Then and Now

Now is Always the Key Time in War Propaganda

Here is a link to Glenn Greenwald's blog post criticizing "now key time" type rhetoric in discussions of the Afghanistan and Iraq war. Some k-ish case defense to accompany a militarism argument perhaps... An excerpt is reproduced below.

Good luck to all at the TOC. Debate well!
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War propaganda from Afghanistan
By Glenn Greenwald, Apr 27, 2010

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The New York Times yesterday excitedly declared that the imminent Battle of Kandahar "has become the make-or-break offensive of the eight-and-half-year [Afghanistan] war" and is "the pivotal test of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy." As Atrios suggests, there never is any such thing as "make-or-break" because we never leave no matter how completely our war and occupation efforts fail. That's what led to the countless Friedman Units of the Iraq War: the endless proclamations that The Next Six Months will be Decisive, only to be repeated at the end of the six-month period of failure as though the prior one never happened.

Just consider what's being said now about how the Kandahar offensive is the "make-or-break" battle of the war and the "pivotal test" for Obama's war strategy by comparing it to what was said a mere two months ago about the now clearly failing assault on Marjah.

Everybody Loves a Winner

Politics debaters take note. Tuesday's New York Times published an article sure to be oft-cited at next weekend's Tournament of Champions.

DOMESTIC POLICY SUCCESSES KEY TO SOFT POWER - HEALTH CARE PROVES ITS TRUE, BUT OBAMA STILL HAS SOMETHING ELSE TO PROVE
Friedman, 4-20-10 (Thomas, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/opinion/21friedman.html?scp=2&sq=friedman&st=cse, New York Times)

In politics and diplomacy, success breeds authority and authority breeds more success. No one ever said it better than Osama bin Laden: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

Have no illusions, the rest of the world was watching our health care debate very closely, waiting to see who would be the strong horse — Obama or his Democratic and Republican health care opponents? At every turn in the debate, America’s enemies and rivals were gauging what the outcome might mean for their own ability to push around an untested U.S. president.
It remains to be seen whether, in the long run, America will be made physically healthier by the bill’s passage. But, in the short run, Obama definitely was made geopolitically healthier.

“When others see the president as a winner or as somebody who has real authority in his own house, it absolutely makes a difference,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said to me in an interview. “All you have to do is look at how many minority or weak coalition governments there are around the world who can’t deliver something big in their own country, but basically just teeter on the edge, because they can’t put together the votes to do anything consequential, because of the divided electorate.” President Obama has had “a divided electorate and was still able to muscle the thing through.”

When President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia spoke by phone with Obama the morning after the health care vote — to finalize the New Start nuclear arms reduction treaty — he began by saying that before discussing nukes, “I want to congratulate you, Mr. President, on the health care vote,” an administration official said. That was not just rank flattery. According to an American negotiator, all throughout the arms talks, which paralleled the health care debate, the Russians kept asking: “Can you actually get this ratified by the Senate” if an arms deal is cut? Winning passage of the health care bill demonstrated to the Russians that Obama could get something hard passed.

Our enemies surely noticed, too. You don’t have to be Machiavelli to believe that the leaders of Iran and Venezuela shared the barely disguised Republican hope that health care would fail and, therefore, Obama’s whole political agenda would be stalled and, therefore, his presidency enfeebled. He would then be a lame duck for the next three years and America would be a lame power.

Given the time and energy and political capital that was spent on health care, “failure would have been unilateral disarmament,” added Gates. “Failure would have badly weakened the president in terms of dealing with others — his ability to do various kinds of national security things. ... You know, people made fun of Madeleine [Albright] for saying it, but I think she was dead on: most of the rest of the world does see us as the ‘indispensable nation.’ ”

Indeed, our allies often complain about a world of too much American power, but they are not stupid. They know that a world of too little American power is one they would enjoy even less. They know that a weak America is like a world with no health insurance — and a lot of pre-existing conditions.

Gen. James Jones, the president’s national security adviser, told me that he recently met with a key NATO counterpart, who concluded a breakfast by congratulating him on the health care vote and pronouncing: “America is back.”

