Schneier on Security

Skeptical • February 21, 2015 7:14 PM

Hey, Signals Intelligence, terrorist/insurgency networks Q/I/T have to communicate with each other, and they swap SIM cards like lice. Can you do a better job tracking and listening to these guys?

Sorry, we’d need rapid access to entire sets of Kis to do that, and that would mean eavesdropping on a foreign company.

Gosh, you’re right. Don’t worry about it. Not like there are people whose lives depend on intelligence like this.

It’s beyond naive to think that any intelligence service – any intelligence service – is going to be limited by a public/private property distinction in a foreign country. No intelligence service of which I’m aware has a rule which states: you may trespass on the property of foreign governments, but never upon foreign private property.

It’s especially naive when you glance at the list of mobile providers GCHQ touted as successes in their trial runs (an Icelandic entity is on there, oddly, with entities in countries like Afghanistan and Somalia, but the document specifically notes that the Icelandic entity was unexpected). Signals intelligence in such countries is likely to be quite important – perhaps vitally important to those operating in such countries. If getting that intelligence requires eavesdropping on a foreign company, there is not a nation on earth that would not do so.

I’d only add that obtaining access to Kis doesn’t necessarily mean bulk surveillance (they could be used for that purpose – but then we’ve already learned of the nations in which the NSA was doing so).

Acquiring data by requesting that another government compel a company do so can be unsatisfactory in various ways even if that data is part of a targeted surveillance operation.

To list merely three:

(A) the request by itself may disclose sensitive information to a varied set of individuals whose knowledge might compromise operational security;

(B) the request may take too long;

(C) legally compelling a multinational company to give data to the government can be complicated in many countries – the company may need to involve personnel or equipment in additional foreign nations, which may oblige the company to then comply with the law in place in those additional foreign nations – which may in turn require the informing of the governments of those additional foreign nations of the request -> good-bye security, good-bye timeliness.

There are others just as significant.

Indeed one might suspect that the authors of the original article had very targeted surveillance in mind when they decided to publish this, though of course the possibility of bulk collection is the angle that must be used to spur wider interest. To the extent the article harms efforts at such targeted surveillance, one might even suspect the authors would be pleased.

Skeptical • February 22, 2015 3:21 PM

@Fluffy: Every time you write here, you advocate the total destruction of democracy — as a real, functional thing. You do seem to love it’s outward appearance, but the autonomy we need to have in order for it to exist in truth, is something you clearly find unnecessary.

Democracy in the US, as everywhere it actually exists, depends upon rule of law. The autonomy of citizens, and persons, derives not from a lock that the government cannot pick nor from a door that the government cannot break down. It derives from the establishment of institutions, practices, and values that restrain and restrict the abuse of government power.

At one point, it is true, to be autonomous one required a castle that the government could not easily breach. In many parts of the world, that is still true.

But of course, if castles are required to preserve essential liberties from government encroachment, then one is not living in a system that respects autonomy. The real problem in such a case is the system, not the lack of a castle.

What drove the independence movement of the American colonies was the sense that their governments were no longer their own, and their institutional protections were being chipped away, quite deliberately, by a group of interests determined to ultimately enslave them. Their answer was not to enable each individual to build a castle, but to enable themselves as a people to build a government capable of serving the public interest, including the preservation of their liberties as well as the enlargement of their welfare and prosperity.

It is in service to that same government which US intelligence agencies act today. The freedoms of speech and press, of expression in general, burn as brightly today as in any other period in history. The liberties of all are as protected, indeed more protected, and expansive, and enjoyed by more people, than in any other period in history.

There is not the slightest sign that anything the US and its allies have done with respect to intelligence has weakened democracy. Far from it.

I’m also curious as to what you believe intelligence services should do instead of this. Practically speaking, I don’t see many alternatives to this type of endeavor, given their likely needs in certain areas of the world and given the disadvantages of alternatives. But perhaps you see something that I do not.

