This is why it is so hard for politicians to go against hawkish positions.
Security is both a feeling and a reality, and they're different. You can feel secure even though you're not, and you can be secure even though you don't feel it. There are two different concepts mapped onto the same word - the English language isn't working very well for us here - and it can be hard to know which one we're talking about when we use the word.
The key here is whether we notice. The feeling and reality of security tend to converge when we take notice, and diverge when we don't. People notice when 1) there are enough positive and negative examples to draw a conclusion, and 2) there isn't too much emotion clouding the issue.
Both elements are important. If someone tries to convince us to spend money on a new type of home burglar alarm, we as society will know pretty quickly if he's got a clever security device or if he's a charlatan; we can monitor crime rates. But if that same person advocates a new national antiterrorism system, and there weren't any terrorist attacks before it was implemented, and there weren't any after it was implemented, how do we know if his system was effective?
...People are more likely to realistically assess these incidents if they don't contradict preconceived notions about how the world works. For example: It's obvious that a wall keeps people out, so arguing against building a wall across America's southern border to keep illegal immigrants out is harder to do.
The other thing that matters is agenda. There are lots of people, politicians, companies and so on who deliberately try to manipulate your feeling of security for their own gain. They try to cause fear. They invent threats. They take minor threats and make them major. And when they talk about rare risks with only a few incidents to base an assessment on - terrorism is the big example here - they are more likely to succeed.
One reason FDR focused on freedom from fear is because fear creates an opening for authoritarian behavior. And while I don't buy the hope message of Obama, I can see a good argument that it is driving at the same concept. Schneier doesn't see any obvious antidote to the problem of security theater and our vulnerability to making good decisions.
I think there are two. One, it is critical to point out that politicians have an incentive to centralize power in the name of security so as to create a general warinesss around anything done by the government in the name of national security. Abuse of this concept is immensely dangerous, and actually cuts across the political spectrum. Two, it is critical that we be situated in community spaces so we can collectively make and discuss security decisions. TV is a fear-based device, the internet allows for more rational conversations. To take a simple example, local broadcasters often do stories about online child predators and rarely discuss global warming. The internet has relatively much more discussion of climate change and much less discussion of child predators, probably because a healthy social context allows better decision-making.
It is quite important, and I don't know how to solve this puzzle, to counter the strategy from elites that anyone who suspects malfeasance on the part of authorities is a conspiracy theorist unless they have clear proof. We place a lot of trust in government and corporate leaders, and they have the resources to keep earning that trust if they choose. As citizens we should move to a situation where we look at hundreds of billions of dollars of unaccountable national security spending or massive paydays for corporate leaders and require justification, rather than the problematic posture we seem to be in right now where every corrupt deed must be proven eighteen different ways before Congress will even choose to do nothing about it.
As we move forward into a governing posture, building a consensus towards openness, with its attending vulnerability from fear-mongering politicians and elites, is going to require a good amount of work. We must change the way we relate to power. The good news is that blogging or creating content to be shared with others is empowering and allows this shift to happen, and more and more people are doing this every day. In some ways, Obama straddles the line and reaches into this community of content-creators, while still retaining a lot of old politics support (hence his acceptance of the war on terror frame). The impetus to change our way of thinking and reclaim our republic from the security theater experts and con men is going to have to come from us. And it is.
At yesterday's Change Congress event with Larry Lessig, Lessig presented the meme behind the campaign. Change Congress has four parts:
No PAC or lobbyist money
An End to Earmarks
Public financing of campaigns
Congressional Transparency
As with Creative Commons and copyright holders, Change Congress candidates and citizens can sign up for any and all of these pledges, matching their ideology with their pledge. It's a brilliant organizing structure. One suggestion I made was to bake national security into the dialogue upfront. Here's the question I asked Lessig, which Micah Sifry has kindly written up.
Q: From Matt Stoller, who discloses that he's done some consulting for the Sunlight Foundation. The hardest nut to crack is national security policy. Is it legitimate how secretive that is? What will you do when this movement bangs up into that wall? If everything else is transparent, then a lot of important decisions will be pushed into the national security arena.
I don't know. I do know that if earmarks were banned, that would remove some of the pressure for special deals, in the first place. I don't know how we'll deal with transparency in secret expenditures. I think there's a lot for me to learn, Lessig admits.
Several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from a new public database of government spending....
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) argued that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts could present an operational security vulnerability.
This is not classified information they are talking about. These departments are simply arguing that the public does not have a right to get unclassified public information. National security cannot be an absolute trump card against transparency, or else you'll get hugely ramped up spending on intelligence contractors where there is none. More fundamentally, every growing pot of money in the Federal government is basically in DHS or the Defense Department.
The Change Congress movement, and the progressive movement as a whole, needs to grapple with this question. When half of discretionary government income flows through the Pentagon, and black box budgets are growing on Capitol Hill, it's unavoidable.
The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq's borders from external threat until at least 2018.
Which is, of course, exactly what we are going to do. This one quote is all of the justification that another Republican administration will need to keep American troops in Iraq, at their present levels, for as long as the administration holds power. Then again, a Democratic administration will keep not as many, but still a lot, of troops in Iraq, too. And the Democratic Congress won't ever do anything about it, because they are afraid of seeming like they were "against the troops." Doing that, or really anything that might even a little aggressive on Iraq, will, of course, hurt election chances..
The whole thing feels like we have entered a military dictatorship through means of manners and peer pressure. We are required to keep troops in Iraq for as long and in whatever quantities conservative generals tell us to keep them in Iraq, because otherwise we would be offending the troops. We can never order them to leave Iraq, because otherwise we would be offending the troops. We also can't cut back on military spending, because to do so would offend the troops. In order to avoid offending the troops, we collectively agree to let the military do whatever its most conservative commanding officers say we should do.
The whole thing smacks of the Algiers Crisis coup that caused the end of the fourth French Republic. In 1958, the French government abolished its constitution and willing handed over power to De Gaulle, including the power to write a new constitution greatly expanding the President's powers, because the military asked the government to do so. Of all the historical comparisons I have seen, the end of the French Fourth Republic really strikes me as the best analogy for what has happened to our democracy. It was, in effect, a modern, relatively bloodless coup perpetuated in a liberal democracy as the result of a national crisis, and with the willing support of a large percentage of the population. This isn't without precedent in America, considering the Business Plot to overthrow FDR back in the 1930's. Really, the only difference strikes me as being the comparatively crude military tactics proposed by the Business Plot, and the even the more sophisticated tactics utilized by De Gaulle were crude in comparison to the more gradual, more sophisticated techniques of the Powell memo. n both situations, military supremacy over the government was assured through popular will of the people, and enforced through our most pervasive institutions: government, mass media, and our sense of national supremacy.
It is funny how much conservatives hate France, since we seem to emulating them quite nicely.
This is a long post framing a lot of thinking we've been doing at OpenLeft and elsewhere around ending the war in Iraq.
One of Wes Clark's best expressions is 'we can do it because we are doing it'. And after wallowing in some frustration over mistakes progressives have made, I'm coming around to the view that we are working hard to end the war. Whether you are working to elect Democrats, fighting on progressive issue advocacy, registering voters, stopping military recruitment, engaging for media reform, running for office, doing voter integrity work, trying to pass good energy legislation or universal health care, you are working to end the war. We just have to begin to understand our political work that way. Just as Grover Norquist framed the conservative movement's moral attitude in a no-tax pledge, we must consider our mantra of reorganizing society as the need to end the war, and the war economy and culture it requires to keep going.
Another new arrival in the West Wing set up a rapid-response PR unit hard-wired into Petraeus's shop. Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.
From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and last week, the office put out 94 such documents in various categories -- "Myths/Facts" or "Setting the Record Straight" to take issue with negative news articles, and "In Case You Missed It" to distribute positive articles or speeches.
This follows the revelation that Petraeus has had closed door strategy sessions with the Republican caucus,persistent rumors that Petraeus will run for President on the Republican ticket in 2012, and Petraeus's grad school buddy Michael O'Hanlon at the unaccountable Brookings Institution fomenting a PR offensive to bolster his friend's image. Now, I know that senior military leaders interweaving their military activities and messaging with partisan Republican operatives is nothing new and so we've all become somewhat desensitized to it, but technically speaking, America still is a republic.