But is it? While Obama’s health care victory prevented a power outage for him, it does not guarantee a power surge. Ultimately, what makes a strong president is a strong country — a country whose underlying economic prowess, balance sheet and innovative capacity enable it to generate and project both military power and what the political scientist Joe Nye calls “soft power” — being an example that others want to emulate.

What matters most now is how Obama uses the political capital that health care’s passage has earned him. I continue to believe that the most important foreign policy issue America faces today is its ability to successfully engage in nation building — nation building at home.

Obama’s success in passing health care and the bounce it has put in his step will be nothing but a sugar high if we can’t get our deficit under control, inspire a new generation of start-ups, upgrade our railroads and Internet and continue to attract the world’s smartest and most energetic immigrants.

An effective, self-confident president with a weak country is nothing more than a bluffer. An effective, self-confident president, though, at least increases the odds of us building a stronger country.

UTNIF Staff updates!

We are pleased to announce some new additions to the UTNIF teaching staff!

John Hines - coach at CPS in Oakland
Jane Munksgaard - University of Pittsburgh
Max Hantel - Georgetown University (former Kinkaid HS debater)


More news to come...!

Sic transit gloria mundi

The March/April issue of Foreign Affairs features a new essay by Niall Ferguson warning of the impending collapse of U.S. primacy in world affairs unless the combined problems of fiscal deficits and military overstretch can be arrested. It is likely that the arguments of Ferguson and others who are similarly inclined will be used by debaters to argue that a reduction in U.S. forces in one or more of the topic countries, rather than compromising U.S. military and security goals, is actually essential to maintaining U.S. hegemony and to preventing the demise of the empire. The painting above, Desolation, from Hudson River school painter Thomas Cole's "The Course of Empire" series depicts an imperial city in decline as nature reclaims the cityspace as its own. The series is used by Ferguson to illustrate his analysis of current U.S. budgetary and security dilemmas.
More development of this argument and others from Professor Ferguson are to be found here.

Gaming Counter insurgency: file in category "strange"

Here is a link (forwarded to the blog by Ricky Garner, the lead instructor of our Summer Survivors program) to an article in Wired about a new videogame developed by University of Texas researchers to train U.S. troops dealing in counter insurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan in "cultural sensitivity."

The Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)is backing UT researchers to create the game which is a "3D sim with scenarios in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Troops play themselves, and interact with Iraqi and Afghan civilians in replications of local villages."

The project uses cultural data provided by the military and the goal is to enter a village, learn about the social structure, identify who is influential, and then "work with the community."

You can read more about the game itself by following the link, but the game is interesting for thinking about this topic in part because there is a significant controversy over the participation of anthropologists and other academics in military efforts to collect and interpret data about the culture of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This controversy about the academic bent of current counter insurgency efforts will be something we will take a closer look at on this blog later. But it is worthwhile to note that criticism of academics and anthropologists who participate in producing knowledge that is used by the military could be useful to debaters on this topic who are interested in interrogating the relationship of our own academic relationship as debaters to the question of what sustains the knowledge base that makes militarism justifiable.

U.S. Military presence in South Korea and Japan: the Toll on Women

Some affirmatives on this topic will hope to side-step the question of U.S. strategic military-economic interests and instead re-focus the question of U.S. military presence around the issue of the effect such deployments have on the regular people in the host country. One issue of great controversy is the role that the military has played in supporting and promoting prostitution in countries where there is a military base. A good affirmative approach might be to insist upon the necessity of narrowing the focus of the discussion over the advantages and disadvantages of U.S. military presence to issues of local concern, rather than questions of "grand strategy." With a claim that "the personal is international" affirmatives might try to reorient the way that judges evaluate the "impact" of U.S. military bases.

The New York Times recently documented the efforts of former sex workers to show that the South Korean and U.S. governments not only tolerated prostitution near U.S. military bases, but that they in fact coordinated and managed the sex trade for decades. "Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military," one of the women, Kim Ae-Ran said in a recent interview.

