The Fear Factor

At the outset, Seeking Security in an Insecure World develops a definition of "security" that begins with its Latin root, securus, which means "without a care." Insecurity, of course, is the opposite state, a condition characterized by anxiety and fear. There is a part of this opening discussion of security and insecurity in Seeking Security in an Insecure World that is, I think, worth quoting for its relevance to the psychological state of the nation in the aftermath of the massacre in San Bernardino, California last week:

Insecurity reflects the state of the world, but it is also a state of mind. Consequently, the proximity, in both space and time, of a threat can affect its ability to produce insecurity. There also seems to be a "dread" factor in insecurity. Humans often dread the unknown and the uncontrollable event, such as a random bombing, out of all proportion to the actual threat such an event poses. The social dimension of insecurity--the creation and spread of collective fears--adds another element to our understanding of the subjective aspect of insecurity. Not only do the conditions that produce insecurity change over time, collective understandings do as well. Security--and insecurity--are socially constructed.

There have been events--objective conditions--that have prompted feelings of insecurity: the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino loom large at present. But human psychology and the way it generates interpretations of these attacks is equally important to our efforts to understand the fear that is driving so much political rhetoric and social discourse lately. Considered objectively (that is, applying reason over and against emotion alone), the threat that terrorism poses is small. Terrorists, after all, fight the way they do because they are weak in comparison to the military and police forces marshaled by developed states. Terrorism is a form of asymmetric warfare, a way of fighting that seeks to avoid the powerful adversary's strengths. Hitting the soft underbelly of a society generally means attacking in ways that violate the collective norms of society--norms against deliberately targeting innocent people, for example--because even strong states, especially if free, expect that law and not force alone will do part of the work of providing security.

Terrorism "works" not by defeating (or evening demonstrating an ability to defeat) the security forces of a state like France or the United States but by getting into the minds of people who can influence the policies of the state. Unable to change the objective aspects of a powerful state's security, terrorists hope to alter the subjective aspects--the psychological terrain--of security. This is why, to terrorists, the victims of an attack are less important than the audience. Victims are chosen randomly; the audience is chosen very deliberately.

If it is true that "security--and insecurity--are socially constructed," then what we are witnessing right now in the United States is a political process--primarily (but not exclusively) the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination--that is actually generating much of our present insecurity. Most people could sense this already, but the point bears emphasis.

Refugees

Those who are looking for absolute security are on the wrong planet. This one has life.

What You Should Be Reading After Paris

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris, those with the least intelligent things to say seem to be shouting the loudest. Some are trying to get attention in the still overcrowded field of those running for the Republican presidential nomination. Others have airtime to fill and ratings to worry about. Then there are those who are simply way too inclined to express their deepest fears on social media. The mix is toxic and, in a democracy, it threatens to affect policy in some truly harmful ways.

Let us suppose you would prefer some reasoned analysis over feverish diatribes. Let us suppose further that you value knowledge as much as a high decibel level. What (and whom) should you be reading? Here are a few suggestions:

Will McCants is the author of the recently published book The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (St. Martin's, 2015) and a fellow of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His brief essay for FP ("How the Islamic State Declared War on the World") is a good starting point for understanding what ISIS is. McCants makes the important point that ISIS is not just a terrorist organization. It is a state--and a state-sponsor of terrorism (much as North Korea is a state and a transnational criminal organization, an insight I owe to this excellent monograph). For McCants' view on the warrant for ISIS-style violence in Islam, see this brief piece on the Washington Post's "Acts of Faith" blog.

Robert Pape, professor of international relations at the University of Chicago and co-author (with James K. Feldman) of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, suggests that ISIS attacked Paris because of the role France has played in a successful military campaign against the Islamic State. "The group," Pape writes, "is lashing out against the states that are now posing crippling blows to its dreams of a caliphate in the Middle East." Pape's Boston Globe op-ed is titled "Why Paris? The Answer Can Be Found in Syria and Iraq."

