Psyche, Science, and Society

Two former top CIA officals on the efficacy of torture

Former CIA analyst Ray Close has sent these comments on the efficacy of torture, followed by comments on the topic by someone from the operations side of the CIA, Haviland Smith, “a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.” They are both members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

In these writings they address the efficacy of torture from the perspective of  veteran intelligence officials and describe its counterproductive nature as an intelligence tool. In this effort they bring little heard perspectives to the raging torture debate :

From: RayClose@
Date: April 25, 2009 10:47:23 AM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: The efficacy of torture (personal commentaries)

(1)  My own personal views on the subject, written yesterday to a group of former colleagues known as VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), who are intensely aggravated by this controversy:

SecDef Bob Gates made what I think was a tactical error today when he said (I am paraphrasing):

“We were worried that the release of the memoranda would inspire retributive actions by our terrorist adversaries, but since there was nothing we could do to prevent the publication of those documents, I guess we’ll just have to live with the consequences.”

This was a mistake, I believe, for at least three reasons:

1.  It was effectively an admission on the part of the administration’s defense secretary that the Obama team has lost control of a sensitive national security-related issue, and has no choice but to tacitly admit and accept the political loss of face that this failure engenders.  Poor idea. When Gates realized that the administration could not suppress the memoranda, tthey would have minimized the loss by taking a positive and “forward-leaning” (Rumsfeld’s favorite term) stance:  support their publication because it is the forthright and responsible thing for an administration to do if it is sincerely dedicated to transparency of decision-making.

2.  Gates’s action amounts, in effect, to actually an acknowledgment by the Obama administration that in their view torture was in fact practiced, that it is indeed illegal and reprehensible, that deliberate and underhanded methods were employed by the previous administration to circumvent established law to enable illicit practices in the interests of expediency, BUT that the present Commander in Chief lacked the political courage to uphold the laws of our country in this case.  (As a very strong believer in Barack Obam’s clear vision and high political principles, I am extremely disappointed in this development, and don’t mind saying so.)

3.  In the highly unlikely event that they had not thought of it before, the SecDef’s statement (“we’ll just have to live with the consequences”) will be interpreted by our adversaries as an invitation to retaliate against the United States, justifying their actions on the grounds that the United States of America has admitted to violating its own standards and is virtually resigned to suffering retaliation from those it has unjustifiably abused.  Whatever legal and moral indignation that we might want to express after a retaliatory action in the future will now be deprived of considerable credibility and substance.

There are two other points that may be too nuanced and complex to be argued at this stage, given the fact that whatever we (VIPS) might say must be punchy and brief:

1. I am not satisfied that the proponents of torture (especially Cheney and his cohorts) have presented enough credible evidence that past use of torture has produced valuable results.  I happen to believe that Cheney’s brand of pressure from above to produce results has the unavoidable and very powerful effect of tempting any intelligence case officer (but in particular one who is trying to justify the use of brutal interrogation techniques) to do two very significant and corruptive things: (a) inflate the importance of the prisoner in question (to declare, often with little or no supporting evidence) that he is a “high-value target.”  (How the HELL do we know that in any but the most rare cases?) And, in turn (b) to inflate the value of the information that he provides (i.e. to “sex up the product”, as the Brits would say.) Sound familiar?  As experienced professional case officers or analysts, we ALL must admit that the temptation is ALWAYS there to do this, just as it is for investigative news reporters or many other kinds of professionals whose personal careers stand to profit from the production of valuable information that supports political objectives, inflates personal egos and promotes self-serving institutional agendas.  (Even research scientists face this kind of temptation to enhance laboratory findings to justify a grant or to win a prize.)  It’s a universal hazard, but one that is particulary real for intelligence officers whose work is almost never subjected to critical scrutiny or peer review because of the protection afforded by the culture of secrecy.  Are we today persuaded that torture produced a steady flow of truly valuable “actionable” intelligence?  Opinions differ sharply. I am VERY dubious.  If that were the case, would there not be many ways that this could be substantiated without serious damage to “sources and methods”?  Of course there would be.  My point:  I think we could usefully insist upon more credible evidence that torture has indeed produced results even remotely comparable to its unquestioned moral, political and operational costs. Think yellow-cake; think about those non-existent ties between Saddam and Bin Ladin that Cheney is STILL claiming.  History is filled with other examples.  A little more transparency is required before we can accept uncritically the claim that illegal torture has been an absolutely critical and invaluable line of defense against terrorism.  I don’t buy it, myself.

