The Calculus of Counter-narcotics

$250 million = the amount spent just by the US in FY2010 to counter narcotics in Afghanistan
$100 million = the amount earned annually by the Taliban from narcotics trafficking

304,000 acres = the number of acres devoted to opium in 2009
304,000 acres = the number of acres devoted to opium in 2010

$64 per Kg = the price of opium in 2009
$169 per Kg = the price of opium in 2010

Total production of opium did decline, but mainly because of a disease damaging the poppy crop.  The spike in prices makes it likely that the number of acres devoted to the crop will increase in 2011.

Flashback: Afghanistan "Mission Accomplished"

I've been teaching Af-Pak in my security class these past few weeks. The war has been going on for so long that many "highlights" now seem like distant history.

For instance, everyone remembers the farce that was George W. Bush's May 1, 2003, celebration of the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The image of the "Mission Accomplished" banner is engrained in our brains, as is the picture of Bush in flightsuit strutting to deliver his speech.

However, people often forget a speech delivered by Donald Rumsfeld that same day in Kabul:

Rumsfeld said that in regard to Afghanistan, Bush, U.S. Central Command Chief Tommy Franks, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai "have concluded we're at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities. The bulk of this country today is permissive, it's secure."

Rumsfeld said he thought American groops could be home by summer 2004.

Austerity, unicorns, and political economy

Mark Blyth waxing enthusiastic about why "austerity" is not commonsensical economic policy at all. Food for thought.


WatsonMedia presents Mark Blyth on Austerity from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.

You can't create national security policy in a vacuum

Stephen Biddle has a spot-on piece over at Foreign Policy on how Presidents, and Obama in particular, must take into account domestic politics when setting national security strategy.  With the release of Bob Woodward's latest book, Obama's Wars, many have jumped on the President's alleged quote that he can't lose the entire Democratic Party to justify the need to set a troop draw-down date for Afghanistan as evidence that he's putting politics above national security (as if anything can be separated from politics).

Biddle responds:

...I do know that it's no sin for a president to consider the domestic politics of military strategy. On the contrary, he has to. It's a central part of his job as commander in chief.

Waging war requires resources -- money, troops, and equipment -- and in a democracy, resources require public support. In the United States, the people's representatives in Congress control public spending. If a majority of lawmakers vote against the war, it will be defunded, and this means failure every bit as much as if U.S. soldiers were outfought on the battlefield. A necessary part of any sound strategy is thus its ability to sustain the political majority needed to keep it funded, and it's the president's job to ensure that any strategy the country adopts can meet this requirement. Of course, war should not be used to advance partisan aims at the expense of the national interest; the role of politics in strategy is not unlimited. But a military strategy that cannot succeed at home will fail abroad, and this means that politics and strategy have to be connected by the commander in chief.

State leaders must always balance the domestic and international when formulating policy.  What may be possible internationally may not be sustainable domestically, and vice versa.  Ignoring either one typically leads to disaster.  Political scientists have long argued that outcomes are the result of simultaneous negotiations between domestic and international audiences, as well as the difficultly states face when trying to sustain public supporter for wars of choice.  Condemning leaders for being prudent may make for good copy, but it makes no sense given all we know about policymaking.

Applied Signaling: Pajamas and 3-year olds

Every night, about 15 minutes or so after we've put my 3-year old daughter to bed, we inevitably hear a knock at the door.  She's typically knocking because she needs to go the bathroom.  She's also knocking because she wants to scope out what we are doing, find out if she is missing anything.  One thing that bothers her is if me or my wife leaves the house after she goes to bed.  In order to go to sleep she needs some kind of guarantee that we aren't leaving and are getting read to go to bed just like her.  It appears she's found one--whether me or my wife have gotten changed into our pajamas.

If we come to her door in our pajamas--or at least different clothes (e.g. sweatpants, etc) than when she last saw us--she takes it as a signal that we are in for the night.  If we were going out or not going to bed soon we would still be in our regular clothes that we wore earlier.  If we haven't changed, she probes--"why aren't you in your jammies?"  This let's us know that she suspects we aren't in for the night.  It also means that she will likely spend a fair amount of time looking out her window to see if our cars stay in the driveway before she will settle in and go to sleep.  Now, putting on pajamas isn't that costly of signal--there is nothing stopping us from putting them on and then changing back into regular clothes to leave the house or host guests.  (However, in all honestly this isn't likely to happen.)

The lesson here is that a) the idea of seeking out signals is intuitive for people and we start at a very early age, and b) rather than fight with our daughter about going to bed we might be better served just changing into our pajamas out the outset to demonstrate to her that we aren't leaving the house, no one is coming over, and we are also getting ready for bed.  She may not believe our words, but she seems to believe the signal that she's identified.  Leveraging that signal can lead to better communication and the outcome that we want.

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]

Prisoners of America's Wars (A shameless self-promotion kinda morning...)

My (first) book, Prisoners of America’s Wars: From the Early Republic to Guantanamo is now shipping on Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, etc.). Considering that this would be the closest thing to offspring that I have ever produced, I thought that I would post it in the hope that it may be of some interest to some Duck readers. I've pasted the abstract below for that very reason:

Prisoners of war have been a significant feature of virtually every conflict that the United States has engaged in since its revolutionary beginnings. Today visitors to Washington DC will frequently see a black POW flag flying high on government buildings or war memorials and monuments in silent memory. This act of fealty towards prisoners reflects a history where they have frequently been a rallying point, source of outrage and problem for both military and political leaders. This is as true for the 2003 Iraq War as it was the American Revolution.

Metrics for Winning Hearts and Minds

I often find myself in disagreement with Amitai Etzioni, but he does makes some sense in his recent Politico op-ed on Petraeus' "metrics" for progress in Afghanistan:

The newest way General Petraeus plans to measure success in the war in Afghanistan reminded me of what the government did when its campaign to persuade the public to stop smoking did not make much headway. It stopped counting how many people had had their last cigarette - and started counting how many anti-smoking pamphlets it mailed.

...Gen. Petraeus has outlined five metrics of military success, including: 'the elimination of Taliban sanctuaries outside the city of Kandahar and continued targeting of senior and mid-level insurgent leaders by U.S. Special Operations forces, an increase in the disappointing number of Taliban fighters brought into a government reintegration scheme, the development of newly authorized local defense forces, and improvement in the capabilities of Afghanistan’s national security forces.'

These measurements correlate very poorly with what the U.S. is seeking and with what General Petraeus argued to date was what he sought to achieve. Petraeus is famous for his counterinsurgency strategy, according to which one cannot win the war militarily, but only by building a 'legitimate and effective' government composed of the citizens of the country, so that those who would rebel will be enticed to come in from the cold.