Andrew J. Bacevich, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and author of the forthcoming book America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, is more pessimistic about what the U.S. or France can do to defeat Islamic extremism. In this Boston Globe op-ed--"A War the West Cannot Win"--Bacevich argues for a defensive posture that leaves those in the Middle East to sort out their political and religious differences without external involvement. 

Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, takes the rhetoric about the response to the Paris attacks down several notches in an essay--"Don't Give ISIS What It Wants"--for FP. Walt argues that ISIS has a long-term strategy and that the first priority of the U.S. should be "not to fall into the obvious trap the Islamic State has set." That was my point in yesterday's post.

Daniel Drezner, professor of international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, also urges everyone to "take a deep breath" before acting in the wake of the Paris attacks. His comments on the Washington Post's "PostEverything" blog--"Formulating a Policy Response in Anger Is Probably Not the Best Way to Defeat the Islamic State"--remind us that, among other things, "the Islamic State is not winning in the Middle East."

Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of Globalized Islam and Holy Ignorance, offers a helpful overview of the many conflicting state interests in the Middle East in this op-ed for the New York Times titled "The Attacks in Paris Reveal the Strategic Limits of ISIS." One cannot read this piece and come away believing there are simple solutions to the conflict in Syria or the broader problems of the Middle East.

In offering this reading list, I am not endorsing all of the views expressed by these individuals. In fact, one couldn't coherently endorse everything each one says for the simple reason that there are some clear differences of opinion among them. I am suggesting, however, that these brief essays--none will take more than about five minutes to read--are better informed and more carefully reasoned than most of what you will get from the twenty-four hour news networks, the vast wastelands of the Internet just on the other side of click bait, or your Facebook friend Earl who has strong opinions about everything.

Chess Lessons

Experienced chess players understand gambits. Politicians should, too.

What, exactly, is a gambit? In chess, it's an opening--a sequence of moves at the beginning of a game--designed to entice the opponent to make a move that will leave her in a weakened position. Typically, a gambit involves leaving a pawn vulnerable to capture, but in a location on the board that requires the opponent to cede control of the center squares or to make some other tactical concession. A gambit, in other words, involves baiting a trap and waiting for the opponent to walk right into it.

Terrorist attacks should generally be understood as gambits. They are intended to provoke a particular response that the terrorists believe will benefit them, at least in the long run. The response the terrorists desire is probably the one that, for the victim and the wider audience, is the easiest to rationalize and the hardest to resist. As a rule of thumb, if you don't know what the terrorists are trying to goad you into doing, you might be better off not doing anything rather than choosing to follow your gut.

So, what is it that the Islamic State might want? Let's start with an even bigger conflict in the Middle East--one that draws in a variety of powers that are distrustful of one another. Let's add a more visible presence of French, U.S., and Russian military forces. And then let's add an end to the open door for Syrian refugees.

Why might the Islamic State want these things? Because its appeal is based on two things: first, its ability to provide better governance than the weak and corrupt governments of Iraq, Syria, Libya, or parts of Egypt, and, second, its ability to present itself as the best defender of Islam against an implacably hostile West.

Those who have reflexively called for widening the war in Syria and Iraq on the one hand while excluding Syrian refugees from the United States and Western Europe on the other might do well to learn something about gambits.

The Urbanization of Insecurity

Tonight Paris has been the scene of an unspeakable atrocity. As President Obama said just a few hours ago, "This is an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share." It is also, once again, an attack on a city--one in a growing list of examples of the urbanization of insecurity.

Cities have long been subject to attack. The burning of Washington in 1814 and the destruction of Atlanta in 1864 provide examples familiar to Americans. But prior to the twentieth century, cities were generally targeted at or near the end of a successful military campaign; they were not generally attacked as a desperate tactic of the weak in an attempt to turn the tables on the strong. Urban terrorism, like the aerial bombardment of cities that preceded it (also called "terrorism" by those who experienced it), is a form of asymmetric warfare--a mode of attack that avoids the adversary's strengths and zeroes in on its vulnerabilities, even if such a mode of attack is considered barbaric or "an attack on . . . the universal values that we share."

