Spindrift

How Spinmeisters Switch Gears

Asbury Park. No spindrift here - at least not today.

The word spindrift started its life in the ocean, where sailors used it to describe the lines of foam that would stretch out from the crest of waves during a gale. 

Spindrift developed a second meaning in 2010, when it became the name of a kind of sparkling water. (Apparently, none of the flavors contain actual sea foam.)

I would like to propose a third meaning for spindrift, this time in the field of political rhetoric.

Mission Creep

My inspiration for this proposal began with the term mission creep. Mission creep appears to have been born around 1993, in connection with the 1993 American intervention in Somalia. Generally the idea starts with a relatively simple mission with clear goals and then, as the situation evolves (which almost always happens), new goals get added. New resources don't necessarily get added, and a complete review starting with why are we doing this almost never happens.

America's forever war in Afghanistan is often presented as a classic example of mission creep. After 9/11, the United States went into Afghanistan with a few clear goals. First, displace the Taliban from government, thereby eliminating Afghanistan as a haven for terrorists. Second, disrupt and if possible destroy the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Third, capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the charismatic leader of al Qaeda. 

We quickly achieved the first two goals, and we had a near miss with the third. It wasn't at all clear to me, at the time, what happened with bin Laden. Initially, our commanders seemed pretty sure he was holed up in a mountainous area near the Pakistan border, which was called Tora Bora. We dropped a lot of bombs, and when the dust cleared we couldn't find him, and our commanders were unsure he had ever been there.

Clean-up operations continued in the newly conquered country, and then, in April 2002, President George W. Bush announced a new goal - constructing a new Afghanistan with a reboot of the Marshall Plan that restored Europe after World War II. This is called nation-building, and from April 2002 it was clear that we would not be withdrawing our forces any time soon. Still, it didn't look as bad as Vietnam. (The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful timeline for Afghanistan. To see it, click here.)

A Little Hitch in the Argument

This story is a nice example of mission creep, and I would be happy if the real story were that simple. However, we have the problem of what actually happened at Tora Bora.

My own thinking about Tora Bora was delayed by a distraction - the epic propaganda campaign that led to the invasion and conquest of Iraq in early 2003, and the increasingly ridiculous search for weapons of mass destruction that simply weren't there.

It was only when I read Nathaniel Fick's 2005 book, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, that Tora Bora swam back to the surface of my mental pond. It looked different.

In December 2001, Fick was a marine lieutenant leading a platoon that had been deployed to Afghanistan. It was part of a force of more than 1,000 marines commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis, who later became secretary of defense in the Trump administration. 

Fick and his marines were at a desert airstrip code-named Rhino, in southern Afghanistan approximately 90 miles from Kandahar. They began to hear that Osama bin Laden was holed up (literally) in mountainside caves near the Pakistani border: Tora Bora. They waited for the situation to clarify. Here's Fick (the Tora Bora story is in chapter 16): 

"After a week of swirling rumors, I began to suspect the mission was just wishful thinking by commanders who always wanted a bigger role in the game. Then the cold-weather gear arrived." Mountain fighting, you know. In December. At 10,000 feet. Warm clothes necessary. 

Then the plan arrived. "From the Jalalabad airfield, we would move overland to two valleys near the Pakistani border. There we would set up blocking positions while special operations units called in airstrikes on the caves where the fighters were hiding. If they tried to flee, they would run right into us." 

Fick and his marines were ready to go. Then the plan changed. The marines would not go, and Afghan soldiers would net Bin Laden instead. At the briefing where Fick heard the news, a colonel said that "fear of casualties had prompted the cancellation at the highest levels of the U.S. government." 

After the briefing a fellow lieutenant called the change a "Goddamn chickenshit decision." A staff sergeant expressed some concern about their Afghan replacements: "Afghan allies? We don't have any Afghan allies. We got Afghans who'll do what we say if it helps them and if we pay them to do it. Bin Laden will trade 'em a goat and escape." 

And it seems that is pretty much what happened. 

The Kerry Report

In 2009, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by John Kerry, released a report entitled Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get bin Laden and Why It Matters Today. Reviewing the material available in 2009, the report concludes that Osama bin Laden was definitely in Tora Bora at the end of 2001, and that we definitely knew he was there. (To see the report, click here.) 

Among the mountain of evidence, I found particularly telling the opinions of two intelligence analysts who had studied bin Laden for years, and who were listening to al Qaeda's unsecured radio transmissions in real time. They both concluded that bin Laden was there and talking to his troops. 

That higher-ups were willing to reject inconvenient evidence, and later go into the disastrous war in Iraq on the basis of transparently shoddy evidence about weapons of mass destruction, suggests that leadership was willing to bend the evidence, in both cases, to reach predetermined conclusions.

Both wars were run out of Central Command, based in Florida. General Tommy Franks was in command, and his deputy commander was Marine Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, who retired in 2003 and wrote a memoir, Inside CentCom, in which he declared that bin Laden had definitely been in Tora Bora. His former boss, Tommy Franks, was singing a different tune, and so General DeLong, in an op-ed story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, reversed his position, declaring: "There exists no concrete intel to prove that he was there at the time." 

In Washington this is called walking your original statement back. Another term is backpedaling. Since I'm writing about spin, let me suggest backspin. Why should we leave such a lovely term in the world of sports?

Unspin

So what are we looking at in Tora Bora - the beginnings of nation-building mission creep, or a well-camouflaged stratagem designed to ensure the forever war that we wound up with? I don't know, and I don't expect to find out.

Lying underneath the spin room is a basement that is the domain of unspin. Here live the things that people simply don't talk about. Occasionally, as in the case of General DeLong, there's some fumbling at the beginning of a story, and you may briefly see the lace fringe of a petticoat before all returns to order. But once the ranks have formed, and the word has been passed, unspin presents a nearly impenetrable barrier.

If you're interested in going down to the basement of unspin to determine the actual command decision-making process at Tora Bora, good luck. While you're there, see if you can find out who was in the room when Nelson Rockefeller died. (For a story in the New York Daily News, click here.)

A Fatal Flaw

Just in case you're leaning toward the theory of mission creep rather than artful manipulation, let me point out that the idea of nation-building in Afghanistan contains a fatal flaw. President Bush proposed a reboot of the Marshall Plan, which was implemented in Europe after World War II. But the original Marshall Plan was designed to help countries that were already nation-states - dilapidated, perhaps, but subject to renovation. 

Afghanistan simply does not look like a modern nation-state. It looks more like the rough and tumble of Renaissance Italy, where families like the Borgias set the tone and Niccolo Machiavelli gave his name to the realpolitik of the day.  Actually, Afghanistan looks even more like Germany before the rise of Prussia: a large collection of small, squabbly political units where alliances shifted frequently and larger outside powers dominated events, either by dangling large subsidies or by force.

As I mentioned earlier, one component of mission creep is a failure to revisit the basic rationale of a policy. In this case, however, I think we may need to look more closely at why the failure occurred. There's an old saying: Follow the money. For a piece in the Times that takes a shot at doing just that, click here.

Back to Spindrift

Okay, that was a long way around, but here we are back to spindrift - a child of mission creep that I hope may have a better career than its parent. 

Spindrift involves an evolution in political argument. It turns out that, just as missions can creep, spin can drift. I confess I had never thought of this before, but there I was reading an article about anti-vaxxers, and the idea dropped into my hand.

Writing in the Times (to see the article, click here), Tara Haelle described how, in recent years, anti-vaxxers have developed a new rhetorical approach - the concept that vaccine requirements impinge on personal freedom. In other words, to their traditional weapon of junk science, they have added a new weapon - junk politics. 

Haelle refers to the work of Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, noting that DiResta "found through Twitter analysis that there was 'an evolution in messaging.'" The anti-vaxxers discovered, according to DiResta, that freedom "was more resonant with legislators and would help them actually achieve their political goals."

Looks like spindrift to me. (DiResta and Gilad Lotan wrote an article on the Twitter research for Wired. To see it, click here.) 

Context and Implications

Naturally, both spindrift and mission creep are much older than their names. In her book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020, pp. 79-85), Heather Cox Richardson talks about how, after the Civil War, southern leaders shifted their political messages (at least those intended for a national audience) away from blatant racism, instead arguing against taxes and in defense of private property rights, which would be more palatable to northern businessmen. 

This all makes me a bit nervous. I had thought I had a grasp of how we are growing apart in this country. Lilliana Mason in her Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018), introduced me to the concept of sorting. The basic idea is that if you are a white evangelical Republican devotee of QAnon, you will have a great deal of solidarity with other people who fit that profile. And, given current patterns of settlement and communication, it is relatively easy to live a life that is almost entirely devoid of cognitive dissonance. (See How Do We Put This Back Together?) 

But now I see anti-vaxxers and reactionary politicians talking to one another, and I'm seeing not just sorting but also melding. It's not just that like attracts like. It is also that, when they get together, they grow more alike.

So, as the right shrinks, it may also become more unified, both in its ideas and in its internal trust levels.

I'd been hoping that the right might just fall apart, but now I think we need to watch for something with small reach but great destructive power.

Asbury Park. Spume but still no spindrift.

See also A Shortage of Serviceable Ducks, The Roots of the Republic, On Demagogues, Jim Crow Was a Failed State.