By John Bradshaw, NSN Executive Director
The Hill | Feb. 9, 2016

Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) continuing infatuation with dictators reflects a long and dangerous tradition among conservative politicians. Cruz has recently expressed his admiration for Egypt’s leader Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s hardline rule, saying that while al-Sisi “may not be a champion of democracy” he has kept the Muslim Brotherhood in line. He has also defended the legitimacy of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, pined for the days when Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya, and regretted the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Cruz justifies his endorsement of these odious regimes by claiming that they are a bulwark against terrorism.

Substitute “communism” for “terrorism” and Cruz’s formulation becomes indistinguishable from Ronald Reagan’s rationale for supporting a long list of authoritarian regimes around the world in the 1980s. Of course, it was Reagan’s eventual U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick who was the godmother of the authoritarian embrace in her famous 1979 piece “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which first brought her to Reagan’s attention. Kirkpatrick argued that the U.S. should work with repressive regimes to combat communism because autocracies could evolve into democracies while totalitarian communist regimes were incapable of that kind of evolution. Reagan seized on this theory – conveniently in line with his own ideological prejudices – and used it to validate his support for abusive regimes in countries from Chile to South Africa to the Philippines and elsewhere. Those regimes and their authoritarian rulers are all long gone, of course, as is the incapable-of-change Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the appeal of authoritarianism remains for politicians like Cruz with an affinity for black and white solutions and a disdain for the grays of foreign policy.

Cruz defends his embrace of dictators by claiming that “if you topple a stable ruler, [you] hand [the country] over to radical Islamic terrorists.” This elevation of “stability” above all other values led Reagan to cozy up to violators of human rights and democratic norms like Ferdinand Marcos and Augusto Pinochet. For Cruz, it leads him to see Muammar Qaddafi as having been an “ally against terrorism” and to advocate for Assad’s regime to remain in power. In this view, all crimes and abuse can be overlooked if the dictator in question is seen as a help in the fight on terrorism.

Even if this approach weren’t morally repugnant, it’s clear that it does not yield the expected results. Authoritarian regimes do not make good allies in the long run.

Read the full article on The Hill here.

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By Sam Davidoff-Gore

December 2015

All of the Republican presidential candidates have called for some form of escalation of attacks against the Islamic State in Syria, whether it be the creation of a regional ground force, a carpet bombing campaign, or a major U.S. troop deployment. For all the candidates’ stated concerns about refugees, these proposals, which include calls to loosen the rules of engagement that protect civilian populations, ignore their humanitarian consequences: any escalation will increase the flow of Syrian refugees to the already overwhelmed countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. But listening to the candidates, one would think that there is no refugee crisis except for the population fleeing to Europe and the refugees being resettled in the United States.

Ben Carson has made a notable effort to understand the Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East. He recently returned from a trip to Jordan where he visited refugee camps and met with Syrian refugees, NGO workers, and Jordanian officials. But Carson’s statements during and after the trip demonstrate that he learned little about the crisis, though his perspective has gained more nuance than his fellow candidates.

The GOP presidential candidates are united in calling for a pause in the U.S. refugee resettlement program. Adding to the flawed argument that Syrian refugees are a security threat to the United States, Gov. Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump have cited cultural, linguistic, and weather-related differences between the United States and the Middle East as reasons that resettlement would be bad for the refugees. This is just casting about for excuses and ignores the large refugee population in the United States that is fully assimilated in such frigid states as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado, and New York.

Additionally, Carson has said that resettling Syrian refugees in the United States is something that only “makes us feel good” and is not a real solution, ignoring both the very real, positive impact that resettlement has on the lives of refugees and the importance of resettlement as a point of solidarity with Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. By standing in solidarity with the countries on the front-lines of the Syrian refugee crisis, the United States strengthens its relationship with these countries and has increased moral leverage to promote refugee-friendly policies. Furthermore, as David Miliband and Nicholas Burns argue, by resettling Syrian refugees the United States gains the authority to call on the Gulf States to do more for Syrian refugees.

