A peculiar kerfuffle between Argentina and the United States has broken out.  The New York Times' Alexei Barrionuevo summarizes the standoff:

Argentina has accused the United States military of trying to bring guns and surveillance equipment into the country under the cover of supplying a police training course, creating the latest diplomatic rift between the countries.

Argentine customs officials seized undeclared equipment on Thursday, including what they described as machine guns and ammunition, spy equipment and drugs like morphine, the Argentine Foreign Ministry said Sunday.

The equipment was on a United States Air Force cargo plane carrying material for a training course that an American military team had been invited to provide to Argentina’s federal police.

Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said Argentina would file an official protest in Washington and ask for a joint investigation into why the Air Force attempted to violate Argentine law by sending “material camouflaged inside an official shipment from the United States,” the ministry said in a news release.

“Argentine law must be complied with by all, without exception,” Mr. Timerman said he had told Arturo Valenzuela, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, after Mr. Valenzuela complained about how Argentine customs officials dealt with the cargo, the Foreign Ministry said.

Virginia Staab, a State Department spokeswoman, called the actions by Argentine officials “puzzling and disturbing” and said American officials were seeking explanations from the Argentine government.

The plane carried experts and training equipment that had been “fully coordinated with and approved by” Argentina’s government, Ms. Staab said. She said Argentine authorities conducted “an unusual and unannounced search of the aircraft’s cargo, seizing certain items.”

Ms. Staab said the confiscated equipment included one rifle, a first-aid kit, ready to eat meals, a secure communications device similar to a GPS, encrypted communications equipment, tables and personnel foot lockers that contained helmets. She said American officials were seeking “the immediate return of all items retained by the government of Argentina.”

Argentine officials described the seized material as including equipment for “intercepting communications, various sophisticated and powerful GPS devices, technological elements containing codes labeled secret and a trunk full of expired medicine.”

Now, ordinarily, this sounds like one of those incidents where some errant paperwork and a whole lot of mistrust has escalated things way beyond the level they should be.  The Wall Street Journal's Ken Parks and Julian Barnes add some context, however, that suggests something weird is going on:

Argentine officials say some of the materials weren't included in documents submitted by the U.S. Embassy before the plane's arrival, a charge U.S. officials adamantly deny.

"I want to emphasize the need for our equipment to be returned promptly by the government of Argentina regardless of what motivated this inexplicable behavior," Paul Stockton, the assistant secretary of defense for the Americas, said on Tuesday.

Argentine officials, however, responded the U.S. needed to learn that Argentina has its own laws that need respect.

"Just imagine what would have happened if an Argentine aircraft had taken the same kind of material to the United States. [The Argentines] would all be in Guantanamo in orange overalls," Anibal Fernandez, President Cristina Kirchner's cabinet chief, said in an interview with local broadcaster Radio La Red.

The training had been scheduled at the request of the Argentine government, and was meant to be a follow-up to a September 2009 exercise, according to Frank Mora, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs.

"This was all coordinated at the highest levels of the Argentine government," Mr. Mora said in an interview. "So it caught us very much by surprise, the way the government reacted."

When the plane arrived on Thursday, it was met at the airport by senior Argentine officials, including Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, who supervised the seizure of the cargo as U.S. officials looked on. (emphases added)

Those two bolded sections lead to two different conclusions.  The presence of the Foreign Minister suggests that this wasn't some paperwork screw-up but something with a clear political motivation (rthough it's far from clear whether the entire Argentinian government knows what the heck is going on).  The actual motivation is far from clear to me, however --  I'm just gonna assume this isn't an effort by the Argentines to muck up their Paris Club negotiations.  This blog heartily welcomes Latin American experts to provide some explanation in the comments section. 

For me, however, the more interesting point is the first bolded jab at Guantanamo.  It's a horses**t allegation, but it's a horses**t allegation that lots of people make when they talk about the United States (Julian Assange and his defenders have repeatedly averred that Assange would be sent to Gitmo if he were ever to enter the United States, which is an absurd premise on both political and legal grounds). 

Here's the thing, though -- is it possible for an American policymaker rebut this kind of wisecrack?  There really isn't a good response, because Gitmo is now one of those toxic terms like "bailout" or "Snooki" that can't be undone. 

The politics of closing Guantanamo are pretty hopeless, which means it ain't gonna close anytime soon.  As a result, this is going to be a sore that continues to fester and continue to erode America's soft power.  Maybe that's not worth the political capital required to resolve the situation -- but at least let's openly acknowledge the foreign policy hit. 

Hey, remember Al Qaeda? I wonder if the group responsible for that extra-special pat-down* I got at Logan earlier this week is still capable of serious power projection.

Peter Bergen in Vanity Fair provides one answer:

[I]t is not the West that faces an existential threat, but al Qaeda. About two months after 9/11, bin Laden boasted to a group of supporters, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." The weak horse turned out to be bin Laden's own. During the past decade, misguided actions taken in the name of the War on Terror -- notably the invasion of Iraq, the bungled war in Afghanistan, and the heavy-handed approach to the treatment of prisoners -- have bought bin Laden and his allies some time. These actions have won a certain amount of sympathy among Muslims for the Islamist cause. But they have not changed the underlying reality: al Qaeda and groups that share its ideology are on the wrong side of history…

Before 9/11, the group had acted freely in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda conducted its own foreign policy independent from the Taliban, taking the form, beginning in 1998, of multiple strikes on American government, military, and civilian targets. Before 9/11, al Qaeda was an organization of global reach. The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai -- activities overseen by al Qaeda's senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan. Almost all of this infrastructure was smashed after 9/11.

One of bin Laden's key goals is to bring about regime change in the Middle East and to replace the House of Saud and the Mubarak family of Egypt with Taliban-style rule. He believes that the way to accomplish this is to attack the "far enemy" (the United States and its Western allies), then watch as America recoils and the U.S.-backed Muslim regimes regarded as the "near enemy" collapse. The attacks on Washington and New York resulted in the direct opposite of his hopes. After 9/11, American troops occupied two Muslim countries and established new bases in several others. Relations between the United States and the authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes became stronger than ever, based on a shared goal of defeating violent Islamists…

[C]itizens in the West must come to understand -- and their leaders must drive the point home -- that although terrorist attacks, including attacks by al Qaeda, will continue to happen, the real damage is done by the panic and lashing out that follows. This is the reaction that al Qaeda craves -- and it is why terrorism works. It's easy to understand the emergence of a culture of paranoia coupled with rhetoric of vengeance. Prudence, calmness, and patience seem almost pusillanimous by comparison. But they work. Rare is the threat that can be defeated in large measure simply by deciding that we will not unduly fear it. Terrorism is one such threat (emphasis added).

Above all, we need to keep al Qaeda in perspective, remembering that its assets are few, and shrinking. After 9/11, bin Laden employed the imagery of a strong horse and a weak horse, but the reality of his situation was better described by Sitting Bull. The Sioux leader, at the Little Bighorn, is said to have observed: We have won a great battle but lost a great war.

Well, even if the U.S. and Arab governments are more closely allied now, surely Al Qaeda has more sympathizers on the Arab street, yes? Oh, wait, what's this Pew poll saying here?

While views of Hamas and Hezbollah are mixed, al Qaeda -- as well as its leader, Osama bin Laden -- receives overwhelmingly negative ratings in nearly all countries where the question was asked. More than nine-in-ten (94 percent) Muslims in Lebanon express negative opinions of al Qaeda, as do majorities of Muslims in Turkey (74 percent), Egypt (72 percent), Jordan (62 percent) and Indonesia (56 percent). Only in Nigeria do Muslims express positive views of al Qaeda; 49 percent have a favorable view and just 34 percent have an unfavorable view of bin Laden's organization.

Hmm… well, I'm sure that U.S. government officials aren't this equanimous about the threat posed by Al Qaeda. Oh, hey, look, Wired's Spencer Ackerman has a write-up of this speech by the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC):

"We aim for perfection," Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday, but "perfection will not be achieved." That's perilous for a senior counterterrorism official to say, since, like terrorism, it's easily demagogued. Leiter repeatedly stated that there's no excuse for terrorism; that any successful attack is a tragedy; and that he'd welcome due oversight and criticism of his efforts if a terrorist pulls something off, just in case his admission seemed self-serving.

But in order not to make terrorists seem "ten feet tall"  --  in other words, inadvertently support their narrative that they're world-historical forces on par with the U.S.  --  it might be time to publicly de-emphasize terrorism in the public discourse. "Sometimes we ought to just talk about this a lot less," Leiter said....

Ultimately, Leiter said, it'll be the "quiet, confident resilience" of Americans after a terrorist attack that will "illustrate ultimately the futility of terrorism." That doesn't mean not to hit back: Leiter quickly added that "we will hold those accountable [and] we will be ready to respond to those attacks." But it does mean recognizing, he said, that "we help define the success of an attack by our reaction to that attack."

I know that assessing the capabilities of terrorist networks is sometimes a no-win exercise, but isn't it about time to acknowledge that Al Qaeda is no longer in the first tier of national security threats? And that maybe, just maybe, really expensive incursions related to Al Qaeda should be reassessed?

Am I missing anything?

[So how extra-special was that pat-down? -- ed. I was hurt that the TSA guy didn't tell me his first name afterwards. Seriously, I'm stunned that the porn industry has yet to exploit this new scenario for "intimate contact."]

Cards on the table:  having experienced one first-hand, I hate the new full body scanners being used at airports.  I hate that their existence allows TSA officials to bark additional orders at me like I'm a five-year old.  I hate having to hold my hands up in a surrender position to be scanned. I hate having to empty every f***ing piece of lint from my pockets before going through one.  I hate that they have lengthened and not shortened the time it takes to get through security.  I hate the fact that other countries with equally acute terrorist concerns are not nearly as physically invasive in their security screenings.   I hate the sneaking suspicion I have that the scanners are merely a massive exercise in kabuki security theater designed to alleviate the psychological fears of some travelers.  I hate that the official response to these complaints boils down to, "we face a determined enemy."  I hate the stupid reassurances that the "imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images," when, whoops, it turns out that this has already happened.  I hate the ways in which these scanners make it so easy to mock the United States. 

The thing is, right now I'm in the distinct minority of Americans. 

The above chart is the result of a CBS poll released yesterday (which also found a majority of Americans to oppose racial profiling) on the question of full-body scanners in airports.  The results speak for themselves. 

Or do they?  Here are a couple of different ways of interpreting these results. 

1)  Big friggin' surprise.  It's pretty easy to find U.S. public opinion polls demonstrating majority support for homeland security measures ranging from crackdowns on illegal immigration to  torture enhanced interrogration techniques.  As I've said in the past, when it comes to homeland security, the average American has few qualms about strengthening the national security state.  This latest poll is just one more data point supporting that argument. 

2)  Oh, you wait... you just wait.  Nate Silver ably rounds up the rages against these machines coming from angry unions, pissed-off bloggers, and generally cantankerous individuals surreptitiously taping their pat-downs. 

What do these vocal members of the minority have in common?  They've all had to fly recently.  Silver posits that as more Americans face the indignity of these scanners, the poll numbers will start to change.  Well see.

3)  New Elite, meet Real America.  Silver also points out that a minority of travelers comprise a majority of actual air travel:

A study by the market-research firm Arbitron found, for instance, that frequent fliers — those who take 4 or more round trips per year — account for the 57 percent majority of all air travel, even though they make up just 18 percent of air travelers and something like 7 percent of the overall American population.

At least one past survey has identified differences in perceptions about airport security procedures between frequent and occasional fliers. This was a 2007 Gallup poll, which found that while just 26 percent of occasional travels were dissatisfied with airport security, the level rose to 37 percent among those who fly more frequently.

What I think we need to know then, is how those who have actually traveled through an airport that uses the full-body scanners feel about them — particularly if they’re people who fly frequently and are therefore going to bear the burden of any inconvenience, embarrassment, invasion of privacy or health risk brought on by the new technology.

Well... maybe.  Silver wants to prioritize the preferences of frequent travelers over other Americans.  To be fair to the pro-scanner position, however, it's not just the people who board planes who are affected the consequences of homeland security failures.  I'm not convinced that the opinions of grounded Americans shouldn't apply. 

There's a deeper cultural question, however.  There's an awful lot of resentment welling up in the United States against "elites."  Defining just who is in the elite and who is in "Real America" is an inexact science.  I can't help but wonder, however, if frequent air travel is the perfect Sorting Hat that separates the elites (i.e., the frequent travelers) from the masses (i.e., everyone else).  [UPDATE:  Adam Serwer makes this point as well:  "The TSA's new passenger-screening measures just happen to fall on the political and economic elites who can make their complaints heard. It's not happening to those scary Arabs anymore. It's happening to 'us.'"  See also Seth Masket and Kevin Drum on this point.]

