User:Timoleon212/Mark Riebling

Mark Riebling is a U.S. political philosopher, historian, and policy analyst. He directs the Book Program at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He co-founded and served as Research Director for the Center for Policing Terrorism, which helps state-and-local police formulate counter-terrorism policy. He is the author of Wedge: How the Secret War between the CIA and FBI Has Endangered National Security. Riebling has written also on other problems of U.S. national security; on the U.S. conservative-intellectual movement; and on secret Vatican Policy during the Cold War and in the Second World War.

Background
Before joining the Manhattan Institute, Mark Riebling worked for several years as a book editor in the Adult Trade Division at Random House; as a researcher for William F. Buckley, Jr., and as a curator for the papers and manuscripts of Ayn Rand. Riebling studied philosophy and comparative literature at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. He attended Dartmouth College and the University of California at Berkeley, as a President's Fellow, and graduated from Berkeley with a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy, studying under A.A. Long, Donald Davidson, and Michel Foucault.

Influence of His Ideas
In Reform of U.S. Intelligence Community

Discussing Rieblng's book, Wedge, in The Washington Post, Vernon Loeb wrote in 2002 that "Riebling's thesis -- that the FBI-CIA rivalry had “damaged the national security and, to that extent, imperiled the Republic” -- was provocative at the time, [but] seems prescient now, with missed communications between the two agencies looming as the principal cause of intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Andrew C. McCarthy, the deputy U.S. attorney who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombers in 1993, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2006 that "Riebling’s analysis [of U.S. intelligence dysfunction] has now become conventional wisdom, accepted on all sides. Such, indeed, is the reasoning behind virtually all of the proposals now under consideration by no fewer than seven assorted congressional committees, internal evaluators, and blue-ribbon panels charged with remedying the intelligence situation." In his January 28, 2003 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush announced an initiative to close what he termed the "seam" between FBI and CIA coverage of foreign threats, as Riebling recommended in Wedge.

In National-Security Studies

Rieblng's writings are used as course or research texts at the Institute for World Politics, Georgetown University, the U.S. Army War College, and the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence. In Espionage: A Reference Handbook, Glenn P. Hastedt writes that “Riebling’s concern for the rivalry and competitive nature of the relationship between the intelligence community is frequently commented upon in studies of intelligence estimates.” In Remaking Domestic Intelligence, Richard A. Posner develops Riebling's proposal, first advanced in Wedge, for a new domestic intelligence service based on the model of Britian's MI5.

Writings on National Security
'Wedge: The Secret War Between the CIA and FBI''

Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, and reissued in paperback by Simon and Schuster, with a new epilogue, after 9/11, Wedge traces the conflict between U.S. law enforcement and intelligence, from World War Two through the post-Cold-War era. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Riebling unearthed new materials from both agencies, and argued that FBI-CIA relations were fractured from the start.

Riebling devotes considerable attention to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His take is that "liaison problems" between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. "contributed" to the Dallas tragedy, impeded the investigation and led to a "fight that precluded the truth from being inarguably known."

Riebling writes that the Nixon White House quietly encouraged the two agencies to encroach on each other's territory, and it established the notorious rump group known as the Plumbers, whose key operatives came from both the FBI and CIA. Wedge also describes the roles of the FBI and CIA in a later Presidential scandal, the Iran-contra affair, which led FBI agents, bolstered by evidence of illegal CIA assistance to the Nicaraguan contras, to ransack the office safe of the CIA’s deputy director for operations.

In the epilogue to the paperback edition, Riebling argues that the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen spy cases further soured relations, resulting in liaison problems that contributed to the intelligence failures of 9/11.

The New Paradigm: Merging Law Enforcement and Intelligence

In a 2006 analysis for the Center for Policing Terrorism, Riebling proposed a new model for domestic security policy. The U.S. needed a new paradigm, he argued, because "all the physical and conceptual walls associated with the modern, sovereign state—the walls that divide domestic from international, the police from the military, intelligence from law enforcement, war from peace, and crime from war—are coming down." As an example, Riebling wrote,

consider the crash that killed Princess Diana. This accident involved an English princess, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.

Riebling's paradigm, "Intelligence-Led Policing," leveraged both Israeli counter-terrorist tactics, and the NYPD "Broken Windows" policing theories, first advanced by Georg Kelling and James Q. Wilson, and implemented under Mayor Rudolf Giuliani by NYPD chiefs Raymond Kelly and William Bratton. Among the Broken-Windows mechanisms, Riebling's model blended problem solving, environmental design, community policing, and public-private partnerships. The basic premise of Riebling's Intelligence-Led Policing theory, meanwhile, readily adapted the Israeli model. Discussing the operations of the Israeli National Police in Tel Aviv, for instance, Riebling emphasized that "investigation of the incident, even a traffic accident, is secondary to the number one goal—which is gathering intelligence. For instance, when they raided a bordello, where the patrons were primarily Arabs from different parts of the region, Israeli police were less concerned about the criminal activity, than with preparing intelligence reports on who these people were, and how they got into Israel."

Views on Military Intelligence

In a review of Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, Riebling argued that "the Pentagon’s judgments about the world have generally proved sounder than the CIA’s," because defense bureaucracies “are rarely infected with such intellectual vogues as tend to deprecate the possibility of surprise or the eternality of conflict." Military intelligence officers, Riebling contended, "cannot afford to be celebrators of diversity, utopians, game-theorists, apostles of negotiation, or purveyors of the idea that the Internet will bring us all together."

Call for Repeal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (June 4, 2002), Riebling argued that "Our current surveillance rules are neither constitutionally required, nor traditionally American. ... For the first two centuries of our country's history, threats to our national security were countered without warrant. And the Supreme Court, from Olmstead v. U.S. (1928) to U.S. v. U.S. District Court (1972), has allowed warrantless surveillance in national security, as opposed to criminal, investigations."

Writings on Vatican Policy
Reagan's Pope

Examining declassified files from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, Riebling has attempted to reconstruct the Cold War alliance between Reagan and Pope John Paul II. In a 2005 article, Riebling described documentation on the first contacts between the pope and the president; nuclear brinksmanship and disarmament; the Solidarity crisis in Poland; and Vice President George Bush's private 1984 meeting with the pope. According to Riebling, the record shows "a continuous scurrying to shore up Vatican support for U.S. policies. Perhaps most surprisingly, the papers show that that, as late as 1984, the pope did not believe the Communist Polish government could be changed."

Jesus, Jews, and the Shoah

Reviewing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book A Moral Reckoning, Riebling criticizes "the leftist paradigms" he says have "come to dominate" study of Third Reich. According to Riebling, leftist historians have "posited exculpatory social structures, collectivities, or 'irresistible forces'" to explain the Shoah. Riebling praises Goldhagen, by contrast, for presenting Germans "as individual moral agents, as thinking and choosing beings." He criticizes Goldhagen, however, for arguing that the wartime Pope, Pius XII,"was serving... the closest human analogue to the Antichrist, Hitler," thus "tacitly and sometimes materially aid[ing] in mass murder." Riebling takes direct exception to Goldhagen's assertion that Pius "chose again and again not to mention the Jews publicly.... [In] public statements by Pius XII . . . any mention of the Jews is conspicuously absent." Riebling writes that Pius used the word "Jew" in his very first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, published on October 20, 1939. "There Pius insisted that all human beings be treated charitably -- for, as Paul had written to the Colossians, in God's eyes "there is neither Gentile nor Jew." In saying this, the Pope affirmed that Jews were full members of the human community -- which is Goldhagen's own criterion for establishing 'dissent from the anti-Semitic creed.'"

Critique of Conservative Reason
Overview of Riebling's Argument

Since the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Riebling has explored "what it means to be a conservative in the age of Obama." He argues that because conservatism emerged as an ad-hoc, Cold-War coalition, it has proven inadequate to post-communist realities. He re-redefines 21st-century conservatism as "the political philosophy of personal responsibility," and grounds this conception in what he terms "the defining Western idea: human nature is choice."

What’s Wrong with the Right?

Riebling argues that the "anticommunist urgencies" of postwar conservatism "subverted the traditional primacy of intellect over politics. Rather than deriving our politics from an intellectual movement, like liberalism, we improvised an intellectual coat of arms to legitimize our policies." Finding scant support on the Old Right for anti-communist “garrison state,” Riebling asserts, Cold-War conservatives "bought into Lionel Trilling’s famous dictum," and decided America lacked a “true” conservative-intellectual tradition.

From Russell Kirk to Irving Kristol, a quorum on the right has consequently rested its defense of American values on European foundations (Burke, Tocqueville). That’s undermined the resonance of the conservative case in the American public square; and while the ad-hoc approach got the Right through the Cold War, it has been less adequate to the Culture War. As a result, conservatives often have the better facts but the worse arguments.

Understanding American conservatism "anew, and aright," Riebling contends, "is therefore an exercise in retrieval."

