When James Q. Wilson passed away earlier this week from leukemia, political science lost a legend.  Wilson was like his onetime colleague Samuel Huntington:  he wrote far and wide and without fear.  His most well-known argument was the "broken windows" theory of crime.  He posited (along with George Kelling) that the best way to reduce serious crime was for a neighborhood to be vigilant about more minor (but publicly visible) signs of disorder, like grafitti and broken windows. 

For me, however, it was his work on bureaucracy that stood out.  His two books on political bureaucracy -- Political Organizations and Bureaucracy -- are landmarks in the field.  Bureaucracy in particular is a fantastically rich work, akin to Tom Schelling's Strategy of Conflict, in that a generation of organizational politics scholars could take a half-page of Wilson's musings and spin them into entire books. 

For some lovely obituaries, see Arthur Brooks in the Wall Street Journal, Harvey Mansfield in the Weekly Standard, and Mark Kleiman at SameFacts.  Wilson was a conservative, and many of his arguments were consistent with conservative principles.  He was  first and foremost a social scientist, however, acutely conscious of his own biases and willing to reverse course when need be.  Kleiman's post encapsulates this point nicely: 

The things that made Jim special – beyond is massive intellect, wide reading, and graceful, accurate prose – were his generosity of spirit and his deep moral and intellectual seriousness. At a time when he was very much committed to the Red team, he helped spread my ideas despite what he knew were my strong Blue loyalties. (Unsolicited, he gave When Brute Force Fails, which is largely a rebuttal to Thinking About Crime, its best blurb.) Jim wanted to get things right, even when that meant acknowledging that he had earlier been wrong: a tendency not common among academics, or among participants in policy debates.

Recently I was asked to sign on to an amicus brief in a case involving the constitutionality of imposing life imprisonment without parole on those who were legally juveniles at the time of their offending behavior. The argument of the brief was straightforward: legislatures had passed juvenile LWOP under the influence of the idea that the 1980s had seen the rise of a new generation of “juvenile super-predators,” whose propensity to violence put the nation at risk of a bloodbath once they became adults unless they were kept behind bars. In fact, the upsurge in deadly violence by adolescents turned out to be merely a side-effect of the crack markets; instead of soaring, violent crime fell sharply. But the laws passed while the theory was in vogue remain in force.

Jim had been one of the promoters of the “super-predator” theory, though he was not its originator. When I glanced down the list of signatories for the amicus I found, at the bottom, “James Q. Wilson.”

Brooks has a nice quote from Wilson about how to be a conservative in the overwhelmingly liberal profession of academia:  "Be twice as productive and four times as nice as your colleagues."  That was James Q. Wilson. 

The best way to honor his legacy is to buy and read Bureaucracy.  You won't be sorry. 

I'm at a stage in my career when reporters will occasionally call or e-mail me for an "expert" opinion on something.  I've gotten better at refusing those requests when I'm not really an expert but just a snarky blogger.  Still, even when I can claim expertise, I don't always do that great of a job. 

To see what I mean, consider this New York Times front-pager by Mark Landler and Annie Lowrey on President Obama's proposed reorganization of foreign economic policy agencies.  I'm quoted accurately in this story -- but I'm not quoted fully.

To explain, here's the key bits of the article:

Mr. Obama called on lawmakers to grant him broad new powers to propose mergers of agencies, which Congress would then have to approve or reject in an up-or-down vote.  If granted the authority, he said, he would begin pruning by folding the Small Business Administration and five other trade and business agencies into a single agency that would replace the Commerce Department....

Despite regular vows by presidents to overhaul government — Mr. Obama made one in his State of the Union address last January — few have followed through. Those who did, like Richard M. Nixon, often met with failure. Scholars have mixed feelings about such reorganizations, with some arguing that they rarely lead to lower head counts, more effective departments or savings.

“My gut tells me those benefits will end up being much smaller than advertised, and the costs much larger,” said Steven M. Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, pointing to the time wasted during the consolidation and the changed political dynamic between the agencies and Congress.

But experts on government efficiency applauded the initiative, saying it was overdue, and some analysts said it made sense to combine agencies involved in business development, foreign investment and trade promotion into a single department with the mandate to promote American exports.

