Government Executive - Authors - Stuart Taylor

Homeland Security chief looks back, and forward

Shane Harris and Stuart Taylor — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In his three years as secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff has weathered relentless congressional criticism, the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005, and a failed bid for immigration reform. But he is upbeat about his department, the shape in which he leaves it, and the future of border security. In a recent interview with National Journal, Chertoff warned about national complacency toward terrorism, praised his department's efforts to prepare for the upcoming transition, and questioned whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be taking on reconstruction efforts. Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

NJ: What are the top challenges facing your successor?

Chertoff: The biggest challenge is to keep the country's focus on the commitment that has been made to protect the country, whether it is securing identification, securing borders, protecting our critical infrastructure, or cybersecurity. All these things at some level impact people in a way that is inconvenient or bad for their business or may tax their patience. Keeping us positioned between hysteria and complacency -- which is where we have to be -- that, I think, is the biggest challenge.

NJ: Is the focus slipping?

Chertoff: Increasingly, some people are saying that terrorism is not that big a threat. That is really going back to the mentality of pre-September 11, 2001. I'm not saying that every day the sky is going to fall. But if we don't recognize the struggle we are in as a significant existential struggle then it is going to be very hard to maintain the focus.

NJ: Now that it has been a while since the attacks, do you think that critics of the administration have changed their position from what they were saying immediately after 9/11? Do they now say that maybe we don't need to work very hard on security?

Chertoff: I don't think the general public thinks that. I think that in elite public opinion there are some that have begun to step away from the idea that we need to do the kind of things that the 9/11 commission recommended. Their argument is really that [the administration's policy] is overbroad. I have heard people say, "We've had fearmongering the last seven years." I kind of scratch my head. Fearmongering, to me, is the 1950s and the belief that the communists were going to take over the United States. If I go back to Lower Manhattan and there is this big hole in the ground where the twin towers were, I don't think there was fearmongering there.

I don't think there was fearmongering in August 2006 when terrorists tried to get on planes and blow them up over the Atlantic. I don't think there was fearmongering in Germany last year, when they disrupted a plot from the Islamic jihadists who had been planning to blow up locations in Germany. I don't think it was fear-mongering in the attacks in Glasgow and London last year.

NJ: What would you list as your biggest accomplishments and biggest mistakes as secretary?

Chertoff: We have made it dramatically harder to get into the country if you are a bad person. If you come to a port of entry, we now have the capability to compare [finger]prints against latent fingerprints that we pick up in safe houses overseas or battlefields around the world, which are kept in a database. We now analyze travel data so that we can see connections: phone connections, monetary connections, travel arrangement connections between visitors and potential terrorists. We now have much more secure travel documents. I don't think it is an accident that we have seen attacks overseas that have not happened here. I think it is because we have raised the bar.

Disappointments: I'm sorry we didn't get an immigration bill last year. I thought we came very close, but I think a combination of timing and the lack of credibility about what the government put up on the border over 30 years, I think those two things snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I think [the effort] was worthwhile. I think the template that was laid out will eventually be a template that Congress will return to.

NJ: Do you plan to stay in your job until January 20, 2009?

Chertoff: God and the president willing, I'm going to stay to the end.

NJ: Where is the department in terms of meeting staff goals for the upcoming transition, to ensure that there are enough career employees to fill positions now held by political appointees?

Chertoff: In terms of our senior positions, our vacancy rate is 10 percent, which is about average. At virtually every significant element of the department, the No. 1 or No. 2 or No. 3 person is a career person. We have been trying hard; I think we have been pretty much completely successful in getting career people with experience in those spots where they can just pick up as soon as the political people leave.

NJ: It seems that every other week a congressional committee puts heat on the department. Is Congress creating a wrong impression that you are not keeping up with its mandates?

Chertoff: If you pay attention to the Congress over time, you have the impression there is recognition of progress. I agree that an individual letter or individual negative report or a sound bite at a hearing can take fire and all of a sudden be a criticism. I also recognize that it is the nature of our agency that we interact with more people than any other agency of the United States government. We have 280,000 people. If 1 percent screw up, that's 2,800 people. That's a lot of potential to screw up.

NJ: It seems as if this will be the nature of the department going forward. There are so many points of public interaction that criticism and complaints are just going to come with the territory. Is that true?

Chertoff: I'm afraid it is, in this sense: Nobody likes to go through security at the airport. And the longer we go before a bomb goes off on a plane, the harder it's going to be for people, on an emotional level, to understand why they have to go through the hassle. But if we drop it and a bomb goes off in a plane, then people are going to say, "Why didn't they take precautions?" And that is in some ways the conundrum of homeland security. It's like getting vaccinated. You don't know you wouldn't have gotten polio if you hadn't gotten vaccinated, but you would sure be foolish if you didn't get vaccinated.

NJ: Looking back, how do you rate the effectiveness of the department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in responding to the needs of citizens and businesses affected by the hurricanes in 2005?

