A Mild Plea for Assistance

As many readers of The Duck may know I am currently on hiatus working full time and writing my dissertation--a handful to say the least.

To that end, can anyone recommend any books or articles that do a good job of summarizing the literature on presidential rhetoric and its influence on public opinion? I am looking for literature on this topic generally, on presidential influence on foreign policy as well as presidential approval ratings.

Many thanks in advance!

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Is Kenneth Waltz an IR Liberal?

Deborah Boucoyannis has published a thought-provoking article in this month’s Perspectives on Politics in which she argues that neo-realism is actually most consistent with classical liberalism, and in which she articulates a new way of distinguishing realist and liberal IR theory.

If her argument is correct, most of us will have to completely rethink how we teach the two theories in our introductory classes.

In particular, she argues that “the balance of power is a liberal prediction…” (underlying the checks and balances systems of liberal constitutionalism as well as the logic of economic liberalism) and by contrast, realism is “better defined as the theory predicting that balances will not occur; that concentrations of power will form, thus destabilizing the system and threatening the security of individual units.”

There are so many fascinating parts of this article I can’t name them all. Boucoyannis’s done us an an enormous service by disaggregating classical and contemporary realism and liberalism, and sorting out the contradictions between IR liberalism and economic and constitutionalism liberalism. (That alone will help me greatly as I attempt each semester to get my policy students to forget everything they’ve ever learned about what the term means in domestic politics.) And her disassociation of Realism and state-centrism is particularly interesting.

But I see two weaknesses in the argument. First, Boucoyannis seems to confuse prediction with prescription in her genealogy of these two theories and her description of their variations. She is trying to redefine them according to what they predict about balancing. But it seems to me that the distinction between IR liberalism and IR realism is not their predictions about that, but rather their predictions about the consequences of balancing, and therefore their prescriptions for how states should act in order to avoid great power war.

Classical realism does not necessarily predict balancing. What it predicts is great power war in the absence of a balance; therefore it prescribes efficient balancing. Liberal IR does not necessarily eschew the balance of power as a prediction. But it predicts that balancing is dangerous rather than stabilizing and therefore it prescribes changes in the nature of the system (international institutions), and the nature of the units (democratic, capitalist, nation-states). So in some ways, I feel like the argument is spot on and very illuminating, but also not that revolutionary.

Second, the similarities Boucoyannis draws with domestic political theories and IR theory seem spurious. In short, her argument seems to rest on a constant confusion of the units of analysis. So while she talks about the constitutionalism inherent in domestic “balance of power” politics among factions, she makes no reference to what would seem to be the international corrolary – interstate organizations, the study of which is a staple of Wilsonian liberal IR theory.

She claims that the only institutional form that matters at the international level is the structural pattern of efficient alliance-building (which is what Realists have been said to predict). But, she then distinguishes this from Realism by distinguishing alliance-building per se from realpolitik, meaning “policy determined by practical, rather than moral or ideological, considerations.” So, does this mean that liberal alliance-building would include alliances formed on the basis of morals or ideologies (e.g. a club of democracies) rather than on the basis of the distribution of power per se? Then this would not seem, to me, to be power-balancing at all.

In the end what Boucoyannis seems to be doing is situating defensive Realism as Liberalism, and offensive Realism as Realism. This is interesting, but of course it completely evacuates the study of international law and institutions from Liberal IR theory. Then again, perhaps social constructivists could simply take up that banner.

Thoughts?

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Ducking the Issues: What counts for Foreign Policy experience?

Hillary Clinton is running as the “Experienced” candidate. Her political experience consists of 8 years in the US Senate and 8 years in the White House as First Lady. In her speeches and discussion, she leaves a great deal of that resume deliberately ambiguous, and in doing so, raises a very important question: How should one count the experience of being First Lady? The New York Times addresses that issue today:

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”

Many First Ladies have significant influences on their Presidential spouses, all the way back to Martha Washington and Abigail Adams. Hillary’s influence and importance in the Clinton White House is not in dispute—clearly she was a close political and policy adviser to President William Clinton. The issue here is if this “front-row seat” counts as substantial foreign policy experience for a Presidential candidate, especially when Hillary has questioned Obama on his lack thereof. That, I think, is a legitimate and open question.

The case against:

Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.

And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled….

But other [former Clinton] administration officials, as well as opponents of Mrs. Clinton, are skeptical that the couple’s conversations and her 79 trips add up to unique experience that voters should reward. She was not independently judging intelligence, for the most part, or mediating the data, egos and agendas of a national security team. And, in the end, she did not feel or process the weight of responsibility.

Susan Rice, a National Security Council senior aide and State Department official under Mr. Clinton who now advises Mr. Obama, said Mrs. Clinton was not involved in “the heavy lifting of foreign policy.” Ms. Rice also took issue with a recent comment by a Clinton campaign official that Mrs. Clinton was “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”

“Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement — that’s the hard part of foreign policy,” Ms. Rice said. “That’s not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady.”

That’s rather important stuff. Of critical important, I think, is her lack of a security clearance. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she now has clearance to greater intelligence and military information than she did while in the White House. She didn’t know all the information, and she didn’t sit in on the most critical and classified decisions. Given that today’s most pressing security issues—terrorism, war, and nuclear proliferation—revolve heavily around intelligence and classified material, its seems reasonable to question whether or not her experience is relevant, as she didn’t directly deal with these things as First Lady. While she certainly had her share of tough decisions to make, none of them were based on national security intelligence.

On the other hand, there’s the case for:

Her role mostly involved what diplomats call “soft power” — converting cold war foes into friends, supporting nonprofit work and good-will endeavors, and pressing her agenda on women’s rights, human trafficking and the expanded use of microcredits, tiny loans to help individuals in poor countries start small businesses….

Friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she acted as adviser, analyst, devil’s advocate, problem-solver and gut check for her husband, and that she has an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be. What is clear, she and others say, is that Mr. Clinton often consulted her, and that Mrs. Clinton gained experience that Mr. Obama, John Edwards and every other candidate lack — indeed, that most incoming presidents did not have.

One of the primary criticisms that all Democrats are levying against the Bush Administration is its squandering of soft-power resources, decimating the US’s image abroad. Clinton’s demonstrated experience and sensitivity to soft power tools, her experience “converting… foes into friends” is central to all the Democrats’ foreign policy platforms. While it may be impossible to prepare for the pressures and demands of the Presidency, she has a better idea of what to expect than anything else. You’d have to go back to George Bush I (VP, CIA Director, UN Ambassador), and before him, Nixon (VP) (and that worked out oh-so well....) for comparable White House experience.

So, the question is open: How do we value resume experience as First Lady? How ought we count it, and how should it be discussed on the campaign trail? This is a tough one, one I don’t think we’ve adequately addressed, in part, because we don’t have a language for discussing the professional aspects of spousal duties. In the contemporary Washington power couple, each person as an independent career—he’s Senate Minority Leader, she’s Secretary of Labor… he (was) an Ambassador, she (was) a Spy—so each defines experience on the basis of individual accomplishments. The spouse doesn’t have to define his or her political role vis-à-vis the other. Of course, none of these spousal positions come with a a title, stationary, or an East Wing office. Hence the question—how do we value Hillary's East Wing experience as she seeks a term in the West Wing?

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Taken for a Ride

I saw Charlie Wilson’s War Saturday night (two thumbs up, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is fantastic, and the great irony about the film is that they had to tone it down from Wilson’s actual life). What’s most fascinating about watching a movie like that is how much of a commentary it is on the present day, as the events from 20+ years ago have a direct and not at all subtle link to the present day’s politics.

There’s a very poignant scene in the movie where Wilson goes to Pakistan for the first time and meets President Zia ul-Haq and his two military advisers. They are asking Wilson for billions in new aid, and at the end of the pitch, Zia says “all the money should flow through us.” And it did.

Now, 20-some years later, the US is fighting another war in Afghanistan, sending billions through Pakistan to fund it. Pakistan is now the #3 recipient of US foreign aid, receiving over $700 million in FY 2007. Two investigative stories in the NY Times reveal that the billions already spent have been fruitless at best and damaging to US interests at worst, while future plans to develop a new AID package for the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan might be dead on arrival, regardless of how the US organizes its operation.

The idea behind the initial and ongoing direct payments to Pakistan were to build the Pakistani military’s effectiveness in counter-terrorist operations and quelling the insurgent Taliban / Al Qaeda forces. However,

Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs….

The $5 billion was provided through a program known as Coalition Support Funds, which reimburses Pakistan for conducting military operations to fight terrorism. Under a separate program, Pakistan receives $300 million per year in traditional American military financing that pays for equipment and training…

“I wonder if the Americans have not been taken for a ride,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Bush Administration is now reviewing its AID program to Pakistan. The goal is to have funds flow to the massively underdeveloped northwestern provinces to build social and governmental capacity to combat terrorist influence. But,

Because the United States is viewed with such opprobrium, it will not be identified on any of the aid, preventing any possible flow of good will. The aid will instead be presented as Pakistani. That, said a senior United States Embassy official, would help the Pakistanis feel like owners of the effort. “This is about teaching them how to get smart about how to run the country and win people’s support,” the official said.

Asked what he thought of the American goal to improve the “capacity” of the administration of which he is a senior member, Mr. Iqbal, the Pakistani official, who attended college in the United States, replied, “Bunkum.”

So here (not Iraq) you have the ‘central front in the war on terrorism’ and the US is pouring in all kinds of money in military and development assistance, and with next to nothing to show for it. Standing right there next to nothing is

one senior American military officer in Afghanistan said that he did not know that the administration was spending $1 billion a year until he attended a meeting in Islamabad in 2006.

“I was astounded,” said the officer, who would not speak for attribution because he now holds another senior military post. “On one side of the border we were paying a billion to get very little done. On the other side of the border — the Afghan side — we were scrambling to find the funds to train an army that actually wanted to get something done.”

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Is there a Santa Claus?

Ever since the invention of the InterNet, not a December goes by without some version of this making the rounds of listservs and e-mail chains and the like. I must have received it a dozen times from various sources. It's cute and funny and all, but I must say that I've never been entirely happy with its conclusions. So in the spirit of the season, I present the first known social constructionist investigation in the the existence of Santa Claus. I mean, why should the natural sciences get to have all the fun -- and why should they get to corner the market on looking into such matters?

The first thing to point out is that a social constructionist would not necessarily consider the existence of Santa Claus to be the same thing as the existence of a man in a red suit who flies around the world in one evening in a sleigh pulled by eight or nine flying reindeer and delivers toys to all of the good children of the world. Perhaps physicists are so literal when it comes to social actors, but we social constructionists tend to have a broader view on the subject. Indeed, for us, an actor exists inasmuch as and insofar as action is legitimately performed in its name. It is the massive set of activities carried out in the name of the state -- invoking state authority, done on the state's behalf -- that provides the evidence for the state's existence, as well as concretely instantiating the actor "the state" from moment to moment. Contra some IR constructivists (like Alex Wendt), it's not like there's some essential stateness lying around somewhere from which state acts emanate; rather, there are a series of actions performed in the state's name, actions that -- if successfully legitimated -- give rise to the effect of a solid object called "the state". It's not center first, action second; it's action first, appearance of a center second.

So the social constructionist standard for an actor's existence is related to the variety of actions performed in that actor's name, and on their reception by the relevant audiences. "Acceptance" here doesn't necessarily mean "belief"; it merely means that the audience accepts that the actor has performed the action, even if the action itself is questioned. If the state seizes my possessions, I might challenge that in court, but in so doing I am accepting the state's actor-hood, even if only provisionally (I might be a principled anarchist or an extremely rigorous libertarian, and so would never completely accept the state as an actor). The only way to refuse to accept a claim of actor-hood is to refrain from even speaking of an action as though it were performed by the supposed actor, something that it is extremely difficult to do in a world constituted by sovereign territorial states.

Now, some of my critical realist friends always object, at this point in the account, that all of those actions performed "in the name of the state" are really being performed by individual human beings. [When talking to a critical realist, always watch for the adjective or adverb "really" -- this generally shows you the weak point in their arguments, since these are the places where they have to rely on the linguistic equivalent of banging a fist on the table in order to make their point.] My usual response is to smile and ask them what basis they have for that assertion; the basis they give usually boils down to either:

-- "individual human beings are constituted to be actors, unlike other beings; other beings are only actors inasmuch as human beings do things with and for them." To me this looks kind of like species prejudice, and also temporal prejudice, since it wasn't so long ago that animals were considered to have moral culpability (and in some parts of the animal rights movement, this is not a radical claim at all).

-- "when you point to something done in the name of the state, you're actually pointing to a physical human being doing something." Hmm . . . empiricism and behaviorism from a critical realist? How deliciously ironic. Sure, if I try to abstract from all of the social content what I "see" is a member of the species homo sapiens whose limbs and extremities and orifices are moving. Well, only if I am looking at a certain macroscopic scale; if I peer in closer, I see mitochondria and various cellular components, closer and I see complex chains of organic and inorganic molecules, and if I go even closer I see atoms. Why stop just on the level that is comfortable to those of us raised in human society -- especially since if we've been raised in human society, we know the difference between that person who has the authority to stop traffic an that other person who does not: the first person is not acting under her or his own authority, but is instead the instrument of the state and as such is not a single isolated individual but is instead a representative of a broader corporate person with a claim on me. The fact that members of the species homo sapiens are involved in these interactions is as little relevant as the fact that oxygen is involved in these interactions.

-- "we can only preserve human agency if we confine the notion of action to individual human beings." I think this is just silly. Indeed, confining action to individual human beings strikes me as a fine way to degrade human agency, because it runs the risk of changing every social arrangement into a more or less deliberate bargain entered into by pre-social individuals, and converting human agency into a matter akin to selecting products from a supermarket shelf. I'd much rather celebrate human creativity, including the various ways that social actors are produced and reproduced over time -- some of those actors are "individuals," to be sure, but this is just as much of a social product as "the state" or "the clan" or "the nation" or even "the civilization" is.

Critical realists dealt with, we can turn to the facts about Santa Claus and actions performed in his name. Every December, millions of kids write letters to Santa, go to malls and other places to see Santa, and discuss what Santa is going to bring them. Millions of adults use the threat of Santa not bringing anything (or bringing coal) as a way to induce better behavior in their kids. NORAD, the strategic air command for the USA, devotes at least some server-space to tracking Santa as he supposedly travels around the globe. And -- this is the most important thing -- every year millions of kids get presents from Santa on Christmas morning. A gift with a note attached saying "from Santa" strikes me as prime facie evidence of an action performed in the name of Santa Claus, and by social constructivist standards, that's pretty much all it takes for Santa Claus to exist as a social actor. Wait, you say: what about legitimacy? Think or a moment of the great lengths that people go through to make sure that their kids can't poke holes in the Santa Claus story: different wrapping-paper for the Santa gifts, modified handwriting for the Santa cards, and so on. And it's not just kids: think of "Secret Santa" activities in offices, at shelters, in churches. And why does the Salvation Army dress its collectors up in Santa outfits? Clearly, they're invoking a selfless giver in an effort to solicit donations for their own charitable work. "Santa" has wide popular cultural currency, and the idea of a "present from Santa Claus" occupies a distinctive place in the cultural resources that we use to make our lives meaningful. QED: Santa Claus exists.