“If you look at American exports, it’s dominated by big business,” said Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “If you want small and medium enterprises to get more involved in exporting” — a goal of the Obama administration — “having small business and the trade office in the same agency makes sense,” he said. “So this could be a boon for that.”

Now, based on that quote, you might think that I'm pretty enthusiastic about this initiative.  If, however, you checked my initial tweets about this proposal, you would notice a lot more agreement with what Stephen Teles said in the paragraphs above me.  My instant assessment was that this was one of those "reorganizing government" initiatives that makes a lot of sense in the abstract but probably leads to more transition costs than long-term benefits.  Indeed, the first thing that came to mind could be summed up in four words:  Department of Homeland Security. 

So what gives?  This is what happens when I talk to reporters.  I had a long chat with Annie Lowrey during which I listed A) the various ways in which Congress won't go for this; and B) why merging different organizational cultures will likely be a big mess.  Lowrey then asked me if there was any rationale for this kind of reorganization.  At which point I said what was quoted in the paper of record. 

Now if you know my views about the National Export Initiative, you'll see I don't hold out much hope of this accomplishing anything.  Still, to repeat, Lowrey's quote of me is completely accurate, and it is a decent motivation for this kind of initiative. 

This is one of those mismatches between reporters and experts.  It's not really the reporter's job to convey the full gist of a conversation with an expert.  This story isn't "What Dan Drezner The Expert Thinks About Something," after all.  Still, this is often the natural expectation of many experts, because we think about the entire conversation, not just one part of it.  Furthermore, it's an expectation that, despite multiple occurences like this, stubbornly persists in my brain.  So the impulse to develop disciplined talking points and not stray from them has never developed. 

Why?  Because I like answering questions fully, or trying to, anyway.  That's why I got a doctorate, and why I became a professor.  This impulse, by the way, is why so many experts loathe presidential debates.  The candidates are  usually too savvy to directly answer a question.  Rather, they are being tested on their ability to pivot from the question that's asked to the talking point that is closest to that question. 

This is a long-winded way of saying that what I said in the Times was the truth but not the whole truth.  And that the odds are good that I'm probably going find myself in this situation again.  And that's OK -- one of the perks of having this blog is that when this sort of thing happens, I can ramble my way to a more fuller explanation of my views. 

So check out David Rothkopf for a full-throated defense of Obama's proposal.  Despite my quote in the Times, you're not going to see one here. 

UPDATE:  Now this is fascinating.  The Anchorage Daily News runs a version of the Times story -- except that the ADN version has much fuller quotes from more experts.  The relevant portion: 

One government efficiency expert, Jitinder Kohli, applauded the move.

"These efforts to rationalize government are long overdue, frankly," said Kohli, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "In fiscally tight times, it's even more important to think carefully about how to deliver savings — and that includes making websites easier to use, providing single points of entry and streamlining."

"In the world of business, reorganization happens all the time, for good reason," Kohli added. "The world changes around businesses, and businesses change to better serve the world. But the government is far, far less nimble."

Still, a body of research throws cold water on the notion that such reorganization leads to lower head counts, more effective departments or cost savings.

"The most important considerations are the costs in wasted time while they do the reorganization, how this changes the politics of the affected agencies in relation to Congress and other executive branch agencies, and how specific the purported benefits of consolidation are," said Steven M. Teles, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. "My gut tells me those benefits will end up being much smaller than advertised, and the costs much larger."

Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts, said "This is one of those ideas that looks great in abstract. But you're talking about merging the organizational cultures of five or six agencies. It takes a long time for efficiencies and synergies to work out. They're not going to play well for a while."

Nonetheless, Drezner said that having a single body devoted to export promotion made sense.

"If you look at American exports, it's dominated by big business," he said. "If you want small and medium enterprises to get more involved in exporting" — a goal of the Obama administration — "having small business and the trade office in the same agency makes sense. So this could be a boon for that."

Susan C. Schwab, who served as a U.S. trade representative during the Bush administration, agreed that the move might improve export promotion. But she said that it might do so at the expense of broader trade policy.

"You'd take a small, very efficient agency and have it totally swallowed up by this behemoth," said Schwab, who is now a professor of public policy the University of Maryland. "From a trade policy perspective, it makes no sense at all."

Schwab added, "Trade policy involves so many different sectors of the economy, and U.S. interests. It's foreign policy. It's manufacturing. It is services, agriculture, consumers, labor, the environment, intellectual property."