Chertoff: I think that there's one organizational structure change I have begun to talk about. I don't know that FEMA ought to be a reconstruction agency. I think that when you get into a deep, long-standing reconstruction effort, you're beginning to deal with issues like public health, social services, education, and housing policy. Not only are these [multi-agency] issues but they are not necessarily in the skill set of people who are at FEMA, who are really there to give immediate shelter and immediate assistance.

FEMA's core mission is emergency management. It's not reconstruction. We maybe need an agency or a capability to reconstruct. But maybe that should not be in FEMA, or in DHS. Maybe that should be in Health and Human Services or in Housing and Urban Development. I know that's unusual for a secretary to give up something. I just think it's not in the core mission. And that's the one area where I think I would encourage someone to take a look.

This kind of resonates back to the theme I raised initially about terrorism. And maybe this is kind of my philosophical looking back three years and looking forward. In many cases, particularly in response to an emergency, there's an immediate time pressure to come up with a solution where there's only a set of imperfect options. And our obligation is to make the best choice we can under the circumstances.

But to criticize the people who work for the agency because it's not a perfect choice is a little bit like criticizing the fire department because when they came in to rescue you from your house they tracked muddy boots onto your kitchen floor. I mean, it's not a reasonable criticism. And if you ask people to do something in an emergency, and then you don't back them up if they made a reasonable good-faith choice -- I don't mean a bad-faith choice or a negligent choice. If they made a reasonable good-faith choice -- if you don't back that up, then you're sending a message of paralysis; you are sending a message to be cautious.

I would like us to perform perfectly in emergencies, whether they're natural disasters or not. I realize it's the nature of the beast that there will be rough-and-ready decisions that have to be made, and there'll be a certain percentage of mistakes and foul-ups. We try to minimize them, but I think it's fair to be charitable in our hindsight judgment. And so that's kind of what ties everything together for me.

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Iraq and beyond

Stuart Taylor — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0400

The mangled bodies of women, children, other civilians, and combatants are piling up. News photos of horrifying mistakes are bringing hatred of America to unprecedented levels around the world. We may be losing the hearts and minds of Iraqis whose loved ones and neighbors become "collateral damage" and whose lives we have so far changed very much for the worse.

But in an important sense, the current second-guessing of the Bush-Rumsfeld war plan, and of President Bush's fateful decision to invade without more international support, is beside the point. The United States today is like a big ship navigating a treacherous sea of icebergs in a dense fog. Bush and his people are at the controls. And for at least the next 21 months, all Americans-including those who consider Bush unfit to lead-must depend on whatever skill and luck he can muster. If he fails, we will all be in even direr peril.

There is good reason to debate what Bush should do next, and in particular to warn against the grandiose visions of empire entertained by some neoconservatives in and around the administration. But carping over whether Bush or Donald Rumsfeld should have steered this way instead of that way yesterday will not help them or us steer around icebergs today or tomorrow. Nor will reveling in the hatred that seems to spur some Bush media critics to attack a war plan that they would defend were this a Democratic administration, just as Clinton-hating conservatives trashed our last president's humanitarian intervention in Kosovo.

Bush was not my choice for president. (I wrote in former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb.) In my opinion, Bush's fiscal policies are recklessly irresponsible; his tax cuts are bad medicine for the economy and too skewed to the rich; his other policies are often disappointing; his bull-in-a-china-shop disdain for diplomacy is incalculably costly, and may well have cost us a northern front through Turkey; his impatient and cocksure responses to reasonable critics seem petty; and his unscripted public comments and demeanor are often an embarrassment, especially by comparison with Tony Blair.

But like the hedgehog, Bush understands one big thing: In this terrifying new world-where rogue nations are bent on developing nuclear weapons and motivated to slip them covertly to Islamist terrorists devoted to mass-murdering Americans-our best chance of avoiding catastrophe is to stop Iraq, Iran, Libya, and others from going nuclear by any means necessary, including military attack. If the threat to attack is sufficiently credible, we may not need to do it again. And it will be credible only if we make an example of Saddam Hussein that shows other rogue regimes that if they seek nuclear weapons, they will meet the same fate. (This may not be feasible in the case of North Korea because it effectively holds hostage the millions of South Koreans within range of 11,000 of its artillery pieces and because it probably already has nuclear weapons.)

The cautious, reactive approach to incipient threats practiced by Bill Clinton, Bush's father, and most of their predecessors might prove to be slow-motion suicide in today's world, with the odds of unimaginable carnage in America rising exponentially as more and more rogue regimes go nuclear. And a preventive-war policy that would have seemed recklessly aggressive a decade ago may now be our only hope.

As to the administration's much-criticized Iraq invasion plan, it's quite possible (but hardly established) that Rumsfeld should have sent a more massive force. And it's possible that unless Saddam's regime suddenly snaps-as did the Taliban, despite much early pessimism about the progress of that war in Afghanistan-an unexpectedly bloody victory may leave us in greater peril than Saddam has ever posed. That would occur if this war leaves the American people with no stomach for a repeat performance and thus belies Bush's threat to attack any other rogue regimes that seek nuclear weapons.

Does this mean that Rumsfeld was an arrogant fool for rushing into Iraq with a force too small to finish the job? Arrogant, yes. Fool, no. Rumsfeld had plausible reasons for proceeding as he did. The stunning speed of the initial push may well have prevented Saddam's forces from torching the southern oil fields and firing missiles at Israel. Perhaps more important, the shock-and-awe, limited-force, low-cost victory for which the administration hoped would have sent just the right message to Iran, Libya, and others: This was easy. You can count on us doing the same to you if you seek to go nuclear.

Now it appears that the Iraqi resistance will be stiffer, the costs of this invasion higher, and the war longer than Rumsfeld had expected. But that does not make the "rolling-start" plan a failure-not yet, at least. Our troops are in Baghdad. Reinforcements are on the way. Eventual victory is assured. No battles have been lost. Coalition casualties have been light. And it is unclear whether this war will be less successful than if Rumsfeld had waited-as the summer heat descended-to assemble twice as many troops.

Nor is it clear that the official talk of an easy, low-cost victory was designed to lull the American people into false confidence. Such optimistic forecasts were designed in part to persuade Iraqis not to fight for a doomed regime. That did not work. But it may have been worth a try. And while Vice President Cheney's March 16 prediction that our troops would be widely "greeted as liberators" looks shaky now, it may yet be vindicated.

The bottom line is that we should spend less time second-guessing the administration's past military strategy and more time pushing for Bush to make the right decisions in the weeks and months ahead. Some suggestions:

To close the "credibility gap" that some in the media seem so eager to enlarge, Bush, Rumsfeld, and their commanders should drop the annoying and self-discrediting pretense that they are never taken by surprise, never unsuccessful, never in doubt, and never wrong. They should also meet constructive criticisms from current and retired military leaders and others with respectful attention and thoughtful rebuttal, not withering contempt.
To salve the wounds that we have inadvertently inflicted on Iraqi civilians, Bush and Congress should promise generous compensation to the injured and to survivors of the dead, and create a process for making such payments as soon as possible.
To show good faith to suffering Palestinians, Bush should make it clear that he is as serious as Tony Blair is about moving ahead with the "road map" for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; perhaps he should start by demanding an immediate halt to new Israeli settlement activity in return for an unambiguous commitment by the Palestinian Authority to do everything in its power to end terrorist attacks.
To counter suspicions that his real motive is to seize Iraq's oil, Bush should say more loudly and clearly that we will hold those assets in trust for the Iraqi people until we turn them over to the new government, and will take nothing to defray the costs of the invasion.
To repair the damage to America's international image and relations, Bush should invite the United Nations and the world community to share responsibility for reconstructing Iraq and reconstituting its government, while ruling out any use by France of its veto power.
To show that his pre-emption doctrine is indeed about self-defense, not empire-building, Bush should vow that we will initiate military force against another nation only when necessary to prevent development of nuclear weapons that could threaten us or our allies, and only if the Security Council refuses to act. He should also offer nonaggression pacts to any and all nations that verifiably renounce nuclear arms, including North Korea.

Bush should, in short, reject the empire-building ambitions of some of his neoconservative subordinates and endorse the stirringly modest description of America's goals that Colin L. Powell offered during a global youth forum on February 14.

Citing America's treatment of the nations defeated in World War II, Powell said this: "What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems, which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No. The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are."

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Beyond Iraq

Stuart Taylor — Tue, 17 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0400

I do not know what we should do about Iraq. But to reach the right answer, we should focus on the right question: What approach seems the best bet to reduce the very large risk that a thermonuclear explosion-whether engineered by Iraq, al Qaeda, or someone else-will obliterate Washington, New York, or another American city (or cities) at some point during the next two or three decades?

That risk dwarfs anything that Saddam Hussein could do with chemical or biological weapons. And even if he drops dead tomorrow, it is quite probable that we will experience such a catastrophe within 20 years-if not 20 months-unless we do two things that are barely on the national radar screen and that go against the grain of Republican unilateralism.

The first is to spend whatever it takes to secure the vast Russian nuclear stockpile and other nuclear installations around the world. They are far more dangerous than Saddam because there is no doubt that al Qaeda (and perhaps other terrorists) will use any unsecured weapons or fissile (bomb-making) materials against us if they can get ahold of them. The second is to get much, much more serious about stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which is a huge threat to civilization itself.

A push to end nuclear proliferation could work only if enforced by the threat or use of pre-emptive military action-not only in Iraq but also in Iran, North Korea, Libya, and perhaps others of the more than 60 nations capable of building nuclear weapons-either on our own or through an international coalition. Doing this on our own, as Bush administration hawks prefer, could mean launching bloody invasion after invasion, at enormous cost in lives, treasure and international standing, if rogue states call our bluff. Rallying a potent and determined coalition seems possible only if we stop thumbing our nose at world opinion, offer to scrap the bulk of our own arsenal and renounce first use of nuclear weapons in exchange for similar concessions by others.

The truth is, no matter what we do about Iraq, if we don't stop proliferation, another five or 10 potentially unstable nations may go nuclear before long, making it ever more likely that one or more bombs will be set off anonymously on our soil by terrorists or a terrorist government. Even an airtight missile defense would be useless against a nuke hidden in a truck, a shipping container or a boat.

As to Iraq, unless we can get U.N. Security Council support for whatever we decide to do (on which, more below), either a go-it-alone U.S.-British invasion or a Bush backdown from the beating of war drums would carry incalculable risks.

An invasion would, of course, end Saddam's quest for nuclear weapons and probably Saddam himself. So far, so good. But some hawks greatly underestimate the costs and risks, claiming that an easy victory in Iraq will lead to a flowering of democracy that will inspire the rest of the Arab world to follow suit, destroy the appeal of militant Islam, pave the way for Israeli-Palestinian peace and make us all safer. This is a fantasy. Unless Saddam is overthrown from within, we would have to take Baghdad in house-to-house fighting, with many thousands of casualties. The task of pacifying and democratizing a nation that has never known freedom and hates our ally Israel would be at least as difficult as bringing peace and democracy to Afghanistan. And the administration has not made a very credible beginning there.

The effects of a unilateral invasion on our national security would extend far beyond Iraq. Viewed optimistically, it might also-if accompanied by a credible threat to launch a succession of pre-emptive wars-convince Iran, Libya, North Korea, and other potential threats that we would do the same to them if they persist in developing nuclear weapons. But then again, rogue nations might react by hiding, rather than ending, their bomb-building programs. And as the cost of a policy of pre-emptive wars without end becomes apparent, American voters might balk.

A U.S.-British invasion would also divert resources from the war against al Qaeda, especially in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda is already regrouping. It would alienate Russia and others whose cooperation we need in the vital project of securing fissile materials. It would thereby increase the danger of a nuclear attack by al Qaeda or others. By enraging hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, it would swell the ranks of terrorist groups-perhaps making it easier for them to recruit nuclear engineers as well as suicide bombers-and risk a militant Islamist takeover of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Years or even decades of sometimes-bloody occupation could keep the hate-America pot boiling. With Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south demanding independence, we would have to choose between crushing those movements and alienating Turkey, a vital ally with a region of restive Kurds bordering Iraq. Many in Europe and elsewhere would see the Bush administration as less interested in democratizing Iraq than in controlling the region's oil and in achieving world domination. All of this international ill will could doom any hope for support in fighting nuclear proliferation.

Does all of this mean that a unilateral invasion should be ruled out as complete folly? Not necessarily. The dangers of backing down are also grave. It is foolish for doves to scoff at the risk that a nuclear-armed Saddam could or would launch what they say would be a "suicidal" attack on the United States. He seems entirely capable of smuggling a bomb into one of our cities, perhaps in league with al Qaeda, and setting it off anonymously in the hope of escaping retaliation. If we stand aside while Saddam builds or buys nuclear weapons, and if at some point thereafter a bomb takes out Washington or New York, how could we be sure that Saddam was involved? The culprits might be terrorists connected, not to Iraq, but perhaps to Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, or Libya. Against whom would we retaliate?

Doves also seem disingenuous in ruling out an invasion unless and until we can produce irrefutable evidence that Saddam presents an imminent nuclear threat. Most would be no less dovish after seeing such proof than they are now. After all, once Iraq has nuclear arms, an invasion would be far more perilous. So a decision not to invade now is a decision not to invade ever-not, at least, until Saddam has actually used nuclear or biological weapons or repeated his use of chemical weapons. And a Bush backdown now would surely embolden other rogue states to accelerate their nuclear programs.

In short, the future will be extremely dangerous no matter what we do about Iraq. The best way out would be to use the threat of a unilateral invasion to push the U.N. Security Council to demand that Iraq submit to unconditional, unrestricted arms inspections, as proposed by President Chirac of France, followed by military action if Saddam balks or cheats or it becomes clear that inspections cannot be effective. France and Russia might go along, suggests a former Clinton administration official, if that were the only way to get a piece of the post-invasion protectorate over the world's second-largest oil supply.

We should not become so fixated on Iraq that we ignore the greater dangers: al Qaeda, loose nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, and nuclear proliferation. House Republicans have idiotically refused to provide adequate funding to secure nuclear stockpiles abroad. They and the Bush administration have greatly damaged the effectiveness of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by spurning the closely related Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, without which more and more nations will be tempted to seek nuclear weapons.

