A Second Hand Conjecture

Frank Lovece sat down with Frank Miller for Newsday to discuss his upcoming film The Spirit. Toward the end of it Lovece asked Miller about remarks he’d made in 2007 in support of the Iraq War, and offered him an opportunity to clarify/retract. Miller was unapologetic:

Lovece: Speaking of which: You engendered some controversy on a radio show, comparing our invading Iraq with our response to Pearl Harbor. Since Iraq didn’t attack us, did you really mean to say that?

Miller: When the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor, we didn’t just declare war on Japan, we declared war on Germany. It was an international fascist effort. And so when I said that the attack on Iraq made sense, it was the same way we had to attack not just Afghanistan. Instead we had to attack the center of Islamofascism.
(Newsday)

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(photo: Charles Roffey – Charles & Fred)

Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.

Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:

Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)

That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.

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Question the timing! That old mantra from the halcyon days of 2002-4, when the Left would be mocked by the Right for wondering about the suspicious timing of terror alerts, is universally applicable to the Presidency. In the case of the Syrian nuclear facility—the underlying story of which isn’t significant—what the intelligence community is choosing to say, and even more importantly, not say, is highly significant:

Perhaps most notable in the briefing on Thursday was how coy the analysts were being about the possibility that Syria has a covert nuclear weapons program. They noted very specifically that “there is no reprocessing facility in the region of al Kibar,” but refused to elaborate when asked whether the Syrians might be building such a facility elsewhere. They also refused to comment on how Syria might have been planning to acquire the natural uranium required to fuel the reactor and they dodged a question about how North Korean diplomats have so far reacted to this disclosure.

Yet, in the briefing detailing their findings, the analysts were certain of the design and intent of the reactor. That isn’t to say that Syria was probably up to something bad—it almost certainly was. But the reasons this is being released right now is definitely puzzling. It makes me wonder what Bush has up his sleeve concerning Iran and reviving all that terrible Axis of Evil talk (Syria, recall, did not make the cut last time).

Even more interesting is the reactions of some on the Right.

I was mildly amused to see FP contributor and respected nuclear expert Joe Cirincione labeled “Obama’s radioactive potato” and “an apologist for Syria” this week on Commentary’s “Connecting the Dots” blog and the Powerline blog, respectively…

Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff seems to think Cirincione is biased against Israel — even though the latter has family in Israel and describes himself as “strongly pro-Israel.” Commentary’s Gabriel Schoenfeld, meanwhile, is certain that Cirincione, despite his rather explicit denial, really is secretly the top nuclear advisor to the Obama campaign. I guess conspiracy theories aren’t exclusive to the Middle East.

This is, recall, for the crime of being skeptical of a poorly sourced press leak with no evidence at the time, and wishing for greater detail to emerge before believing the administration’s reports about the incident.

All the while those carping heads keep missing the real point here, which is not that Syria has a high-level relationship with North Korea. It is that this event has highlighted the way the media is spoon fed stories by the government, and has apparently abrogated the lion’s share of its investigative power over to government agencies.

That so many don’t seem to realize this remains baffling.

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For at least a decade, there has been a running joke in the world of intelligence contractors that perhaps 90% of what the CIA does could be done for 1/10 the cost and 10x the effective accuracy by private, open-source agencies. The superiority of open source analysis is not really in question, though there are some topics, namely about specific military capability and intent, that kind of by design require classification.

Take North Korea. The CIA is set to publicly confirm ties between North Korea and Syria over the development of nuclear technologies, definitely including power generation and probably including weapons production. This, however, is something that has been spread across the news wires since at least 2004.

Why 2004? Almost exactly four years ago on April 22, 2004, two trains traveling through the northern city of Ryongchon collided, and the explosion killed dozens and injured thousands. Satellite photos showed an enormous area of devastation around the impact site.

At the time, niche right-wing newspapers were discussing the presence of Syrians at the explosion site, or that the explosion delayed the shipment of missile components or WMD material to Syria, or variations on the same story. In the years since, the connection slowly dropped off everyone’s radar until the Osirak-style Israeli raid on a suspected Syrian nuclear site in late 2007. There were naturally some skeptics, despite Israel’s claim to have seized “nuclear materials” at the site.

Of course, with all such things, there was too much reliance on rumor and speculation, and way too little on-the-scene reporting by journalists (most of whom rely on official government sources for most of their stories and do very little investigation).

This is not really a surprise, in other words. Anyone who is shocked North Korea was actively selling dangerous weapons has never seriously studied the country (there is a good reason they’re labeled one of the world’s top weapons traffickers and proliferators). Anyone who is familiar at all with the twisted mindset of intelligence analysts—some of whom have told me they don’t read the news because “open source in unreliable” and don’t watch Al-Jazeera because it is “an enemy broadcast”—will not find any of this new or even particularly interesting. Which of course raises the question: why does it even matter now? This is old information, in the public arena for years. That the CIA has only now caught up, at least publicly, is not too surprising. The only interesting aspect to this is how thorough they were, if they can justify their enormous collection budget (and, not coincidentally, how much of their reporting actually did rely on things like the Open Source Center).

So will the CIA’s revelation confirm or refute the many theories that have been passing back and forth for a good four+ years about the ties between Syrian and North Korea? That remains to be seen. What I think is more interesting is both how this yet again demonstrates a critical way Big Media punts its responsibility to investigate things; how, despite that shortcoming, open sources can bring one a relatively clear picture of the state of the world; and how out-of-sync with the modern media environment our intelligence agencies appear to be. That is the buried lede here, one the LA Times could have highlighted if they knew what they were talking about.

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The military is praising Syria and Saudi Arabia for their efforts to restrict the flow of insurgent reinforcements into Iraq: “In early 2007, 110 foreigners were coming into Iraq from Syria every month. That is now reduced to 40 to 50.”

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(listening notes; Dinosaur Jr., The Volcano Suns, The Minutemen, The Dixie Chicks, Hank Williams Sr., The Rolling Stones)

Late in the eighties I was taking a course in American history after 1945. One of my fellow students was a bright, interesting Palestinian. We had become acquaintances and spent a fair amount of time after class discussing various topics. He was not in my mind anyone much different than other students. He was a good guy. While he was a Muslim, and a believer he wasn’t what I would call devout and certainly not radical. Needless to say eventually the topic of the class turned to the Arab Israeli conflict and the professor gave an entire class period over to this young man to give a presentation. It was quite good, if one sided, at showing the conditions in the refugee camps, various atrocities committed by the Israeli’s and Israel’s refusal to negotiate in good faith. He was quite effective at arousing the sympathies of the class, including mine. The discussion after that turned into a chance for the more left leaning members of the class to give monologues about their deep sympathy for the Palestinian people and the brutality of the Israeli’s.

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