Spencer Critchley

Originally published at the Huffington Post: Incredibly, among all the debate this week over the release of the Senate torture report, some Americans have been defending torture itself.

Think about that: Americans, openly defending torture.

Their arguments apparently rest on one underlying assumption: that the need to protect ourselves justifies all else.

Former G.W. Bush White House communications director Nicolle Wallace* expressed it forcefully on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday:

“I pray to god that until the end of time, we do whatever we have to do to find out what’s happening.”

“The notion that somehow this makes America less great is asinine and dangerous.”

“That’s what this is about. Does this help us kill people who want to kill us regardless of what we do.”

Here’s something that makes America less great: placing safety above all other values.

In other words, assuming that this should be a nation of cowards.

I don’t for a minute discount the horror of the deaths of 3,000 innocent people on September 11, 2001.

But if we are to use 9/11 as an excuse to throw away our fundamental values — and adopt some of the values of the people who attacked us — we will dishonor those deaths. We will dishonor the deaths and injuries of so many brave people who volunteered to fight terrorism on our behalf. And we will dishonor the ordinary courage of civilians who choose not to panic.

Of course we should be vigilant in defending America. But let’s remember that America is an idea, not just a homeland: a nation built not on accident of birth, but on shared belief in democracy, and all that it means.

If you think we can protect America while abandoning the idea of America, then you don’t understand America very well.

There’s a song that says this is the home of the brave. We sing that song with a lot of feeling.

Let’s act like we mean it.

*Also, incongruously, a former spokeswoman for John McCain, a powerfully eloquent opponent of torture.

Originally published at the Huffington Post: Amid all the frenzy over ebola, terrorism and immigrants, it can start to seem as if fear and loathing are the new normal. They’re not — or not yet, anyway. If you want to regain your faith in human nature (after losing a little more of it first), just compare two small towns: Murrieta, California and Cold Lake, Alberta.

Remember last summer’s the wave of unaccompanied children fleeing Central America? Many feared for their lives because of violent gangs back home.

Here’s a reminder, from a July 3, 2014 CNN report, of how these scared young refugees were met in Murrieta:

In a faceoff Tuesday with three buses carrying the migrants behind screened-off windows, the demonstrators chanted “Go back home!” and “USA” and successfully forced the coaches to leave Murrieta, CNN affiliate KFMB reported…

The protesters, who shouted “Impeach Obama!” and “Deport! Deport!” confronted the buses a day after the town posted a notice on its website: “Murrieta Opposes Illegal Immigrant Arrival.”

Now let’s turn our gaze north to Cold Lake. Last Thursday night, someone broke some of the windows of Cold Lake’s mosque and sprayed “Go Home!” and other hate messages on its walls. It’s not certain there was a relationship, but the incident followed murderous attacks by lone wolf terrorists in Ottawa and near Montreal.

And how did other Cold Lake residents respond? According to the Canadian Press:

By Friday afternoon residents of the city, population 14,000, had posted colourful signs on the front of the mosque saying “You are Home!” and “We stand united as Canadians.”

Then people started showing up with ladders and buckets to clean the paint off.

Every cowardly bigot, in the US, Canada or anywhere, is put to shame by the people of Cold Lake. And there are plenty who should be ashamed — Murrieta isn’t a rare example. Think of the hysteria over another mosque, the one built near Ground Zeroin New York. Think of Cliven Bundy. Or think of the hatred stoked by Fox News and its ilk every day of the week.

Luckily, that hatred isn’t welcome everywhere. As Cold Lake’s mayor, Craig Copeland, put it:

“Cold Lake showed its true stripes today… Cold Lakers came out and supported the Muslim community and by 3:30 in the afternoon the windows were replaced and the graffiti was gone. This is what makes Cold Lake a great place to live.”

It’s what would make the world a great place to live.

The world could use a lot more Cold Lakes.

Originally published at the Huffington Post: Critics of Obama’s war strategy seem to want him to fight a new kind of war with old weapons.

As I described last time, they judge success and failure by traditional measures — in particular, by who controls how much ground.

But in a new kind of war — counterinsurgency — such measures don’t always apply, at least not in the same way.

Think about all the anxiety over how much territory ISIS currently holds, and the calls for U.S. “boots on the ground.”

Yes, boots on the ground might very well win territory faster. But in counterinsurgency, territory is just one dimension among many, and the others can matter more. When and how you control territory can be as important as whether you control it at all.

U.S. war planners learned this lesson, at great cost, in Vietnam. They had to learn it all over again after the invasion of Iraq.

In both cases, they tried to control territory that turned out to be quicksand.

That was because while ground may have been won, the political and social environments were not. In both cases we were fighting on behalf of governments that didn’t have the support of big segments of their country’s populations — they were illegitimate. And so there was no foundation on which to build a lasting victory. Instead, there was “quagmire.”

The result of this painful learning was the emergence of a new doctrine of counterinsurgency, based on American experiences as well as those of colonial powers. The doctrine was established by the U.S. Army – Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published in 2006 (and since updated). It was put into practice in the strategic turnaround known as the Iraq Surge.

The Field Manual recognizes that in fighting an insurgency, strategy can’t just be “enemy-centric,” as it was in the past. It must also be “population-centric:” it must address and fix the social factors that give rise to the insurgency in the first place.

