The First 90 Days is #1 seller for HBS Press

Note:  if you are looking for information on my efforts to raise awareness of the problems at the Harvard Business School, go to the next posting.

I just got word from Harvard Business School Press that my new book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels is their #1 seller.  Some quotes from the message:

"We were all thrilled that F9D was our #1 book at B&N; Superstores last week."

"Even more spectacular was the fact that for the first time in my memory,  B&N; outsold Amazon on the title (even though F9D was also our #1 book at Amazon).  "

"We're going back to press.. again.. for another 15,000 copies, which will bring us to 66,000 in print... less than four months after publication date."

This is the seventh printing so far.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/25/04; 11:27:24 AM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Institutional Insecurity

Note: if you are looking for my Open Letter to the Alumni and Student of HBS, and associated documents, click here.

Since beginning my efforts to raise awareness of the problems at HBS, I have been reminded, again and again, of the pervasiveness of the culture of fear in the institution.

I have received much-appreciated support from faculty colleagues – tenured and untenured - for surfacing the problems and calling for action to address them. But this support always is delivered covertly, accompanied by comments like the following direct quote from a message I received from a colleague, “People here are very cautious about expressing any dissonant views where they might be heard or seen, because they know the traditions here.”

A surprising number of colleagues are aware of the depth of the problems confronting HBS, but have chosen to engage in self-censorship. One said to me, “the administration is focused on everything but the important problems.” Another said, "look at who the Dean listens to," and pointed out that many of the "wisemen" of the institution had been shunted aside. In both cases, I was quickly told these comments were not for attribution.

With few exceptions, colleagues do not want to meet on the HBS campus. It comes clothed in the cloth of “it’s a beautiful day, let’s take a walk across the bridge.” But it’s clear they are afraid of being implicated in what I’m doing.

Interestingly, this is as true of tenured colleagues as of untenured ones. You would think having tenure at Harvard would give you as much freedom and security as anyone could want. But apparently it doesn’t.

I find this all quite ironic, because research on radical innovation suggests that it cannot take place in such a fear-infused, risk-averse environment. Incremental innovation, the gradual working out of existing approaches to third and fourth order variables, proceeds uninterrupted. Indeed it is encouraged in such circumstances. But the sorts of dramatic breakthroughs that one would hope would be nurtured in this wealthy and well-connected institution are systematically quashed by the fear of not seeking buy in from the powers that be.

As a personal example, my unit head, George Baker, told me that I should not pursue the work that I did on accelerating leadership transitions. If I had heeded that advice, I wouldn't have written The First 90 Days and have a bestselling book today (see posting above).  It makes me wonder how many other colleagues have great ideas that they don't develop for fear of threatening someone's place in the sun or getting marked as "not one of us." It is fascinating, tragic, and completely at odds with what we profess to our students about how to manage organizations.

The institutionalized pattern of bullying behavior [which is, at the core, what it is] is borne of insecurity, on the part of the bullies, the bullied, and the bystanders. It survives, I think, because the University has such poor governance systems (few checks and balances) and so much organizational slack.

 [I have been heartened, incidentally, to see that bullying behavior has been largely eliminated from the elementary school my son attends; bullies and their victims are identified early and receive interventional counselling. I also have a theory that many academic bullies were victims of physical bullying when they were children.]

This bullying behavior also has, unfortunately, been applied to HBS students, and I worry greatly about the lessons it teaches them about the practice of management.

One obvious example of this is the events that  led to the resignation of Harbus editor Nick Will in 2002. The Boston Globe ran a November 13, 2002 editorial on this unfortunate episode titled "Censorship Education."

But the culture of fear exerts a more subtle and pernicious influence on students’ attitudes.  One alumnus sent me a note saying, "when I was a student, fear-of-the-screen and fear-of-hitting-the-screen were the primary driving motivations of students. Conspicuously missing motivations included love of business, desire to be a strong leader, and vision of becoming an "outstanding business leader."

I also received, as another example, a supportive email from a student (not one who is in my course or whom I know) who had read my Open Letter to Alumni and Students of HBS. I appreciated the support, but was somewhat depressed by the way it was couched. “I congratulate you on having the courage and conviction to stand up for what you believe in the face of dominating adversaries like Larry Summers and Dean Clark. I don't think many people would have the guts to do what you're doing.”

I view neither of these people as particularly dominating. In the circumscribed domains in which they operate, they unquestionably exert power. But in my experience, one ends up being bullied if (1) one allows oneself to be or (2) one has no options or allies. I won't and I do. In fact, one of the key lessons in my negotiation course is that options, devotion to creating and sustaining them and, critically, belief that one has them, are fundamental sources of power.

Bullying behavior flows down from the top. The people who rise feed on it. The rest are cowed, leave, or decide to opt out of being actively engaged in the work of the school.  Too many fine people have ended up living, effectively, as isolated outcasts in the institution.

When I teach my leadership transitions programs at Johnson & Johnson, the Chairman and CEO, Bill Weldon, comes at the end of the first day to participate in a dialogue with participants. In his dialogue in my program last week, he said something that really rang true for me in looking at the situation at HBS and Harvard as a whole. He said, “When we look at every significant problem we encounter, the root cause always comes down to a failure of leadership. It may show up as a program that goes off the rails late in the game, or a quality problem at one of our plants, but lack of leadership is always the root cause.” This is as true here as it is there. The difference is, they know it.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/24/04; 2:21:41 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Harbus Publishes My Open Letter to HBS Alumni and Students

The Harbus today published excerpts from my Open Letter to the Alumni and Students of the Harvard Business School.

The full text of the Open letter is in the next posting below.  It includes links to all the relevant articles, as well as the analysis that I did of casewriting trends at HBS.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/22/04; 1:09:41 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

An Open Letter to the Alumni and Students of the Harvard Business School

Note: This has been sent to all members of the Harvard Alumni Board and leaders of the HBS Student Association, as well as to the editors of the Harbus and the Crimson.

I am an associate professor at HBS. (See faculty directory for my information). I am writing with regard to two recent articles published in the Harvard Crimson concerning issues I believe to be of critical importance to preservation of the HBS brand – the composition of faculty at the school, control over tenure process, and control over fundraising.

I believe that these issues, and the way that they are being dealt with by the administration, raise a fundamental question of governance for the school. To what extent should alumni and students be informed about, and participate in, decisions that have potentially significant consequences for the HBS brand and its equities?

Here are the events to date:

1. My original January 26th posting to this blog about HBS, the tenure process and the future of the "delicate experiment"  On Not Getting Tenure at HBS This posting now has 7000 reads. In this posting I raised concerns about trends at the school that I believe are taking HBS away from its traditional focus on practice: 

• Increasing hiring at junior and senior levels of discipline-oriented academics who are strongly incented to publish in academic journals and not to write for practitioners or develop course materials.
• Changes in the HBS tenure process, including indications that President Summers was exerting more direct control, which were exacerbating this trend.
• A dramatic reduction in the percentage of field-based cases, as compared to “library” cases that do not require fieldwork for this analysis.
• A report by the Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education that indicated that the “quality” of participants in HBS’s open enrollment programs was declining.

2. My February 9th posting to this blog summarizing the analysis I did that indicates a major reduction in the percentage of field cases being written at HBS and raises concerns about the reduction in faculty involvement in case writing and associated incentives -  Casewriting Trends at HBS

3. My February 18th posting about information I had received from junior faculty about changes in the HBS tenure process -  Death Knell for the Delicate Experiment at HBS

4. The February 27th article that the Harvard Crimson wrote about my blog which also revealed that Harvard/Summers had imposed a new tenure system on HBS in 2002 - Junior Professor Criticizes HBS on Blog

5. My February 27th posting to this blog in response to the Crimson story - Response to Harvard Crimson Story on HBS Tenure System.

6. My March 1st letter to the Editors of the Crimson in response to their article - HBS Hiring Practices Should be Questioned

7. My February 27th posting to this blog speculating that President Summers might be planning to centralize not just tenure decisions, but also fundraising at Harvard and the implications for HBS-   Centralization of Control at Harvard: What about endowments and fundraising?

8. My March 1st posting to this blog on the experience of being compared to a terrorist by a tenured colleague -  On the Perils of Speaking Truth to Power

9. The March 4th Harvard Crimson article in which the possibility that the HBS and HLS capital campaigns might be folded into the university-wide campaign was revealed - Harvard Plans for Capital Campaign

10. My March 4 posting to this blog on the implications of this for HBS, in which I note that there had apparently been no discussion among the full tenured faculty of this possibility - Harvard Moves to Centralize Fundraising

I also want to reiterate and extend my challenge to the administration to:

• reveal its data that supports its assertion, as cited in the- Harvard Crimson, that there has not been a change in the balance of library vs. field cases,
• respond to my assertion that  faculty involvement in casewriting is declining,
• openly discuss the report that was given to the faculty about the declining quality of executive education participants and what is being done about it,
• be more open about President Summers' moves to centralize control of the tenure process and potentially the fund-raising process and their implications
• involve the alumni more in making these critical decisions about the composition of the faculty and the focus of the school.

Finally, some may question why I am doing this.  The answer is - (1) because I care about the institution and its traditional values and don't want to see HBS become "just another business school," - pursuing the traditional HBS educational model has been the focus of my life for nearly 20 years, and (2) because I can raise these issues with relative safety, and so speak for those who have similiar concerns, but too much to lose to be open about it. 

Please also note that this is not a new set of concerns on my part.  After the faculty was made aware of the problems with Executive Programs by Senior Associate Dean Dick Vietor a couple of years back, I wrote about changes in the ExEd marketplace (see the BizEd article The End of Executive Education as we Know It? below, which I circulated to key faculty and staff) and I tried hard to raise awareness internally. 

Also, after 1999 I was working intensively with Johnson & Johnson, helping them to develop their high potential leadership programs and then facilitating these programs.  This not only brought me into contact with hundreds of practicing managers, it led me to have in-depth discussions with J&J;'s leadership development staff about the way things were going. [This work was the basis for my new book on transition acceleration - The First 90 Days].   When I raised these concerns in a faculty meeting, however, I was roundly and publicly criticized by a tenured colleague for working too closely with J&J.;

Naturally  I was not in a postion to be openly critical about hiring patterns and "academization" of the school because I was coming up for tenure myself.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/15/04; 11:23:19 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [1]

The Case of the Missing Harbus Article

Update: Although I had been told by the journalist that an article would run in the next issue it didn't happen. 

I had been expecting an article about the concerns I have been raising to appear in the Harbus (the student-run newspaper) today (March 8).  One of their journalists interviewed me and indicated that they wanted to do an article. I queried this person on the deadline and was told they wanted to run it today.  Their deadline was Thursday night and I received an email in Thursday afternoon indicating that they would call me for additional clarifications.  But the call never came and the article did not appear. Also a very thin issue, with no editorial.  So it will be interesting to see what happened. 

It may just be that they simply needed more time given the complexity of the issues.  If so, then this is responsible journalism.  I just hope that the Harbus staff is not coming under undue pressure from the administration on this.  There is precedent for this, in particular the events that led to the resignation of Harbus editor Nick Will in 2002.  The Boston Globe ran a November 13, 2002 editorial on this unfortunate episode titled "Censorship Education." The Harvard Crimson also weighed in at the time.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/8/04; 6:22:16 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

The First 90 Days Has Sold 42,000 Copies

My new book on accelerating yourself into a new job, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels has now sold over 42,000 copies in less than six months.  Having it sell 50,000 in a year was really beyond my wildest dreams.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/7/04; 6:27:51 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Harvard Moves to Centralize Fundraising

In a post a few days ago, I worried that President Summers might be undertaking a more ambitious plan for centralization at Harvard that included not just the tenure system, but also fundraising.  I was particularly concerned about the implications for HBS's own fundraising and endowments.  Other business schools, for example, Sloan at MIT, have been taxed very heavily by their respective university administrations.

These fears were confirmed by an article in today's Crimson, Harvard Plans for Capital Campaign.  Here are some key quotes.  Note especially the comments about folding the HBS and HLS campaigns into the larger university campaign.

The campaign will try to attract donors to fund some of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ oft-repeated goals, which include revamping undergraduate education, creating ambitious new science programs, developing the University’s campus of the future in Allston and supporting public service careers...

Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Donella Rapier said that in contrast to the last campaign, which placed more focus on the goals of individual schools, Summers plans to emphasize University-wide and cross-faculty initiatives in his fundraising efforts....

The University-wide campaign might overlap with—or even overshadow—ongoing campaigns at the Harvard Law School (HLS) and HBS. Rapier says those campaigns, with goals of $400 and $500 million, respectively, might be folded into the larger University campaign.

Rapier says a decision has not been made on whether to conduct a targeted campaign centering on a few major goals like science or Allston or whether to pursue a broader, more general campaign instead. While a general campaign would include individual schools’ goals to a greater extent, Harvard and outside fundraisers say its easier to interest the richest donors in initiatives or buildings that figure into Harvard’s long-term priorities.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/4/04; 7:07:34 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [2]

David Kay urges Bush administration to "come clean" on WMD

In an interview with the UK Guardian, David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, and leader of the post-war search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq urged the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people."

The article states that.

Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.

This is a key point.  We need to be sure that both the intelligence community and the political leadership move expeditiously to tackle the problems that led, repectively, to them (1) making a fundamental misread of the existence of WMD in Iraq, and (2) engaging in the selective use of intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/3/04; 10:54:11 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

The First 90 Days Cracks 40K copies

My new book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, has now sold 40K copies in the first 5 months.  Another very nice boost.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/2/04; 3:47:58 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Getting Back to Basics

Well, I had decided to set up a discussion board to let others post their thoughts about what is going on at HBS...and then thought better of it.  It raises a lot of thorny issues concerning what people can and cannot say.  And I'm not is a position to police the postings.

So I hope that someone will consider setting up such a discussion group for people concerned about HBS to engage in a reasoned discussion.  But it can't be me.

It's also time for me to get this blog back to its fundamental purpose - offering commentary on World Events (on Weekdays) and other issues related to my work.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/2/04; 10:20:58 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

On the Perils of Speaking Truth to Power

One small note on the perils of, as John F. Kennedy so aptly put it, "speaking truth to power."

As I was walking to my office from a meeting this morning, I met a tenured colleague, who was obviously angry at me for raising these issues. He put his arm around my shoulders as we walked side by side, and not lightly (we are not close and he has never come anywhere near me before, so it was his way of expressing aggression) and asked me what I was planning to do given that I hadn't been promoted. He then suggested that I might start a terrorist group.  I of course found this somewhat offensive. But it was also ironic, as I was quite literally just coming from a discussion with two senior US Army officers who had sought out my advice about strategy for dealing with the situation in southern Iraq.

Was it Kissinger who said something about academic politics being so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low?

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/1/04; 3:27:09 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [2]

My Letter to the Editors of the Harvard Crimson

 The Harvard Crimson today published my response to their article Junior Professor Criticizes HBS Through Blog as a letter to the Editors.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 3/1/04; 2:39:58 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Centralization of Control at Harvard: What about endowments and fundraising?

If the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers are, under President Summers' impetus, moving to centralize control over the tenure process it raises an interesting question.  Is this part of a larger process of centralization that the President is pushing?  What about endowments and fundraising?  Is that going to become more centralized too?  After all, the alumni of HBS are a rich prize indeed.  They are presently the subject of a $500 million capital campaign.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/27/04; 9:19:46 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [2]

Response to Harvard Crimson Story on HBS Tenure System

The Harvard Crimson ran this article today about the HBS tenure process and my comments about it on this blog. [See also my posting Death Knell for the Delicate Experiment.] Fascinating revelations. It seems that President Summers gained the authority to impose some version of the ad hoc tenure process on HBS in 2002, but the untenured faculty wasn't told anything about it until some very recent meetings. And even then it wasn't clearly flagged as a major change.

From the article:

According to a Mass. Hall spokesperson, a 2002 vote by the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers gave Summers veto power over promotions at all of the University’s schools, including HBS.

The boards instructed Summers to use “some variation of the so-called ad hoc system,” in which academics from outside HBS advise the president on promotions, the spokesperson says.

The imposition of an ad hoc process by President Summers on HBS (I assume he was the driving force here) raises fundamental questions of reliance and fairness for junior faculty at the school. There also are important assertions made by spokesmen for HBS, concerning my analysis of casewriting trends at the school, that are not correct.

Like other junior faculty, I relied on being evaluated according to existing promotion policy - standards and process - as laid out in HBS's "blue book."  Like other junior faculty, I was asked to attend meetings, held by Dean Clark and Senior Associate Dean Srikant Datar since 2002, to review and reinforce the evaluation process that I would go through. No mention was made of these changes at those meetings.

There are other very troubling questions.  Were any untenured faculty told of this informally, perhaps by mentors, and did this give them an advantage?  Also what about the tenured faculty?  I assume they knew, but how did it affect their actions? For example, there was another person in my Unit who was scheduled to come up for evaluation at the same time as me, but the decision was made to delay his case a year.  Why did that happen?

The fact that my tenure case didn't get as far as President Summers desk also is not a salient point.  The internal evaluation of candidates within HBS must have been done in the shadow of what the faculty believed would pass the ad hoc process, and this would have disadvantaged me because of my managerial focus.

In addition, how can such a major change in the way faculty are evaluated happen without key constituencies, especially students and alumni, being informed and consulted?

The article also makes and important, and incorrect assertion about my analysis of case-writing trends at the school. It indicates that the database I used did not include cases that are restricted for internal HBS use.  This is incorrect. As an HBS faculty member, I get access to a version of the Harvard Business School Publishing web site that includes cases that are restricted from use within HBS and I included those in my analysis. And I stand by that analysis. So I challenge the administration to release the data that supports their assertion that field case writing activity has not declined dramatically.

Finally, the article does not address the key question of whether faculty are becoming less involved in casewriting.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/27/04; 8:05:19 AM - Comments [4] Trackback [3]

Intelligence Community Assessments of Terrorist Threats

The recent testimony to Congress by CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Intelligence Agency DIA Director Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby is sobering indeed. See the summary in the Christian Science Monitor, click here.

Here is the key section from the CSM article:

Vice Admiral Jacoby termed Iraq the "latest jihad for Sunni extremists." "Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists where novice recruits develop their skills, junior operatives hone their organizational and planning capabilities, and relations mature between individuals and groups as was the case during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and extremist operations in the Balkans," he said. Jacoby added that in Iraq, "the Sunni population has not decided whether to back the coalition or support the opposition."

So winning those hearts and minds in the Arab/Muslim world is becoming increasingly important - and more dismal. "Support for America has dropped in most of the Muslim world," Jacoby noted. In Morocco, for example, he cited public opinion surveys showing support for the US dropping from 77 percent in 2000 to 27 percent in the spring of last year. In Jordan, it fell from 25 percent in 2002 to 1 percent in May 2003. And in Saudi Arabia, it fell from 63 percent in May of 2000 to 11 percent in October 2003.

So let's review the bidding. 

(1) The war in Iraq and US policy toward the Muslim world has enhanced extremists ability to recruit and offered them a new training ground.  (2) It's bad enough now, but if the Sunnis decide to join to opposition en masse (perhaps in reaction to efforts by the Shia to take control or the Kurds to gain autonomy) it will get a lot worse, (3) we have had some success in cutting off the head of Al Qaeda, but more heads are growing, (4) return to point (1).

So who is going to be held accountable for this mess?

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/25/04; 8:26:43 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [1]

Review of Predictable Surprises - A Nice Boost

I received some nice feedback about my work in the last few days. It concerns a pre-publication review of my next book, Predictable Surprises, by James Lee Witt, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) under President Clinton (see review below,  he agreed to waive the usual anonimity).

Predictable Surprises was coauthored with my colleague Max Bazerman at HBS and will be published this fall.   It documents the reasons why so many serious problems have to become full-blown crises before thy are addressed, looking at the cognitive, organizational and political factors that contribute. The book also lays out a prescriptive framework for recognition, prioritization, and mobilization of looming predictable surprises. (An earlier version of this framework appeared in our HBR article with the same title).

Max and I got interested in the phenomenon independently and then entered into a very productive collaboration to write the book.  I had been thinking about predictable surprises as part of the crisis management section of my Corporate Diplomacy course. For Max, his interest flowed from the work he has been doing on public policy failures, such as auditor independence and overfishing. 

For both of us, the events of September 11th provided the spur to do more work in this area. For example, it felt important to contribute to strengthening our crisis-response capability. So I had been designing and running real-time crisis response simulations, first for HBS, and then for the University as a whole.

But the book became a vehicle for Max and I to try to make an enduring contribution to avoiding situations like September 11th, which we believe was a predictable surprise (we discuss this in detail in the book.)

We contracted for the book with HBS Press, and when the manuscript was complete, they sent it out for academic and practitioner reviews.  The academic reviews were strongly positive and that was great.  But the review from James Lee Witt, someone who is deeply experienced in helping the nation to avoid and deal with crises, really made my week.

Here it is:

"I found this book fascinating; it is a new perspective on planning in preparing.  The more I read the more predictable surprises I began to identify in my mind.  For instance, the Mad Cow incident in Washington State; it was only a matter of time until the United States had an occurrence of Mad Cow Disease.

Now we have a new term by which to describe those inevitable disasters.  Predictable Surprises -- it perfectly captures the sentiment of many disasters.  People look at the fallout from an event and wonder why it could happen, but as you look back you see that there were signs.  People often do not want to see the problems that face them, nor do they want to take a proactive approach to solving problems before they become problems.

Based on my background in Public Safety and Emergency Management I found it especially interesting because we are always trying to encourage people to perform risk assessments that enable them to plan and prepare in an all-hazard manner.  This quote from Chapter 9 captures the spirit of why we plan and prepare for disasters.  "You might wonder why we include crisis organization as a tool for preventing predictable surprises.  The reason is that the act of preparing for crisis contributes to their avoidance... Forearmed is forewarned."

The authors approach to leadership was refreshing.  Leadership is something that I'm frequently asked to speak on and I find it particularly interesting to learn how others perceive leadership.  So often, leadership is not held accountable for making decisions that are an investment in the overall health and longevity of the organization.  Investments that payoff over time are rarely as popular as those that have an immediate ROI.

I found the overall writing style to be easy to read well-organized; it was engaging and I enjoyed the narrative tone.  The examples that the authors chose were helpful because they covered both public and private issues.  They were also issues that resonate with the general public; most people have a basic knowledge of September 11th and Enron.

Yes, I believe that this project belongs on the HBS Press list.  It is a new perspective on leadership and responsible stewardship of not only the government, and CEOs, but anyone who can recognize these patterns."

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/23/04; 4:49:48 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [1]

Death Knell for the Delicate Experiment at HBS

This post is a follow up to my recent post On Not Getting Tenure.  In that post, I described my concerns about what is happening to HBS - in terms of the tenure process and its impact on the composition of the faculty and the focus of its research.  In particular, I am very concerned that HBS is falling prey to forces of academic orthodoxy that would render it increasingly irrelevant as a source of ideas that actually have an impact on business practice. 

Some new information has come to my attention about the HBS promotion process and Harvard President Summers' impact on it that, I think, sounds the death knell for the "delicate experiment" in bridging theory and practice at the school.

As you read what follows, I invite you to consider the following questions:
* If this is not a significant change, why is it happening?
* If it is a significant change, why is it necessary? What is the problem to which this is the answer?
* What incentives (which economists rightly believe are a major influence on behavior) does this create for junior faculty at HBS, in particular their incentives to make investments in insitituion-specific capital such as case writing, course development, and teaching?
* When were these changes implemented and were they applied to this year's tenure candidates?
* Critically - What role should HBS alumni have in influencing decisions that may significantly affect the school's brand equity?

Each year, HBS holds a series of meetings for non-tenured faculty in which the Dean and the Senior Associate Dean responsible for the promotions process reinforce the criteria for promotion, as laid out in HBS' "blue book" of promotions standards, and provide an overview of the process.  According to several people I talked to who attended, the latest meeting had quite a different character from previous ones.  Some good aspects, such as increasing openness about the stages of the process. 

But then a big shift was announced. 

[Interestingly, however, it apparently was not identified by the Dean as a change.  People in the meeting who had been at similiar meetings in previous years recognized it was a significant change, while some of those who hadn't been at a meeting in a prior year thought they were hearing about a long-standing process. If this is indeed the way it was presented, and I have it on good authority that its was, then strikes me as a bit odd that such a major shift can occur and not be explicitly labeled as such.  Of course doing so would raise difficult questions about the fairness of changing the rules when people have been relying on the original set for many years.]

HBS has now added two "outsiders" in critical roles in the process. One is a scholar from outside of Harvard, the other is a tenured faculty member from within Harvard but outside HBS.  I assume that this is the result of negotiations between the Dean of HBS and President Summers, and is a way for HBS to avoid becoming subject to the full-blown ad hoc process.  But the result will be just as damaging.  

Why?  First because the expert from outside Harvard is chosen to be an unimpeachable representative of the "field" in which the candidate for tenure is being evaluated.  After the candidate's internal subcommittee is established, the outside expert briefs them on the state of the field, which of course strongly frames the context in which the candidate is evaluatated.  Critically, it means that the candidate must be placed in a "field" that leading external scholars recognize as a legitimate and important one.  So much for interdisciplinary research.

Second, the person from within Harvard presumably is a product of, and supporter of, the "star" system that has made the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences such a difficult place in which to get tenured.  Will they push HBS in that direction?

These outsiders apparently sit in on key meetings between the Dean of HBS and President Summers.  It would be interesting to know if the field expert from outside Harvard plays a role in identifying key external players, which would mean they would influence who the subcommittee asks to write letters evaluating the candidate's contributions.  It also would be interesting to know the extent to which these people weigh in with their own opinions about the candidate's fitness to be tenured at Harvard, and what impact that will have.

My point: this arrangement places the outsiders in positions to have enormous influence on the process. 

In fact, it is not clear to me that there is a difference, in terms of impact and outcomes, between this and a full blown ad hoc process.  It may simply be a face-saving way for HBS to surrender substantial control over its tenure decisions.

There are also questions about exactly when this process began to be applied to HBS tenure cases.  I have it on good authority that what was described to me as a similar "quasi-ad hoc process" was applied to the first HBS tenure case after President Summers was appointed, that of Brian Hall in the NOM unit.  So there are important issues here, I think, about shifting standards and reliance on the part of junior faculty.

Now place yourself in the position of a young tenure track faculty member at HBS. As a rational actor playing a high stakes game, how would you respond to a realization that the rules of the game have changed in this way?  Would you (1) devote a lot of time to writing cases and practitioner-oriented articles, and developing course materials that outside scholars view as something lower than the lowest-class journal articles or (2) focus on identifying yourself stongly with a discipline, publishing in its journals, and cultivating its leading members?

Tough choice.  And the end of delicate experiment.

[Obviously I'm not privy to the whole story and would be interested in learning more.]

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/18/04; 6:12:41 AM - Comments [2] Trackback [5]

Hoist with our own petard in Iraq? - Iraqi Governing Council Undermining US Plans

The Washington Post has a fascinating article today on the challenge of creating a stable government in Iraq. Iraqi Panel Pivots on US Plan 

The Governing Council, which was strongly shaped by the Bush administration, is top-heavy with exiles and others with lots of ambition, but limited constituencies in Iraq. (See this interesting overview in the Middle East Report). They are, unsurprisingly, trying to hold on to control.  The original administration plan, which involved using caucuses to select a new Iraqi leadership, would have given them a fighting shot at doing that.  But opposition from leading Shia religious leaders led to UN involvement, which has now created the expectation of early elections.  So now the Governing Council wants to hold on to power until the elections, so that they can position themselves politically, influence the rules etc.  The key section of the WP article notes:

"Senior U.S. officials said the council's motives were largely selfish. With elections likely by early next year at the latest, sovereignty could give council members unrivaled political influence in the months before the vote, allowing them to engage in patronage and skew balloting rules.

U.S. officials say that an interim government selected through local caucuses, even if participation is limited, would create a more representative and accountable group of Iraqis than the council, whose members were handpicked by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. The Bush administration hoped that caucuses would allow new political talent to emerge and challenge the clique of former exiles who now effectively control the council.

The council's rejection of the caucuses is emerging as the most serious dispute between members and the occupation authority, placing the Bush administration in the awkward position of criticizing a group it assembled last summer and touted as the "most representative governing body in Iraq's history."

"The Governing Council has been an effective body during this phase, but is it the appropriate body to hand over total sovereignty to?" a senior U.S. official asked. "Is it sufficiently representative? Who is it accountable to? Will it be viewed as legitimate by the Iraqi people?

Is this a predictable surprise? Given the misguided effort by the Pentagon hawks to elevate Chalabi and his allies (and to trust him to provide them with intelligence), I definitely think so.

For those who are interested, the "hoist with his own petard" allusion refers to a passage in Shakespeare's Hamlet:

"For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his owne petar"
                    -- Shakespeare, Hamlet III iv.

Mark Israel notes:
"Hoist" was in Shakespeare's time the past participles of a verb "to hoise", which meant what "to hoist" does now: to lift. A petard (see under "peter out" for the etymology) was an explosive charge detonated by a slowly burning fuse. If the petard went off prematurely, then the sapper (military engineer; Shakespeare's "enginer") who planted it would be hurled into the air by the explosion. (Compare "up" in "to blow up".)

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/17/04; 12:32:01 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Case Writing Trends at HBS

This is a supplement to my post On Not Getting Tenure.

To illustrate the issue confronting HBS with respect to development of case studies, I did some analysis.  I went to the HBSP site (www.harvardbusinessonline.com) and requested a list of cases entered into HBS's case system in the past year (619 entries).  I took the most recent 200 entries and focused just on the cases and not the notes and exercises (leaving 138 data points).  I then categorized these cases according to whether they were (1) field cases (i.e. based on at least some field research) or library/general exerience cases (i.e. written from secondary sources or the author's experience - there are very few of the latter), and (2) written by faculty alone or assisted (often largely written) by a case writer or research assistant.

The results, expressed in percentage terms are

                             Field cases      Library/General Exp.   Total

Faculty only              11%                   16.9%                   27.9%

Assisted                   45.6%                  26.5%                  72.1%

Total                        56.6%                  43.4%                   100%

Then I requested cases from more than 24 months ago, looked at the first 138 and did the same analysis. Here are the results:


                             Field cases      Library/General Exp.   Total

Faculty only              8.5%                   3.5%                   12.0%

Assisted                   65.5%                  22.5%                 88.0%

Total                        73.9%                  26.1%                   100%

Note the major shift that has occurred away from field cases and toward library cases.

A look at the distribution of case writing within the faculty would likely also be instructive. I suspect that a disproportionate share is done by a small (and dwindling) group. It would also be interesting to look at the amount of faculty effort that goes into the library cases. To do these well involves a lot of work, but my experience is that most of it is done by the case writer and, critically, the faculty do not get contact with practicing managers.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/9/04; 11:14:05 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [4]

Proliferating Pakistan: Political Theater at its Worst

A disturbing example of political theater this week.  In response to revelations that Pakistan exported nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran, the government of President Musharraf "discovered" that the lead scientist on the project, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had, without anyone else being aware of it, sold the crown jewels of the program.  Right, and pigs fly.  Dutifully taking the fall, Khan pleaded for understanding on television, and was rewarded with an instant pardon, case closed.  The reality, probably, is that Pakistan exchanged nuclear know-how for missile know-how, at least with North Korea. And the notion that the military and the government were unaware, as opposed to actively involved, just doesn't hold water.

But the Bush administration has apparently given its blessing to this charade. Why? Perhaps in exchange for a free hand to pursue Osama and Company in Northwest Pakistan once the thaw comes.  Capturing or killing Osama just in time for the fall elections would be a huge short-term boost for Bush.  But is it worth the cost of turning a blind eye to the worst kind of nuclear proliferation?  I think not.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/9/04; 1:40:15 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Commissioning the Commission: The Devil is in the Details

Now that the Bush administration has agreed to an independent commission to study the intelligence failures that contributed to the Iraq war, it will be fascinating to watch the maneuvering around the commissioning of the commission. 

In particular, watch out for (1) who gets appointed to it (2) how broad its mandate is, (3) how extensive its powers to secure documents and testimony are, and (4) what the time frame for reporting will be. 

The administration will seek to gain the cover and PR benefits of setting up a commission, while of course seeking to place sympathetic people on it, keep the mandate narrow, limit access to evidence, and have the report come out after the election. 

The Democrats will of course push in the the opposite direction. 

The battle will partly get played out in the media, so stay tuned.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/2/04; 2:37:34 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Thanks - Tenure Decision at HBS

I have received many supportive messages from people concerning the decision by HBS not to tenure me (see my previous posting On Not Getting Tenure/Academic Parasitism at HBS). I very much appreciate them.  I'm absolutely fine and in fact excited about the possibilities going forward.

But I do remain very concerned about the future of HBS as an institution that makes a distinctive contribution in the field of business.  It would be a great loss if HBS became just another business school.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/2/04; 1:34:55 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Scapegoating the Intelligence Community/Asking the Wrong Question

Now that the full magnitude of our "mistake" in assessing the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has become clear, pressure is growing concerning what to do about this failure.

The key question is the extent to which the failure occurred because of (1) a weakness in intelligence gathering and analysis, and/or (2) the misuse of available intelligence by our political leadership.

Last week in his Senate testimony, chief arms inspector David Kay stated that they (the intelligence community) were wrong on almost everything and called for an independent inquiry. The Bush administration has been reticent about approving such a probe, presumably becuase they are concerned that the investigation could end up focusing on the misuse of available intelligence, as much as on its poor quality.

In the meantime, the effort to spin the investigation is in full swing.  See for example Charles Krauthammer's lastest WP column. 

The real question here is not whether the CIA was wrong about Iraq's WMD, it was whether or not intelligence suggested that there was a threat that was worth going to war over.  While the CIA may have been wrong about the WMD, they were not the ones that were pushing for regime change in Iraq. The impetus of that came from the Pentagon, using the WMD intelligence as a justification.  The CIA believed, correctly, that Hussein was contained and deterred.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 1/31/04; 4:22:38 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

The Opportunity Cost of the Iraq War, Revisited

Back in September, I posted some thoughts about the opportunity cost of the Iraq war, Opportunity Lost: How History Should Judge Bush. In that posting, I stated that:

"The concept of opportunity cost kept running through my mind as I was digesting the President's speech on Iraq. The idea is a simple, but powerful one: when thinking about a choice about how to allocate some scarce resource, say for the sake of argument $87 billion, you should focus on the opportunities you will give up by going down a certain path.

What else might we have spent this vast sum of money on if we were going to thoughtfully dedicate it to enhancing our national security, never mind to education or public health? Would it have helped to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan? Would it have helped our intelligence services focus on the growing terrorist menace in southern Asia? Would it have helped to train first responders in American cities to deal with chemical or biological weapons attacks?

I say "would," of course, because this is water under the bridge. We are committed (entangled? ensnared?) in Iraq and the President rightly says we can't afford to lose. So we will go forward and spend precious lives and treasure."

As it becomes increasingly obvious that "we was had" on Iraq, because we had faulty intelligence, or manipulative interpretation of it by the administration, or both, the  magnitude of these costs are  becoming clearer.  Of particular important are the comment of General Abizaid, the head of the Iraq operation, about the challenges posed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as reported in The New York Times. U.S. concerned by extremists in Pakistan, Saudi.

The United States must confront broader strategic problems posed by Islamic extremists in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in addition to stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, the head of the U.S. military's Central Command said on Thursday.

"Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are involved in their own fight against extremists that is crucial to the ability of their nations to maintain control of the internal situation," Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the region, told reporters.

 Abizaid said the two "most immediate problems" in what U.S. officials call the global war on terrorism are bringing stability to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'd also tell you that two broader strategic problems that we have to deal with, that must be dealt with in a broad range, happen to be Pakistan and Saudi Arabia," Abizaid added.

There are real concerns, for example, about whether Pakistan will permit the US to conduct operations against the Taliban in the spring.  See also my previous posting,The Problem with Pakistan.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 1/30/04; 10:30:47 AM - Comments [3] Trackback [0]

On Not Getting Tenure at HBS

I'm back after a long hiatus. Career developments were a major factor.  Just before Thanksgiving, I learned that I would not be getting tenure at the Harvard Business School. Tenure is an up-or-out system, and so I needed to regroup and start thinking about what I wanted to do with my life after the end of the academic year. (more on this later).

Perhaps I am flattering myself, but I think my case raises some issues about the future of HBS and of business school in general. Over the past few years, I have become increasingly concerned about these questions:

* To what extent are business schools producing insights of use to practicing manager?
* Is the investment that they are making in research justified in terms of results? - a straightforward ROI assessment?
* Most critically: Is the HBS brand at risk because of what is happening there?

