war, depended on the pursuit of prosperity through the rebuilding of cross-border economic networks. As this rebuilding took place, it became the motor of more permanent and far-reaching European cooperation. Accepting the basic insight, Anderson argues that Milward nevertheless exaggerates the degree to which this process was democratic; in fact, far from restoring and deepening democracy in Europe, as the EU's founders wished, the institutions they built have eroded and weakened it. This tendency has reached an apogee in the creation of a single currency defended by a powerful centralized monetary authority that exerts deflationary pressure on wages in order to guard the rigid conditions of the Stability and Growth Pact. The lack of comparably powerful legislatures at the European level means that the voice of the popular will is silenced. (A rare exception was the rejection by French and Dutch voters of the EU's constitutional treaty in 2005, a wrinkle ironed out by the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.) Any democratic impulse in the integration process long ago withered away and has been replaced by an elitarian, even oligarchic form of consensus policy-making conducted behind closed doors and consummated in faits accomplis.
Anderson is significantly more admiring than Milward of the federalist impulses of EU architect Jean Monnet and his peers. He applauds their transnational vision, their dirigiste commitment to welfarism and their desire to set Europe on foundations that would allow it to forge its own path between the superpowers. At the same time, he insists that the federalists' idealism needs to be set against the enduring impact of continental geopolitics: France's fear of Germany after World War II; West Germany's desire to rejoin the comity of powers; and above all, the brute reality of the American desire to see Europe as a stable garrison in the cold war. For Anderson, Europeans have simply failed to acknowledge their real status as an outpost of the American imperium; worse, over the decades from Truman to Bush II, they have become more subservient, not less.
Despite the disagreements, all this is presented with the utmost respect for Milward's intellectual achievement. (Indeed, Milward is the book's dedicatee.) The tone changes when Anderson takes up contemporary EUrology, dispatching with gusto the various models--intergovernmentalist, confederalist, imperial--that social scientists have offered as guides to understanding what has become in only a few decades one of the most complex of contemporary political structures. Common to most if not all versions of EUrology, Anderson charges, is an overestimation of what the EU has really achieved, an underplaying of its continued geopolitical weakness and a complacency about its embrace of neoliberal economics. The lack of accountability in European institutions cannot be written off as easily as the mainstream scholarship assumes, nor should we excuse or dignify the Eurocrats' attempt to replace the guns and blood of political struggle with consensus reached through secret diplomacy.
That the initial chapters of The New Old World are based for the most part on pieces published previously in the London Review of Books does not make them any less valuable: such a penetrating and wide-ranging critique of the field is still rare. But at this point in the book, just when one expects Anderson to elaborate his own analysis of the European Union in more detail, he instead reprints a number of tours d'horizon of the three countries--Italy, France and Germany--that constitute what he terms the European "Core." The shift in gears from the EUrological to the national is abrupt and justified perfunctorily as though to set before our eyes that very impossibility of writing about Europe that Anderson notes to be such a striking feature of the intellectual landscape.
Part of the problem is that these pieces, although worth rereading, are in some cases quite old and have inevitably dated. (The first part of the Germany chapter was originally published as an essay in the LRB in January 1999.) Anderson's political antennas, sensitive to considerations of the longue durée, are always closely attuned to the demands of the conjuncture. In his hands, historical analysis, massive and precisely crafted, invariably serves as ammunition in an unceasing war of position. Thus his essays, despite their dense scene-setting, distancing tone and expert knowledge, are nothing if not assessments of the moment. In this sense, though in almost no other, they resemble that effort at a "history of the present" that Anderson himself has castigated in the work of Timothy Garton Ash. (Like Garton Ash, Anderson focuses on the political class and its machinations; but whereas Garton Ash, in Anderson's view, cozies up to it and offers a view from over its shoulder, Anderson stands at a remove and is constantly unmasking it.)
There is another difficulty. Anderson singles out his Big Three not only because of their role in the European Union but also--perhaps primarily--for their predominant place in European cultural life. A strictly EUrological intent might have suggested a different choice of candidates; momentum toward integration has frequently come, after all, either from smaller countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands or from the European Commission (the chief administrative organ of the EU). But Anderson's idealist bent pushes him away from such themes and back to the specificities of Old Europe's national Kultur bearers. In each case, the rise of neoliberalism is linked to the left's loss of ideological and philosophical vigor. Something of the former Gramscian is manifested here: the implication is that because the left lost the war of ideas in Italy, France and Germany, catastrophic political consequences followed. Once there were titans like Sartre and de Gaulle, runs the message; now we are left with BHL and Sarko. The tone is regretful; the analysis, acerbic. But the overarching political conception is surprisingly old-fashioned--what counts is Big Three politics, each mediated by the international balance of forces but unfolding largely within its national borders. Dealing with exactly the same three countries, historian Charles Maier once wrote a classic of comparative history, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975), in an effort to explain the wider mutation of political life and institutions across Europe after World War I. Anderson does not do this. As membership in the EU has expanded from six states to twenty-seven, he has remained focused on the Big Three. He sees the EU as one further--perhaps the last--triumph of the Western European bourgeoisie, but his eschewal of systematic comparison offers less guidance than Maier's on the reasons for its success.