An agency without a strong trade representative, she said, could end up giving "short shrift" to some concerns.

Had this been the version that the Times ran, I wouldn't have bothered blogging about this, because my quotes were both accurate and captured to gist of what I was saying. 

Of course, this is a longer story, which reminds me that sometimes it's not the reporter that has mismatched incentives -- it's the editor worried about length. 

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh asked a former U.S. serviceman who called into his show a totally-hypothetical-and-not-in-any-way-designed-to-impugn-the-patriotism-of-the-sitting-president-kind of question: 

Are you aware of any military contingency plans for a president who might not be your prototypical pro-America president? Are there contingency plans to deal with a president who may not believe that the United States is the solution to the world's problems?

Marc Ambinder provides both a succinct ("No.") and a more detailed answer.  Now, some readers might take umbrage at the partisanship of Limbaugh's question, but I think it dovetails nicely with some recent research interests of my own.  In particular:  what would happen if the president was under threat of turning into a zombie? 

Let's break this down into two phases:  A) a president who's been bitten but is still clearly human; and B) an undead POTUS. 

The first situation could distort the government's initial policy responses.    After all, the actors with the most immediate stake in sabotaging any attack on zombies are those who have been bitten by zombies, and the human relatives of zombies. By definition, the moment humans are bitten, they will inevitably become zombies. This fact can dramatically alter their preferences. This change of mind occurs in many zombie films. In George Romero's Land of the Dead (2005), the character of Cholo has the most militant anti-zombie attitude at the outset of the film. After he is bitten, however, he decides that he wants to "see how the other half lives." In Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (2002), as well as Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Survival of the Dead (2010), family members keep their undead relatives hidden from security and paramilitary forces.  

Clearly, soon-to-be-ghouls and their relatives can hamper policy implementation.  One would expect a soon-to-be POTUS to order research efforts on finding a cure rather than focusing on prevention, for example. 

If the situation is unclear when the president is infected, all hell breaks lose once he becomes a member of the differently animated.  The law here is extremely murky.  From Ambinder:

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 spells out a procedure. Let's look at 3 USC 19, subsection "E."  We're dealing with a situation where there is no President, no Vice President, no Speaker of the House and no President Pro Tempore. The law then appoints the Secretary of State as President until either the end of the current president's term in office OR someone higher in the chain of command suddenly re-appears or recovers from injuries and is able to discharge the powers of office.  (The Secretary of Defense is sixth in line, after the Secretary of the Treasury.)

This seems clear: If it's not clear, after some sort of decapitation attack, whether the President, the Vice President or the two Congressional successors are alive, or if they're all alive but disabled, then the Cabinet secretaries become acting President -- until and unless a "prior entitled individual" is able to act.

Let's say that the POTUS, the VPOTUS, the Speaker and the President Pro Tempore are all injured; only the Vice President recovers. As soon as that person is eligible, he or she can "bump" the Acting President aside whenever he wants....

The problem is that, in a catastrophic emergency, the people who need to know who is in charge might not have the resources to find this out immediately. These people are, in particular, the Secret Service, and the folks who execute lawful orders from the National Command Authority (which is another name for the commander in chief's executive powers).

Well, then what the hell happens if a president is bitten by a zombie, dies, and then becomes a zombie?  It seems to me that the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 doesn't cover this contingency. 

There is also the question of the conflicting bureaucratic imperatives that some organizations, like the Secret Service, would face in this scenario.  For example, in Brian Keene's The Rising, the U.S. government falls apart almost immediately. A key trigger was the Secret Service's difficulties altering their In divining bureaucratic preferences, where you stand depends on who you eat. standard operating procedures. After the president turned into a zombie, he started devouring the secretary of state. As a result, "one Secret Service agent drew his weapon on the undead Commander-in-Chief, and a second agent immediately shot the first." 

I think the lesson to draw here for Rush and others is that in divining both bureaucratic and presidential preferences, where you stand depends on who you eat. 

I hereby applaud Rush for being brave enough to highlight this troublesome question during a week when nothing else is going on in the world. 

FP's Josh Rogin ably summarizes the State Department's rollout of the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), an exercise that was clearly inspired by the Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Review. This was Anne-Marie Slaughter's signal achievement during her tenure as Director of Policy Planning,* which leads to the obvious question of whether it really matters.

The QDDR is dedicated to Rickard Holbrooke, who passed away earlier this week. In a revealing Financial Times article, Brain Katulis of the Center for American Progress makes a particularly telling point about the arc of Holbrooke's career:

"If you compare Holbrooke's tenure in his job as representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he was able to do in the 1990s on Bosnia, you really see that the balance of power in the interim had shifted from the state department to the Pentagon," said Brian Katulis at the Centre for American Progress in Washington.

Katulis hits upon a theme that has been a source of concern here at this blog for a good long while. For at least a decade, there's been a vicious feedback loop: State loses operational authority and capabilities because of poor funding, which leads to more tasks for Defense, which leads to even more lopsided funding between the two bureaucracies, which leads to an even greater disparity in responsibilities, and so forth.

Will the QDDR change that? That's sorta the point of the whole exercise -- the phrase "civilian power" appears 281 times in the QDDR. I'm dubious -- the only way this works is through greater staffing and greater funding for U.S. foreign aid, and in this Age of Austerity, the first things that get cut are.... diplomats and foreign aid funding.

I'd love to see Hillary Clinton make the case to Congress than an extra $50 billion for State would improve American foreign policy enough to cut, say, $100 billion for DoD. I'd love a free pony too, for all the likelihood that this will happen.

I'm not the only one who's dubious. The Christian Science Monitor's Howard LaFranchi ends his story on the QDDR as follows:

[E]xperts, as well as some military officials, have pointed out that the concept of "civilian power" sounds good, but that the US diplomatic corps is not prepared and doesn't have the numbers to take over many tasks from the military.

Clinton acknowledges that the shift in priorities and organization is "a work in progress," but she also emphasizes that someone will be designated at both the State Department and at USAID to oversee implementation. "I am determined that this report will not merely gather dust, like so many others," she said. And she wants Congress to approve making the QDDR a regular and required State Department policy-review process.

Slaughter echoed those words in a humorous sum-up with reporters. "I'm pretty sure you're thinking, 'I've heard this before,' " she said - a big plan to change the way a government agency works. "But this is different."

The big difference, she insisted, is that Clinton has given the reorganization top priority: "She knows ... we can't afford to continue working in the way we have been."

Reading the QDDR, it's clear that there's a hope that Foggy Bottom will scrape together more resources through wringing greater efficiencies out of the current budget. This is certainly possible -- no one is going to label the State Department a lean, mean fighting bureaucratic machine -- but color me skeptical that there's all that much savings of "government waste" in them thar hills.

To be fair, however, one report is not going to change a dynamic that's been building for more than a decade. It's only a first step. Still first steps are better than no steps. We'll see if this remains Clinton's top priority.

*I have no inside knowledge about this, but am simply assuming that Slaughter will be returning to her academic haunts after the standard two-year leave has expired -- in other words, in early 2011.

There are many peculiar rites of passage for each incoming U.S. administration: the first scandal, the first resignation, the first broken campaign promise, and the first botched use of force. 

Add to this list the first Bob Woodward book of an administration. Like a debutante's coming-out party, there are highly formalized rituals -- the press leaks about the good stuff in the book, the Sunday morning talk show commentators obsessing over the more controversial bits and pieces, the inevitable meta-essays on Woodward himself. As a young foreign policy wonk, I remember looking forward to the latest Woodward tome the way others looked forward to the latest Stephen King novel. 

That was then, however -- with Obama's Wars, has Bob Woodward demonstrated that he's about as irrelevant as the debutante circuit? 

Woodward is operating in a very different media environment now. What used to be his bread and butter -- the political and bureaucratic machinations of presidential administrations -- is no longer his exclusive province. Beyond the Washington Post and New York Times, media outlets as varied as Politico, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and the New Yorker now generate monthly weekly hourly revelations that Woodward used to be able to hoard for his books. As my old dissertation advisor used to say, "is there anything new here?"

Let's see what Steve Luxenberg's preview in the Washington Post has to say: 

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward....

Among the book's other disclosures:

-- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn't think about the Afghan war in the "classic" terms of the United States winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?" he said.

-- The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

-- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA's worldwide covert operations.

-- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. "They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally," then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.

-- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here "a potential game changer." He said: "When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one where you can't afford any mistakes."

-- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. "He's on his meds, he's off his meds," Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.

Hmmm.... there is some interesting stuff, but it's more in the details (Karzai's depression, the CIA's paramilitaries) than in the overarching narrative. Obama feuded with the military on Afghanistan? There was bureaucratic dissension on Afghanistan? Well, blow me down!! 

This ain't how it used to be. In The Commanders, for example, Woodward showed that JCS Chairman Colin Powell was much more reluctant to attack Iraq than previously known. 

Now it's possible that this is simply a function of me being more cynical older than I used to be. But the fact is, I just don't look forward to a new Bob Woodward book anymore. 

Question to readers:  has Woodward jumped the shark? 

Question:  what do Top Secret America and Wikileaks have in common? 

Answer:  they both pretty much put me to sleep. 

Call me shallow, call me jaded, call me cynical, but there's not that much there there in either effort.  Day 1 of the Top Secret story was the most informative of the bunch, no doubt -- but even that story was frustratingly short on detail.  Day 2 and Day 3 were worse, in that they didn't tell me anything I already know.  Day 2 of Top Secret America told me that  outsourcing to private contractors is bad, bad, bad, and very expensive.  Day 3 was kind of like your local news teasers: "Are NSA employees living RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO YOU?!"  If you live in the vicinity of BWI, it turns out the answer is, "yes, but it's not a big deal." Again... yawn. 

If Top Secret America actually prompts hearings/reform efforts, then yay, dead tree journalism.  Otherwise, the reveal was far less than the hype. 

As for Wikileaks, Blake Hounshell and Andrew Exum sum up my feelings on the matter.  So it turns out that the war in Afghanistan is not going well and Pakistan is playing a double game?  Well, knock me down with a feather!! 

In essence, neither story provides much in the way of new information -- they merely serve as news pegs through which intractable policy issues can be debated anew.  If those debates prove fruitful, that's great -- but during a summer in which I've seen the Stupidest Topics Ever become cable show fodder, I ain't getting my hopes up. 

This might be my own subfield prejudice at work.  Every once in a while someone from security studies tells me that international political economy is really, really boring and that they can't understand how I could find it interesting.  I think today is one of those days in which I would tell them the same thing. 

Am I missing anything?  Seriously, anything? 

Over the weekend, CIA chief Leon Panetta had a chat with This Week's Jake Tapper, and provided the following assessment of Al Qaeda' capabilities:

TAPPER: How many Al Qaida do you think are in Afghanistan?

PANETTA: I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaida is actually relatively small. I think at most, we're looking at maybe 60 to 100, maybe less. It's in that vicinity. There's no question that the main location of Al Qaida is in tribal areas of Pakistan....

PANETTA: I think what's happened is that the more we put pressure on the Al Qaida leadership in the tribal areas in Pakistan -- and I would say that as a result of our operations, that the Taliban leadership is probably at its weakest point since 9/11 and their escape from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Having said that, they clearly are continuing to plan, continuing to try to attack this country, and they are using other ways to do it.

TAPPER: Al Qaida you're talking about.

PANETTA: That's correct. They are continuing to do that, and they're using other ways to do it, which are in some ways more difficult to try to track. One is the individual who has no record of terrorism. That was true for the Detroit bomber in some ways. It was true for others.

They're using somebody who doesn't have a record in terrorism, it's tougher to track them. If they're using people who are already here, who are in hiding and suddenly decide to come out and do an attack, that's another potential threat that they're engaged in. The third is the individual who decides to self-radicalize. Hasan did that in the Fort Hood shootings. Those are the kinds of threats that we see and we're getting intelligence that shows that's the kind of stream of threats that we face, much more difficult to track. At the same time, I think we're doing a good job of moving against those threats. We've stopped some attacks, we continue to work the intelligence in all of these areas. But that area, those kinds of threats represent I think the most serious threat to the United States right now. (emphasis added) 

Seriously?  60-100  guys?  That's it?  As Philip Giraldi points out, this kind of assessment raises some Very Important Questions, like:  "If CIA Director Leon Panetta is correct and al-Qaeda has been reduced to a tiny remnant why are we spending nearly a trillion dollars a year on defense, intelligence, and homeland security?"