Anti-base activists have long decried the situation and point to such calculated exploitation as evidence that U.S. bases have more to do with U.S. interests than those of the countries they are alleged to protect.

This book -Sex Among Allies- by Katherine HS Moon, looks to be of interest.

No doubt, Cynthia Enloe's book - Maneuvers - will be of great help to debaters interested in this kind of advocacy. The google books overview of the book is insightful:

"Maneuvers takes readers on a global tour of the sprawling process called "militarization." With her incisive verve and moxie, eminent feminist Cynthia Enloe shows that the people who become militarized are not just the obvious ones--executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles. They are also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies. Militarization is never gender-neutral, Enloe claims: It is a personal and political transformation that relies on ideas about femininity and masculinity. Films that equate action with war, condoms that are designed with a camouflage pattern, fashions that celebrate brass buttons and epaulettes, tomato soup that contains pasta shaped like Star Wars weapons--all of these contribute to militaristic values that mold our culture in both war and peace."

OPCON Transfer to South Korea and Reevaluating U.S. Military Presence

Although this post is the result of some very preliminary investigation, the South Korea part of the topic looks to be a little bit tricky. There has already been a scheduled major reformulation of the U.S. military role in S. Korea. This reformulation will either make Affs strategic because they will benefit from a strong claim that many of the negative's disadvantages are non-unique, or, it will make it tough to find defensible, topical action that doesn't go too far beyond the direction of the status quo.

Currently, the U.S. has wartime Operational Control of South Korean military forces. This arrangement is part of the legacy of the Korean War (1950-1953). Peacetime control of South Korean military forces was returned to South Korea in 1994. Now, the U.S. and South Korea plan to transfer wartime OPCON (Operational Control) of South Korean troops to S. Korea in 2012. The agreement for transfer of this authority was seen to be mutually beneficial for the U.S. and South Korea because it was thought it would enable a realignment of U.S. forces for more strategic flexibility. Rather than being bound to S. Korea, U.S. forces could be recomprised as Rapid Deployment Force that would be authorized and capable of responding to a myriad of threats in the region. At the time the OPCON transfer was agreed upon, South Korean leadership supported the move because it was seen as a restoration of South Korean sovereignty. Some voices in South Korea, though, have expressed concern that 2012 is too soon and might leave South Korea vulnerable to a threat from North Korea. There has been some significant grumbling in South Korea, with calls to slow the process down. But, to date, the U.S. has indicated that OPCON transfer is still on track to happen by 2012.

The likely question debates about S. Korea on this topic will revolve around will be how much reduction in U.S. military presence is too much? Would a reduction in forces seem like a total abandonment of security commitments to South Korea, when the peninsula is still adjusting to the proposed OPCON transfer? Or, has a reduction in U.S. presence already been accounted for by South (and North) Korea and will, in actuality, be of little diplomatic consequence.

Affirmatives may try to claim that OPCON transfer is only a first step toward the establishment of a Rapid Deployment Force and that a true draw down in forces is necessary to solidify a change in the role of troops currently in South Korea. From there, they may attempt to claim an array of advantages based on an effective regional RDF. These advantages will be torn from the pages of the Quadrennial Defense Review and its outline of the emerging U.S. security concerns.

For more information, check out the following:

"Seoul seeks extended U.S. protection." February 4, 2010. Lee Jong-Heon. UPI Asia.
http://www.upiasia.com/Security/2010/02/04/seoul_seeks_extended_us_protection/2951/

"Taking Defense Into Our Own Hands." February 12, 2010. Joong Ang Daily.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2916530

"It's not the right time to discuss OPCON transfer." June, 22, 2009. Bruce Klingner. Heritage Foundation.
http://www.heritage.org/press/commentary/ed062209c.cfm

"Upgrading the South Korea-U.S. Alliance." March 4, 2009. Lee Jae Young. UPI Asia
http://www.upiasia.com/Security/2009/03/04/upgrading_the_south_korea-us_alliance/3491/