Brian Downing's blog

Hillary Clinton – The Next Harold Stassen

Tue, 13 May 2008 08:55:11 -0700

As Hillary Clinton persists in efforts to become the Democratic nominee for president, she is angering many in the party. It would be better to say she is further angering them. She will also be damaging her image – and that may present serious problems in future political endeavors, whatever they might be.

Even a year ago, the Clintons were not well liked by many prominent members of the Democratic Party. Their eight years in the White House brought few accomplishments. Indeed, their two principal ones, NAFTA and welfare reform, enjoyed more support from the GOP than from their own party. Both bills were opposed by many Democrats and seen as ploys to shore up the Clinton’s support in the center. The blunders and scandals of the Clinton years need no elaboration. Many in the party blame them for the loss of both Houses of Congress, which hadn’t happened for decades, and for tepid support for Gore in the 2000 election.

Reports from Foreign Provinces

Tue, 06 May 2008 06:57:02 -0700

In recent weeks we’ve seen numerous supporters of the war point confidently to positive indicators and to benchmarks being met or neared. And we’ve also seen numerous critics of the war assert just as confidently that there’s been little if any progress. It all makes me think back to events long ago.

Late in the Vietnam War, I occasionally came into contact with a special forces captain. He stopped by to look at the militia units I worked with and we spoke often and in time informally. A former NCO, he had been in Southeast Asia intermittently for over nine years going back to the late fifties, mostly with S. Vietnamese (ARVN) units. I doubt anyone knew them better. Before he left for the states, after the usual farewell conversation I asked, “How long will this country last after the American troops leave?” The question was not if the ARVN would hold – any 19-year-old corporal could see they wouldn’t – but how long until the N. Vietnamese and Viet Cong inevitably overwhelmed them. It was a guileless if tactless question, and pondering it was unpleasant to someone who had worked with the ARVN so long and devotedly. He exhaled then began his reply.

My Interview with George Washington

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:09:24 -0700

I used to have fairly interesting dreams, the details of which I shall omit just now. Suffice it to say that advancing years and predilection with foreign policy have taken a toll. My reveries were usually graced with young women such as the one I chatted with Saturday in a bagel store on Rt 66. But last night I dreamed of a conversation with George Washington.

GW: Ever since my apotheosis I haven’t paid much attention to foreign affairs. I did for a while, right up to the Mexican War. I trust we learned from that.

Me: Hmmmmm. Where to begin. May I call you George?

GW: Certainly not. You act like that impertinent speculator Devon who dropped by unannounced to tell me of dubious land deals in Westmoreland County.

US Enterprises, Iraq: Buy, Sell, or Hold?

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:07:26 -0700

A stockbroker called me the other day with yet another pick. It was Devon, the same guy who told me a month ago that Bear Stearns was a screaming, slam-your-hands-on-the-table, back-the truck-up-and-load-up buy. I say short the market on occasional spikes that fortune sends our way, but I listened to him just the same.

Devon: Mr Downing? Hi, this is Devon from New American Century. I know you’re very busy and I won’t take much of your time. It’s just that . . . well, damn it, Mr Downing, this opportunity is so exciting I just had to let you know about it! May I call you Brian?

Al Qaeda in Iraq – and in Public Testimony

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:39:38 -0700

The Bush administration, General Petraeus, and Ambassador Crocker have all recently pointed to success in defeating al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). But just how important has AQI been in violence in Iraq, how successful have we been in expelling them, and at what cost has any success against them come?

The number of AQI personnel is difficult to assess, though most estimates, including that by the State Department’s intelligence section (INR – probably the most accurate part of our intelligence community in recent years), put AQI’s numbers as of last year at between one thousand and fifteen hundred. (By way of comparison, the Sunni insurgents were put at twenty times that.) How many of those numbers were actual combatants and how many simply helped infiltrate jihadists into the country or acted in other supportive roles is of course unclear. It is also unclear if AQI has been responsible for all the terrorist bombings that US officials assert, or if AQI is reflexively blamed for acts that cannot be affixed to any other group.

The Petraeus-Crocker Report – Round Two

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:49:29 -0700

Last September, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker gave testimony before Congress on events in Iraq. Most critics of US policy in Congress came across as bloviators and dilettantes with little understanding of political and military matters. The result was the administration won the day and the war continued. When the general and ambassador reprise their performances this week, the questions might display better understanding of the region.

Analysts look for alternative explanations for events; politicians and politicized officials present pat explanations that suit their purposes. A fruitful line of questioning would probe explanations, other than the Surge program, for the decline in insurgent attacks. Former Sunni insurgents, who have been on the US payroll and fighting al Qaeda since well before the Surge began, have bargained with the US to protect them from Shi’a militias, which had been slaughtering them in large numbers. A related question is to what extent this shift came as a result of Saudi influence, which aimed at erecting a barrier to Shi’a-Iranian power. And this of course raises the issue of who turned whom and what pressures exist for us to stay in Iraq for an indeterminate period. These are not academic questions; they address the relevance of Petraeus’s Surge and ask if we are being dragged into the endless Sunni-Shi’a conflict.

Spinning Plates in Iraq

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:18:16 -0700

The recent fighting in Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere between Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Maliki government forces with American support have ably demonstrated that the relative tranquility has not been based solely or even mainly on General Petraeus’s surge program. The decline in violence has been based on many factors. The Sunni tribes of Anbar and Diyala have garnered US protection from Shi’a militias in exchange for their help in fighting al Qaeda. Shi’a groups have ceased fighting the US and each other, due to fears of a US-Sunni partnership and also due to Iranian pressure.

All observers are wondering if the recent violence will spread and undermine the administration’s Iraq policy. (Supporters dread it; opponents privately yearn for it.) Several forces will likely prevent a return to the violence of a year ago – at least for the time being.

First, Sadr is unlikely to find allies in or outside of Iraq. He is not well respected among most Shi’a because he caters to urban masses and lacks the Islamic credentials that his father and Sadr’s rivals enjoy. Sunnis abhor him as the would-be avatar of their expulsion or extermination. And Iran, despite being supportive of him in some respects, views him as anti-Persian and an obstacle to its goal of a stable, Shi’a dominated Iraq.

Second, purely military considerations suggest that the violence will be contained. Sadr’s troops, though armed and trained by Iranian cadre, lack the discipline to deliver a decisive defeat to Maliki’s forces, who for their part have demonstrated no ability to do the same to Sadr’s. A return to a truce is more likely than an internecine war.

Third, the US is unlikely to press Maliki to fight on for an extended period or to launch once more its own incursions into Sadr’s strongholds. Much as the US would like to see Sadr’s command terminated (Wolfowitz is said to have authorized his killing years ago), protracted battles would call into question the surge’s success and make Petraeus’s upcoming visit to Washington far more than the triumphant publicity event it is hoped to be.

Fourth, Iran does not want its co-religionists, upon whom it places its hopes of a stable neighbor to its west, degenerate into intra-sectarian warfare. All this makes for a containment of the present fighting.

Stability and Instability after the Surge

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:53:19 -0700

Now that US casualties in Iraq are down for the time being, the administration is hoping that meaningful political progress can take place, which will allow the US to greatly reduce its presence there someday. But the US presence will be sizable for at least the next few years and will itself present problems for political progress by sowing seeds of instability in Iraq and also in Saudi Arabia.

The US asserts that al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, but the claim is difficult to accept. Since being driven from Afghanistan in 2001, al Qaeda has become a transnational assortment of cells, groups, and like-minded people, sharing common political goals and various degrees of willingness to effect violence, from abetting terrorist attacks to actually performing them. Its amorphousness makes it adaptive and difficult to defeat. It has lost sanctuaries in Anbar and Diyala where recruitment, training, communications, and operations were centered, yet in recent months it has launched devastating strikes in Shi’a urban areas and on tribal leaders cooperating with the US. Still operational in Iraq, al Qaeda can maintain enmity between Sunni and Shi’a and tie down US troops for the foreseeable future. A decade or more does not seem impossible.

Attacking Iran ~ Redux

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 04:33:06 -0700

It’s been clear for several years now that the neo-conservatives want to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and probably much of its military and infrastructure as well. The recent National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program several years ago seemed to have thwarted the plan. But when Admiral Fallon, who opposed such strikes, resigned last week as head of CENTCOM, speculation on such attacks naturally returned. Fallon’s ouster might simply be a bluff to keep Iran from causing more trouble and more US casualties in Iraq, which will continue the illusion that the relative calm there has been engineered by General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency program, and does not stem, even in part, from Iranian policy. However, the prospect of a series of airstrikes later this year is real.

Fear and the Looming Recession

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:02:59 -0700

Over the last sixty years, recessions, though entailing considerable hardship for many, have usually been short and shallow, at least compared to the Depression. This has been so, we are assured, because we have learned much about economic downturns and how to counter them through fiscal policy and monetary policy. Our knowledge of the economy has grown, but perhaps the complexities and causes of recessions have grown at least as much.