It's a fair question -- shouldn't these guys be able to deal with 60-100 guys?   

The easy answers here are A) path dependence; and B) concerns about U.S. reputation.  There's a harder answer here, however, that is buried within Panetta's comments, as well as those of just about every other counter-terrorism expert.  Let's call it the Counter-Terrorism Mantra, which consists of the following: 

1)  Al Qaeda is nowhere near as powerful as it was a decade ago

2)  Al Qaeda is now really unpopular among Muslims worldwide

3)  Because of their desperate straits, Al Qaeda is encouraging anyone and everyone to try attacking the United States

4)  One of these homegrown, disgruntled sorts might not be a moron be smart and lucky enough to succeed. 

I understand why the Counter-Terrorism Mantra is used -- because the political costs of underestimating Al Qaeda's capabilities are far greater than overestimating their capabilities.  That said, this kind of mantra leads to Very Stupid and Costly policies. 

The fact is, Al Qaeda's abilities to execute Grand Guignol-kind of attacks appears to be nil.  There have been plenty of opportunities over the past five years for AQ to launch the kind of attack that would put fear into the heart of the West -- the USA-England World Cup match, most recently -- and there's been nothing.  Even if Captain Underpants or the Times Square bomber had succeeded, the carnage would have been on a far lower scale than the 9/11 attacks. 

Isn't it time that some rational cost-benefit analysis was applied to counter-terrorism policies?  In a world where "The [defense budget] gusher has been turned off, and will stay off for a good period of time," isn't it time for political leaders to argue in favor of resource retrenchment, even if it increases the probability of a successful attack just a smidgen? 

I can ask this question, because I can be dismissed as an out-of-touch, elities, zombie-loving, pointy-headed academic who knows nothing about counter-terrorism.  What I'd like to see is a few bona-fide counterterrorism experts have the stones to ask a similar question. 

The story of the day, from David Sanger and Thom Shanker: 

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President' Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course....

One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran's nuclear program.

In an interview on Friday, General Jones declined to speak about the memorandum. But he said: “On Iran, we are doing what we said we were going to do. The fact that we don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t mean we don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies — we do.”

But in his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.

In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.

Now, if one doesn't read carefully, the obvious implication to infer from this lead is that the Obama administration has been lax on both policy planning and thinking about military contingencies. 

If one reads the entire story carefully, however -- something I highly recommend -- two important facts stand out.  First, Gates wrote this in January, but it's being leaked now, in mid-April.  As Spencer Ackerman notes, the Obama administration has geared up on a variety of fronts on both Iran and nonproliferation.  You can criticize the response as inadequate or misguided -- but it's safe to say that there was a policy response. 

So why leak the memo now?  The Power Line's Scott Johnson asks that very question: 

As always with stories like this, one wonders about the motives of the Times's sources. Why would anonymous officials leak word of a highly classified memorandum suggesting that the administration has no policy beyond what has proved to be empty talk? These apparently well-informed officials must think that we have something to worry about.

That's one possibility.  Another (not mutually exclusive) possibility is that whoever leaked was on the losing side of the policy debate.  The White House has been centralizing the foreign policy process, which inevitably leads to some hurt feelings.  Furthermore, the bureaucratic politics on Middle East policy have become both nasty and personal.  It wouldn't surprise me if someone in the administration thinks that it's payback time.  Which isn't to say that the leaker is necessarily wrong, but Marc Ambinder is right -- there are multiple possible motivations for the leak in the first place.  

The second useful nugget of information comes from this paragraph: 

Mr. Gates’s memo appears to reflect concerns in the Pentagon and the military that the White House did not have a well prepared series of alternatives in place in case all the diplomatic steps finally failed. Separately, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote a “chairman’s guidance” to his staff in December conveying a sense of urgency about contingency planning. He cautioned that a military attack would have “limited results,” but he did not convey any warnings about policy shortcomings (emphasis added).

If the senior uniformed officer is skeptical of the utility of a military attack, that strikes me as pretty important.  Sure, one option could be to really ramp up the military option to include a ground assault, but even Iran hawks acknowledge that this is off the table. 

So, what do I know now that I didn't know prior to reading Sanger and Shanker?  I'd say the following: 

1)  All policy options on Iran stink. 