Consider the pattern that has emerged in recent years.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, appeared to present a new form of terrorism. After all, roughly nine times more people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 than had died in the January 1985 Air India bombing over the Irish Sea, which had previously been the deadliest terrorist attack in history. What made the 9/11 attacks different from the many terrorist attacks that had gone before were their sophistication and their manifest intent to kill as many people as possible. But there were precursors to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The unsuccessful effort in 1993 to bring down the World Trade Center in retrospect appears to have been a harbinger of things to come. It was an attack intended to inflict mass casualties, as was the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo attack in Tokyo. In the latter case, an apocalyptic Japanese cult calling itself Supreme Truth attempted to spread sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system. The attack, motivated by the group's belief that it was destined to rule Japan, was preceded by a multimillion-dollar effort to manufacture and test biological weapons. Ten times between 1990 and 1995, Aum Shinrikyo attempted to spread biological agents in and around Tokyo. For various reasons (some illustrating the difficulty of working with biological weapons), not a single person was killed in any of these attacks. Consequently, Aum Shinrikyo turned its attention to chemical weapons. In the Tokyo subway attack, twelve people were killed and over a thousand were injured. Still more experienced some form of severe psychological trauma.

An incident similar to the deadliest part of tonight's attack in Paris occurred in Moscow in October of 2002 when fifty Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theater during a performance, taking approximately 700 hostages. The terrorists, who wired themselves and the building with explosives, demanded that Russia end its war against separatists in Chechnya. At least 129 people died in the theater, most from a toxic gas Russian forces pumped into the building prior to the raid that brought the ordeal to a conclusion.

On the morning of March 11, 2004, ten bombs exploded on commuter trains in downtown Madrid. The detonation of the bombs was a coordinated effort, with all ten exploding within minutes of 8:00 a.m. In addition to the ten bombs that exploded, police located and safely detonated three other bombs. After the attack, it was determined that 191 people died and approximately 1,800 people were injured in the blasts. Initially, the attack was thought to be the work of the Basque separatist group ETA, but it was later found that Islamic extremists, inspired by an al Qaeda call for attacks on Spain, were responsible.

A little over a year later, on July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded in the London Underground while a fourth bomb exploded on one of the city’s iconic red double-decker buses. These explosions all occurred at the height of the city’s morning rush hour, effectively bringing the city to a standstill while rescue crews rushed to help those trapped both above and below ground. After extensive rescue efforts and searches, the final count was fifty-two people dead and more than 950 injured. The attacks, suicide bombings executed by four British men, all of whom had no known terrorist background or affiliation, highlighted the danger cities face not only from foreigners but from their own citizens as well.

On November 26, 2008, the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba launched a brutal and carefully planned attack on multiple locations in Mumbai, India. The attack spanned three days as ten gunmen indiscriminately killed Indians and foreigners alike in highly populated areas, including a hospital, a Jewish center, a café, and two hotels. The attackers, all well prepared, continually eluded capture by Indian police and counter-terrorism units. Indeed, in the aftermath of the attacks, there was much controversy over how ten gunmen could cause so much destruction and fight off Indian forces for three days within a single city. Overall, 164 were killed and 308 were injured.

What these cases tell us is that cities are vulnerable--and thus are tempting targets for extremists. While an effective response by well-prepared police or military units can mitigate the impact of urban terrorism, there seems to be little that can be done to prevent attacks like those that have occurred in Paris, Mumbai, London, Madrid, Moscow, and other cities. Governments seeking answers where there are few to be found are likely to use more military force abroad and more electronic surveillance at home. And they will face pressure from their most reactionary citizens to turn away refugees, notwithstanding the fact that refugees, far from being the problem, are themselves fleeing terrorists.

The world's most vibrant and prosperous cities are places of great diversity with the tolerance needed to match and nurture it. They are threatened most by intolerance, whether homegrown in the form of racist policemen or imported in the form of religious extremists. Unfortunately, the very qualities--diversity and tolerance--that make a city like Paris so attractive are also the ones that make it so vulnerable. And this fact, I fear, leaves us little to work with in trying to address the urbanization of insecurity.

Rethinking the Islamic State

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story on the evolution of the Islamic State. While it might be better to characterize what has been happening as an evolution in Western thinking about the Islamic State, a point that the story (if not the headline) attempts to make, there is some useful information to be gleaned from the pastiche of interviews and expert analyses presented in Tim Arango's narrative.

First, individuals living in areas controlled by the Islamic State and experts on the region make the point that the Islamic State, while extremely repressive, has brought a measure of stability to parts of Iraq and Syria that have long been in turmoil. This stability is, at least to some extent, due to the elimination of the corruption that existed under the region's dictators and, all too often, its supposed liberators as well. As a man from Raqqa put it, "You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul, and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million." Sadly, neither the forces favored by the West in Syria nor the governments that succeeded Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan have been convinced that good governance--clean governance--is essential to the state-building enterprise. This seems to be something that the Islamic State, for all of its horrors, understands.

Second, three of the experts quoted in the article--Harvard's Stephen Walt, the Brookings Institution's William McCants, and former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin--find parallels between the violence of the Islamic State and that of revolutionary France, Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, and some other modern states. If these parallels are meaningful--and I would argue that they are--then Western discourse needs to abandon the rhetoric of fighting terrorism where the Islamic State is concerned, unless those using that rhetoric intend "terrorism" to mean what it did when the term was coined in connection with the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. A state that conducts beheadings--whether with a guillotine or a sword--should be condemned, but we misconstrue what is happening if we call the beheadings acts of terrorism while using that term in its modern sense.

A few weeks ago, while working on the third edition of Seeking Security in an Insecure World, I wrote the following about the Islamic State for the section of the book that deals with failed states:

At the heart of the Peace of Westphalia was an agreement to eliminate religion as a reason for warfare by establishing a rule of mutual tolerance among (if not within) states. Both the Holy Roman Empire’s bid to subdue Protestant principalities and the effort of Protestant rulers to extend their control to Catholic territories were delegitimized by their joint acceptance of a principle encapsulated in the Latin phrase cuius regio eius religio (the ruler of the territory determines the religion practiced in it). While religious differences have factored into conflicts many times in the Westphalian era, now the basic principle is being threatened. 

The Islamic State--also called the Islamic State in Iraq and ash-Sham (the term for Syria in classical Arabic) or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)--has capitalized on state failure to inject into the modern world a distinctively pre-modern understanding of the way religion and the state are to interact. On June 29, 2014, the Islamic State publicly proclaimed a caliphate with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the first caliph since the days of the Ottoman Empire. It is a theocratic state that considers itself unbound by the Westphalian principle of sovereignty with its corollaries of non-aggression and non-intervention. In fact, the formation of the caliphate signaled the Islamic State’s intent to pursue a policy of expansion that would, according to prophecies in the Qur’an, lead to the Day of Judgment with its divinely foreordained apocalypse. For Muslims who subscribe to the most literal reading of the Qur’an, the establishment of the caliphate was a pivotal event; thousands began traveling from all over the world to the lands controlled by the Islamic State to lend their support to its efforts, military and political, to impose divine judgment on both Muslim and non-Muslim apostates. 

