HELPING OUT PALIN #1

Foreign Policy magazine, growing frustrated with Palin's nonexistent foreign policy record and general fear of the press, has publicly posted 20 questions that they'd like her to answer. I think they're pretty interesting, so, in order to help her out, I thought I'd take a stab at answering them.

#1 In a broad and long-term sense, would you have responded differently to the attacks of 9/11?

First let me answer with what I think the administration got right: freezing the bank accounts of suspected terrorists and working with the international community to track down members of the Al Qaeda network and bring them to trial.

Of course, this process was disrupted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the near unanimity amongst U.S. elites for the necessity of the Afghanistan war, it hasn't actually accomplished the stated goal. We need to realize that the enemy is a small collection of non-state actors. We need to work more to track and trap these guys in order to shut their networks down, rather than focusing on large-scale conflicts. And where their host countries won't agree to extradition with us (like pre-war Afghanistan) or they can't find them (like Pakistan), we need to upgrade our light footprint special forces troops and deploy them, rather than cluster bombs and armored combat brigades. Interestingly, this was Donald Rumseld's plan to reform the military before September 11th, and I wish he'd been more successful.

Obviously the invasion of Iraq was a gigantic mistake. Anyone who thinks the war was a good idea in the beginning, or wants to continue it now, just isn't serious about national security. Right now I think there's a general consensus that the war itself was a mistake, and while there are a few arguments floating around for why we ought to stay, the main motivation at this point is Pride. Which is to stay, there's no reason at all we shouldn't begin leaving tomorrow.

In terms of a domestic response, we ought to have and still ought to create a domestic intelligence agency, similar to the UK's MI5. The FBI is not properly equipped to deal with counter-terrorism, and they shouldn't have to. Homeland Security is a joke, rather than streamlining bureaucracy, they've just added another layer. Obviously the PATRIOT ACT is controversial, but not for the right reasons. This administration designed a series of provisions in order to help them spy on political opponents, including ultra-dangerous vegan potluck dinner groups, and sold it as a series of counter-terrorism measures. But let's not throw out the whole Act. We really do need roving wiretaps to cope with the cell phone age. But we don't need to be poking around people's library records. And some programs, like data-mining, are more likely to erode our capabilities by producing false positives than by producing any actionable intelligence.

And one more thing: torture is wrong, and it doesn't work. The mixture of moral rot and incompetence demonstrated by their torture policy exemplifies everything wrong with the Bush Administration.

(See Sarah, wasn't that easy? Only 19 more to go...)