This isn't necessarily a partisan divide -- conservative elites appear to be just as frosted with the TSA as liberals.  Body scanners are an issue that only animates the hostility of elites, however.  Real America couldn't give a flying fig one way or the other -- except if National Op-out Day gets them mad when they're traveling because of even longer security lines.  But I think it's a better than 50/50 chance that they'll be angrier at the opt-outers than the TSA employees. 

Maybe the scanners will quickly disappear in the face of elite protests.  Or maybe it means that some clever populist will seize on this issue as a way to talk about out-of-touch elites again. 

Clearly, I hope it's #2, but I don't know.  With travel season upon us during the next six weeks, we'll see..... 

Time to catch up on recent events in the zombieverse: 

1)  Data point #527 that zombies are moving up to the top of the cultural zeitgeist:  AMC will be airing a televised version of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic book series.  The Comic-Con trailer looks pretty cool. 

2)  In an effort to allay rising fears of a zombie apocalypse, Cracked proffers Seven Scientific Reasons a Zombie Attack Would Quickly Fail.  They're trying to be on the side of the angels with this piece, but I gotta say that I'm pretty unconvinced by most of their arguments.  They are correct to point out the myriad ways in which zombies are vulnerable to the elements, animals, and firearms.  What they don't talk about is that zombies are not likely to be as seriously affected by these countervailing effects as humans with, well, pain receptors.  It doesn't matter if a zombie destroys itself trying to get at live human flesh.  What matters is that by having this single-minded pursuit, they're pretty likely to succeed, guaranteeing that the zombie race can replicate even as individual zombies decay. 

3)  A few people in the blogosphere are pinging me about this Guardian story regarding zombie ants.  From the original story: 

The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists....

The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas.

The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy.

The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground.

The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a "death grip" around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position.

I hate to break it to tem, but this is hardly the first zombie insect story -- Greg Laden at ScienceBlogs was all over the zombie insect question earlier this summer.  It turns out that zombie hornets might exist, which sound way scarier to me than zombie ants.   

These creatures are more like the "old school" Haitian zombies, in which some evil master controls them, than the flesh-eating ghouls of post-Romero zombie cinema that have been my primary concern.  Still, Current Intelligence's Adam Weinstein is freaked out: 

A plant had one of nature's most industrial animals do its physical bidding, somehow bringing the neurons and synapses to heel in a coherent, productive way. The liberal arts major in me is mystified and repelled.

The armchair strategist in me thinks: How can our enemies use that?

I'm no chemical or biological weapons expert, so if you are, tell me if I'm crazy, please: Can you imagine a future powder solution, not unlike weaponizable anthrax or botulinum agent, that spreads a fungus capable of commandeering a human brain? Could particular strains be developed to direct hosts into this behavior or that: jumping out of windows, refusing to eat, choking strangers out? Could it even be used to turn reasonable, free-thinking individuals into PBIEDs -- that is, suicide bombers?

Well.... first of all, I refuse on principle to believe that an M. Night Shyamalan movie premise could ever constitute a real threat. 

Second of all, even if I violated that principle, I'm not sure that this is as serious a threat as the flesh-eating zombie.  What makes that strain particularly virulent is its ability to replicate itself.  These kind of zombies, at best, render themselves as total slaves.  What they can't seem to  do is spread the zombie virus beyond themselves to other agents. 

At worst, this kind of bioweapon could, in theory, be used to create a giant army of zombies.  Lacking free will, however, they'd be far less effective than the droids in The Phantom Menace. 

I think that's all the zombie news this week.  More updates as warranted. 

The Obama administration has been trying to road-test the National Security Strategy.  Last month is was NSC Advisor James Jones' address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- which is now remembered more for a politically incorrect joke than anything else. 

This weekend it was the president's turn in his commencement address at West Point.  Is there anythng of interest to note?  Some are focusing on what he said about Iraq (victory + withdrawal of combat troops this year).  Let's focus on Obama's bigthink, which I'd label realist internationalism. 

Here's the realist sections:

[W]e must first recognize that our strength and influence abroad begins with steps we take at home. We must educate our children to compete in an age where knowledge is capital, and the marketplace is global. We must develop clean energy that can power new industry and unbound us from foreign oil and preserve our planet. We have to pursue science and research that unlocks wonders as unforeseen to us today as the microchip and the surface of the moon were a century ago.