True. The "metrics" the US needs to be looking for are the extent to which civilian sentiment is moving toward the government rather than toward the Taliban. But then Etzioni tells us that's not happening - through reference to the same kind of irrelevant indicators (like how many areas the Taliban hold) that tell us something about Taliban strength but nothing about the views of the Afghan citizenry on the legitimacy of the government or US presence in the country:

To measure progress on this front one, would have to know, for instance, that, if following the last election, the public does feel that the Karzai government is more representative and less fraudulent? Hardly. Does the public feel that the Karzai government and its local representatives, including the police and army, are less corrupt? No indication to this effect. Do they feel minimally secure in their homes and public spaces? Evidence shows to the contrary; the Taliban has been spreading in the northern, non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and holding on to most of the Southern ones. According to the Afghan NGO Safety Office, Afghanistan is more dangerous now than at any time since 2001. Four years ago, insurgents were active in only four Afghan provinces. Now, they are active in 33 of 34.

Etzioni doesn't cite the data he is quoting from, but recent polling data - precisely the type you would look at if you wanted to gauge Afghan sentiment re. their government and ISAF forces - suggests his interpretation is a wee bit too gloomy.

Another war on terror outrage: asylum denied

Did anyone else know about this additional outrageous consequence of the "war on terror"? You may have to be a subscriber to see this note from The Nation, September 20?

Deborah Amos's Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (PublicAffairs; $25.95) is a harrowing account of the pain and anguish suffered by the Iraqi Sunni diaspora in the Middle East. Especially perverse is a legal hurdle faced by exiles seeking asylum in the United States. Amos reports that Iraqis who have "paid ransom for the release of a loved one who had been kidnapped by a militia or criminal gang" have been barred from relocating to the United States by the Patriot Act, which considers "the paying of ransom in such cases—regardless of the circumstances—as constituting 'material support' for terrorists." Iraq's exiles have been left stranded by their putative liberators between a decimated past and a future not yet born.

I searched around and found an item from May in the NY Review of Books noting that Congress granted the State Department and DHS the right to waive the "material support" limit when it involved payments “under duress.” However, the authors claim that 1000s of potential refugees and asylum-seekers continue to be denied entry into the US because of anti-terror laws.

Marty Peretz, Harvard, and the First Amendment

 I attended the Harvard Social Studies concentration’s 50^th anniversary celebration on September 25, well aware of the controversy over the University's naming an undergraduate research scholarship in honor of New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz.  Generating the conflict were Peretz’s long history of contemptuous writings about Muslims and other groups and especially his recent, disgraceful statement: “I wonder whether I need . . . pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

Peretz later retracted the statement.  On the eve of Yom Kippur, he also claimed to be atoning, primarily in private, because "in this past year I have publicly committed the sin of wild and wounding language, especially hurtful to our Muslim brothers and sisters."  But Harvard’s agreement to establish the scholarship in Peretz’s name cast a pall over what should have been a celebration of a wonderful Harvard major.  It was a disappointment to me, many Social Studies alumni, and other Harvard affiliates.  More importantly, Peretz’s initial statement is indicative of disturbing trends that seem to be gathering force now, almost ten years after 9/11.

Miliband of Brothers (Stolen from Channel 4, but too good not to reuse)

For my first Duck post to be so parochial is a shame, but I can’t resist commenting on the result of Labour’s leadership election, declared a couple of hours ago. For someone such as myself who was once, briefly, one of Ralph Miliband’s students at LSE in the 1960s, the idea that the son of the author of Parliamentary Socialism should now be the leader of the British Labour Party is weird. That he should have obtained that post by beating his elder brother is positively surreal. Brothers have quite often competed for the top job in old-style monarchies – indeed, in the Ottoman Empire it was standard practice for the winner to have his male siblings garrotted, food for thought for both David and Ed Miliband this evening– but I can’t think of any similar instance in a modern political party. But perhaps we ought not to be surprised. David and Ed may be actual brothers, but virtually the entire leadership of the British political class, including the Prime Minister and his Deputy, have so much in common that they form an unofficial fraternity. They are all white men, late 30s or early 40s, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, former political advisers and policy wonks none of whom have ever held what members of the public would regard as a proper job for more than a month or two. They even wear the same suits and ties.

Revolving Doors, Lobbyist Edition

Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer's lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.

Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected Senator exits Congress and it persists in the long-term. The sharp decrease in revenue is also present when we study separately a small subsample of unexpected and idiosyncratic Senator exits. Measured in terms of median revenues per ex-staffer turned lobbyist, this estimate indicates that the exit of a Senator leads to approximately a $177,000 per year fall in revenues for each affiliated lobbyist. The equivalent estimated drop for lobbyists connected to US Representatives leaving Congress is a weakly statistically signi cant 10% of generated revenue.  The equivalent estimated drop forlobbyists connected to US Representatives leaving Congress is a weakly statistically signi cant 10% ofgenerated revenue.We also find evidence that ex-sta ffers are more likely to leave the lobbying industry after their connected Senator or Representative exits Congress. (emphasis mine)

They also show that ex-staffers revenues has grown at a faster rate than non ex-staffers since the late 1990's.

Here's a graphical representation of the findings from the paper:

Bill Clinton and the Russian Israelis

Former President Clinton jumped into the Mideast Peace process earlier this week. According to Josh Rogin's reporting at The Cable, Clinton met with a group of reporters and, when asked to comment about the current negotiations, began by saying:

"I wouldn't say too much about this if Hillary weren't Secretary of State and in charge of these negotiations, so I'm darned sure not going to say too much now."

Ah, but that's not like Mr. Clinton.

And it wasn't.

To explain the origin of exchange, you must explain the origin of trust

I've just started reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist.  So far, it is an excellent, through-provoking read.  A key to Ridley's argument is that the innovation of exchange--the trading between two parties of separate items or services that both parties value--that led to mankind's dominance of the planet and the explosion of knowledge and technology.

Ridley explains how exchange--or barter--is qualitatively different from reciprocity (an activity that can be found in other species):

at some point, after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object. This is not the same as Adam scratching Oz’s back now and Oz scratching Adam’s back later, or Adam giving Oz some spare food now and Oz giving Adam some spare food tomorrow. The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz. And the more they did it, the more valuable it became. For whatever reason, no other animal species ever stumbled upon this trick – at least between unrelated individuals.

As I read this it occurred to me that Ridley is likely right, but also that exchange is just as dangerous an activity as it is a transformative one.  Why?  Because to base one's existence on exchange means making oneself vulnerable to and dependent on others for what one needs.  As Ridley notes, earlier humans were self-sufficient.  But moving from self-sufficiency to exchange means trusting others that they will provide what you need and will honor the exchange.

Cyber warfare and legal responsibility: drifting further apart?

Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging, a Clausewitzian centre of gravity on a field, but constituted by curious and enthusiastic citizens on the internet. As William Merrin argued at a keynote in 2009, security has been crowdsourced. US officials set up webcams along the Mexico border so that citizens can sit at leisure and watch for shadowy figures moving through the desert (and they do watch). Other national leaders have encouraged citizens to launch DDoS attacks against strategic targets. Sometimes, ordinary people just feel the urge to participate without any guidance, for instance the ‘Help Israel win’ group of students who targeted Hamas in the 2008-09 Gaza conflict. If thousands or even millions of people act collectively this way, where does legal responsibility lie for any harm caused? Is there legal responsibility for encouraging people to participate? Are people using digital media today out of patriotic gusto in ways that will later incriminate them?