Unless we get serious about stopping proliferation, we are headed for "a world filled with nuclear-weapons states, where every crisis threatens to go nuclear," where "the survival of civilization truly is in question from day to day," and where "it would be impossible to keep these weapons out of the hands of terrorists, religious cults, and criminal organizations." So writes Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., a moderate Republican who served as a career arms-controller under six presidents and led the successful Clinton administration effort to extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The only way to avoid such a grim future, he suggests in his memoir, Disarmament Sketches, is for the United States to lead an international coalition against proliferation by showing an unprecedented willingness to give up the vast majority of our own nuclear weapons, excepting only those necessary to deter nuclear attack by others.

The Bush administration has done far more to foreclose this option than to keep it open. And even if the United States reverses course, a lot of things would have to go right to avoid nuclear catastrophe. But can we afford not to try?

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Uncivilized

Stuart Taylor — Tue, 16 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0400

This principle is disdained, however, by the large percentage of the Muslim world's 1.2 billion people who support the indiscriminate murders of Israeli men, women, and children. It is also ignored by the European elites who palliate wanton massacres of Jews while excoriating unintended killings of civilians by Israeli troops seeking to root out Palestinian fighters. Most do not even attempt a forthright defense of the morality or legality of Palestinian terrorism, preferring to euphemize mass murder as "resistance."

But some apologists for Palestinian terrorists (like those for the Irish Republican Army, Italy's Red Brigades, and others) do sketch the outlines of an argument: that the ends of stopping an imperialistic Israeli settlement policy and liberating Palestinians from Israeli occupation justify the means of attacking civilians. Repugnant as this argument is, it begins with two kernels of truth and contains a moral-relativist logic with superficial appeal. It is therefore worth confronting and refuting.

The kernels of truth are that a rule against ever targeting innocent civilians for lethal attack is hard to sustain as a moral absolute and would condemn some American and Israeli leaders. If killing 10 (or 100) innocent civilians were the only way to avert the certain deaths of 1,000 others, shouldn't we do it? Does anyone doubt the morality of our own government's post-September 11 policy of shooting down any civilian airliner that hijackers are about to crash into a skyscraper, and thus sacrificing already-doomed passengers to save others? If 60 years ago, German Jews or Allied infiltrators had launched suicide bomb attacks on German cafes and buses in the hope of stopping or slowing the Holocaust, would we see moral equivalence? If Ariel Sharon had ordered the extermination of Palestinian men, women, and children, would we condemn Palestinians for responding with suicide bombings?

The very notion that civilian lives are inherently more innocent or precious than the lives of (say) 18-year-old boys who enlist in the military is unsupportable. The soldiers and sailors at Pearl Harbor, and those at the Pentagon on September 11, no more deserved to die than did their mothers, fathers, or 10-year-old sisters. While military volunteers (unlike draftees) do assume the risk of combat, that makes them no less innocent than you or me; it makes them more heroic, if the war is just. The end--winning the war--is identical. The means--killing innocent people--is no less terrible if the innocents to be killed are soldiers.

So what's the basis for the soldier-civilian distinction in the law of war? It is that, as a general rule, killing combatants (although not enemy prisoners) is more likely to help win the war than killing civilians. This distinction is sound as a matter of law, because law needs general rules. But general rules have exceptions--in life, if not always in law.

The incineration of 115,000 to 150,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki (these are conservative estimates) by atomic bombs probably did more to end World War II than killing 500,000 Japanese soldiers and seamen in ordinary combat would have done. And by ending the war, these bombs saved the 1 million to 2 million (by some estimates) Americans and Japanese who would have died in an invasion of Japan. Whether the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo ended up saving more lives than the over 100,000 it took is more debatable. So is this question: How many American military men should President Harry Truman have been willing to sacrifice in order to avoid killing so many Japanese civilians? And what about the bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict?

The point is that in some cases, there may be a strong argument that the end of saving innocent lives can justify the means of deliberately killing civilians. One could formulate a cold-blooded moral equation along the following lines: Targeting civilians is an appropriate strategy whenever the justice of the cause multiplied by the likelihood of success exceeds the human cost, if we measure "justice of the cause" by the number of lives to be saved (or of Palestinians to be freed from Israeli occupation); "likelihood of success" by the mathematical probability that the killing will in fact help the cause; and "human cost" by the number of civilians to be killed.

Does this mean that sometimes targeting civilians is OK? Absolutely not, contends professor Philip Bobbitt of the University of Texas Law School, the author of a new book (The Shield of Achilles) that explores deeply the history of war and law: "The terrorist does not reluctantly accept the accidental killings that accompany warfare; his whole point is to kill ordinary people in order to make them fearful. If we make targeting civilians lawful, we turn our armed forces into terrorists."

Notwithstanding the likelihood that the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and (perhaps) Tokyo ended up saving more lives than they took, Bobbitt asserts, they would have been war crimes had civilian populations been the primary targets. He acquits Truman only on the ground that these cities were in fact military targets, because they contained military facilities, a portion of Japan's military-industrial base, and (in the case of Tokyo) the seat of the enemy regime and war machine.