Call this the Miracle on 34th Street version of the case for Santa Claus' existence: to the extent that there's a series of social practices identifying Santa Claus as their author, there's a Santa Claus. Of course, that movie presents a mythologized version of the account; there's a concrete human (or apparently human -- Santa is often envisioned as an elf of some kind) being who claims to be, and is eventually recognized by the US postal service and the State of New York (and the two female protagonists) to be the one and only Santa Claus. But in actuality, we have something closer to the situation that Thomas Hobbes identified centuries ago as pertaining to the concept of sovereignty: the commonwealth only exists insofar as it is "personated," and that personation is, at bottom, a social convention. Hobbes' Leviathan is a sustained argument to the effect that the commonwealth ought to keep getting personated lest we collapse into a civil war, and as such is an implicit acknowledgment of their being no higher court of appeal for questions of actor-hood than the diffuse processes that go into making socially sustainable claims. We aren't living in a movie; we don't have a single identifiable individual member of the species homo sapiens who is the one and only genuine Santa Claus. Instead, we have a whole panoply of cultural practices revolving around the idea of gifts that show up from mysterious sources. And inasmuch as those practices continue, the actor that they sustain continues, and Santa Claus continues to exist.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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Spy-hard

In the post- 9-11, post Iraq world of Intelligence and policy, the great hue and cry has been that the US needs better Human Intelligence. To that end, the Intelligence Reform act created the National Clandestine Service out of the CIA's old Directorate of Operations, in an attempt to beef up our human intelligence capability.

Joseph Weisberg, writing in the Washington Post, raises an interesting and provocative argument:

Although we dedicate enormous resources to recruiting "human sources," there just aren't many good ones available. The central problem is that the people who actually know the secrets we'd be interested in aren't recruitable. Officials at the highest reaches of foreign governments have wealth and power and usually no compelling reason to put those at risk. The most knowledgeable members of terrorist groups are ideologically committed and aren't going to work for the CIA or anyone else.

Those 'assets' that the CIA (or other agencies) do manage to recruit, he asserts, are essentially useless:

Intelligence from almost all CIA assets is unreliable for the simple reason that so many of them are double agents, meaning that the CIA recruited them but that they are being controlled by their own countries' intelligence services. When I worked at CIA headquarters in the early 1990s, I once suggested to a friend who worked in counterintelligence that up to a third of all CIA agents could be doubles. He said the number was probably much higher.

Concrete proof is always scarce in these matters, but from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, most and very likely all Cuban agents on the CIA payroll were doubles. So were a majority of East German agents during the Cold War.

So why even bother? Now, Weisberg is does not want to totally scrap HUMINT, he just feels that the CIA should target more obtainable and useful (and boring) information and get over the myth of the super-spy:

Sympathetic Europeans who work at companies involved in the illicit transfer of nuclear components might help us understand how the underground nuclear supply chain works. Scientists who attend highly specialized conferences might glean valuable insights into foreign capabilities.

What Weisberg's article made me think about (and this is an example of poor blog writing, as I'm burying the lead, but the nice thing about blogs is that I can write as I think, and this is what I was thinking on Sunday...) is perhaps "secret" information is really not all that valuable. Perhaps this massive expansion of the intelligence community, producing a great number of classified intelligence products is only marginally more useful than a subscription to the Washington Post, Google, and regular reading of Abu Aardvark.

What leads me to this question is not any empirical study-- I've never read a classified TS document (though once, as a State Department Intern, I did have a Secret clearance to read cables and such, but little that I read then was all that exciting, and what was dealt with operational security, like the plans for a Secretarial trip to Lebanon that was of course public news the minute she landed...). Rather, what gets me here is some of the theoretical work I've done on language, building on Wittgenstein's Private Language argument--you can't have a private language because to have a meaningful social relations, you must speak in a way others can understand. Red, Pain, Beetle In the Box, that kind of stuff.

Add to this one of the rules of Networks. The bigger the network, the more powerful it is. The original Fax machine wasn't all that valuable because there wasn't anyone else to fax to. Only when everyone had a fax machine did it become a valuable thing to have because then you could actually use the fax to communicate and expect people to be able to fax.

Put this together, and perhaps you get to the point where information--intelligence--is only valuable when lots of people know it. Thus, secrecy, classification, and the like are usually more harmful than beneficial. As an illustration, consider the NIE on Iran. The public conclusion has been very powerful and had a tremendous impact on both the domestic political debate on what to do about Iran's nuclear program, as well as the way Iran views the potential for negotiations with the US about its nuclear program. I don't know what is in that report, but does it matter?

Now, I can understand two counter-arguments for 'secrecy' and classification.
1) OP-SEC: When I was interning at State, Secretary Albright was going to Lebanon. The first visit by a US SecState in several decades. Obviously a difficult security situation, and you don't want to put her at risk, so the trip details are classified. But, once she got there, it was all public.
2) Sources and Methods: This is no different than the reporters who have anonymous sources--people talk more freely on a not-for-attribution basis. But in this case, what difference is there between a CIA officer and Dana Priest? (she's a Post Reporter who covers national security). Once, in a chat she was doing, someone asked her the question-- who has better info, you or a spy--and she said her. People were more willing to talk to a reporter than a spy for a whole host of reasons. Essentially, being overt was more of an asset than being under cover.

So, I've just taken an interesting Post Op-Ed on the problems of HUMINT and turned it into an ontological discussion of secrecy in spying. Not quite sure how I got there (well, actually I am rather sure of how I got there, but not in any way that I could explain in a blog post. Private language and all that...).

But, its going to be a fun long weekend with plenty of time to blog over the next 4-5 days, so a) you have more of this to look forward to and b) i hope this keeps you as entertained as it does me and c) if you've read this far, you deserve a medal or a cookie or something. Perhaps go read this Drezner post and decide if its Funny. I am still not sure.