@Pseudo-delusional: Skeptical thinks taxpayers give a crap about the effectiveness of NSA’s targeted surveillance of State Senator Obama, Supreme Court Justice Alito, General Petraeus, Colin Powell, or journalists, bankers, attorneys, and everybody else in the world who they don’t need to blackmail yet. … East German asskisser who whined about the Stasi’s compromised effectiveness… petulant public whining… famous historical object of derision

Fortunately both of us are able to express our viewpoints regardless of whether “taxpayers” agree with either one of us. Only one of us seems to have any tolerance for disagreement, though, which makes the other one of those unfortunate types that hates people while proclaiming his love for humanity. Of course, in this persona you merely spew hatred. One has yet to see you express a love for anything, nor indeed to indicate a single positive sentiment about anything. If you are as truly unhappy as your posts indicate, then, to the extent you do well by others, or if your unhappiness is caused by illness or injury, I wish you better fortune. As to the Stasi, they had much the same attitude towards disagreement that you do. 0041004D0046

Skeptical • February 22, 2015 6:39 PM

@Nick P: I have no idea. A friend of mine, who actually is technically conversant, suggested it as a “screwball pitch” in his words, which translated means a silly joke. He assured me that it was nothing offensive, and given his sense of humour it may actually be a meaningless string. Interesting guy – quite libertarian, but we have enough common ground on key principles to avoid acrimony. Also a very old friend, whom I’ve helped over the years on matters in my area, and who has helped me on matters in his area.

But $270bn would be about where the PRC’s military budget probably is, so I wouldn’t suggest it as a limit. 🙂

@Pseudo: I’m having a discussion, not engaging in a war. What are you doing?

Skeptical • February 24, 2015 8:14 PM

@Nick P: Randomly thought to treat it like ASCII (standard) text encoded as hex. Comes out to be AMF with only a news site showing up in Google search. However, searching for it in framework of security leads to a bunch of “AMF” malware. Your friend get you to put malware in your signature as an inside joke for security pro’s? 😉 I’m done on guessing, though, as it would be pure speculation. I had to try ASCII, though, as it was a common trick back in the day. Had no Unicode tools on my machine so I couldn’t do it. (shrugs)

lol Okay, thanks. Malware angle is a dry hole, but you’ve found out enough to figure out the “punchline” I think, and it looks to be about his speed. A little backstory: He and I find ourselves occasionally on the same flights, and in a gratuitous waste of money I’ll sometimes browse to this site while he’s unsuccessfully working his “charm” on the flight-attendant (or drooling over his pillow in a magnificent imitation of the Niagara Falls), and he’ll peek over at it (since this is more squarely his area than mine). He’s been impressed at many of the comments, and discussions. He caught a few of Pseudo’s more hostile remarks, and noticed what seemed to be a deliberate effort to insert 60s/70s military slang into his remarks.

And that old slang is what appears to have brought us here, though I’ll get confirmation next time we contact. “AMF” is an old piece of military slang. “AMF” -> Alpha Mike Foxtrot -> Adios MotherF*cker. Supposedly it can be used in a friendly and in an unfriendly sense.

Skeptical • February 25, 2015 6:50 PM

@Dirk: We seem to be back to our espionage discussion where your opinion is that it is a perfectly legal activity if the laws of the country on whose behalf it is executed make it so, and irrespective of the laws of the country it is perpetrated against.

You’ve missed the distinction.

If Nation A’s intelligence officers commit espionage in Nation B, those officers may be acting in violation of Nation B’s law but in conformity with Nation A’s law.

The crucial question from a rule of law vantage for Nation A is whether its intelligence services are bound by its laws – not whether its intelligence services are bound by the laws of other countries.

You even claim that principle to be enshrined in international law.

I’ve said, and shown, that there is nothing in international law that forbids espionage.

To the best of my knowledge, the US is not at war with The Netherlands, and neither is this country considered a terrorist nation, part of some axis of evil. They are actually a NATO partner. So is Belgium (Belgacom), for that matter.

War is not, nor ever has been, a prerequisite to conducting espionage. Indeed, one of the more salutary possible purposes (and effects) of espionage is the prevention of war.

