the morningside post

America, Orwell, Iraq: Michael Massing’s “Thought Police” in the new book, What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics

Comment by Tom Lansner

Tom Lansner is adjunct associate professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in international media and communications. He covered conflicts in many countries over a decade as correspondent for the London Observer and other publications. His three-part e-seminar on war reporting is available at Columbia Interactive.

Americans are killing many, many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Does that resonate anywhere? It is a reality that most of the world, outside the United States, recognizes and finds repugnant. But it is a fact little mentioned by most American media, or covered too lightly to move the issue from the dust of the public record into a debate on the public agenda.

Are these killings accidental or unintentional or mistaken or avoidable, or simply murderous? Are they “un-American?”

Words do matter, of course. George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” still commands our attention in its lucid warning that language can corrupt as much as enlighten political discourse. What we call something shapes our perception of it. And the battle for perceptions is keenest in times of violent conflict, where public support for spending [especially our own] blood and treasure can easily wane if reasoned arguments are unconvincing — or emotional appeals insufficiently compelling.

Mobilize Me 4: Raising Fallujah

And if a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.  For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride? 

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

 

Security is improving throughout Al Anbar.  I saw it in Fallujah two weeks ago.  After two devastating battles and countless insurgent attacks in and around this -- some would offer infamous -- city, there finally seems to be the stability required to chart a way forward.

That's the good news.  The not-so-good news is that we've got a long way to go to accomplish our overall mission here and achieving security objectives is just the start point in this campaign.  It's what happens next that will determine the nature of our involvement (or absence) here. 

This should not be a purely military endeavor.

Viewed in general terms, there's no rocket science to these developments.  Achieving security has simply to do with dividing Fallujah into manageable portions, clearing each district of insurgents, and maintaining appropriate measures to ensure they don't return.

But viewed up close, there is a complex tangle of influences, relationships, and requirements that make every indicator of success in Fallujah a remarkable -- and reversible -- event.

Just as imporant as the kinetic aspects of these operations is the effort to influence local opinions and allegiances.  The battlespace in this and all counterinsurgencies has long been understood as both physical and ideological.  In Anbar, this is becoming clearer each day to the people that count.

In many ways, this is a case of mind over matter.  It's an inter-generational effort: Take a few steps back and you realize that the center of gravity here is really the hearts and minds of Fallujah's children. 

Mobilize Me 2: Palace Intrigue?

I arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad two weeks ago, after spending a few days in Qatar.  The C-130 flight from Doha to Baghdad International Airport was filled with a bunch of soldiers returning to Iraq after a few days of R&R.  They were mostly motivated.  From BIAP, I took a Blackhawk to Landing Zone Washington, catching a glimpse of neighborhoody Baghdad along the way.  Through the oven blast of air, I watched palm trees, sand-colored houses and a few tall buildings flow quickly beneath us.  In a grassy patch of dirt I saw a bunch of kids playing soccer.

The embassy is an interesting place, located in one of Saddam's former palaces on the banks of the Tigris.  It's a mostly comfortable existence, with a coffee shop called the Green Bean in what I presume was one of the ballrooms, a large 24-hour gym, and good dining facilities.  There's even a nice -- very nice -- outdoor pool.  Downsides?  We take indirect fire practically every day and it's becoming evident to me that you can easily get cabin fever staying inside the wire. 

I've been thinking about the incoming mortar rounds and rockets.  Do the insurgents really think they're going to drive us out of this compound?  Maybe some do, foolishly, but there have to be other motivations at play, as well.  Some likely fire at us for money, some probably do it for fun, some might do it simply to demonstrate to various audiences that they can.

Though I'm ashamed to admit it, I must: I am at risk for becoming a fobbit at the Mother of All Forward Operating Bases.  Still, I like being able to go for a run and take a shower at will.  Oh, and I'll take a latte.  Make it a double.

Mobilize Me!

A few weeks before graduating from SIPA, I got a telephone call from Headquarters, Marine Corps.  The captain on the other end of the line (a good guy I'd worked with before) asked if I would deploy to Iraq.  Over the following weekend I participated in SIPA Follies, an end-of-year satirical production, and had the realization that yes, I would deploy.  Five weeks after that I exited the DC Metro at the Pentagon station and walked upstairs to check in.

In some ways, nothing had changed since I'd finished my duty there two years before.  In other ways, however, there was a greater sense of normalcy to the place, as if the people working there had settled into the understanding that, yes, this will indeed be a long war.

The theory and practice of intelligence in the age of terror

In an interesting juxtaposition of theory and personal experience, on Friday I attended both the Saltzman Forum on Intelligence Reform in the the Age of Terror and New Yorker columnist Lawrence Wright's one man show, "My Trip to Al Qaeda."  Both events highlighted, in very different ways, the failures of the intelligence community before September 11th, the ramifications of changes made since that time, and potential problems facing the intelligence community in the future.

The Saltzman Forum included practitioners and academics from the intelligence field.  First to speak was Lt. General William Odom, USA (Ret.), who previously served as Director of the National Security Agency and Assistant Chief of Staff for Army Intelligence.  While recognizing the benefits of reorganization, citing examples from the private sector of successful reforms, he was highly critical of the efforts to this end in the intelligence community over the past few years.  General Odom emphasized the point that if intelligence is public, it is no longer intelligence. Therefore, he feels that Congress should take a diminished role when it comes to oversight, in order to avoid micromanagement, something that has been built into recent legislation.  Instead, General Odom advocates for a highly distributed network of intelligence capabilities across the various agencies in the field, with oversight coming at the level of each type of intelligence: human, signals, and imagery.  General Odom also emphasized that an intelligence customer will get the intelligence that he or she wants.  As he put it, if the commander doesn't want it, he won't get it, even if you spoon feed it to him.