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Why the United States shouldn't withdraw from Iraq: abridged version

Yes, you read the title correctly. I don't think the United States should withdraw from Iraq. My disagreement with the views of some of my fellow bloggers, most of "my blog friends," and every candidate with a shot at getting my vote in the 2008 elections, stems from a number of ethical and realpolitik considerations.

I feel strongly that the United States has an ethical obligation to repair Iraq--or at least to continue to try. I agree, in essence, with the so-called "Pottery Barn" rule: we broke it, we own it.[1] This is a matter of accepting moral responsibility for all the harm we've inflicted on Iraq through our misconceived and bungled invasion.

Against this weighs one brute fact: American men and women continue to die, suffer horrific physical and mental trauma, and otherwise suffer greatly for the Bush Administration's colossal miscalculations. It would also be unethical to perpetuate that state of affairs simply to salve the conscience of those of us who remain safe and secure at home. I don't see an easy choice between these two wrongs, but I think that, on balance, the less-bad choice is to continue our commitment to Iraq.

The US presence, in all likelihood, depresses the level of violence in Iraq. I agree with those who argue that "the surge" is something of a smoke-and-mirrors game, and that its contribution to security in Baghdad--and Iraq in general--has been far less than the Bush administration and its boosters would like us to think. But it does provide some evidence that a more robust troop presence deters some level of civil violence in the country. And then there's the larger problem: the alternative providers of protection are largely pretty nasty sectarian militias.

Indeed, we have real reasons to fear the consequences of the British pullout from Basra.

The full scale of the chaos left behind by British forces in Basra was revealed yesterday as the city's police chief described a province in the grip of well-armed militias strong enough to overpower security forces and brutal enough to behead women considered not sufficiently Islamic.

As British forces finally handed over security in Basra province, marking the end of 4½ years of control in southern Iraq, Major General Jalil Khalaf, the new police commander, said the occupation had left him with a situation close to mayhem. "They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world," he said in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV.

If true, this actually has very bad implications for the United States. One of the major reasons for improvement in the Iraqi security environment has little do with "the surge," and much to do with changing coalitional politics among warlords, chieftains, and other violence-wielding heads of patron-client networks in Iraq. Many have thrown their lot in, at least temporarily, with the United States and against the more radical insurgents. In a fashion reminiscent of imperial control, the United States has, in turn, provide them with arms and authority. It has, in the process, produced an environment of widely diffused coercive power.

As Robert Farley notes:

Ezra, Eric Martin, and Rodger Payne provide good commentary on Ned Parker's LA Times article about the fragmentation of Iraq. As we've discussed before, the tribal alliances strategy (if not the Surge itself) has left Iraq without a central government capable of keeping order or executing policy. "Low level reconciliation" is all fine and well, but it fundamentally misses the point; such reconciliation might persuade armed groups to refrain from fighting each other for the time being, but does nothing to increase state capacity. As an oil-producing state Iraq needs less of what we traditionally call state capacity (the ability to tax in particular) than other states, but "less" is different than "none".

A related problem is that these groups have, as of now, little to gain by reconciling themselves with and placing themselves under the control of the Iraqi state. It is the United States that controls and distributes the goodies, it is the United States that keeps order, and it is to the United States that these groups will appeal when things go badly. All states are "imagined" in some sense, but the central Iraqi state really is fictional in almost every sense of the word.

This echoes a point I made some time ago about the tension between how states usually go about low-cost control over peripheries--by relying on local collaborators and pursuing divide-and-rule policies--and the importance of creating "strong states" in the context of US strategic goals in the war on terror. We aimed, in Iraq, to build a strong state with an inadequate commitment, and now we've finally been forced to bring our tactics in line with our capabilities.

But this means that the United States cannot leave now without Iraq sliding into total anarchy. In that sense, Rob is right that "unfortunately, General Petraeus felt the need to overstep his professional bounds and enter the political fray in order to ensure that he would have the capability to execute a strategy that would keep us in Iraq more or less forever..." Converting the situation on the ground in Iraq into one from which we can exit is going to require staying, at least for some time. It takes time, effort, patience, and a certain Machiavellian ruthlessness to reconstitute some sort of central authority under these conditions.

The Turkish raids into Kurdistan, moreover, foreshadow just how bad things could get without a US presence. As long as the United States has troops in the region, the Turks need to show some restraint. But if we leave with the status-quo ante, we have to be very concerned about what would follow.

It might, on the other hand, be the case that the American presence, for the same reason, shields both the Kurdish rebels and Kurdistan's leadership from the threat of massive Turkish reprisals. But, on balance, I find it difficult to see an American withdrawal leading to a Kurdistani crackdown on the PKK.

The "Kurdish problem" represents only the most pressing threat of regional escalation. We still need to be concerned about the regional consequences such the US withdraw and escalating violence draws in the Saudis, Syrians, or Iranians beyond what we have already seen.

A lot may change, of course. We need to keep our eye on events in Basra. Further evidence, or new developments, could alter the calculations I've mentioned in favor of withdrawal. And, of course, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan itself suggests a need for the US to redeploy some of its overextended military from Iraq.

So that's the short version of why I don't support a US pullout. This isn't the post I wanted to write. I've been meaning to produce a much more substantial essay on the subject. But my revised book is due with its publisher in about a month, and I think I've held off too long on this matter.