(2)  It is a widely accepted truth these days that what the U.S. intelligence community has lacked since the emergence of terrorism is old-fashioned HUMINT.  In particular, this is taken to mean (for example) that we have been totally unable to recruit the agent who is willing to penetrate the inner circle of al-Qa’ida and learn its future plans  — or even to pinpoint where its braintrust is physically located. We who have spent our lives in this profession would all agree, I believe, that the greatest challenge, as well as the greatest reward, that a case officer in the clandestine service can experience is to recruit that kind of agent — to persuade another person to betray his whole value system and risk his life for what WE believe is right.  We know that an important inspiration of terrorism is the bitterness, resentment, frustration, sense of futility and impotence, etc., that produces fire in the bellies of young men and women in the Third World. The most probable way that kind of person can be recruited is if he or she, already a trusted part of a terrorist organization at some level, falls under our physical control and is treated with more respect and dignity than he or she has ever encountered before. Myths about American contempt for Islam or ambitions to dominate the Muslim world must first be disproved —  and the widely known images of Guantanamo, Abu Ghuraib and Bagram must be replaced by something entirely different. A tough thing to do, now that the other images are so sharply etched. But only then can the prospective agent be  persuaded to change sides and work for our value system against his own, at the risk of his own life.  How many of us would know where to begin today to recruit a prospective agent today?  If we want the kind of trustworthy sources who will REALLY help us, this is the best (perhaps only) way to go about it.  We certainly  won’t recruit agents by waterboarding them.  As PROFESSIONAL INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS who have experienced and practiced this extremely challenging and rewarding process, we are in a unique position to refute the arguments of those whose instincts are narrowly focused on the efficacy of brute force to achieve the honest cooperation of former enemies — agents willing and capable of obtaining reliable information to guide our national security policy. Our profession has nothing to do with force or the infliction of pain as a motivator.  We know better.  If force were the primary tool to employ, what would make an INTELLIGENCE officer any different from a conventional soldier or law enforcement officer — each of which has a perfectly legitimate but totally different role to play in protecting society from external danger?  We have our own operational doctrine and set of professional standards to define, then to exemplify and to proudly uphold.  Let’s not let others act and speak for us!
My two cents.
Ray

(2) Haviland Smith, probably known to others of you, is an old friend and contemporary of mine who was an outstanding operations officer in the Clandestine services for about thirty years, starting in the early 1950s.  His career included many tours in the Middle East and Europe, but also as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff at Headquarters.  He is retired now, and writes columns for his local newspapers in the Vermont-New Hampshire area. This is a very credible man.
Ray

RURAL RANTS
The Efficacy of Torture

April 21, 2009

Haviland Smith

Most Americans who are watching revelations about our past torture practices and related abuses, or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, seem primarily interested in the extent and nature of those activities.  In the arcane world of secret intelligence, many professionals are asking precisely what if any benefits have accrued as a result of these questionable activities.  More simply put, does torture work?
Interrogation is one of the disciplines used by intelligence officers working to obtain information.  It rests somewhere in a continuum that includes, interviewing, recruitment, debriefing and elicitation.

The most basic of these techniques is arguably recruitment, in which an intelligence officer seeks to obtain the cooperation of a prospective agent for the purpose of producing needed intelligence.  Recruitment attempts can be categorized into two general categories, collaborative and coercive. Of these two, collaborative recruitments have been the only ones that have been consistently successful.

Coercive recruitments rarely work because there is no communality of interest, only the threat of some as yet undefined punishment for the prospective recruit.

Collaborative recruitment is like seduction.  It involves a dynamic in which two people realize that they have a common goal and then work together to reach that goal. The point is, it is a mutually shared process and goal.  It works only if there is some positive benefit in it for both participants.

Interrogation is a totally different process.  It starts with the fact that it involves one person who has been captured or arrested and is now being held captive by another, creating an uneven situation in which there is no mutual benefit in sight.

That means that at the onset of the interrogation process, there is no identity of purpose between captor and captive. There is only reason for the captive to do everything he thinks will help him survive.

In an uneven, captor/captive situation, the captive – and this is particularly true in military or intelligence operations – has no reason to tell the truth.  He has every reason to try to figure out what his captor wants and to then try to provide it.  He will say virtually anything to stop torture, but will be terrified to reveal the real truth, realizing that doing so will probably end the interrogation process, bringing a totally uncertain future for him, perhaps even death.

