IRL Examples for Noir this Week

These articles talk about two sides of the same noir coin. One discusses why the U.S. hasn't been able to move from military engagement to diplomacy in Afghanistan.  The other argues that, back home, political rivalry is turning into war with an enemy.

We'll be using "noir" in a way that is expansive, in order to describe a set of cultural forces. We'll also try to be concrete and precise.

One interesting passage from the Afghanistan piece:

Mr. Trump is not the first president to struggle over how to align goals with reality. In 2009, as President Obama escalated combat troop levels in Afghanistan, his advisers identified only two vital American interests in the war, according to participants, the kinds of interests that might justify sending soldiers into battle. 

One was the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. The second was the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda “and its affiliates.” Neither problem really existed in Afghanistan; they resided over the border, in Pakistan. After 2002, Al Qaeda’s most lethal operators largely fled to Pakistan. Mr. Obama’s strategists nonetheless rationalized their escalation on the grounds that if Afghanistan fell into chaos, Al Qaeda would return — a plausible fear but an indirect and even speculative reason to send American men and women to war.

Our course's first of six causes of noir culture is "the generalization of war."  Was the Obama Administration's strategy an example of this?

From the same article:

In effect, Pakistan’s strategy of nuclear deterrence, conceived to keep India’s military at bay, has also deterred the United States. The United States has so feared the risks of violent disarray in Pakistan that it has tolerated interference by Inter-Services Intelligence in Afghanistan since 2001 that it otherwise would most likely not have accepted.

Does this suggest that the credible threat of force works to protect a weaker power where negotiations would not?  Could Pakistan have done something less noir in dealing with the U.S?  Does U.S. foreign policy only (or mostly) respect threats of force? Lots of questions!

The other piece is called "Is Our Democracy Wobbly?" (the online title is different).  It claims that democracy depends on "two basic norms," "mutual toleration and "forbearance."  It says that "democratic norms are vulnerable to polarization," and when that happens,

Parties come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe. When that happens, politicians are tempted to abandon forbearance and win at any cost. If we believe our opponents are dangerous, should we not use any means necessary to stop them?

This is how democracy died in Chile. Before the 1973 coup, Chile was Latin America’s oldest democracy, buttressed by vibrant democratic norms, including a well-established “culture of compromise.” Chileans liked to say that there was no political disagreement that could not be settled over a bottle of Chilean cabernet. But beginning in the 1960s, Chile’s culture of compromise was shattered by Cold War polarization. 

We'll talk about Afghanistan later in the course (as a thought experiment on whether detection can replace invasion), so think a bit about what is going on there (two major mass slaughters of civilians in the past week) and why.  And bear in mind the question of US democracy as we get into Chandler's The Long Goodbye, which doesn't think too much of it.

 

Plan A Example: Warlord Rotation in Afghanistan

In lecture yesterday I claimed that international criminal justice could replace most cases of international Plan A -- invasion, war, occupation. My example was Afghanistan.  My evidence? It combined historical precedent--successful prosecutions in major public trials in international courts of mass murderers in military contexts--with a counterfactual that I called the criminal justice "thought experiment" (global investigation rather than invasion).  Another piece of evidence was, in effect, justice couldn't be worse than what we're doing right now, which is maintaining the warlord rotation that has plagued the country since the first modern coup in 1973.  Those slide are below.

I framed all this with an outline of the typical noir view in contrast to two standard arguments. Here's that slide:

Permanent war is a feature not a bug for the warlord I discussed, Dostum, since war is what he does and it's the game he wins. Permanent war, especially if it's low-grade and not too destructive, is also a feature not a bug for most military establishments. 

Another feature of permanent war is greater impunity for its actors: as long as the threat continues, actions that would be questioned or even indicted and tried in peacetime and at home have a greater chance of begin tolerated.  An example is torture, and the Exeuctive Summary of the US Senate's  Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program was released the morning of yesterday's lecture on countering Noir Cause 1: Generalized War.  The New York Times posted the (rather redacted) summary of the 6000 page report here.  The NYT has a piece on the summary's 7 Key Points.  They also have a nice timeline of the interrogation program, and a piece on whether torture "works."   There are many defenses of torture: here's one. Here's a clip of Sen. John McCain, himself a torture victim in Vietnam, defending it.  The NYT again has an article by one of their major national security journalists outlining the pro vs. con positions.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan: 

I had an Osama slide as well, in which the US actually does do criminal investigation and, nine years later, it works (though killing and disposal blocked the truth-telling functions of the trial).

This comes to us courtesy of lit and history since they allow us to grasp background or buried causalities.

US Senate Report on CIA Torture is Released (UPDATED 12/17)

Reflecting an instance of our Noir Cause 1, War Comes Home, the Senate is publishing a landmark report on CIA torture. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is summarizing its findings in in a stream here; NBC news text is below. Sen. Feinstein's summary states that torture produced no reliable intelligence that could not have been obtained in other ways, that the CIA and the Bush Administration deceived elected officials about the nature and extent of interrogation and detention behaviors, among many other findings in the 500 + page document.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid calls the release another Abu Grahib moment.  Discussion and analysis is all over the Internet, and today we'll discuss Noir International in lecture as part of our Noir Solutions segment this week.

UPDATE: Many of you are psych majors: Democracy Now had an interesting segment on the role of psychologists in developing torture practices after 9/11.  There's also a history professor discussing the CIA's role in developing "enhanced interrogation" during the Cold War and spreading the practice internationally.  It's kind of amazing stuff actually.

War Doesn't Fight Terror

See this reference to a Rand study showing terrorism was addressed successfully by military force only 7% of the time, and much more successfully via "political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent)"  This blog has some good comments on the limits of Obama's approach to Afghanistan, though the definitive big picture challenge to the Nobel speech comes from Glenn Greenwald.  I've also noted its doomsday aspects here.