[1] I must note that this catch phrase reduces rather profound issues of moral responsibility to the equivalent of bumping over a lamp at an overpriced chain store. The fact that Thomas Friedman proudly claims credit for it tells us all we need to know (but rather we didn't) about the state of foreign-policy punditry in this country.

Image source: Boston Globe

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The Year's Under-reported Stories

Foreign Policy has released its annual “Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2007.” Among the contenders:

1. The Cyberwars Have Begun. However, see Miriam Dunn Cavelty’s article “Cyberterrorism: Looming Threat or Phantom Menace” in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.

2. US Navy is in Iraq for the Long Haul. And a good thing too, if trade in the Arabian Gulf is to be protected from the emerging threat of piracy, which is on the rise off the coast of Iraq and is already thriving in other areas of the world characterized by state failure. See the International Analyst Network for more.

3. Rifts Within Al-Qaeda Widening. But is this really news? The movement has always been less monolithic than it has been portrayed by the West.

4. And my favorite, we have evidently "entered" the era of robot warriors. According to FP:

“Although militaries have used robots for everything from minesweeping to defusing bombs, the new "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system"--or SWORDS--is different. For one, it's packing heat: an M249 machine gun, to be exact. It can fire on a target from more than 3,000 feet away. So far, three of these $250,000 robots have been deployed to Iraq to conduct dangerous ground operations that would otherwise put soldiers' lives at risk.”

Well, now we’re ready to crush the rebels! On to Planet Hoth!

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Help Wanted

An actual job description currently posted on the website of a major government contractor:

JOB DESCRIPTION:
The Policy Analyst would focus primarily on projects investigating the creation and evolution of subnational identities within and across states, focusing on the construction and interpretation of narratives, contestation, and negotiation with hegemonic discourses, and the temporalization of values, ethics, and ideals. In the project, analysts conduct research on reiterative social interaction between an object group and other groups, discursive practices of political and religious leaders, modes of cultural learning and knowledge acquisition, contemporary uses of collective memory and cultural repertoires, and the implication of culture on attitudinal perspectives of other groups, the state, regional states, and international actors.

The project seeks to understand how these created identities are constitutive of systems of authority, religion, and kinship; how they affect attitudinal perspectives of other groups, the state, regional states, and international actors; how they affect the manner in which members ascribe meaning to specified themes, messages or events; how they inform the organizational cultures of militaries and other security providing institutions; and how they influence military effectiveness.

The Policy Analyst would conduct literature reviews, assist in structuring research design, analyze secondary sources, and assist in structuring and conducting primary research, and write final deliverables. The Policy Analyst would focus on studies involving the Philippines and other countries as required.

REQUIRED EDUCATION/SKILLS:
Master's degree or enrolled in a doctoral program in anthropology, sociology, history, political science, government, area studies, and/or strategic studies required. The candidate must have excellent research, writing, and communication skills.

DESIRED SKILLS:
A background in social constructivist approaches to cultural identity is desirable as is experience conducting fieldwork or living and working abroad. Language skills – particularly Arabic or Southeast Asian languages (Tagalog, Bahasa or others) - are a plus.

1. So who says that my 'airy-fairy' constructivist training isn't policy relevant now?!?! Take that all you realism is the only policy relevant theory people. Ha!

2. What does it mean to do discursive analysis of sub-national identities for "the man"? Sell out, practical application of knowledge in service of better policy, or merely a legitimation claim to further what policies we're already doing?

3. Should I apply for this job? Would you apply for this job? (Balance your ethical comments against the roughly 85K salary the job is rumored to have. Plus benefits.)

4. What are the odds that the person who wrote that reads this blog?

Discuss

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The evolution of punditry (updated again)

The recently leaked photographs of Liberal Fascisms table of contents have provided some of my favorite bloggers with an excuse for another round of snark at Jonah Goldberg's expense. John Cole mostly hits the proverbial nail on the head when he writes:

The most depressing thing about Jonah Goldberg’s new book is that this whole “liberals are fascist” argument is going to morph from something idiot frat boys would argue after three credit hours in poly sci. and a dozen Mickey’s Big Mouth and would be laughed out of the room to something that idiots like Peggy Noonan and David brooks will peddle with straight faces on Hardball.

But that's not quite right.

Goldeberg's basically a second-rate right-wing blogger with family connections. And such bloggers would, about ten years ago, have been right-wing usenet trolls. So the fact that he's written a book reproducing one of the most common arguments among faux-intellectual usenet ideologues shouldn't shock anybody. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if Goldberg main research involved using google to access old posts on alt.politics groups.

My recommendation? Skip Goldberg's remake and read the original version.Hayek's far too smart to rely on "similar element" comparisons among European political ideologies that, by their nature, all share some features by virtue of descent from common ancestors and mimetic transfer.

UPDATE: I was thinking about posting a long overdue response to a series of critiques Donald Douglas leveled at "What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate" when I came across a real gem: a piece by Goldberg rejecting the "American Empire" label:

Critics of American foreign policy point to the fact that the U.S. does many things that empires once did - police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency - and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren't parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she's the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works.

Now, I happen to think these are pretty good arguments against some of Ferguson's warrants for declaring American an empire ('it's big, it's powerful, it's got troops all over the place....') but its also a stunning display of the kind of reasoning that should have prevented him from writing the book in question.

UPDATE II: It turns out I already wrote a better version of this post two years ago.

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The Middle Class rises again...

Several days ago, I asked if someone making 97,000 / year was Middle Class, and Rodger followed up wonderful post on the two "two Americas," economic and cultural.

Matt Bai, NY Times Magazine political writer and new contributor to their political blog The Caucus, raises the issue again. Responding to a John Edwards ad where Edwards promises to "save the middle class," Bai asks:

All the Democratic candidates, to one extent or another, have been blurring the distinction between the poor and the “middle class” — arguing, in effect, that rising inequality means there is increasingly little distinction between the two. It’s important to define these terms, because they have a lot to do with how you make policy. We know what we mean by poverty, more or less; the federal government defines that by income ($20,650 for a family of four at the moment), and about 14 percent of Americans qualify. But you might be surprised to learn — I certainly was — that there is no recognized definition of what it means to be middle class....

Think about the implications this debate has for an issue like health care. Like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and most of the other Democrats running, Edwards would offer subsidies for “middle-class” families to make insurance more affordable. But how high will those subsidies go? Will health care be more affordable for a household where two working parents make, say, a combined $100,000 but struggle mightily with childcare and a mortgage? Is that family considered middle class or rich?

From Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Democrats have succeeded in helping the most vulnerable American families when they’ve built the broadest possible economic constituency for their reforms. Most Americans describe themselves as middle class, and with good reason; their daily economic decisions may not be life-or-death, but they’re not easy, either. If the family on the edge of six figures isn’t, in fact, going to get a health-care subsidy, then a lot of American families might not view the proposed program as being about the middle class, at all. And what makes us think they’d support it? And what might that ultimately mean for the lower-income families who need the most assistance?

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The debate climate of the climate debate

The press has periodically made note of various allegations, but the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee just released (December 12) its full report on Political Interference with Climate Change Science Under the Bush Administration. The Committee has been gathering evidence for 16 months and examined 27,000 pages of documents from the Bush administration. It also conducted multiple hearings and interviewed key figures.

What did the Committee find? The Report's homepage provides this summary:

The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.

Long-time readers may recall that I've blogged previously about the administration's secrecy and exclusionary practices in regard to the climate change debate.

I'm particularly concerned about the context for deliberation since it is vitally important for public truth-seeking. Debates distorted (and dominated) by powerful actors are not likely to result in legitimate outcomes.

IR scholars interested in deliberation and the public sphere might want to check out the scholarly work of James N. Druckman. For example, this is a useful article: "Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)relevance of Framing Effects," American Political Science Review (2004), 98: 671-686.

Druckman finds that distortions can be checked by elite competition and heterogeneous discussion. Thus, congressional oversight of this type potentially has tremendous political value -- both procedurally and substantively.

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NATO Troops Should Redeploy to Protect Kosovar Serbs

Human Security Report Project's newsfeed reports:

Serbia has promised NATO it would not use force against Kosovo if the breakaway province carried out a vow to declare independence early next year, a senior alliance commander said on Thursday. NATO has patrolled Kosovo since it bombed Serbia for nearly 3 months in 1999 to force the withdrawal of Serb forces accused of atrocities in a war against separatist Albanian guerrillas in the province. "Right now we have enough forces on the ground to protect the people of Kosovo," said Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, a U.S. Navy officer.

This plus Belgrade's attempt to seek redress through the ICJ, suggest I was right: NATO’s fears of renewed atrocities against Kosovar Albanians may hve been overblown. But this doesn’t mean there are not important reasons to prioritize the protection of civilians – only that assumptions about who should be protected may need to be reconsidered.

The danger comes not from the certainty that Kosovar Albanians are seceding from Serbia, but from the possibility that Kosovar Serbs will try to secede from a newly independent Kosovo.

Kosovar Serbs are likeliest to attempt secession if they have reason to fear persecution or violence from their newly empowered neighbors.

This has happened before – spates of revenge killings of Serb civilians accompanied the return of refugees from Macedonia in 1999. In such an instance Serbia will be not only inclined but possibly justified in “intervening” on their behalf. This precise dynamic triggered the 1991 war between Serbia and newly independent Croatia, which immediately began “cleansing” the Krajina Serb minority in Croatia.

If NATO wishes to contribute to maintaining stability in the region, the priority should be to provide immediate protection the 100,000 Kosovar Serbs in the northern regions, rather than deploying to protect Albanian civilians farther south from some feared JNA offensive. There would be no more helpful confidence-building measure in the next few months than to send the signal that NATO is biased in favor of stability and civilian protection, rather than in favor of Kosovar Albanians per se.

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The Mitchell Report and Global Governance

Obviously, the Mitchell Report is all the big news in the world of sports, culture, and politics this morning, and is receiving saturation coverage. Rather than try to add my 2 cents as a baseball fan, I thought I might try to tease out an interesting IR angle to the whole thing.

As I was driving home yesterday, I heard Selig in his press conference assert that Baseball had one of the most stringent testing drug policies (now) of any major sport. The radio commentators were discussing this and said, well, if by major sport you mean NFL, NBA, and MLB, then yes. But, compared to the testing at the Olympic level, it has a long way to go.