Truly gifted interrogators say unequivocally that they can move from the essentially hostile imbalance that is inherent at the beginning of an interrogation to the stage of mutual advantage found in a recruitment scenario simply by approaching the captive as if he were a recruitment target.  At that point, using the same process of seduction, he not only establishes a mutuality of interest, but completely removes all the disadvantages of coercion.

Members of the Bush Administration and the occasional “anonymous CIA source” have consistently told us that waterboarding has produced critical intelligence.  Yet, admissions have crept into the public domain that not all of what was learned by waterboarding was true and accurate.  Many of the most experienced and successful Military and FBI interrogators support this conclusion, saying it simply does not work.

The purpose of this piece is not to attempt to justify waterboarding or any other sort enhanced interrogation technique, or torture.  We live in an unfortunate environment in which, thanks to mass media productions like Fox TV’s “24″, many Americans have been led to believe that torture produces critical intelligence.  As that is the primary argument used by proponents of waterboarding, it simply must be challenged and cleared up.  The keys to this matter lie probably the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

If it is found to be true that torture is productive, the debate formed in the Bush era on the legality of enhanced interrogation will continue.  It will probably end with the banning of these techniques based simply on their lack of constitutionality.

However, if it can be established, as is claimed by so many successful and experienced interrogators, that torture does not work and really never has, there will be no need for further debate.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff

1 comment April 25th, 2009

Huffington: My Late Night Visits from the Ghosts of Financial Outrages Past, Present, and Future

Arianna Huffington has been reading about the massive bailouts, the largest corporate welfare program in history, and is having nightmares. She kindly shares them with us.

My Late Night Visits from the Ghosts of Financial Outrages Past, Present, and Future

By Arianna Huffington

With my younger daughter away at Coachella (which I’m told has something to do with music), I was looking forward to a quiet night in, curled up in bed with my laptop and a few dozen pieces on the financial crisis I’d either bookmarked during the week or cut out from newspapers and magazines (yes, I still read them). But instead of reading a few and nodding off to sleep, I ended up staying up most of the night, getting more and more outraged with each article I read. In the end, I probably wound up getting less sleep than my music-festival-rocking daughter.

Reading the business section these days is not for the faint of heart — or those hoping to drift off to sleep. Instead, you end up like Scrooge, visited by the ghosts of outrages past, present, and future.

As a public service (I toss and turn all night, so you don’t have to) — and also to make sure you haven’t succumbed to outrage fatigue — I’ve decided to distill some of the more infuriating lowlights from the last week. Warning: If you are reading this after 10 p.m., you might want to hold off until morning.

Outrage #1:

Goldman Sachs became profitable again — by pioneering a new round of accounting tricks. In its report on the first quarter of 2009, Goldman claimed a profit of $1.8 billion. How did the banking giant do it? By magically making December disappear. In September, as the financial crisis worsened and pressure from the Fed mounted, Goldman switched from being an investment bank to a traditional bank holding company. As part of that, it had to change its fiscal year — it used to end in November, now it ends at the close of the calendar year. That meant Goldman’s latest report didn’t include December — a month in which the bank lost more than $1 billion. As reported by Floyd Norris, this billion-dollar tidbit was not mentioned in the text of the company’s press release about its “profitable” first quarter — it was buried deep inside the tables that accompanied the release.

The press coverage of the stunning turnaround wasn’t much more edifying. For example, it wasn’t noted until the 12th paragraph of the first New York Times story on Goldman’s “profits” (on the jump page) that the bank had “also reported a loss of $1 billion in the month of December.” A pretty relevant piece of information — if you made it that far. The headline on the story read “Goldman Posts Profit and Plans Share Sale.” No questioning, no shading. Just the facts — as Goldman wanted them presented.

And the bank had good reason for promoting such a sunny (albeit completely manufactured) take. When you’re readying to do a share sale, it helps to have the share price up, which is easier to pull off when you’re able to hide $1 billion in losses.

When asked by Norris about the abracadabra make-December-disappear accounting trick, Goldman chief financial officer David Viniar practically took to his fainting couch. “We are so careful in what we try to do,” he said. “We are so careful about compliance and following rules, and doing all the things we should do.”

I’m sure it was unintentional, but Viniar’s answer exposes the seedy truth that lies at the heart of the current crisis: the real outrage of the financial meltdown isn’t about banks and corporations breaking the rules. It’s that they don’t have to. There’s no need to break rules that are deliberately set up to allow you to legally game the system.

Take, for example, the underlying reason Goldman is raising $5 billion in stock. They desperately want to repay the $10 billion they received from taxpayers as part of the TARP program — not because they feel bad about taking it but because the TARP money comes along with restrictions in executive compensation. As Nassim Taleb puts it on HuffPost: “This is a masquerade. So long as Goldman Sachs may need us again in the future, whatever bonus they are paying today is a bonus that may be covered by the taxpayer tomorrow.”

And, as one of The Nation‘s readers points out, if Goldman were really looking after their shareholders and not the bonus pool for a handful of executives, they might think about using that money to pay off the $10 billion they owe Warren Buffett, which is costing Goldman more than the government’s $10 billion due to the better deal Buffett cut for himself than Hank Paulson cut for taxpayers (a whole other reason for outrage).

Even if Goldman does pay off the $10 billion it got from taxpayers, it shouldn’t be allowed off the accountability hook, since Goldman is still holding on to the $13 billion it got from the taxpayers via the backdoor as an AIG counterparty.

Might that $13 billion have had something to do with Goldman’s first quarter “profit”? Not according to Viniar. Profits “related to AIG in the first quarter,” he said, “rounded to zero.” Yes, but what are the chances that in a true free market system, one in which Buffett rather than Paulson made our deals, taxpayers would be paying Goldman, through AIG, 100 cents on the dollar?

What’s more, Goldman has borrowed $28 billion of private money that’s been backed by the FDIC — and which doesn’t come with the same restrictions as TARP funds. And, as Stanford economist Jeremy Barlow points out, “Money is fungible, and if Goldman didn’t have access to the cheap guaranteed government money through the debt program, it would have been less easy for them to come up with the funds to repay TARP.”

But Goldman wants to eat its bailout cake and have its executive bonuses too. Which is allowed by the rules.

See why I didn’t get much sleep?

Outrage #2:

Edward Liddy, the former Goldman Sachs board member installed as the head of AIG by former Goldman Sachs chairman Hank Paulson, turns out to have holdings in Goldman Sachs of more than $3 million — raising serious questions about potential conflicts of interest and the role Goldman Sachs played in the initial decision to bail out AIG.

Former IMF economist Simon Johnson hasn’t lost his capacity for outrage, saying of Liddy’s Goldman stake: “Have we completely lost any sense of what is and is not a conflict of interest? Have we really built a system in which greed fully overshadows responsibility? Is it not time for a complete rethink of what constitutes acceptable executive behavior?”

AIG’s response to the outrage generated by the Liddy news is even more outrageous. According to a spokeswoman there, the $3 million doesn’t represent a conflict for Liddy because it’s such “a small percentage of his total net worth.” In other words, Edward Liddy doesn’t even get out of bed for conflicts of interests worth only $3 million. By that logic, the way to keep the Wall Street oligarchs honest is to just give them all billions of dollars. Oh wait, we’re already doing that.

Outrage #3:

Pension funds are just now starting to get “uneasy” about their Wall Street investments. CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund, has finally come to the conclusion that it should consider insisting that fees be performance-based, instead of, as the New York Times put it, “an arrangement where hedge fund managers could collect hefty fees regardless of whether the funds made or lost money.”

While it’s shocking that it took pension fund managers this long to come to that conclusion, it’s even more shocking that they would have ever done otherwise — especially considering that the pot of money they were giving to the Wall Street cowboys to gamble away represents the life savings of millions of people.

The change in fee arrangements comes none too soon. In 2005, 13 percent of public pension funds had money in hedge funds. By last year, that number was up to 40 percent — while 50 percent now invest in private-equity funds.

That’s a lot of government workers having their money put into a financial carny game where it’s “heads I win, tails you lose.”

Speaking of the relationship between private-equity funds and pension funds, this week delivered another rock turned over — revealing another outrage. Turns out Steven Rattner, the head of Obama’s task force for the auto industry, is under investigation by Andrew Cuomo’s office and the SEC for being involved in a pay-to-play scheme between the private-equity firm he formerly ran and the New York State Common Retirement Fund. Investigators say that 20 investment firms may have been involved in pay-to-play schemes.

Outrage #4:

The three big credit rating agencies — Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch — stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in the government’s latest plan to ease the credit markets.

You may remember these three as primary cast members in the ensemble production that’s practically destroyed our economy. Without the AAA rating these three agencies gave to billions of dollars worth of junk, we might not be where we are today.

But fear not. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says he has looked at the models the three are using now and is “comfortable.”