By the middle of 2015, and in spite of armed opposition on the ground supported by American and British airstrikes, the Islamic State controlled a swath of territory roughly equivalent to the size of the British Isles with a population estimated at six to eight million. Its territory, primarily in the most ineffectively governed regions of Iraq and most war-torn parts of Syria, demonstrates well the hazards posed by failed states and the tendency for conditions in them to threaten other states. To be clear, in the territories it controls the Islamic State exercises many of the functions associated with modern states. It enforces law, collects taxes, maintains both military and police forces, and even seeks to build alliances with like-minded organizations. (In March 2015, Boko Haram offered--and the Islamic State accepted--a pledge of allegiance that, in theory, extends the caliphate to West Africa.) In many respects, the Islamic State exercises more effective control over the territories it occupies than the states it has displaced did. However, the Islamic State does not have, and will likely never obtain, the recognition of other states. It exists as a quasi-state (due to the absence of the critical element of recognition) only because the recognized states whose territory it occupies are themselves quasi-states (due to their inability to exercise effective control). Nation-building, therefore, appears as an essential element of any strategy to defeat ISIS, a point recognized by President Obama in his pledge at the June 2015 G-7 meeting in Germany to accelerate efforts to train the Iraqi army to fight Islamic State units.

In working on a book that deals with contemporary issues, there is a constant concern that the period between writing and publication will witness changes that render even the most careful analyses obsolete. Our powers of prediction in international politics are severely limited. In this instance, however, I suspect the Islamic State will still be around next spring when the new edition of Seeking Security appears. It will likely be looking more and more like a "real" state. And some in the West will probably still be trying to figure out why it doesn't really make sense to call it a terrorist organization.

On Drones and the Law

Recently the UN Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism, Ben Emmerson, presented his third annual report. This report focuses on the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations with special emphasis on civilian casualties in drone strikes.

The report notes that while the number of drone attacks in Pakistan declined in 2013, drone strikes increased in Afghanistan and in Yemen. The decline in Pakistan came amid complaints from the Pakistani government that U.S. drone strikes were undermining its authority.

Paragraph 71 of the report lays out a series of questions regarding the legal status of drone strikes and suggests that there is "an urgent and imperative need to reach a consensus between States" on the answers to these questions. Included among the questions are these:

• Is the international law principle of self-defence confined to situations in which an armed attack has already taken place, or does it entitle a State to carry out pre-emptive military operations against a non-State armed group on the territory of another State, without the territorial State's consent, where it judges that there is an imminent risk of attack to its own interests? . . .
• Does international humanitarian law permit the targeting of persons directly participating in hostilities who are located in a non-belligerent state, and, if so, in what circumstances? . . .
• In the context of non-international armed conflict, when (and under what circumstances) does international humanitarian law impose an obligation to capture rather than kill a legitimate military target where this is feasible?

While the Special Rapporteur is no doubt correct that the international community thus far has failed to reach a consensus view on these (and other) matters, the report notes (in Paragraph 31) that on February 25, 2014, the European Parliament adopted a resolution (by a vote of 534 to 49) that concludes that "drone strikes outside a declared war by a State on the territory of another State without the consent of the latter or of the UN Security Council constitute a violation of international law and of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of that country."

The complete text of the 21-page report is available here. For the Guardian's take on the story, go here.

MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan (USAF Photo / Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt)

The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up

The title of this post is the title of a New York Times editorial that says exactly what needs to be said at this point.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today publicly accused the CIA of what amounts to a criminal act in its efforts to impede the Committee's investigation of a program of torture ("enhanced interrogation" according to the euphemism used by the George W. Bush administration) involving terrorism suspects that was initiated in 2002. The text of Senator Feinstein's statement on the floor of the Senate is available here and a video of the speech can be seen below.

This is no small matter.

Own Goal

This headline appears in today's New York Times: "Suicide Bomb Instructor Accidentally Kills Iraqi Pupils." Some British soldiers serving in Northern Ireland called this sort of thing an "own goal" when it happened to IRA terrorists during the Troubles.

"Likes" for Pakistani Taliban

The Los Angeles Times reports that Tehreek-i-Taliban (TTP), the group that Pakistani authorities charge with the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, now has a Facebook page. The page, with 281 "likes" as of Friday evening, is used for recruiting. It follows a pattern in recent years of Islamic militant organizations using social media to recruit new members.