Second, news media have reported a new super-cyber-weapon this week, the first digital nuke, apparently capable of destroying real-world objects. Previous malware just shut down systems or stole data. Once this new piece of malware touches a digital system (e.g. through a USB stick) the malware itself secretly takes control of the system, and can make it destroy whatever it is managing – a bank, a nuclear plant, whatever you can imagine. The designer can tell it what to target, but thereafter the software does its own thing. In terms of responsibility, whoever funds, designs and delivers such a weapon would seem the locus of responsibility. But not many nations have the expertise to detect such software. Successful attacks would just seem like industrial mishaps. Expect reports of mystery explosions near you (especially if you live in Iran).

Where does this leave international law? We’ve caught up with World War II and the regulation of mass armies and nukes. Who has the technical expertise, political will and diplomatic savvy to draw up laws for a world of crowdsourced armies and weaponized software?

(Cross posted from the New Political Communication Unit blog)

Moral Movements and IR Theory

Joshua Busby has a new book out on transnational campaigns that might be the best new contribution to the advocacy networks literature since Keck and Sikkink's original Activists Beyond Borders. In Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, Busby proposes a theory of the conditions under which such movements succeed at securing commitments from states:

Whether states accept commitments made by principled advocacy movements depends primarily on how three factors conjoin: 1) the balance of material incentives facing states, 2) the cultural resonance of the messages and 3) the number and preferences of policy gatekeepers. States will support moderately costly actions against their material self-interest when the issue is framed to fit with the country's values and when policy gatekeepers personally consider these attributes important.

The story Busby tells about the sources of such frame resonance are perhaps most interesting. Drawing on a variety of older literature as well as his casework (climate change, HIV-AIDS, the ICC and debt relief), Busby emphasizes not only ideational messages themselves but also the attributes of messengers as a constituent part of a successful or unsuccessful frame. This is borne out as well by preliminary findings from my focus group research in the human security area: practitioners often argue that the attributes of the entities pitching new ideas impact the likelihood of those ideas being "picked up" in global civil society.

Besides the argument and the cases, another contribution of the book is the conceptual precision Busby brings to bear - distinguishing political from policy successes, state interests v. the micro-motives of individual politicians, issues v. campaigns. But he leaves a few questions open - such as how "policy gatekeepers," targets of advocacy influence within governments - are analytically distinct from "advocacy gatekeepers" such as those outlined by Clifford Bob and his collaborators in their study of how ideas flow through advocacy networks. Are these two distinct forms of gate-keeping power or simply differently positioned actors at different points in the advocacy chain?

Also, one small quibble: in focusing only on "principled advocacy networks" rather than wider forms of contentious politics, Busby's framework refies an old and somewhat suspect distinction between "strategic" v. "principled" activity. But Susan Sell and Aseem Prakash's research on intellectual property rights shows that firms and NGOs are not so unalike in either their motivations or their strategies: all organizations need to survive and surely some of the dynamics that occur between advocates and policy gatekeepers reflect the political economy of resources as well as ideas between states and NGOs.

"We should not see moving out of academia as a failure"

Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:

Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.

Curry was commenting here on changing the mindset of the students, but I would argue in many disciplines the problem isn't the students, but the professors.  There are still large groups of people in academia that not only disagree with this sentiment, but actively work to undermine students who choose to take their education and apply it outside of academia.  My experience has been in the realm of political science, but certainly know others that have had similar experiences in other disciplines.

The skills one learns in graduate school are absolutely applicable outside of academia.  In many cases, students may be better positioned to apply what they've learned and have a more fulfilling career in either government or business.  Not everyone is cut out for this type of career, but then again not everyone is cut out for a life in academia either.  In many cases, it takes a different set of talents to thrive in either environment.  And when we take into account the utter dysfunction of the academic labor market, I don't think pressuring students to seek a career in that market is the most responsible thing to do.

Bottom line: the focus should be on the students and what will be the best move for them, not what professors think is the 'proper' career for those pursuing and holding a Ph.D.

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]

Pennsylvania’s Perverted “War on Terror”

How does America's bloated anti-terror bureaucracy spend its time and our money? A story out of Pennsylvania last week throws light on the earth-shakingly important work these saviors of our soil perform, defending us all from the scary monsters who pose such a dire menace to America.

Or rather it illustrates, yet again, the myriad ways in which our homeland security hogs work to rationalize their existence and perpetuate their wallow in the "homeland security" slops-trough—even while eroding our civil liberties.

Predicting flu outbreaks, fashion trends, and political unrest with social networks

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have released a new paper that looks at the potential predictive power of social networks.  They claim that current methods of contagion detection are, at best, contemporaneous with the actual epidemic.  What is needed is a true early detection method, one that would actually provide an accurate prediction of a coming epidemic.

Christakis and Fowler claim that social networks can be used as sensors for various types of contagions (whether biological, psychological, informational, etc).  In an inventive twist, they leverage what is known as the Friendship Paradox--the idea that, for almost everyone, a person's friends tend to have more friends than they do.   Contagions tend to appear sooner in those individuals that are closer to the center of a social network.  The logic goes that if you ask a group of people to name one of their friends, those friends will be closer to the center of the network than the people you asked.  Rather than map and monitor an entire social network, simply monitoring these friends should allow researchers to detect the outbreak of, say, H1N1 much earlier.

They tested their theory using Harvard College undergrads, attempting to detect the outbreak of the flu.  (You can watch Christakis discuss the paper and research during a recent TED talk in the video embed below).  What did they find?

Creeping Reasonableness

I've been wondering when the Locke/Demosthenes effect would manifest itself through the faux political rivalry of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Could this be their moment?

Stewart on the need to return to a deliberative ethic in American democracy - best if viewed starting @ 2:10 below:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rally to Restore Sanity
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Colbert's response @ 3:54 below:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
March to Keep Fear Alive
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

David Carr writes:

In a sense, the pair from Comedy Central are a postmodern response to a modern media universe.

His round-up of insights on the politicization of satire and satirization of the political include the following:

Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of public radio’s “Studio 360,” called Mr. Stewart’s rally for civility “a milestone in this arc of increasing entanglement between show business and politics. The current media condition is not just more power. It’s nuclear power, and we don’t really know where we are going with it,” he said.

“Stewart and Colbert are awkwardly transitioning from media figures to political figures with an understanding that there may not be that much difference anymore,” said Michael Hirschorn, a writer and a producer of a number of reality shows.

My modest prediction regarding this twin set of rallies: Stewart's will draw a significant number of moderates, for precisely the reasons he hopes, but Colbert's will also draw Americans on both the far left and far right. If so, that will be an interesting pot in which deliberative democracy can, momentarily, stew - and I wonder what exactly they're planning to stir it with come the day.

Hope to see you there on October 30th at 8:00 a.m.!

Irrelevance of the third kind

Lots of noise of late about the "relevance" question in political science, some of it thoughtful, so of it not so much. While this is obviously an old question -- indeed, in some ways, it's the oldest question in the discipline, dating back to the original efforts to place the study of politics on some kind of scientific footing in the early part of the 20th century -- I find myself thinking about it a lot these days, both in the context of university administration (which is one-half of my day job) and as a result of the dislocatingly bizarre experience of attending the European SGIR conference last week almost immediately after the conclusion of APSA the previous week. To make things even odder, both conferences had similar themes (politics and hard times), but couldn't have been much more different in terms of the content of the overall discussions. But neither, I think, featured much "relevance" of the sort that almost all of the participants in the most recent discussion seem to be focusing on -- which is to say that there wasn't much going on at either conference that was directly, or in many cases even indirectly, policy-relevant.

Readers of my previous missives on this subject will not be surprised to hear, once again, that I am no fan of policy-relevance as a criterion for whether we're doing a good job as we study and produce knowledge about world politics. This extends to the kind of indirect policy-relevance that Jon cites; people may read and discuss his work in policy circles, but I would be somewhat shocked and a bit horrified if they spent much time discussing mine as they were trying to figure out the appropriate course of action to undertake in some specific situation. A clarification of the logic of social-scientific inquiry (my latest book) is not going to tell anyone much of anything about how to "go on" and act in the world, except in the negative sense of dispelling the mystical aura of certainty that sometimes surrounds particular scientific claims and appears to make them practical antidotes to the awful responsibility of committing to a course of action: science doesn't actually solve the problem of how to live and what to do, and remembering that might help policymakers to recognize their own irreducible responsibility when it comes to selecting options. And a historical-configurational study of the specific combination of factors bringing about the reconstruction of postwar Germany (my previous book) is not going to do much to help policymakers either, except inasmuch as thinking about that case might create a certain sensitivity to factors of culture and identity in political life. So I would say that the most direct link between my work and the policy world is a linkage mediated by the intellectual disposition that critical-historical study imparts and strengthens, and has basically nothing to do with any logical implication of my substantive arguments.

Fresh (and Re-Freshed) Duck

In addition to being blown away by the recent Duck facelift (ht to Dan), you may have also noticed a slight shuffling in the roster. Congratulations to Stephanie Carvin, Laura Sjoberg, Vikash Yadav, all of whom are now officially (to quote Stephanie) "perma-ducks."

Some of our other guest bloggers have stepped aside for now. We are grateful to Tony Lang, Mlada Bukovansky, Drew Conway, Daniel McIntosh and Craig Hayden for their contributions to the Duck over the past year of transitions, and wish them the best. Many will continue to write at their other fabulous blogs, and we'll continue to read and link.

While Patrice McMahon and Virginia Haufler will remain in the guest roster for another season, the departure of so many guest Ducks has left openings for fresh faces. We are happy to welcome three new guest bloggers to the Duck crew this academic year.

First, Clifford Bob of Duquesne University will join us for a stint with commentary on global civil society, US foreign policy, ethnic violence, and anything else he specializes in or cares to comment about. Cliff is the author of The Marketing of Rebellion and is now completing a new manuscript on conservative transnational movements. He is also known among IR scholars for his snazzy titles. We can't wait to see what he cooks up here at the Duck.

Second, we'd like to welcome Chris Brown - that's right, the Chris Brown (of LSE) - to the Duck ranks. Professor Brown specializes in US and British foreign policy, global social justice and the ethics of war; his most recent in a long line of books is Practical Judgment in International Political Theory and for those unaware, he appeared on the single most interesting panel last year at the International Studies Association Annual Conference.

Third, we are pleased to introduce Ben O'Loughlin of Royal Holloway University in the UK, who will periodically chip in his two pence on issues related to international political communication. O'Loughlin's work has emphasized the relationship between the media, war and new security challenges, and he blogs at the New Political Communications Unit. We look forward to his discussions of anything and everything.

And finally, we are all extremely excited to see Nexon back from the dead... er... DoD... er... something like that. Welcome, Dan. We knew you'd be back.

Please join us in welcoming this year's crew.

Book Blegging

Loyal Duck readers, I was hoping you might be able to help me out.

Do you have any recommendations for books about the inventive ways that people (scientists, designers, business folk, etc) have evaluated hard to test subjects? I am looking for something that is less about methodology, per se, and more about testing ideas in a practical way where either the environment or subject matter makes testing difficult (thinking here of astrophysics, for example). I am not looking for something that looks at the subject from a philosophical standpoint, but is more of a collection of examples that highlight the inventive ways people have gone about testing hypotheses in practical ways.

For example, I am thinking here of Shapiro's famous observational test of general relativity (the Shapiro Delay), or the discovery of Neptune.

Hopefully this makes some sense. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Toward a Post-Zombie IR

While I was on my working leave, Foreign Policy asked me to write a response to Dan Drezner's "Night of the Living Wonks. They published it, in abridged form, about a month ago under the title of "America's Triumph over the Zombie Horde". Predictably, they misspelled my name.

What few people know, however, is that my typically skewed sense of priorities drove me to write not one, but two responses.

For our readers' edification, and to mark my return to blogging, I give you my other, heretofore suppressed, take on Dan Drezner's article.

Driving Parents Crazy: Why are some violent radicals fathers?

My blogging has been light lately as I have been on the road travelling a lot. This recent period has had me travelling like something of a crazy person with trips all over the Centre/East Coast of North America.

Part of this trip included some time in Ottawa, where it was some interesting times. The week before I arrived there was a series of dramatic arrests here against individuals suspected of plotting to carry out terrorist attacks against the city. These are individuals who, from most media accounts, were largely raised in Canada and subsequently became radicalized.

This is not the first series of arrests that have been carried out by Canadian police and intelligence services in recent years. The case of the Toronto 18 (although only 11 were eventually charged) – seems to be similar in the sense that it was a bunch of individuals that became radicalized and eventually tried to carry out terrorist acts in Toronto. Although their efforts were almost comically bad – and full of screw-ups along the way – the plot to blow up Toronto office buildings was not really anything to laugh about.

This is kind of old news now, but a couple of thoughts on this latest series of arrests – with the caveat of course that I am no terrorism expert.

I suppose the main thing that has caught my attention is that one of the suspects, Khurram Sher, has young children. Initially, I found this somewhat shocking – but upon reflection I realized that this is not unlike recent London bombers (in the 7/7 attacks and the attempts of 21/7 ) – some of whom were married and some with children. And some of the lead suspects in the Toronto 18 case also had children.

I’ve been asking terrorism researching friends why this might be. Apparently the appropriate question is why, in these cases does having children not provide an “insulating” factor against radicalization? If there is some kind of parenting instinct, why is it not enough to overcome or prevent some individuals from wanting to carry out violent acts?

