Friedman and Bruni

In “Order vs. Disorder, Part 4” The Moustache of Wisdom ‘splains that the strategy of “containment” this go-round is not what it was during the Cold War.  In “Serving Without Protecting” Mr. Bruni says a hearing into the White House security breach underscores the public shame of the Secret Service.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I’ve been arguing for a while now that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the wider East-West clash of civilizations what Off Broadway is to Broadway. It’s where you can see many trends at a smaller scale first. That is why I study it closely. Whether it is airline-hijacking, suicide-bombing or trying to do nation-building with the other — Israelis called it “Lebanon invasion” and “Oslo”; we called it “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” — what happens there often moves to the larger stage. So, as I have asked before: What’s playing Off Broadway now?

It’s a play called “Containment.” When faced with a barrage of rockets from the Hamas militants in Gaza, Israel largely retaliated with artillery and air power. These inflicted enough pain on Hamas and the Gaza civilian population that Hamas eventually agreed to a cease-fire — but not to surrender.

Indeed, Israel chose to deliberately leave Hamas in power in Gaza because it did not want to put Israeli boots on the ground and try to destroy it — which would have required bloody house-to-house fighting — and because Israel also did not want to leave Gaza as an ungoverned space. Israel’s adopting a strategy of containment toward Gaza also became viable after Egypt’s top military commander, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, replaced the Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohamed Morsi. The Brotherhood saw Hamas as an ally and allowed it to dig tunnels into Egypt and smuggle in goods for profit and rockets to hit Israel. Sisi, who sees the Brotherhood as his archenemy, has closed those tunnels.

So containment, as a purely military strategy to stem disorder, can work for Israel, for now. Containment also seems to be where the U.S.-led coalition is heading, for now, against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS. Since neither we nor our coalition partners are willing — or, thus far, in the case of the Iraqi Army and Syrian “moderates,” able — to put many boots on the ground to oust ISIS, we will rely on air power to prevent ISIS from expanding and maybe to shrink it.

But here we come to the most important difference between the containment we used to defeat the Soviet Union and the containment of Hamas and ISIS. We and the Israelis are both using containment to seal off a problem that we each perceive as too costly, politically and in human terms, to try to eliminate. But that strategy has its limits.

As Mark Mykleby, a retired Marine colonel and the co-director of the Strategic Innovation Lab at Case Western Reserve University, put it to me: “In the Cold War, we contained the Soviets militarily to set the conditions for the U.S.S.R. to collapse on itself, but that wasn’t the whole story. We also rebuilt the shattered economies of our former enemies, built international institutions like the I.M.F. and World Bank, and redesigned our own governing institutions to address our new post-World War II reality so that we would have the strategic scaffolding in place to continue building a post-Cold War world once the Soviet Union did in fact collapse.

“In the case of Gaza,” he added, “the Israelis are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of a chronic problem by simply ‘containing’ the Palestinians.” Without a strategy for improving living conditions there, that could prove very damaging to Israel in the long run as Gaza becomes a human disaster zone. The West is doing something similar with ISIS: containing without building “the regional scaffolding to support and leverage” a more modern, consensual and pluralistic Middle East that might fill the ISIS space.

Containment, said Mykleby, only makes long-term sense if you commit money and political capital to fill that space with something decent. Israel is not doing that because Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and be a partner to a two-state solution. And because right-wing Jewish settlers so dominate Israel’s ruling coalition that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu cannot or will not put on the table anything close to what the more moderate Palestinian Authority demands for a two-state deal. Nor is it clear the Palestinians could deliver the security Israel demands. In short, the whole relationship is broken, making a strategy beyond containment very hard.

On Broadway, we’re hamstrung in building a post-ISIS political strategy by the fact that some of our coalition partners have no shared vision for a post-ISIS Syria or Iraq and do not want democracy in this region. Also, some of them, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are purveyors of the intolerant, anti-pluralistic Sunni ideology that inspires ISIS fighters. Even Turkey’s Islamist government has some pro-ISIS sympathies.

In short, containment in both theaters is necessary but not sufficient for long-term stability. But, unlike the Cold War where our containment strategy was largely the product of like-minded democracies working to liberate like-minded people from a bad system, in the Middle East, we have few like-minded partners.