These somber analyses of the hollowing out of Europe's Core are followed in a quite different vein by a sequence of essays (originally published in the LRB in 2008) on Cyprus and Turkey. Here we move from domestic institutions and struggles over national cultures to sweeping, morally charged narratives set in an emphatically geopolitical context. Anderson terms his subject the European Union's "Eastern Question," in the belief that its treatment of Cyprus and Turkey reveals as much about the EU as the treatment of the old Eastern Question (the fallout from the decay of the Ottoman Empire) did about the real nature of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century. This is, in short, all about the unmasking of European pretensions. Despite their fine talk about human rights, the Europeans have consistently left the Greek Cypriots in the lurch and acquiesced in Turkey's de facto partition of their island. At the same time, Anderson says, they have welcomed the prospect of Turkish membership, as EU policy-makers and polite opinion do their best to sweep inconvenient mention of the Armenian genocide under the carpet.
Anderson is in less familiar territory here, and it shows. His lengthy retelling of the Cyprus tragedy manages to be schoolmasterly and polemical at the same time. The pendant pieces on Turkey push tendentiousness further. He exaggerates the chances of Turkish membership in the EU (which currently look bleak, since Europeans, pace Anderson, do not do everything the Americans tell them to). But it is the history offered here that is uncharacteristically ropy. Having reminded us at the outset that the European Union is dealing with the descendant of an imperial state, he warns that the early modern Ottoman Empire was "designed for the battlefield, without territorial fixture or definition." One could as easily describe the British Empire in analogous terms, but to what end? The character of states is not fixed by their origins, and even when such assertions about empires are true, they are idle as guides to the present outlook and behavior of their postimperial successors. As for his suggestion that nineteenth-century imperial reforms failed to transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule, this is scarcely borne out by the facts. If political Islam emerged in the late nineteenth century as a new program for the empire--dismissed by Anderson, with a typical impatience for the politics of piety, as "ideological bluster"--it was precisely because of the dramatic impact of the reform program on Islam's place in Ottoman society.
A matter highly relevant to the worldview of the Turkish political elite also deserves more weight than Anderson devotes to it: namely, the massive human cost of imperial decline, as millions of Muslims over the century after 1821 were forced to abandon their lands in the arc from Greece through the Balkans to the Caucasus, and made a new home in Anatolia. But accounting for that forced migration would have complicated and contextualized the story of the Armenian genocide, which is Anderson's real subject. It would have required explanation rather than indictment. One would have had to situate the genocide, for instance, within the embrace by the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party at the time, of a much more sweeping population politics, one that identified a bewildering range of ethnic groups--Christian and Muslim--as suspect and potentially disloyal elements, and brought to the fore the tight interconnection between the bureaucracies of mass murder and refugee resettlement during World War I.
As for the politics of the memory of the genocide, too much in Anderson's charge sheet is dictated by rhetorical positioning. It is true, as he says, that the Turkish elite has connived in a silence about the genocide that remains hard, indeed dangerous, to break. But his allegation that European sympathies in this matter are on the side of Turkey's Kemalist, secular elite strains belief. Turkey's cover-up has been denounced in the French Parliament, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, among other venues. Of the many reasons Europeans are balking at Turkish membership, this is not the least important. And while it is certainly correct that Western historians of modern Turkey fight shy of using the "G-word" (just as Soviet historians used to weigh carefully what might jeopardize their access to the archives), this professional deformation does not inhibit the European commentariat that Anderson unnecessarily pillories.
A litany of authorial errors serves little purpose. It is more useful to explain the peculiarities of Anderson's perspective and tone. Fundamentally, this book charts the reaction to a deep and evidently wounding disappointment, one that has more to do with Anderson's ideas than can be explained solely by the global rise of neoliberalism and the long retreat of the left. It is Europe, perhaps above all, that has disappointed him. From very early in the history of the New Left Review, which turns fifty this year, Anderson embraced a Europeanist position for at least three reasons. First, it offered a convenient perch from which to lambaste the parochialism of the British left. Second, one could imagine that the regional concentration of power achieved by the Western European bourgeoisie through the economic integration process in the 1950s might paradoxically--if the left ever got its hands on the reins--pave the way for a coordinated continental path to socialism. And third, perhaps most important, the New Left Review regarded (Western) Europe as a kind of cultural and intellectual font and devoted itself to disseminating the works of Gramsci, Althusser, Mandel and many other social theorists previously neglected or unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world.