Based on some brief conversations, I'm not sure there is a straightforward answer. One explanation is that violent radicals have often married young and, naturally, have had children as a result. So in this sense it may just be something that has happened along the way, or during the process of violent radicalization.

Perhaps more interestingly it was also suggested to me that there is some research to support the idea that the women in the lives of violent radicals – such as their wives – may play a role in encouraging them to act. Kind of like a bad version of Macbeth, I guess. But in that case the question about the insulating effect of children then applies to the women as well – why don’t children discourage them from encouraging violent radicalism? Why would they prefer that their husbands act than their children to have a father?

But upon some (very light) investigation into this – it seems as though many women who actually execute terrorist acts (as opposed to only encouraging) are mothers as well. This is particularly the case with the Black Widdows of Chechnya where women are often in their mid-20s and may have 2-3 children. A depressing thought.

Another interesting question to come off of this is if there is a difference between fathers in the Middle East in harsh circumstances (such as Palestine) and Western radicals? While I could imagine that being the son/daughter/wife of a “martyr” might convey (however perversely) a certain social status in the Occupied Territories, would this hold true for the Canadian Muslim community (who have been very quick to denounce the supposed plot on a national level)?

I would be very interested in suggestions for research in this area. I’m fairly certain that if I asked my parents I would get some kind of sarcastic comment about myself and my brother being enough to drive anyone crazy. However, I have to think that there is more social-scientific research out there that doesn’t involve parental sarcasm.

This video of one of the London bombers holding his infant daughter is pretty chilling. He is literally making a video for her – spelling out exactly what he was about to do and that she should pray for him in heaven. I don’t like to think of myself as overly sentimental – but you would think that having kids would discourage someone from actively harming themselves?

The Latest in Mole Whacking

Yesterday, the New York Times had a story about huge proposed increases in military assistance to Yemen, framed around the "war on terror." Since the Christmas day 2009 attempted airliner bombing that was linked to Yemen, the U.S. was allocated about $155 million in military aid for FY 2010 -- up from about $5 million in FY 2006.

The Pentagon's latest plan calls for $1.2 billion in the next six years, about $200 million annually. That's nearly a 25% increase from 2010 and an enormous change in commitment over a short period of time.

Apparently, by comparison, Aghanistan is so 2009:

“Yemen is the most dangerous place,” said Representative Jane Harman, a senior California Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee who visited Yemen in March. “We’re much more likely to be attacked in the U.S. by someone inspired by, or trained by, people in Yemen than anything that comes out of Afghanistan.”

Since the Pentagon claims that there are only about 100 al Qaeda personnel in Afghanistan, this quote may well be literally true.

Of course, Harman says nothing about Pakistan, which has for some time been the real ground zero in the war on terrorism. The unpopular drone strikes demonstrate how that part of the AfPak war is being fought.

Those of us who have some doubts about the ability of military force to fight terrrorism (and achieve other foreign policy objectives) will be relieved to read this paragraph:

Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said in a policy talk last week that American-backed assaults by Yemeni forces on Al Qaeda may “deny it the time and space it needs to organize, plan and train for operations.” But in the long term, he added, countering extremism in Yemen “must involve the development of credible institutions that can deliver real economic and social progress.”

There is another big problem with the Pentagon's plan -- Yemen's relative disinterest in the mission:

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton...said the priorities of President Saleh, an autocrat whose family has ruled [Yemen] for three decades, do not coincide with those of the United States.

“If we’re just pouring money and equipment into the Yemeni military in the hopes that it will be used against Al Qaeda,” Mr. Johnsen said, “that hope doesn’t match either with history or current reality.”

The whack-a-mole metaphor has been widely used by critics of U.S. foreign policy -- to describe outcomes in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The new Global Views survey is here! The new Global Views survey is here!

I admit it, I usually look forward to the release of US and international public opinion data. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs just released this year's Global Views survey aptly titled Constrained Internationalism: Adapting to New Realities. Only a quick look so far, but a couple of things jump out on first glance:

First, these views strike me as far more rational (in the Page and Shapiro sense) than the general tenor of elite and media discourse. In the past decade, the US has spent roughly half of the world's expenditures on defense (i.e., slightly more than every other country in the world combined). Despite that, most Americans appear to believe that US influence and power in the world has dropped precipitously in the same time period. Apparently, not enough bang for the buck. As a result, the public wants to be more "selective" in engaging the world. No surprise here.


But, consistent with data over the past twenty years, this isn't a call for isolationism. The attitudes continue to show support for the US to "do its share" to solve the worlds' problems and include a lot of support for maintaining American military bases abroad coupled with a desire to see more multilateral burden-sharing. Seems to be a call for smarter international engagement with more diplomacy and less reliance on US military as the cornerstone of US policy.

Second, the public has far less faith in the utility of military power than it did in the months after 9/11. Again, given the fiascos in Iraq and and Afghanistan, no real surprise here. But contrary to the increasing chorus of "bomb Iran" or "let Israel bomb Iran" voices, these attitudes also carry over to assessments of US obligations to Israel in its feud with Iran. According to the Executive Summary:

"A majority of Americans (56%) think that if Israel were to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran were to retaliate against Israel, and the two were to go to war, the United States should not bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel and against Iran.

Fewer than half of Americans show a readiness to defend Israel against an attack by its neighbors."

The report does not reveal the saliency of these particular attitudes and the views could well change if we move from hypothetical survey questions to real world events. But, it is clear the American public is wary of yet another escalating conflict and war. And, while there is a long history of robust US public support for Israel, these views do strike me as carrying very real and additional risks for the Israelis.

Relevant? Who Me?

OK, I'll bite. Lots being written these days about the relevance of political science. The latest today from Stephen Hayward at American Enterprise Institute.

I'll join with John Sides that this is an intellectually sloppy caricature of the discipline. But, I'm always struck by the question -- often posed by political scientists themselves -- are we relevant? Here's a little thought experiment on the IR/Comparative side of the discipline: let's say that all IR scholars (security and IPE) and comparativists simply stop their formal and informal advising to the US government, think tanks, NGOs, and the US media. No more participation on panels/reports at USIP, Brookings, the Atlantic Council, or the Wilson Center (whose executive summaries are on every LA's desk on the Hill); no more briefings at INR, FSI, or out at Langley (that often are noted in memos up the chain). No briefings, lectures, or conferences at NDU, NATO, or anywhere in the Pentagon (that are frequently plagiarized in subsequent briefing slides); no more background conversations with the Times or NPR or local media outlets around the country.

The reality is that all of these institutions rely to some extent on the scholarship of political scientists who do field work (especially in countries and regions not always on top of the fold), who compile data and systematically compare historical and/or contemporary cases, who think about broader trends, and yes, who develop models and use various types of methodologies to do more rigorous testing of empirical evidence. Hundreds of political scientists descend on DC every month to present their work and share their insights at these institutions.

