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From: Fabrice Aidan [iy Sent: 7/11/2013 2:44:31 PM To: Jeffrey Epstein [jeevacation@gmail.com] Subject: Fwd: (s) 7/11, Atlantic Council (Hof): Syria: Blackberry Diplomacy Importance: — High You'll find it interesting. Warm regards Envoyé de mon iPhone Début du message transféré : Expéditeur: GBIU-MideastNews <GBIU-MideastNews@dentons.com> Date: 11 Juillet 2013 LEa8309 UTC+02:00 "Gray, Alex" Be "Mahle, Melissa Ee _ CS Objet: (s) 7/11, Atlantic Council (Hof): Syria: Blackberry Diplomacy Atlantic Council Syria: Blackberry Diplomacy By Frederic C. Hof July 11, 2013 A friendly discussion about Syria with a former US State Department colleague gave rise to a point | will not soon forget. "Fred, there's no time for policy deliberations about Syria or anyplace else. We live in the era of Blackberry diplomacy. We react and we improvise as best we can." Anyone under the age of thirty reading the above would probably think, "Why in the world is the US government using the Blackberry?" Those who turned thirty long before the end of the last century—even those of us who try seriously not to be technological Luddites—wonder sometimes if the communications revolution and the 24/7 news cycle it has spawned will end up doing more harm than good to the progress of civilization and well-being of the republic. Those who have had the privilege and burden of working in the US national security establishment are well-acquainted with how hard it is to find time to think. This was true long before the advent of email and other forms of electronic communication. Although there may have been times when officials could contemplate great matters of state at something approaching leisure, those days have been long gone. Even offices created expressly to explore policy options stretching beyond a twenty minute horizon—the State Department's Policy Planning Staff comes to mind—routinely get pulled into the maelstrom of daily struggles to manage breaking developments through some combination of strategic messaging and diplomatic demarches. Email makes it easy for officials up-and-down the chain to plunge into the fray, battling to mold language for use at a daily briefing; language that all-too-often mystifies or misleads foreign listeners who hang on words from the podium as if they are meant to convey the results of deep, deliberative thought on the part of the world's only superpower. Yet email neither created the problem nor prevents its solution. The problem is the failure of government, certainly in the context of Syria and likely in other foreign policy contexts as well, to wrap the daily news cycle food fight in an insulated casing of objectives and strategy clearly understandable to those charged with planning and executing foreign or national security policy. There may be some who believe that objectives and strategy are just so 20th century; so Brent Scowcroft-like and so pre-Twitter. There may be some who actually handle affairs of state in ways they would not dream of applying to their personal financial portfolios. Perhaps resistance to structured, deliberative processes producing objectives and accompanying strategies is a function of fewer and fewer people in the national security establishment ever having availed themselves of military service; an experience where matters of this nature become, through training and education, as natural as breathing. Perhaps in the specific case of Syria there has been a temptation to avoid the hard choices such a process would serve up in the hope that the regime of Bashar al-Assad would just go away, thereby making hard choices someone else's problem. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030209