Most GOP candidates do not go beyond calling for a resettlement pause when discussing the Syrian refugee crisis, a negligent decision to ignore an important foreign policy issue. But, Carson, along with Huckabee and some Republican members of Congress, have gone further, criticizing Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States for not resettling Syrian refugees and calling on them to do more. (This argument is fleshed out by Douglas Feith in the Wall Street Journal.) While it is true that the Gulf States should be providing more for Syrian refugees as well as resettling them, there is no way for the international community to force them to do so. First, these states are not signatories to either the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol. This means that while they claim, dubiously, that they have resettled Syrians as “guests” and “workers,” they are not legally obligated to provide these Syrians with the rights and protections associated with being a “refugee.” Second, because none of the Gulf States borders Syria, they are able to physically keep Syrians out, unlike Jordan and Lebanon. Unfortunately for the GOP, simply stating that we should resettle Syrian refugees in the Gulf States does not constitute sound policy, especially given their calls to halt resettlement in the United States. Without meeting its own moral obligation to accept refugees, the United States cannot expect other nations to shoulder this burden.

Funding of refugee services in Jordan is where Carson completely stands out from the GOP field. He alone calls for increased assistance for Jordan, claiming “all they need is adequate funding,” as if that is the only obstacle to refugees happily staying in refugee camps until the end of the Syrian war. (Sen. Lindsey Graham co-sponsored legislation with Sen. Patrick Leahy to spend an additional $1 billion on the Syrian refugee crisis this year, but has since distanced himself from that bill.) Carson is correct that UNHCR’s Syrian refugee response effort is woefully underfunded and that important services, such as food vouchers, have had to be limited because of the funding. But, Carson’s belief that funding is a silver bullet that will create a sustainable open-ended refugee community ignores reality.

It is unclear how much interaction Carson had with Syrian refugees while in Jordan. He reportedly visited Azraq and Zaatari refugee camps, but his campaign has not released an itinerary. In his visit to Zaatari he most likely saw that it is possible for Syrians to rebuild their lives in refugee camps. But he and the rest of the GOP field ignores, or are ignorant of, the issues of insecurity and sexual violence that plague these refugee camps, issues that simply providing more money cannot fix. He further ignores the much larger population of Syrian refugees that live outside of camps. Finally, he ignores the larger Syrian refugee populations in Lebanon and Turkey, not addressing how he would assist those countries handle their refugee populations. Despite understanding that Jordan needs more monetary assistance, Carson, along with the rest of the GOP field, fails to grasp the complexity of the situation and the nuance required to address it. Throwing money at the situation will not help.

Dr. Carson is the only GOP candidate to seriously address the humanitarian aspect of the Syrian refugee crisis. Given his demonstrated lack of understanding of foreign policy issues, this speaks volumes about how little the GOP presidential candidates care about addressing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. The GOP has been unable to articulate a clear strategy for addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, just as they have been unable to articulate a clear strategy to fight the Islamic State. That their proposals would increase the flow of Syrian refugees is just another sad irony of the GOP’s poor understanding of the Syrian civil war.

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A BUREAUCRATIC FAILURE, NOT A SCANDAL

John Bradshaw, NSN Executive Director

January 19, 2016 | USA News

As a former foreign service officer who served in several small U.S. posts overseas, the 2012 attack at the Benghazi facility had a particular resonance for me. But from the beginning, it was clear to me that this was not a political scandal, but the tragic outcome of two interacting forces: bureaucratic inertia at the State Department that led to chronic inadequate security for U.S. posts, and the propensity of foreign service officers to continually push against the boundaries of the security envelope.

The various investigations of the attack, including the Accountability Review Board chaired by former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, all concluded that the security provisions for the State Department facility in Benghazi were inadequate given its location in what was essentially a war zone. U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, who tragically lost his life in the attack, had noted his concerns about security and had on several occasions asked for increased presence of security personnel. The State Department security bureaucracy, unfortunately, did not respond to those requests effectively.