I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little no, and very much so. I further believe that this is the result of the "capture" of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly HBS) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them. So here is what happened, as well as my assessment of what is going on inside HBS.

Background

Not getting tenure was of course a big disappointment. It also came as somewhat of a surprise.( see my info.) (I'm not trying to brag here, just give an indication of why getting tenure was plausible.)

Since coming to HBS in 1996, I have authored or co-authored five books and numerous articles and cases.  My work has been received very well by my primary audiences - business professionals and educators (I'm admittedly not a traditional academic).  My two negotiation books, Breakthrough International Negotiation and Breakthrough Business Negotiation won the major practitioner-awarded book prize (from the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution) in the negotiation/dispute resolution field in 2001 and 2002 respectively. 

My first, co-authored, book on accelerating oneself into a new leadership role, Right From the Start, has sold over 30,000 copies since 1999 and helped spawn a consulting/coaching industry focusing on executive "on-boarding " and "assimilation." My new book, The First 90 Days: Citical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, is on the subject of getting up to speed fast in a new job. It has sold 40,000 copies in the five months since publication, and was on the Businessweek best seller list in December. 

The companion interactive performance support tool that I developed, called "Leadership Transitions" is HBS Publishing's second best selling e-learning product (after their flagship Harvard Managementor). It has grossed over $1 million in revenue and has been licensed by 40 major corporations.  Here too, I  have helped launch a new movement in the Human Resources and Leadership Development communities to focus on helping managers get up to speed in their new roles. 

My next book, Predictable Surprises, which I co-authored with my colleague Max Bazerman at HBS, has also received strong pre-publication reviews (including one from James Lee Witt, who was the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration in the Clinton Administration, click here  to read it.)

Beyond this, I developed a two-section elective course at HBS, called "Corporate Diplomacy," from scratch (courses at HBS are often "inherited" i.e. passed from the original developers to younger faculty for some additional development/revitalization. It's much hard to do it from a standing start) to the point where 160 or so second year students signed up for it each year; developed and led the executive program HBS does for the World Bank; helped prepare Harvard and HBS to better deal with crises, etc. etc. So I had reason to hope that HBS would recognize and reward my contributions, and I was a bit surprised when they didn't.  Which gets me to how my tenure case fits into broader trends at HBS.

Relevance vs. Respectability

In the six years that I have been at HBS, I have observed a battle going on between believers in the importance of managerial relevance and upholders of academic respectability. The  former is losing.  The right balance is hard to strike in professional schools, especially those situated in leading research universities.  Go too far in the direction of practice, and you become a consulting/training company.  Go too far in the direction of academic respectability, and you become irrelevant.  The latter has been the fate of many of the business schools at leading universities - they rarely produce cutting-edge thinking that impacts business practice (take a look at the top 250 books on management at BarnesandNoble.com and note how few are written by business school academics.)  Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, for example, was apparently not renewed in his postion by Stanford.

For a long time, the main exception to this has been HBS, which was defined at its founding as a "delicate experiment" in bridging theory and practice. Since its founding, HBS has been a source of innovative business thinking, and there are faculty who are continue to turn out good stuff - e.g. Jay Lorsch, Clay Christensen, Robert Kaplan, and Joe Badaracco.  But my sense is that the pipeline for ideas that impact business is going dry at the school.  Also the school is confronting troubling trends - in terms of increasing "capture" of the school by discipline-oriented academics, reductions in the quality of executive program participants, and declining involvement of faculty in developing cases studies - the school's bread and butter - that I believe point to deeper problems.  The cadre of people genuinely focusing on general management issues is approaching zero in membership.

Capture by the Disciplines

The move to more "systematic" management education began in the late 1950's with reports commissioned by the Ford and Carnegie foundations that criticized the vocational focus of business schools.  Among the key recommendations was a move to embrace applied mathematics, economics, and behavioral science as the foundations of a management education. This approach, which reduced the tension between more academic arts and sciences faculties and their counterparts in professional schools, took hold and reshaped business education. 

[Let me say that research on business issues unquestionably needs to be conducted rigorously and systematically, so long as relevance and business practice remain the focus of the research efforts and field research predominiates. As a doctoral student at HBS I was taught by By Barnes and others to give primacy to the phenomena - to focus on issue of importance to managers - and not to engage in sterile displays of adeptness with tools such as  mathematical modelling and statistical analysis. This phenomenon-focused approach is very much the tradition of HBS - I was particularly influenced by Fritz Roethlisberger's The Elusive Phenomenon which advised business researchers to "wade into the swamp" and grapple with the phenomenon of interest, then bring to bear the tools that would best yield insight and not to be someone with a hammer casting about for nails.]

HBS embraced much of what was good about this reform effort, while retaining its distinctive identify and approach. From its founding until the late 1970's, HBS operated according to its own idiosyncratic knowledge creation model.  It focused on the case method and strongly valued teaching and connection with practice. Critically, it encouraged interdisciplinary research and trained many of its own faculty (including people with a lot of business experience) in the HBS Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program to conduct such research. 

But the practice of training your own faculty is anathema at most academic institutions. Instead, the academy is organized into "disciplines" (economics, psychology). Most academics have primary allegiance to their disciplines and associated reference communities, and not the particular institutions in which they reside. They seek to publish in their discipline's leading refereed journals, attend its conferences, etc. One important way you gain tatus in the academic disciplines is by having your Ph.D graduates "seeded" into other institutions.

But this means that discipline-oriented academics have little incentive to make investments in "institution-specific capital" like teaching, developing courses, and writing case studies. [At some institutions, an award for good teaching is fatal in terms of tenure.]

Beginning in the early 1980's HBS's traditional model came under increasing attack.  As I understand it, soon after John McArthur was appointed Dean (he was Dean from 1980 to 1995), then Harvard President Derek Bok began pushing very hard to increase the academic respectability of HBS, using the club of the President's control of the tenure process. Unlike the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Harvard, HBS had not been subject to Harvard's "ad hoc" process - in which the President appoints an independent committee to review all tenure appointments and to treat each tenure decision as an open search for the best candidate in the world for that position. 

The result of the ad hoc process has been very few internal promotions within Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) and the resulting "star" culture. (The standing joke is that young faculty in the GSAS are treated by their senior colleagues as if they were victims of a fatal childhood disease - kindly, but with the expectation that they will not be around for very long). This promotion system works reasonably well in the humanities and sciences, but is devastating in professional schools because it doesn't reward connections with, or contributions to practice.

[The Kennedy School, for example, is subject to the ad hoc process and has a reputation for eating its young. It has ended up focusing on policy analysis and formulation and offers relatively little in terms of preparing people to be practicing politicians or public managers. My understanding is that surprisingly few of its two-year Masters in Public Policy program students (who get a high octane analytical education) end up in high places. The graduates of the one-year Mid-career Masters program do much better, but they have already proven their leadership ability. They are often are frustrated by the analytical/policy orientation of KSG.]

The result of President Bok's pressure was that HBS began to hire more "outsiders," respected business scholars from leading research institutions.  This set in motion a process of increasing "capture" of HBS by discipline-oriented academics and strengthened the forces taking the school in the direction of academic respectability. This process of capture has continued through the administration of the current Dean, Kim Clark (himself an economist). It has accelerated recently because the school has reached a "tipping point" in terms of the declining influence of the old guard and the rise of the young academics. The result has been increasing hiring of leading scholars into tenured positions from outside HBS, as well as much more hiring of newly minted Ph.D. from the disciplines (principally economics, psychology, and sociology) into tenure track positions rather than from inter-disciplinary business doctoral programs.

 [This also puts the young research faculty in the unenviable position of having to teach a very tough audience, HBS MBAs, without having accumulated much real-world experience.]

The discipline-oriented academics also have "captured" HBS's doctoral programs, re-orienting them strongly to the training of young discipline-focused research stars. The result is that HBS is looking more and more like all the other business schools with, I believe, associated negative results. The fundamental principle of business strategy, after all, is to cultivate and sustain competitive advantage. So it makes little sense to become like everyone else.

Recently, President Summers has added to the pressure on the school to become more academic in its orientation There are recent developments on this, click here to view new posting . I have it on good authority that he made it clear more than a year ago that he would no longer accept letters in support of tenure cases from faculty in non-first tier schools. This is a big problem for those at HBS who come up for tenure on the basis of interdisciplinary research, course development, and practitioner-oriented work. The people in other top-tier schools are essentially always discipline-centric research scholars. I also have it on good authority that President Summers convened the first "quasi-ad hoc" committee to look at the only tenure case that HBS put forward.  [This year there were four people up for tenure at HBS myself, Das Narayandas, V.G. Narayanan, and Stefan Thomke. The other three made it.]

Certain species of birds practice what is known as "brood parasitism" by laying their eggs in the nests of birds of other species. As I see it, the capture of HBS is the academic equivalent of brood parasitism - the discipline oriented academics feeding on the brand that the practitioner-oriented people in the school labored so hard to build. The HBS brand is very strong and it can be fed on for a long time before getting tarnished. The discipline-oriented academics that are hired at business schools may benefit from the higher salaries and research support that they get compared to their colleagues in Economics and Psychology Departments, and it certainly mean more job openings for them. But I have to believe that the "capture" of HBS and other business schools is a negative development in terms of the creation of new knowledge about the theory and practice of management.

Declining Quality of Executive Program Participants

The increasing influence of the "young academics" is just one of several influences that I believe are taking HBS away from a sufficiently close connection to the practice of management. There also are issues concerning who comes to HBS's executive programs. In an HBS faculty meeting a year or so ago, the then Senior Associate Dean in charge of Executive Programs, Dick Vietor, gave a sobering presentation on the state of HBS's open enrollment executive program offerings. The core message of the presentation was that HBS was attracting fewer and fewer managers from leading US companies in growth industries and more from (1) non-leading companies in stagnant industries, and (2) international participants who continued to see the HBS brand as very attractive.

[What I heard in this presentation reinforced observations that I had made while working with leading companies, who increasingly do not send their people to business schools. In response, I wrote an article called   The End of Executive Education as We Know It? that was published in BizEd, a trade magazine for the executive education industry.]

To me, this was a clear warning sign of creeping erosion of the HBS brand. I also think it has potentially dire consequences for innovation and knowledge creation at the school - if professors don't connect with the best practitioners, it becomes hard for them to learn, develop and test new ideas that influence practice.  

Declining Faculty Involvement in Development of Case Studies 

The other primary way that HBS has kept its faculty abreast of real-world practice is through the writing of case studies on companies. Here too I believe there are major problems.  Many of the discipline-oriented tenure-track faculty don't appear to want to invest much time in writing cases. Why? Because it's an institution-specific investment (and a very time consuming one) that takes them away from their research and ability to publish in leading journals. Journal publishing is what they rightly care about, because it will get them promoted within their disciplines and gives them options should things not work out at HBS. When they do write cases, they prefer to do "library cases" (based on secondary sources), rather than field cases (based on direct contact with companies and managers.)

The result is, I believe, a vicious cycle of increasing isolation of the school from practice. HBS has compensated, to some degree, by hiring professional case writers, allowing tenure track faculty to increasingly delegate the field research to them and to research assistants.. But this simply enables the isolation of faculty from practice to continue and grow. 

To see that this is an issue, one need only search on the www.harvardbusinessonline.com site for cases written in the past year and see how many of them are (1) library cases (i.e.cases written from secondary sources) rather than field cases and (2) "co-authored" by RAs or full time case writers who often do essentially all of the field research and most of the writing. I did this analysis. To view the results, click here. This is very different than the traditional pattern.  

Lack of Involvement by HBS Alumni in Key Decisions  

I also think there are troubling governance questions here, especially given that other major institutions, corporations and government, are confronting governance crises. I think that the HBS alumni should be very concerned about the strength of the HBS brand. But the faculty is really not subject to much oversight concerning these major changes in direction. I suspect that HBS's alumni are unaware of the profound changes that are going on at the school. Yet they are currently the subject of a $500 million capital campaign. But my sense is that the alumni little more than superficial collective oversight or voice in the institution.    

The Tenure Process at HBS  

My tenure case occurred in the context of these changes.  After doing my Ph.D at HBS, I went to the Kennedy School in 1991. I was hired back by HBS in 1996 into what was then a small Negotiation Unit that had developed an innovative and well received new first year required course in negotiation. In 1999 this unit, which was led by Jim Sebenius, was merged with a larger unit, Organizations and Markets, led by Professor George Baker, one of the leading "young academics" at HBS.

[Professor Baker also has led the charge to increase the academic respectability of HBS Doctoral programs. He is a fine economist who, I believe, belongs in a fine economics department, and not a business school. (see his info, click on "publications" to get a sense of his contributions)]

This unit then hired two leading scholars in economics and psychology from the outside, focused on hiring young research stars, and the ascendancy of discipline-oriented academics within the combined unit was complete.

[The required first year negotiation course, incidentally, progressively fell in student ratings to very low levels, and I saw some of the young faculty in my unit suffer terribly by trying to teach it without the requisite training and experience.]

It was in this context that I came up for tenure.

The way the tenure process works is an important factor here. It's a process that looks impartial and rigorous on the surface, but that is shot through with discretion and provides candidates with no chance to respond to their critics. The candidate submits a personal statement outlining his or her accomplishments and plans, along with a supporting package of written materials. The Dean appoints a subcommittee of three tenured faculty to review the case and make recommendations to the tenured faculty as a whole.. The candidate being evaluated does not get to know who is chosen for this subcommittee. 

The subcommittee solicits written evaluations from (1) all the tenured faculty in the candidates unit (the unit's opinion is critical), (2) from others inside the school, and (3) from selected outsiders. The candidate can make recommendations about who should evaluate their case, but the decision is up to the subcommittee. The subcommittee also decides which pieces of the candidates written materials get sent to reviewers. The candidate does not get to know who is asked to write letters, what materials they are sent for evaluation, or what their criticisms are.  The subcommittee reviews the letters and comes to a conclusion about the candidate. If positive, it goes on to the full tenured faculty for debate and ratification, and then to the Dean who has the final say over who gets recommended to the President to be granted tenure (the President has final say). If negative, the candidate is informed, and advised to withdraw.

In my case, most of the senior faculty in my unit, the discipline-oriented academics, were not supportive of my case. My understanding is that my work on negotiation was sent to several leading research scholars in the field outside of HBS. In the field of negotiation, the leading scholars are psychologists who study negotiation by doing experiments with highly simplified situations. My work in negotiation, which focuses on a systems view, is a critique of theirs, so unsurprisingly they hated it. 

Within HBS, select tenured faculty from outside my unit were also asked to evaluate aspects of my case. But I was told by one tenured faculty member that the choice of who was asked to read my material in his unit was "not an obvious one," the implication being that the person was not the best equipped to evaluate my case.  This is one example of how the tenure process is subject to a great deal discretion on the part of members of the subcommittee (who are themselves selected by the Dean).

The process also is influenced by factional politics within the school. I've concluded that you have to have a very strong patron in your unit supporting your case, or you are fighting an uphill battle. And I wonder if this is a system that truly fosters excellence. I also know that the letters that came back from non-psychologists in the field of negotiation and from practitioners and educators were outstandingly supportive. But my case was finished.

At this point, I was told by the Senior Associate Dean who manages the promotions process, Srikant Datar (an outside tenure hire from Stanford) that the subcommittee had recommended that my case not go forward. He also sketched out the main criticisms of my case. Candidates in this situation are offered the chance to withdraw their case, in part to save them the embarrassment of being formally denied tenure (although many outside Harvard would consider such a denial a badge of honor) but, I think more importantly, so the school can avoid having to take contentious cases to the full tenured faculty.

I informed my Unit Head, George Baker, of the discussion and told him I was inclined to go forward to the full tenured faculty. He had advised me not to do my work on leadership transitions. He had read my course development materials but not indicated that he thought they were substandard. He had never come to one of my classes to observe me teaching. And when there had been contention about what do to do with my case, he and the former head of the Negotiation unit that I had joined, Jim Sebenius, had been asked to read the assessment letters in my file (with identifying information removed). Jim strongly advocated for my case and Professor Baker killed it.

Now he advised me to withdraw my case, rather than go to the full tenured faculty, saying, "there are cases where this might make a difference, but yours is not one of them." Concluding I had little to lose, and hoping that a hearing before the entire tenured faculty might lead to some discussion about the future of the school, I did something I'm sure they haven't seen done before. Not only did I not withdraw (candidates have a right to a hearing before the full tenured faculty), I wrote a detailed rebuttal and asked that it be appended to the report that the subcommittee would send to the full tenured faculty.

This request was denied by Professor Datar, and I was told by another tenured faculty member that the subcommittee would now write a "brief" that would highlight the negative aspects of my case to support their recommendation to the full tenured faculty. I of course have no idea what actually went on the full faculty meeting concerning my case.

I made a final appeal directly to the Dean, referencing HBS's written promotion standards and restating my contributions with reference to them. But to no avail. Just before Thanksgiving, I got the call from the Dean indicating that he would not recommend to President Summers that I be tenured at HBS.

And that was that. As I mentioned previously, the other three people up this year -  Narayandas, Naryanan, and Thomke - made it.

Moving Forward

Having been at Harvard since 1985, first as a doctoral student, then as faculty, it is of course quite wrenching to be leaving. But I am endeavoring to see it as a opportunity for some self renewal.  Fortunately there is a lot of interest in my The First 90 Days book and that helps. I'm quite glad that I decided to push on with this work, which I think will help a lot of practicing managers. And I'm hopeful that I will be able to continue teaching great students.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 1/26/04; 12:17:59 PM - Comments [16] Trackback [13]

The End of Executive Education as We Know it?

[An edited version of this article appeared last year in BizEd, a trade magazine for people in the executive education industry.  I received strong endorsement for the core argument from a number of heads of executive development in leading corporations.]

Are business school executive programs doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs? As I work with companies on leadership development and observe emerging trends, I am increasingly asking myself that question. The vagaries of the business cycle no doubt are contributing to a tightening of corporate training budgets. The events of September 11 unquestionably had a major short-term impact on executive program enrollment.

But these events have masked a more profound shift in the core approaches leading companies are adopting to develop their management talent. Business school open enrollment programs have essentially no place in the emerging corporate management development paradigm, as companies are increasingly turning to more integrated, in-house approaches to leadership development. Even more disturbing, the prospects for business schools to create customized executive programs are clouded at best, as their offerings become decreasingly relevant to corporate needs.

The bottom line is that business schools need to take a hard look at who their customers are, and what the value proposition is that they provide those customers. Otherwise, business school executive programs may find themselves on the way to extinction.

Accelerating Leadership Transitions

What gives me standing to make such bold claims? For the past three years I have been working closely with leading companies helping them to create processes for accelerating the transitions of high potential leaders into critical positions.

As one example, consider a Leadership Transitions process that I developed for vice president-level individuals at a Fortune 100 company. In the late 1990’s, top management at the company in question was very concerned, as were many successful large “old economy” companies, about losing “the war for talent.”  The company had suffered numerous “regrettable losses” of high potential leaders and sought me out to help reverse the trend.

I supported the creation of a new leadership development process and it given to over 500 high potential leaders. I have subsequently worked with numerous other large corporations to help them implement similar processes. The results illustrate some key trends and the consequent challenges for business school executive education.

My Leadership Transitions process introduces participants to a common framework and language for accelerating transitions into new senior management positions. I employ a blended approach: Participants familiarize themselves with a Leadership Transitions on-line performance support tool I developed by doing some pre-work. After the face-to-face portion of the process they use the same tool to manage transitions to new positions—their own and those of their direct reports.  Some of those entering critical positions become candidates for what I call “Acceleration Coaching,” a short term, business-focused intervention that builds on the tools and concepts developed in the face-to-face session. The program portion of the process is just two days long and is intensely interactive. Participants work on their own transitions, interspaced with case discussions and short lectures.  

Emerging Trends

The Leadership Transitions process illustrates four trends I see under way in a wider range of leading companies. Each of these trends poses significant challenges for business school executive programs:

From programs to integrated processes – Leading companies are increasingly moving away from set-piece programs toward integrated development processes consisting of relatively short “niblets” of content (maximum one week for mid-level people, maximum two to three days for more senior people, one day for executives). This content is delivered in group settings, interspersed with structured progression through critical developmental positions, coaching support, and action learning assignments. The challenge for business school executive programs is obvious: It is unclear how their programmatic view of the world fits into these sorts of more free-flowing, integrated development processes.  When leading companies turn to outsiders to help support these processes, they are more likely to contract with workplace learning organizations such as Executive Development Associations and the Forum Group than with business schools.

From transformational experiences to JIT performance support – A related trend is the move away from longer, “transformational” developmental programs to providing just-in-time support for key “passages” in the lives of managers. This trend has received substantial impetus from the work of Ram Charan and his colleagues in their book The Leadership Pipeline.  I see more and more companies are explicitly focusing development efforts on the key transitions from technical contributor to first-time manager, from manager to manager of managers, from functional leader to general manager, and from general manager to enterprise manager. In this case, the challenge for business schools is that few existing executive programs are explicitly tailored to provide performance support for key managerial passages such as these.

From face-to-face to blended delivery – It’s now passé to say that “the Internet changes everything,” but the impact on executive development is just beginning to be felt. The early focus on the development of online programs is morphing into the adoption of a blended approach that combines online pre-work with intersession assignments and performance support tool takeaways.

In the work I do, for example, the Leadership Transitions online performance support tool is a central component of the process; participants are introduced to it before the face-to-face session by doing and submitting some pre-work to me via email. After the two-day session tool allows participants to refresh their understanding of key concepts. Acceleration coaches employ the same framework and tool when they work with new leaders and “graduates” of the process use it to manage their new direct reports. Given that most leading business school core expertise is in face-to-face teaching, the move to blended delivery may be a disruptive technology with which business schools will have to contend.

From conceptual teaching to action learning – Leading companies are strongly embracing action learning in designing their key leadership development initiatives. While conceptual readings and/or expert presentations may be provided at the outset, the focus quickly shifts to collective efforts to solve critical business problems. Increasingly they are adopting a blended approach to action learning. This means combining shorter face-to-face group sessions with more extended individual and group work facilitated through the Web.

The problem with this approach, however, is that the focus on the customized business problem that is inherent in the action learning approach is potentially at odds with the standardization and scale economies that traditionally have underpinned business school executive programs. Once again, traditional business school curricula are losing their relevance to the needs of executive leadership development within today’s corporations.

Listening to the Voice of Which Customer?

Like all trends, the four described above will take time to fully take root and spread broadly. At present, they are emerging in select leading companies. But the medium-term implications for business school executive programs are potentially dire. If leading companies cease to rely on business school programs—open enrollment or customized—to develop their people, then what happens? One potential answer is that business schools will increasingly fill their programs with people from non-leading companies or increase international participation in their programs. But this of course reduces the ability of faculty to learn from participants and stay on the leading edge, potentially creating a death spiral from which it may be difficult, if not impossible, for business schools to recover. It also progressively undercuts a core selling point for these programs—the opportunity for students and business school faculty to interact with high-potential peers.

The value proposition of traditional open enrollment programs rests on three legs: concepts, connections, and credentialization. And to their credit, in good programs, participants do come away having learned much of value. Many participants are also attracted by the opportunity to build their professional networks and even to identify future job opportunities. For some who attend programs at leading schools the credentialization benefits are important, although many of these people would prefer Executive MBAs to certificate-granting programs.

But note that some of the benefits that accrue to the individuals attending these programs actually tend to be negatives from the point of view of companies. The fact that managers are networking at a business school executive program is a minus for corporations, because such networking can cause them to lose good people. Likewise credentialization tends to make people more mobile, which is not desirable from the company point of view. This is another reason why leading companies also are undertaking much more aggressive efforts to recruit high potential business undergrads and given them customized training, rather than hiring MBAs—more bad news for business schools.

The implication is that companies need to be sold on business school executive programs on the basis of business impact, not in terms of networking or credentialization. Companies would almost always prefer customized, company-focused training to open enrollment programs. And now, given the movement in leading companies toward integrated development processes, just-in-time performance support, blended delivery, and action learning, the traditional competitive advantages of business schools are very much in danger of becoming obsolete.

Whither Business School Executive Programs?

Suppose that the trends that I have described do merge into a new paradigm of corporate management development. How should business schools executive programs position themselves to respond?

One answer is to tailor very different offerings for the two key customer groups: individuals and companies. For high potential individuals, the networking and credentialization benefits of executive programs are at least as important as the substantive content. So one approach may be to offer multisession executive programs that ultimately result in an executive MBA degree or master’s degree in Management.

On the company side, business schools can either decide to focus on nonleading companies (not a very desirable outcome) or they can figure out how to repackage their core capabilities to serve leading companies. One approach here is to essentially become the leadership development organization for a portfolio of smaller but up-and-coming companies that don’t have the resources of General Electric. Another is for schools to focus their efforts on the very pinnacle of the corporation, where even leading companies concede that participation by very senior executives in (short, impactful) executive programs can help advance business goals.

Beyond that, business schools need to move from a program view of management development to a process view. Then, they must figure out where they fit in companies’ increasingly integrated development processes. For some, it may also mean moving to embrace the delivery of full-process solutions, including just-in-time performance support, blended delivery, and action learning, as well as traditional programmatic content.

The alternative for business schools is a slow descent into mediocrity.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 1/25/04; 5:22:52 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [3]

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 10/7/03; 9:46:31 AM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Who is behind the Iraq Today newspaper?

In response to my posting about David Frum and Andrew Sullivan's lauditory comments about Iraq Today (see below, it's a new Iraqi newspaper that is published in English, I have questions about the real audience and who is behind it) I received the following email from the publisher, Stephen MacSearraigh.  My responses are indented and italicized.

Stephen MacSearraigh
Publisher
Iraq Today

Michael,
I was sent your blog, and wish to respond to its many inaccuracies.

First, David Frum did not receive, or to the best of my knowledge request permission to reprint the extract. Frum is not the only reporter to speak favourably of Iraq Today; Thomas Friedman of the NYT, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and Daniel Henninger of the WSJ to name but three (and three who can hardly be considered to be of the same political stripe) have also been good enough to be complementary about the paper in their columns.

There is, of course, no way to verify this.  Of course it is possible that Frum simply violated copyright law, in which case I encourage you to seek redress through the legal system.  The journalists you name have made (minor) complementary comments about your reporting, but the focus of their stories has not been on you.

Second, the "here" referred to in the article is Iraq, not Mosul, and there is nothing in the context to suggest that the article was written from Mosul.

Nothing except the following passage from the piece, " On the walls of Mosul University, one of Iraq's oldest, warning signs are clearly displayed; "No Jordanians, No Palestinians". Iraqis are clearly still upset that other Arabs were able to study in Iraq, effectively on Saddam's payroll. Iraqis have had enough of seeing their own lives compromised for the benefit of Arabs from neighboring countries.”

Third, Mustafa Alrawi is an ethnic Iraqi, albeit one who has spent most of his life outside the country. Some five million Iraqis are resident outside Iraq.

Iraqi covers his nationality.  What's his ethnicity?

Fourth, I have not been employed by Energy Intelligence Group, the publisher of PIW, since November 2000.

If you read my post carefully, you will have noted that I said that "Stephen MacSearraigh was (is?)  the Washington DC research director for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. "  So obviously I wasn't certain.  Thank for the clarificiation.  Perhaps you can share with us what you have been doing since November of 2000?

Fifth, and as you well know, just because a company does not have a web site does not mean it does not exist. The FSA Register is a public record of financial services firms which fall under FSA regulatory jurisdiction. Mina Corp does not. A search of the company records at Companies House would have been the appropriate check.

 You're right.  Mina Corp does exist in the records of Companies House.  However, whoever is behind it is using a nominee company secretary and a nominee company director service to conceal their identities. (I downloaded company registration)  So perhaps you would be willing to fully disclose who is behind Mina Corp, where the money is coming from. Why you are getting it, etc.

Sixth, the name Mina refers to a kind of intricate silver work found in Iraq. Its spelling in Arabic is different from the spelling for the word for port.

 This is obviously one of the disadvantages of you publishing your paper in English (for who exactly?), because all you have is the word Mina.  Also if you read carefully, I indicated in my post that it was also a term for silver.

It's difficult to write so little and be so wrong. 0/10, I'm afraid. A retraction and an apology would be appropriate.

Not a chance.  Is the quality of your response to my post is indicative of the openness of your reporting?  Who is behind you and what is their agenda? 

I have made (minor) changes to my post, but stand by the main thrust.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 10/6/03; 10:30:13 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

My New Book - The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

I haven't posted for a while, I know.  Lots going on, but the most exciting thing is the Harvard Business School Press launch of my new book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels (Barnes and Noble purhase link, Amazon.com purchase link).  It's about how you can accelerate yourself (and people who work with you) into a new job. (Also helpful for job-seekers, preparing for interviews etc).  Topics include working with a new boss, building coalitions, learning more quickly about new organizations, and getting early wins.

If you can, please do me two favors. (1) Tell people you know who are looking for or starting new jobs about the book, and (2) Let the Human Resources and/or Leadership Development folks in your organization know about the book.  Details and endorsments below.

Thanks

Michael

The First 90 Days (From Barnes and Noble.com)

Whether challenged with taking on a startup, turning a business around, or inheriting a high-performing unit, a new leader's success or failure is determined within the first 90 days on the job.

In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers proven strategies for moving successfully into a new role at any point in one's career. The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly.

Practical examples illustrate how to learn about new organizations, build teams, create coalitions, secure early wins, and lay the foundation for longer-term success. In addition, Watkins provides strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter, and shows how individuals can protect themselves-emotionally as well as professionally-during what is often an intense and vulnerable period.

Concise and actionable, this is the survival guide no new leader should be without.

What People are Saying

Goli Darabi - Senior Vice President, Corporate Leadership & Succession Management, Fidelity Investments
Few companies develop a systematic 'on-boarding' process for their new leaders, even though this is a critical function with major organizational implications. Michael Watkins's The First 90 Days provides a powerful framework and strategies that will enable new leaders to take charge quickly. It is an invaluable tool for that most vulnerable time-the transition.

Mike Kinkead - President and CEO, timeBLASTER Corporation, serial entrepreneur, and Cofounder and Trustee, Massachusetts Software Council
Anyone who's been the CEO of a start-up or early-stage company knows that you go through many 90-day leadership transitions in the course of a company's formative years. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Watkins provides crucial insights, as well as a toolkit of techniques, to enable you to accelerate through these transitions successfully.

Colonel Eli Alford - U.S. Army
Every job-private- or public-sector, civilian or military-has its breakeven point, and everyone can accelerate their learning. Read this book at least twice: once before your next transition-before getting caught up in the whirl and blur of new faces, names, acronyms, and issues; then read it again after you've settled in, and consider how to accelerate transitions for your next new boss and for those who come to work for you.

Suzanne M. Danielle - Director of Global Leadership Development, Aventis
Watkins provides an excellent road map, telling us what all new leaders need to know and do to accelerate their learning and success in a new role. The First 90 Days should be incorporated into every company's leadership development strategy, so that anyone making a transition in an organization can get up to speed quicker and smarter.

Gordon Curtis - Principal, Curtis Consulting "The First 90 Days is a must-read for entrepreneurs
Michael Watkins has nailed a huge corporate problem and provided the solution in one fell swoop. The pressure on new leaders to hit the ground running has never been greater, and the likelihood and cost of failure is escalating. Watkins's timing with The First 90 Days is impeccable.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 10/1/03; 10:28:40 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Military Meltdown, Part 3

An Op-ed piece in today's NYT by a Lt.Col in the reserves raises similar concerns about the future of enlistments.
Boots on the Ground, Family Back Home

"The Army's decision to keep its Reserve forces in Iraq on duty for a full year from their arrival may have profound consequences for both the Army and the war in Iraq. While the Army will gain increased flexibility with its "boots on the ground," the long deployments may demoralize reservists. When mobilization and demobilization are included, 12 months on duty in Iraq will mean a 14- to 16-month separation from family and career for reservists."

See also this piece by a Islamabad-based columnist, with an interesting overview of US Army forces and commitments.
America needs a bigger army

"United States Army has 417,000 enlisted soldiers and 76,000 officers. Iraq has 146,000 American troops, Kuwait 34,000, Afghanistan 10,000, Balkans 5,000, South Korea 37,000 and Europe an additional 100,000. United States Army has a total of 33 active-duty combat brigades. At least 16 of those brigades are already in Iraq. Two are in Afghanistan, two in South Korea and one in the Balkans."

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/21/03; 8:58:56 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Fenced In

As I watch developments in the Middle East, I continue to wonder whether our relationship with Israel truly serves our long-term security interests. The Sharon government’s mystifying decision to "remove" Arafat had the predictable impact of strengthening him.
Washington Veto Puts Arafat on Pedestal
What To Do About Arafat?

If that were not bad enough, it elicited a predictable UN Security Council resolution, tabled by Syria, condemning Israel.  After threatening to abstain, we vetoed this resolution, and in the process destroyed whatever progress we had made in trying to convince the Muslim world that we were honest brokers.  [Regardless of the truth of this, this will be their perception, and perceptions matter a great deal].  It  likely will contribute to the negative dynamic in Iraq.

In the meantime, the Sharon government is pondering the route of the new security fence, designed to prevent Palestinian terrorist attacks. This is proving to be highly divisive, both within Israel, and between Israel and the United States.  Predictably key settler groups want the fence to bulge out to encompass them, in effect annexing territory. Background/Fence divides Israel and U.S., Israeli and Israeli

The Bush administration has signaled its unhappiness about the fence.  But as with the veto threat, it's unclear that they will really go to the mat over this.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/19/03; 5:56:00 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Military Meltdown, Continued

A couple of interesting pieces on unhappiness in the US military have appeared in the British media in the past couple of days. As discussed in my posting, Military Meltdown, below, I'm very concerned about the corrosive impact of the strains imposed by the Iraqi operation on our military, especially the Army, Army reserve, and National Guard.

The first piece, in the UK Guardian, is by Tim Predmore, a serving member of the101st Airborne Division. We are facing death in Iraq for no reason.  It may be that this guy just has an ax to grind, but he is a five-year veteran of an elite division (formed during the Second World War, on the tip of this spear during D-Day and the fight through the hedgerows of Normandy, renowned for their defense of Bastonge during the Battle of the Bulge). This piece originally appeared in Peoria, in Predmore’s hometown newspaper.

The second piece, in the UK Independent, is a broader look at unhappiness on the part of service people and their dependents.   White House is ambushed by criticism from America's military community.

The concerns expressed about falling reenlistments and the potential for hollowing out of the military are very real.  

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/19/03; 5:40:18 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Evidence of Andrew Sullivan's Hypocracy, Continued

Remember the old adage, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?" Well Andrew Sullivan gets my Glass House Award for setting new standards for hypocracy in his blogging. 

Today Sullivan pinned his "Dowd Award" given "to writers, columnists or pundits who deliberately distort, elide, truncate or garble quotes for ideological purposes" on Dana Milbank at the Post (which to its credit later corrected the error) for a story on Cheney.

Then he gave his "Raines Award", an "award for a legend in media bias" to the Guardian for the following quote from this story on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

"The militant groups abandoned the truce on August 21 after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader in a missile strike that followed a suicide bombing which killed 22 people in Jerusalem."

He puts this quote forward as evidence of the Guardian's pro-Palestinian bias saying,:

"Wouldn't that chronology suggest that the truce was ended first by the suicide bombing - or would that imply that Israel isn't always at fault? "

You would think that you would want to be above reproach yourself to cast these sorts of stones, wouldn't you?

But Sullivan turns out to deserve both his Dowd and Raines awards. He actually selectively quotes the Guardian in order to accuse it of media bias!  The full quote from the Guardian is, (missing part italicized).

"Palestinian militant groups declared a unilateral ceasefire on June 29, but they continued to carry out suicide bombings, which they claimed were retaliation for assassinations by the Israeli military. The militant groups abandoned the truce on August 21 after Israel assassinated a Hamas leader in a missile strike that followed a suicide bombing which killed 22 people in Jerusalem."

See any pro-Palestinian bias there?

Does Sullivan really think he can cast these low blows without being challenged?  Is he willing to issue a correction?

See also my posting below on, "Sullivan Also Wins Cheap Shot Award" on his unprincipled attacks on the BBC.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/16/03; 9:01:39 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Right Wing Media Conspiracies: David Frum and Iraq Today

Addendum: Andrew Sullivan picked up this same editorial (discussed below) from Iraq Today in his posting today.

In his current column (third item) in the National Review Online, David Frum devotes a lot of screen space to promoting a “new Iraq paper” called Iraq today. 

“If you are not reading www.iraq-today.com, well you should. And maybe you should begin with this revealing and thought-provoking September 15 editorial”

He then proceeds to reprint just about all of the editorial, written by one Mustafa Alrawi. The key quotes from the editorial are  

“Evidence on the ground suggests that the absence of Arab involvement in Iraq is actually not a bad thing at all. The truth is that most Iraqis would rather have an American dominated force here, than an Arab one.

The grim reality, particularly hard to hear for all those Arabs that felt they were supporting their Iraqi brethren when demonstrating to stop the war, is that most people here don't want anything to do with them.

On the walls of Mosul University, one of Iraq's oldest, warning signs are clearly displayed; "No Jordanians, No Palestinians". Iraqis are clearly still upset that other Arabs were able to study in Iraq, effectively on Saddam's payroll. Iraqis have had enough of seeing their own lives compromised for the benefit of Arabs from neighboring countries.”

Hmm, I thought, that’s interesting.  The fact that he regurgitated so much of it suggests that he had permission, dare I say encouragement, to do so.  This got me wondering: who runs "Iraq Today" and how is it funded?

So I did some digging.

First finding, Mosul is in the Kurd-controlled north of the country, which is both doing well and is pro-American.  So if the "here" referred to in the article is the north of Iraq, then the story is accurate, albeit misleading.

Second finding, Mustafa Alrawi, who is not identified in the editorial, is, or was until recently, a journalist for the Jordan Times.

Third finding, the publisher of Iraq Today is one Stephen MacSearraigh.  It turns out that MacSearraigh was, until 2000, the Washington DC research director for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly.  This publication is described as follows on its web site.

The “Bible” of the international oil and gas industry for the last 40 years. Success in today's oil and gas industry depends on one thing -- an excellent source of reliable information that makes sense of this complex world. Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW) remains, after four decades, the one publication a busy executive needs in order to gain a quick and accurate understanding of what is happening in petroleum around the world. It explains why events are important, and how changing trends are likely to affect an executive's organization, whether that be in the industry itself, in government, or in finance.

Fourth finding, the Editor-in-Chief of the papar,  Hussein Sanjari, is an ethnic Kurd, who has been active in organizations protecting minority rights.

Fifth finding, Iraq Today’s web site indicates that “seed funding” was provided by Mina Corp “a private UK investment company.”  A Google search revealed no such company. In addition, a search of the registry of the UK Financial Services Authority also revealed no such firm.

So what is Mina Corp? Mina is a historical term for an ancient silver currency used in the region. Mina means money – get the picture?

BTW if you do want to tune into something good on Iraq, check out Iraq Daily.

 

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/16/03; 11:53:20 AM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]

The End of Roadmap - 1 of 2 for today

The roadmap was pronounced dead today. 

The Sharon government’s declaration of its intent to “remove” Arafat, and its willingness to openly entertain killing him, have drawn predictable responses from Europe.  Equally predictably these efforts have strengthened Arafat, whose failed leadership of his people is unquestionably a major part of the problem.  The alliance between Israel and the US is under great strain with the US signaling that it will abstain on a UN resolution forbidding Israel from expelling or killing Arafat. The US effort to marginalize Arafat has failed.  The economic and political situation in Israel continues on its downward course.

This is happening in spite of the fact that the outlines of a sustainable solution (two states, borders adjusted to address Israeli security concerns, non-militarization of the Palestinian state) have been well recognized for more than a decade.  Why?

The answer lies in the ability of the “true believers” on both sides to sabotage any move toward negotiated agreement.  On the Palestinian side, Hamas and others employ the poison of terrorist suicide bombings against civilians to polarize the environment.   On the Israeli side, the settlers and their supporters oppose any move toward a solution that would jeopardize their vision of a Greater Israel, for example agreements to dismantle the hundreds of settlements that now dot the West Bank and Gaza. The can rely on the overwhelmingly superior power of the Israeli state and the support of people like Sharon and members of his government even further to the right

[Note: I’m absolutely not arguing moral equivalence here.  Because, from a realist point of view, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that these forces reinforce each other and eliminate any hope that a “sensible middle” can form and negotiate a sustainable peace.]

The long-term implications for Israel are, I believe, dire.  A recent piece by Avraham Burg, the Speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and a Labor Party member of the Knesset puts that case far better than I ever could in the International Herald Tribune. A failed Israeli society is collapsing: The End of Zionism?

This situation also creates great difficulties for Jews in America.  The continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not in the United States’ long-term national security interests.  But any effort on the part of American Jews to criticize the positions of Israeli governments is met with severe criticism.  Edgar Bronfman, the head of the World Jewish Congress got into hot water for sponsoring a letter to President Bush opposing the creation of the security fence in the West Bank and asserting the right in Israel was purposefully creating a rift with the US. Bronfman: Jewish LeadersCreating Rift Between Israel-US

He then dug himself in deeper with comments the Palestinians would be more effective if they directed attacks just against the settlers. The ego of Edgar Bronfman

In response, a key representative of the settlers, Shlomo Riskin, the Chief Rabbi of Efrat, Israel, wrote the following piece, which is circulating widely on Jewish e-mail lists in the U.S. as part of a campaign to undermine Bronfman and silence dissent in the Diaspora. [italics mine]

As a proud Israeli Settler and as a Jew concerned with Jewish life all over the world I was outraged at the story in the JTA News which quoted Edgar Bronfman as saying "'a more effective' Palestinian tactic would have been to launch attacks only against settlements, which do not enjoyinternational support, rather than inside pre-1967 Israel. If the Palestinian suicide bombers only went to the settlements and told the whole world they were wrong, then the whole world would have had a case against Israel and there would be a two state solution by now. Instead, they sent them into Israel proper, which is ghastly."

I went to Efrat at the behest and encouragement of both former Prime Minister Rabin, of blessed memory, and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. I am a citizen of the State of Israel, living where the elected government of Israel believes that I am fully justified in living. How can a leader of the Jewish people publicly declare that my life is less worthwhile than any other Jewish life? And how can a leader of the Jewish people convey to the President of the United States his displeasure with the fence which protects my life and the lives of Israeli citizens which are endangered every day by Palestinian terrorist attacks and which have already taken hundreds of innocent Israeli lives.

It is to be hoped that leaders are people who are not subject to the daily dangers that we face in Israel, but at least have the sensitivity to understand that if there is eventual peace a fence is removable, but a human life is never returnable. And it is further to be hoped that leadersof our people would understand that terrorism against Jewish lives can never be condoned anywhere in the world – not within the green line, not beyond the green line, and not in New York City.

I await from the President of the World Jewish Congress not only a garbled statement that he was misunderstood but a total repudiation of a hateful suggestion he so unfortunately made.

Sincerely

Shlomo Riskin
Chief Rabbi of Efrat, Israel

My point? – Without in any way excusing the unconscionable tactics of Hamas and its ilk, the settlements and the occupation are at the core of what prevents a solution to this dispute.  Most Israelis don’t support them.  Most American Jews don’t support them.  But efforts on the part of settlers and their supporters to silence domestic and diaspora opposition to them, in the name of solidarity, have largely been successful.  And I fear that Israel will pay the price, as will we.

Without question, the Palestinians need new and better leadership.  But so do the Israelis.

Background:

I began studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1995 when I co-authored a case study with Kristen Lundberg on the Oslo Peace process, based on research we did with the key participants in the process.  I later worked on a project sponsored by the Peres Institute for Peace in Tel Aviv, training young leaders from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority in negotiation and conflict management techniques.   I watched the painful unraveling of the process, beginning with the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, and proceeding through the rise of the Netanyahu government, the difficulties in Hebron, the failure of Wye River and Clinton’s initiatives, and the descent into the second intifada.  If to be a Zionist means to support a Jewish state, with secure borders, accepted by its neighbors, free to live in peace, not being corroded from within by the occupation, then I’m a Zionist.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/15/03; 10:17:53 AM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]

Debate with Mason Allen - 2 of 2

Mason Allen disagrees with the thrust of my blog for the past week and a half.   His arguments and my responses are reposted below.

From Mason:

On the day that millions of Americans of all political stripes took a moment of silence to remember the innocent lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001, you posted a blog blaming the US for terrorism. See "We have made some significant portion of the Iraqi population nostalgic for the “good old days” of Hussein’s autocracy. We have shattered our alliances with the European powers. We have diminished the United Nations. We have permitted the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to fester..." Etc., etc., Yesterday, as Israel announces its intent to expel Arafat from the disputed territories, thus effectively ending the framework of Oslo, you post a rant meant to defend the BBC from Andrew Sullivan. Trust me, the BBC can handle itself... The past week and a half, your daily blog has consisted of knocking down straw-dogs in the Bush administration, simply because Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz don't agree with your vision of world history (which consists of, as far as I can see, treating Al Queda as a criminal syndicate and considering no international terrorist organization a threat to the US until after the commission of their terrorist acts). Come on, Michael! If you have an oppinion about what should be done in the field of foreign affairs or domestic policy, say it! As it is, you just rant about the administration, which makes you a partisan strategist, not a "world events" blogger.

From Michael: With all due respect Mason, I think you should read more carefully. You wrote: On the day that millions of Americans of all political stripes took a moment of silence to remember the innocent lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001, you posted a blog blaming the US for terrorism. I did no such thing. Here is what I said: "Their acts on September 11, and the ones that preceded 9/11 in Yemen and in Africa, justified a relentless campaign to track them down, to destroy their bases of support, and to give them no rest until every one of them is dead. But is not enough to destroy Al Qaeda, we must discredit their vision too; we must undercut the wellspring of hatred that feeds their cause, provides their recruits, funds their terror. And it is here that we are failing so badly that I fear for our future.[See The Economist Two Years On]" Note, too, that President Bush spent a lot of time before the anniversary shamelessly using the event to pitch for Ascroft's program. Also note that I said: "And they got the first part of the equation, the terrorist part, right. Our immensely successful operation in Afghanistan, efforts to cut off funding, and operations in cooperation with our allies to roll up terrorist networks were working; we had Al Qaeda on the run." So where do you get me saying the US is supporting terrorism? Then you note that I said: "We have made some significant portion of the Iraqi population nostalgic for the “good old days” of Hussein’s autocracy. We have shattered our alliances with the European powers. We have diminished the United Nations. We have permitted the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to fester..." Etc., etc., Well, yes. Do you disagree? If so, what's your evidence? Then you say: The past week and a half, your daily blog has consisted of knocking down straw-dogs in the Bush administration, simply because Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz don't agree with your vision of world history (which consists of, as far as I can see, treating Al Queda as a criminal syndicate and considering no international terrorist organization a threat to the US until after the commission of their terrorist acts). Well I certainly disagree with their view of world history. But the second part of what you wrote is a gross mischaracterization of my views. Note that I said: "The operation against Iraq was misguided for several reasons. Not only was their no pre-war connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Iraq was by no means the most likely place for terrorists to get weapons of mass destruction (the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and home-grown efforts are much more likely). " This is where I think we should have been concentrating our effort. There are lots of other people (Anthony Zinni for example) who are also strong on national security that agree with me. Then you wrote: Yesterday, as Israel announces its intent to expel Arafat from the disputed territories, thus effectively ending the framework of Oslo, you post a rant meant to defend the BBC from Andrew Sullivan. Trust me, the BBC can handle itself... First of all its my blog, so I decide what I feel like writing about. You and other readers decide whether or not to read it. Second if you call a "rant" laying out evidence of Andrew Sullivan's unprincipled attacks, well wait until you really get me on a roll. Third, the BBC is facing off against Murdoch and crew. Finally, if you have a problem with me working to hold members of the administration accountable for what their are doing, well, that's too bad. If there were merely "straw dogs" and not the leaders of the our nation, I wouldn't be wasting my time.

From Mason: Put simply, either terrorism is a legitimate response to percieved injustice, or it is not. There is no third option. Any discussion which attempts to address the "wellspring" of hatred or to address terrorists' demands implicitly legitimizes terrorism as a mode of political expression. You say the US (or, to be precise, Pres. Bush & Co.) failed to adopt an "inward" (my word) approach to terrorism. The "inward" response to terrorism involves asking ourselves, "why do they hate us?." It includes relinquishing our rights to the wills of the UN or some other nebulous voice of the international community; it means apologizing for past acts of agression and, perhaps, quitting the Middle East altogether and withdrawing our support for Israel. Three points: 1. Addressing terrorists' MESSAGE legitimizes the MEDIUM of terrorism. 2. Addressing terrorists' MESSAGE encourages additional acts of terrorism. 3. Any discussion of the "roots" of terrorism attempts to impose SUBJECTIVE moral standards onto what is an OBJECTIVE legal question. Again, the legal question is, either TERRORISM is OK or it is not. It doesn't matter if I use TERRORISM to demand a 'pure' Saudi Arabia, a free Palestinian state, better schools or universal healthcare. The response to terrorism must be the same irrespective of the content of the message. In light of this strategic analysis (which I believe is correct), the Bush adminsitration may have made tactical errors (such as failing to win the support of the French & Germany vis a vi Iraq; it is debatable if ANY US administration could have won their support in 2002 for ANY US policy...). However, the overarching theme of the administration's policy, that is, hunt down & kill terrorists, is valid.

From Michael Again, you are mischaracterizing my views and then arguing against the mischaracterization. If you want a liberal straw man to debate with, you are going to have to look elsewhere. I said and believe that hunting down and killing Al Qaeda is the right thing to do. I don't think what they are trying to do has anything at all to do with perceived injustices. You also don't see me engaged in any handwringing about "why do they hate us." They do, that's it. For those that do, and that seek to destroy us, there is no middle ground. But we cannot ignore the forces that allow Osama bin Laden and his ilk to gain funding, recruit etc. Above all, we shouldn't be doing things that unnecessarily increase the level of hatred (note the word unnecessarily) and/or that catalyze a clash of civilizations. The Israeli Palestinian conflict, and our role in it, plays a large role in this (The Economist agrees with me on this, see article the article cited in the original post.) Addressing these issues by-no-means legitimizes terrorism. It is a pragmatic response to the realities of the situation, which we cannot wish away. How does promoting economic development in the Muslim world legitimize terrorism? How does seeking a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict legitimize terrorism? The subjective-objective standards debate is a complete waste of time. The pragmatist/realist (of which I count myself one) focuses on understanding and responding to the threat. If succeeding in doing this means that we need to understand the subjective realities of those whom our enemies are trying to recruit, then that's just sensible. We certainly don't need to endorse or agree with those views. Finally, as to our allies. They completely supported us in Afghanistan (and still do). They were completely supportive of our direct campaign against Al Qaeda on every dimension. They (rightly I believe) didn't agree with us on Iraq. But the administration had their minds made up.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/15/03; 7:28:23 AM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Andrew Sullivan also wins Cheap Shot Award - 1 of 4 for today

Sullivan's bashing of the BBC is also getting tired. (see my posting on Sullivan below) Today, he engaged in a contemptable exercise in distortion, bolstering his attacks on the BBC by comparing headines from the NYT, the FT and the BBC on what the UK intelligence panel said about Blair: 

BAATHIST BROADCASTING CORPORATION I:

"Blair Gets A Pass from Iraq Intelligence Panel" - New York Times.

"UK Parliament Clears Blair Over Iraq Arms" - Financial Times.

"Blair 'overrode terror warnings'" - BBC News.

What he fails to mention are a few other headlines from today's papers on the same story:

Washington Post Panel Warned Blair of War Risk: British Leader Was Told Terrorists Could Gain Arms

Guardian UK Report reveals Blair overruled terror warning

The Associated Press (appearing in the Washington Times!) Lawmakers Attack Blair Over Iraq Warning

Oh yes, and what about the other article from today's Financial Times - UK report fuels debate over Iraq WMD threat: Spy chiefs warned Iraq war could help al-Qaeda

Note:  See the comment on this post and my response.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/12/03; 1:27:26 PM - Comments [4] Trackback [0]

Andrew Sullivan: Apologist - 2 of 4

More evidence emerged today that our leaders were warned that the war on Iraq would likely increase our vulnerability to terrorism, and that the destruction of the Hussein regime would heighten the risk that weapons of mass destruction would fall into their hands (see my next two posts).

Yet Andrew Sullivan blithely continues to press his case that (1) everything is going swimmingly and (2) Bush's critics lack "moral clarity."  From his blog today:

"Listening to the Democratic debate earlier this week, I was amazed at how few had any strategic plans for taking the war to the enemy, how the very concept of 'enemy' seemed to unnerve and embarrass them."

"For these people, the first instinct is always, always, always, that the United States is morally suspect. They haven't changed. The moral clarity after 9/11 terrified them. They wanted it to go away so badly so they could switch the conversation back to the faults and evils of America."

"I remember thinking two years ago that support for the war was easy then; but the real test would be in a few years when forgetfulness would set in and complacency revived. Which means, of course, that the real test of our mettle is now. So the question is not, once again: what have we done wrong? It is: Where are we going to hit those bastards today?"

Well excuse me, but my father and grandfather were both military men, and I was a longtime reservist.  I've studied international conflicts for close to a decade.  I applauded what the administration did in Afghanistan and is doing in the fight against terrorist networks.

I just happen to think (and it seems that some knowledgeable people in British intllelligence agree) that the Iraqi operation was misbegotten: born of a lie concerning the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, nutured on wishful thinking about its impact on terrorism and the post-war challenges of reconstruction and democratization, and growing up to be a terrible millstone around our necks.

As we squander lives and treasure in Iraq, things are not going well in Afghanistan, much more pressing weapons of mass destruction challenges confront us in North Korea and Iran, our domestic prepareness remains dangerously weak, and we are digging ourselves a huge financial hole.

Beyond that, these people lied to us Andrew, and it may cost us dearly.

So if you are planning to be other than an apologist for this mess, for heavens sake wake up.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/12/03; 12:01:07 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Blair was Told War Would Increase Terrorism Risk - 3 of 4 for today

Not only did the war not make us safer from terrorism, it likely made things worse.

From the UK Guardian - Report reveals Blair overruled terror warning: PM told war would increase al-Qaida threat

"The intelligence chiefs added: "Any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists, including al-Qaida."

See also the Washigngton Post Panel Warned Blair of War Risk British Leader Was Told Terrorists Could Gain Arms -

"The report "said that "in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate Iraqi regime policy."

"The joint committee also concluded that "al Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq"

Was the Bush adminstration aware of this?  Did the CIA make similar assessments?

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/12/03; 9:04:37 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Wolfowitz's Bait and Switch - 4 of 4

Wolfowitz Survival Tactic #4. Shift the argument to whatever is most marketable and pretend this was your argument all along.  Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War: With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy

"In a telephone interview Saturday, Wolfowitz denied that the administration is providing different justifications for the war with Iraq. He said he and other administration officials had been "clear from the beginning" that there were three arguments for invading Iraq: halting the development of weapons of mass destruction, liberating the country from "a terrible tyranny," and creating a democratic model that would serve as an inspiration for the rest of the Middle East."

Excuse me, but what about terrorism? What convinced Congress and the American people to support the war? It's telling and terrible that there is no mention of terrorism in this list of rationales.  Let us not forget what Wolfowitz said before the war:

"As terrible as the attacks of September 11th were, however, we now know that the terrorists are plotting still more and greater catastrophes. We know they are seeking more terrible weapons-chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. In the hands of terrorists, what we often call weapons of mass destruction would more accurately be called weapons of mass terror. The threat posed by the connection between terrorist networks and states that possess these weapons of mass terror presents us with the danger of a catastrophe that could be orders of magnitude worse than September 11th. Iraq's weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes - not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat. Disarming Iraq and the War on Terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror." Department of Defense Transcript

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/12/03; 9:04:26 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/11/03; 7:49:00 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

The War Goes On: Reflections on the Meaning of September 11

“All those who seek to destroy the freedom of the democratic nations must know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish this." 
                                                     --Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America

I had planned to try to write something reflective about September 11 today.  Something about where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the news from New York.  About the stunning, numbing, shock that spread as a second plane hit the Twin Towers, the news of the hijackings came in, the Towers fell, and all those people died.  About the fear, the crippling uncertainty about what would happen next, about where would this go.  It was like the world was ending.

I had planned to do this, but I can’t. Because the war goes on, and those who would exploit our feelings about that terrible day do not give us the luxury to pause and remember.

The world as we knew did end on September 11. It has been replaced by a strange new world, one in which we wage preemptive wars and fight in the shadows against unseen foes, one in which we confront the enemy within, the enemy that would stoke our fears, so that we will willingly surrender our freedoms. 

It’s difficult to remember, now that we are enmeshed in this global war, that 9/11 was the act of a very small group of Islamicist extremists, albeit one a very big vision:  to unite the Muslim world under their twisted banner and to destroy our way of life.

Their acts on September 11, and the ones that preceded 9/11 in Yemen and in Africa, justified a relentless campaign to track them down, to destroy their bases of support, and to give them no rest until every one of them is dead.

But is not enough to destroy Al Qaeda, we must discredit their vision too; we must undercut the wellspring of hatred that feeds their cause, provides their recruits, funds their terror.  And it is here that we are failing so badly that I fear for our future.[See The Economist Two Years On]

The road from September 11 to Iraq was paved with equal parts of good intentions, ideological blindness, and fear.

Let us have no doubt that directly and forcefully taking on Al Qaeda was the right thing to do.  September 11 represented a critical shift in the scale of terror. For the first time, terrorists were able to cause not just mass fear, but mass casualties.

And once something becomes possible, it become likely. It’s an appallingly short step from 9/11 to chemical, biological, or radiological attacks on US cities.  The danger inherent in the equation:

Terrorists + Weapons of Mass Destruction = Mass Casualties, Economic Dislocation, and Social Upheaval

is all too clear.  So we had to, at all costs, prevent this deadly conjunction.

The need to keep this from happening is, in part, what motivated the Bush administration to do what it has been doing.  And they got the first part of the equation, the terrorist part, right.  Our immensely successful operation in Afghanistan, efforts to cut off funding, and operations in cooperation with our allies to roll up terrorist networks were working; we had Al Qaeda on the run.  The world had united behind us. We had the moral high ground.  We were winning the war.

So much for good intentions. 

We are still winning against Al Qaeda, but at best we can win a tactical victory now, not a strategic one.  The reason is that we went badly off track in our efforts on the weapons of mass destruction side of the equation. In the process, we fractured our coalition to fight terrorism, have done little to diminish the attraction of Osama bin Laden’s vision, and have committed enormous resources to doing the wrong things. 

The operation against Iraq was misguided for several reasons. Not only was their no pre-war connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Iraq was by no means the most likely place for terrorists to get weapons of mass destruction (the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and home-grown efforts are much more likely).

Now we have made Iraq safe for Islamic fundamentalism. We likely have scattered the knowledge about how to make weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps even the weapons themselves, to the winds.  We have made some significant portion of the Iraqi population nostalgic for the “good old days” of Hussein’s autocracy.  We have shattered our alliances with the European powers.  We have diminished the United Nations. We have permitted the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to fester. We’ve paid too little attention to pressing threats in North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. We have committed hundreds of billions to Iraq, rather than to fighting terrorist networks and strengthening domestic preparedness.  We have squandered the soft power of America in the world.  We have surrendered the moral high ground.

So much for ideology.

If the attacks on New York and Washington hadn’t happened, the Bush administration would never have been able to muster support in Congress, and among the American people, to wage preemptive war in Iraq and to pass the Patriot Act. 

After 9/11, the nation suffered from a collective post-traumatic stress syndrome that clouded our judgment.  The fear and uncertainty made it straightforward to convince us that Iraq posed a clear and present danger, that Hussein had something to do with 9/11, and so on.  We longed for clarity and action. We were willing to sacrifice. We were easy to lead.

We are still being led by our fear.  On the anniversary of September 11, we are still being told that to fight terrorism we must be willing to sacrifice some of our freedoms. Bush's Counterterror Proposals Could Be a Hard Sell

Don't believe it. It’s another diversion. It’s an excuse in case there’s another attack.

If there is another major attack in the country, and the administration hasn't done everything possible to prevent and prepare for it, there will be hell to pay.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/11/03; 10:33:39 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

A Clear and Present Danger in Iran - 1st of 3 for Today

The temperature of the slow-burn crisis over Iran's nuclear weapons program went up significantly this week with the tabling of an IAEA report on Tehran's non-compliance with Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty requirements and findings of small amounts of weapons-grade uranium. Bush on warpath over UN's shock report on Iran A-bomb  Alarm also is growing in Washington about the intensifying relationship between Iran and Syria.Khatami's Message Submitted to Syrian President

Iran may now be just inches from having nuclear weapons and, even more ominously, the medium-range missiles to deliver them anywhere in the Middle East.  This cannot be permitted to happen.  In sharp contrast to the Iraq situation, the administration appears to be engaged in intensive coordination with other Security Council members on how to deal with this which is good.  It appears that Tehran will be given one final chance to come into compliance by declaring all its facilities and opening them to full compliance, as well as negotiating additional safeguards by late October. Iran May Get Last Chance to Open Nuclear Program

If they don't, then what should happen?  The answer is that we should employ every tool at our disposal - economic, political and military - to stop this from happening.  As  a last resort, I would support the use of strikes against nuclear facilities and the associated risks of escalation rather than see them succeed in their ambitions.

The interesting question, though, is not what should we do, but what can we do to deter the Iranians from going nuclear?  

Given the challenges we face with Afghanistan, Iraq, and North Korea, do we have the capacity to employ the military instrument against Iran?  Or is this an example of the opportunity cost of waging war and occupying Iraq, by far the weakest of the "axis of evil" [See my previous posting, Opportunity Lost for my thoughts on this].  Can we credibily threaten the Iranians given our current commitments?  Or has our operation in Iraq significantly reduced our capacity to deal with this clear and present danger? 

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/10/03; 12:47:46 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Grilled Wolfowitz - 2nd of 3

It's good to see Congress waking up and pushing back.   See Senators Grill Wolfowitz on Iraq  Note the Hagel quote. I respect him a great deal.

Contrast the grilling the committee gave Wolfowitz during the Q&A; with his prepared propaganda (I mean opening statement) trying to keep up the administration line that the invasion in Iraq was all about fighting terror.

I like my Wolfowitz well grilled, rather than half baked.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/10/03; 12:46:48 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Puncturing the Pundits: David Frum and Michael Meacher - 3rd of 3

As I see it, the goal of pundit puncturing is to make the web safe from true believers of all stripes, particularly those who are unencumbered by knowledge, or scruples, or both.  I expect nailing these people to give  roughly the same sort of satisfaction as lancing a particularly pustulent boil.

I'm hoping to start the ball rolling with a little right-left pundit puncturing.

Case Study #1. David Frum Blames Canada

There's something particularly loathsome about a Canadian pandering to the right in the US by trashing his native land...and doing it while he's in Canada to boot.  But that's exactly what David Frum did over at the National Review web site.  Frum's primary claim to fame is that he was one of Bush's speechwriters, the one who wrote the "Axis of Evil" speech. Quite a distinction, eh? 

[BTW Satirewire's parody of this speech ranks high up in the rankings of the funniest things I've ever read]

In any case, probably while shamelessly sipping a cold Molsen Canadian, Frum took aim at his native land in a segment of his "diary" entitled "Unserious at the Border."

He launches with a completely unsupportable across-the-board attack on Canadians' commitment to the war on terror.

"I’m writing this from Canada, where many regard it as almost a moral principle to be unserious about terror."

Oh really David, and your evidence for this very serious charge?

"Earlier this summer, Canadian police arrested nearly two dozen illegal immigrants, most of them Pakistani, on suspicion of al Qaeda links."

Right, and this shows that Canadians are not serious about fighting terrorism? 

"And the reaction of the Candian authorities? They released three of the men on relatively small bail bonds..."

OK, let's see... two dozen is 24. You call that "a case" in Canada, right? And 24 minus 3 is 21 people still detained... OK. So I'm still not quite getting it.

"..when they redetained one of them (the one who overflew the reactor) [one of the detainees flew over the Pickering nuclear plant which is just outside Toronto] shortly before Labor Day, Canada’s print and broadcast media convulsed in outrage."

Here Frum links to one article in the Toronto Star in which the writer expressed concern about this guy's detention. 

A closer read would find that the article also has the following quote

"Even RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli said Wednesday "there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that there is any terrorist threat anywhere in this country related to this investigation."

And, had David dug even a micron deeper, he might have come up with a September 6th Toronto Star article on the investigation.  It turns out that this group was using a bogus business school (horrors!) to gain entry to Canada  This article adds the following essential context.

"Immigration investigators and the RCMP have remained tight-lipped during this investigation, confirming only that on the morning of Aug. 14, during a series of raids, they arrested 18 Pakistani students and refugee claimants and one Indian national"

"Federal authorities say more evidence will be presented later this month. Until then, it is difficult to say whether this is a case of foreign students who may have used a bogus school to illegally stay in the country - or the dismantling of a huge terrorist sleeper cell."

"Immigration members have now ordered three men of the group released, keeping 20 detained until their next hearings, which will happen over a few weeks this month, and in early October."

Oh those Canadian softies. 

And as for the media that "convulsed in outrage"?

The Star article notes that:

"A small but vociferous group of civil right activists, Muslim organizations and Pakistani-Canadians have come forward to protest the men's detainment. It's a by-product, say some, of the fear that lingers after the horror of Sept. 11 - and perhaps is heightening as the second anniversary approaches."

Cheap shot David, shame on you. 

Case Study #2 Michael Meacher, Live from Left-wing Lala Land

I'm not concentrating much fire on the lunatic left in my blog because they are not in much of a position to do serious damage to the planet right now.  But lest we forget that they exist, and can be just as dangerous as the lunatic right, along comes Michael Meacher's piece in the Guardian,   The War on Terror is Bogus  subtitled "The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination" Meacher is a Labor MP and was, until recently, Minister of the Environment in the U.K.. 

It's hard to know where to begin with this nonsense, but here goes...

"We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC)."

Was this document written?  Yes.  Was it written as a blueprint for a global Pax Americana? No. Was it written to influence US policy on defense issues? Yes.  Was it written at the behest of Dick Cheney and Co.? No.

"The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Is there a need for a substantial American presence in the Gulf? Of course, oil security is essential for our national security.  But its a spectacular leap from this to taking military control of the Gulf region.  I suspect Iran and Saudi Arabia might have something to say about this.

And then he really begins to lose it.

"Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". 

Right.  And if Michael knew any thing about the military, he would know that a communication, command, control, and intelligence system (that is the correct term, I believe, abbreviated C3I) is what the military uses to coordinate its intelligence gathering and use of forces.  The US military has a global presence and so of course requires a corresponding system. 

One worries that Michael thinks they meant a political command and control regime of global dominiation.

And now he goes right over the edge.

"First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested."

Having just written a book chapter on intelligence failures before 9/11, I can conclusively say that there were missed opportunities to "connect the dots" and prevent the attacks. 

But Meacher proceeds to indulge his paranoia in a truly offensive way.

"Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?"

Michael, you are truly a left-wing lunatic. 

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/10/03; 12:43:37 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Andrew Sullivan: On the Flypaper

I've been reading Andrew Sullivan's blog for about six months or so and I must say he really perplexes me.  His positions mark him as a social liberal/progressive and a fiscal/defense conservative. Yet he is reflexively supportive of the Bush administration, which is made up of social conservatives and fiscal/defense liberals. What gives? 

Doesn't it bother him that practically no one in leadership positions in the Republican Party would acknowledge his right to love and the pursuit of happiness? Doesn't it bother him that they are putting us in very deep financial hole? Is he deluding himself? Is he a hypocrite who gains from being a scarce commodity - a conservative, openly gay politically commentator in America? Of the two explanations, I would prefer to think that it is the former, and that he will come to see the light.

He latest piece on Bush's supposed "flypaper strategy" [click this link and look at left column] is a classic example of his rose-colored thinking about the administration. He looks at the negligence that led us into this mess in post-war Iraq and sees a well-thought out strategy.

Does he honestly believe that attracting terrorists to Iraq  was part of the plan? If so he should read the Washington Post article referenced in my last posting.  Rumsfeld and Co. were living in a dream world.

Does he honestly believe that the fact that we are attracting terrorists to Iraq now is a good thing?  If so, he should take a hard look at the Israeli experience. With all their knowhow and sophistication, they can't stop suicide bombers from blowing themselves up in buses and restaurants.

[I wrote this before I saw the news about the terrible suicide attack on a bus stop used by soldiers in which six Israelis were killed and at least 10 seriously wounded, see At least seven killed, 15 wounded in Tzrifin suicide bombing  and a second one outside a Jerusalem cafe that killed six and injured 40]

Each time the Israelis cut off a head, a dozen more spring up. So why will we be able to do what the Israelis cannot?  The lsraeli answer is to build a very high wall to keep the Palestinians out.  There are no walls in Iraq for us to hide behind.

OK Andrew, Iraq is flypaper.  Who is the fly?

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/9/03; 12:27:18 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz Ignored CIA Warnings of Post-war Difficulties

There is an utterly damning account in today's Washington Post [ Spy Agencies Warned of Iraq Resistance] about pre-war intelligence assessments of the post-war difficulties we would face in Iraq.  You should read the article in its entirety and send it to everyone you know.  But here are a few choice quotes:

On the existence of clear warnings of problems:

"[S]ome administration officials have begun to fault the CIA and other intelligence agencies for being overly optimistic and failing to anticipate such widespread and sustained opposition to a U.S. occupation. But several administration and congressional sources interviewed for this article said the opposite occurred. They said senior policymakers at the White House, Pentagon and elsewhere received classified analyses before the war warning about the dangers of the postwar period. "Intelligence reports told them at some length about possibilities for unpleasantness," said a senior administration official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity. "The reports were written, but we don't know if they were read."

On the likelihood of guerilla style attacks on US forces:

"Before the war, the CIA passed on intelligence that some members of Hussein's Republican Guard military units and his Baathist Party had plans to carry on resistance after the war, according to one senior intelligence official. "They had been given instructions should the regime fall," the official said."

On the likelihood of making Iraq a new breeding ground for terrorists:

"CIA analysts last summer also expressed concerns that the "chaos after war would turn [Iraq] into a laboratory for terrorists," according to another former intelligence analyst."

On how Rumfeld, Wolfowitz, and Co. saw the world through rose colored glasses:

"In the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, senior Pentagon officials were privately optimistic about postwar Iraq, and their assessment shaped calculations about the size of the occupation force that would be required and how long it would have to be there, as well as the overall cost of the U.S. management of Iraq after the fall of the Hussein government."

Former Secretary of the Army Thomas White points the finger directly at Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz:

"Speaking of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, White said, "Their view of the intelligence was much different. Their notion of it was resistance would run away as the few remaining Saddam loyalists were hunted down."

So now the cost in lives and funds will be higher than it would have been if these warnings, and the assessments of experienced military officers like General Shinseki, the Chief of the Army, had been listened to in the first place.

And why did this happen?   I think it was because Rumsfeld wanted to use the war to push his vision of military transformation, to show all those "Clinton generals" that he knew how to do it better.

Again, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz must be held accountable for their costly negligence.  I agree completely with Congressman Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee [See my post "Neoconned no more" below] that the President should "allow them to return to the private sector."

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/9/03; 11:38:27 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Rummy Knows Best

There must be something about Ireland, with all its articulate people, that causes Donald Rumsfeld to place both feet in his mouth. 

On his way over to the Middle East he stopped at Shannon and said of the security situation in Iraq: "This is their country. They are going to have to provide security." [See my posting "Memo to the President" for my thoughts on that.]

On the return trip stop at Shannon Rumsfeld upped the foot-in-the-mouth ante by alleging that critics of the administration were essentially giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  Here's the quote from Rumsfeld: Criticism of Bush Strengthens U.S. Foes:

"We know for a fact that terrorists studied Somalia, and they studied instances that the United States was dealt a blow and tucked in, and persuaded themselves that they could in fact cause us to acquiesce in whatever it is they wanted to do...The United States is not going to do that; President Bush is not going to do that...They take heart in that and that leads to more money going into these activities or that leads to more recruits or that leads to more encouragement or that leads to more staying power."

I find it alarming that this administration seems to find democracy in America to be inconvenient. I find it alarming that they have such a thin skin when criticized [see my previous post on the Authoritarian Administration] I find it alarming that they can't admit they were wrong on the post-war issues. [Amid Iraq Policy Shift, Refusal to Admit Change Is a Constant]  I find it really alarming that Rumsfeld's statement has unfortunate echos of Vietnam. 

The truth is that this country has never failed to support its leaders when our fundamental national security interests were at stake and when they were making the right choices. 

Rumsfeld's choice of Somalia as Exhibit A of America being "dealt a blow and tuck[ing] in" demonstrates what a thin reed he is holding onto. A colleague and I wrote a short history of the US and UN Operations in Somalia that has been praised by people in the military who were there.  There was never a compelling national security interest at stake for the US in Somalia.  We went in, stabilized the country and let aid agencies deliver food to starving people.  We then left the UN with an impossible mission to complete [build a nation from a clan society with too few resources]  We got entangled in a hunt for a warlord with inadequate military backup. [Let us recall that the failure of another Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, to approve a request from the local commanders for heavy armor led to him to honorably resign over this.]  We then lost some very fine people as chronicled in Blackhawk Down and withdrew from this chaotic morass, where we had little at stake, before we suffered more casualties. 

Would Rumsfeld have had us stay and fight it out in Somalia?  Does he have another good example of us "tucking in"?  The mess in Beruit? Vietnam?

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/9/03; 3:12:02 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Who will be held accountable?

We are committed to succeed in Iraq, regardless of the costs, because the costs of failure would be higher still.

We are committed, but...

To say we are committed does not mean that we are happy about how we got into this mess.  Some very poor judgment, and perhaps even outright manipulation, got us into Iraq.  Who will be held accountable for that? 

To say we are committed does not mean that the people who planned the post-war operations in Iraq don't have a lot to answer for. Some very bad planning has placed at risk whatever accomplishments the war achieved.  Who will be held accountable for that? 

To say we are committed does not mean that we buy the administration's rationale for why we are there.  The administration created Iraq as the new "central front" in the war on terrorism.  This was not part of the plan.  And it is insulting in the extreme to continue to pretend otherwise.  The link between Saddam Hussein and September 11 never existed.  Hussein's régime and Al Qaeda were not allies.  By creating a power vacuum, a dissatisfied population, and a convenient set of targets in Iraq, the administration has put us in the position of having to fight on this front.  Who will be held accountable for that? 

To say we are committed does not mean that anyone else is going to help us.  The President's continued use of the declarative tense, in which he essentially tells the international community to help us out or face an even bigger mass, suggests that he still doesn't get it. This is a President who doesn't know how to admit mistakes and ask for help. It's simply a continuation of the rhetoric of threat and unilateralism that has alienated us from our allies.  Who will be held accountable for that? 

If we don't hold someone accountable for those errors of judgment, we will have only ourselves to blame when they reoccur in the future.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/8/03; 3:21:18 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Opportunity Lost: How History Should Judge Bush

The concept of opportunity cost kept running through my mind as I was digesting the President's speech on Iraq.  The idea is a simple, but powerful one: when thinking about a choice about how to allocate some scarce resource, say for the sake of argument $87 billion, you should focus on the opportunities you will give up by going down a certain path.

What else might we have spent this vast sum of money on if we were going to thoughtfully dedicate it to enhancing our national security, never mind to education or public health? Would it have helped to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan? Would it have helped our intelligence services focus on the growing terrorist menace in southern Asia?  Would it have helped to train first responders in American cities to deal with chemical or biological weapons attacks?

I say "would," of course, because this is water under the bridge.  We are committed (entangled? ensnared?) in Iraq and the President rightly says we can't afford to lose. So we will go forward and spend precious lives and treasure.

At the same time, I believe that history will and should judge President Bush not so much on what he did, but on what his choices made it impossible to do.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/8/03; 12:31:12 PM - Comments [3] Trackback [1]

Wolfowiticism

I was pondering what Paul Wolfowitz could do when he returns to the private sector, and then suddenly it hit me: standup comedy.  This guy is the master of the (sometimes long, admittedly) one-liner.  So I decided to create a posting on Wolfowiticisms.  If you come across any other good ones in your travels, please send them along and I will add them..

Propaganda Warning: All of these quotes are accurate, although admittedly in some cases taken out of context in a way that would make splotchy Bill O'Reilly and Co. at Fox proud.

On what it will take to make things work in Iraq:

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." Reuters, Monday July 21

On the link between Iraq and 9/11 #1:

"As terrible as the attacks of September 11th were, however, we now know that the terrorists are plotting still more and greater catastrophes. We know they are seeking more terrible weapons-chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. In the hands of terrorists, what we often call weapons of mass destruction would more accurately be called weapons of mass terror. The threat posed by the connection between terrorist networks and states that possess these weapons of mass terror presents us with the danger of a catastrophe that could be orders of magnitude worse than September 11th. Iraq's weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes - not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat. Disarming Iraq and the War on Terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror." http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/t01232003_t0123cfr.html

On the link between Iraq and 9/11 #2:

"I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it." http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030801-depsecdef0526.html

On why we used the threat of weapons of mass destruction to justify the war:

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." ~ as quoted in Vanity Fair, May 2003

On the size of the forces required to secure Iraq:

"Wildly off the mark," Wolfowitz's response to Chief of the Army General Shinseki's assessment that several hundred thousand troops would be needed.

On the cost of the war #1: 

Oil revenue "could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years."  testifying before Congress a week before the war began.

On the cost of the war #2:

"there will be some significant bills there." on the administration's request for $87 billion more  http://www.wstm.com/Global/story.asp?S=1430163

On the success of post-war planning

"There’s been a lot of planning for all phases of this war and many aspects of the plan I think have been spectacularly successful and any plan has got to adjust to realities we’re finding on the ground and this plan has been adjusting steadily.  - http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030904-depsecdef0646.html

On working with the UN in Iraq: 

"It’s been on our agenda ever since the fall of Baghdad -- understanding that we wanted to bring in more international troops and part of that plan is going to try to get U.N. support." http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030904-depsecdef0646.html

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/7/03; 10:27:43 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Neoconned No More: Respected Congressman says Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz Must Go

The country has been neoconned so successfully that I was worried that Rumsfeld and Co. would not be held accountable for the Iraqi debacle. Now the cracks are really showing.

[Neoconned:  To be led astray by neoconservatives; to fall under the influence of "raving romantic" neocons and live to regret it (see Obey comments below); see also recovering neocons]

Congressman David Obey (D-Wausau) has gone public with a blunt recommendation to the President that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should lose their jobs for their failure to anticipate and plan for the consequences of their Iraq policy. Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, took direct aim at Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in a highly unusual 3-page letter to the President on Friday. Obey said "I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector." Obey tells why he wrote the president

Obey further said that,

"I think it is serious to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave. But the more I looked at what is happening in Iraq, at what is happening with our allies, and at what is happening here in the United States, the more I came to the conclusion that this was necessary."

"I am certain that they have worked hard and have made financial and personal sacrifices for what they perceived to be the national interest. Nonetheless, it is impossible to review the record of the past year and not conclude that they have made repeated and serious miscalculations -- miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities."

"They had wildly romantic ideas about how easy it was going to be to turn Iraq into the second coming of New Hampshire in terms of democracy." [separately in his interview with the Capital Times, he described Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as "raving romantics"]

The Capital Times(a progressive publication to be sure) quickly picked this up win an editorial calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, Editorial: Rumsfeld Should Resign saying,

"Is there anyone in the world who seriously believes that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz handled preparation for and execution of the U.S. invasion of Iraq appropriately, or that they are doing so now?"

Citing Obey's letter, the editorial closed with,

"Obey's assessment is rooted in genuine concern for America and Iraq. The Bush administration ought not reject this wise counsel. It is time to replace Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz."

Hurrah! Thank heavens someone in the government has been willing to put this on the table.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/7/03; 8:56:00 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

General Zinni Trashes Administration Iraq Policy

To add to Bush's troubles, the respected former US commander of the Centcom region (which includes the Middle East), General Anthony Zinni (see bio below) blasted the administration  in a speech to Marine and Navy officers, Ex-Envoy Criticizes Bush's Postwar Policy saying,

"There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together" and

"Why the hell would the Department of Defense be the organization in our government that deals with the reconstruction of Iraq?...Doesn't make sense." and

"We certainly blew past the U.N.. Why, I don't know. Now we're going back hat in hand."

Even more telling, he said,

"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice, I ask you, is it happening again?"

The general is on record before the war as assessing Iraq to be # 6 or 7 on our national security priority list.
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Biography of General Anthony C. Zinni, USMC (Ret.)

General Zinni is currently serving as a Special Advisor to the Secretary of State and as a distinguished Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Prior to his current position, he served as Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command. Prior assignments include deputy commander in chief, U.S. Central Command; Commanding General, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force; Commander, Combined Task Force for Operation United Shield; chief of staff and deputy commanding general of combined task force Provide Comfort. Additional assignments include military coordinator, Operation Provide Hope; Director, Unified Task Force Somalia, Operation Continue Hope; deputy commanding general, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico, Virginia. General Zinni holds a bachelor’s degree in economics, an MA in international relations, and an MA in management and supervision.

His decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V” and gold star in lieu of a second award, and the Purple Heart.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/5/03; 1:49:06 PM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]

Wolfowitz Watch

I've decided to chronicle his survival tactics. Perhaps I should give style points?

Survival Tactic #1: Try to shift the blame to the Arab media Blaming Arab Media Will Not End America’s Iraq Woes  

Survival Tactic #2: Claim you were intending to do it all along, and not being forced to do it, kicking and screaming all the way Wolfowitz says U.S. wanted U.N. resolution since fall of Baghdad

Survival Tactic #3: Master the art of understatement. Wolfowitz on the costs of Iraq:  "there will be some significant bills there." Translation:  We need $60 to $70 Billion more.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/5/03; 1:44:15 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Memo to the President: Time for a Ritual Sacrifice of Rumsfeld

The time is fast approaching for President Bush to ritually sacrifice Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and Wolfowitz and Feith while he's at) to save his presidency. Bush's foreign policy, which has been driven in an unprecedented way by the civilians at the Defense Department, is in tatters -- and not just in Iraq. Bush Foreign Policy and Harsh Reality

Rumsfeld's unscheduled visit to Iraq is a sure sign that he knows he is vulnerable.  Asked about problems with Iraqi security during a stop for refueling on his way to the Middle East, Rumsfeld: More Forces Key to Secure Iraq Rumsfeld uttered what will probably become his epitaph.

"This is their country. They are going to have to provide security." 

If that is not a statement of utter helplessness, I don't know what is. Never mind that it is our obligation under international law as occupying power to provide security.

Meanwhile, the top US General in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez, is between a rock and a hard place. Top U.S. commander in Iraq says he needs more troops He said at a Baghdad news conference that "if a militia or an internal conflict of some nature were to erupt ... that would be a challenge out there that I do not have sufficient forces for."

More seriously, he said, "I have communicated very clearly to Central Command, who in turn communicates to Washington ... and to senior leadership that has come through here, that I do not need additional U.S. forces...Clearly, I have also stated that if coalition forces were to be offered, we would gladly accept them." 

So the bottom line is that he needs more troops, but he can't ask for more US troops.  Again, if this translates into unnecessary losses of our forces in Iraq, it is unconscionable.

Meanwhile, the US has not yet drummed up much support for its effort to internationalize Iraqi operations in the UN. US isolated as Europe scorns plea for more troops in Iraq

In the UK, the beleaguered Tony Blair appears to be biting the bullet and preparing to send more troops. MoD considers more Iraq troops  Things also have taken a noticeably negative turn for the Blair government in the Hutton inquiry, with senior government bureaucrats openly contradicting the politicians on the influence of politics on the "dodgy dossier". Intelligence chief: Dossier exaggerated the case for war and the British are gearing up for anticipated Al-Qeada sponsored terror attacks. Top British cop says terror attack inevitable.

On the home front, the administration is facing increasing questions over the cost of the Iraqi operations Hill Braces For Iraq Request and Bush's foreign-policy has become a tempting target for his Democratic competitors.

If I were Karl Rove, I would be advising the President to engineer the departure of Rumsfeld and Co. while there is still time for a major mid-course correction.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/5/03; 11:10:11 AM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]

The Authoritarian Administration

Some insight into why the Bush administration seems to be so rigid may be provided by this article in the UK Guardian, by psychologist Oliver James, who analyzed the president as an "authoritarian personality" So George, how do you feel about your mum and dad?  

James is actually drawing on recent research on the psychology of conservativism.  [Which in turn draws on a significant post-WWII stream on research on authoritarianism]. This paper in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition caused quite a stir, given that the goal was to,

"consider evidence for and against the hypotheses that political conservatism is significantly associated with (1) mental rigidity and closed-mindedness, including (a) increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (b) decreased cognitive complexity, (c) decreased openness to experience, (d) uncertainty avoidance, (e) personal needs for order and structure, and (f) need for cognitive closure; (2) lowered self-esteem; (3) fear, anger, and aggression; (4) pessimism, disgust, and contempt; (5) loss prevention; (6) fearof death; (7) threat arising from social and economic deprivation; and (8) threat to the stability of the social system. We have argued that these motives are in fact related to one another psychologically, and our motivated social—cognitive perspective helps to integrate them". 

Yikes.

This paper engendered understandable hostility among conservatives, given that research was funded by the Federal government. See this bulletin from the Republican Study Committee (RSC) which was posted on Dan Burton's website (Burton is the Chair of the House Committee on Goverment Reform).Studies on Conservative Motivations: Federally Funded with at least $1.2 million from NIH & NSF.  Question: Are they hoping to block future inquiry of this type by eliminating funding?  Question: Does the existence of the RSC document and its contents (1) support or (2) undermine the case that the researchers have made?

If Bush is an authoritarian personality, and if, as seems plausible, the character of the president powerfully influences the character of his presidency, who he selects to serve him, etc., then it goes along way to explaining why this administration seems to have such a high need for control to the point of being compulsive and secretive.

To be fair, I should note that Bush is by no means the first president to be psychoanalyzed in an unflattering way. Clinton was an analyst's field day. See for example, The Phallic Presidency, as were Nixon, Kennedy, FDR and so on, as discussed in Presidential Character: Predicting Performance In The White House.

Also to be fair, Jacques Chirac would probably benefit from substantial time on the couch.

So keep your fingers crossed that the trans-Atlantic clash of the control freaks can lead to the right thing being done in Iraq.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/4/03; 9:51:15 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

The Coming Military Meltdown

Each August I teach one or two sessions on coalition-building in the Kennedy School of Government's National and International Security Program.*  This two-week program brings together senior military officers and their civilian equivalents in the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.  This year I did the closing session on Iraq, a comparison of events in 1991 and 2003.  The sessions are organized as discussions, so I get to ask some questions, then listen. I always learn a lot about what keeps the professionals up at night.

One of the questions I asked was "Is the US military personnel system melting down?" By which I meant, are we at risk of losing our most precious military resource, our highly trained and committed people because we are over-committed. A deep collective sigh issued forth from the group, after which a senior US General emphatically said "yes." 

This question goes to the core of the risks we face in Iraq, beyond the obvious ones of having our soldiers killed.  Our military is a "coalition of willing." A lot of capability resides in National Guard and Reserve units.  Many of these folks, signed up for "a weekend a month," and now find themselves on long-term overseas assignments.   This comes on top of the stresses already imposed on our military by the operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan. 

In addition to the risk of having serious erosion in National Guard and Reserve units, there is a great deal of concern about falling rates of reenlistment in the regular Army. Key component of our core war-fighting strength face back to back year-long deployments.  Ironically, an improving economy, which provides alternative employment opportunities, could exacerbate this problem.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just released a report that suggests that "under current policies, the Pentagon would be able to sustain an occupation force of 38,000 to 64,000 in Iraq long term down from the existing 150,000 that a number of lawmakers said is not enough to confront the spiraling violence." Pentagon May Have to Reduce U.S. Forces in Iraq -CBO

Cost is also an issue. The same CBO report indicated that "A U.S.occupying force of less than 64,000 would cost between $8 billion and $10 billion a year, the CBO said, while a force of up to 106,000 adding Marines and other ground forces would cost $14 billion to $19billion."  Paul Bremer has already indicated that he expects there to be a significant budget gap Latest Iraq threat: cash crunch The administration's latest request for an additional $60 Billion for Iraq reflects that reality.Bush to Seek $60 Billion or More for Iraq

In the meantime, there is increasing pressure on the Blair government in the UK to send more troops.  Preparatory notes for a meeting that Foreign Minister Jack Straw was to have with the Prime Minister were leaked to the Telegraph and paint a very sobering picture of the challenges. Send more troops or risk failure, Blair told

To deal with this problem we have three basic alternatives.  One is to increase our capability to sustain troops in the field.   The CBO estimated the cost of recruiting, training and equiping two more divisions (roughly 80,000 people to be $19 billion and indicated that it would take three to five years to do it.

A second alternative is to turn much more control over security to the Iraqis. There are obvious problems with doing this quickly. The brother of the Shi'a cleric that was killed in the recent bombing has indicated that he has rearmed his militia, although he has indicated that he will not engage in violence against US forces. Brother of assassinated cleric foreswears violence against Americans.

The third alternative is to internationalize the operation. There is a fascinating analysis piece in today's Washington Post suggesting that this course of action was pushed on the White House by a coalition of the State Department and the Joint Chiefs over the objections of the civilian leadership of the Defense Department. Powell and Joint Chiefs Nudged Bush Toward U.N If this is the case then this is a really important shift.

Negotiations over a UN resolution are underway, with the pre-war opponents of US policy holding out for more control and more of the spoils of war. Germany and France Criticize U.S. Draft Resolution on Iraq I do expect that a resolution, tied to direct commitments of troops will emerge from this.

At the same time, there is every indication that the Bush Administration will cede control over Iraq grudgingly, if at all.  To me, this is part of a pattern of trying to hold onto things too tightly, and to let go only when forced to do so.  The irony is that the Bush administration could have declared victory after Hussein fell, moved immediately to internationalize the reconstruction effort, and emerged looking like a genius.  He could have said that the US needed to take the lead in dealing with the threat, and that this should be a lesson for the UN.  Now the move to take Iraq to the UN is simply going to be a very painful comedown.

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* I get to do this because I have conducted in-depth studies of national security negotiations in the Middle East, Korea, and Bosnia.  Accounts of these negotiations and the people who led them, and analysis of negotiation and coalition-building tactics, is presented in my book with Susan Rosegrant, Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post Cold-War Conflicts.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/4/03; 9:02:31 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/4/03; 9:02:09 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/4/03; 1:55:33 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Paul Wolfowitz: Off with his head!

I came across an item this morning that really made my blood boil.  It's an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Paul Wolfowitz entitled Support Our Troops and subtitled "Iraq isn't part of the war on terror? Try telling the soldiers that."

It's Wolfowitz at his Orwellian best, purposefully mixing up cause and effect to justify a flawed policy of which he was the chief proponent.  Consider the following quote:

"Anyone who thinks that the battle in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror should tell it to the Marines of the 1st Marine Division who comprised the eastern flank of the force that fought its way to Baghdad last April. When I met recently with their commander, Maj. General Jim Mattis in Hillah, he said that the two groups who fought most aggressively during the major combat operations were the Fedayeen Saddam--homegrown thugs with a cult-like attachment to Saddam--and foreign fighters, principally from other Arab countries. The exit card found in the passport of one of these foreigners even stated that the purpose of his "visit" to Iraq was to "volunteer for jihad.""

Let's recall that it was Wolfowitz who led the charge for regime-change after 9/11 by linking his longtime agenda to the terrorist threat. It was he who helped convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 (when he didn't) and who argued that a blow against Iraq was a blow against terrorism (which is wasn't). 

Now that he has helped to make Iraq safe for Islamicist fundamentalism, he has the temerity to suggest that we should (1) support our troops (which of course we do) because (2) they know they are fighting terrorism in Iraq (which they are, now) and (3) this justifies the original Iraq policy which placed them in danger (which it doesn't).

He conveniently avoids noting that (1) our troop are dying because (2) he and his cronies decided to make Iraq safe for fundamentalists to enter and go after us and (3) this helps demonstrate just how flawed his policy was.

May his head roll.

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Addendum #1: The Flypaper strategy - A commenter on this post suggested that we have pursposefully and cleverly adopted a "flypaper" strategy of attracting foreign terrorists to Iraq so we can eliminate them.  If so, (1) this was certainly not part of the original plan, (2) it ignores the fact that Islamicist terrorism is infectious, the terrorists are recruiting more terrorists in fertile Iraq, and (3) we haven't had much success in eliminating them. Iraq is flypaper.  Who's the fly, them or us?

Addendum #2.  Hussein's Support for Terrorism - The same commenter noted that Saddam Hussein was paying $ to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, which is support for terrorism.  But there is no evidence of a connection with Al-Qaeda and no evidence that Hussein was encouraging terrorism against the United States.  Also I didn't see any indication of the Israelis feeling that Hussein's payments to families constituted a threat worth doing anything serious about, so why should we do it on their behalf?

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/3/03; 11:25:54 AM - Comments [4] Trackback [0]

Reasons to be Cheerful

In the midst of all the bad news, there are some significant indications of a major shift in US foreign policy. These all have to do with hopeful signs that pragmatism/realism is triumphing over ideology in the administration.  You will note is that there is very little talk these days about preemption, much less American empire.

Part 1.  Iraq

In Iraq, the realities of the situation seems to have triggered some fundamental rethinking on the part of the administration.  [In Besieged Iraq, Reality Pokes Ideology in the Eye] This is taking two forms.  First, there's an acceleration of the move to create an Iraqi government [Iraqi Cabinet Takes Oath of Office.]  Second, the administration is going to the UN with what appears to be a genuine power and burden sharing proposal. [U.S. Wants Larger U.N. Role in Iraq]

Part 2.  North Korea

On the North Korean front, the seeming trend towards escalation has been nipped in the bud.  Following some indications that the Chinese were losing patience with both sides [US should clarify position on North Korea, China says'], the North Koreans toned down their rhetoric [North Korea softens rhetoric, says it is ready for 'dialogue'].  More significantly, the administration has for the first time signaled that it will change its policy in favor of negotiating a deal. [White House Shifts Policy on Iraq']

Part 3.  Israel and the Palestinians

On the Israeli -- Palestinian front, there are hopeful signs that we can begin to have a reasoned debate about the relationship between the United States and Israel. One signal is that the following significant article was published in the New York Times Sunday magazine. [How to Talk about Israel]  It pretty much captures my views on this issue.  We have to open up the possibility that (1) US interests are not identical with those of Israel on security issues and (2) we can talk about this, including being critical of policies of certain governments in Israel, without triggering a reflexive charge of anti-Semitism. 

In addition, the power struggle within the Palestinian Authority appears to be coming to a head.  [Palestinian PM to Quit Without More Power-Minister] I'm hopeful this will lead to the departure of Arafat from power, although I think this would be better accomplished through internal Palestinian reform than through the actions of the Israelis to deport him. [Arafat: 'The road map is dead']

True Believer Watch

Michael Ledeen, one of the intellectual brain trust for the neoconservatives, argues that Hezbollah (and by extension their Iranian backers) is behind the recent wave of bombings in Iraq.[ The Latest Horrors ] He cites no evidence that I could see (he also tries to implicate Libya etc.).  Also the claim that Hezbollah is a center of this is simply not credible given that one of the recent bombings targeted a Shi'a cleric who had spent a lot of time in Iran. Unsurprisingly, strong supporters of the Sharon government in Israel, like Ledeen, are working hard to up the pressure on Hezbollah and Iran, and I see this as part of that effort. Iran's weapons program is a big problem to be sure.  But let's keep the focus on this, and not accuse them of being behind everything that's going wrong in the Middle East.  In the long run, I believe that Iran is a natural ally of the United States.

Maureen Dowd takes the empire builders to task for improvisation in foreign relations in her column today [ Empire of Novices]. She does a lot of "the sky is falling." Personally, I'm grateful that the administration is showing flexibility in terms of their approach in Iraq and North Korea. 

Andrew Sullivan [http://www.andrewsullivan.com/] came back the summer vacation with thoughtful pieces about the war, insolvency, and Bush-hatred.  Interestingly he was immediately taken to task by his core readership for going "wobbly" on the war.  His defense in today's column is credible, and his acknowledgment of the need to internationalize the rebuilding of Iraq is refreshing. 

Joe Conasson has a piece in The Nation today.  [Where's the Compassion? ] It's an excerpt from his new book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth in which he argues that "Compassionate Conservatism" is a fraud that allows Bush to simultaneously play to his conservative base and reach out to the compassionate middle.. 

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 9/3/03; 8:51:57 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: Required Reading for Those Interested in Influence and Propaganda

I don't consider myself a liberal.  I'm too supportive of the military and too much of a supporter of globalization and the free market to take that label.  At the same, I find the rhetoric of the right (Fox et. al) to be simplistic and dangerous.  As a student of influence, I also find their campaign to pull the US to the right fascinating, if misguided.

It is in this spirit that I recommend Franken's new book:  Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them:  A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, which has just been published. 

"Lies" is an unusual book. It's part political satire and part investigative journalism. It also raises irony to an art form. Franken is unfailingly and scathingly funny. He, backed up by thorough research from his Harvard-based "TeamFranken," evicerates the right by presenting undeniable evidence of a pervasive pattern of lying, lying some more, and even lying about lying.

I also found Fox's misguided efforts to prevent publication of the book to be remarkably dumb for such a media-savvy group.

The sensible middle in this country needs to understand what these people do and how they do it. Al Franken has done his nation a service by writing this book.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/29/03; 12:35:00 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

The Problem with Pakistan

What country poses the greatest danger to our security today? My answer is Pakistan, not Iran or Syria. Why? Because of the very dangerous conjunction of weapons of mass destruction, missile systems, regional/ethic conflict, and Islamicist fundamentalism.

The problem with Pakistan has a number of interconnected elements:

Nuclear Instability in the Pakistani-Indian Conflict.

Largely lost in the terrible news of suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem last week was the detonation of bombs in the financial district of Mumbai (Bombay), India [Bombay Bomb Blasts Kill at Least 45] In the aftermath, India was quick to link the bombing to Pakistan [India suggests Pakistan link in Mumbai blasts] which has brought promising efforts to reduce tensions between the two countries in their dispute over Kashimr to a scretching halt (this presumably was one goal of the terrorists). The bombing occurred against the backdrop of rising tensions between Muslims and Hindus in India [Warning of rising Muslim anger over discrimination]. It also occurs in the context of an inherently unstable nuclear “game”between the two countries, which are too close to each other to permit a stable deterrence regime to be put in place, so increasing the risk that one or the other will launch a preemptive strike against the other. [Avoiding an India-Pakistan Nuclear Confrontation]

Nuclear Proliferation and Iran

Pakistan’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems likely were supported by the North Koreans [who just yesterday threatened to declare themselves a nuclear state and conduct a test see North Korea Threatens Nuclear Test] It appears that Pakistan has passed that knowledge along to Iran [ElBaradei: Iran Was Shopping on Nuclear Black Market] as part of a growing and potentially very dangerous relationship between those two countries. [ Pak official over ties with Iran]

Safe Ground for Islamicist Terrorism

Pakistan also remains an important organizing nexus for violent Islamicist fundamentalism. Pakistan’s role as a seedbed for such groups is, of course, longstanding.The country’s religious schools fan the flames of anti-Americanism. The Pakistani intelligence service strongly supported the Taliban in Afghanistan. There are reasons to believe that Osama Bin Ladin remains holed up in the north of Pakistan, protected by sympathetic tribes. [Inside story of the hunt for Bin Laden].The central government is either unwilling or unable to deal with these forces and so they continue to fester. Pakistan (or at least the current government) is a nominal ally of the US in the war on terrorism but remains fearful of appearing too supportive of the US.

The nightmare scenario is the rise to power of a fundamentalism government in Pakistan that controls a nuclear arsenal. I believe that achieving this was part of Osama bin Ladin’s “grand strategy.” He may yet realize it.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/29/03; 8:45:02 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Oh, that wily Saddam! and other tales of Iraq

Three really interesting articles on Iraq:

#1. In the LA Times - U.S. Suspects It Received False Iraq Arms Tips

"Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war."
 
The article goes on to suggest that Hussein might have sent us this disinformation to confuse us. Fascinating!  So it was that wily old Saddam Hussein's fault that we decided to go to war against him! Or perhaps there were other sources of false intelligence.  Multiple choice question: Who had an incentive to provide false intelligence to help support the case for the US to go to war in Iraq? Answers: (1) Saddam Hussein (2) Iraqi exiles (3) the Israelis. (Choose any two) Or perhaps there were people in the administration who had the answer and went looking for the evidence to back it up. Or both.

#2. In the Washington Times (to my surprise) -  U.S. Miscalculated Security For Iraq: Post-Saddam Resistance Unforeseen, Officials Say

"Some defense officials said privately in interviews that the plan in place for security after Baghdad's fall has been an utter failure. They said it failed to predict any significant resistance from Saddam loyalists, much less the deadly combination of Ba'athist holdouts and foreign terrorists preying daily on American troops."

Refreshing and sobering at the same time.

#3. In the Washington Post - UN Troops Considered for Iraq Duty

"The administration's willingness to consider creation of a multinational peacekeeping force under a U.N. mandate could signal an important shift, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior officials have thus far been reluctant to cede any U.S. authority over reconstruction and stability operations."

A good move, if the folks at Defense will accept it.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/28/03; 1:21:23 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

It depends what you mean by “negotiations”

The United States and North Korea yesterday held their first discussions in four months. These occurred in the context of the six-party talks sponsored by the Chinese to attempt to deal with the continuing tensions on the Korean peninsula.  The administration was quick to state that it would not hold “any separate formal bilateral meetings with the North Koreans.”

OK, so no separate formal bilateral meetings. This presumably means that the administration can hold (1) non-separate bilateral meetings, (2) informal bilateral meetings, (3) separate formal multilateral meetings,and (4) separate formal bilateral dance parties.  Which covers a lot of territory in terms of negotiating.

That's good, because we need to be talking to the North Koreans. In particular, we need to be talking to them about their nuclear ambitions, about their isolation from the world, about their collapsing economy, and about their export of missile and nuclear technology to other nasty regimes in the world.

Why all these contortions to mask the fact that we are talking with North Korea? Because key people in the Bush administration have a long history of excoriating those who advocated negotiations “as weak on the enemy”, as helpfully describing the North Korean leader as “tyrannical dictator,” and as advocating surgical strikes on North Korea's nuclear facilities (it is a very nasty regime to be sure, but what good does it do to personally attack the leadership). So they needed to find a face-saving way to back away from that position. Thanks to the Chinese for providing it.

Of course talking is not necessarily negotiating and negotiations do not necessarily lead to agreement (nor should they always, more on that in a minute.) Beyond the decision to talk to each other, all that has happened so far is a restatement of both sides' irreconcilable positions. An agreement to continue talking may be the best we can expect to emerge from this round.

Should we do a deal with the North Koreans?  It depends on the answer to several questions:

*Can we negotiate a verifiable agreement in which the North Koreans trade their proliferation-prone weapons programs for $ and security guarantees?  Well, we can try.

* Would the North Korean agree to such a deal?  Indications are that they would, they've been trying to do such a deal for a while.

*Would we agree to such a deal?  This is where it gets sticky.

The answer depends on what our alternatives are. Back in 1993-1994 we had close brush with war in Korea.  We pulled back when General Luck, who was leading US forces in the region at the time, told the Clinton administration that he could win a war, just “not right away.”  The Pentagon's projections at the time were 30,000 US casualties, a million dead in Korea, and a $trillion of damage to the Asian economy.  The administration also concluded that the “surgical strike” option advocated by Republicans such as Arnold Kanter and Brent Scowcroft was as likely as not to trigger full-scale war, turn Seoul into a sea of fire, etc. Besides it wasn't clear we knew where all of their nuclear facilities were. Doing nothing would have permitted the North Koreans to go openly nuclear. So we negotiated a deal that bought us some time.

Our alternatives are pretty much the same this time. We can (1) try to strangle them and hope that they don't lash out or sell weapons to bad guys or collapse in a really damaging way, or (2) we can resort to military action in the hope that we can get a quick victory, or (3) we can negotiate.

The difficulty is that there is a deep split in the administration about whether to negotiate, as evidenced by the departure of the State Department's most senior official dealing with the North Koreans. In the past, such internal divisions have led to a lowest-common denominator compromise on the US side: we will talk but not offer anything. Which means, of course, that we won't get anything.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/28/03; 10:04:26 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

We Can't Afford to Fail in Iraq

I was not in support of going to war in Iraq.  I thought the administration's case for doing so was weak and driven by agendas that were not in our best interests for the long term.  I also felt that there were more pressing security priorities (I did support both the first Gulf War and the operation in Afghanistan).  I am on the record as worrying that an invasion (1) would result in the scattering of the very weapons (chemical and biological) that we wanted to keep out of the hands of terrorists and (2) would make Iraq safe for Islamicist fundamentalism, creating a fertile new recruiting ground for our enemies. I'm still worried.

But pre-war arguments about whether to invade Iraq and the associated "what ifs" are water under the bridge.  We are committed now and have to succeed.  To fail would be to do terrible damage to the credibility of the United States and hence to our security.  If you have not read the text of President Bush's speech to the Amercian Legion yesterday you should (skip the upfront stuff and scroll down to what he has to say about Iraq). We are committed and there is no easy exit here.  We either devote the resources (not necessarily more troops) or we let a dangerous gap develop between demands and capacity, and so risk the fragmentation and radicalization of Iraq The festering problems between the Turks and the Kurds in the north are one example of what could go wrong. 

We also have big problems in terms of our core coalition with the UK.  The Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly - over his leaks concerning the government's "sexing up" of it's Iraq WMD dossier -  is slowly eviscerating Blair's government.   Our enemies have recognized that the UK is a weak link and are trying to erode British support through attacks on British forces. I also wouldn't be surprisied to see a significant terrorist attack in the UK to further that process.  That, along with the attack on the UN and the departure of aid workers, are elements of a coalition-breaking strategy designed to isolate the US.

For those of you that think the answer is to hand the whole thing over to the UN, think again. The UN's  failures (e.g Somalia) and successes (e.g. East Timor) in terms of nation building have established that security is a prerequisite, and that it can only be established  by having a military force, the core of which is provided by one nation, in place.  The UN can, however, manage key "nation-building" tasks better than we can.  The answer, in my opinion, is to internationalize the military side of the operation under NATO. This, of course, will mean doing a deal with the French and the Germans, which will be painful.

Nor is the answer necessarily more troops. But if they are needed, the administration had better not let ego stand in the way of providing them.

We must also, I believe, resist calls to further expand our military operations in the Middle East to encompass Syria, Iran, or Saudi Arabia as some commentators, for example Jed Babbin at the National Review, have called for.  We have bitten off quite a bit already.  A direct demonstration of our power, both hard/military and soft/values, in Iraq will suffice to put pressure on neighboring regimes to reform. 

Also there are potential advantages to attracting the world's terrorists to Iraq, where we can engage them directly.  It is not at all clear that the Iraqis will support them, especially if they and not us are blamed for lack of progress, or if they choose the wrong targets.

Finally, as I noted in my posting yesterday, we can't afford to try to do this on the cheap.  The notion of embracing Hussein's security and intelligence services, for example, is a seductive one, because they can help us in the short run.  But we will be doing a deal with the devil.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/27/03; 8:10:10 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

In Good Company? Administration Supports Thieves and Thugs in Iraq

Perhaps it was inevitable that our failure to provide short term security in Iraq would lead us to embrace people who will threaten our long term goal of institutionalizing democracy.  See the Washington Post article on US efforts to recruit members of Hussein's dreaded intelligence service. And an article on US pressure on Jordan not to request the extradition of the Defense Department's favorite autocrat-in-training Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, so they can sue him for financial corruption (he was convicted in absentia of theft from the Petra Bank in Jordan.

If you are trying to do occupation on the cheap, the wise colonialist purges the top tier and embraces the rest of the old regime.  Watch for rationalizations on how "this is just temporary" etc.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/26/03; 11:23:06 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Michael Watkins' Blog

I plan to post commentaries to this blog on world events on weekdays. I will endeavor to stake out a position in the middle - pragmatist/realist.  I tend to be conservative on issues of defense and spending and liberal on social issues.  I believe that most of the world's problems are caused by "true believers" and those who lead them.  Inevitably I will therefore offend many people on both the left and the right.  Paraphrasing former Secretary of State George Schultz, "If you drive down the middle of the road, expect to be hit on both sides."

I welcome comments on my postings, but cannot promise to respond to everyone.

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 8/26/03; 10:42:55 AM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]