Dutch Home Secretary Plasterk has publicly stated that the Gemalto hack was unacceptable and illegal under Dutch law. The only correct way for the US/UK to go about this was to negotiate a deal with Gemalto and French/Dutch authorities. What’s been achieved here is further erosion of trust within NATO and between the EU and the US, depicting both the US and the UK as rogue nations that don’t give a rat’s *ss about the laws and the sovereignty of their allies and partners. That’s really clever foreign policy.

It’s theatre. At this point Gemalto’s share price has regained about all the ground it lost when this story first broke. US cooperation with the Netherlands runs very deep and the mutual interests, cultural values, and history that bind the two nations together are as strong as ever. Indeed, given the percentage of the Dutch and Belgian population that has apparently been radicalized (to judge by the per capita figures of those who departed to fight for ISIS in Syria), I would say that these nations have a very strong interest in effective signals intelligence by the Five Eyes.

And who knows – as Russia continues to take a tactically astute but strategically mistaken course in Eastern Europe, perhaps cooperation among Western nations will grow.

That’s not what I said. But Clapper did perjure himself and even admitted to it. Martha Stewart was indicted and prosecuted for lying to federal investigators about a stock trade. So was baseball player Roger Clemens for supposedly lying to Congress about drug abuse. Examples galore. To the best of my knowledge, US law does not recognize the protection of “national security” to be a defense to a charge of perjury. The fact that Clapper is still in office and wasn’t even indicted raises more than one question about dual standards and certain people seemingly being above the law.

Very different cases Dirk. Whether to prosecute someone for perjury, or for making false statements to federal agents as in the case of Stewart, is heavily based on circumstances.

What I’m saying is that the US is so obsessed by squashing the mosquitoes in the toilet that they are ignoring the elephant pissing all over the living room (ISIS). How on earth is it possible that the rise of a neanderthal movement currently estimated at about 200k combatants has gone unnoticed despite a global surveillance dragnet? Either the NSA is looking for terrorists in all the wrong places or its analysts are completely incompetent. Talking about an epic fail …

What exactly is it you think they missed? Are you asking why the NSA did not predict the course of the Syrian civil war, and the fortunes of ISIS in its battles against the Iraqi Army? The relativity of time notwithstanding, I do not think the NSA is yet capable of intercepting signals from the future, though I also believe certain reporters could charge the NSA with doing so without blushing.

Are you asking how the US failed to disrupt terrorist plots emanating from ISIS’s territory? Which got through?

Frankly I agree that the US should have made ISIS more of a priority earlier, and in more dramatic fashion, but that’s not an easy call to make, and it would have been a major policy shift in US counterterrorism strategy (which has been light footprint with reliance on raids and strikes on key targets). Obama’s strategic detachment has its weaknesses as well as its strengths. However, the slow play, if effective, has the benefit of encouraging greater regional responsibility for extremist movements and with fewer losses of American lives in yet more fighting in Iraq.

Only under the machiavellistic principle that the goal justifies the means,

If the ends never justified certain means, Dirk, we would all be pacifists (and probably living under the rule of those who are not). The question is one of balancing the harm done by those means against the harm prevented, or the good accomplished, by the ends which are sought to be achieved.

If the US really believed these keys to be such an important asset in their fight against insurgent networks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia etc., they could have made very specific requests for very specific mobile networks to authorities and Gemalto instead of just collecting it all.

I noted the reasons why this might not be feasible. If the Kis were being used to that end, especially in Iraq or Afghanistan, the rapidity with which access would be needed would have required special and (I’m guessing) extraordinary cooperation from various governments, some of which are lukewarm on certain US counterterrorist efforts (at least in public).

It would appear Gemalto just pulled a Lenovo. Their one week forensic investigation has revealed that “the attacks only breached its office networks and could not have resulted in a massive theft of SIM encryption keys”. I wonder if they actually believe that themselves because I don’t think anyone else does.

Judging by the reaction of the share price, quite a few people do.