What Is Conservativism?

Riebling proposes to approach this question in what he calls "an Aristotelian way, reflecting on 'how we talk about these things in daily life." A conservative, RIebling contends, explains behavior spiritually, and personalizes responsibility.

In Aristotelian terms, “the principle of motion is within us.” A liberal, by contrast, explains behavior mechanically, and externalizes responsibility: “the principle of motion is outside us.” Thus, in the typical policy debate, a liberal makes excuses for the human agent, and a conservative places blame. The spark of the liberal argument -- “He didn’t have the same opportunities you did” -- meets the conservative conceptual firewall: “Lots of people start poor, but still find ways to make it.”

Riebling's next step is to ask: If conservatism is the political philosophy of personal responsibility, then on what view of man must it rest? In Kantian terms: How is personal responsibility possible? According to Riebling, "That [question] tracks us back to a worldview of human nature as choice, and character as destiny -- the mainstream moral tradition of the West."

We are not free to choose our nature; rather, our nature is to make choices, for which we are personally responsible. To sum up the human condition in a single, simple sentence, compressing the essence of a 2500-year conversation: We must choose to act on what we know.

Retrieving the "Lost Tradition"

Riebling then proposes to map this moral tradition in the American mind. He locates its intellectual godparent in Puritan minister Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island. "From the soul’s personal responsibility to choose its own path to God, Williams deduced that we must be free to choose to act on what we know -- and from this principle, he fashioned the first truly free society." From Williams, Riebling traces the political idea of personal responsibility through the Founders, the Seekers, the Unitarians, the Transcendentalists, the Self-Help movement, and ultimately to Goldwater and Reagan.

Revaluation of Conservative Values

Riebling's final move is to apply this rediscovered tradition to the present, "renewing the conservative policy-agenda." A conservative in the Age of Obama, Riebling argues, "must defend and extend the freedom to act on what we know." Riebling presents an integrated tiara of policies, which he argues "can garner bi-partisan political support, and transform the quality of American life." The issue-areas in which he proposes a personal-responsibility approach include: policing and prisoner re-entry, race and ethnicity, welfare, the economy, medical progress, social entrepreneurship, education, the civil justice system, and urban policy.

Critique of Randian Reason
Atlas Shagged

In an analysis of Ayn Rand's theory of sex, Riebling has developed several philosophical criticisms of what he calls "official Objectivism." He writes: Granted, man is "the rational animal" -- but reading objectivists on sex, one might easily conclude that man is rational only, and animal not at all." Riebling adds:

Under Aristotle’s rubric, man has by nature many desires. We desire by nature to know, to eat, to drink, to sleep, etc. Objectivism should not have any problem with such natural proclivities; and indeed, Miss Rand seems to acknowledge them in a justly praised passage of “The Objectivist Ethics,” where she reminds us that our stomachs will tell us we are hungry, but not how to obtain food. Thus too, our loins will tell us we are horny, but not with whom we should sleep. In both cases we must choose consciously whether, and how, to satisfy our appetites.

"How we should manage our appetites is of course an ancient question in ethics," Riebling continues. "It has been of great concern to the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, the Christians, the Moslems, and in fact to most everyone except objectivists. This raises another weakness in official objectivism: its tepid participation in the Great Western Conversation, its tacky and in sometimes counterfactual insistence on its own revolutionary newness, and its marked aversion to the finding of continuities with any pre-Randians but Aristotle."

Take, for instance, Emerson’s statement: “Wealth is mental, wealth is moral” (“Wealth," 1861). This strophe encapsulates, and anticipates, a key theme of Atlas Shrugged.  Yet rather than positioning herself as the corrector and reviser of a pre-existent, uniquely American, individualist tradition -- rather than citing Emerson to buttress the very point she tries to make in her Cosmo piece -- Miss Rand dismisses him as “a very little mind.”

So, too, Riebling argues, "objectivists fail to align themselves with Stoics like Marcus Aurelius -- who espoused self-mastery, defined as the harnessing of appetites by reason. Objectivists thus unmoor themselves from two-plus millennia of answers to uniquely human problems: e.g., how to get over on a Saturday night without feeling bad about it on Sunday morning."

Personal Life
Mark Riebling has been romantically linked to several celebrities, including Stacy London, co-host of the TLC television program "What Not To Wear"; model and television host Alli Joseph; and film and television actress Robin Swid. His friends include Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of the rock group Rush, who mentions Riebling in his books Ghost Rider and Traveling Music.