The Italian Case

In Milan today, an Italian court found 23 Americans guilty of kidnapping a Muslim cleric and sending him to Egypty for interrogation in 2003. All of the defendants were working for the CIA. All were tried in absentia. It is the first conviction gained anywhere in the world against Americans on charges related to extraordinary rendition, the policy of sending terrorism suspects abroad to be interrogated, often with torture, beyond the reach of U.S. or international legal protections.

If prosecutors obtain international arrest warrants, the Americans convicted today, most of whom have retired from the CIA, could be subject to arrest in virtually any country to which they might travel outside the United States.

"Push and Push and Push"

According to The Terror Presidency, a new book by former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (and current Harvard Law professor) Jack Goldsmith, attorneys within the Bush Administration pressed hard using faulty legal arguments to expand executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. David Addington, Vice President Cheney's legal counsel at the time, said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

The New York Times Magazine will publish a lengthy piece on Sunday (available here) about Goldsmith and the challenges he faced trying to resist the Bush Administration's legal maneuverings. According to Goldsmith, the president's lawyers adopted a "go-it-alone" perspective on the presidency "because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it."

Needless to say, similar ironies can be found in most of the Bush Administration's counter-terrorism policies.

Briefly Noted

Jane Mayer, who has written about torture for the New Yorker on a number of occasions, has a story in the current issue on the CIA's "black sites" and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's numerous confessions. It's available here.

Wednesday's New York Times carried an op-ed by Gen. Wesley Clark and Kal Raustiala on the distinction between terrorists and combatants ("unlawful" or otherwise). It's an important distinction that the United States has been getting wrong since the beginning of the so-called "war on terror."

Twenty-one Problems; Solutions Included

Foreign Policy has asked twenty-one experts to suggest one thing that would make the world a better place. In response, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. addresses anti-Americanism, Jeffrey D. Sachs considers global poverty, and Lt. Gen. William E. Odom takes on nuclear proliferation--to name just a seventh of the experts and their issues.

See the complete collection here.

"At Sea Off the Coast of San Diego"

The "Mission Accomplished" banner that provided the backdrop for President Bush's remarks aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln four years ago today is what most people usually remember of that Karl Rove-inspired photo op. It is an image that epitomizes the hubris and miscalculation of the Bush Administration. But some of the President's words on May 1, 2003, are also worth recalling on this anniversary:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

If only that were true.

President Bush took advantage of the opportunity to repeat one of the war's false pretenses:

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report (see page 66), there was "no evidence" that contacts between Iraqi officials and representatives of al Qaeda "ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence," the Commission continued, "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." Since the "liberation of Iraq," that country has become what Afghanistan was in the 1980s--a training ground for terrorists.

In most respects, President Bush and his advisers were clearly "at sea"--and even adrift--"off the coast of San Diego," as the transcript of the speech notes. But on one important point President Bush's words were prophetic: "Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home."

War on Terror: The Board Game

Consider this an advisory rather than an endorsement:

From the U.K. comes a board game based on the "war on terror." Seriously.

[Thanks to Kevin Iga for the tip.]

Rendition on Trial

Twenty-six Americans, most of whom are believed to be CIA agents, and six Italian intelligence officials have been indicted in Milan for their role in the abduction and extraordinary rendition from Italy of a terrorism suspect, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

It is uncertain whether Italy's government will request the suspects' extradition from the United States. Even if such a request is forthcoming, the U. S. government is almost certain to refuse. However, Italian law permits trials in absentia.

On Wednesday, the European Parliament, following a lengthy investigation, issued a report that accuses the U.K., Germany, Italy, and several other EU member states of allowing their airspace and, in some cases, airports in their territories to be used for approximately 1,200 unlawful CIA flights transporting terrorism suspects in cases of extraordinary rendition.

Four Wars

Phillip Carter, in a piece published in Slate yesterday, breaks down the problems of trying to fight the four different wars in Iraq that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates identified last week. It's a brief essay that is well worth reading.

[Via Washington Monthly.]