I am respectfully skeptical of both contentions. And even Bobbitt is troubled by the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden (primarily by the British)--clearly not a prime military target--that killed more than 30,000 Germans (some guess 135,000). Winston Churchill himself expressed concern a few months afterward that the Dresden inferno may have crossed the line. And both Churchill and Truman brooded about the terrors they had unleashed to win the war. "Mr. President," Churchill said at a January 1953 White House dinner, "I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before St. Peter and he says, 'I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?' " Neither man expected to be rewarded with a bevy of virgins.

Historians and statesmen have long argued about the morality and legality of these attacks on Japanese and German cities. Some have pronounced Truman and Churchill guilty of war crimes. But it is beyond dispute that their bombing strategy was designed to hasten--and did hasten--both the end of an apocalyptic war in which 40 million noncombatants had already died and the demise of the evil regimes that had launched that war. If there were war crimes, there were also mitigating circumstances.

No such connection to a just cause even begins to mitigate the evil done by those who have targeted and massacred Israeli (or American) civilians. The Palestinian bombers' primary cause is not just: It is to destroy the Jewish state by killing as many Jews as possible.

Many Palestinians do have a just cause: ending Israeli occupation, creating a Palestinian state, and living in peace. But that cause is not on the same moral plane as saving lives. Nor will it be furthered by the current attacks. Bobbitt notes, "If the 35-year Israeli occupation and Israeli settlements in occupied lands are unlawful, then Palestinian violence in those areas directed against the occupation forces is not terrorism."

But be that as it may, the attacks on civilians in Israel proper are convincing moderate Israelis and Americans (who never imagined themselves agreeing with Ariel Sharon) that tight military control of the West Bank and Gaza--perhaps for decades--is the only way to contain Palestinian terrorism.

Truman and Churchill saw the bombing of cities as a "hideous" (Churchill's word) strategy to end an even more hideous war. Today's American and (most) Israeli leaders regret, and strain to minimize, civilian casualties in Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, many Arab leaders, like Nazi Germany's, broadcast lies to inculcate their people with murderous hatred of Jews. Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, provides posthumous family financial packages for Palestinian suicide bombers. With the many decent Arabs who abhor terrorism cowed into silence, the mobs in the streets celebrate the murders of Jews. Many celebrated the murders of Sept. 11.

We aspire, not always successfully, to be civilized. They revel in barbarity.

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Marines' martial arts training aims to make the tough tougher

Stuart Taylor — Fri, 04 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Boxing gloves and padded headgear are not the weapons that any Marine would choose for jobs such as hunting down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or executing amphibious landings on hostile shores. But in the fog of war, close-in combat is always a possibility, notes Lt. Col. George H. Bristol, "starting with assault-rifle fire at maybe 10 yards and moving in to where you're fighting with the weapon, being up in an enemy's face and having to either smash him or take him to the ground to finish him off."

Martial arts techniques of the nonlethal variety can also be invaluable in peacekeeping duty, disarming agitated civilians, dispersing angry mobs, transporting prisoners, or handing out food rations to crowds of starving people.

And for all the high-tech weaponry in today's arsenals, the grueling physical regimen and fighting techniques taught at the Marine Corps Martial Arts Training Program, which is based at Quantico, are playing an increasingly important role in training Marines at all levels, maintaining their warrior spirit, and giving them confidence that they will be ready when called upon to fight.

"A Marine Corps of well-trained tan belts," says Bristol, the director of the program, "will kick the shit out of anybody else in the world, sir!"

The tan belt is the first of 10 rungs on the new Marine Corps martial arts training ladder. For the first time, all 172,000 active-duty Marines, from the commandant on down to the newest recruit, must earn tan belts--and by no later than 2003. And all are encouraged to progress to higher belt levels throughout their careers.

The tan-belt course includes 27.5 hours of instruction in 49 killing techniques to be used on enemies who are too close to stop with bullets or grenades. Among them are bayonet thrusts, knife slashes, "vertical stomps," choke holds (and how to break them), leg-sweep throws, eye gouges, and more.

Close-in combat has been part of Marine Corps basic training for as long as anyone can remember. But until recently, "it has always remained just out of the mainstream; practiced with zeal in entry-level training and by a few stalwarts but ignored by the Corps as a whole," Bristol wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette.

"If you spend all day on a computer typing," says Master Gunnery Sgt. Cardo Urso, Bristol's chief instructor, "that warrior ethos goes away, and pretty soon you're just a diary clerk or a supply guy."

Gen. James L. Jones has pushed to change that since he became commandant of the Marine Corps in July 1999, and to meld the best of many martial arts techniques with rigorous conditioning, mental discipline, and character-building.

As a company commander in Vietnam, Jones was impressed that the South Korean marines serving there had black belts in tae kwon do. To give the U.S. Marines a similar edge, the commandant assigned the 44-year-old Bristol--who has black belts in judo, jujitsu, and karate and a nose misshapen by 35 years of practicing hand-to-hand combat--to develop an intensive new martial arts training program for all Marines.

Launched in October 2000, the program includes the basic tan-belt course and follow-on training in more-sophisticated skills-such as karate-style chops to vulnerable parts of the neck, blocking knife attacks, executing a "face rip," and attacking pressure points on the neck, arms, and legs-and related reading assignments for Marines who want to progress through the tan, gray, green, and brown belts, to the six levels of the black belt.

Still more important than these specific combat skills and drills, Bristol and Urso stress, are the program's lessons in teamwork, tactical judgment, mental discipline, and character.

Teamwork is built into every aspect of a grueling two-hour medley of conditioning drills--such as the "centipede," in which two teams of four helmeted Marines apiece lie on their bellies, with each man or woman's feet over the shoulders of the next in line; each group then pushes up to arm's length and races on its collective hands for about 50 yards.

"You're almost there, man, you're almost there, keep going," yell the instructors. When the first four cross the finish line, they jump up, run back to the other four, pick them up fireman-carry style, and lug them the rest of the way. Then it's on, without a break, to the next drill, and the next, and the next.

The boxing session between Capt. Isabelle and Sgt. Mitchell is also part of a team enterprise. For the moment, Mitchell is acting as the instructor, and Isabelle is allied against him with the 10 or so Marines doing the impossible drills outside the boxing ring. Whenever Mitchell gets a chance to look over and inspect the progress of Isabelle's teammates, he calls out penalties, which mean they must do still more repetitions. Isabelle's job is to throw a barrage of punches so relentless that it forces Mitchell's gaze away from his fellow trainees. Their job is to get through their repetitions as quickly as possible so that Isabelle can get out of the ring.

Learning how to run such a "combat cohesion" exercise is one aspect of an elite, seven-week instructor-training course here at Quantico. Urso and his 11 men--some of the fiercest hand-to-hand warriors in the Marine Corps--give advanced training to green- and brown-belt experts (including Isabelle and Mitchell) from Marine bases and ships around the world.

These trainees were already experienced martial arts instructors before they arrived at Quantico, and those who pass this course will earn black belts and thus qualify to train other instructors when they return to their bases and ships. But first they must undergo a daily regimen that combines martial arts instruction, running, and reading with "body-hardening" drills and other exercises.

These include kicking and being kicked--hard (albeit through pads); being thrown judo-style over another trainee's shoulder onto the ground, 10 times in a row; "Chinese push-ups," with the body formed into an inverted "V"; a 50-yard race on hands and feet, dragging a companion on his back while he hangs on to your waist; a 500-yard swim in full uniform, including heavy combat boots, capped by fighting in shallow water at the end; and much more.

"If this kind of close-in fighting is going to occur, it's going to occur when you're tired," explains Bristol. "So what we'll do normally is high repetitions of a technique where they get very tired, or rough-terrain movement--up and down hills--or running our obstacle course, and then fight at the end of that, so that the student is fairly exhausted before he throws the first bayonet thrust or the first punch."

But the idea is not to break people or tear them down. "Our focus is to get everybody through, not to make them say, 'I quit,' " says Staff Sgt. Ricardo Mendoza, one of Urso's instructor trainers. "The point is to challenge them to their limits-and get them to surpass their previously known limits."

The urge to say, "I quit" must be considerable during a drill called "bull in the ring." Today's variant has a passing resemblance to college wrestling, only with eye gouges, face rips, and other unsporting techniques.

The unlucky "bull" has to grapple with seven other Marines in rapid succession, for several minutes each, starting each time from a seated, back-to-back position. By the time the bull faces the third opponent, exhaustion has set in--with four more fresh adversaries to go. The others cheer the bull on before and after they take him on.

"You've got a whole lot of heart, staff sergeant," one calls out. There is also some coaching: "You've got to get underneath that jaw or you're not getting any pressure on the carotid."

Occasionally an instructor will toss a "weapon of opportunity" within reach--a (plastic) knife, say, or a rock--to give whichever grappler can grab it first a chance to finish his adversary quickly.

Back in the boxing-exercise room, Urso is talking about tactics. "This room is designed for them to fail," he says, "but they can pass it if they work as a team [and] find a way to get around that instructor."

The only way most of the trainees can get through their assigned drills is to sneak little breaks while the instructor is busy fending off punches and to call out more repetitions than they are actually doing. That's not cheating. It's tactics. It's doing just as much corner-cutting as necessary to get an impossible job done. And that, says Urso, "is what we want them doing on the battlefield. We also want them doing it in life."

Urso and his instructors offer trainees a combat analogy: When you are closing on the enemy, you will have to make tactical decisions. Do you move in as fast as possible, or pace yourself to save energy for fighting? Urso brings another analogy into play when teaching Marines how to choke off an enemy's carotid artery: "Let's talk about other chokes. What about the chokes that we do every day with our lance corporals who have new ideas, who want to try something, and me as a leader I start choking that lance corporal off, and I don't let him breathe? If you choke off those lines of communication, pretty soon you're going to have unconsciousness, and eventually it will lead to death."

Such homespun lessons might not be everybody's stairway to wisdom. But the 43-year-old Urso--a stocky, mustachioed bundle of energy with a shaved head, black belts in judo and karate, a penchant for spontaneous sparring with his men, and knuckles callused into mini-weapons by 30 years of boxing, wrestling, tae kwon do, sombo, jujitsu, kobudo, and other forms of fighting--radiates an infectious enthusiasm.

"I know that martial arts training fundamentally changes young men and women for the better," he asserts. "I've seen that for 30 years.... We want ethical warriors. The way a Marine should feel is, when you walk into a room, everybody in the room should feel safer because you're there. [And] when we turn him or her back to society after, say, four years, society's getting a better citizen."

Maybe it has something to do with channeling into cooperative endeavors the primal, atavistic aggression that is hardwired into the human species by eons of struggling for survival. Whatever the reason, the instructors and trainees here exude an esprit de corps that would be impossible to fake, and hard to find among their contemporaries on university campuses.

Tempers do flare now and then. During one drill, a charging trainee slams his blunt, simulated bayonet much too hard into his instructor's chest pad. "If you can't control your weapon as a brown-belt instructor, something's wrong--you understand?" barks the instructor. "Yes, sir," comes the reply. But Urso adds, sotto voce, "We're neurologically wired to close in. We like them to do that."

The day before, 2nd Lt. Anuradha K. Bhagwati seemed to suspect the tall, powerfully built Marine with whom she was grappling of slacking off a bit: "Come on, sir, fight!" she demanded. "I'm fighting!" he replied.

Bhagwati, whose day job is commanding a radio platoon in Okinawa, is the only woman--and not a very big one--in this group of instructor trainees. Many of the others sport the gigantic biceps (often splashed with tattoos) that come from pumping lots of iron. How can she hold her own against these hulks?

"I generally get thrown back further," Bhagwati allows, "but every person, no matter their body size, can make a technique work." And so she does.

Commandant Jones initially considered focusing martial arts instruction on tae kwon do or aikido. But he and Bristol ultimately decided to emphasize techniques more likely to be useful in actual close-in combat by helmeted Marines armed with M-16s, bayonets, and knives, and carrying heavy packs and flak jackets. It would make little sense for a Marine thus encumbered to try a tae kwon do kick to the head of a helmeted enemy.

The Marine Corps brand of martial arts that Bristol and his staff have developed has "aspects of many different martial arts-punches, kicks, throwing techniques from judo, some of the joint manipulations from jujitsu and various weapons arts," he says. But it's not the sort of thing you would see in a Bruce Lee film.

"Military combative training is always done with a battlefield end-state in mind," says Bristol. "It's always weapons-based. No military society has ever won a battle punching and kicking.... Our program begins with rifle firing, and it's not as if we're going to throw down our rifles and say, 'Put up your dukes.' What these skills do is give you incredible confidence, not only in yourself but in your fellow Marines."

In today's world, Urso stresses, such confidence often means using as little force as possible. "The easy thing," he says, "is a well-defined enemy on the battlefield, because there's no doubt what you're supposed to do. The harder thing is in these areas like Afghanistan, where two weeks ago this village was Taliban, and now they're gone, and that's where it's more difficult for a 17- or an 18-year-old [Marine], maybe the first time he's ever away from home, who's now in harm's way, who doesn't know if these people are friend or foe."

Suppose, he says, that "you've got a 14-year-old suspected terrorist and you've got him flex-cuffed on the ground and all of a sudden the 80-year-old grandmother comes out and she doesn't want you to take him away. The right response is not a three-round burst in her chest. It's to control her in a humane way.... If they're trained well, they don't go off the handle as quick, and they use less force."

The required reading to attain various belt levels includes books and articles about the feats of past Marine heroes, history's great warrior cultures--the Spartans, the Apaches, and the Zulus--and comparing the story of Achilles in the Trojan War with the experience of American fighting men in Vietnam. The seven-week instructor-training course that ended in early December included a final written test of about 100 questions. And while their students were getting ready for that, Urso and six of his men were taking college courses at night in anatomy, physiology, and sports medicine, the better to prevent and mitigate injuries.

Before arriving at Quantico, this reporter had requested a chance to get a taste of martial arts training by participating in some of it--a request that Urso graciously humored by inviting me to put on the gloves in the boxing-training room, which was formerly called the "room of pain."

He stood patiently, occasionally firing off a gentle pop to my chest, while I flailed away at him with all my strength. In amazingly short order, all my strength was gone, my arms drooped like noodles at my sides, and my throat felt like I'd been a week in the desert without a drink. They changed the room's name, but they kept the pain. Master Gunnery Sgt. Cardo Urso looked fresh as a daisy.

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