2)  The bureaucratic politics of U.S. Middle East policy are getting worse;

3)  The administration has responded to the Gates memo, but not in a way that pleases all of the bureaucratic heavyweights inside the administraion. 

4)  January is apparently a month of foreign policy "wake-up calls" and "bombshells" in the White House. 

What I don't know, after reading Sanger and Shanker, is whether someone like Gates would approve of the administration's current contingency planning on Iran. 

As Peter Feaver observed over at Shadow Government, there's an ever-increasing number of leaks coming from the Obama administration on foreign policy. 

Beyond the drip-drip-drip on the Afghan strategic review, the foreign policy community is now agog at Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf's story in Time on the rise and fall of Greg Craig, Obama's first White House Counsel.  Former colleague Laura Rozen labels it as, "one of the most devastating accounts to have emerged of the Obama White House."

Calabresi and Weisskopf's story contains astonishing revelations, like the following: 

• Obama's foreign policy preferences changed as he confronted political realities;
• As time has passed, Obama has paid more attention to the political ramifications of his national security decisions;
• There were fierce bureaucratic battles over the release of national security memoranda;
• Greg Craig's influence waned when his policy recommendations produced political blowback;
• Over time, Obama has tried to balance national security concerns with his desire to unwind some of the Bush administraton's excessive actions.
• People who oppose Greg Craig did so mostly for short-sighted political reasons.

Well, blow me down.  

I don't mean to belittle those who either ardently support or ardently oppose the initial efforts to eliminate the legacies of Guantanamo and the like.  But stories that reveal politicians to be acting, er, politically don't really cause my jaw to drop. 

The only interesting thing I found in this piece was the part Rozen excerpted:

Obama arrived at Emanuel's office a few minutes later, took off his windbreaker and sat down at a table lined with about a dozen national-security and political advisers. He asked each to state a position and then convened an impromptu debate, selecting Craig and McDonough to argue opposing sides. Craig deployed one of Obama's own moral arguments: that releasing the memos "was consistent with taking a high road" and was "sensitive to our values and our traditions as well as the rule of law." Obama paused, then decided in favor of Craig, dictating a detailed statement explaining his position that would be released the next day.

But for Craig, it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Four days later, former Vice President Dick Cheney attacked Obama on Fox News Channel for dismantling the policies he and Bush had put in place to keep the country safe. More significant was the reaction within Obama's camp. Democratic pollsters charted a disturbing trend: a drop in Obama's support among independents, driven in part by national-security issues. Emanuel quietly delegated his aides to get more deeply involved in the process. Damaged by the episode, Craig was about to suffer his first big setback.

In other words, the  median American voters are comfortable with using illiberal means to protect the national interest (hmmm... that sounds familiar).  And, shock upon shock, politicians respond to public attitudes.   

I read with great interest the Wall Street Journal story entitled "A President as Micromanager" about Barack Obama's decision-making style -- and had the exact same reaction as Noam Scheiber: 

The big problem is that the piece conflates two very different things: One is micromanaging, which involves making decisions that are well below your pay-grade. The other is wanting detailed information on which to base decisions that are at precisely your pay grade. The Journal story presents lots of evidence for the latter; zero evidence for the former....

If I had to guess, I'd say what happened is that the Journal found itself with a nice story about the way Obama makes decisions, but that it seemed too positive. As the piece itself notes: "Unavoidably, the accounts all come from people who admire Mr. Obama, not from his critics, who aren't privy to such sessions." The "micromanager" frame was presumably added somewhere along the way to correct for this problem and make the piece seem more even-handed.

Indeed.  For all the puff pieces on Obama's management style, this article suffers from the reverse problem -- it tries to paint a negative frame and doesn't succeed because of the lack of evidence.  Instead, the Obama in the WSJ story is someone who is intellectually curious, eager for data (which, as Scheiber points out, is distinct from micromanaging) and naturally contrarian. 

In other words, pretty much the opposite of the last person to occupy the Oval Office.  Which is fine with me. 

A recurring theme of this blog has been the relationship between academics and policymakers.  What, if anything should academics have on offer?  What should they have to offer? 

Stanford's alumni magazine offers an interesting take on this question, asking six scholars and policymakers affiliated with the university about, "what lessons they drew from conflicts they studied or had a role in, and how they relayed their insights to the people in charge."