Stevens, who was passionate about his mission and committed to moving Libya forward, believed that his work in Benghazi was vital and went forward with his trip on Sept. 10, 2012. At that time, according to senior Obama administration counterterrorism officials, there was no specific intelligence that indicated any imminent attack on the U.S. facility there. The subsequent chaotic events, leading to Stevens’ death along with three U.S. colleagues, set off a frenzy of second-guessing and recriminations. The search for scapegoats and scandals was on. But there was no scandal to be found. Instead, there is a sad trail of bureaucratic failures and plenty of blame to be shared.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became a primary target of the scandalmongers. She has been linked to various conspiracy theories, debunked by congressional investigations, including her alleged complicity in the issuance of a mythical “stand down” order that prevented a rescue of U.S. personnel. But the most ridiculous allegations against the secretary were that she intentionally and callously denied extra security requested for the Benghazi facility. As the secretary has repeatedly testified, including in her marathon appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October, she was not an expert in operational security issues and left those issues to security experts.

The U.S. has nearly 200 posts of various sizes around the world. It is not possible or desirable for the secretary of state to become immersed in the details of security deployments at each individual post. At the posts where I served, all in the developing world and with their own security challenges, we relied on in-country experts, regional security officers and the appropriate bureaus back in Washington to ensure our security. We certainly did not expect the secretary of state to be reviewing our security profile and responding to our requests.

That is not to say that the State Department as a whole should not be more focused on security issues. Attention to the security of posts has in fact improved considerably in recent decades, with some glaring exceptions like Benghazi. Funding for constructing more secure facilities has increased, even if it does not yet match the full need.

The challenge of keeping our diplomats secure while not leaving them holed up in fortress-like embassies is still being addressed. Clearly, foreign service officers need to travel and interact with the local populations to effectively do their jobs. Stevens embodied this hands-on approach to diplomacy, and in my experience, there are many foreign service officers who share this desire for active engagement and who are willing to take on the risks associated with it.

The State Department needs to devote the resources and focus to ensuring that our diplomats are as safe as they can be. But we also need to recognize that brave diplomats like Stevens will push past the limits of their safety when they think it is necessary. We are lucky to have such people promoting America’s interests around the world.

To read more, click here.

Photo credit: Hillary Clinton Testimony to House Select Committee on Benghazi, [C-SPAN, accessed 1/19/2016.]

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December 18, 2015

While all the candidates on the Republican debate stage in Las Vegas criticized Democrats on national security issues, very few of them presented anything resembling a clear strategy for tackling the threats facing the United States. Instead, they substituted tough talk, threats, and fearmongering for strategy, showing that they know how to scare people, not solve problems.

Jeb Bush thinks we need “to destroy ISIS before it destroys us.”

• By saying that, Jeb Bush showed that he has no idea what kind of threat ISIS is or how to combat it.

• If every ISIS combatant assembled in one place, their roughly 30,000 fighters would be fewer than the total number of soldiers in a two U.S. Army divisions. ISIS also lacks an air force or a navy.

• ISIS poses a real threat to the interests of the United States, but it doesn’t threaten our existence as a nation.

• Nazi Germany and the USSR couldn’t destroy the United States; the idea that a ragtag group of irregular infantry a fraction of the size of one of our three branches of the military could “destroy us” is beyond belief.

• It’s hard to believe that a man running to be commander in chief has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to a group he identifies as the gravest threat to America today.

Ted Cruz says he “will utterly destroy [ISIS] by targeting the bad guys.”

• Cruz’s strategy to destroy ISIS is – literally – to tell the military to destroy ISIS. It’s as if he believes nobody in the Pentagon, CIA, or the U.S. Armed Forces has ever thought of “targeting the bad guys.”

• In fact, “targeting the bad guys” is what the U.S.-led coalition has been doing for the past year and a half, launching over 9,000 air strikes against ISIS.

• In Tuesday’s debate, Ted Cruz showed America that his understanding of strategy goes no deeper than “tough talk plus war crimes equals victory.”