The recession we are now descending into is not simply another bust following years of boom. It is accompanied by, and in part caused by, deep problems in two bases of middle-class life: real estate and credit. Real estate values have dropped in most parts of the country – more sharply in some areas than others, but an ominous national trend. The consequences are not confined to the real estate world. Many homeowners have been refinancing their houses and withdrawing equity in order to pay the costs of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Some do so simply to make ends meet. Many have been relying on the rising values of their houses as ersatz retirement plans that allow them to spend more of their incomes now. This is coming to an end.

In Which They Serve

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:22:17 -0800

Every now and then, we make a passing observation that bounces around our minds and leads us to ponder its significance. Not long ago, I was standing in line to board a plane. Finishing off a cup of coffee as my boarding pass was scanned, I asked if there was a wastebasket handy. The employee dutifully, though unnecessarily, held the wastebasket to just below her chin and smiled. As I dropped the cup in, she smiled more broadly and chimed, “Thank you!” A bit surprised and confused by this service, which went well beyond anything I expected – or wanted – I boarded the plane and walked back to my seat, in coach. “That poor woman,” I thought to myself.

The League of Elderly Gentlemen

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:45:36 -0800

Some sixty years after VE-Day, veterans of the 3rd Armored Division held a reunion, as they have every year since 1946. The guys who had spearheaded the Normandy Breakout and first crossed the Siegfried Line met in Northern Virginia, atop a hotel overlooking the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. I attended with a neighbor who commanded a company of Shermans in the 3rd. We joked that I had been their drummer boy.

The numbers had dwindled since the first reunion; the years had now taken more than the Wehrmacht had. Some knew others there, most did not. My neighbor could find none of his “boys.” Then there were the wives, children, and grandchildren, who lately had been showing more interest in the war and its meaning. There was even a Belgian man, born well after the war, whose village the 3rd had liberated in late ’44, just before the Bulge. A band played music from the era. Several couples got up and danced, and acquitted themselves well. There was no backslapping or tall tales. Those staples of army reunions, I was told, were common enough at the first dozen or so get-togethers, but had worn thin long ago. Since then, and especially lately, the affairs were simply assemblies of elderly gentlemen, short vacations with catered dinners. No boasting, little nostalgia; just a nice outing.

The Company We Keep

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:10:23 -0800

A review of Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

“A vast field of illusion . . . we have no plan . . . wishful blindness . . . ham-handed operations . . . nobody knew what to do . . . we had also fooled ourselves . . . more courage than wisdom . . . we were just plain asleep . . . etc, etc.”
Quotes from CIA officials and the statesmen they served.

Tim Weiner, longtime national security reporter for The New York Times, has interviewed many CIA officials and pored over volumes of internal documents. His 700-page report is a stunning litany of incompetence and failure. Weiner finds that despite its cachet of stealth and efficacy, the agency is a deeply flawed bureaucracy that has never been able to perform its national security mission.

In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA trained thousands of indigenous personnel to start guerilla movements in the Ukraine, N. Korea, Albania, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, these covert operations had been penetrated by the other side early on and the would-be partisans were collected upon insertion. Most were killed immediately. Some became double agents, sending false information to the West, most of which the credulous agency accepted for years. A few were allowed to operate because the CIA funds coming in were being siphoned off and used to run communist intelligence organizations. Later, similar operations in Cuba, Laos, N. Vietnam, and Iraq fared little better.

The Veteran in Recent Mythology

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:19:05 -0800

Over the last few decades, the image of the veteran has undergone numerous pendulum-like changes. The changes reflect the public’s unfamiliarity with military service and war. Even when positive, the mythic images are more often than not harmful, to both the soldiers and the nation.

When young soldiers went off to Vietnam in the sixties, they were the benefactors of a highly romanticized image that had been bequeathed to them by veterans of World War Two, a war which in the public imagination had been fought by young Americans who had all been noble, virtuous, and ever victorious. The usually affable Bill Mauldin learned hard lessons in Italy and tried to convey some of them to the folks back home:

The Thinking in Langley

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:31:17 -0800

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals. . . .

Joseph Conrad, An Outpost of Progress

In 1984, after a few years of grad school, I interviewed for an analyst position with the CIA. On the appointed morning, I drove down the George Washington Parkway, took the turn-off leading to the Agency’s campus, and stopped at the checkpoint. The guard dutifully checked for my name on a roster and then directed me to the appropriate parking area.