Like you of course, I have no doubt whatsoever that the careful journalists at The Intercept drew the correct conclusion from 2010 documents reporting on GCHQ trial runs at detecting Ki deliveries – even if those same documents noted that many of the deliveries were protected by strong encryption, something Gemalto noted yesterday.

And like you, I found The Intercept’s extrapolation of the number of Kis that must have ultimately been collected from those trial runs very rigorous and well supported.

We know that whenever a government tests a concept, the program which results (and one always does, right?) always produces at scale in a manner easy to extrapolate from little data.

Seriously, even truly cautious journalists have grossly misunderstood some of the documents in Snowden’s archive. As for those perhaps overly eager for a sensational splash… I frankly don’t know who is correct here, but on the basis of the evidence offered so far, neither side is persuasive.

Well, unless the USAF is building its own aircraft, this intelligence was passed on to a company that not only spared itself quite some costs in R&D but also profited from selling the resulting product.

The intelligence reportedly spurred an alteration in existing electronics packages to render them more effective against a Soviet adversary. It’s a bit strained to call US espionage targeting Soviet military radar systems an instance of commercial espionage. The purpose of the espionage is quite clearly military in nature, not commercial. Air superiority in combat, not shareholder profit in peace, was the purpose.

And although this is all tangential, I also doubt it saved any company any costs on R&D. The nature of the changes that the espionage allowed were likely more in the way of effective countermeasures against the specifics of Soviet systems, and, reportedly, the acquisition of the intelligence required a redesign of the electronics package for a particular aircraft already under contract (i.e. costs would have increased).

Skeptical • February 27, 2015 3:19 PM

@Dirk: Anyway, POTUS has made it clear that the US doesn’t do no-spying agreements with anyone. Which ticked off France, Germany and other European countries in a major way.

🙂 Neither does France or Germany. Nor are their governments so naive as to be “ticked off” that the US won’t guarantee that no espionage will be conducted against them.

Local alternatives – when available – will eventually get preferred over US tech and services. It’s already happening in China and Russia. Haydn knows it, Alexander knows it and I’m pretty sure so do you.

Sure – as I’ve said before, in most countries business and government are much more deeply intertwined than in the United States. I’d fully expect foreign companies to leverage “the NSA issue” as much as possible – along with “the Google issue” – in attempting to persuade their governments to carve out protected marketplaces against competitors that consumers would otherwise choose. And that’s not to say that US companies wouldn’t try to do the same if they were in the same circumstances.

What do you mean “sometimes”? Snowden has made it obvious that it’s happening everywhere and all the time.

I’ve yet to see the documents relating to Operation Omniscience, much less detailing its success. The US must prioritize a finite amount of resources just like everyone else.

Chances are they have. But if they did, it’s unlikely they asked for such SIGINT to be obtained by breaking into EU institutions, SWIFT, Belgacom, Gemalto and probably quite some other organisations. Unless of course you have evidence that Belgian and Dutch authorities knew all along what NSA and GCHQ were up to in their respective countries and secretly condoned it.

I have no idea. But I can’t share your instinctive probability assessment.

France, Germany and most other EU countries want a diplomatic solution. The US – or at least powerful lobbies there – want a proxy war with Russia by supplying US arms to the Ukrainian kleptocrat government at the expense of the American taxpayer and from which only the US military-industrial complex benefits.

Okay, let’s stop for a second.

Contrast your complaint about US inaction in Syria with your above theory.

In your theory above, the defense companies desire profits by increased sales of their goods to the US Government, and are therefore causing the US Government to adopt a foreign policy in which such sales will become necessary.

Yet in Syria, it’s quite clear that US did not adopt a foreign policy that required it to purchase large amounts of military goods and provide them to foreign fighters. The presumable desires of defense companies to sell such goods apparently did not move foreign policy there at all – even though it would have been far easier for Obama to do so in that case.

So I don’t think an explanation of US foreign policy in the Ukraine that relies on the incentive of defense companies to sell military goods is a good one. The weakness lies in its presumption of the influence of defense companies on foreign policy (answer: not much). Were the assumption true, US foreign policy in Syria would have looked like different over the last two years.

What’s really happening then?

