It was heralded as a history-making and one hundred year old tradition-breaking event last week when Sir John Sawers, the current Chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), spoke publicly of the role his agency plays. From a theatrical standpoint, his performance was a “smash.” In practical terms, it was a good try at creating a pretense of a new and open MI6. As late as the 1990s official Britain still refused to admit SIS actually existed, whether under that name or its earlier designation as MI6. This was not so much a deception as it was a forelock-tugging recognition of the storied past of the secret institution that so steadfastly favored its anonymity. Tradition has always been important to the “friends,” as the rest of Britain’s foreign affairs establishment called their clandestine cousins. Giving up the long since out-dated thin veneer of purported non-existence was hardly an operational blow to Her Majesty’s pimpernels . Of equal lack of real importance — other than as a public relations device — was Sir John’s forswearing of the use of torture to gain information by his organization or acceptance of such intelligence from less ethical allies. With not a little cynicism he noted torture was also against the law. (Nice of you to mention that, Chief.) As the British are masters of the concept of thinly sliced definition of language, one wonders what aspect of behavior toward gaining deadly time-sensitive information will be put into effect. What “special instance” will come to exist to test this new politically correct civilian intelligence agency interpretation of “Queen’s Regulations.” It may salve the conscience of some in Parliament, press, and the public that their national security is protected by an intelligence service that doesn’t use violent methods of interrogation to gather critical information. Nonetheless, public statements to that effect by the head of their foreign intelligence adds little to the efficacy of the service itself. Sir John knows that well enough as a long-serving foreign affairs civil servant. Beyond the stated ethical base of this exercise is the fact that all of Britain’s security services have received budget increases in the midst of broad defense cutbacks. For political reasons it has become important to burnish MI6′s reputation, which had become the focal point for the post-Blair public dispute over the Secret Intelligence Service inadequate performance on the question of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The new Conservative-led government found a convenient whipping boy in the pejorative characterization of the Tony Blair days of “slavish” support of American assessments. WMD has become the convenient target, and MI6 the ineffectual purveyor of false intelligence. It seems that the Tory/Lib Dem spinmeisters decided SIS would have to lift its skirts to satisfy a never satisfied press and public, which have wearied of Britain’s military involvement in the Middle East. As has been the case so often in the past, the amateur sleuths in the press and politics have missed the important point. MI6 had informants within the Saddam hierarchy. The trouble was that Saddam suspected that fact even though he and his trusted lieutenants didn’t know the identity of the specific agents. Saddam simply used these unknown intelligence adversaries as a conduit in a highly successful campaign of disinformation. By the end of 2002 or early 2003, Baghdad had already shipped to Syria the left-over chemical stores from the first Gulf War that were suspected of existing but never found by the UN teams. This information was picked up by the SIS contacts, but it merely became proof that Iraq still had WMD capacity — which was exactly what Saddam wanted the world to think. It was his view that he would be safe from invasion if it was thought that he had nuclear and/or bio-chemical weapons. Unfortunately for Saddam, fear of his purported WMD did not engender the reaction he expected from London and Washington. The negotiations that the Iraqi leader had expected to be spurred by fear of his WMD worked the opposite way, and the U.S. and Britain attacked. So seven years later the SIS has to play the contrite incompetent to satisfy the new political reality at Downing Street. British intelligence, and to a certain extent its partner in pre-war Iraq, the CIA, have had to acknowledge they were snookered by Saddam with the unwitting assistance of ambitious Iraqi exile leaders, and thus went to war. Which is worse: an intelligence agency that thinks there are weapons of mass destruction when there aren’t any — or intelligence officers who can’t tell the difference between real and fabricated information? British officialdom apparently now believes it doesn’t really matter just so someone of importance promises such errors will never happen again. And that was what Sir John has done: that and present his boyish 55-year-old countenance to the press and public. This was supposed, as the Financial Times put it, to take “a big step towards greater transparency and improved public confidence.” But it doesn’t mean a damn as far as intelligence operations is concerned other than making a difficult job more so. And the best of British luck to you chaps!