The most we can hope for are “least bad” allies and “least bad” outcomes. In today’s Middle East, least bad is the new good.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

My mother used to leave the front door unlocked. She used to leave the side and back doors unlocked, too. This was mostly a function of sloppiness — she had four kids, three pets and a whole lot else on her mind — but when pressed about it, she reasoned that anyone bent on intrusion would find a way and that it was all a matter of chance in the end.

She missed her calling as the director of the Secret Service.

What we’ve discovered over the last week and a half about the crackerjack operations of this elite agency boggles the mind, and nothing I learned during Tuesday’s congressional hearing into its procedures did anything to un-boggle it.

The subject was how, on Sept. 19, a deranged man managed to get deep inside the White House — much deeper, it turns out, than the agency initially let on. We were first given the impression that he’d merely made it through the front door. Only later did The Washington Post and other news organizations unearth that he had zipped down the vestibule, past a staircase, through the East Room and almost to the Green Room. By the time all the facts emerge, we’ll find out that he treated himself to a grilled cheese and a glass of Ovaltine in the kitchen, where he was interrupted mid-sandwich and given a doggie bag.

At the hearing, there were acute questions and ludicrous ones, genuine concern and disingenuous grandstanding, florid preening and runaway egos, which is to say that many politicians were crowded into one room.

There was verbiage so oblique it barely qualified as English, which is to say that government officials testified. Front and center was the head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, who behaved in the manner of so many beleaguered bureaucrats before her. She pledged reviews, reports, inquiries and assessments — a brimming thesaurus of self-examination — and tried to run out the clock.

She muttered sentences like this: “In downtown areas, there is sound attenuation.” This was a reference to the Secret Service’s confusion in 2011 over whether someone had been shooting at the White House or a motor vehicle in its vicinity had backfired.

The answer was shooting: Seven bullets hit one of this country’s defining symbols, which is also the president’s private residence, in which he and his family must feel — and be — unconditionally safe. And it wasn’t Secret Service agents who identified the evidence. It was a housekeeper, happening upon shattered glass days after the fact.

These aren’t minor, random smudges on the record of the Secret Service, which was also embarrassed a few years ago when agents on assignment in Colombia partied with prostitutes. They’re cause for grave worry and a different kind of housecleaning.

Nothing about the events of Sept. 19 honors the responsibilities and capabilities of a great nation. According to Pierson’s testimony, two agents that day had eyes on the intruder, who was known to them as a potential troublemaker and had shown up at the White House fence less than a month earlier with a hatchet. They were right not to detain him then: He’d committed no crime. But how could their monitoring of him during his return visit be so lax that he even got over that fence?

Not a beast or a beep worked properly. The guard dogs didn’t guard. The alarm boxes didn’t alarm. The front door couldn’t be locked automatically as he sprinted toward it, because it wasn’t rigged that way. We can fly drones over Pakistan, but we can’t summon a proper locksmith to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Time and again, Washington validates the naysayers who like to dismiss it as the capital of bureaucratic incompetence. The president unveils his signature health care reform — arguably the cornerstone of his legacy — and the website repeatedly crashes. The I.R.S. loses whole years of emails. A contractor for the National Security Agency steals away with a seemingly bottomless trove of classified documents.

The Department of Homeland Security fails to keep track of more than 6,000 foreigners in the country on student visas, or so ABC News reported in early September. And don’t even get me started on the Department of Veterans Affairs.

There’s precedent, yes, for White House intrusions. An uninvited guest once watched a movie with Franklin Delano Roosevelt before being detected.

And America isn’t alone. In 1982, Queen Elizabeth II awoke in Buckingham Palace to encounter a strange man in her bedroom. He and she reportedly chatted for 10 minutes.

I guess the palace didn’t have all the “layers” and “rings” of security repeatedly mentioned at the congressional hearing, though a lot of good all those layers and rings did us. In the end, it’s people who make the difference. The Secret Service needs better ones.

I can’t resist…  In the comments “gemli” from Boston had this to say:  “While this recent lapse is alarming, we should remember that in 2000 a deranged man managed to get deep inside the White House, and stayed there for eight years.”