John Kasich thinks that “frankly, it’s time that we punched the Russians in the nose.”

• It’s not clear exactly what Gov. Kasich means, but, let’s assume he means he wants the United States to take some kind of military action against Russia, the geopolitical version of “punching them in the nose.”

• The problem with taking military action against Russia is that they have nuclear weapons, and military escalation against them could bring us to the brink of nuclear Armageddon, as it did when Khruschev decided to “punch America in the nose” in the ‘60s by putting nuclear weapons in Cuba.

• Like Bush, Cruz and many others on the debate stage, John Kasich showed that beyond tough talk he has no clear idea how to tackle the national security challenges facing America.

Photo Credit: Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas speaking at the 2015 Defending the American Dream Summit [Gage Skidmore, accessed 12/18/2015]

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By Steven Simon and NSN Advisory Board Member Daniel Benjamin

December 15, 2015 | POLITICO

American politics are undermining American national security. In their jockeying for the Republican presidential nomination, GOP contenders—Donald Trump above all—have managed to exacerbate dramatically the two U.S. weaknesses most likely to erode our country’s safety: fear and Islamophobia.

The United States has made tremendous progress in the fight against terrorism since September 11. Yet it has also become all too clear that we are short of the kind of societal resilience that is essential for our success in fighting terrorism. Beyond that, we lack a shared recognition of the importance of the American Muslim community in preventing the spread of extremism. In recent weeks, the Republican candidates have worsened matters markedly through their relentless stoking of public panic and hatred of Muslims.

U.S. politicians are, in short, inviting attack.

Consider this: In the 14 years since 9/11, only 45 Americans have been killed (including the 14 last week in California) on American soil by jihadist violence. Every one of those losses is tragic, and because the fear that one attack suggests another might be around the corner, terrorist casualties have an outsize impact. But in light of an armed, global foe and the universal certainty that we would experience one or more catastrophic attacks with four- or five-digit death tolls after the destruction of the Twin Towers, that is an extraordinary figure and testament to American ingenuity in an extraordinarily complex effort.

And yet, despite vast and productive investments in intelligence, law enforcement and the military, public discussion—and especially the political rhetoric of the moment—suggests that we face imminent disaster. Public opinion polling reveals a society gripped by fear, even if the odds of personally being affected by terrorism are vanishingly small.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the ever more media-saturated world we inhabit; wall-to-wall television coverage, even when there is nothing new to report, heightens the sense of fear. But there is also a feedback mechanism driven by our politics that is vastly magnifying the anxiety. In the wake of San Bernardino, Republican candidates wrestled to see who could inflate the significance of the attack most. Mike Huckabee, attacking President Barack Obama’s response, likened the mass shooting to Pearl Harbor. Chris Christie, after making the vacuous argument that every place in America could be attacked, went bigger still: “We need to come to grips with the idea that we are in the midst of the next world war.”

Marco Rubio used the classic technique of heightening fear by talking about how fearful everyone was: “People are really scared and worried,” Rubio told Fox News. “You know, last night I ran into a couple who often travels abroad or to other parts of the country for New Year’s Eve. For the first time in over a decade, they’re not traveling anywhere this year because they’re so scared. Ran into someone else today who said they’re avoiding stadiums and malls during the holiday season because they’re scared.” Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore saw a chance to extricate himself from the cellar of the race with apocalyptic rhetoric, speaking of San Bernardino and saying, “We have to be prepared because the world is breaking down.”

Nothing could be more counterproductive: It is axiomatic in counterterrorism that to win, we must diminish the payoff the terrorists receive from their attacks. That means limiting casualties whenever possible, and the police who stopped Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik from attacking a second time deserve real gratitude. But it also means maintaining some perspective on the event and not allowing it to go viral. The public attention and the fear that the San Bernardino attack has engendered compared, for example, with the 2009 Fort Hood shooting has been off the charts. We are enabling the terrorists to terrorize us.