Simply put, American innovation must be the foundation of American power - because at no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy. And so that means that the civilians among us, as parents and community leaders, elected officials, business leaders, we have a role to play. We cannot leave it to those in uniform to defend this country - we have to make sure that America is building on its strengths....

And so a fundamental part of our strategy for our security has to be America's support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding. And we will promote these values above all by living them - through our fidelity to the rule of law and our Constitution, even when it's hard; even when we're being attacked; even when we're in the midst of war.

Seriously, that last paragraph could have been the mash-up version of John Quincy Adams' 1821 July 4th speech. 

Here's the internationalist part:

Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation - we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don't.

So we have to shape an international order that can meet the challenges of our generation. We will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well, including those who will serve by your side in Afghanistan and around the globe. As influence extends to more countries and capitals, we also have to build new partnerships, and shape stronger international standards and institutions.

Now, realism and multilateralism don't go hand in hand terribly well -- here's the key paragraph where Obama tries to link them:

The burdens of this century cannot fall on our soldiers alone. It also cannot fall on American shoulders alone. Our adversaries would like to see America sap its strength by overextending our power. And in the past, we've always had the foresight to avoid acting alone. We were part of the most powerful wartime coalition in human history through World War II. We stitched together a community of free nations and institutions to endure and ultimately prevail during a Cold War.

Essentially, the administration will try to argue that multilateralism serves as a force multiplier, allowing America to extend its reach while burden-sharing with supporters who benefot from an American-led international order.

Does this formulation work?  I like the emphasis on internal renewal, and I tend to think that the United States does retrenchment strategies better than most countries.  That said, one problem with multilateralism is that burden-sharing often turns into free-riding. 

Another p;roblem is that without an animating idea, it's difficult to retain multilateral solidarity.  "Multilateralism for multilateralism's sake" doesn't work unless you live in Brussels -- and even then it's a bit dodgy.  "All for one, and one for keeping order" has its virtues, but emotionsal resonance isn't one of them.  

There has to be a purpose beyond order to rally allies to a cause.  We'll see if the Obama team has one when the NSS rolls out. 

Developing....

In honor of The Princess Bride, your humble blogger describes someone as "going Vizzini" when they repeatedly use a word in a way that doesn't correspond to how the rest of society would use it.  

Today's example is the New York Times story, "Attacks on Detainee Lawyers Split Conservatives."  The lead: 

A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.

But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. (emphasis added)

The story repeatedly argues that the conservative legal community is deeply divided on the issue. Now, I understand split as implying that members of this community are lining up on one side or the other. The thing is, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that anyone in the conservative legal community is really lining up behind Keep America Safe. The Times story by John Schwartz has a quote by John Yoo that kinda sorta supports the ad, but it's really weak tea -- Yoo "said he had not seen the material from Ms. Cheney’s group," according to the story.    

Then we get to this section: 

A Keep America Safe spokesman responded to a request for comment by passing along links to essays by supporters like Marc A. Thiessen, a columnist for The Washington Post, who wrote on Monday that the detainees did not deserve the same level of representation as criminal defendants.

The lawyers, Mr. Thiessen wrote, “were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants.” He said, “They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military’s ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.”

Thiessen is not a lawyer (he's not the best debater in the world either).  I would describe the conservative legal blogososphere as not really supportive of the ad.   

Even if we expand our orbit to include other prominent conservatives, it seems pretty clear that beyond Thiessen, Bill Kristol, Michelle Malkin, and the Cheneys, there ain't a lotta conservative love for the attack ad.  Over at The Cable, Josh Rogin tried to get a GOP Senator to endorse the ad and failed.  I wouldn't characterize Glenn Greenwald as a defender of the right, but even he notes that, "only the hardest-core ideological dead-enders are defending them." 

The more interesting way to frame this story would have been to show that professional norms do act as a serious constraint on political behavior.  Schwartz quotes David B. Rivkin Jr., co-chairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism in exactly this fashion:

“I appreciate the partisan advantage to be gained here,” Mr. Rivkin said, but “it’s not the right way to proceed.” He said he preferred “principled ways for debating where this administration is wrong — there’s no reason to resort to ad hominem attacks.”

So, just to sum up -- the Times got to this story at least a day later than everyone else, and then used an inappropriate frame to describe the situation. There's no conservative legal split -- there's a pretty strong consensus that the Keep America Safe ad crossed the line.