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The Old Lady Shows Her Ankles
The Irony of Manifest Destiny : The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy By William Pfaff (Walker & Co., 240 pages, $25) It was hardly necessary, but William Pfaff warns us anyway that some of the unconventional thinking in his new book “may give the reader pause” In fact, giving pause his been his specialty throughout his 50-odd years as a foreign affairs commentator. Pfaff continues to write as a “realist” from his expatriate base in Paris, apparently unconcerned by the reaction he invites from both right and left. His main complaint in The Irony of Manifest Destiny , his ninth book, is that the avowed American objective of exporting universal democracy amounts to a secular utopian gambit. As such, it is an “intellectually unsustainable idea as well as politically impossible to achieve, hence a cause for global concern.” Pfaff’s argument builds on an emerging body of thought from other analysts, including Thomas Corothers’ 2008 Foreign Affairs article and David Reiff’s book At the Point of a Gun . For balance, he acknowledges that he speaks for a minority view. “Republicans generally as well as neoconservatives and a great many people from the liberal camp remain supporters of the idea that the world’s destiny is democracy.” But he is convinced this road leads nowhere. “It is evident,” he writes, “that democracy on the American model is not going to be made to prevail in the contemporary world.” The conduct of U.S. foreign policy, he believes, has been “breathtaking in its ignorance of history” and disastrous for targeted countries as well as the United States itself. Pfaff takes his title from the old slogan of the 19th century when the United States was forcing its coast-to-coast geographical unity. That destiny seemed manifest, at least to Americans. Since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, however, the concept has been “reimagined as a divinely ordained mission to humanity and is now essential to the American myth”. He sketches 250 years of history in somewhat polemical terms, concluding that a Wilsonian global federation of democracies is “unrealistic and has virtually no chance of succeeding”. In recent decades, he says, the idea became more dangerous as it was recast to authorize “aggressive international intervention, and when necessary preemption, to destroy obstacles to the American vision of the future”. Today, he asserts, moral constraints have been relaxed and “nothing is prohibited other than what we prohibit ourselves.” Ethical values, he maintains, “have been subordinated to an ideology of national triumphalism”. Pfaff wondered how we became so deluded, and set about in this book to pinpoint the shift in Western thought that made is possible. He found the fault line in the Enlightenment of 18th century Europe, when religious domination of governance was cast aside in favor of secular utopianism. “The Enlightenment created a Western intellectual and moral structure that was expected to rest on reason, scientific knowledge and secular progress, but in this case [U.S. foreign policy] does not. Perhaps anticipating a critical outcry, Pfaff is quick to acknowledge that this book, probably the last of his long career, is “inevitably the work of sweeping journalistic generalizations.” Enlightenment scholars will be nodding in agreement. Some of his assertions seem sweeping indeed, notably his lack of nuance in his account of the history of Western thought and his failure to support his theses with references from Enlightenment luminaries such as Denis Diderot, or at least Voltaire. Pfaff also seems a bit cavalier in his condemnation of the current U.S. mission, scarcely mentioning the medieval justice systems of the Taliban and what that means for modern Afghans — brutality and suppression of women. He approvingly quotes the late George Kennan as saying the world has its share of unstable governments, “But so what? We are not their keepers. We never will be.”
American feminists to express their outrage in 5..4..3..2..1..1..1.. hey, where are they?… (JPost) When women’s rights activist Wajiha Al-Huwaidar flew out of Saudi Arabia last week for a holiday in Italy with her family, she was hoping for a brief respite from what she describes as the ‘gender apartheid kingdom.’ She wasn’t so lucky. As she left, her husband received an automated SMS text message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing him that his wife, legally considered his ‘dependant’ under Saudi Arabia’s strict gendered guardianship system, had left the country. Al-Huwaidar’s husband received the same text, she learned last week, when she had left Saudi Arabia on another recent trip to Germany. “It is sad how Saudis use technology in a way not intended to be used for,” she told The Media Line. “In Saudi Arabia, technology brings more restrictions and misery! They use it to have more control over people’s lives, especially women.” The Saudi government has gone to great efforts recently to improve the image of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the country’s religious police who are tasked with enforcing the guardianship system.
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Saudi Arabia: Mutaween Go High-Tech in Bid to Keep Women From Escaping, Text Message Sent to Male Guardian if She Tries to Leave Country…