Four Years

Four years can seem like an eternity or like yesterday. If you're like me, it hardly seems possible that the American invasion of Iraq was four years ago this week. As part of our semester work, the international newsroom class that I'm taking with Ann K. Cooper at the journalism school sought to mark this anniversary with a multimedia project. Iraq Four Years Later looks at different ways the war is having an impact - from the refugee crisis and the Iraqis who have sought asylum in the US to the sectarian divisions there and here to the wider, regional impact and the possible scenarios for peace.

The website, which was designed by journalism grad Duy Linh Tu, is meant as a kind of snapshot of what the last four years have wrought in US foreign policy and in the lives of countless Iraqis. Check it out - and be sure to watch the scenarios for peace video package, which includes footage from the 2007 ISP Crisis Simulation. 

Eason Jordan at SIPA

Last week, Eason Jordan of iraqslogger.com spoke at SIPA.

Jordan worked for 23 years at CNN, eventually becoming the network's Chief News Executive and President of Newsgathering and International Networks. But after two of his CNN colleagues were killed by insurgents in Iraq in 2004, Jordan co-founded and co-chaired the Iraq News Safety Group, and on behalf of the group met senior U.S.and Iraqi officials to address the safety concerns of news organizations whose journalists report from Iraq. His interest in and knowledge of the dangers faced by journalists covering the war sparked a controversy during the 2005 World Economic Forum. During an off-the-record discussion, Jordan allegedly said that US military forces were deliberately targeting US journalists. He has always denied that he said this -- suggesting only that his statements could have been clearer -- but he resigned from CNN as a result.

What is clear from his remarks at SIPA -- captured in this podcast recorded by SIPA student Aaron Ernst -- is that the controversy did not destroy his concern for the war in Iraq and the way it is covered by the media.

SIWPS Lecture - Professor Amy Zegart, UCLA - US Intelligence and the Origins of 9/11

The story of what went wrong prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks has been retold in great detail, but the question of why it went wrong remains.

Amy Zegart, Associate Professor at UCLA's School of Public Affairs, argues that answering the question requires a careful analysis of the systemic barriers that have stymied intelligence reform for decades. It is not that the US lacked the knowledge about what to do or how to do it; instead, organizational weaknesses inherent to the intelligence agencies prevented them from adapting to the rise of terrorism after the Cold War ended. The fault lies with three key factors that make reforms difficult: the structure of organizations, the self-interested nature of key actors in the process, and the fragmented design of the federal government. That is, senior policy officials recognized the coming threat and saw the connection between this new threat and the changes in operating procedures it necessitated, but simply lacked the ability to implement these changes.

In 1980, 58% of the intelligence community’s funds were spent on the Soviet threat; by 1993, that number had dropped to 13% and much of the difference went to counterterrorism. Furthermore, looking back at the CIA’s annual threat assessments, since 1994, terrorism had been a top threat on the list each year and in the top three since 1998. The FBI also declared publicly that it had made terrorism its top priority as early as 1998. Finally, in the decade before the attacks, twelve separate unclassified studies targeted the CIA, FBI, and the remainder of the US Intelligence Community in 340 separate recommendations for reform.

Visiting the Rock

Last Friday I traveled with Professor Anne Nelson and several US Marines to "The Rock," the New York City Fire Department's training facility on Randall's Island. The purpose of the trip was for Marines based in New York, including Colonel Busby, the current Marine fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Major Bell and Corporal Delgado from the New York City Public Affairs Office, to establish ties with the FDNY. 

Our day was spent with the Haz/Mat training team, particularly Lt. Tony Mussorfiti.  After we were treated to lunch and coffee, we spent about an hour talking to them about the challenges and changes to their work in the post-9/11 world. Most of these men have been working on these issues for 20 or more years; the importance of Haz/Mat did not begin when terrorism appeared on the national radar in 2001. We appreciated their candor concerning the hurdles they have faced in getting their operating procedures standardized and the immensely difficult task of coordinating efforts with other first responders in the region. They also let us know how impressed they are with the skill level of incoming firefighter trainees and the new simulator training technology. Most of all, however, they expressed their desire to have a better relationship with the policy community. It was clear that they feel frustration that their hard-earned experience is often ignored over that of "experts" --  many of whom have little or no exposure to the daily realities that firefighters, and other first responders, actually face in the field.

Het begrip van terrorisme

That's Dutch for "understanding terrorism," and on Tuesday, November 14, a group of SIPA students attempted to do just that with a group of undergrad and graduate students from the Dutch United Nations Students Association. This diverse group is affiliated with Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands' oldest university (founded in 1575) and the first where freedom of belief and religion was practiced. The discussion was led by SIPA professor Reid Sawyer.

While I can't say for sure exactly what our Dutch friends learned, Professor Sawyer gave us all a solid sense of what the most important questions in the counterterrorism field are today:

• Will the terrorism of tomorrow look like the terrorism of today?
• Will violence increase or decrease?
• How much money are we willing to spend and how much risk are we wiling to accept?
• Will we see the use non-conventional weapons?
• Will we see the use of suicide bombing spread?

Professor Sawyer's introductory remarks, as well as the extended discussion it sparked touched on issues of terrorism that span the Atlantic and suggested that we have a lot to learn from one another. Why? For those of us on the western side of the Atlantic, what's happening in Europe may be the closest thing to a crystal ball we have in terms of terrorism's future. 

According to Professor Sawyer, ideological trends seen in Europe's Islamist circles are steadily migrating to the U.S., washing up in America about half a year after they appear in Europe. Yet, he believes there is a "tendency to dismiss the attacks in Europe as not having implications for the U.S."

So what did our friends, whose own societies have been roiled by terrorist violence, have to share with us?