So far as the first of these reasons is concerned, the battle is over. The British Labour Party is now more unambiguously pro-European than the Tories, and Europe is not by and large a major bone of contention within it. As for the third reason, the scale of the achievement of the New Left Review and its associated imprint, Verso, which turns forty this year, is now clear: their dissemination of Euro-Marxism influenced intellectual life in Britain, especially on its campuses. But this did not have any greater political impact, since the universities were never, as the NLR once anticipated, the "weak link" of capitalism. Worse still, the fountainhead of ideas has dried up, and the European left is--so Anderson suggests--intellectually bankrupt.
This brings us to the remaining reason for Anderson's embrace of a Europeanist position: the chances of turning the European Union into an engine of socialism, or at least of social democracy. As late as 1998, Anderson was still willing to see this as a possibility; in an exchange with the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio, he anticipated that if the German Social Democratic Party won elections that year, "the four major countries of Western Europe...will for the first time in history be ruled simultaneously by governments declaredly of the Left. This constellation would occur just as the great project of a single continental currency comes into being. The power to reshape the conditions of life for the peoples of Europe for the better would lie in the hands of the official Left, across national frontiers, in a way that it has never done before." The Social Democratic Party did prevail, and under Gerhard Schröder it did form a government, but the outcome belied Anderson's hopes. In short order, the Schröder government cut taxes, reduced welfare benefits and sent German troops into combat (in Kosovo and Afghanistan) for the first time since World War II. It was the latest in a series of disappointments--in the EU, its institutions, its electorates--that has left Anderson facing a Europe very different from the one he has believed in over so many years.
What is left for him, then, but to pour scorn upon the pretensions of contemporary liberal Euroboosters? Do they see Europe as a beacon of light, a reminder of a better world than that across the Atlantic? They forget, says Anderson, that the European Union in geopolitical terms is nothing more than a "deputy empire." Do they praise it for having devised a postconflictual form of politics? Prove them wrong by reminding them that key member states retain strong senses of their own self-interest. All of this makes Anderson enjoyable to read. But it also makes him a better prosecutor than judge.
The desire to rout the liberals and pick holes in their woolly self-delusions leads Anderson into strange company. In particular, he has a soft spot for tough-minded realists and neocons. Robert Kagan is commended for providing, in Of Paradise and Power (2003), the best account of Europe's subservience to the United States; Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), Christopher Caldwell's assault on the hypocrisies of immigration debate in the EU, is said to break "free from the prevailing morass of sanctimony and evasion" thanks to "the clarity of its historical analysis and sharpness of its comparative perspective." Not that Anderson cannot spot the weaknesses in the realists' and neocons' arguments; but their readiness to ignore taboos, to castigate the self-satisfaction of Old Europe's elites, is something he seems to relish.
So too is their geopolitical realism. In Anderson's Europe, one is constantly waiting for the old demons to return. Unified Germany in particular is depicted as a potential Bismarckian, if not quite Nazi, Grossmacht ready to impose its will on its cowering neighbors; the European Union is a new Concert of Powers replaying in a new key the old struggle for mastery. Throughout The New Old World, present-day presidents and prime ministers are termed "rulers," their governments "regimes," as though to imply their fundamental illegitimacy--despite their electoral victories. It is a view of the continent--and its voters--that sits oddly with the other plank of the Andersonian critique: the EU's lack of democracy. Either power has relocated in some unaccountable way to the neoliberal corridors of Brussels, voiding national politics of much of its autonomy, or in fact it remains in the hands of the Germans, the French and other would-be hegemons. Anderson wants us to fear the old tyrannies and the new one at the same time, but this seems inconsistent, if not incoherent.
Elitism can take many forms, of course. Anderson's political goals have, on the showing of this book, moderated considerably over time: what counts now for him in Europe is the revival of popular politics and the struggle against growing economic inequality. But if previous positions have been tacitly abandoned, there has been no diminution in authorial certainty: the tone of omniscience remains for the most part intact, and there are flashes of the author's trademark hauteur. More discordant with his avowedly democratizing goals, it seems to me, is his prose. Connoisseurs of Andersoniana will enjoy recherché gems such as "amphibology," "capsizal" and "conflictivity." Without touching on the obiter dicta in French, German, Latin and Italian, we find, in only a few pages, "decathexis," "semi-catallaxy," "paralogism" and "censitary," alongside archaisms like "estoppage," "prebends" and "brigade" (used as a verb). Such language stands as testimony to elitism of a different kind, that of a small substratum of the postwar British left whose basically Leninist conception of radical politics led them to abjure too close a contact with the masses, whose ultimate victory they supposedly championed. But now another kind of elitism, much more impenetrable in word and deed, is in the ascendant in Europe. Anderson is good at puncturing its self-serving myths. But the explanation of its staying power must be sought elsewhere.
About Mark Mazower
Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton)
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