Music as a Response to Terrorism

Music often celebrates the heroic and mourns the tragic in the human experience. Occasionally, what is heroic or tragic is also political. Beethoven's Eroica Symphony (Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major), which originally carried the title Bonaparte, is perhaps the most famous example of concert music celebrating the heroic. (According to an early biographer, Beethoven flew into a rage and removed the title when he heard that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor.) Dmitri Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony (Symphony No. 7 in C major), composed during the German siege of Leningrad in World War II, is another excellent example of the celebration of the heroic.

Where there is a text set to music, the political dimensions of a piece of music can be made more explicit. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which employs not only the text of the Latin mass but nine war poems of Wilfred Owen, is a beautiful work--overtly political--that mourns the tragedy of war.

Can music offer a response to terrorism in the post-9/11 world? Two of the foremost American composers have suggested that it can.

Within months of 9/11, the New York Philharmonic commissioned an orchestral work by John Adams. His composition (On the Transmigration of Souls), which incorporated a recording of various voices reading a list of names of victims of the destruction of the World Trade Center and a choral text that included lines taken from handmade flyers left in Manhattan by the families of the missing, was a compelling memorial that one critic compared to Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

More recently, Steve Reich's Daniel Variations has been premiered at the Barbican Theatre in London, Carnegie Hall in New York, and Disney Hall in Los Angeles. I was privileged to attend the West Coast premiere at Disney Hall last night.

Daniel Variations was commissioned to honor the memory of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and killed by militants in Pakistan in 2002. It begins with a text spoken by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) in the the Book of Daniel: "I saw a dream. Images upon my bed and visions in my head frightened me." It is a vision of terror, but against this awful premonition in the first movement, Reich in the second movement presents a surprisingly powerful affirmation expressed in five simple words spoken by Pearl in the tape made by his executioners: "My name is Daniel Pearl."

The music is an important part of what makes the second movement so powerful, but so is the significance of names. Those whom the Nazis sent to concentration camps during World War II were dehumanized by having their names stripped from them; a number tattooed on each prisoner's arm replaced his or her name. Knowing this, we can understand how the simple recitation of Pearl's name in Daniel Variations can be heard as an assertion of his humanity under circumstances of extreme inhumanity.

Grant Gershon, director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, said in a pre-concert talk about the program that the second movement of Daniel Variations left every performer in tears during the first read-through in rehearsals. Most of those in the audience last night were, it seemed, similarly overwhelmed.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Reich's Daniel Variations is that it celebrates the heroic more than it mourns the tragic. In this respect, it offers a life-affirming response to terrorism.

Enriched Uranium To Go

Two cases of attempted smuggling of enriched uranium in the Republic of Georgia that are reported in tomorrow's New York Times have underscored the difficulty of accounting for--and securing--all the fissile material available in Russia and the former Soviet republics at the end of the Cold War. According to the Times, both in 2003 and in 2006, individuals with ties to Russian middlemen were arrested in Georgia while attempting to sell small quantities of uranium. The 100 grams of uranium seized in the January 2006 case, a sample apparently intended to seal a larger deal, was enriched to almost 90 percent U-235. In larger quantities--six to eight kilograms--U-235 at that level of enrichment could be used to make a nuclear weapon.

As Dan Caldwell and I note in Seeking Security in an Insecure World (p. 70), there is enough fissile material worldwide to produce over 100,000 nuclear bombs. A number of states--India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and Iran--are producing more even now. In the former Soviet Union, fissile material is often inadequately secured. Accounting systems are often in such disarray that the theft of stored fissile material can go unnoticed. Corruption among scientists, military officers, and government officials exacerbates the problem. While the United States has helped Russia to "blend down" large quantities of its highly enriched uranium and to secure even more, the two Georgian cases suggest that much more needs to be done.

The 9/11 Commission gave the government of the United States low marks--a "D," to be exact--in the area of preparation for nuclear terrorism. Given the news out of Georgia, it may be difficult to make the case for a higher grade.