Earlier this morning, on my way into work, I heard Sen. McCain on ESPN, and they were asking him what, if anything, the government could do about this (and recall that most of the good stuff in the Mitchell Report is the result of government work--the hearing and several drug busts and plea agreements). McCain said (paraphrasing): Not much, except to fund the USADA to improve testing practices and perhaps work more with the World Anti-Doping Agency.

From an IR perspective, I think this raises a rather interesting question--given that there is a robust international organization with a well developed regime of anti-doping rules and norms that apply to international sport, why is it that the major US sports feel that they are somehow exempt or above or beyond these global norms? Past attempts to apply Olympic-level testing to US pro athletes (NHL hockey and NBA basketball players) by the USOC met with resistance from the leagues and players associations of those sports.

So, why is it that the US and US-based organizations place themselves above this global anti-doping norm? Many major international sports have an Olympic-caliber anti-doping regime, which requires tough random testing, and a number of their most significant events have been hit by drug scandals (Tour de France...). As US pro sports go global in an ever increasing way (particularly baseball and basketball), how can they make global inroads and yet flout a global norm on drug testing?

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Putin's plan

Will Putin's plan be Russia's victory? I can't tell you. However, I can tell you that it does apparently involve Putin becoming prime minister. Dmitri Medvedev, the apparent heir apparent, yesterday declared that he would name none other than Vladimir Putin as his prime minister.

Thus shall Vladimir Putin keep a grasp on the reins of power, though, as I have previously noted, it is no guarantee. The prime minister's position is substantially weaker than the president's; should Medvedev suddenly decide to disregard Putin's wishes, he would have substantial legal power to do so. On the other hand, Medvedev is not known to have a power base of his own in the Kremlin--he is, at least for now, heavily dependent on Putin. Legal authority is one thing, actual political power another altogether.

An interesting thing to note: for many Putin observers, it is tempting to view him as an all-powerful political mastermind. Everything he does is aimed at a dark and calculated purpose. Is Medvedev's anointment part of a multi-year plan to regain the presidency? Possibly. But there's no guarantee that it will work--nor is it even necessarily part of some sort of larger plan. I am reminded just a bit of Karl Rove. Right up until election night 2006, part of me was convinced that there would be no Democratic victory--that Karl Rove had some ace up his sleeve that would somehow not only stop the Democratic tide, but even turn it back, and the Democrats would lose Congressional seats, not gain them. The Rove mystique is now gone. Similarly, we should be wary of a Putin mystique. He is not all-powerful, all-knowing, all-foreseeing. Some of his maneuvers are short-sighted, ad hoc, and ill-planned. To think otherwise grants him super-human powers he doesn't deserve. The hard part is distinguishing the plan from unplanned, the wise move from the foolish, in circumstances where we, as observers, have only limited information.

Nevertheless, the oddball personality cult of Putin continues to develop, as we can see from photos of a fashion show staged by the pro-Putin Nashi [Ours] youth group. The slogan of the day seems to be, "Vova [a diminutive for Vladimir], I'm with you!"

[beware the link--it is worksafe, but oh, it burns, it burns]

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Glitterati Power

From USA Today: “Darfur Benefit Party Brings Celebs Out in Force”

While Forest Whitaker chatted with a refugee, his wife, Keisha, worked a table selling her line of lip gloss, with money going to the IRC. Her top seller: the shade she named Forest.

Whitaker, who arrived directly from the Toronto set of Repossession Mambo, said issue-oriented films remain high on his agenda. In March, he'll shoot Hurricane Katrina-related The Patriots, to be directed by Tim Story (Fantastic Four).

Shopping for jeans and dresses, Heather Graham said she was disappointed "that our country isn't doing more for Darfur. Africa's one of those places that really needs help."

It’s easy to make light of the glitterati for this self-serving humanitarianism. (For another example, click here.) Celebrities use causes to brand themselves.

But so what?

Governments do the same thing when they tie foreign aid to official recognition of their beneficence. And whether it is Bono peddling poverty reduction, George Clooney advocating for Darfur, or Leonardo diCaprio condemning conflict diamonds, celebrity sponsorship seems to go hand in hand with public awareness of global issues.

But scholars of humanitarian affairs should be asking: under what conditions are these humanitarian players effective in practical terms, and at what? Is theirs an agenda-setting effect: can the rise of new issues in the transnational primordial soup be traced to celebrity influence? Or do they essentially bandwagon on issues that have already gained prominence? If so does this at least have a catalyzing effect on transforming campaigns into mass movements? Do they exercise power, as Dan Drezner’s recent National Interest piece argues, through social networks of access to policymakers and donors – civic activism plus? Or, is the power of celebrities not their personal crusades but the stories they tell on screen?

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Oh Dana...

From today's Post: White House spokeswoman Dana Perino revealed on NPR this weekend that

During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

So she consulted her best source. "I came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "

...Shows the relevance of IR theory-- had she been in my class, she would have read Essence of Decision!

...I guess she's not a fan of Kevin Costner movies...

...Don't know much about History. Don't know much about Science Books, don't like the French I took...

...How do you think they got Pigs in space? One of the missiles went horribly awry...

Readers are invited to come up with more "Oh Dana's" in the comment section.

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The candidate

After months of intrigue that fueled rampant speculation, Putin has finally endorsed a successor.

Drum roll, please...


And the winner is...Dmitri Medvedev.

Medvedev has been considered a front-runner for years, along with former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. In recent months, this seemed to be working against him. Since September, when Putin abruptly dismissed