The US doesn’t want a proxy war in the Ukraine. It’s destabilizing, it forces the US to put military and intelligence resources into Eastern Europe rather than the Pacific or the Middle East, it weakens the European economy, it makes cooperation with Russia on areas of common interest more difficult.

Neither, though, does the US want to permit Russia to be permitted to use a special war strategy in Europe to accomplish its objectives. The US regards the successful use of such a strategy as dangerous, in that it may encourage Russia to attempt elsewhere in Europe where the US has actual military commitments, and in that it can be used as a threat to undermine existing, and relatively new, Eastern European democracies.

European interests are identical to those of the United States that I’ve described. Where they begin to differ is in the cost of economic pressure on Russia. The US economy is relatively robust and healthy, and is not dependent on Russia. Consequently the US can exert a tremendous amount of economic pressure on Russia without sustaining much damage itself. By contrast, Europe’s economy/economies is much more fragile and so its ties to Russia’s economy and finances matters more. Increased pressure by Europe is politically more difficult for each government to exert.

Calls from some within the US to provide military supplies to the Ukrainian Government are being made, but I suspect that the US (along with its allies) does not believe such aid would achieve the desired end. So, for the moment, that’s not a part of US policy, nor a part of the policy of any nations in Europe.

But… that is all subject to change.

Because the alternative is even uglier. Country ‘A’ under false pretexts (WMD programs, ties with AQ) invades country ‘I’ to topple an authoritarian leader ans his batsh*t crazy sons whose oil they want.

The US didn’t desire Iraq’s oil, nor frankly does it need Iraq’s oil. Contracts for extracting and selling Iraqi oil were awarded on an open basis by the Iraqi Government, mostly to non-US companies.

They spend more than a trillion USD and after more than 8 years pull back out of a totally divided country they have left in shambles. The power vacuum proves fertile soil for the rise of a barbaric army operating under a flag of fundamentalist Islam, ranks of which grow to over 200k combatants. These militias terrorise and butcher by the thousands the local population not only in country ‘I’ but just as well in parts of adjacent country ‘S’ that ‘A’ has also been destabilising.

Problem is that ISIS didn’t rise in Iraq. It rose in Syria. Some of its leaders do derive from al-Qaeda in Iraq – but those leaders were in Syria because the ones not killed were driven out of Iraq. The Syrian Civil War furnished the power vacuum in which ISIS rose, but the US didn’t cause the Syrian Civil War.

Years after the US left, ISIS pushed successfully into Iraq. The causes of ISIS’s success are complex, but on the Iraqi side the major problems were: (A) corruption and sectarian division within civilian and police entities, particularly what Sunnis perceived (often justly) as the excesses of a Shi’ite dominated government and officer corps and (B) corruption and sectarian division within the Iraqi military, which rendered them less than fully effective as a fighting force.

As a side effect, the EU faces collateral damage by a new generation of jihadi terrorists returning from the battle grounds to their home countries.

People who made the decision to join ISIS before leaving Europe, Dirk. And many who made that decision before ISIS ever entered Iraq. You cannot lay the blame for the Syrian Civil War, or radicalized elements within various European cities, at the feet of the US.

Skeptical • March 1, 2015 7:34 PM

@Dirk: You’re right re ISIS/Iraq. I wrote hastily, sloppily, and in error on some points, and I appreciate (honestly, I do) the time you took to point out the mistakes.

So acknowledging that, let me write more carefully and accurately this time.

Foreign fighters have traveled to fight in the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2011, though they were used in Iraq during ISIL’s major offensives in 2014 and some are still present.

The rise of ISIL’s foreign fighters, and the largest swelling of its ranks prior to its major offensives, occurred in Syria, under the leadership of personnel who had previously fought in Iraq and largely, by 2014, with independent funds.

So the threat of foreign fighters returning to Europe has everything to do with the Syrian Civil War, the humanitarian catastrophe of which, combined with radicalized pockets of persons in Europe who had not been assimilated well into their various societies and a slick outreach program by components of Nusra that later became part of ISIL, proved effective in drawing a few thousand Europeans to Syria. It’s a mistake to blame for the US for this. US actions in Iraq are important to understanding the history of ISIL, but so are many other things, ranging from European colonialism and British policy post WW1 to the policies of Qatar and other states to the brutality of Assad’s regime.

Until the offensives of 2014, the US and Europe focused primarily on tracking those foreign fighters, and upon developing intelligence of groups within Syria that sought to strike at Western targets. Although renewed US intervention had been discussed earlier than 2014, some argued effectively that inserting American forces would heighten the threat to the West, transforming conflicts internal to Syria and Iraq in which the US had little role into conflicts where the US became a major combatant and target. Since the prospects for an enduring resolution in Syria or Iraq were quite dim at the time, and remain so today, inserting American forces was considered a losing proposition.

That judgment was quite frankly an eminently reasonable one.

Indeed, even in the summer of 2014, when ISIL gains in Iraq and, apparently, the development of other intelligence, seems to have led the US to begin planning for more involvement, the US refused to become more involved until Prime Minister Maliki, who has been (with some justice) widely viewed as an enormous contributing factor to sectarian strife in Iraq, was removed and replaced with a leader, and with policies, more conducive to a stable Iraq. Iran quickly withdrew its support for Maliki, who was at last pushed from power, and US involvement began to increase.

As to the other points we discussed:

Ukraine and Syria are two entirely different cases. Contrary to Ukraine, any ground intervention against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is just very hard to sell both to Congress and the American people in light of the previous disastrous interventions in Iraq and the cost at which they have come. The sales pitch for Ukraine is way easier: “restoring democracy” for those poor Ukrainians who are defending against the ancient foe Russia and its dictator Putin.

No, you’re not describing the problem correctly. It’s not “sending US forces into Syria/Iraq vs. sending arms to Ukraine.” It’s “sending arms to ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels and the Kurds vs. sending arms to Ukraine.”

Here’s the explanation you gave me w/r/t the Ukraine:

A = US defense firms desire profits from a program in which the USG buys arms and gives them to Ukraine

B = US defense firms lobby/influence the USG to begin such a program

C = USG seeks to institute such a program.

AxB -> C

One problem is that this reasoning predicts that the USG should have long since been sending huge amounts of arms to certain Syrian rebels and to the Kurds. Proposals to do so were not only pushed by substantial portions of the Democratic party, but have also been very strongly supported by Republicans. And yet the USG did not adopt such a program.

Another problem with the explanation you give is that it’s simply untrue that the US desires a proxy war with Russia. The US has been extremely limited even in the intelligence it has shared with the Ukraine precisely because it seeks to avoid such an outcome.

From the US vantage, as nations Russia and the US have deep areas of common interest. The problems arise in certain limited areas due to policy choices made by Putin that are actually strategic mistakes, but into which, even if he recognizes them as mistakes, he may feel locked.

The US would prefer Russia walks back the mistakes, allowing the US and Russia to develop stronger cooperation on areas of common interest. And contrary to the frankly paranoid and disturbingly xenophobic rhetoric emanating from Russian propaganda sources, that does not include weakening Russia. Certain groups in Russia seem mired in the 20th century, in old conflicts and old ways of thinking, unable to forge ahead to a better future along a cleaner path. What Russia needs is a competent and uncorrupted military (this has improved, though there is still some way to go – and I view this as important not only to Russian security, and to Russian national pride, but also to US security), judicial and political institutions with less corruption and better rule of law, and economic development not only of the resources it can extract from the soil but development of the resources of its people, i.e. the minds and ingenuity of the Russian populace.

Yet instead of this, they are being given an odd admixture of blatant corruption and an inability by some to let go of the Cold War.

Restoring Russian greatness does not require reviving the policies of the Soviet Union. Russian culture runs deeper, with better resources, and would those in power but grasp that, they would hand to their children and grandchildren an immensely better future.

So… no, the US does not desire a proxy war with Russia. This isn’t 1980 and the Ukraine isn’t Afghanistan. In 2015, the US and Russia have far more to gain by cooperation than by conflict. But the US is not willing to allow Eastern European nations to lose their independence to threats of military force from Russia. Neither is the rest of Europe.

But they do have far more resources in this field than the average country does. So from what we know so far, I’d say “sometimes” is a serious understatement.

The US has more resources, but also a great many more commitments. Prioritizing how those resources are used remains vitally important.

I’d also add that most US allies are open and democratic societies, in which open source intelligence is probably capable of answering most questions that policymakers might have in crafting policy.

Re intertwining of business and government in nations other than the US:

Again I’m speaking of most, not of all. The reasons are multiple. In some democratic nations, single companies (or tightly knit groups) can dominate the economy, resulting in tighter, interdependent relationships with the government. Other reasons include, in some cases, a longer, deeper history of mercantilist policies, or simply an economic and legal structure in which government and business are more tightly intertwined (which can vary widely, ranging from German corporatism to nationalized companies like Petrobras).

That intertwining can be beneficial in many ways – it may lead to better labor protection in some instances. It may sustain a vital area of research in other instances. And so on. There are entirely rational reasons why it may exist – I don’t mean to imply that its presence or absence has anything to do with national virtue or wisdom (though sometimes it does).

That intertwining is much less the case in the US, which is in part why it has led the movement towards free trade, even when it has exposed its own industries to fierce foreign competition. For better and for worse, it means that firms in the US operate with greater independence from government, and that profit is more sharply determinative of their actions.

Skeptical • March 3, 2015 10:05 PM

@Dirk: It goes without saying that there are several other factors that have contributed to today’s situation, but there is no denying that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was the catalyst that gave birth to IS, their rise in Iraq and subsequent push into Syria.

Eh, on the one hand, the absence of security in many areas post 2003 allowed insurgent groups, such as AQI, to take root.
On the other hand, the presence of US forces and their insistence on the creation of a functional system of democratic government, with a professional military, gave Iraq a shot at resisting these insurgents.

And with the new counterterrorism strategy implemented by Petraeus, they largely defeated the insurgency.

After that, 2009-2011, is really a decision point for the Iraqi Government. Do they build better cohesion in their military ranks, eliminate corruption, and make the dignified treatment of Sunnis a priority? Or do they instead turn a blind eye to the abuses of Shia militias, and worse?

They chose worse. And consequently they destroyed the efficacy of their fighting forces while further alienating the Sunni population.

And through all this – the diminishment of the Iraqi military, the corruption of the government, the abuse of the Sunnis – AQI continued a stream of car bombs, and sensing opportunity in the open battlefield of Syria, the skies clear of US planes and the rapidly falling boots of US soldiers, they sent a force to begin a new enterprise. It grew, became self-sufficient, and an internecine war began. But enough pledged to ISIL that major offenses were launched with success from Syria last summer.

Most of the story of the creation of ISIS has to do with the dynamics of Iraq, Sunnis, and Shi’ites, not the US. The choices being made by the Iraqi Government were the choices of greatest impact.

To be honest, I don’t think ISIL was really avoidable. There’s an aspect of equifinality here – multiple roads to the same destination. Zarqawi was to focus on Jordan, before turning to Iraq instead; who knows how that would have fared. AQI decided on Iraq for various reasons, but if not Iraq, they could just as easily have decided on another – such as Syria. We don’t escape the general problem regardless of the decision take in 2003.

In any event, I hope we can agree that while trying to understand the multiple historical currents leading to the confluence of ISIS is fun, and useful, when it comes to ethical blame for their crimes, there is but one party to bear it: ISIS.

They’re also on the rise in Libya, another failed state after the US and its allies toppled Khadaffi. US drone activities in Yemen have only strengthened al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

“On the rise in Libya” meaning existing Islamist/criminal groups saw an advantage in aligning with the ISIL brand, and changed their name accordingly. Some taxes not must go north, but in exchange they tap into ISIS’s rich smuggling networks, so it may be a “win win” arrangement.

The allies did stop Qaddafi from massacring his people to retain power, and in the aftermath neither side has yet obtained full power. Is it a success or a failure? I guess we’ll see.

In light of this gigantic mess, the decision not to go back is entirely understandable from a political and military point of view, but it does not absolve the US from its responsibility for the monster they have created.

I think as soon as you see this as a “monster they have created” you diminish the importance, and internal dynamics, of other organizations and forces that were at work here.

As to whether to undertake operations, the US has clearly decided to undertake significant operations, and is has been conducting them for some time now.

There is no doubt in my mind that in a couple of decades from now history will be pointing a damning finger at US foreign policy and interventions as the main culprit for the destabilisation of the entire region and the blowback thereof both on Europe and the US itself.

Dictators crumbled, whether under external forces (Iraq) or from within (Egypt, Tunisia – to some degree Jordan). History will look back on this as a time of enormous transition – as one in which the deep upwellings of sectarianism, corruption, and decay at last rose to the surface, and all at the same time, resulting in chaos, in the loss of some governments, in a civil war, in the gain of a functioning democracy.

As I have pointed out in an earlier post, Russia considers Ukraine part of its backyard, not only historically but also because a majority of the populace in several regions is Russian.

But in fact Ukraine is an independent state. Russia’s claims to exert a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe as “its backyard” are from another century (and they weren’t any more persuasive then either). Russia can continue to make these claims, and even pursue them peacefully. What sparked the anger of Europe and the US is the involvement of Russian arms and the threat of more – and not as a means of bringing stability so that Ukrainians may decide themselves, but as a means of equipping their favored side to win in battle.

Any politician with half a brain could have foreseen the current outcome with Russia defending its interests in Ukraine in pretty much the same way the US would do if tomorrow the Mexican government is overthrown by a bunch of pro-Putin oligarchs canceling existing economic treaties with the US in favour of new ones with Russia.

Mexico pursues trade deals with partners in South America, just as Britain pursues (and closes) rather far-reaching trade deals (among other things) with the rest of the nations composing the EU. Yet the US has not sought to send in military forces to disrupt their governments.

Putin’s actions in Crimea were foreseeable. His action in eastern Ukraine less so, especially as sanctions ratched up, because the costs and risks climbed high while the end-game remained very uncertain. In some ways however his actions in Donetsk confirm the worst suspicions about Putin (that his actions are understandable only if one takes seriously a nationalistic quest to restore, in some form, what he views as the old glory of Russia in the ghost of the USSR).

What makes them all the more bewildering is that his actions have absolutely cemented the relationships of Eastern NATO countries with the Organization. He has guaranteed that NATO will now be more thoroughly considering a range of conflict scenarios with him, and training appropriately. From a security vantage, this is the very worst thing he could have done.

It really has nothing to do with restoring sovereignty or democracy, but everything with corporate and state interests.

For the EU and the US, this has everything, absolutely everything, to do with sovereignty and democracy. All of this carries eerie echoes of fall of the Iron Curtain, and the fear of the Baltic States is quite real. The US did not fight, and emerge the victor (though, really, the entire world did) from the Cold War to watch Russia once again turn Eastern Europe from fledging democracies into Russian-dominated client states in services to a hostile foreign policy. And Europe, if anything, feels this more keenly than the US.

If Putin does not understand that, then we are in a far more dangerous situation than I believed, as the odds of a Russian action to take a bridge too far go up considerably.

For domestic political reasons, Merkel will speak softly, but she makes clear the gravity of her concerns.

For now, the best thing the US can do is turn the rhetoric down a notch, hold off on arms shipments and see how this further plays out.

Putin can’t afford to allow Ukraine to sit peacefully for long. He may be hoping that the government launches an offensive, but if not, his proxies will launch one themselves.

The key right now is helping restore the Ukrainian economy – which will be very tough, given the level of corruption. But desperate times can produce cataclysmic changes, and so we shall see. If the Ukrainians form a functional government, with laws and reforms on path to a sustainable democracy, then Putin’s little adventure will be in serious trouble – as, at that point, arms transfers to Ukraine would become a very real possibility if the rebels remained intransigent on points on which they should compromise.