From the Manual:

Western militaries too often… falsely believe that armies trained to win large conventional wars are automatically prepared to win small, conventional ones. In fact, some capabilities required for conventional success — for example, the ability to execute operational maneuver and employ massive firepower — may be of limited utility or even counter-productive in COIN [counterinsurgency] operations. Nonetheless, conventional forces beginning COIN operations often try to use these capabilities to defeat insurgents; they almost always fail. [Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 2006 edition, Introduction, page ii.]

This sounds a lot like the kind of plan for which Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, for example, keep beating the drum.

Instead, says the Manual:

…success in the form of a durable peace requires restoring legitimacy, which, in turn, requires the use of all instruments of national power. A COIN effort cannot achieve lasting success without the HN [host nation] government achieving legitimacy. [ibid, page 39.]

This population-centric approach was behind the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, which provided critical social support for the military surge.

You can see population-centric thinking at work in what President Obama is doing now:

• Insisting that the Iraqi government become more legitimate, in the eyes of both civilians and soldiers
• Pushing Iraq to defend itself as much as possible with its own forces
• Forming an alliance of Sunni Arab states against the Sunni extremists of ISIS.

But the adoption of population-centric strategy doesn’t mean the enemy-centric kind has been discarded (though some feel the U.S. military initially swung too far in that direction). Sometimes you just have to take out the bad guys, the people who will never stop attacking you, no matter how much social good you do.

And we’ve seen that happening, too, first in the killings of Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama Bin Laden, and now in the air strikes on ISIS. There’s something new about these enemy-centric actions, too, though: they aren’t massive, conventional attacks. Instead, they’re targeted, both for their direct effect and to avoid harming and alienating the larger population.

Critics, judging by the old-war measure of success, complain that the air strikes aren’t winning enough territory. I doubt if that’s the point, at least for now. The strikes appear to be aimed at ISIS’ leadership, its infrastructure and its sources of financial support: the oil installations that had been yielding millions of dollars per day.

In addition to his immediate strategy of employing both population- and enemy-centric approaches, Obama has a third element in play, one that works at a larger scale and over a longer time span: energy policy. The main reason we’ve been tangled up for so long with so many illegitimate regimes is, of course, our dependence on their oil. From day one of his administration, reducing that dependence has been one of Obama’s highest priorities. He’s pursuing it, with more success than is often reported, through alternative energy, domestic oil and gas drilling, and conservation — his “all of the above” strategy.

The president isn’t doing this just because he wants to help the environment, although of course that’s part of it. A smarter energy policy also leads towards greater national security, through ending the oil-fueled foreign policy distortions that help spawn the insurgencies we keep having to fight.

Naturally, reasonable people can debate elements of Obama’s strategy — neither fracking nor drones, for example, are uncontroversial — or with the strategy as a whole — nothing, after all, is certain.

But the debate over both the strategy and its elements would be more useful if more people understood their meaning: a new way of fighting a new kind of war.

Critics who call for simplistic solutions like “getting tough” — some go so far as to recommend imitating Vladimir Putin, of all people — are trying to re-fight the wars of the past.

Originally published at the Huffington Post: President Obama has faced a lot of criticism lately for not being “tough enough” on ISIS. Most of it seems to boil down to this: Why won’t he do what we always do?

• Why didn’t he leave (unwanted) forces in Iraq?
• Why didn’t he arm the Syrian rebels?
• Why isn’t he putting boots on the ground?

In other words: Why won’t he double down on the failed strategies of the past?

To be fair, some of the attacks carry more weight than the rest. For example, complaints from military leaders that they aren’t being given enough freedom to get the job done. They may well be right — and I expect they know more about the subject than I do (odd as it may be to hear that from a pundit).

But what if military victory — at least as traditionally defined — is not the primary objective? What if, instead, the goal is to escape the seemingly endless need for military victories — each one ending up so transient and inconclusive?

After all, we’ve been stuck in an entropic cycle of such “victories” (and some defeats) for decades, each one leading to the need for more. To a large extent, it’s been a cycle of support, accommodation and intervention on behalf of governments that can’t, or won’t, take care of their own people. We beat back a threat, and sow the seeds of three new ones.

People who complain that Obama’s foreign policy has no theme might look no further than this: just like he’s always said, it’s time for a change.

• Maybe he could have strong-armed the Iraqi government into accepting an ongoing US military presence. And when would that presence stop being needed?
• Maybe he could have stuck by his “red-line” comment armed the Syrian rebels (because, apparently, not changing your mind has a mystical power that outweighs all others). That would have required arming only the moderates we could trust among a hellacious tangle of those we couldn’t. How well has that worked in the past?
• And yes, maybe he could put boots back on the ground now, and that might lead to the earlier destruction of ISIS. But what then? Long-term occupation, presumably: using military might to keep a lid on a powder keg.

What if, instead, Obama’s objective is to protect the United States from any direct threats, while helping and pushing other countries to protect themselves?

Beginning with the hard work of establishing the only solid foundation of security: legitimacy.

If that were Obama’s goal, the right response to terror might look a lot like what the one we’ve been seeing. In his six years in office, Obama has managed to cripple Al Qaeda, even while he’s been withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. Before attacking ISIS in Iraq, he arranged for a new, more representative Iraqi government. He formed an alliance that for the first time includes Arab states. And the attacks he’s leading are focused on degrading ISIS’ leadership, infrastructure and financing more than seizing control of ground.

It’s almost as if winning and occupying physical territory might not be the only choice for fighting the new, stateless threat of terrorism.

It’s almost as if change actually means change.