Not exactly the word I’d use. Especially since, as the Wall Street Journal notes, the ratings agencies are still paid by the companies whose products they’re supposedly giving disinterested ratings to for the benefit of investors.

“Until the rating firms bite the bullet and develop forward-looking signals and methods,” says former credit-rating analyst, Ann Rutledge, “it’s going to be same old, same old, and their models can be gamed.”

After all, them’s the rules. And Ben Bernanke is “comfortable” with them.

I’m not. And you shouldn’t be either. I know from personal experience that it’s easy to become worn down by the steady drip, drip, drip of scandal after scandal after scandal. But our weariness plays perfectly into the hands of those who got us into the mess we are in (the same people, by the way, who remain in charge of Wall Street). They welcome our outrage fatigue. They are counting on it. Their future depends on it.

Which is why we need to stay outraged. Even if it means losing out on a good night’s sleep. And you know how much that means to me.

April 25th, 2009

Zimbardo: Blame the leaders whjo created the torture scene

Phil Zimbardo,former President of the American Psychological Association and author of The Lucifer Effect, sends this article comparing his argument in that book to recent news:

“Guilty” verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tenet for creating conditions leading to abuse and torture of prisoners in the U.S. war on terrorism

By Philip Zimbardo

More than 10,000 people cast their votes during the last year and a half in a virtual voting booth at www.LuciferEffect.com.  The vast majority of online voters found all four Bush officials  (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet) guilty of having created the legal frameworks, laws and motivational conditions that provided the foundation for the abuses and torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons.  These findings were true regardless of political preference, across all age groups, and whether or not respondents had read The Lucifer Effect book prior to voting.

These informal public judgments accord with the recent Senate Armed Services bipartisan report that blames Bush officials for detainee abuse.  It also finds that the prison guards and interrogators were not the “true culprits.”  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28180540/

Remarkably, the Democrats were only slightly more likely to vote guilty than were those identified as Republicans.  Furthermore, the majority of Republicans found each of the four officials guilty:  Bush 95 % (Democrat) to 57% (Republican);  Cheney 88% to 72%;  Rumsfeld 89% to 72%;  Tenet 83% to 70%.  Those identified as “Other” political preference overwhelmingly gave guilty verdicts to all four:  93% Bush; 96% Cheney; 95 % Rumsfeld and 89% Tenet.

The percentage of guilty votes increased substantially with the age of voters, thus it appears that the more conservative individuals took a harsher view, with 97% and 99% of those over the age of 60 finding Bush and Cheney guilty.

In 2004 I agreed to help the defense team organized by Gary Myers, legal council for one of the Army Reserve Military Police, Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick, which started my quest to understand the causes of abuses and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  I had an opportunity to read all of the many investigative reports by the various generals, including the one by James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense.  I also studied the relevant Human Rights Watch reports, International Red Cross reports, and had a chance to interview the interrogators, military criminal investigators and senior military officers who were involved at Abu Ghraib.  After in-depth evaluation of Chip Frederick, I felt competent in rendering a judgment that he was the “good apple,” while it were the conditions he and the other MPs were forced to work and live in that constituted the “bad barrel” that corrupted him and the other prison guards on Abu Graib’s Tier 1A night shift, where all the abuses occurred.

My findings were summarized in two chapters (14 & 15) of The Lucifer Effect published by Random House in 2007.  While the military justice system put Frederick and many of the other MPs on trial for abuses they had perpetrated on individuals they were supposed to protect while in their custody, none of the officers who should have been in charge were ever tried.  The wide range of abuses took place over more than three months in the fall of 2003 before being exposed.  Command complicity involves responsibility for illegal or immoral behavior of subordinates that officers should have known about, had they cared enough to be watching their store – the torture dungeon.

My summation to the military prosecutor in Frederick’s trial (2004) stated that although the soldier on trial was guilty of the abuses for which he was charged, it was the situation and the system that were largely responsible.  The situation was the complex set of environmental circumstances in operation on the night shift in the interrogation center of Tier 1A, that created horrendous conditions for our soldiers as well as the detainees.  The system included those in charge of creating and maintaining those situations by means of resource allocation, rules of law and conduct, and especially the top-down pressures for “actionable intelligence” to be obtained by all means necessary.

I ended my conceptual analysis with a call for readers of my Lucifer Effect book to play the role of jurors in deciding if some of the military command in charge at Abu Ghraib, along with Bush officials were the ultimate “systems managers” responsible for some of these abuses and tortures.

Our internet-based virtual voting booth made it possible for many visitors to register their vote.  The summary of these votes by more than 10,000 people attest to the widespread public understanding that the abuses of human rights and integrity that have been perpetrated under the banner of protecting Homeland Security and are traceable all the way up to the highest levels of our government, rather than only the foot soldiers performing the dirty work in the trenches of war.

It is encouraging that the Senate Armed Services Committee also supports this viewpoint in holding accountable our former leaders-”the bad-barrel makers”– not just their followers-the allegedly “bad apples” — who did their dirty work at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prisons.

April 25th, 2009

Olbermann: Waterboarding is torture

[H/t Scott Horton, who points out that Olbermann builds upon the definitive law review piece on the subject.]

April 25th, 2009

Bacevich: Obama’s embrace of American dominance

Andrew J. Bacevich argues, correctly, I think, that Obama’s foreign and military policy is a continuation of the common neoconservative-neoliberal consensus of American dominance. Bascevich, and I, believe that a rethink of this fundamental assumption is vital to reform the country, and the world:

Obama’s sins of omission

By Andrew J. Bacevich

THE HISTORY of American liberalism is one of promoting substantively modest if superficially radical reforms in order to refurbish and sustain the status quo. From Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Bill Clinton’s New Covenant, liberals have specialized in jettisoning the redundant to preserve what they see as essential. In this sense, modern liberalism’s great achievement has been to deflect or neutralize calls for more fundamental change – a judgment that applies to President Obama, especially on national security.

Granted, Obama has acted with dispatch to repudiate several of George W. Bush’s most egregious blunders and for this he deserves credit. In abrogating torture, ordering the Guantanamo prison camp closed, and setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, Obama is turning the page on a dark chapter in American statecraft. After the hectoring and posturing that figured so prominently in his predecessor’s style, the president’s preference for dialogue rather than preaching is refreshing.

But however much Obama may differ from Bush on particulars, he appears intent on sustaining the essentials on which the Bush policies were grounded. Put simply, Obama’s pragmatism poses no threat to the reigning national security consensus. Consistent with the tradition of American liberalism, he appears intent on salvaging that consensus.

For decades now, that consensus has centered on what we might call the Sacred Trinity of global power projection, global military presence, and global activism – the concrete expression of what politicians commonly refer to as “American global leadership.” The United States configures its armed forces not for defense but for overseas “contingencies.” To facilitate the deployment of these forces it maintains a vast network of foreign bases, complemented by various access and overflight agreements. Capabilities and bases mesh with and foster a penchant for meddling in the affairs of others, sometimes revealed to the public, but often concealed.

Bush did not invent the Sacred Trinity. He merely inherited it and then abused it, thereby reviving the conviction entertained by critics of American globalism, progressives and conservatives alike, that the principles underlying this trinity are pernicious and should be scrapped. Most of these progressives and at least some conservatives voted for Obama with expectations that, if elected, he would do just that. Based on what he has said and done over the past three months, however, the president appears intent instead on shielding the Sacred Trinity from serious scrutiny.

What the president is doing and saying matters less than what he has not done. The sins of omission are telling: There is no indication that Obama will pose basic questions about the purpose of the US military; on the contrary, he has implicitly endorsed the proposition that keeping America safe is best accomplished by maintaining in instant readiness forces geared up to punish distant adversaries or invade distant countries. Nor is there any indication that Obama intends to shrink the military’s global footprint or curb the appetite for intervention that has become a signature of US policy. Despite lip service to the wonders of soft power, Pentagon spending, which exploded during the Bush era, continues to increase.

There are differences, to be sure. Bush counted on high-tech manned aircraft above and mechanized ground forces below to make quick work of any foe, with Iraq the point of main effort. Ostensibly learning from Bush’s failures, Obama is taking a modified approach, centering his attention on “Af-Pak.” His preference is for high-tech unmanned aircraft, the weapon of choice for an expanded Israeli-style program of targeted assassination in Pakistan. Meanwhile, when it comes to ground forces, Obama’s inclination is to park the tanks and get troops out among the people, as his intensified effort to pacify Afghanistan suggests.

Obama’s revised approach to the so-called Long War, formerly known as the Global War on Terror, should hearten neoconservative and neoliberal exponents of American globalism: Now in its eighth year, this war continues with no end in sight. Those who actually expected Obama to “change the way Washington works” just might feel disappointed. Far than abrogating the Sacred Trinity, the president appears intent on investing it with new life.

********

Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, is the author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”

April 25th, 2009