Fear-mongering has been a primary feature of the national discussion about terror since Obama assumed office. It began with strong partisan opposition to his plan to close the prison facility at Guantánamo—a prospect that attracted little attention when George W. Bush first proposed it. There is abundant evidence that U.S. military brigs and supermax penitentiaries—from which no one has ever escaped and which are more often criticized as being cruel and inhuman than lax—are easily capable of safely holding the remaining Guantánamo detainees. Still, the president’s critics have routinely suggested that no facility could hold them and closing the facility would be opening the door to a terrorist rampage in the continental United States.

With the rise of ISIL, the scare tactics have multiplied exponentially. Presidential hopeful Sen. Lindsey Graham prophesied an “American city in flames” after the fall of Mosul, while Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe warned of an ISIL program to develop a weapon that would destroy whole cities—a program unknown to the U.S. counterterrorism community. Texas Gov. Rick Perry and at least two Republican House members have spoken ominously about jihadists’ using a base across the border in Mexico to infiltrate the United States, another complete fantasy.

More recently, the debate over accepting Syrian refugees has intensified a fearfulness that now verges on hysteria. The United States has accepted more than 130,000 refugees from Iraq, for example, since 2007. No terrorist violence has been committed by any of them since arriving in the country. Two Iraqis were found in 2009 to have been involved in terrorism in Iraq; they were arrested and have since received sentences of 40 years and life in prison. Refugee vetting processes have been tightened even more since. And yet elected officials and much of the public routinely ignore all of these facts.

Using fear to get ahead in American politics might not be a new phenomenon, but it is more dangerous than ever. Consider the difference between the discussion of terrorism today and, say, the missile gap debate in the 1960 election—an issue of truly existential dimensions. The Politburo was not going to launch a nuclear strike against the United States because of our presidential campaign or our national mood. But ISIL and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—which is still the jihadist group most likely to carry out a major strike against U.S. interests—will undoubtedly be more motivated to attack us because we, as a nation, are afraid. Homegrown terrorists—as Farook and Malik appear to have been—will also see a greater reason to act now given the potential for overreaction and political crisis.

Closely linked to the issue of fear-mongering is the Islamophobia now surging through the body politic. Republicans may be congratulating themselves for denouncing Trump’s latest vicious buffoonery—his proposal to bar Muslims, including American citizens, from entering the country. But many of them are enjoying cruising in his slipstream. Where were they when Trump declared that the way to defeat terrorists was “to take out their families” in contravention of the laws of war and more than 200 years of United States military practice?

Comments such as these perfectly validate the part of ISIL’s narrative—which it appropriated from Al Qaeda—that says the West seeks to destroy Islam and its believers. The same is true for all the menacing rhetoric about creating national registries for Muslims in the United States and for cutting off Muslims from their families abroad. Proposals like these further undermine one of the most powerful claims America makes to Muslims abroad in its public diplomacy—namely, that the United States is a safe haven from the violent hatreds now roiling the world.

The ease with which Ben Carson has been able to suggest that a Muslim should not be president and with which Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz have proposed preferential treatment for Christian refugees from the Middle East is appalling. They are espousing, as so many have pointed out, bigotry for political ends. They evince a total misunderstanding of what the United States needs for domestic security.

There seems to be no recognition of how much our security depends on the state of the American Muslim community. Intelligence and law enforcement do a great deal to prevent attack, but it is because of the relatively well-integrated American Muslim community, which has been largely immune to extremism, that the number of terrorism victims at home is so low.

Just consider some of these statistics: According to FBI Director James Comey, there are 800 open investigations into domestic extremists. The director of MI5 in Britain might envy that number. British counterterrorism officials have for years spoken of their 3,000 individuals “of concern”—a figure that never varies because, as they point out, they don’t have the manpower to cover more.

And those 45 casualties? Since 9/11, Spain, France and Britain have all had individual terrorist incidents that killed more people than that. Muslims make up approximately 3.8 percent of the population of the European Union, or a bit less than five times as much as in the United States. Yet, in the past 14 years, jihadist violence has claimed more than nine times as many victims on EU soil than in the United States. The number of American Muslims who have gone to fight with ISIL relative to the size of our population is one-third what it is in Europe.