If relevance is defined by the frequency of citation by Washington-based journalists, then yeah, I'd agree political scientists seem to be living in backwater.

But, if relevance is defined in terms of transmission of knowledge and information, albeit incomplete and often probabilistic, to help inform internal policy debates, my experience tells me there's plenty of relevance. In the past few years alone, we can see the influence on policy discussions and development from scholarship on the democratic peace, smart sanctions, the complexities and limitations of state building, as well as a lot of region/country specific scholarship on the challenges in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Institutionalized Riot Systems and the Hyper-real Koran

Fourteen civilians and two security officers have now died in Kashmir in violence related to rumors about the "Burn a Koran Day" in Florida. When added to the death in Afghanistan, this brings the total number of deaths to seventeen so far. Many more will die in the coming weeks and months even though the Koran burning was called off. Rumors will resurface that the burning has gone ahead even though such rumors will have no basis in reality. Why is this likely? Paul Brass' groundbreaking work on institutionalized systems to produce riots may help us to better understand what is happening and what will continue to ripple outward.

Riots in the South Asian context (and maybe also in Southwest Asia) are usually highly organized and meticulously preplanned. Institutionalized riot systems are often activated prior to elections or as a mechanism to sustain/revive political mobilization. Often times the core object which mobilizes the masses to riot is an object which has disappeared (e.g. a holy relic, an idol, or a child). Another major mechanism for mobilizing rioters is a purported or actual desecration of a sacred space (e.g. blood hurled into a temple; pig carcass thrown into a mosque) or a sacred text/symbol.

The threat by a fringe group to burn the Koran plays conveniently into the standard play book of an institutionalized riot system. Once the threat has been made and publicized it is very difficult to verify that the sacred object/text has not been desecrated. The Koran (the referent) disappears and rumors (or in the fashion of Baudrillard - the simulation) can circulate freely. The hyper-real Koran is far more useful to a riot system than the real one anyway. Now that a measure of plausibility has been (stupidly and maliciously) supplied by Dove World Outreach, it can be easily manipulated.

The riot system plays on an emotive politics of group humiliation. The symbols favored by a riot system make politics legible even to the least educated (or I should say -- particularly to the least educated). Of course, this analysis is not meant to deny that many rioters do have quite legitimate grievances. However, the manner in which those grievances are expressed is channeled towards collective violence by an institutionalized riot system.

From an empirical standpoint, one can usually only infer the presence of a riot system. While some criminal investigations have revealed the existence of organized riot systems at particular points in time (e.g. evidence of coordination of rioters via cell phones or published lists of the address of members of minority communities to be targeted in a pogrom), this evidence is not always readily available. However, the existence of riot system may be a good working hypothesis in any location which has been witnessing spasm of riot related violence like the Vale of Kashmir or particular parts of Afghanistan. As Brass originally argued, the only way to prove the hypothesis is through careful ethnographic analysis, which will be quite difficult in both Afghanistan and Indian Administered Kashmir. (It is statistically probable that areas which have a history of riots are more "riot prone" than areas which do not. However, this empirical observation lacks a causal explanatory mechanism since mass mobilization and collective violence do not happen with any measure of predictability from day to day or month to month -- years may pass in some areas before another major riot).

There is a long standing debate in South Asian politics as to whether civic engagement or criminal investigation is the best route for dampening and disrupting a riot system which has become institutionalized. I cannot weigh into that debate here. I will only conclude by recounting that an institutionalized riot system is designed to serve the interests of particular local actors. Different actors will activate riot systems in their locales for their own particular reasons. A particular mullah may see activation of the riot system as a way of amassing influence; a politician may see it as an easy way to distract attention or rally voters to a particular party or cause. Only careful and detailed reporting will help us to understand this story as it re-emerges in different local spaces around the world.

The Local is Global

For those of you who do not know, I live in Gainesville, Florida, a college town in Northeast Florida with lots of wonderful things - like a great bunch of colleagues, a great bunch of graduate students, weather to write home about, and a (frequently) rocking football team. It is (largely) a fairly politically progressive place, but there's still good country music - a great home to mix my Southern roots and lefty-academic tendencies. It is also, however, the place where the "Qu'ran burning" almost happened, and (thankfully) didn't. But that didn't stop it from causing deaths all the way around the world in Afghanistan.


For those of you who missed this story, Dove World Outreach Center (linked here to their Wikipedia page because their website host took down their site), is a small (about 50 members in a town of more than 100,000) non-denominational christian church in Gainesville. They recently made the global news, but had been on the local radar for a while, because their children wore shirts that said "Islam is the Devil" to Gainesville public schools, prompting school uniform legislation. It is a very small and fringe group, and has been very disruptive locally to a community that is actually quite decent about tolerance and diversity.

The lead pastor at Dove (not linked here because he seems to like the attention) Terry Jones announced in late July that Dove would be burning copies of the Qu'ran on September 11, 2010, vaguely describing it as in protest of the so-called "Ground Zero" mosque (which is, of course, not at "Ground Zero"). After receiving negative national and international media attention, and being condemned by figures as diverse as President Obama, Angelina Jolie, and the President and Faculty of the University of Florida, Jones and Dove World backed off their plan at the last minute and indeed burnt no books.

Those of us who got wind of the cancellation in the 48 hours leading up to the scheduled burning breathed a big sigh of relief, knowing that such an event would be devastating, whatever one's political persuasion - given the risks it would pose to Americans at home and abroad, and the message it would send to Islamic communities in Gainesville and around the world. At least I had been terrified that many innocent people would die over the burning, if it happened, both in Gainesville and around the world. I assumed that the cancellation of the burning would stop that violence.

But it happened too late for some people in Afghanistan. Protesters there had come out to show the government, which many of them saw as too pro-Western or pro-American, that supporting and taking the support of a state that would allow something as disrespectful as burning the Qu'ran would not be tolerated, and that a democratic Afghanistan would have to deal seriously with these issues. The news that the burning had been cancelled did not travel quickly enough, and the protests continued into Sunday in Afghanistan. The protesters were apparently displaying "hostile intent" in their attempts to occupy and sit-in at a local government building, and were fired on by Afghan troops.

Not knowing what happened there, I don't want to get into a "he said, he said" discussion of Afghan military police violence and insurgent threats - but what I do know is that some people in Gainesville, Florida are at least partly responsible for the deaths of some people in Afghanistan, who remain unnamed in Western news coverage. As citizens of the United States (or even other Western countries), we often convince ourselves that our individual political decisions do not affect how the world works, or other people that we don't know across that world. Terry Jones and Dove World showed that's not true - a couple of (fringe) people's politics affected a lot of people's lives, and ended (at least) two of them. The local is global, it seems; and the global is local. What we do with that, as scholars and as activists, seems to remain an open question. I, for one, think that the first priority should be making as aggressive statements about tolerance and respect as some make about intolerance and disrespect.

Much Ado in Mostar

OK, so I've been bit pessimistic of late -- an impending war between Israel and Iran, the rise of religious fundamentalisms around the globe, Bosnia's leadership taking the country back to the brink, etc.... But here's an upbeat story. I helped Steve Nemsick and Jane Applegate a bit on their new documentary about Andrew Garrod's work with Youth Bridge Global in the southern Bosnia-Herzegovina city of Mostar. I've spent quite a bit of time in Mostar in the past several years and I've lectured at both Mostar ""East" and Mostar "West" universities. The students really are hungry for an end to the ethnic politics of the Balkans. If there is a lasting solution to the problems in the region, it will likely be with the help of these students.

Here's the trailer:

The APSA Drinking Game

The following, unless otherwise specified, result in the taking of one drink for every observation/sighting at the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association. The Duck of Minerva is not responsible for any liver damage or unfortunate choice of panel questions that may result after participating in this game.

1. Someone wearing their conference badge at 2am or more than a mile from the actual conference site.
2. Bow-ties.
3. Observing two people talking where one person is looking over their shoulder for someone more important.
4. Someone carrying their own book around.
5. Young scholar gushing in the present of a senior scholar (+1 drink bonus if that senior scholar is looking over his/her shoulder for someone more important as per #3).
6. Running into someone who knows you, but you have no idea who they are. (Alternatively, going up to someone you know to talk to them and then realizing that they have no idea who you are. +1 if they are looking for someone more important as per #3).
7. Running into your grad school nemesis/an old flame /unfortunate conference one-night stand.
8. Any question longer than 2 minutes, or where any individual actually has no question but just wants to talk a lot. (+1 if there is less than one minute left before the lunch break starts.)
9. A panel with no questions.
10. A panel where the number of panelists outnumber the audience (Easy!)
11. Finding someone who goes to a panel every session. (Hard!)
12. Academic fist-fight (where insult to a scholar where he/she is in the room); Academic catfight (where the insult to a scholar is given where he/she is at the conference, but not in the room) (+1 drink for actual fist-fight).
13. Hung-over presenter (+1 if possibly still drunk).
14. iPad (+1 if academic is clearly searching for ‘illicit material’ on observed iPad)
15. A poster presentation that was clearly designed the night before in a fit of panic (ie: with crayons on hotel bar napkins.)
16. Panelist drinking something that is clearly other than water (+1 if any condition in #13 applies).
17. Exhibit hall stalker (someone clearly trying to meet all of the people they came to see in front of the book hall entrance or beside the Cambridge University Press booth (+1 if eating all of the chocolates from CQ Press).
18. Desperate/lonely Liberty Fund/Heritage Institute representative trying to make eye-contact with you.
19. Finding a book that you have endorsed in the book hall that you actually haven’t read.
20. Meeting someone not actually giving a paper on American electoral studies.

I would like to thank the many contributors to this list which was established over the course of the weekend at the APSA Conference in Washington DC. I’m assuming most would like to stay anonymous for various reasons. Suggestions welcome – particularly for the ISA edition that will be coming this March.

Debate Day

When I was a college student, I spent every Labor Day working in the debate squadroom at Kansas. Everyone on the team, in fact, was expected to put in a full day working on their affirmative cases, negative arguments, etc. Sometimes, debaters learned the identity of their colleague on that day -- it is a two-person team activity after all. After the work ended, our coach and his wife hosted the team for dinner.

Even though it was a Labor Day of work and not rest, I always enjoyed it and have fond memories.

Recently, former National Debate Tournament champion Michael Horowitz (Emory 2000) wrote a short piece for Slate about his own fond memories and experiences in college debate. In the article, he discusses a book by Mark Oppenheimer about that author's personal experience in debate. Indeed, the piece is penned as an open letter to Oppenheimer.

I'm not sure I agree with Horowitz and Oppenheimer that "debate is 'football for dorks.'" Yes, it is a competitive activity, but I'd probably use a different comparison. My colleague during sophomore and senior year used to describe our skills metaphorically by quoting from Stripes:

The world isn't fair! Truth isn't fair!

Is it fair that you were born like this? No!

They're not expecting somebody like you. They're expecting some clown.

You're different. You're weird.
You're a mutant. You're a killer!

You're a trained killer!

You're a lean, mean, fighting machine!

I've written before about being a "made man in the Kansas debate mafia."

For me, this is the key paragraph in the Horowitz piece:

One thing that struck me was how you were discouraged early in your debate career, by an "earthy, hippiesh senior girl," from "trying too hard" and doing too much research. You were encouraged instead to exercise your brilliance and charm to win debates, and the most entertaining debate stories in your book are the ones in which you emerge triumphant thanks to a clever turn of phrase, an eloquent monologue, or your sharp wit. To me, eloquence, research, and reasoning form the trinity of good debate. Too often, all of them are lacking from our political discourse. To the extent any of them are present, however, it is often style (or attempts at style) privileged over substance. This is unfortunate, because debate without substance runs the risk of being mere sophistry or just a dilettantish rhetorical dance.

I could not agree more with this.

Incidentally, Horowitz recently published a book that looks interesting: The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics.

Update 9/7/10: A friend of the blog sent along a link to a new debate documentary: "Debate Team." Apparently, it is available in DVD -- and they have a lot of interesting deleted scenes online. The clips seem to support the Horowitz point about substance vs. style.

Also, if you look around on the web, you can find an old photo of my colleague and I holding Mike's trophy. It gets around.

The World's Most Dangerous Crisis

[cross-posted at Current Intelligence]



Earlier this week, President Obama announced the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq and pledged his commitment to begin drawing down American forces in Afghanistan beginning next summer. A key theme in his address to the nation was the need for the United States to redirect resources from nearly a decade of two wars and invest in the economy at home. Yet, although the President is trying to move away from an era of “perpetual war,” Washington is already abuzz about the next impending military action the region: an Israeli strike on Iran, which would likely disrupt US objectives and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and create enormous political, strategic, military, and economic costs to the United States around the globe.

Jeffrey Goldberg triggered the most recent discussion with his article “Israel is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran: How, Why – and What it Means” in the current issue of The Atlantic. Based on dozens of interviews over the past few years, Goldberg’s assessment is that most Israeli leaders (and citizens) now view a nuclear Iran as an existential threat and, as a result, there is “better than a 50 percent chance Israel will launch a strike on Iran by next July.”

I spent a couple of weeks in Israel in June also talking to senior Israeli political and military officials and I came away with a similar impression. The Israelis will not tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons and they will take military action to slow it if no one else does.

To be sure, there is a possibility that the Israeli government is sounding particularly hawkish as a signaling ploy to generate a stronger international response to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But I concur with Goldberg’s assessment that the current Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes the existence of the state of Israel and the entire Zionist movement is threatened by a nuclear Iran. They see the threat as both direct – a nuclear Iran will act more aggressively by unleashing Hezbollah and Hamas to launch direct attacks on Israeli cities – and indirect – as the next generation of educated Israelis will leave the country for the relative safety and comfort of the United States or Europe. As a result, both the security and demography of Israel will be irreparably changed.

Regardless of whether or not this is the true nature of the threat, and whether or not a nuclear Iran could be contained, the dominant view in the upper echelons of the Israeli government is that Iran with a nuclear weapon cannot (and will not) be tolerated.

I’ve spent the past twenty years studying decisionmaking and war. Decisions for war are often a confluence of heightened assessments of threat coupled with various psychological or ideological biases that discount the costs of war. In this sense, decisions for war are more likely when leaders perceive an enemy as a paper tiger – ferocious and dangerous if left unchecked, but easily dismantled by swift and concentrated military action. In these circumstances, war becomes more likely when it is seen as both a necessary and relatively low cost instrument.

What is striking about the debate in Israel today is that no one seems to be discounting the costs to Israel if it does strike Iran. The Israelis that I met with all agreed that Israel would be isolated in the world if it launched a preventive attack. It would trigger large-scale retaliations by enraged Iranians and radicalized Muslim populations against Jews and Jewish interests around the world. The Israelis also expect that an attack would imperil the Palestinian Authority’s statebuilding efforts on the West Bank and trigger counter attacks against Israel from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and from Hamas in Gaza. Israeli intelligence officers told my group that it believes Hezbollah and Hamas have acquired somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 rockets from Iran in the past several years. These weapons are more sophisticated and longer range than Qasam rockets used by Hamas in Gaza and can now strike almost every city and town in Israel. This would compel a full-scale land campaign by the Israeli Defense Forces in both Gaza and Lebanon.

And, finally, the Israelis are conscious that a strike would trigger a reaction against American military personnel and interests throughout the Muslim world. This would profoundly affect all American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. More broadly, it could seriously destabilize the entire Persian Gulf and broader Middle East, and be disastrous to the global economy.

Even with this analysis in hand, many in the Israeli leadership appear to believe that striking Iran would be the best option if nothing else is done to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

The challenge for the Obama administration in the coming months is to simultaneously deter Iran from moving forward on its nuclear weapons program while persuading the Israelis not to take matters into their own hands. This will not be easy. The Iranian regime has shown little sign of altering its course. Constraining the Israelis – difficult under any circumstances – will be considerably more difficult after the mid-term elections in November if the hawkish, pro-Israeli Republicans do as well as expected.

Obama entered office as the most boxed-in President since Harry Truman – facing two wars and a global financial crisis. But it is this situation that may be the biggest challenge for his Presidency, and the most dangerous. If Obama fails and the Israelis strike, the regional and global reaction to both Israel and the United States will be severe. We almost certainly will be looking at a fundamentally altered environment, in security and economic terms, for the next generation.

My Summer with Religious Rights

I've been on the road most of the summer (8 of the past 10 weeks) so the blogging has been quite light. I spent twelve days in Israel and then a bit more than three weeks doing research in Europe followed by my first real vacation in more than a decade -- a three week car trip with my kids out to visit family and friends in the upper Midwest.

One of the more intriguing elements that linked all three trips was the presence of conservative, religious politics everywhere I went. I talked to Jewish settlers on the West Bank, I spent time with several young (and newly self-identified) conservative Muslims from Sarajevo and Paris, and I spent three weeks with conservative, Christian evangelicals in North Dakota, central Minnesota, and western Michigan.

Despite the differences in religion and world experiences, I am struck by the similarity of these groups to each other. Here are a few observations:

1. Perhaps the most obvious observation is that religious identity is the most salient identity held by individuals in each of these communities and, while I've interacted with each of these communities for years, the beliefs are more highly political and exclusivist than I've experienced in the past. Each community feels besieged and perceives there are coordinated attacks by "others" to de-legitimize their beliefs and their culture.

They each see existential threats everywhere they look, but the central threat is really coming from liberalism. Secularlism, human rights, globalization and open markets, free trade, labor and capital mobility, migration (legal or not), etc... are all seen as posing fundamental threats to their (perceived) way of life.

2. It is not the zeal or energy that is striking or new, rather it is the casualness and ease with which so many members of these communities express their intolerance, xenophobia, and even outright racism. There isn't even a pretense of politeness or basic civility, let alone any curiosity of the other. I had a lengthy conversation with several young Bosnian Muslims who repeatedly invoked Allah to convey collective guilt not just on the Serbs but on all the "filthy" and "genocidal" Serbs, Christians, and Jews. I heard references to Palestinians as collectively "lazy" and "bred to be terrorists." In North Dakota, I heard repeated racial epithets (the n-word) directed at President Obama and several references to his "godless Islamic cult." In some instances, complete strangers approached my conversations with various groups to add additional diatribes against the "other." I was really astounded by the ease with which such raw, emotional, and racist language was expressed.

3. Each community is adamantly anti-authority and says it "just wants to be left alone" from the influence of the state. Settlers in the West Bank settlement of Offra showed us settlement homes that were demolished by the Israeli government as part of the peace process several years back. The settlers have left the ruins untouched as a monument of their struggle against the Israeli government and the peace process. The Sarajevo Muslims railed against the the Bosnian central government for its efforts to integrate communities, to develop tax codes and regulatory infrastructures in Bosnia. And, the evangelical Tea Partiers in the upper Midwest blasted America's "socialist" federal government.

And yet, despite all of their protests, all three groups are wholly dependent on the state for their basic existence -- the settlers could not live in the West Bank without the Israeli government providing electricity, water, transportation and communication infrastrasture -- let alone security. The Bosnian Muslims would not have a unified community or protection without a viable central government. And, the rural tea partiers -- the farmers and ranchers -- could not exist without a federal government that keeps them afloat with extensive agricultural subsidies and direct assistance to maintain rural electricity, communication, and transportation -- the Dakotas rank in the top five of per capita federal dollars to states. The cognitive dissonance is palpable....

4. Many hold militant and apocalyptic views. Many of the folks I talked to believe the world is in serious trouble -- politically and economically. The settlers in Offra told my group that there will be civil war if the Israeli government tries to demolish more houses or dismantle settlements. The Bosnian Muslims -- most who were too young to fight in the Bosnian War in the 1990s -- warned that they were ready to finish the job that their fathers and brothers were unable to finish against the infidels. And, in the upper Midwest, the gun culture includes far more emphasis on automatic and semi-automatic weapons designed to protect "God and Country" from "Obama's socialism" than the emphasis on hunting with shotguns and hunting rifles I grew up with.

It is not surprising that such views seem to be rising -- especially in a time of global recession. But, it would be a mistake to conclude that these views are simply a function of economics. We've seen fairly consistent trends in the rise of religious fundamentalism across the globe for the better part of the past twenty years. Liberalism has become more deeply embedded in global institutions and practices in the past several decades, but it also has triggered widespread reactions. Still, with global liberal economic models performing poorly, we're likely to see more anxiety and the rise of more populist demagogues seeking to exploit that anxiety.