The most fascinating anecdote comes from Priya Satia: 

In 2007, the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence invited Satia to address staffers from more than a dozen different intelligence organizations about Middle East counterinsurgency. She spoke about the risks of groupthink, and the price British and Iraqis paid for that. But the message seemed to pass people by.

They wanted to hear more about T.E. Lawrence, she says, not sounding very surprised. “The kind of people who get into intelligence have been inspired by the T.E. Lawrences—they staked their careers on having some kind of secret role in the making of history, and when you tell them that’s not going to work, I mean, what are they supposed to do with that information?”

I assume Satia must have been talking to the operations people, because I find it hard to believe that analysts are really all that inspired by T.E. Lawrence. 

That quibble aside, Satia raises an interesting point.  Many social scientists focus on the myriad structural reasons why things are the way they are.  Policymakers believe they can help shape the way things are.  The last thing they often want to hear is why their ideas won't work.  And while scholars can often explain why an idea won't work, they are often at a loss to offer a superior, politically viable alternative. 

This might be an "irreconcilable" problem, but I'll leave that question to the commentators. 

Ever since Barack Obama was elected, I've received myriad queries about whether I'm going into the administration.  And, for a variety of reasons, my answer has always been, "no, not interested." 

After reading Ryan Lizza's profile of Rahm Emanuel in The New Yorker, however, I must confess that there is one job that I would do for free: 

I noticed that over [Emanuel's] left shoulder, on the credenza behind him, was an official-looking name plate, which he said was a birthday present from his two brothers. It read “Undersecretary for Go F**k Yourself.”

Now that's my kind of job.  It's a bit senior for me, though.  If asked to serve, I would consider the stepping stone to that position -- Deputy Assistant Secretary for Eat S**t and Die. 

Noam Scheiber reports on a battle a-brewin' within the Obama administration:

Foggy Bottom has spent the last month hinting at its designs on economic policy, which would presumably come at the expense of Treasury. The latest indications are that Hillary's first target may be the U.S.-China relationship, which Geithner's immediate predecessor, Hank Paulson, spearheaded in the Bush administration. Publicly, Treasury officials welcome a more active role for State. Privately, they say parting with Paulson's brainchild, the Strategic Economic Dialogue, is highly unlikely, noting Geithner's longstanding experience in the region. Let the border skirmishes begin.

On the one hand, this kind of turf war clearly needs to get settled in short order.

On the other hand, in a perverse kind of way, it's not a bad battle to have. Despite all the foreign policy heavyweights in the administration, China is kind of like the orphaned child looking through the window. Since Obama took office, I think it's safe to say that they haven't been feeling the love.

I normally abhor a big bureaucratic battle royale, but in this case it might be good for the Chinese to know that they're wanted.

Question to readers (and Laura Rozen and Megan Carpentier): who wins? Given the status quo -- in which Treasury controls the SED -- my money is on Geithner.

Laura Rozen's latest Cable post suggests that the Obama administration might be falling into the same trap that befell the Clinton and Bush administrations: 

[There are] only a dozen or so positions to be filled [at the NSC] immediately, given that much of the NSC staff is seconded from other federal agencies who will hold over in the new administration's early months. Not only that, but the Obama team reportedly plans to scale back the NSC from its Bush/Cheney days. Under Bush, the NSC had six deputy national security advisor positions; the Obamans are looking to a more traditional, flatter model, my sources tell me, with as few as one deputy national security advisor and senior directors for different regional and functional areas below that (Europe, etc.).

Now, a flatter model may or may not be a good idea.  If "scaling back" includes cutting the NSC staff more generally, however, it would be a boneheaded move.  Worse, it would replicate the exact same boneheaded move made by the previous two administrations.  When Condi Rice came to the NSC, she pruned the staff by a third.  Similarly, the NSC was cut in the first years of the Clinton administration to honor candidate Clinton's pledge to cut White House staff by 25%. 

In the end, the NSC has no resources except access to the president and staff.  To actually coordinate or implement foreign policy, the NSC needs to be on top of what other agencies are doing.  A smaller staff makes that task much more difficult.  Indeed, after policy coordination miscues in the early years of their administrations, both Clinton and Bush wound up reversing course on the NSC.   

Hopefully, Obama will learn from their mistakes -- because nobody likes shrinkage.