No one is suggesting that all is rosy in the American Muslim community. Un- and underemployment in the Muslim community is 9 percent higher than in the nation as a whole. But the evidence to date suggests that the United States has been very fortunate: Muslims here are better integrated and less alienated than almost everywhere else in the West. Geographically, they are spread out through the United States, which has nothing like the Muslim urban ghettos of Europe. Economically, the Muslim community looks like the Catholic community. A large majority believes hard work pays off—which means they see the U.S. workplace as fundamentally fair. They reject extremism by large majorities—larger, in fact, than their European counterparts.

In a period when the terrorist threat is principally a threat from within—from homegrown militants, rather than foreign operatives trying to penetrate U.S. border controls from abroad, these characteristics add up to a huge advantage for the United States: American Muslims are less likely than European Muslims to become terrorists, and American-Muslim communities are more prone to police their own, and even to assist U.S. law enforcement when something goes very wrong.

Read the full article here.

Photo Credit: Donald Trump at New Hampshire Town Hall on August 19th, 2015 [Michael Vadon, accessed 12/15/2015]

The post Donald Trump Is Helping the Terrorists Win appeared first on National Security Network.

Tara Sonenshine, NSN Advisory Board

December 8, 2015 | THE HILL

President Obama was right to lay out the strategy for defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and to explain his policy. Full stop.

But we confront a bigger problem than just ISIS, which the president understated: The temptation to turn fear into paralysis and forget the lessons of history.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and an increasing number of supporters like the logic of keeping out people whose backgrounds, ideas, values, religions and other defining characteristics we don’t like and whom we are afraid of. It’s a tempting theory. Just cordon off people and ideas behind big walls and tight borders and all will be well. The theory has appeal to many — keeping a nation safe by removing any potential irritants, denying safe haven to those fleeing conflict and letting those who need shelter find another backyard. It is so easy to conflate “outsiders” with “terrorists” and blend immigration issues with international terror and create a blob of fear. Just put everyone we don’t like in a ghetto or behind a barrier.
If only it worked that way; we’d have a lot more historical examples of successful ghettoes where the bad guys are kept out and the good ideas and people bring global peace and prosperity. But the theory is a myth that needs to be challenged with facts.

Firstly, ideas don’t get shut down by banning them or their authors… During the Cold War, we branded communists and evildoers and set up the House Un-American Activities Committee to track those whose ideas threated us. (See the movie “Trumbo” to get a look at how it worked out.) At the height of the Cold War, we cut off all goods and services from reaching the island of Cuba to hem in the people whose ideas we hated. Boatloads of refugees fled to our shores. Over time, things thawed. Today we have diplomatic relations and the beginning of tourism between Miami and Havana. We discovered that not every Cuban is a communist and not every communist is out to destroy us.

We know about walls. The Berlin Wall kept relatives in East Germany and West Germany separated. Only documentation could allow travel. But ideas travel. The rise of satellite television and CNN allowed ideas to scale walls and images to flow in and out of homes on both sides of the wall. On Nov. 9, 1989, after weeks of unrest, the East German government announced that all East Germans could visit the West. Four days later, the wall came down. A united Germany found a way to stop criminals and thugs from getting in and out of the country without deeming those from the East as evil… None of this suggests that we should not enforce borders and insist upon the rule of law. We must. And none of this suggests that we stop granting political asylum or end immigration. We can’t.

What it means, however, is that we cannot be simplistic, seizing upon easy answers to hard questions. We can’t bar all doors, close down information technologies, put like-minded groups into boxes and shut the lids. And we can’t conflate issues out of political convenience to win over hearts and minds. We have to wrestle with complexity and come together with solutions instead of soundbites.

In the end, this is about a passionate commitment to principles: freedom, dignity and security. We should not pretend it’s easy.

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President Obama speaks at the National Defense University in December 2012. [Ash Carter, accessed 12/8/15]

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