Quite
an interesting thesis. But I think Glennon discounts the third leg.
Partisan political machinery. (Glennon hand waves it away). I
think if the double was in control we would have seen things done
much differently in Iraq (the withdrawal and lack of SOFA),
Libya (no ground forces and "leading from behind"), Syria (lack
of full support to the resistance two years ago
and not just the lame non-lethal assistance), the Syrian
chemical weapons "red line," and now the late move to
"train and equip" the rebels and the "anything but
Bush" strategic direction in Iraq and Syria, just to name a few. No,
I think President Obama owns all those and that illustrates the elected
leadership is calling the shots with the support of and blessing of the
partisan political machinery. Yes everything rests on politics, every
national security action is a political action or must be understood
from the political perspective but it is the partisan political class that
makes the double government (or perhaps a
"triple government.") I know from an Asian perspective that the
Asia advisers in the administration have no standing with the President and his
key circle of advisers because none of them came through the
"crucible" of the 2008 and 2012 president election
campaigns (except for Mark Lippert the new Ambassador to Korea for which
Korea is very happy). Maybe our republic has shifted from the three
branches - executive, legislative and judicial to the elected, the
shadow bureaucracy (the "self governing national security
apparatus") and the partisan political machine.
Vote
all you want. The secret government won’t change.
The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says
Tufts University’s Michael Glennon
By Jordan Michael Smith
|
OCTOBER 19, 2014
THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office
expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo
Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and
privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.
But six
years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks
almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains
open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans.
Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same
president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is
spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear
weapons.
Why did the
face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend
to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to
take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon
has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even
if he tried.
Though it’s
a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by
electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our
government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and
Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security
apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability,
transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double
government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it,
steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up
serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
Glennon
cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover
upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in
Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States
could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.
Glennon’s
critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the
quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to
the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably
blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White
House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees
the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in
good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful
oversight to rein them in.
How exactly
has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke
with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This
interview has been condensed and edited.
IDEAS: Where
does the term “double government” come from?
GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s
famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over
the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him.
Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British
government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There
are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which
people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was
in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient
institutions,” that actually set governmentalpolicy. And those were the
House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.
IDEAS: What
evidence exists for saying America has a double government?
Continued at the link below)
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