Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, and National Security

Constitution and Presidency

"And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan."

Federalist 8: "It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority."

Democracy in America: "If the Union’s existence were constantly menaced, and if its great interests were continually interwoven with those of other powerful nations, one would see the prestige of the executive growing, because of what was expected from it and of what it did."

JFK taped meetings and calls on the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, JFK discussed the Cuban Missile Crisis on national TV.

As you reflect on JFK's decisionmaking, think about Peter Drucker's dictum: “The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision without disagreement.”

A couple of years later, LBJ dealt with the Gulf of Tonkin. Bad intelligence contributed to the US reaction in the Gulf of Tonkin -- as Robert McNamara later acknowledged:

President Bush the elder launches Desert Storm:

Powell had such influence during the Gulf War because of Goldwater-Nichols.

We went into Afghanistan because of 9/11. Why did the intelligence community fail to foresee or prevent it? From the report of the 9/11 commission:

Commenting on Pearl Harbor,Roberta Wohlstetter found it "much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals.After the event,of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."...With that caution in mind,we asked ourselves, before we judged others,whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably
have known or done. We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures in:

• imagination (see bin Laden memo)
• policy (see NBC report)
• capabilities (see Washington Post on translators)
• and management (see map of intelligence community)

Faulty intelligence also affected Iraq policy, as the WMD Commission concluded.

In the fall of 2007, President Bush responded to the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (full transcript here):

QUESTION: My question, sir, is are you feeling troubled about your standing here today about perhaps facing a credibility gap with the American people?
PRESIDENT: No. I'm feeling pretty spirited -- pretty good about life. And I made the decision to come before you so I could explain the NIE. And I have said Iran is dangerous. And the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary. I'm using this NIE as an pportunity to continue to rally our colleagues and allies. The NIE makes it clear that the strategy we have used in the past is effective.

The Courts

"That's why we must promote our values by living them at home -- which is why I have prohibited torture and will close the prison at Guantanamo Bay."

See Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

Chris Matthews, the great constitutional scholar, on Hamdan: