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Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
FROM INSIDE OBAMA’S SITUATION ROOM . . . THE CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE COVERT WAR AGAINST IRAN, THE STRUGGLES TO DEAL WITH A RECALCITRANT PAKISTAN AND ITS FAST-GROWING NUCLEAR ARSENAL, THE TENSIONS WITH THE AMERICAN MILITARY OVER AFGHANISTAN AND WITH ALLIES SWEPT UP IN THE CHAOS OF THE ARAB SPRING Three and a half years ago, David Sanger’s book The The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power described how a new American president came to office with the world on fire. Now, just as the 2012 presidential election battle begins, Sanger follows up with an eye-opening, news-packed account of how Obama has dealt with those challenges, relying on innovative weapons and reconfigured tools of American power to try to manage a series of new threats. Sanger describes how Obama’s early idealism about fighting “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue and frustration, how the early hopes that the Arab Spring would bring about a democratic awakening slipped away, and how an effort to re-establish American power in the Pacific set the stage for a new era of tensions with the world’s great rising power, China. As the world seeks to understand the contours of the Obama Doctrine, Confront and Conceal is a fascinating, unflinching account of these complex years, in which the president and his administration have found themselves struggling to stay ahead in a world where power is diffuse and America’s ability to exert control grows ever more elusive.
496 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
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April 6, 2017
Barack Obama's Foreign and Military Policy Viewed from the Inside
When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I expected a great deal from his Presidency — much too much, it’s clear in hindsight. What I didn’t expect was that as President he would exercise U.S. military power almost as aggressively as George W. Bush. As the subtitle of this excellent book hints so broadly, the apparently anti-war candidate Obama quickly morphed in office into a resolute, hands-on Commander in Chief.
In his campaign, Obama had “promised to restore traditional American ‘engagement’ by talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners. His supporters saw a welcome turn away from the ‘with us or against us’ black-and-whites of the Bush years. His critics saw naivete and softness. Both have been surprised. This is a book about those surprises.”
In practice, Obama learned that his brand of engagement yielded little more than vitriolic rhetoric from Iranian mullahs, North Korean generals, and the Pakistani military. What has proved far more effective are the actions he could take consistent with his more sophisticated view of American power: a massive increase in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the country’s first-ever (known) use of cyberwarfare in a targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear program, along with increasingly brutal sanctions on the country and its government; the ever-growing use of Special Forces in operations such as the murder of Osama bin Laden; and a pronounced “pivot” from Europe to Asia in combating the rise of China, as exemplified by the opening of a new military base in Australia. While ending U.S. participation in our “war of choice” in Iraq and beginning the pullout from Afghanistan, President Obama has sharply stepped up our use of the weapons of war in a growing number of undeclared and sometimes undercover hostilities.
Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama has made an idelible mark on the U.S. military and intelligence services, sharpening their missions and reshaping their priorities, and all while forcing them to live within more limited means. And anyone who might be tempted to think that Obama acted this way out of weakness needs to understand that great extent to which he made decisions at crucial times in the face of opposition from nearly all those around him — in giving the green light to the Navy SEAL mission to kill bin Laden, and in deciding to ask Hosni Mubarak to resign. As Sanger writes, “‘He personally basically overrode just about his entire government,’ said one official in the room, noting that Gates and Clinton were still actively opposed, ‘Look, this is what I’m going to do,’ Obama said, according to notes of the meeting. ‘I’m going to call [Mubarak] now.’”
All this, and more, comes to light in the five sections that form the backbone of this book. Sanger writes about each of the leading hotspots in turn: Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iran; Egypt; China and North Korea. This is truly world-class reporting, informed by sources at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.
Sanger concludes, “It is too early to know if the emerging Obama Doctrine — a lighter footprint around the world, and a reliance on coalitions to deal with global problems that do not directly threaten American security — will prove a lasting formula. His effort at ‘rebalancing’ away from the quagmires in the Middle East toward the continent of greatest promise in the future — Asia — was long overdue. But it is a change of emphasis more than a change of direction. Obama proved her was adaptable to new realities, what James Fallows rightly called ‘the main trait we can hope for in a president.’”
If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be a 30-year veteran of The New York Times and serve as its Chief Washington Correspondent, read this extraordinary book with an eye on those sources, both named and anonymous, and their revelations, which pop up seemingly on every page. You’ll see, then, how very deeply embedded in the fabric of official Washington is this one newspaper — a newspaper that serves as the source of an extraordinary proportion of the stories that make their way onto evening news broadcasts and the front pages of other papers around the world. In laying bare the pattern of Barack Obama’s surprisingly aggressive use of military power, Confront and Conceal is just as effective in revealing David Sanger’s unusually high-level access at the White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)
When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I expected a great deal from his Presidency — much too much, it’s clear in hindsight. What I didn’t expect was that as President he would exercise U.S. military power almost as aggressively as George W. Bush. As the subtitle of this excellent book hints so broadly, the apparently anti-war candidate Obama quickly morphed in office into a resolute, hands-on Commander in Chief.
In his campaign, Obama had “promised to restore traditional American ‘engagement’ by talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners. His supporters saw a welcome turn away from the ‘with us or against us’ black-and-whites of the Bush years. His critics saw naivete and softness. Both have been surprised. This is a book about those surprises.”
In practice, Obama learned that his brand of engagement yielded little more than vitriolic rhetoric from Iranian mullahs, North Korean generals, and the Pakistani military. What has proved far more effective are the actions he could take consistent with his more sophisticated view of American power: a massive increase in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the country’s first-ever (known) use of cyberwarfare in a targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear program, along with increasingly brutal sanctions on the country and its government; the ever-growing use of Special Forces in operations such as the murder of Osama bin Laden; and a pronounced “pivot” from Europe to Asia in combating the rise of China, as exemplified by the opening of a new military base in Australia. While ending U.S. participation in our “war of choice” in Iraq and beginning the pullout from Afghanistan, President Obama has sharply stepped up our use of the weapons of war in a growing number of undeclared and sometimes undercover hostilities.
Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama has made an idelible mark on the U.S. military and intelligence services, sharpening their missions and reshaping their priorities, and all while forcing them to live within more limited means. And anyone who might be tempted to think that Obama acted this way out of weakness needs to understand that great extent to which he made decisions at crucial times in the face of opposition from nearly all those around him — in giving the green light to the Navy SEAL mission to kill bin Laden, and in deciding to ask Hosni Mubarak to resign. As Sanger writes, “‘He personally basically overrode just about his entire government,’ said one official in the room, noting that Gates and Clinton were still actively opposed, ‘Look, this is what I’m going to do,’ Obama said, according to notes of the meeting. ‘I’m going to call [Mubarak] now.’”
All this, and more, comes to light in the five sections that form the backbone of this book. Sanger writes about each of the leading hotspots in turn: Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iran; Egypt; China and North Korea. This is truly world-class reporting, informed by sources at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.
Sanger concludes, “It is too early to know if the emerging Obama Doctrine — a lighter footprint around the world, and a reliance on coalitions to deal with global problems that do not directly threaten American security — will prove a lasting formula. His effort at ‘rebalancing’ away from the quagmires in the Middle East toward the continent of greatest promise in the future — Asia — was long overdue. But it is a change of emphasis more than a change of direction. Obama proved her was adaptable to new realities, what James Fallows rightly called ‘the main trait we can hope for in a president.’”
If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be a 30-year veteran of The New York Times and serve as its Chief Washington Correspondent, read this extraordinary book with an eye on those sources, both named and anonymous, and their revelations, which pop up seemingly on every page. You’ll see, then, how very deeply embedded in the fabric of official Washington is this one newspaper — a newspaper that serves as the source of an extraordinary proportion of the stories that make their way onto evening news broadcasts and the front pages of other papers around the world. In laying bare the pattern of Barack Obama’s surprisingly aggressive use of military power, Confront and Conceal is just as effective in revealing David Sanger’s unusually high-level access at the White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)
May 31, 2013
A thorough and engaging book about the complex world that Obama confronted during his first term and his and his team's attempts to deal with it. Singer writes of the "surprising" use of American power, but it's not really that surprising. All presidents have their ideas of how to shape the world to their liking, and all have used various means in that pursuit. Like Obama, many have used covert action by the CIA (in fact, every president since Truman has used it). With such a capability in place, the temptation to use it is a strong one.
Every president has attempted to formulate a "doctrine" to guide their foreign policy; the Obama doctrine is heavily based on a lighter footprint, a "smarter" war. Still, every foreign policy strategy and tactic has its shortcomings as well as its advantages, as Sanger shows. It serves as a reminder that foreign policy and the world around us is far more complex and difficult than election-year soundbites would lead you to believe, and we should all have an appreciation of the difficulties policymakers face when it comes to foreign policy and national security.
The sections on Afghanistan and Pakistan; drones and cyber warfare;China and Korea and the Arab Spring, are Sanger at his best in research depth and narrative.His interviews with key people from the USA President down and across a wide spectrum, are revealing and understandably authoritative. Sadly and conversely his section on Iran was inadequate, at least to me.
Transforming Afghanistan into a modern nation was not and never had been feasible. There is simply no way to replace the development aid and military spending that accounted for the vast majority of Afghanistan's GDP. So our focus shifted to warily watching Pakistan and (rightly) putting our pursuit of al-Qaeda first, even if it means jeopardizing our relationship with Pakistan, as the mission to kill Osama bin Laden did. In the end, we will likely leave Afghanistan little better off than it was (although we lasted longer there than the Soviets), our relationship with Pakistan will remain fraught (but we can never end it lest China fill our void), and al-Qaeda may eventually be able to rebuild, but there is no doubt that we have dealt al-Qaeda a mighty blow. It is the one true success of the last few years.
Iran is one of two instances where Obama's policy of more open engagement backfired on us. It soured our relationship with Israel (with settlements already a sore spot), and we wound up reacting to them instead of being proactive. We launched America's first major cyber attack, dubbed Olympic Games, in conjunction with the Israelis in part to prevent them from preemptively bombing Iran. It was enormously successful on one level. We set Iran's nuclear program back years. But we also inadvertently released a virus into the "wild," and we have merely delayed, not stopped, Iran's progress. Perhaps most disconcerting about this section is an apparent acquiescence to an eventual nuclear Iran on the part of members of the Obama administration (Israel understandably feels different).
Although it's too early to tell the full story of Obama's foreign policy successes and failures, "Confront and Conceal" is an excellent place to start.
Every president has attempted to formulate a "doctrine" to guide their foreign policy; the Obama doctrine is heavily based on a lighter footprint, a "smarter" war. Still, every foreign policy strategy and tactic has its shortcomings as well as its advantages, as Sanger shows. It serves as a reminder that foreign policy and the world around us is far more complex and difficult than election-year soundbites would lead you to believe, and we should all have an appreciation of the difficulties policymakers face when it comes to foreign policy and national security.
The sections on Afghanistan and Pakistan; drones and cyber warfare;China and Korea and the Arab Spring, are Sanger at his best in research depth and narrative.His interviews with key people from the USA President down and across a wide spectrum, are revealing and understandably authoritative. Sadly and conversely his section on Iran was inadequate, at least to me.
Transforming Afghanistan into a modern nation was not and never had been feasible. There is simply no way to replace the development aid and military spending that accounted for the vast majority of Afghanistan's GDP. So our focus shifted to warily watching Pakistan and (rightly) putting our pursuit of al-Qaeda first, even if it means jeopardizing our relationship with Pakistan, as the mission to kill Osama bin Laden did. In the end, we will likely leave Afghanistan little better off than it was (although we lasted longer there than the Soviets), our relationship with Pakistan will remain fraught (but we can never end it lest China fill our void), and al-Qaeda may eventually be able to rebuild, but there is no doubt that we have dealt al-Qaeda a mighty blow. It is the one true success of the last few years.
Iran is one of two instances where Obama's policy of more open engagement backfired on us. It soured our relationship with Israel (with settlements already a sore spot), and we wound up reacting to them instead of being proactive. We launched America's first major cyber attack, dubbed Olympic Games, in conjunction with the Israelis in part to prevent them from preemptively bombing Iran. It was enormously successful on one level. We set Iran's nuclear program back years. But we also inadvertently released a virus into the "wild," and we have merely delayed, not stopped, Iran's progress. Perhaps most disconcerting about this section is an apparent acquiescence to an eventual nuclear Iran on the part of members of the Obama administration (Israel understandably feels different).
Although it's too early to tell the full story of Obama's foreign policy successes and failures, "Confront and Conceal" is an excellent place to start.
August 6, 2012
While this is a topical, important, and useful overview of Obama’s foreign policy posture thus far, it is not likely to be either politically or historically relevant after the upcoming election (i.e., Tuesday, November 6, 2012). In other words, this is a true “current events” title.
Some critics have rightfully pointed to the chapter on U.S. cyber-warfare efforts against Iran (aka “Olympic Games”) as revelatory. It certainly is a fascinating exposé, one that may very well justify the price of the book, but I found that the overall purpose of the book – to explore a wide-ranging survey of reportage dealing with the emerging “Obama Doctrine” – served a much more serviceable purpose. Sanger covers U.S. policy with respect to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, drone warfare, China, North Korea, and the “Arab Spring” (i.e., Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria). That’s a lot of territory for one politically oriented trade book.
Sanger is clearly sympathetic to the Obama administration’s plight, and generally paints a favorable portrait of their tenure (“Confront and Conceal” is a follow-up to its favorably-reviewed predecessor, “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power”). Still, it’s hardly a fawning encomium. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in current foreign policy challenges; however, it may be rather dull for policy wonks who are, perhaps, more well-informed than an average low-information voter.
Some critics have rightfully pointed to the chapter on U.S. cyber-warfare efforts against Iran (aka “Olympic Games”) as revelatory. It certainly is a fascinating exposé, one that may very well justify the price of the book, but I found that the overall purpose of the book – to explore a wide-ranging survey of reportage dealing with the emerging “Obama Doctrine” – served a much more serviceable purpose. Sanger covers U.S. policy with respect to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, drone warfare, China, North Korea, and the “Arab Spring” (i.e., Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria). That’s a lot of territory for one politically oriented trade book.
Sanger is clearly sympathetic to the Obama administration’s plight, and generally paints a favorable portrait of their tenure (“Confront and Conceal” is a follow-up to its favorably-reviewed predecessor, “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power”). Still, it’s hardly a fawning encomium. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in current foreign policy challenges; however, it may be rather dull for policy wonks who are, perhaps, more well-informed than an average low-information voter.
November 13, 2012
If you paid any attention to the recently-completed 2012 campaign, you heard a lot of talk from both Democrats and Republicans about America's place in the world. In particular, the Republican presidential primary was dominated by talk of how America must "shape events" and "serve as a beacon to the world." David Sanger's extensively-researched, "Confront and Conceal," uses a massive amount of declassified material and Sanger's far-ranging access to key decision-makers to explore just how the Obama Administration is acting on the world stage.
As you can imagine, the world is far more complex than a presidential primary soundbite would lead you to believe.
Sanger explores several foreign policy arenas - Iran, China-North Korea, Pakistan-Afghanistan, and other hotspots in the Middle East - that prove that America cannot simply dictate events. The competing range of interests and sensitivities has confounded the top foreign policy minds our country has to offer, and Sanger analyzes each (potential) conflict in detail.
If you ever thought that President Obama was the kind of guy who would be pushed around by foreign powers in the naive pursuit of dovish interests, Sanger's book proves that idea false. America is already fighting non-traditional wars on many fronts. Not only has the Obama Administration stepped up the use of drone aircraft to a degree only imagined by the Bush Administration (who come off looking like guys playing checkers in a chess world), the Obama Administration is also taking cyberwarfare beyond the dreams of the most hyperbolic spy novelist. The pages on Iran and cyberwarfare offer a glimpse into real-world spycraft, but Sanger leavens the book with the ominous specter of blowback - what America's spymasters unleash may indeed come back to bite us.
Other pages offer similar insights. If you've ever wondered just what the heck we're still doing in Afghanistan, Sanger provides the answer: Pakistan. This near-rogue nation could be the most ominous global security threat of the 21st century. Sanger also explores how the Obama Administration must deal with this notoriously proud, fickle, and corrupt nation . . . I'd be a heavy drinker if I worked for State, that's for sure.
Sanger's analyses of China, North Korea, and the rest of the world also offer rare insights into the real world we live in and how we are seen by the rest of the world.
I only give this four stars because Sanger is not much of a stylist. The book is workmanlike, which is fine because the material is so good . . . I just don't want to oversell it. If a five-star book is a meal that is both delicious and nutritious, "Confront and Conceal" is more like a bowl of granola - chock full of nutrition, satisfying, and something you probably should eat, but not a meal you'd rave about. Still, you're better off having eaten it, and you'll definitely be better off having read Sanger's latest book.
As you can imagine, the world is far more complex than a presidential primary soundbite would lead you to believe.
Sanger explores several foreign policy arenas - Iran, China-North Korea, Pakistan-Afghanistan, and other hotspots in the Middle East - that prove that America cannot simply dictate events. The competing range of interests and sensitivities has confounded the top foreign policy minds our country has to offer, and Sanger analyzes each (potential) conflict in detail.
If you ever thought that President Obama was the kind of guy who would be pushed around by foreign powers in the naive pursuit of dovish interests, Sanger's book proves that idea false. America is already fighting non-traditional wars on many fronts. Not only has the Obama Administration stepped up the use of drone aircraft to a degree only imagined by the Bush Administration (who come off looking like guys playing checkers in a chess world), the Obama Administration is also taking cyberwarfare beyond the dreams of the most hyperbolic spy novelist. The pages on Iran and cyberwarfare offer a glimpse into real-world spycraft, but Sanger leavens the book with the ominous specter of blowback - what America's spymasters unleash may indeed come back to bite us.
Other pages offer similar insights. If you've ever wondered just what the heck we're still doing in Afghanistan, Sanger provides the answer: Pakistan. This near-rogue nation could be the most ominous global security threat of the 21st century. Sanger also explores how the Obama Administration must deal with this notoriously proud, fickle, and corrupt nation . . . I'd be a heavy drinker if I worked for State, that's for sure.
Sanger's analyses of China, North Korea, and the rest of the world also offer rare insights into the real world we live in and how we are seen by the rest of the world.
I only give this four stars because Sanger is not much of a stylist. The book is workmanlike, which is fine because the material is so good . . . I just don't want to oversell it. If a five-star book is a meal that is both delicious and nutritious, "Confront and Conceal" is more like a bowl of granola - chock full of nutrition, satisfying, and something you probably should eat, but not a meal you'd rave about. Still, you're better off having eaten it, and you'll definitely be better off having read Sanger's latest book.
July 19, 2012
A true must-read for any citizen that is interested in our present foreign policy; particularly this administration's responses to what has become known as "The Arab Spring" and more critically maybe, Obama's mostly classified actions to keep Iran from going nuclear while also trying to keep Israel from bombing it's nuclear facilities. This book also does much to explain Obama's defining decision to expand the Drone program in places as seemingly inconsequential as Yemen (an issue I was particularly interested in). Insightful, well written, unbiased and well-documented, this book contributes greatly to understanding how this young and generally inexperienced President has responded to our very volatile world while trying to manage and ultimately end, the 2 wars that he inherited. Great insight also into Hillary Clinton's role as Sec of State. Wonderful book and I actually found myself, at times, turning the pages as if it were a thriller. I was also left with the impression...that if there wasn't such a thing as WikiLeaks...we would know much less about what our Government and our President is actually doing abroad.
May 1, 2017
finished this one yesterday, 30th april 2017...wasn't that the day (give or take) that the last helo lifted away from the roof of the embassy in saigon. '75 was it? good read. i liked it. 3-stars.
kindle, library loan, and available, so i read it. this was maybe the 5th, 6th nonfiction (give or take) i've read recently (91st title of the year) and as others have noted the title, at least the first portion of it, or actually the middle portion of it, bears little relation to the subject matter. i dunno, maybe throw out the whole shebang.
was this published early in 2012? or late, as 't'would seem by information (benghazi) included late in the telling? there's information herein that is somewhat enlightening, enlightening, too, for the manner in which it is presented. i don't get why the information about that voice of america show is included, parazit, a parody aimed at iranian leadership. had to search-engine more, curious is why, and the show was relatively (to me) short-lived...maybe 2009-12? if one can trust information on the web? one of two people involved with the show left. sanger only highlights the show itself, not its demise, nor the creation of another...on-ten?...something like that, web again, information...that met the same demise. don't see the connection to the title of sanger's work here.
other information is handy. the idea of pakistan and its nukes being a problem. information about china. who's in the swing of things. makes me wonder if there is an analogy there to pre-war japan, wonder if the same sort of individuals are ascendant in china now. spooky, in that sense.
at least one review that i noticed thought sanger is...kind and gentle to obama. well, yes, he is also gritty...say the equivalent of a 220-grit sandpaper as opposed to a 60-grit or less on the daily news today here and now.
in one of the previous i'd read, perhaps it was Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, or perhaps it was Attention Deficit Democracy, or perhaps it was both and perhaps another No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, the point is made that during the bush administration, bush/cheney/rumsfeld, there was a concerted effort to move american power away from congressional oversight into the realm of a closed space of executive privilege...and the point was made that that kind of behavior, in the past, actions conducted by the c.i.a., assassinations and the like, had led to more congressional oversight.
sanger touches but briefly on that idea, and gives obama the green light. case in point, sanger tells of that man named "davis" in pakistan, as others have done, shot two probably pakistani intelligence agents. there is more information here...(the story is also present in at least two other non-fiction i've read, one from the above and that ex-cia story, see history, 7-8 titles back). sanger uses the expression "a trigger-happy cia agent gone wild" early in the telling to characterize davis's actions...coming as it did, just prior to theobama (oops!) osama killing. in this telling, sanger says the two pointed their guns at davis...who was tied up in traffic. the other non-fiction had variations on the story.
and then there is obama using drones often. and the u.s.'s strange relationship with pakistan and pakistan's bizarre place in the world. yes means no and black is actually white but we all know that so let's move on now. the point is the drones...obama is not characterized as "trigger-happy" but one of the other non-fiction i read to do with the subject matter questioned the power that has come to reside in the white house, a power that had congressional oversight at one time, no longer the case. sanger, as i said, touches briefly on that idea and couches the use of drones with the phrase "light footprint". pakistanis would argue otherwise. though perhaps they don't call us gringos. people south of the border do that. those problematic borders. or, no problem at all, to bush/cheny/rumseld and now obama.
but sanger's light footprint is most relevant in the case of benghazi. sanger, in a sense, praises obama's policy of having nato take the lead to help prevent a possible genocide when khadafy was on the way out. surprising. okay, sure. sanger: obama has shown he will not hesitate to use military force in defense of america's direct interests--the bin laden raid is the boldest example--but that he will use it in the most sparing way when those interests are indirect. libya fit into the doctrine because obama concluded american technology could make a decisive difference and yet americans died without help in benghazi and our commander-in-chief, ready to cross pakistan's border with drones, was either unavailable or made the decision to stand down american force to rescue them. only the c-in-c can authorize force to cross another nation's border. sanger gives obama a pass: the closet american military unit with the specialized skills to mount an emergency rescue was on the east coast of the united states, and it would have taken eighteen hours, at least, to insert them.
ah, yes, the critical "eighteen hours"...apropos, when the embassy and america succumbed to an attack after eleven hours or more. and a pass to obama. italy is across the med. i'd hazard there were "special forces" closer than eighteen hours away in afghanistan, iraq, and pakistan...or even in country. when the call went out, I NEED HELP I'M UNDER ATTACK! you can bet your ass that american force was moving, engaged, and ready. but only the c-i-c can provide the necessary clearance to cross another nation's border and in benghazi's case, obama blew it. the question that will be forever unanswered...because our elite media refuses to ask it, is why.
what else? there's information in this one and it is portrayed in such a way that is enlightening, to me anyway, sounds like other readers believe the same. iran, north korea, syria, pakistan, china. as i read, i recalled our time in vietnam...crossing the border into laos, cambodia to a degree, the anger about that. that anger is and has not been present during our time in afghanistan and two administrations now have taken powers that congress tried to put a lid on, and there's been anger, to a degree, depending on which party occupies the white house...if it is the fabled "other party" there is more anger...when one's party does it, we look the other way. as does sanger. there simply is not present the kind of indignant anger present as there was during vietnam, as there was during the fabled "torture" review. drones? a light foot-print, nothing more.
there's information related to the counter-terrorism/counter-insurgency options, as there was in a few of the other titles i'd read.
what else? there's nothing here, as there is in one or two of the other titles i'd read, about the capture and keeping of folk deemed a threat to the u.s.a. actions the bush administration was taken to task for are given a pass, in a sense here...that is not a subject herein. we've become so polarized that at times it is comedic reading the various takes on subjects.
all-in-all, this one is as enlightening for what information it presents as for what information it does not present. no pun intended...at least not consciously. still, good read, i liked it. that's enough for now. 3-stars.
kindle, library loan, and available, so i read it. this was maybe the 5th, 6th nonfiction (give or take) i've read recently (91st title of the year) and as others have noted the title, at least the first portion of it, or actually the middle portion of it, bears little relation to the subject matter. i dunno, maybe throw out the whole shebang.
was this published early in 2012? or late, as 't'would seem by information (benghazi) included late in the telling? there's information herein that is somewhat enlightening, enlightening, too, for the manner in which it is presented. i don't get why the information about that voice of america show is included, parazit, a parody aimed at iranian leadership. had to search-engine more, curious is why, and the show was relatively (to me) short-lived...maybe 2009-12? if one can trust information on the web? one of two people involved with the show left. sanger only highlights the show itself, not its demise, nor the creation of another...on-ten?...something like that, web again, information...that met the same demise. don't see the connection to the title of sanger's work here.
other information is handy. the idea of pakistan and its nukes being a problem. information about china. who's in the swing of things. makes me wonder if there is an analogy there to pre-war japan, wonder if the same sort of individuals are ascendant in china now. spooky, in that sense.
at least one review that i noticed thought sanger is...kind and gentle to obama. well, yes, he is also gritty...say the equivalent of a 220-grit sandpaper as opposed to a 60-grit or less on the daily news today here and now.
in one of the previous i'd read, perhaps it was Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, or perhaps it was Attention Deficit Democracy, or perhaps it was both and perhaps another No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, the point is made that during the bush administration, bush/cheney/rumsfeld, there was a concerted effort to move american power away from congressional oversight into the realm of a closed space of executive privilege...and the point was made that that kind of behavior, in the past, actions conducted by the c.i.a., assassinations and the like, had led to more congressional oversight.
sanger touches but briefly on that idea, and gives obama the green light. case in point, sanger tells of that man named "davis" in pakistan, as others have done, shot two probably pakistani intelligence agents. there is more information here...(the story is also present in at least two other non-fiction i've read, one from the above and that ex-cia story, see history, 7-8 titles back). sanger uses the expression "a trigger-happy cia agent gone wild" early in the telling to characterize davis's actions...coming as it did, just prior to the
and then there is obama using drones often. and the u.s.'s strange relationship with pakistan and pakistan's bizarre place in the world. yes means no and black is actually white but we all know that so let's move on now. the point is the drones...obama is not characterized as "trigger-happy" but one of the other non-fiction i read to do with the subject matter questioned the power that has come to reside in the white house, a power that had congressional oversight at one time, no longer the case. sanger, as i said, touches briefly on that idea and couches the use of drones with the phrase "light footprint". pakistanis would argue otherwise. though perhaps they don't call us gringos. people south of the border do that. those problematic borders. or, no problem at all, to bush/cheny/rumseld and now obama.
but sanger's light footprint is most relevant in the case of benghazi. sanger, in a sense, praises obama's policy of having nato take the lead to help prevent a possible genocide when khadafy was on the way out. surprising. okay, sure. sanger: obama has shown he will not hesitate to use military force in defense of america's direct interests--the bin laden raid is the boldest example--but that he will use it in the most sparing way when those interests are indirect. libya fit into the doctrine because obama concluded american technology could make a decisive difference and yet americans died without help in benghazi and our commander-in-chief, ready to cross pakistan's border with drones, was either unavailable or made the decision to stand down american force to rescue them. only the c-in-c can authorize force to cross another nation's border. sanger gives obama a pass: the closet american military unit with the specialized skills to mount an emergency rescue was on the east coast of the united states, and it would have taken eighteen hours, at least, to insert them.
ah, yes, the critical "eighteen hours"...apropos, when the embassy and america succumbed to an attack after eleven hours or more. and a pass to obama. italy is across the med. i'd hazard there were "special forces" closer than eighteen hours away in afghanistan, iraq, and pakistan...or even in country. when the call went out, I NEED HELP I'M UNDER ATTACK! you can bet your ass that american force was moving, engaged, and ready. but only the c-i-c can provide the necessary clearance to cross another nation's border and in benghazi's case, obama blew it. the question that will be forever unanswered...because our elite media refuses to ask it, is why.
what else? there's information in this one and it is portrayed in such a way that is enlightening, to me anyway, sounds like other readers believe the same. iran, north korea, syria, pakistan, china. as i read, i recalled our time in vietnam...crossing the border into laos, cambodia to a degree, the anger about that. that anger is and has not been present during our time in afghanistan and two administrations now have taken powers that congress tried to put a lid on, and there's been anger, to a degree, depending on which party occupies the white house...if it is the fabled "other party" there is more anger...when one's party does it, we look the other way. as does sanger. there simply is not present the kind of indignant anger present as there was during vietnam, as there was during the fabled "torture" review. drones? a light foot-print, nothing more.
there's information related to the counter-terrorism/counter-insurgency options, as there was in a few of the other titles i'd read.
what else? there's nothing here, as there is in one or two of the other titles i'd read, about the capture and keeping of folk deemed a threat to the u.s.a. actions the bush administration was taken to task for are given a pass, in a sense here...that is not a subject herein. we've become so polarized that at times it is comedic reading the various takes on subjects.
all-in-all, this one is as enlightening for what information it presents as for what information it does not present. no pun intended...at least not consciously. still, good read, i liked it. that's enough for now. 3-stars.
December 25, 2012
This book is an in-depth description and analysis of the Obama administration's efforts in the world's hot spots.
The scope of the book seems impressive; I will give here the list of topics and then discuss what I thought of the writing of the book.
Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the inherited situation, the mistakes before finally forging their own approach, the acceptance of a "good enough" solution.
Iran -- the stuxnet virus, the difficult collaboration with Israel.
Drones -- the drawbacks of an otherwise-successful approach.
The Arab spring -- how the administration tried to improve its predictions of uprisings, but before they were ready to analyze these things better the revolutions started. How they walked the fine line of support versus standing back; comparison of Libya and Syria.
China and North Korea -- how to return the US to having a role in Asia, how to understand the interface we have to China through their leader, how to deal with North Korea.
Here are the reasons I thought the book was excellent:
* sources: the author is a veteran New York Times journalist who has many sources and a lot of experience in finding foreign policy and war information. This is coupled with access to the wikileaks revelations. The result give an impressive feeling for what must have been happening in the administration's deliberations.
* writing style: journalists often write very good and readable books, and this is no exception. It is long but quite gripping, and I read it with great pleasure. He also does a great job of taking complex sequences of events and collecting them into a clear picture. Instead of sacrificing the complexity of the story, he works hard to explain it well.
* analysis and insight: I am not an expert, so the 10% rule might apply here, but I found the analyses and the resulting insights to be quite convincing.
The scope of the book seems impressive; I will give here the list of topics and then discuss what I thought of the writing of the book.
Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the inherited situation, the mistakes before finally forging their own approach, the acceptance of a "good enough" solution.
Iran -- the stuxnet virus, the difficult collaboration with Israel.
Drones -- the drawbacks of an otherwise-successful approach.
The Arab spring -- how the administration tried to improve its predictions of uprisings, but before they were ready to analyze these things better the revolutions started. How they walked the fine line of support versus standing back; comparison of Libya and Syria.
China and North Korea -- how to return the US to having a role in Asia, how to understand the interface we have to China through their leader, how to deal with North Korea.
Here are the reasons I thought the book was excellent:
* sources: the author is a veteran New York Times journalist who has many sources and a lot of experience in finding foreign policy and war information. This is coupled with access to the wikileaks revelations. The result give an impressive feeling for what must have been happening in the administration's deliberations.
* writing style: journalists often write very good and readable books, and this is no exception. It is long but quite gripping, and I read it with great pleasure. He also does a great job of taking complex sequences of events and collecting them into a clear picture. Instead of sacrificing the complexity of the story, he works hard to explain it well.
* analysis and insight: I am not an expert, so the 10% rule might apply here, but I found the analyses and the resulting insights to be quite convincing.
November 25, 2012
A truly fascinating book about the foreign policy challenges of Obama's first term and how he responded to them.
But to me its also an embedded discourse about the nature of foreign policy and the necessity and frustrations of embracing complexity, as it is largely an exercise in grappling with ambiguity in a hall of mirrors. Every situation has costs and benefits and a great deal of uncertainty not only about what will happen, but what is currently happening, and why. And so its imperative that you have people who have the ability and care to evaluate what happening, as well as how different sides might see the situation through vastly different lenses. And that means not only trying to know what the other side sees and believes, but understanding that it impacts your decision-making process.
And what you end up realizing is that it's for grownups, meaning it is not the province of talk radio blowhards, pundits, and loudmouths who would like to simplify it into some inflammatory sound bite that is inevitably untrue but easily repeated by the ass end of the electorate. Dealing with other countries is messy, complex and difficult and doesn't lend itself well to simple notions. and anybody who says differently is a jackass.
I just wonder if we're a country that can acknowledge these realities or whether we're going to simply wave flags and insist that the world bend to our vision simply because we're too lazy to do otherwise, because this book makes it pretty clear that there are no simple or easy answers, only difficult problems that have answers that have benefits but real costs, many of which will be unforeseen and take years to realize.
But to me its also an embedded discourse about the nature of foreign policy and the necessity and frustrations of embracing complexity, as it is largely an exercise in grappling with ambiguity in a hall of mirrors. Every situation has costs and benefits and a great deal of uncertainty not only about what will happen, but what is currently happening, and why. And so its imperative that you have people who have the ability and care to evaluate what happening, as well as how different sides might see the situation through vastly different lenses. And that means not only trying to know what the other side sees and believes, but understanding that it impacts your decision-making process.
And what you end up realizing is that it's for grownups, meaning it is not the province of talk radio blowhards, pundits, and loudmouths who would like to simplify it into some inflammatory sound bite that is inevitably untrue but easily repeated by the ass end of the electorate. Dealing with other countries is messy, complex and difficult and doesn't lend itself well to simple notions. and anybody who says differently is a jackass.
I just wonder if we're a country that can acknowledge these realities or whether we're going to simply wave flags and insist that the world bend to our vision simply because we're too lazy to do otherwise, because this book makes it pretty clear that there are no simple or easy answers, only difficult problems that have answers that have benefits but real costs, many of which will be unforeseen and take years to realize.
July 12, 2016
Indispensable for understanding not only the profound challenges facing the U. S. militarily and diplomatically, but also the extreme pressure facing America in the post 9-11 era. Obama gets points for acknowledging and acting upon the reality that American power and resources are not limitless. He loses points--understandably so--as one watches him constructing policy "on the fly", pulled in contradictory directions by American idealism and the cruel realpolitik of maintaining relations with troublesome nations necessary for maintaining U. S. geostrategic interests. In short, the Obama Doctrine, such as it is, lacks an ideological center, which may account for the abysmal job this administration had done in communicating goals to the American people. The author takes Obama to task several times regarding the contradiction between campaign promises of transparency and the opacity of the decision-making process with regard to foreign policy. Nevertheless, it provides a foundation--the book only covers the first term--for developing greater insight into the world of shadows and light in which policy makers operate, and the process by which decisions emerged, forming a de facto "Obama Doctrine". All of which points to the need for a broader, more open dialogue on a nationally-directed, transparent direction for America's future overseas.
March 24, 2013
This was an interesting book, but the entire tone was overly fawning with very, very little critique or counter-point to the administration. To his credit, Sanger seems to recognize and tries to rebut the fact that the book mostly consists of previous reporting and background quotes provided from inside the White House. I don't know that you can expect much more considering the fact that it was written late in the first term and Sanger needed to maintain access into the 2nd.
So, as long as you take this with several grains of salt and understand that this is basically an 'authorized biography' of the 1st term of the Obama Administration, you can read and enjoy the narrative that Sanger puts together.
There is some new information, primarily concerning 'Olympic Games' (i.e. Stuxnet) that I don't believe had been reported previously. This section is no less fawning, but is quite a bit more interesting. If you are time pressed, you can probably read this portion and skim the rest of the book.
So, as long as you take this with several grains of salt and understand that this is basically an 'authorized biography' of the 1st term of the Obama Administration, you can read and enjoy the narrative that Sanger puts together.
There is some new information, primarily concerning 'Olympic Games' (i.e. Stuxnet) that I don't believe had been reported previously. This section is no less fawning, but is quite a bit more interesting. If you are time pressed, you can probably read this portion and skim the rest of the book.
July 2, 2012
If you like this kind of stuff it is a great read, current as of three months ago. Fascinating insight into Obama and his administration and fills in all the blanks of the last year and a half with respect to American foreign policy. Highly recommend it, Sanger writes well and has a good sense of narrative.
December 24, 2014
Thoughtful and well-written recap of Obama's challenge in managing secrets and spying. Sanger's analysis is insightful, and especially interesting given the way Obama campaigned where these issues were not emphasized. I also think the impact on Obama of his political allies was interesting. Must read for politicos.
June 30, 2012
I am not an Obama fan. His domestic and economic policies are terrible. However, I have a new found respect and appreciation for his foreign policy, his involvement, his decisions, and how he has dealt with what he inherited. I am glad I found this book.
July 26, 2012
Reminiscent of Woodward's books about Bush, this book gives an extremely detailed look inside the Whitehouse and the operations within. After reading all these books I walk away with much more confidence in both of these Presidents.
I highly recommend this book.
I highly recommend this book.
April 5, 2015
Executive Summary
This book is an interesting read for foreign policy buffs but a must-read for cyber security professionals interested in the evolution of cyber warfare. It is the first published book that chronicles the current US government’s thinking about the merits of cyber attacks as a middle-ground diplomacy option between invading a country on one hand and sanctions or negotiations on the other. It is also the first book that gave the public details about operation “Olympic Games,” a multiyear covert operation that the governments of the United States and Israel directed against Iran that changed the cyber security landscape forever. Security pundits have been saying for years that cyber warfare is theoretically possible or, more precisely, that cyber weapons could cause physical damage on a massive scale. Olympic Games demonstrated conclusively that hackers can use a cyber vector alone, without the aid of other kinetic weapons, to destroy components of a country’s critical infrastructure. Regardless of how successful Olympic Games ultimately was in slowing down the Iranian nuclear program, using cyber tools to inflict physical damage against your adversaries is now a viable option. Operation Olympic Games represents the world crossing the line between theory and practice, and this book is your guide to understanding that decision. This book is part of the canon, and you should have read it by now.
Introduction
In June 2012, David E. Sanger published an article[1] in The New York Times proclaiming for the first time that the United States, in conjunction with Israel, was indeed behind the infamous Stuxnet malware attacks that targeted the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz. He published his article as a teaser to advertise his new book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.[2]
In both the article and the book, Sanger demonstrated an unprecedented level of access to President Obama’s former staff members that provides insight into how leadership made important changes to American policy around offensive cyber operations. The book is a fascinating look at the inner machinery of how two presidents made decisions that changed US foreign policy away from President George W. Bush’s [See Note] “You are with us or against us” mentality into something Sanger calls the Obama Doctrine.[2] I originally picked up the book because of chapter 8, “Olympic Games.” For the cyber security professionals in the crowd, this chapter alone is worth the price of admission.
The Story
Olympic Games is the now-declassified US code name for the cyber initiatives aimed at degrading Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability.[2] Many international leaders are afraid of what Iranian leadership might do if they were to get their hands on a nuclear bomb.[3] Iranian leadership claims that their nuclear program is peaceful and is designed to provide electric power to Iran’s citizens.[4] In the past, the only options Western governments had to dissuade Iranian officials from their nuclear ambitions were economic sanctions and military strikes. According to Sanger, as Iran got closer to its goal of building a working nuclear bomb during President Bush’s time in office term, Israeli leadership became more and more anxious to pursue the military option since they believed Israel might be one of the first targets of such a bomb.[2] President Bush was not keen on starting a fight with yet another Middle Eastern country. He was already fully engaged with Iraq and Afghanistan. He needed a different way to deal with the problem. Olympic Games became the in-between option.[2]
Sanger fills in a lot of details about Olympic Games that many suspected were true at the time but had no evidence to prove. He explains how the operation grew out of military channels under President Bush and how President Obama moved it over to intelligence channels during the first weeks of his administration for legal reasons. Sanger describes how at least as much work went into the legal justification for a covert action to destroy critical infrastructure in a country with which the United States was not at war as the amount of work that the coders did when they planned, built, and tested the actual cyber weapons. He describes how the operation used unwitting Siemens employees who were working at Natanz to transfer the malware into the facility, a facility that had no connection to the Internet. Siemens is the company that builds the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices used at the plant to control the Iranian centrifuges that Olympic Games was meant to destroy.[2]
All of this is fascinating detail, and Sanger’s book,[2] along with his preceding New York Times article,[1] was the first time that the public became aware of it. More importantly though, Sanger’s book puts a line in the sand marking the exact spot where cyber warfare moved from a theoretical idea to practical implementation. According to Richard Clarke, author of Cyber Warfare: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do about It,
“The term ‘cyber war’ … refers to actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.”[5]
In my review of Jeffrey Carr’s book, Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld, I tweaked his definition a bit to be more precise:
“Cyber Warfare involves one or more nation states using cyber weapons to destroy each other’s national treasure to achieve some political purpose.”[10]
Before operation Olympic Games, security pundits only pontificated about the possibilities of cyber warfare. We would point to real-world examples like Estonia[6] and Georgia[7] that did not quite meet Clarke’s definition but were, from our point of view, clear indicators of where this was heading. Some estimates claim that the damage done by operation Olympic Games caused Iranian engineers to replace more than 4,000 damaged centrifuges out of the 9,000 that were on site at Natanz.[8] For the first time in our short cyber security history, we had a publicly known event that precisely met Clarke’s definition, and my definition too for that matter. The world changed, and you cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
Just this year, cyber attackers destroyed the data residing on 32,000 computers from a number of Korean companies, including Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, Munhwa Broadcasting Corp., YTN, and Korea Broadcasting System. Public attribution is unclear, but the South Koreans believe the attacks came from North Korea.[9] If that’s true, the attack represents the first example of another nation taking its cues from the United States and Israel and operation Olympic Games. I expect that this is just the beginning.
The Tech
Sanger details the three phases of the operation. The first step was to build and deploy a “beacon” designed to map the network at Natanz and get the information back to the United States. The second phase was to build and test the “bug,” the malware that would destroy the centrifuges. The last phase was to deploy and upgrade the bug on the fly to seek new and better targets.[2] According to Sanger, the intent of Olympic Games was not to destroy the plant completely but to play mind games with the Iranian technicians, to cause confusion within the technical ranks, and to add time on the clock for the inevitable day when Iran would succeed in making enough nuclear material to build a bomb.[2] The jury is still out on whether Olympic Games succeeded, but Sanger uses Olympic to make a larger point about the change in US foreign policy under President Obama.
I am not a foreign policy expert by any means. I vaguely understand that all presidents spend huge chunks of time trying to manage US interests abroad, but it seems to me, after reading Sanger’s description, that President Obama had to deal with an inordinate number of varied and complex international issues in his first term compared to other presidents. Regardless if you are a President Obama fan or not, after reading Sanger’s account, you have to agree that Obama’s first term was quite a ride. Let me just touch on the highlights:
• Reducing US military forces in Iraq
• Surging US military forces in Afghanistan
• Negotiating with an on-again, off-again Pakistani alliance
• Assassinating Osama Bin Laden without Pakistani buy-in
• Managing the Arab Spring: Tunisia
• Managing the Arab Spring: Libya
• Managing the Arab Spring: Syria
• Managing the growing Chinese power in the East
• Managing the seemingly instability of North Korea[2]
Out of all of this, Sanger opines that a new US foreign policy emerged. By the end of his first term, President Obama was finally acting on foreign policy interests that he did not inherit from President Bush. The international events mentioned above schooled President Obama on the limits of US power. He refocused his approach by narrowing the scope of America’s strategic objectives, showed restraint with his willingness to use the middle option with drone technology and cyber attacks, found a wedge to use with China in the form of growth boundaries versus isolation, and decided that he is totally fine with the idea that other nations can take the lead during international crisis situations. From my reading of Sanger’s thesis, it was a new beginning for a now-seasoned president.[2]
Conclusion
The book is an interesting read for foreign policy enthusiasts, but the Olympic Games chapter is a must-read for every cyber security professional interested in the evolution of cyber warfare. More importantly though, Sanger’s book puts a line in the sand marking the exact spot where cyber warfare moved from a theoretical idea to practical implementation. Security pundits have been saying for years that cyber warfare is theoretically possible or, more precisely, that cyber weapons could cause physical damage on a massive scale. Olympic Games demonstrated conclusively that hackers can use a cyber vector alone, without the aid of other kinetic weapons, to destroy components of a country’s critical infrastructure. Regardless of how successful Olympic Games ultimately was in slowing down the Iranian nuclear program, using cyber tools to inflict physical damage against your adversaries is now a viable option. Operation Olympic Games represents the world crossing the line between theory and practice, and this book is your guide to understanding that decision. This book is part of the canon, and you should have read it by now.
Note:
All references to President Bush in this essay refer to President George W. Bush, the 43d President of the United States and not his father, President George H. W. Bush, the 41st President of the Unites States.
Sources:
[1] "Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran," by David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 1 June 2012, last visited 14 December 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/wor...
[2] Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger, published by Crown Publishing Group, June 2012
[3] “The west fears the Iranian nuclear research program,” by Carol J. Williams, The Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2012, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world...
[4] “Tighter sanctions on Iran trigger threats and defiance,” by Carol Williams, Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2012, Last Visited 26 December 2013,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world...
[5] "Book Review: ‘Cyber Warfare: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do about It (2010)’ by Richard Clarke and Robert Knake," by Richard Howard, Terebrate, 21 January 2013, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://terebrate.blogspot.com/2013/01...
[6] "Estonia's Lessons in Cyberwarfare," by Scheherazade Rehman, US News & World Report, 14 January 2014, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/w...
[7] "Georgia accuses Russia of coordinated cyberattack," by Tom Espiner, CNET, 11 August 2008, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-1001...
[8] “The Stuxnet outbreak: A worm in the centrifuge: An unusually sophisticated cyber-weapon is mysterious but important,” The Economist, 30 September 2010, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.economist.com/node/17147818
[9] "South Korea Says Chinese Code Used in Computer Attack," by Cynthia Kim, Jungah Lee and Saeromi Shin, Bloomberg, 21 March 2013, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03...
[10] "Book Review: “Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld (2009, 2010)” by Jeffrey Carr," by Rick Howard, Terebrate, 24 March 2013, Last Visited 26 December 2013,
http://terebrate.blogspot.com/2013/03...
References
"Ex-Pentagon general target of leak investigation, sources say," by Michael Isikoff, NBC News, 27 June 2013, last visited 14 December 2013,
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_ne...
"McCain slams White House for alleged security leaks," CBS This Morning, 6 June 2012, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mccain-sl...
"The Long Shadow Of Saudi Aramco," by Kelly Jackson Higgins, darkReading, 14 October 2013, last visited 19 December 2013
http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-br...
"Who was behind Stuxnet?" by 60 Minutes, CBSNewsOnline, 4 March 2012, Last Visited 26 December 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwrWi4...
“Who is behind Stuxnet?” by Tom Gjelten, NPR, 26 September 2011, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/1407893...
"Why the Shamoon virus looms as destructive threat," by Byron Acohido, USA Today, 16 May 2013, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertr...
This book is an interesting read for foreign policy buffs but a must-read for cyber security professionals interested in the evolution of cyber warfare. It is the first published book that chronicles the current US government’s thinking about the merits of cyber attacks as a middle-ground diplomacy option between invading a country on one hand and sanctions or negotiations on the other. It is also the first book that gave the public details about operation “Olympic Games,” a multiyear covert operation that the governments of the United States and Israel directed against Iran that changed the cyber security landscape forever. Security pundits have been saying for years that cyber warfare is theoretically possible or, more precisely, that cyber weapons could cause physical damage on a massive scale. Olympic Games demonstrated conclusively that hackers can use a cyber vector alone, without the aid of other kinetic weapons, to destroy components of a country’s critical infrastructure. Regardless of how successful Olympic Games ultimately was in slowing down the Iranian nuclear program, using cyber tools to inflict physical damage against your adversaries is now a viable option. Operation Olympic Games represents the world crossing the line between theory and practice, and this book is your guide to understanding that decision. This book is part of the canon, and you should have read it by now.
Introduction
In June 2012, David E. Sanger published an article[1] in The New York Times proclaiming for the first time that the United States, in conjunction with Israel, was indeed behind the infamous Stuxnet malware attacks that targeted the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz. He published his article as a teaser to advertise his new book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.[2]
In both the article and the book, Sanger demonstrated an unprecedented level of access to President Obama’s former staff members that provides insight into how leadership made important changes to American policy around offensive cyber operations. The book is a fascinating look at the inner machinery of how two presidents made decisions that changed US foreign policy away from President George W. Bush’s [See Note] “You are with us or against us” mentality into something Sanger calls the Obama Doctrine.[2] I originally picked up the book because of chapter 8, “Olympic Games.” For the cyber security professionals in the crowd, this chapter alone is worth the price of admission.
The Story
Olympic Games is the now-declassified US code name for the cyber initiatives aimed at degrading Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability.[2] Many international leaders are afraid of what Iranian leadership might do if they were to get their hands on a nuclear bomb.[3] Iranian leadership claims that their nuclear program is peaceful and is designed to provide electric power to Iran’s citizens.[4] In the past, the only options Western governments had to dissuade Iranian officials from their nuclear ambitions were economic sanctions and military strikes. According to Sanger, as Iran got closer to its goal of building a working nuclear bomb during President Bush’s time in office term, Israeli leadership became more and more anxious to pursue the military option since they believed Israel might be one of the first targets of such a bomb.[2] President Bush was not keen on starting a fight with yet another Middle Eastern country. He was already fully engaged with Iraq and Afghanistan. He needed a different way to deal with the problem. Olympic Games became the in-between option.[2]
Sanger fills in a lot of details about Olympic Games that many suspected were true at the time but had no evidence to prove. He explains how the operation grew out of military channels under President Bush and how President Obama moved it over to intelligence channels during the first weeks of his administration for legal reasons. Sanger describes how at least as much work went into the legal justification for a covert action to destroy critical infrastructure in a country with which the United States was not at war as the amount of work that the coders did when they planned, built, and tested the actual cyber weapons. He describes how the operation used unwitting Siemens employees who were working at Natanz to transfer the malware into the facility, a facility that had no connection to the Internet. Siemens is the company that builds the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices used at the plant to control the Iranian centrifuges that Olympic Games was meant to destroy.[2]
All of this is fascinating detail, and Sanger’s book,[2] along with his preceding New York Times article,[1] was the first time that the public became aware of it. More importantly though, Sanger’s book puts a line in the sand marking the exact spot where cyber warfare moved from a theoretical idea to practical implementation. According to Richard Clarke, author of Cyber Warfare: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do about It,
“The term ‘cyber war’ … refers to actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.”[5]
In my review of Jeffrey Carr’s book, Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld, I tweaked his definition a bit to be more precise:
“Cyber Warfare involves one or more nation states using cyber weapons to destroy each other’s national treasure to achieve some political purpose.”[10]
Before operation Olympic Games, security pundits only pontificated about the possibilities of cyber warfare. We would point to real-world examples like Estonia[6] and Georgia[7] that did not quite meet Clarke’s definition but were, from our point of view, clear indicators of where this was heading. Some estimates claim that the damage done by operation Olympic Games caused Iranian engineers to replace more than 4,000 damaged centrifuges out of the 9,000 that were on site at Natanz.[8] For the first time in our short cyber security history, we had a publicly known event that precisely met Clarke’s definition, and my definition too for that matter. The world changed, and you cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
Just this year, cyber attackers destroyed the data residing on 32,000 computers from a number of Korean companies, including Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, Munhwa Broadcasting Corp., YTN, and Korea Broadcasting System. Public attribution is unclear, but the South Koreans believe the attacks came from North Korea.[9] If that’s true, the attack represents the first example of another nation taking its cues from the United States and Israel and operation Olympic Games. I expect that this is just the beginning.
The Tech
Sanger details the three phases of the operation. The first step was to build and deploy a “beacon” designed to map the network at Natanz and get the information back to the United States. The second phase was to build and test the “bug,” the malware that would destroy the centrifuges. The last phase was to deploy and upgrade the bug on the fly to seek new and better targets.[2] According to Sanger, the intent of Olympic Games was not to destroy the plant completely but to play mind games with the Iranian technicians, to cause confusion within the technical ranks, and to add time on the clock for the inevitable day when Iran would succeed in making enough nuclear material to build a bomb.[2] The jury is still out on whether Olympic Games succeeded, but Sanger uses Olympic to make a larger point about the change in US foreign policy under President Obama.
I am not a foreign policy expert by any means. I vaguely understand that all presidents spend huge chunks of time trying to manage US interests abroad, but it seems to me, after reading Sanger’s description, that President Obama had to deal with an inordinate number of varied and complex international issues in his first term compared to other presidents. Regardless if you are a President Obama fan or not, after reading Sanger’s account, you have to agree that Obama’s first term was quite a ride. Let me just touch on the highlights:
• Reducing US military forces in Iraq
• Surging US military forces in Afghanistan
• Negotiating with an on-again, off-again Pakistani alliance
• Assassinating Osama Bin Laden without Pakistani buy-in
• Managing the Arab Spring: Tunisia
• Managing the Arab Spring: Libya
• Managing the Arab Spring: Syria
• Managing the growing Chinese power in the East
• Managing the seemingly instability of North Korea[2]
Out of all of this, Sanger opines that a new US foreign policy emerged. By the end of his first term, President Obama was finally acting on foreign policy interests that he did not inherit from President Bush. The international events mentioned above schooled President Obama on the limits of US power. He refocused his approach by narrowing the scope of America’s strategic objectives, showed restraint with his willingness to use the middle option with drone technology and cyber attacks, found a wedge to use with China in the form of growth boundaries versus isolation, and decided that he is totally fine with the idea that other nations can take the lead during international crisis situations. From my reading of Sanger’s thesis, it was a new beginning for a now-seasoned president.[2]
Conclusion
The book is an interesting read for foreign policy enthusiasts, but the Olympic Games chapter is a must-read for every cyber security professional interested in the evolution of cyber warfare. More importantly though, Sanger’s book puts a line in the sand marking the exact spot where cyber warfare moved from a theoretical idea to practical implementation. Security pundits have been saying for years that cyber warfare is theoretically possible or, more precisely, that cyber weapons could cause physical damage on a massive scale. Olympic Games demonstrated conclusively that hackers can use a cyber vector alone, without the aid of other kinetic weapons, to destroy components of a country’s critical infrastructure. Regardless of how successful Olympic Games ultimately was in slowing down the Iranian nuclear program, using cyber tools to inflict physical damage against your adversaries is now a viable option. Operation Olympic Games represents the world crossing the line between theory and practice, and this book is your guide to understanding that decision. This book is part of the canon, and you should have read it by now.
Note:
All references to President Bush in this essay refer to President George W. Bush, the 43d President of the United States and not his father, President George H. W. Bush, the 41st President of the Unites States.
Sources:
[1] "Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran," by David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 1 June 2012, last visited 14 December 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/wor...
[2] Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger, published by Crown Publishing Group, June 2012
[3] “The west fears the Iranian nuclear research program,” by Carol J. Williams, The Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2012, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world...
[4] “Tighter sanctions on Iran trigger threats and defiance,” by Carol Williams, Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2012, Last Visited 26 December 2013,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world...
[5] "Book Review: ‘Cyber Warfare: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do about It (2010)’ by Richard Clarke and Robert Knake," by Richard Howard, Terebrate, 21 January 2013, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://terebrate.blogspot.com/2013/01...
[6] "Estonia's Lessons in Cyberwarfare," by Scheherazade Rehman, US News & World Report, 14 January 2014, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/w...
[7] "Georgia accuses Russia of coordinated cyberattack," by Tom Espiner, CNET, 11 August 2008, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-1001...
[8] “The Stuxnet outbreak: A worm in the centrifuge: An unusually sophisticated cyber-weapon is mysterious but important,” The Economist, 30 September 2010, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.economist.com/node/17147818
[9] "South Korea Says Chinese Code Used in Computer Attack," by Cynthia Kim, Jungah Lee and Saeromi Shin, Bloomberg, 21 March 2013, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03...
[10] "Book Review: “Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld (2009, 2010)” by Jeffrey Carr," by Rick Howard, Terebrate, 24 March 2013, Last Visited 26 December 2013,
http://terebrate.blogspot.com/2013/03...
References
"Ex-Pentagon general target of leak investigation, sources say," by Michael Isikoff, NBC News, 27 June 2013, last visited 14 December 2013,
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_ne...
"McCain slams White House for alleged security leaks," CBS This Morning, 6 June 2012, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mccain-sl...
"The Long Shadow Of Saudi Aramco," by Kelly Jackson Higgins, darkReading, 14 October 2013, last visited 19 December 2013
http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-br...
"Who was behind Stuxnet?" by 60 Minutes, CBSNewsOnline, 4 March 2012, Last Visited 26 December 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwrWi4...
“Who is behind Stuxnet?” by Tom Gjelten, NPR, 26 September 2011, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/1407893...
"Why the Shamoon virus looms as destructive threat," by Byron Acohido, USA Today, 16 May 2013, last visited 19 December 2013,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertr...
October 25, 2012
http://philadelphiareviewofbooks.com/...
In 2009 and 2010, a sophisticated computer virus dubbed Stuxnet by cyber security commentators infected programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at an Iranian nuclear facility, altering the speed of some of the plant’s centrifuges causing them to spin out of control and explode. Reporting by the New York Times’s David Sanger revealed Stuxnet as part of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush’s top secret Olympic Games program which explored the prospect of joint U.S. and Israeli offensive cyber measures in delaying Iran’s nuclear capability. Stuxnet infiltrated the Iranian system through USB drives, collected data for weeks or maybe even months unheeded by security and migrated to the dedicated Siemens PLCs where it completed its prescribed task. Only when Stuxnet went viral, infecting other computers in Iran not connected to the nuclear plant’s network, did the bug draw the attention of Iran and the international cyber security community.
Over two years later, many media outlets refuse to fully acknowledge that sponsorship of this most brazen attack on a sovereign nation came from the top of the U.S. and Israeli governments, from the very desks of Obama and Netanyahu and their predecessors. This media complicity in the U.S. and Israeli moratorium on speaking about cyber security issues in this light is fruitless. As reported by the Daily Telegraph, a laudatory video of the accomplishments of Gabi Ashkenazi, Chief of the Israeli General Staff, was shown at the General’s retirement party in February 2011. Stuxnet featured among the successes. Still, some of Sanger’s claims, particularly about the vector through which Stuxnet “escaped” the targeted Iranian network, have been questioned by cyber security experts such as Professor Larry Constantine of the University of Madeira in Portugal.
The complexity and efficiency of Stuxnet, however, has called the world’s attention to the danger of state-sponsored cyber-attacks. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, the largest private cyber security firm in the world, said recently, “Somewhere in 2020, maybe 2040, we’ll get back to a romantic time – no power, no cars, no trains.” Mainstream thinkers were not speaking like this before Stuxnet. Kaspersky drew an illustrative analogy at a recent conference in Washington. “If previous viruses were like bicycles,” Joseph Menn, for Reuters, reported Kaspersky saying, “then the Stuxnet worm that damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in Iran two years ago would be a plane, and the latest programs, dubbed Flame and Gauss, would be ‘space shuttles.’” And integral parts of Flame and Gauss, which infected Iranian oil infrastructure and Lebanese financial institutions respectively, indicate they are progeny of Stuxnet, though since the code became public the identity of the source of each program remains opaque. Kaspersky Lab researchers have found that Stuxnet, Flame, Gauss and other worms like them are being used as “warheads” and many of the malware “payloads” they carry have unknown objectives.
Kris Ardis, writing in EDN recently, compared the cyber security community’s reaction to Stuxnet to the TSA’s implementation of shoe screenings after the Richard Reid “Shoe Bomber” plot was foiled. “Security added at such a late step can only be superficial, only protecting against obvious threats,” Ardis writes. Still the U.S. military and national security apparatuses seem to be waking up to the issues in recent months, especially in light of further coverage of Olympic Games in the press. Michael Hayden former chief of NSA and CIA, speaking on a panel at the National Military Family Association in Arlington, Virginia in October, remarked, “In this era, practically all the external trends,” in cyber-technology particularly, “weaken the traditional unit of power, which is the nation state, and pushes power down … to private enterprise and pushes power down even to individuals,” and some of those individuals will inevitably be criminals and terrorists. On October 11, Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, admitted that foreign interests, whether state-sponsored or otherwise, have begun probes in vital infrastructure networks for private U.S. energy firms. “They are targeting the computer control systems that operate chemical, electricity and water plants, and those that guide transportation throughout the country,” Panetta said during a speech in New York. And for those of us concerned about the encroachment of executive powers on the protection of domestic and international law, Panetta continued, “If we detect an imminent threat of attack that will cause significant physical destruction or kill American citizens, we need to have the option to take action to defend the nation when directed by the President.” This sounds strikingly similar to all justifications for the use of American force since 9/11.
As with the use of drones, the most readily available analogous covert military operation of the Obama administration, the danger of reciprocity – the enemy using our own weapons against us – is unthinkable. But unlike drone technology, which is not easily replicated, even by sophisticated governments, replicating a virus like Stuxnet may be as easy as clicking copy and paste. According to Aviv Raff of Israeli cyber security firm Seculert, this copying and pasting has already begun in earnest. “Design features of Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame are appearing in opportunistic criminal malware,” he says.
Writing for the New Yorker before all of the details from Sanger’s reporting were revealed, Steve Coll wrote, “In national security as in much else, what goes around often comes around. Presidents Clinton and Bush reportedly both declined to use cyber-attacks to manipulate data and drain bank accounts whose balances supported Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Their reasoning was that the American economy depends to a great degree on the integrity of the international banking system; cyber sabotage would invite other states to try similar attacks; and the protective defenses of America’s own banks were weak.” We can only assume those other states and the terrorists they may harbor have gained technological wherewithal in the ensuing years. And as Coll and others have noted, the U.S. relies on networked infrastructure far more than any of its enemies.
China, ironically, is taking two apparently conflicting tacks in the international cyber security debate, calling for drastic revisions of international law in its application to cyber, and also supporting suspect military-allied telecom providers in the U.S. market. The U.S. Congress has accused two telecom companies in particular, Huawei and ZTE, of failing to comply with investigations according to Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek.
All of these dramatic new developments in cyber security discussions were enflamed by David Sanger’s reporting which was collected and expanded in his recent book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. Olympic Games and Stuxnet are the most novel uses of American power Sanger reveals, but each of them – the use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the escalation of Special Forces raids in finding Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives, the hands-off approach to the Arab Spring (except in Libya’s case), and the pivot to Asia – all hinge on a reduced physical footprint in national security campaigns necessitated by the recession Obama inherited from Bush.
In Confront and Conceal, Sanger frames questions of foreign policy in terms of historic scope, drawing comparisons between Obama’s inheritance of Afghanistan to Lyndon Johnson’s experience with the quagmire of Vietnam. While this may be apt in describing Obama’s initial escalation of the ground war – the troop surge – in Afghanistan, a more fitting analogy for the implications of drone and cyber warfare would be the Bay of Pigs crisis. As Coll writes in his New Yorker essay, “The United States thought it would monopolize nuclear weaponry for a lot longer than it did; the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb just four years after Nagasaki. It already seems evident that in the future, both lethal drone technology and the ability to conduct cyber attacks will be very broadly distributed—not just among governments, but among individuals, corporations, and terrorists.” When will the U.S. face the threat of a paralyzing cyber-attack? Sooner than we think.
Back to our physical quagmire, for a moment. Even in Sanger’s rather sympathetic text, Obama’s drawback of the surge is portrayed as a failure, when the real mistake came in accepting the military’s assessment and authorizing more troops, escalating the quagmire, digging in our heels. But Obama, for all his passionate objections to the Iraq War, always called the Afghan operation the war of necessity – until he decided that troops on the ground weren’t necessary to its objectives.
Sanger uses his considerable skills of characterization to provide vivid narratives of international policy struggles that often occur around crowded conference tables. Haughty Pakistani generals blow smoke in the faces of buttoned-up American intelligence and military officials. The two camps mesh so poorly there is no wonder why the relationship between the two ostensibly allied nations has deteriorated so much in the past few years. Sanger tells the story of Raymond Davis, a private intelligence contractor who kills two Pakistani operatives on the streets of Lahore in broad daylight. Washington must pull some strings to bring Davis back home from Pakistan where he faces trial and national vitriol. Bit by bit the slights add up, until the Pakistani parliament outlaws U.S. drone strikes in the country.
Recent criticism of Obama’s close involvement with drone targeting, particularly from the progressive press, has raised issues of executive authority. Obama managed, after the drawdown of troops, to lower the profile of the unpopular war in Afghanistan while at the same time removing all troops from Iraq. However, while the counterterrorism approach appears to be a public end to the war, Obama’s focus on covert operations, as in the Bin Laden raid, is really an escalation of certain types of violence that infringe on the sovereignty of foreign states. In Sanger’s account, this well-publicized (though never publically endorsed) covert activity has produced an American foreign policy more determined by the antagonistic unilateralism of the U.S.’s ostensible allies, particularly Pakistan and Israel, than by evenhanded diplomacy.
Looney Tunes humor aside, the image of Benjamin Netanyahu holding up a cartoon image of a bomb at the recent U.N. General Assembly speaks volumes about the lack of clearheaded debate. When the Israelis speak, they speak apocalyptically, and when they act, lately, they assassinate. While the posturing and bloviating of the Iranians, Americans and Israelis over Iran’s nuclear program seems old, the assassination of scientists, defection of Iranian operatives, and sabotage of Iranian nuclear materials by the Americans and Israelis, flesh out this secretive shadow war in Sanger’s narrative. Mossad’s recent brazenness in killing Iranian nuclear scientists with magnetic car bombs portends a dangerous game of espionage on par with Cold War operations, which, along with cyber sabotage, may be the only logical extension of aggression as all U.S.-Israeli bombing simulations show horrible consequences for the region and geopolitical security. This puts the U.S. and Obama, in particular, in a sticky diplomatic place.
Much of Sanger’s reportage, in Confront and Conceal, of the Stuxnet controversy and the Olympic Games project, raises serious questions about the press’s role in parroting state sources. This is particularly well illustrated when the press is invited to Idaho Falls for a cyber-defense demonstration, while only miles away the Olympic Games operation troubleshoots its planned attack on centrifuges in industrial warehouses. All we know we have learned from privileged sources. What have they deemed too sensitive to keep from the public eye? Whatever the case, when Obama slipped during a casual Google+ chat with young questioners and spoke frankly about the drone program, it must have driven the press crazy, as he’d been so scrupulously silent about it up until then and resumed this silence afterwards. At least we know who’s pulling the strings, even if he forgets every once in a while.
The American involvement in the Arab Spring presents a difficult policy narrative for Sanger to compile because the Obama administration has acted so contradictorily in different situations. This is not to say a nuanced approach does not make sense. It is hard, however, to tell, in his dealing with Mubarak and the Egyptian revolution, whether Obama was acting on strongly held principles or strategic interest, because he only gave the smallest of symbolic support to the protestors toward the end of their efforts to overthrow the regime. Obama, in fact, is almost absent in the post-revolutionary development of a democratic state in Egypt. Perhaps this shows that his conception of democracy includes a respect for a people’s self-determination, but many would argue that democracy must protect the rights of all people even if (perhaps especially if) the majority of people wish to infringe on the rights of a minority, which may be a real danger in Egypt. This lesson took nearly 200 years for American democracy to learn; perhaps Egypt needs a little help in jumpstarting this modernization towards moderation. While the two examples of Libya and Syria show contrasting approaches to humanitarian intervention, the administration’s justification for staying out of Syria – that it would mean a full scale war where American soldiers would be imperiled – is legitimate. Nevertheless, Syria might resemble Rwanda more than Libya ever could have, and the U.S.’s tragic inaction in Rwanda was used by Obama’s staff, especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as reasoning for the intervention in Libya.
The U.S. relationship with China, on the other hand, is less fraught with overt hostilities than its other competitors and outright enemies, not to mention many of its friends. Sanger explores this relationship mostly through the lens of North Korean disarmament, which China has been unable or unwilling to promote. China’s new diplomatic initiatives to rewrite international law around cyber security may provide Obama an access point in further negotiations with the often reticent Chinese.
As I ended my recent review of David Maraniss’s new biography of Obama with a laundry list of things Obama promised in his attempt to whip up progressive support during his campaign but failed to deliver on, I can’t help reiterating myself. Obama’s foreign policy, like much of his domestic policy, is marked by its inability to live up to the awesome and promising rhetoric Obama uses so deftly. He has yet to address climate change, energy policy or the staggering debt. Like at home, he has failed to build productive coalitions around these and other issues. I’m convinced he’s doing a better job than Romney would, but that’s not saying all that much.
In 2009 and 2010, a sophisticated computer virus dubbed Stuxnet by cyber security commentators infected programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at an Iranian nuclear facility, altering the speed of some of the plant’s centrifuges causing them to spin out of control and explode. Reporting by the New York Times’s David Sanger revealed Stuxnet as part of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush’s top secret Olympic Games program which explored the prospect of joint U.S. and Israeli offensive cyber measures in delaying Iran’s nuclear capability. Stuxnet infiltrated the Iranian system through USB drives, collected data for weeks or maybe even months unheeded by security and migrated to the dedicated Siemens PLCs where it completed its prescribed task. Only when Stuxnet went viral, infecting other computers in Iran not connected to the nuclear plant’s network, did the bug draw the attention of Iran and the international cyber security community.
Over two years later, many media outlets refuse to fully acknowledge that sponsorship of this most brazen attack on a sovereign nation came from the top of the U.S. and Israeli governments, from the very desks of Obama and Netanyahu and their predecessors. This media complicity in the U.S. and Israeli moratorium on speaking about cyber security issues in this light is fruitless. As reported by the Daily Telegraph, a laudatory video of the accomplishments of Gabi Ashkenazi, Chief of the Israeli General Staff, was shown at the General’s retirement party in February 2011. Stuxnet featured among the successes. Still, some of Sanger’s claims, particularly about the vector through which Stuxnet “escaped” the targeted Iranian network, have been questioned by cyber security experts such as Professor Larry Constantine of the University of Madeira in Portugal.
The complexity and efficiency of Stuxnet, however, has called the world’s attention to the danger of state-sponsored cyber-attacks. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, the largest private cyber security firm in the world, said recently, “Somewhere in 2020, maybe 2040, we’ll get back to a romantic time – no power, no cars, no trains.” Mainstream thinkers were not speaking like this before Stuxnet. Kaspersky drew an illustrative analogy at a recent conference in Washington. “If previous viruses were like bicycles,” Joseph Menn, for Reuters, reported Kaspersky saying, “then the Stuxnet worm that damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in Iran two years ago would be a plane, and the latest programs, dubbed Flame and Gauss, would be ‘space shuttles.’” And integral parts of Flame and Gauss, which infected Iranian oil infrastructure and Lebanese financial institutions respectively, indicate they are progeny of Stuxnet, though since the code became public the identity of the source of each program remains opaque. Kaspersky Lab researchers have found that Stuxnet, Flame, Gauss and other worms like them are being used as “warheads” and many of the malware “payloads” they carry have unknown objectives.
Kris Ardis, writing in EDN recently, compared the cyber security community’s reaction to Stuxnet to the TSA’s implementation of shoe screenings after the Richard Reid “Shoe Bomber” plot was foiled. “Security added at such a late step can only be superficial, only protecting against obvious threats,” Ardis writes. Still the U.S. military and national security apparatuses seem to be waking up to the issues in recent months, especially in light of further coverage of Olympic Games in the press. Michael Hayden former chief of NSA and CIA, speaking on a panel at the National Military Family Association in Arlington, Virginia in October, remarked, “In this era, practically all the external trends,” in cyber-technology particularly, “weaken the traditional unit of power, which is the nation state, and pushes power down … to private enterprise and pushes power down even to individuals,” and some of those individuals will inevitably be criminals and terrorists. On October 11, Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, admitted that foreign interests, whether state-sponsored or otherwise, have begun probes in vital infrastructure networks for private U.S. energy firms. “They are targeting the computer control systems that operate chemical, electricity and water plants, and those that guide transportation throughout the country,” Panetta said during a speech in New York. And for those of us concerned about the encroachment of executive powers on the protection of domestic and international law, Panetta continued, “If we detect an imminent threat of attack that will cause significant physical destruction or kill American citizens, we need to have the option to take action to defend the nation when directed by the President.” This sounds strikingly similar to all justifications for the use of American force since 9/11.
As with the use of drones, the most readily available analogous covert military operation of the Obama administration, the danger of reciprocity – the enemy using our own weapons against us – is unthinkable. But unlike drone technology, which is not easily replicated, even by sophisticated governments, replicating a virus like Stuxnet may be as easy as clicking copy and paste. According to Aviv Raff of Israeli cyber security firm Seculert, this copying and pasting has already begun in earnest. “Design features of Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame are appearing in opportunistic criminal malware,” he says.
Writing for the New Yorker before all of the details from Sanger’s reporting were revealed, Steve Coll wrote, “In national security as in much else, what goes around often comes around. Presidents Clinton and Bush reportedly both declined to use cyber-attacks to manipulate data and drain bank accounts whose balances supported Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Their reasoning was that the American economy depends to a great degree on the integrity of the international banking system; cyber sabotage would invite other states to try similar attacks; and the protective defenses of America’s own banks were weak.” We can only assume those other states and the terrorists they may harbor have gained technological wherewithal in the ensuing years. And as Coll and others have noted, the U.S. relies on networked infrastructure far more than any of its enemies.
China, ironically, is taking two apparently conflicting tacks in the international cyber security debate, calling for drastic revisions of international law in its application to cyber, and also supporting suspect military-allied telecom providers in the U.S. market. The U.S. Congress has accused two telecom companies in particular, Huawei and ZTE, of failing to comply with investigations according to Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek.
All of these dramatic new developments in cyber security discussions were enflamed by David Sanger’s reporting which was collected and expanded in his recent book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. Olympic Games and Stuxnet are the most novel uses of American power Sanger reveals, but each of them – the use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the escalation of Special Forces raids in finding Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives, the hands-off approach to the Arab Spring (except in Libya’s case), and the pivot to Asia – all hinge on a reduced physical footprint in national security campaigns necessitated by the recession Obama inherited from Bush.
In Confront and Conceal, Sanger frames questions of foreign policy in terms of historic scope, drawing comparisons between Obama’s inheritance of Afghanistan to Lyndon Johnson’s experience with the quagmire of Vietnam. While this may be apt in describing Obama’s initial escalation of the ground war – the troop surge – in Afghanistan, a more fitting analogy for the implications of drone and cyber warfare would be the Bay of Pigs crisis. As Coll writes in his New Yorker essay, “The United States thought it would monopolize nuclear weaponry for a lot longer than it did; the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb just four years after Nagasaki. It already seems evident that in the future, both lethal drone technology and the ability to conduct cyber attacks will be very broadly distributed—not just among governments, but among individuals, corporations, and terrorists.” When will the U.S. face the threat of a paralyzing cyber-attack? Sooner than we think.
Back to our physical quagmire, for a moment. Even in Sanger’s rather sympathetic text, Obama’s drawback of the surge is portrayed as a failure, when the real mistake came in accepting the military’s assessment and authorizing more troops, escalating the quagmire, digging in our heels. But Obama, for all his passionate objections to the Iraq War, always called the Afghan operation the war of necessity – until he decided that troops on the ground weren’t necessary to its objectives.
Sanger uses his considerable skills of characterization to provide vivid narratives of international policy struggles that often occur around crowded conference tables. Haughty Pakistani generals blow smoke in the faces of buttoned-up American intelligence and military officials. The two camps mesh so poorly there is no wonder why the relationship between the two ostensibly allied nations has deteriorated so much in the past few years. Sanger tells the story of Raymond Davis, a private intelligence contractor who kills two Pakistani operatives on the streets of Lahore in broad daylight. Washington must pull some strings to bring Davis back home from Pakistan where he faces trial and national vitriol. Bit by bit the slights add up, until the Pakistani parliament outlaws U.S. drone strikes in the country.
Recent criticism of Obama’s close involvement with drone targeting, particularly from the progressive press, has raised issues of executive authority. Obama managed, after the drawdown of troops, to lower the profile of the unpopular war in Afghanistan while at the same time removing all troops from Iraq. However, while the counterterrorism approach appears to be a public end to the war, Obama’s focus on covert operations, as in the Bin Laden raid, is really an escalation of certain types of violence that infringe on the sovereignty of foreign states. In Sanger’s account, this well-publicized (though never publically endorsed) covert activity has produced an American foreign policy more determined by the antagonistic unilateralism of the U.S.’s ostensible allies, particularly Pakistan and Israel, than by evenhanded diplomacy.
Looney Tunes humor aside, the image of Benjamin Netanyahu holding up a cartoon image of a bomb at the recent U.N. General Assembly speaks volumes about the lack of clearheaded debate. When the Israelis speak, they speak apocalyptically, and when they act, lately, they assassinate. While the posturing and bloviating of the Iranians, Americans and Israelis over Iran’s nuclear program seems old, the assassination of scientists, defection of Iranian operatives, and sabotage of Iranian nuclear materials by the Americans and Israelis, flesh out this secretive shadow war in Sanger’s narrative. Mossad’s recent brazenness in killing Iranian nuclear scientists with magnetic car bombs portends a dangerous game of espionage on par with Cold War operations, which, along with cyber sabotage, may be the only logical extension of aggression as all U.S.-Israeli bombing simulations show horrible consequences for the region and geopolitical security. This puts the U.S. and Obama, in particular, in a sticky diplomatic place.
Much of Sanger’s reportage, in Confront and Conceal, of the Stuxnet controversy and the Olympic Games project, raises serious questions about the press’s role in parroting state sources. This is particularly well illustrated when the press is invited to Idaho Falls for a cyber-defense demonstration, while only miles away the Olympic Games operation troubleshoots its planned attack on centrifuges in industrial warehouses. All we know we have learned from privileged sources. What have they deemed too sensitive to keep from the public eye? Whatever the case, when Obama slipped during a casual Google+ chat with young questioners and spoke frankly about the drone program, it must have driven the press crazy, as he’d been so scrupulously silent about it up until then and resumed this silence afterwards. At least we know who’s pulling the strings, even if he forgets every once in a while.
The American involvement in the Arab Spring presents a difficult policy narrative for Sanger to compile because the Obama administration has acted so contradictorily in different situations. This is not to say a nuanced approach does not make sense. It is hard, however, to tell, in his dealing with Mubarak and the Egyptian revolution, whether Obama was acting on strongly held principles or strategic interest, because he only gave the smallest of symbolic support to the protestors toward the end of their efforts to overthrow the regime. Obama, in fact, is almost absent in the post-revolutionary development of a democratic state in Egypt. Perhaps this shows that his conception of democracy includes a respect for a people’s self-determination, but many would argue that democracy must protect the rights of all people even if (perhaps especially if) the majority of people wish to infringe on the rights of a minority, which may be a real danger in Egypt. This lesson took nearly 200 years for American democracy to learn; perhaps Egypt needs a little help in jumpstarting this modernization towards moderation. While the two examples of Libya and Syria show contrasting approaches to humanitarian intervention, the administration’s justification for staying out of Syria – that it would mean a full scale war where American soldiers would be imperiled – is legitimate. Nevertheless, Syria might resemble Rwanda more than Libya ever could have, and the U.S.’s tragic inaction in Rwanda was used by Obama’s staff, especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as reasoning for the intervention in Libya.
The U.S. relationship with China, on the other hand, is less fraught with overt hostilities than its other competitors and outright enemies, not to mention many of its friends. Sanger explores this relationship mostly through the lens of North Korean disarmament, which China has been unable or unwilling to promote. China’s new diplomatic initiatives to rewrite international law around cyber security may provide Obama an access point in further negotiations with the often reticent Chinese.
As I ended my recent review of David Maraniss’s new biography of Obama with a laundry list of things Obama promised in his attempt to whip up progressive support during his campaign but failed to deliver on, I can’t help reiterating myself. Obama’s foreign policy, like much of his domestic policy, is marked by its inability to live up to the awesome and promising rhetoric Obama uses so deftly. He has yet to address climate change, energy policy or the staggering debt. Like at home, he has failed to build productive coalitions around these and other issues. I’m convinced he’s doing a better job than Romney would, but that’s not saying all that much.
June 13, 2012
Confront and Conceal is, in many ways, the sequel to The Inheritance. The Inheritance was about the foreign policy challenges Obama inherited from Bush. In Confront and Conceal, Sanger examines how Obama has faced those changes and attempts to pin down an “Obama Doctrine.” In Inheritance, Sanger presented America’s foreign policy challenges as almost siloed. Here, he makes clear that our continued presence in Afghanistan is largely driven by our strategic interests in Pakistan, and those strategic interests are amplified by our interest in not leaving Pakistan with the alternative of China as their major ally and benefactor. And the money to pay for it all comes from the same place. Everything is linked.
Confront and Conceal is organized into five parts, covering: Afghanistan & Pakistan, Iran, drones & cyber warfare, the Arab Spring, and China & North Korea. The section on Afghanistan & Pakistan is the longest by a fair margin, taking up almost one third of the book. China & North Korea, by comparison, is given short shrift. In my mind, it’s hard to argue that the Arab Spring deserves twice the space as China & North Korea.
A renewed exuberance for the Afghan war (reflecting Obama’s campaign rhetoric) soon faded under sober inspection. Transforming Afghanistan into a modern nation was not and never had been feasible. There is simply no way to replace the development aid and military spending that accounted for the vast majority of Afghanistan’s GDP. So our focus shifted to warily watching Pakistan and (rightly) putting our pursuit of al-Qaeda first, even if it means jeopardizing our relationship with Pakistan, as the mission to kill Osama bin Laden did. In the end, we will likely leave Afghanistan little better off than it was (although we lasted longer there than the Soviets), our relationship with Pakistan will remain fraught (but we can never end it lest China fill our void), and al-Qaeda may eventually be able to rebuild, but there is no doubt that we have dealt al-Qaeda a mighty blow. It is the one true success of the last three years.
Iran is one of two instances where Obama’s policy of more open engagement backfired on us. It soured our relationship with Israel (with settlements already a sore spot), and we wound up reacting to them instead of being proactive. We launched America’s first major cyber attack, dubbed Olympic Games, in conjunction with the Israelis in part to prevent them from preemptively bombing Iran. It was enormously successful on one level. We set Iran’s nuclear program back years. But we also inadvertently released a virus into the “wild,” and we have merely delayed, not stopped, Iran’s progress. Perhaps most disconcerting about this section is an apparent acquiescence to an eventual nuclear Iran on the part of members of the Obama administration (Israel understandably feels different; this is their Cuban Missile Crisis).
Drones and cyber warfare of course get ample attention in the first two parts, but Sanger devotes a (short) section entirely to them as well. They have become integral to American strategy. They were the two covert programs Bush urged Obama to preserve. Obama has not only preserved, but greatly expanded, our efforts on both fronts. And he has been deeply involved; “[p]erhaps not since Lyndon Johnson had sat in the same room, more than four decades before, picking bombing targets in North Vietnam, had a president of the United States been so intimately involved in the step-by-step escalation of an attack on a foreign nation’s infrastructure.” With cyber warfare, for now all the advantages lay with the attacker: they can wait for just the right moment to strike, the victim won’t know who hit him for far too long, and there is no effective deterrence. These are more disconcerting when we consider our own vulnerabilities. The attacks on Iran also showed that cyber attacks can cause physical damage.
The Arab Spring caught the administration flat-footed. But who could have ever predicted something like that? The better measure is how we reacted. Obama bumbled with Egypt, hit all the right notes in Lebanon (where Sanger sees American interests as small), and has been helpless to prevent the slaughter Syria (which Sanger sees as much more important to American interests). But for all its greater strategic importance, Syria is challenging in all the ways Lebanon was not, as Sanger takes pains to show.
The label ‘China and North Korea’ is a bit of a misnomer. It’s really a section on China with a few mentions of North Korea. But only because there isn’t much to say. How could we have learned so little in the past three years about a country that we once called part of an axis of evil? Sanger has little to nothing new to say about new North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Open engagement hurt us in China too—many Chinese leaders saw it as weakness. Americans often view China as monolithic and under the utter control of Hu Jintao, but Sanger explains that efforts to decentralize eroded the power of the central government, and American intelligence officers now recognize three factions: isolationists, those who see us as a friendly rival, and those who see us as a less-than-friendly rival.
Sanger’s primary goal is to pin down an Obama Doctrine (words the administration adamantly refuses to utter). He ultimately boils it down to a strategy of confrontation and concealment. Obama is no less likely than Bush to order a preemptive strike. He is far more likely to do it with drones, cyber weapons, or special forces. Ground wars are to be avoided at all costs. It’s too early to judge Obama’s presidency, though. Early on, Sanger points out that at this point in their presidencies, Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t look like debacles, Nixon hadn’t gone to China, and Truman’s policy of containment was still an experiment.
Where I think Sanger (and Obama) get it wrong is in the idea of a “new” military. A smaller, more flexible military that can strike but isn’t built to wage wars of occupation. But we thought much the same in the 90s. We will, at some point, feel we need to go into a country and wage war on the ground, and we will need ground troops to do it. And that ability gives us no small measure of “soft power.”
Confront and Conceal is organized into five parts, covering: Afghanistan & Pakistan, Iran, drones & cyber warfare, the Arab Spring, and China & North Korea. The section on Afghanistan & Pakistan is the longest by a fair margin, taking up almost one third of the book. China & North Korea, by comparison, is given short shrift. In my mind, it’s hard to argue that the Arab Spring deserves twice the space as China & North Korea.
A renewed exuberance for the Afghan war (reflecting Obama’s campaign rhetoric) soon faded under sober inspection. Transforming Afghanistan into a modern nation was not and never had been feasible. There is simply no way to replace the development aid and military spending that accounted for the vast majority of Afghanistan’s GDP. So our focus shifted to warily watching Pakistan and (rightly) putting our pursuit of al-Qaeda first, even if it means jeopardizing our relationship with Pakistan, as the mission to kill Osama bin Laden did. In the end, we will likely leave Afghanistan little better off than it was (although we lasted longer there than the Soviets), our relationship with Pakistan will remain fraught (but we can never end it lest China fill our void), and al-Qaeda may eventually be able to rebuild, but there is no doubt that we have dealt al-Qaeda a mighty blow. It is the one true success of the last three years.
Iran is one of two instances where Obama’s policy of more open engagement backfired on us. It soured our relationship with Israel (with settlements already a sore spot), and we wound up reacting to them instead of being proactive. We launched America’s first major cyber attack, dubbed Olympic Games, in conjunction with the Israelis in part to prevent them from preemptively bombing Iran. It was enormously successful on one level. We set Iran’s nuclear program back years. But we also inadvertently released a virus into the “wild,” and we have merely delayed, not stopped, Iran’s progress. Perhaps most disconcerting about this section is an apparent acquiescence to an eventual nuclear Iran on the part of members of the Obama administration (Israel understandably feels different; this is their Cuban Missile Crisis).
Drones and cyber warfare of course get ample attention in the first two parts, but Sanger devotes a (short) section entirely to them as well. They have become integral to American strategy. They were the two covert programs Bush urged Obama to preserve. Obama has not only preserved, but greatly expanded, our efforts on both fronts. And he has been deeply involved; “[p]erhaps not since Lyndon Johnson had sat in the same room, more than four decades before, picking bombing targets in North Vietnam, had a president of the United States been so intimately involved in the step-by-step escalation of an attack on a foreign nation’s infrastructure.” With cyber warfare, for now all the advantages lay with the attacker: they can wait for just the right moment to strike, the victim won’t know who hit him for far too long, and there is no effective deterrence. These are more disconcerting when we consider our own vulnerabilities. The attacks on Iran also showed that cyber attacks can cause physical damage.
The Arab Spring caught the administration flat-footed. But who could have ever predicted something like that? The better measure is how we reacted. Obama bumbled with Egypt, hit all the right notes in Lebanon (where Sanger sees American interests as small), and has been helpless to prevent the slaughter Syria (which Sanger sees as much more important to American interests). But for all its greater strategic importance, Syria is challenging in all the ways Lebanon was not, as Sanger takes pains to show.
The label ‘China and North Korea’ is a bit of a misnomer. It’s really a section on China with a few mentions of North Korea. But only because there isn’t much to say. How could we have learned so little in the past three years about a country that we once called part of an axis of evil? Sanger has little to nothing new to say about new North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Open engagement hurt us in China too—many Chinese leaders saw it as weakness. Americans often view China as monolithic and under the utter control of Hu Jintao, but Sanger explains that efforts to decentralize eroded the power of the central government, and American intelligence officers now recognize three factions: isolationists, those who see us as a friendly rival, and those who see us as a less-than-friendly rival.
Sanger’s primary goal is to pin down an Obama Doctrine (words the administration adamantly refuses to utter). He ultimately boils it down to a strategy of confrontation and concealment. Obama is no less likely than Bush to order a preemptive strike. He is far more likely to do it with drones, cyber weapons, or special forces. Ground wars are to be avoided at all costs. It’s too early to judge Obama’s presidency, though. Early on, Sanger points out that at this point in their presidencies, Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t look like debacles, Nixon hadn’t gone to China, and Truman’s policy of containment was still an experiment.
Where I think Sanger (and Obama) get it wrong is in the idea of a “new” military. A smaller, more flexible military that can strike but isn’t built to wage wars of occupation. But we thought much the same in the 90s. We will, at some point, feel we need to go into a country and wage war on the ground, and we will need ground troops to do it. And that ability gives us no small measure of “soft power.”
March 20, 2017
Thoroughly enjoyed David Sanger's look into the Obama administration. The depth of sourcing and reporting is incredible, and I really appreciated how consistently even-handed the perspective remained throughout. My slight critique is with the title; not so much that it doesn't quite fit (I still don't feel that it does), but that it makes a pretty bold statement that seems bolder than the thesis of the book. The title seems a little sensational for a reasoned and rounded report of the Obama administration's handling of foreign policy, since the narrative doesn't ever seem to take too strong a line, or at least as strong a line as the title indicates (dictates?). I think the title does a disservice to the strengths of the book, and I look forward to recommending it on the strength of its merits in spite of the slight contradiction.
January 19, 2018
This book was an even handed and well written account for American foreign policy during Obama's first term as president. It's refreshing to read about the complexities of our relationship to the world when there's so much partisan oversimplifying happening in the news. The account dives deep and describes the challenges Obama was facing in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libra, Syria, China, and North Korea. It certainly makes clear how difficult a job the presidency is when trying to walk the line between what you think is right, what the country can afford, and how it will be viewed throughout the world and at home.
The segment on Olympic Games, the cyber attack on the nuclear facilities at Natanz, Iran is what drew me to this book originally. But it's a far richer read than I imagined it would be.
The segment on Olympic Games, the cyber attack on the nuclear facilities at Natanz, Iran is what drew me to this book originally. But it's a far richer read than I imagined it would be.
July 14, 2020
I really wish that I would have read this 5 or 6 years ago.
An excellent review of Obama's first term in regards to his foreign policy. The book is very readable - a page turner. The background is outstanding and I'm surprised that much of the material covered is actually not classified.
Sanger presents the ups and downs of Obama's Foreign Policy. Significant effort is made to highlight both successes and failures. In the very significant anecdotes, it's clear that President Obama had an appreciation for process which some would argue that we're sorely missing these days.
An excellent review of Obama's first term in regards to his foreign policy. The book is very readable - a page turner. The background is outstanding and I'm surprised that much of the material covered is actually not classified.
Sanger presents the ups and downs of Obama's Foreign Policy. Significant effort is made to highlight both successes and failures. In the very significant anecdotes, it's clear that President Obama had an appreciation for process which some would argue that we're sorely missing these days.
December 24, 2024
Read this for a research paper I'm working on. It's a readable and interesting account of how Obama turned out to be more forceful in the use of US power than one would have expected from his campaign. Good accounts of US policies and dilemmas in Afghanistan, Iran, the Arab Spring, and elsewhere. Very good chapter on the Bin Laden raid. It's a bit outdated and ripped from the headlines, but Sanger is a great journalist, and this is still a useful book if you want a general account of Obama's first-term foreign policy.
May 3, 2025
I read this for class. It was a really good book. You can skip this one if you have read Woodward. Nothing super groundbreaking, but more strategic look at Obama's decision overall over his dealings with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, China, etc.
I definitely agree with the pivot away from middle east and understand or agree with his rationale. Even back then we were aware that China was a rising power and conflict could happen. Its 2025 now and that could happen.
I definitely agree with the pivot away from middle east and understand or agree with his rationale. Even back then we were aware that China was a rising power and conflict could happen. Its 2025 now and that could happen.
June 11, 2019
A decent read (well, half of it). Don't buy it, though. Find a free copy to download. Regardless of who fed him the data, the author has a responsibility to not publish what he knows contains classified information.
July 10, 2017
Look inside Obama challenges
Worth a read if you are a fan of national security policy. Stuxnet even gets its own whole chapter. Great read.
Worth a read if you are a fan of national security policy. Stuxnet even gets its own whole chapter. Great read.
December 18, 2018
Informative, tremendous detail, highlights and defines major foreign policy themes in early Obama years, but a bit overwhelming in its breadth
March 27, 2020
A solid read with some good insight and access to those involved in the American side of the subject matter.
July 31, 2024
Interesting read on how international conflict has shifted, and how and why Obama's promises and outcomes differed. Only covers most of first term, and therefore depicts an incomplete legacy.
July 11, 2017
Barack Obama may have been the only Nobel Peace Prize winner in history to order lethal force used on a regular basis, but things could have been worse. Confront and Conceal attempts to make a case for an "Obama Doctrine", one which avoids epic disasters like the destruction of Iraq, but still asserts American influence via surgical operations and international organizations. Sanger reviews the actions of the Obama White House regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, China and Iran, with a special section on drones and cyberwarfare. He relies on extensive interviews with administration officials, including then-secretary of State, Clinton, as well as State Department cables which were made available via Wikileaks. He creates a picture of an Obama who -- though mocked for his weakness or aggression, depending on the mocker -- attempted a cautious but efficacious approach to foreign policy. Considering Sanger's access -- interviewing heap-big chiefs as high as as the secretary of state- - it is perhaps no surprise that the representation rendered here is admiring, on the whole.
Obama encountered no shortage of foreign policy crises during his first time. He began it faced with the deathly tar pit of Afghanistan, further complicated by the amount of trouble-makers hiding in the western fringes of Pakistan. Excising the United States from Afghanistan wasn't as simple a matter as cutting losses and leaving, for neither the DC nor Pakistan desired a power vacuum between Pakistan and Iran. The Arab spring, which forced DC to choose between its interests and its proclaimed values, further muddied the waters. The cascade of populist revolts took everyone by surprise, including the President who was determined to restore the American reputation in the middle east. To avoid messes like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama preferred to use a light footprint approach: if American interests were at risk, then action must be taken --but the action should be swift and precise, using new tools like drones and cyberwarfare. Diplomacy was preferable to brute force, however: Obama was also a genuine internationalist, who preferred using global organizations to apply pressure to ne'er do wells like Qaddafi, and to effect change. This was not always possible; the Iranians didn't trust his intentions and regarded him as timid; the international community remains divided over Syria, with some supporting Assad and others supporting the rebels and ISIS. Ditto for North Korea: as vexsome as they are to all of their neighbors, China included, they won't just go away. Leaving the north in the hands of the Kim family cult isn't an attractive option for China, but it's more attractive than millions of malnourished and uneducated refugees streaming into China.
While I am not a fan of the bloated government in DC, in any administration. I did have a grudging respect for much of Obama's foreign policy, however, at least until he began getting the country more entangled with Syria and resurrecting Cold War tensions. That respect was validated here, as Obama seems to have approached DC's expanse of empire with the desire to do as little damage as possible. I don't know how strong willed and idealistic someone would have to be to sit in the One Chair of the west wing, surrounded by the whispering host of the DC establishment, faced with a neverending series of crises and commitments, and say "To hell with you, I'm not playing this game", and start manipulating the Titanic of state away from its inevitable course of empire. Obama seems to have resisted it for several years: agreeing to escalate in Afghanistan, but only with a pre-determined date to cut losses and run; continuing Bush's development of the Olympic Games project, which would give him more options in Iran; and using drones instead of conventional bombing and strike team, because those were the only options DC produced. (The targets were 'terrorists', of course. DC wouldn't casually assassinate just any reichsfeinde. That would never happen, no sir.)
Cantankerous sarcasm aside, Confront and Conceal was a varied and endlessly fascinating history given the range of topics and their (unfortunately) continued relevance. The Kims are even more problematic now than they were; Syria continues to exact a morbid fascination for the establishment, and China...well, it's still there. So too are the opportunities for mischief the digital world has opened, as this weekend's crippling wave of digital attacks (chiefly in Britain) have shown all too well. I would take its general admiration for the establishment with no small level of salt, however. Foreign-policy wise, I think it's especially helpful for the material on the US-Pakistan relationship.
Related:
Playing to the Edge, Michael Hayden. Another keyhole light inside the establishment.
Obama encountered no shortage of foreign policy crises during his first time. He began it faced with the deathly tar pit of Afghanistan, further complicated by the amount of trouble-makers hiding in the western fringes of Pakistan. Excising the United States from Afghanistan wasn't as simple a matter as cutting losses and leaving, for neither the DC nor Pakistan desired a power vacuum between Pakistan and Iran. The Arab spring, which forced DC to choose between its interests and its proclaimed values, further muddied the waters. The cascade of populist revolts took everyone by surprise, including the President who was determined to restore the American reputation in the middle east. To avoid messes like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama preferred to use a light footprint approach: if American interests were at risk, then action must be taken --but the action should be swift and precise, using new tools like drones and cyberwarfare. Diplomacy was preferable to brute force, however: Obama was also a genuine internationalist, who preferred using global organizations to apply pressure to ne'er do wells like Qaddafi, and to effect change. This was not always possible; the Iranians didn't trust his intentions and regarded him as timid; the international community remains divided over Syria, with some supporting Assad and others supporting the rebels and ISIS. Ditto for North Korea: as vexsome as they are to all of their neighbors, China included, they won't just go away. Leaving the north in the hands of the Kim family cult isn't an attractive option for China, but it's more attractive than millions of malnourished and uneducated refugees streaming into China.
While I am not a fan of the bloated government in DC, in any administration. I did have a grudging respect for much of Obama's foreign policy, however, at least until he began getting the country more entangled with Syria and resurrecting Cold War tensions. That respect was validated here, as Obama seems to have approached DC's expanse of empire with the desire to do as little damage as possible. I don't know how strong willed and idealistic someone would have to be to sit in the One Chair of the west wing, surrounded by the whispering host of the DC establishment, faced with a neverending series of crises and commitments, and say "To hell with you, I'm not playing this game", and start manipulating the Titanic of state away from its inevitable course of empire. Obama seems to have resisted it for several years: agreeing to escalate in Afghanistan, but only with a pre-determined date to cut losses and run; continuing Bush's development of the Olympic Games project, which would give him more options in Iran; and using drones instead of conventional bombing and strike team, because those were the only options DC produced. (The targets were 'terrorists', of course. DC wouldn't casually assassinate just any reichsfeinde. That would never happen, no sir.)
Cantankerous sarcasm aside, Confront and Conceal was a varied and endlessly fascinating history given the range of topics and their (unfortunately) continued relevance. The Kims are even more problematic now than they were; Syria continues to exact a morbid fascination for the establishment, and China...well, it's still there. So too are the opportunities for mischief the digital world has opened, as this weekend's crippling wave of digital attacks (chiefly in Britain) have shown all too well. I would take its general admiration for the establishment with no small level of salt, however. Foreign-policy wise, I think it's especially helpful for the material on the US-Pakistan relationship.
Related:
Playing to the Edge, Michael Hayden. Another keyhole light inside the establishment.
July 21, 2012
David Brooks commented in a recent NYT piece ("Where Obama Shines", July 19, 2012) that Obama has been a pretty effective president, from a foreign policy standpoint: "He, Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of his team have created a style of policy making that is flexible, incremental and well adapted to the specific circumstances of this moment. Following a foreign policy hedgehog, Obama’s been a pretty effective fox." David Sanger's Confront and Conceal lays out some of the details of Obama's policy, specifically in regards to the Middle East. Sanger notes, "By narrowing America’s strategic objectives, by showing considerable patience and ingenuity in handling challenges like Iran’s nuclear ambitions, by rethinking the management of China’s new influence, and by insisting that other nations no longer take American intervention for granted, Obama created a foundation for a new direction for America’s global role." The key to Obama's policy is a new willingness to act unilaterally, quickly, and with deadly force where needed. The examples are clear: the bin Laden raid, the escalating drone strikes that have brought al-Qaeda to the brink of strategic defeat, and—perhaps most important as a symbol of Obama’s approach—Olympic Games, the plot to destroy the Iranian uranium enrichment facility via cyber-espionage.
The chapter on Olympic games is by far the most interesting and engaging chapter in the book. As Sanger describes it,
"The intent of the operation was twofold. The first was to cripple, at least for a while, Iran’s nuclear progress. The second, equally vital, was to convince the Israelis that there was a smarter, more elegant way to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem than launching an airstrike that could quickly escalate into another Middle East war, one that would send oil prices soaring and could involve all the most volatile players in the region."
Sanger describes the operation in great detail, and has clearly enjoyed incredibly privileged access to top intelligence officials within the US government. Reading the detailed description of the whole process by which Olympic games was put together and implemented, I couldn't help but wonder, is this a good thing? Is it really necessary to have a reporter reveal every detail of the planning and operation of one of the most sophisticated cyber-weapons ever created? Officially declared or not, we are at war with Iran, and I don't see the benefit to US interests of the release of sensitive intelligence data to the general public. During World War II, would it have been acceptable for a New York Times reporter to published detailed stories about the Allie's use of the broken Japanese military codes, just a few months after the battle of Midway, when the war was not yet won?
This is a well researched, engagingly written book, and certainly highly illuminating. I just wonder what damage may have been done to the US intelligence community, and if it was really necessary for this book to be published now.
The chapter on Olympic games is by far the most interesting and engaging chapter in the book. As Sanger describes it,
"The intent of the operation was twofold. The first was to cripple, at least for a while, Iran’s nuclear progress. The second, equally vital, was to convince the Israelis that there was a smarter, more elegant way to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem than launching an airstrike that could quickly escalate into another Middle East war, one that would send oil prices soaring and could involve all the most volatile players in the region."
Sanger describes the operation in great detail, and has clearly enjoyed incredibly privileged access to top intelligence officials within the US government. Reading the detailed description of the whole process by which Olympic games was put together and implemented, I couldn't help but wonder, is this a good thing? Is it really necessary to have a reporter reveal every detail of the planning and operation of one of the most sophisticated cyber-weapons ever created? Officially declared or not, we are at war with Iran, and I don't see the benefit to US interests of the release of sensitive intelligence data to the general public. During World War II, would it have been acceptable for a New York Times reporter to published detailed stories about the Allie's use of the broken Japanese military codes, just a few months after the battle of Midway, when the war was not yet won?
This is a well researched, engagingly written book, and certainly highly illuminating. I just wonder what damage may have been done to the US intelligence community, and if it was really necessary for this book to be published now.
April 2, 2013
This book is a fascinating look into current events in the Middle East
and Asia and how President Obama and his team of advisers are reacting
and dealing with those events.
The book's author seems to be in on the inside track when it comes
to getting access to President Obama's key people in the Oval
Office. I'm impressed that the author was able to relay candid
interviews from such people as Hilary Clinton, Gen. Stanley
McChrystal and Robert Gates. The author also relays conversations
with people from other countries' governments such as Gen. Ashraf Kayani
of Pakistan, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel.
The book is a fascinating account of President Obama's new doctrine
of leveraging the United States leadership in technology such as
the use of drones to hunt and destroy terrorists wherever they
may be (and the resultant difficulties in continuing to justify
their use), use of consensus to force other countries to contribute
men and material to enforce UN Security Council resolutions and
a light footprint thru the use of Special Operation Forces
when conducting military operations.
The book also deals with difficulties in dealing with such
countries as Iran, North Korea and China and spent a lot of
time discussing the events leading to the downfall of Egypt's
Mubarak during the Arab Spring and the resulting chaotic struggle
for power among the various factions in Egypt led by the Muslim
Brotherhood.
The book reads like a fast paced novel about US foreign policy
with plenty of reflections on President Obama's handling of
various crises that he faced during his first term as President
of the United States. I like that the book deals with events
that occurred fairly recently (such as the Arab Spring in Tunisia
and Egypt, termination of Bin Laden by Seal Team Six, fall of
Libya's Gaddafi, current rebellion in Syria and the change
in leadership in China). Because of this, it is fresh and
familiar and adds to the understanding of problems occurring
in other countries and the difficult choices that President
Obama faces when dealing with these kinds of problems.
My favorite parts of the book:
a. Extricating the USA from Afghanistan without leaving that
country a breeding ground for terrorists.
b. Operation code named "Olympic Games" which detailed the use
of a computer virus specifically crafted to destroy Iran's
nuclear centrifuges.
c. Detailing the difficulties that President Obama is currently
facing to justify the use of drones to attach terrorist cells
inside Pakistan.
d. Delicate balancing act to reassure Israel that the US has their
back and not to launch any kind of pre-emptive strike against
Iran.
e. Rise of China economically, politically and militarily and
the choices that the USA faces to deal with this rise. Also,
how to mitigate China's bullying attitudes towards its
neigbors (Vietnam, Japan, Philippines etc.) in support of its
territorial claims
and Asia and how President Obama and his team of advisers are reacting
and dealing with those events.
The book's author seems to be in on the inside track when it comes
to getting access to President Obama's key people in the Oval
Office. I'm impressed that the author was able to relay candid
interviews from such people as Hilary Clinton, Gen. Stanley
McChrystal and Robert Gates. The author also relays conversations
with people from other countries' governments such as Gen. Ashraf Kayani
of Pakistan, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel.
The book is a fascinating account of President Obama's new doctrine
of leveraging the United States leadership in technology such as
the use of drones to hunt and destroy terrorists wherever they
may be (and the resultant difficulties in continuing to justify
their use), use of consensus to force other countries to contribute
men and material to enforce UN Security Council resolutions and
a light footprint thru the use of Special Operation Forces
when conducting military operations.
The book also deals with difficulties in dealing with such
countries as Iran, North Korea and China and spent a lot of
time discussing the events leading to the downfall of Egypt's
Mubarak during the Arab Spring and the resulting chaotic struggle
for power among the various factions in Egypt led by the Muslim
Brotherhood.
The book reads like a fast paced novel about US foreign policy
with plenty of reflections on President Obama's handling of
various crises that he faced during his first term as President
of the United States. I like that the book deals with events
that occurred fairly recently (such as the Arab Spring in Tunisia
and Egypt, termination of Bin Laden by Seal Team Six, fall of
Libya's Gaddafi, current rebellion in Syria and the change
in leadership in China). Because of this, it is fresh and
familiar and adds to the understanding of problems occurring
in other countries and the difficult choices that President
Obama faces when dealing with these kinds of problems.
My favorite parts of the book:
a. Extricating the USA from Afghanistan without leaving that
country a breeding ground for terrorists.
b. Operation code named "Olympic Games" which detailed the use
of a computer virus specifically crafted to destroy Iran's
nuclear centrifuges.
c. Detailing the difficulties that President Obama is currently
facing to justify the use of drones to attach terrorist cells
inside Pakistan.
d. Delicate balancing act to reassure Israel that the US has their
back and not to launch any kind of pre-emptive strike against
Iran.
e. Rise of China economically, politically and militarily and
the choices that the USA faces to deal with this rise. Also,
how to mitigate China's bullying attitudes towards its
neigbors (Vietnam, Japan, Philippines etc.) in support of its
territorial claims
Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews