Rally Signage

According to NPR, the "great debate" in the hours before the big luau on the National Mall was whether people were coming to the rally for politics or comedy:

When Jon Stewart announced his Washington, D.C., Rally to Restore Sanity, he inspired much joy among fans of his Daily Show.

But he has also sparked a fierce debate among pundits over whether Stewart really has comedy or politics in mind for the event. It is scheduled for Saturday afternoon on the National Mall.

"I have had the growing suspicion that the participants in this rally don't entirely think of it as a comedy show," Timothy Noah of the online magazine Slate says. "I think that they are mistaking ... participation in this rally for some sort of political statement. That confusion troubles me."

A cursory glance at the rally signs suggested Timothy Noah is missing an important point: to blend comedy and politics. And people clearly didn't come all for the same reason or all with the same politics.

Should I go vote for women because they're women?

Reading a recent TIME article on "Why Women Candidates are Talking Tough" inspired me to blog about the upcoming elections a little bit. While there are a record number of women candidates for national office, predictions are that women will lose ground in representational terms. If women pick up any ground (or even don't lose it), it is predicted to be GOP women winning seats and Democratic women losing them. With so many unappealing women to vote for (whose names I'll leave off this blog post to be polite), and so few appealing women to vote for ... what's a progressive, Democratic, pro-choice woman to do?

The easy argument (and what I'm likely to do) is to vote with your political preferences. But in the rest of this post, I'll make an argument for voting for every woman you can, regardless of political preference.

Zombie NATO? Or, the Poverty of Realism

A great many bloggers and policy wonks, motivated by the upcoming Lisbon Summit, are weighing in on NATO's future. NATO faces a number of challenges and difficult issues, including:

• The inconclusive war in Afghanistan that has led member after member to reduce (or eliminate) its commitment to ISAF;
• Whether to take on a missile defense as part of a broader "territorial defense" mandate;
• The future of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe;
• Continuing divisions over how to engage the Russian Federation; 
• Turkey's growing "neo-Ottoman" focus; and
• Recession-driven defense cuts that threaten to eviscerate many a member-state's substantive contribution to NATO military capabilities.

While opinions differ over the health of the alliance, I've been particularly struck by the weakness of Steve Walt's arguments for why NATO is headed for membership in the society of the walking dead. He isolates three major reasons for his negative assessment: Afghanistan, defense cuts, and Turkish foreign policy.

Pork Barrel Nation: From Prisons to Pentagon

Here is a fascinating story detailing how a network of legislators and corporations works together on bills such as Arizona’s recent and controversial immigration bill.  The two-part report shows corporations and trade groups writing laws, encouraging “lawmakers” to promote and pass them, then using the legislation to expand their businesses.  In this case, prison companies--one of the few bright spots in our woeful economy--were involved in writing the Arizona bill.  Now they stand to make millions from new jails for illegal aliens, especially women and children, awaiting deportation. 

All of this was conducted through an outfit called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which disingenuously calls itself a nonprofit—and apparently has the IRS status to prove it.  After all, it’s not lobbying, it’s “educating” legislators, as ALEC’s leader states in the report.   Of course, ALEC is “educating “our representatives to support the bill prepared by its corporate members so that they can profit off of it later.  But it’s still education!

The focus of the report may be domestic, but the implications are obviously wider, including to the mother of all pork-barrelers, the military and its corporate hangers-on.  According to the Wall St. Journal, defense now accounts for over $700 billion annually, amounting to over 50% of domestic discretionary spending and an estimated 19% of all federal spending (dwarfing Medicare expenditures). 

The Strategic Impact of Wikileaks

Rob Farley opines at World Press Review on the political/strategic implications of War Diarii:

Perversely, efforts to increase government transparency often have negative effect on actual secrecy policy. For example, the ability of individuals to uncover written notes from government meetings through FOIA requests or through lawsuit discovery has led to the practice of shredding notes following most meetings. Data that does not exist cannot be leaked. We can similarly expect in the future that incident reports of the type leaked to Wikileaks will become less available to potential leakers. The U.S. military collects and correlates this data in order to improve tactical effectiveness. Information about particularly effective methods, about failure, and about enemy capability spreads across units with access to the data. Because of concerns over adverse political effects, however, the military will probably collect less data, destroy more, and further limit access to what data remains.

It all sounds pretty dire, but then again Rob may just be grumpy because of this.

OK, seriously. Read the whole thing here.

The decline of American math and sciences?

I attended a forum on the math and science curriculum last night at my kids' school and we had an interesting presentation and discussion on the general state of math and science education in the United States. Several of the parents present at the forum were math and science faculty members from Smith College and from UMass. One prominent theme was the lament that the US was falling behind China and India in the math and sciences.

One of the parents referred me to an article and data published last summer in Money magazine. A key finding:

As math and science talent accumulates abroad, companies do more of their hiring there, reducing demand in the U.S. That's partly why undergraduate engineering majors are a shrinking proportion of the total, down from 6.8% to about 4.5% over the past 20 years. Employers then claim they can't find engineers in the U.S. -- so they have to hire abroad.

Another passage generated a sharp response from several parents:

The fastest-growing college majors in America as of 2007, says the U.S. Education Department, were parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies, as well as security and protective services.

Then this morning, Thomas Friedman's column added another plug for the decline of American math and sciences in American education.

UPDATED: So you want to get a PhD in the humanities/political science

Makes you laugh, but also cry a little bit inside...

Update: and for those polisci folks out there

Social Science: Apparently Too 'Sciencey' for the Iranian Government...

...so says a senior Education Ministry official:

"Expansion of 12 disciplines in the social sciences like law, women's studies, human rights, management, sociology, philosophy....psychology and political sciences will be reviewed," Abolfazl Hassani was quoted as saying in the Arman newspaper.

"These sciences' contents are based on Western culture. The review will be the intention of making them compatible with Islamic teachings."

The Ayatollah added:

"Many disciplines in the humanities are based on principles founded on materialism disbelieving the divine Islamic teachings," Khamenei said in a speech reported by state media.

"Thus such teachings...will lead to the dissemination of doubt in the foundations of religious teachings."

I have no doubt that this will only serve to elevate Iranian social science to new heights.  I mean, it isn't like doubt is fundamental to the scientific enterprise or anything...

[via The Monkey Cage]

Three Cheers for Wikileaks

The last few days have seen a fury of debate about Wikileaks’ latest disclosures.   To my mind, Wikileaks’ release of the Iraq and earlier Afghanistan documents is a public service—throwing critical light on the way in which America has pursued its wars at ground level.  

Some have dismissed the documents as nothing “new.”    Of course, it is true that we have had information about the wars, human rights violations, and civilian casualties in everyday stories by the media.  But much of that, among reporters “embedded” by the military, has been carefully screened.  Moreover, what has been written is also of course filtered through the eyes of journalists, with their own biases.  

I think it is extremely useful for the public to have the opportunity to see ordinary soldiers’ day-to-day experience of the wars in any number of incidents that have not in fact received attention.  This in my view makes the information “new”—and clearly worthwhile.   That is why the world’s headlines over the last few days have been full of stories about civilian casualties, torture, and the role of military contractors--based on the Wikileaks disclosures.  

As to the argument that the releases put civilians and soldiers at risk,

IR makes it to TED

Joseph Nye gives a TED talk:

In Praise of Falsification

For those that have not read it yet, The Atlantic recently featured an article profiling Dr. John Ioannidis who has made a career out of falsifying many of the findings of medical research that guides clinical practice.  Ioannidis' research should cause us all to appreciate the various bias we may bring to our own work:

[C]an any medical-research studies be trusted?

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem. [my emphasis]

Unlike most famous researchers, Ioannidis is not famous for a positive discovery or finding (unless you count his mathematical proof that predicts error rates for different methodologically-framed studies).  Instead, his status has been obtained because of his ability to falsify the work of others--to take their hypotheses and empirical research and show that they are wrong.

What you should know about 'Right to Know'

While WikiLinks is dumping information from the US military all over the internets, the South African government is taking some rather disturbing steps to ensure that citizens, citizens and pretty much everyone in between will not have the right to access any information deemed a threat to "national security".  What kind of information threatens national security? Well, according to the “Protection of Information Bill”, pretty much whatever government (local, regional, national) decides. It’s a dangerously vague bill that could possibly do great harm to South Africa. I don't think I need to go into great detail why so much government control over information is a bad thing. I'm not an African politics specialist, but I've been chatting about it with my very cool historian friend Sarah Duff, who gave me the following run-down of the main issues below that I thought I would share with Duck readers as this story, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention outside of South Africa. If nothing else, how could you possibly resist a movement with a logo of a crumpled vuvuzela?

Last month the Minister for State Security, Bheki Cwele, announced to the Ad Hoc Committee currently steering the controversial Protection of Information Bill through the South African Parliament that ‘secrecy is the oil which lubricates our democracy.’ While not only an icky choice of metaphor, Cwele’s positioning of secrecy at the heart of South African democracy runs counter to the ideals embodied by our Constitution, and is also ‘against the spirit of 1994’, as struggle veteran and former cabinet minister Kader Asmal remarked last week. If it is passed in its current form, the Protection of Information Bill will empower state employees – in government departments, parastatals, local government councils, and state agencies – to classify all and any information as secret without having to provide reasons for doing so.

Is Academic Jargon Elitist?

Shortest Drezner:

The specialization of knowledge leads actors to reduce the transacton costs of communication with each other. Naturally, this phenomenon creates a barrier to entry for outside consumers, while instilling a common identity among specialists.

This is his short and concise but jargony argument in favor of the value of academic jargon. For the long-winded explanation in language non-academic can understand, see here.

"War Diaries 2.0": Is Wikileaks Moving Down the Learning Curve?

In a number of respects the Iraq War Diaries constitute a repeat of the Afghan War Diaries – a massive data dump bringing to light few unknowns but admittedly casting those knowns in much sharper relief, an act for which Julian Assange is being hailed or harangued by those of different persuasions, for different reasons. At Lawyers, Guns and Money, I've pointed out a couple of things that are different this time ‘round:

Assange was previously criticized, including by me, for protecting his sources but exposing the names of vulnerable individuals named in the documents themselves. In his newest public statements, Assange has bent over backward to insist he did a more careful redaction this time. My cursory examination of some random documents suggests it may be true. (I withhold judgment until either I or someone else has looked through a larger number of them, but I do feel generally a bit less uncomfortable than I was last time he unleashed a dump like this - if only because he acknowledges the norm of limiting collateral damage by war reporters as well as war fighters.)

That said, DOD and members of military families have legitimate concerns about the security of troops on the basis of this information. This is a different concern than the one I’ve written about previously, which is the security of local civilians, but it’s also not to be taken lightly. I continue to think there is a middle ground between staying silent and dumping massive amounts of data on the public.

Assange's newfound powers of redaction do also, of course, raise a question as to how Assange possibly managed to redact such a large number of documents, given his claim that it would require $700 million and Pentagon help to redact the AWD. I guess miracles never cease in this technological age.

My post goes on to argue:

Wikileaks’ mode of information dissemination is also quite different this time around. The Afghan War Diaries site was fairly rudimentary, a simple portal through which individuals could download the entire set of files. Warlogs.Wikileaks.org includes a search engine with a topic model, and in the absence of a search presents documents from the files seemingly at random. (I like the tool that automatically expands acronyms.)Most interestingly is the separate page where individuals can comment on bits of the logs without downloading the whole, flagging specific documents and providing commentary. Truly, “War Diaries 2.0".

Not sure as yet how precisely the topics are generated, whether through searches or some sort of coding scheme developed in advance by Assange and team. Oh that Wikileaks were as transparent about its decision-making as it asks governments to be.

Finally, the answer to the question in the title may ultimately be based on internal dynamics within the organization itself - which are also in constant motion. An excellent source to follow on what Wikileaks is, as opposed to what it does, is here.

A Quick and No-Doubt Premature Look at WikiLeaks (Iraq Edition)

Just a few initial observations/questions

1. Iraq Body Count is arguing that the documents help provide further information on civilian deaths.  No doubt this will add further impetus for the call for militaries to release information on casualties killed in armed conflict. I wonder, however, if IBC has to walk a fine line here – if they say that the information released provides information on hundreds or thousands of previously unknown incidents, it means that they are effectively saying their own methodology was flawed. On the other hand if they say that it confirms their numbers, then they undermine their own argument for releasing information.[Update: IBC is indeed saying that the documents "contain an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths."]

Still, I think they are trying to straddle the middle based on this account here.  They’re saying that they are predominantly getting more details (ie: names) from the reports. However, in my mind, this still doesn't answer the more important  question as to whether it’s really a good idea to publish the names of victims on a database a) during the middle of a raging civil war b) located in a Western country, controlled by a technically unaccountable NGO, where the families have no input or control over what is stated. (But a blog post for another day...)

Friday Signaling Roundup

Here are a few quick signaling items for your perusal.  I will try to do a similar roundup each Friday if I've stumbled on enough items throughout the week.  Enjoy!

• How to Signal That You Are Marrying for Love? It's tougher than you might think.  Some suggest using a pre-nuptial agreement to signal one's love and affection instead of their love of money.  If one is truly marrying for love and not money they should have no problem signing a pre-nup if they are the less-wealthy of the pair.  However, the pre-nup may act as a signal from the wealthier of the two parties that they have reason to believe that the marriage will not last.  Therefore, pre-nups are likely only an optimal signal when they are suggested at first by the least wealthy member of the couple. (via Cheap Talk)
• Tyler Cowen asks the questions "Which ingredient most signals a quality dish?":  I can't think of one off the top of my head.  Scallions is noted in the post, and that's a pretty good one.  I'd think that ingredients that are financially costly and/or time consuming to prepare would also signal quality.  So, higher quality cuts of meat or dishes that are slow roasted or smoked, etc.  A friend of mine once remarked, "Ah, Bean salad.  If you've got bean salad then you know there is going to be great desert."  He was using the quality of an earlier dish to predict the quality of a later one.  (via Marginal Revolution)
• Can Cheap Talk Deter (PDF)? Potentially in an entry-deterrence situation, according to a draft paper by Dustin Tingley and Barbara Walter.  Tingley and Walter find that in an experimental setting, contra the expectations of their formal model, when participants were able to make a verbal threat to the first potential market entrant it decreased the instances of conflict from 83% (where communication wasn't allowed) to 38%.  This is interesting, since the verbal threats by the defender where by definition costless (since they wouldn't not face the challenger again and additional challengers would not know if they followed through on the threat)--meaning, they shouldn't have revealed any additional information to the challenger.  My first thought is that in an experimental setting subjects might be revealing information through their body language or micro-expressions (which can't be captured by a formal model) and that these signals conveyed additional information to the challenger.  But defenders where only allowed to communicate their threats to challengers through email.  The authors offer some potential reasons for the discrepant results, such as the unexpected success of early round costless threats actually signals that the defender is a savvy player and understands the game (i.e. fighting early in early rounds to deter future entrants makes sense, and therefore they are likely to follow through on the threat since future entrants will see that they fought).

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]

Remembering Professor Fred Halliday

In April of this year I noted the death of Professor Fred Halliday – a noted scholar of nationalism, the Middle East and International Relations generally. He was something of a giant in British IR and I know his work was well known throughout the Middle East as well. I was fortunate enough to be in one of his last MSc International Relations courses at the London School of Economics in 2001-2.

There are a number of things being done to commemorate Professor Halliday and his work. For London readers, there will be an event at the LSE on 3 November (tickets required). Additionally, Alejandro Colás and George Lawson have written an article in Millennium Journal of International Relations (made freely available by SAGE) reflecting on his work which may be of interest to blog readers.

Operation Dragon Strike and Kandahar

The New York Times is reporting that ISAF troops are making progress in Kandahar.  Credit for progress is given equally to the surge in troops and a new mobile rocket which has "pinpoint accuracy -- like a small cruise missile."  While military commanders are cautious, Western and Afghan civilians are saying that Taliban losses have "sapped the momentum the insurgency had in the area."

As I am skeptical of some of the spin and zombie reporting which has been generated by the American media in recent months, I thought I would check and see what Afghan news sources are reporting from the areas of fighting: Mehlajat, Arghandab, and Zhare District.

There is little news coverage of the actual offensive aside from short press releases by the government or the Afghan army and occasional editorials which express pessimism about the likely outcome of the operation.  What is more interesting for those trying to understand the conflict from afar is what is being reported and discussed in the local media... Below is a quick summary of some of the more interesting news articles I came across.

Too many bodies? Communicating the population question

The question of human over-population of our planet seems to resurface every few decades, driven by fears that there are too many people to feed, clothe and shelter, or that the sheer volume of human beings working, travelling and polluting is causing environmental damage. But the persuasiveness of such claims is weakened empirically and normatively. In terms of facts, it does not help the over-population claimants that every time the population question is raised, humanity seems to deal with the problem. People do find food, clothing and shelter. And in terms of values, the notion of limiting or reducing the number of human beings appears a slippery slope to calls for coercion and perhaps eugenics in the name of ‘the greater good’. But in 2010 the question is being asked again.

The Individual Utility of Incompetence

There are many reasons why organizations (government, businesses, etc) grow dysfunctional and stagnant.  One major reason lies with the promotion and retention of less capable workers.  There have been a number of studies that explored this dynamic (for example, The Peter Principle, which theorizes that people are promoted as long as they are competent, which means at some point they reach a position of incompetence).  In general, though, the promotion and retention of incompetent workers would seem to run counter to the rational interests of the larger organization.  So why does this behavior persist?  Why are less competent workers able to retain their positions and, in some cases, obtain promotions?

One potential reason is that it is their very incompetence that is valued.  Incompetence acts as a credible, costly signal that they can be trusted by superiors looking to accumulate a power base.

Happy 75th Anniversary to the Gallup Poll

"A unique anniversary is upon us. Seventy-five years ago today -- Oct. 20, 1935 -- the Gallup Poll published its first official release of public opinion data.

Here we are three-quarters of a century later, still working to fulfill the mission laid out in that first release: providing scientific, nonpartisan assessment of American public opinion.

The subject of that first release? Well, given the fact that 1935 was smack dab in the middle of the Depression, it may come as no surprise that the topic focused on public opinion about “relief and recovery,” or in other words, welfare. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was at that time heavily involved in creating a number of relief, recovery, and work programs designed to help people whose lives were being affected by the Depression. Figuring out what the public thought about all of this became Dr. George Gallup's first official poll question."

You can read the rest of Frank Newport's write up of the first poll here.

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]

What do you call an aircraft carrier with no aircraft? HMS Queen Elizabeth.

The London School of Economics runs a blog on British politics to which I contribute occasionally; this week I’ve posted on the British Government’s defence review, and I thought I’d share this with the Duck readership. A little bit of context: the new British government is simultaneously engaging in developing a National Security Strategy, while conducting a Comprehensive Spending Review and a Defence Review. The previous government made a number of rather bizarre defence procurement decisions without much sense of how they would be paid for so there is a problem here not entirely of the present government’s making. The majority Conservative Party in the governmental coalition is traditionally in favour of a strong defence, and in particular wishes to replace the existing Trident submarines – Britain’s nuclear deterrent – when they become obsolete. The Liberal Democrats, minority party in the coalition are less gung-ho generally and want an alternative to a submarine based deterrent.  Liam Fox, the Conservative Defence Secretary is on the right-wing of the party, and stood for the leadership against the current Prime Minister, David Cameron.  Cameron and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, are rather more firmly based in the 21^st century and I suspect are less pro-defence spending than Fox, but the latter has out-manoeuvred them in the short term at least… now read on!

James Ron: IR Profs Should Teach Religious Fluency

Here is a fabulous interview on Canadian TV with Professor James Ron of Carleton University. Ron's key argument is that we are not giving our students a sufficient education if they leave our classes fluent in human rights discourse but not in the nuts and bolts of the world's leading religions.

A real "aha" moment for me as a teacher - sure, I've always tried to make sure they know the difference between Sunni and Shi'a or the difference between an Islamic and a Muslim majority state, or the role of the Holy See at the UN, but Ron's argument goes further: he's not simply saying students should know facts about religion and politics, but that religious narrative itself is a language students need in order to communicate effectively as future diplomats. At the same time, he humbly and humorously reminds us what a socio-cultural mine-field such teaching can be, whether it's our students or our own kids.

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]

The Case Against the Case Against Blast Weapons II: Stigma and banning on intent vs effect (and a response to Charli Carpenter)

The debate that my original post has sparked has been really interesting. Charli Carpenter has written a thoughtful and excellent response to my first post, and even Discourse on Explosive Weapons (DEW) - part of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) has been paying attention.  Happily, they seem to welcome this debate and it is in this spirit that I shall continue to engage on the issue.

I would like to stress that by no means am I particularly happy about civilians dying in armed conflicts. (I’m not sure why I feel the need to insist on this point, but it *is* the internet.)  However, I am concerned with the way that humanitarian actors engage with the policy community to bring about change and how they relate to the armed forces of various nations. (I add that I am more of a historian in this respect than a ‘political scientist’.) More importantly, my concern is that when these actors talk past each other that there are real consequences. The legal regime on landmines involves several layers of protection (no signature to any treaty, signatory to 1980 CCW, signatory to Amended Protocol II of the 1980 CCW, signatory to the 1997 Ottawa Treaty.) Quite frankly, it’s a bit of a mess and I think it’s better to have more straightforward regimes that are as inclusive as possible, even if slightly weaker in substance.

Between Scylla and Charybdis

James Traub reminds the Atlantic Community not to freak out over Turkey's "Neo-Ottoman foreign policy."

It's a caricature to say that Turkey has chosen the Middle East, or Islam, over the West. Turkey's aspiration for full membership in the club of the West, including the European Union, is still a driving force. But Turkey aspires to many things, and some may contradict each other. The country wants to be a regional power in a region deeply suspicious of the West, of Israel, and of the United States; a Sunni power acting as a broker for Sunnis in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere; a charter member of the new nexus of emerging powers around the world; and a dependable ally of the West. When Turkey is forced to choose among these roles, the neighborhood tends to win out, and that's when you get votes against sanctions on Iran. At this week's NATO summit in Brussels, for instance, Davutoglu has expressed skepticism about missile defense, because any such system would be aimed at countries like Iran and Syria, which Turkey declines to characterize as threats.

Plagiarism and Frank Fischer

A fascinating, if somewhat depressing, article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (via Andrew Gellman) discusses recent accusations of plagiarism against Rutgers-Newark political scientist Frank Fischer by (1) an angry graduate student from the University of Zagreb and (2) Alan Sokal of science-wars fame.

The account begins with a political-science graduate student at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia, named Kresimir Petkovic. Last year Mr. Petkovic submitted a paper to the journal Critical Policy Studies. The paper was a critique of the work of Frank Fischer, a professor of politics and global affairs at Rutgers University at Newark, who also happens to be an editor at the journal. Mr. Fischer has edited or written numerous books on public policy, and in 1999 he won an award for his scholarship from the Policy Studies Organization.

He took issue with Mr. Petkovic's paper, saying that the graduate student had mischaracterized his work. In an e-mailed back-and-forth between the two, the possibility was raised that Mr. Petkovic's paper might be published in the journal, along with a debate-style response from Mr. Fischer. That possibility was later dropped and, after several months, Mr. Petkovic's submission was rejected.

Petkovic enlisted the help of Sokal; using the kind of content analysis many of us are familiar with from turnitin, they identified a number of instances in which Fischer more-or-less lifted text from other authors. While he did not place the text in quotation marks, Fischer did cite relevant authors at or around the relevant passages. He also attributed quotations to original sources that, in fact, appear to have been culled from cited (but not associated with the quotations) secondary sources.

The Drone and the Cyborg

The drone and the cyborg were born near the dawn of the nuclear age (i.e. the Vergeltungswaffen and the Kamikaze), and appeared in several previous conflicts, but they did not simultaneously reshape the dynamics of war until after 2001.

The armed drone represents a displaced subjectivity that eludes the laws of war and Eurocentric/ anthropocentric notions of sovereignty. The soldier operating the drone spies, hunts, and kills from thousands of miles away; s/he murders combatants and non-combatants without taking any risk or responsibility. The drone violates the sovereign territory of foreign powers for days at a time – the drone is becoming a permanent armed presence in the skies of the targeted zones. The armed drone is the manifestation of a literally disembodied soldier on the battle zone; the armed drone is an avatar.

When Myths Meet Reality in Iraq and Afghanistan

What are America’s prospects in Afghanistan?  Two articles from The New York Times today throw light on the question. 

In Afghanistan, the Exit Plan Starts With ‘If’:

[America’s Afghanistan] strategy looks a lot like the one that brought General Petraeus success in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. With Iraq engulfed in apocalyptic violence, American field commanders reached out to nationalist-minded guerrilla leaders and found many of them exhausted by war and willing to make peace. About 100,000 Iraqis, many of them insurgents, came on the American payroll. 

The Americans were working both ends of the insurgency. As they made peace with some insurgent leaders, they intensified their efforts to kill the holdouts and fanatics. The violence, beginning in late 2007, dropped precipitously. 

Can the Americans pull off something similar in Afghanistan?

The other article provides a preliminary answer—by undermining the question’s premise. 

Sunnis in Iraq Allied With U.S. Quitting to Rejoin Rebels

Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents. 

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency. 

The defections have been driven in part by frustration with the Shiite-led government, which Awakening members say is intent on destroying them, as well as by pressure from Al Qaeda. The exodus has accelerated since Iraq’s inconclusive parliamentary elections in March, which have left Sunnis uncertain of retaining what little political influence they have and which appear to have provided Al Qaeda new opportunities to lure back fighters. 

The Awakening members’ switch in loyalties poses a new threat to Iraq’s tenuous social and political balance during the country’s ongoing political crisis and as the United States military prepares to withdraw next year. 

* * *

One Awakening leader in Diyala, Bakr Karkhi, said during an interview that nearly two dozen of his fighters had rejoined Al Qaeda during the past few weeks, a process he said had been occurring throughout Sunni areas of Iraq. Other fighters, he said, had abruptly stopped reporting for duty. “I became suspicious when some of them started making questionable comments, so I expelled them,” he said. “Others left the Awakening on their own and then disappeared from their villages. We found out they were conducting illegal operations and cooperating with armed groups, including Al Qaeda.” 

Sic Transit Pax Petraeus.  The supposed success of the Iraq “surge” is still anything but clear or assured—despite bipartisan acclaim for it here in the U.S.  The eagerness with which Republicans and Democrats embraced the surge was, of course, not based on long-term research or deep insight.  It was simply an easy way to declare a kind of “victory” in a hugely expensive and bloody war entered on false pretenses and without strategic vision.  In that, it was much like George Bush's declaration of victory in Iraq onboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln back in 2003. 

On the bright side, the myth of the surge has provided short-term cover for a drawdown of American troops—though some 50,000 remain in Iraq.  That is progress of a sort, but leaves the U.S. heavily committed and the Iraqis still incapable of solving their problems on their own.

The Obama/Petraeus strategy in Afghanistan is to forge a similar myth—as a basis for a similarly slow and hugely costly “withdrawal.”  But if neither the Afghan nor Iraqi surges leads to durable peace--due to deep political distrust between the indigenous forces there--then the policies will in fact be failures.  Sadly, the straws in the wind from today's news point to exactly that--the predictable result when myths meet realities. 

What's Intriguingly Not Getting Discussed at ISSS/ISAC...

... but is getting discussed at Women's Day? (Go figure.) Alex Wendt would be horrified but unsurprised.

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money}

The Political Economy of Journal Citations

I'm writing you from the ISSS/ISAC conference in Providence, RI, the yearly guns 'n' bombs gala thrown jointly by the Security Studies section of ISA and the International Security and Arms Control section of APSA.

Drawing a large crowd this morning was the roundtable on "How to Publish in International Security," peopled by representatives from Stanford University Press, Georgetown University Press, the Journal of Strategic Studies and International Security.

Of course there were some standard nuggets of advice for aspiring scholars: 1) Make sure your paper is ready for publication first; 2) make sure you pick the right journal; 3) don’t submit to multiple journals 4) be persistent but polite in dealing with editors; and 5) beware of MIRVing:

"If you've put it out there on the Internet already we are less likely to see it as original work."

But among these, the one that stuck with me was this point:

"Cite the journals you want to publish in."

Now what caught my attention was not the suggestion but the rationale. It is not, Hoyt argues, because journal editors scan authors' submissions or previous work for evidence of favorable citations but for a more mundane reason I wouldn't have thought (and am still not sure whether I think) should enter into my citation practices:

"Journals depend on library subscriptions. Libraries are facing budget cuts and journals are a huge expense for libraries. As they decide which ones to cull, they consider factors like how often a journal is cited in the profession. Without library subscriptions these journals will simply disappear."

The implication, aspiring writers, is that we should cite early, often and strategically in the hopes of maintaining diverse venues for our work. But whether or not this metric will make for the best scholarship who knows. Hoyt's suggestion also implies that we should be using our libraries' electronic journal resources rather than reading from our own subscriptions, so libraries can track our usage of specific journals.

But most of all, it's also a healthy reminder that the political economy of our profession matters.

Credit and penalty

The Federal Government makes you pay a penalty if, among myriad other things, you: don't have children, don't get married, and don't take out a mortgage. Of course, we don't call these "penalties." We call them "not getting a tax credit." Yet some people think that reducing someone's tax liability if they engage in a particular behavior is different than increasing someone's tax liability if they don't engage in that same behavior.

The same people also believe, for incomprehensible reasons, in the existence of a meaningful legal distinction between forcing U.S. citizens to pay the Federal Government money if they fail to purchase a product called a "mortgage" and forcing U.S. citizens to pay the Federal Government money if they fail to purchase one called "health insurance."

Unfortunately, it seems that such irrational beliefs may also extend to a U.S. Federal judge:

"The individual mandate applies across the board," Vinson wrote. "People have no choice and there is no way to avoid it. Those who fall under the individual mandate either comply with it, or they are penalized. It is not based on an activity that they make the choice to undertake. Rather, it is based solely on citizenship and on being alive."

As a social scientists, I can't help but wonder what drives such obviously flawed reasoning. Is this an example of the psychology of loss aversion, the cognitive blinders created by partisan bias, or something else?

The Blogs of War

Later this week, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion with my esteemed colleagues Juan Cole, Manan Ahmed, Joshua Foust and Madiha Tahir on "The Blogs of War: The Analytical Terrain of the Af-Pak Blogosphere" at the annual conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For my contribution to this discussion, I have been scouring blogs from US/ISAF soldiers in Afghanistan. (I ignored the glossier blogs which are mainly exercises in official public relations and propaganda). Since I am up to my eyeballs reading blogs posts, I thought I would share a few observations...

Who is blogging?  Some soldier-bloggers are (as the derisive military jargon put it) Fobbits (i.e. forward operating base dwellers), Poges, or REMF (rear echelon mother fuckers) who rarely go outside of the wire and engage in direct combat.

Denied-ada. Canada fails to get a UN Security Council Seat. (But how many EU Nations do we need on there anyway?)

It was Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend but Canukistan has one less thing to be grateful for today - it failed to get a UN Security Council seat for the first time in 50 years of trying.

Alas, (eh?), Canada lost out to Germany and Portugal in the Western group (with India, South Africa and Colombia running uncontested for the other three seats.)

The Harper government, ridiculously, is blaming Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff for the humiliating loss. This makes somewhere between zero and negative sense.

Instead, there are several factors to blame for this - the EU is a united front whereas Canada needs to lobby hard in the UN. Additionally, the electoral process seems to be pretty sketchy – and heavily dependent on gifts by suitor countries. (Apparently we went with vials of maple syrup. Way to go, guys.)And, as the Globe and Mail points out, the government hadn’t exactly had run a gung-ho campaign in order to secure it.

And the AL Cy Young Award Should Go To...

Time for a little baseball blogging.

There is quite a lot of buzz surrounding the AL Cy Young award this year. While there are a number of pitchers that possess a high number of wins (17, 18, 19, and even 20 games), there are many who believe the award should go to Seattle's Felix Hernandex.  Despite only winning 13 games and losing 12, Hernandez's performance this year has been nothing short of amazing.  His problem is that he played on one of the worst teams in the league.  He was 8th in the league amongst starters in terms of runs support (86 runs over 34 starts) and was actually dead last in terms of runs support per nine innings (3.1).  If you look beyond wins to the other two orthodox statistics that make up the pitching triple crown, Hernandez finished first in ERA (2.27) and second in strikeouts (233).  It is his performance in these other two categories that have many arguing for Hernandez to win the award, since he shouldn't be penalized for his team's lack of ability to score runs to support his dominance.

If someone like Hernandez wins this year it would truly represent a paradigm shift in the way baseball writers evaluate player performance.  In the history of the AL Cy Award, no starting pitcher has ever won with less than 16 victories (Zach Greinke won last year).  In the NL, only Fernando Valenzuela managed to win the award with as few as 13 wins, and that was in 1981, and no winner from either league had a record as close to .500 as Hernandez does.

That being said, I would actually argue that Hernandez is not the only "non-orthodox" contender.

Explosive Arguments

Recently, Stephanie made "the case against the case against blast weapons," - that is, "explosive weapons" as described by Landmine Action's recent report:

"The short version is that it is calling for a ban on so-called ‘blast-weapons’ as a method of warfare... I think that 1) the report is problematic; 2) that there may actually be a case for not banning such weapons – possibly even humanitarian ones. Instead, states AND humanitarians should look to regulation as a more effective alternative.

I have written a longer riposte to this argument at Lawyers, Guns and Money. But let me just say here that as I understand it, Landmine Action is not calling for a complete ban on the weapons. The report only calls on states and global civil society to "strengthen further an underlying presumption that the use of explosive weapons in populated areas is unacceptable" (p. 14). I recently spoke with Director of Policy and Research Richard Moyes and he confirmed that Landmine Action is not proposing an outright ban such as a codified rule in an Additional Protocol to the Convention on Conventional Weapons. Rather, he said simply, "I’d like to see us establish a terrain in which there is a general concern rather than acceptance about the use of explosives in populated areas."

In other words, Moyes and Stephanie seem to be on the same page with respect to regulating conventional explosives. Stephanie doesn't elaborate what regulations she has in mind or why they would be more humanitarian than Moyes', but some of the organization's specific proposals include establishing a mechanism to accurately count civilian casualties from explosive violence so some determination can be empirically made about whether these weapons can or cannot be used in a controlled manner; and in particular to reduce their use in specific areas where civilian casualties are likely to be highest.

Stephanie does have two deeper critiques about the report that bear further engagement. I think both may have some validity but in my view, the first doesn't actually undermine Moyes' moral point, and the second merely ducks that point (no pun intended). Read my entire response here.

Mobile Duck: Wireless for War?

I am going to try to keep this short, because the function to split the page is not available in this browser ...what browser, you ask? Safari for IPad, I'll tell you.

I've decided to make this my first IPad post in part because I was itching to try it, but also because it seemed fitting for it's subject matter...a talk that Peter W. Singer gave at ISA-West in Los Angeles on September 25 on his book,Wired for War. So I thought I would write about Wired for War wirelessly. Funny, right? Maybe I should keep my day job. Maybe.

Ok, my thought about this talk and the book is relatively straight-forward, but perhaps still important. Singer started his talk with a commander's letter "home" to a "dead" robot's company, thanking the manufacturer for sparing the military the need to write a letter "home" to a soldier's mother ...as if a mother's grief was the true tragedy of a soldier's death. Elsewhere in the talk, Singer noted that many people who oppose the use of robotics in the US military or criticize it from an enemy or victim perspective attack the masculinity of its users. They argue that the use of robots is cowardly, and that 'real men' face and fight their enemies.

Singer's analysis, of course, did not highlight the gendered dimensions of these discourses. Still, as important work in this field like Lauren Wilcox's has demonstrated, this is not the first time that gender discourses have been key to debates about the use of new technologies in war. While, in Singer's terms, whether 'we' are 'wired' for war or not seems to matter, being 'equipped' at whatever technological level seems include meeting standards of masculinity.

The Osirak Myth (again)

I failed to comment on Jeffrey Goldberg's September 2010 Atlantic Monthly piece about US or Israeli responses to Iran's apparent nuclear weapons program. Goldberg has the threat meter set to nearly 10 as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly said this summer that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon (p. 60).

A lot has been said and written about this piece, but this claim has not received enough attention (p. 58):

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Dan Reiter of Emory, however, has published some work that directly challenges the claim that the Osirak bombing was a success.

Whither Human Security?

In an International Affairs article earlier this year, Mary Martin and Taylor Owen point out that the term is all but dead, both in the UN system and within the governments who once championed the concept:

"The term 'human security' has all but vanished from the reports of the UN Secretary-General and high-level panels, and from branch organization use... Canada, one of the principal initial proponents of the human security agenda, is also going through a period of withdrawal from both the advocacy and use of the concept... 'human security' was among a group of term blacklisted in government parlance."

But Martin and Owen also show that human security concepts are increasingly penetrating and transforming state practice - even among governments, like the US, who once obstructed norm development in the broad area of human security:

Kandahar and My Lai; Drone Strikes and Carpet Bombing

 The New York Times recently posted reports about the U.S. military's trial of soldiers accused of randomly killing civilians in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, “for sport.”  Apart from the horrors of the alleged crimes, there is a terrible irony in the stories.  This goes beyond the fact that these kinds of incidents are hardly news.  They are completely predictable in any war, even among the best-trained and most disciplined armies—let alone those in which governmental and military leaders provide signals that make incidents like Abu Ghraib possible.  

The irony also goes beyond the coincidence that this story appeared in the New York Times the same day as another, titled “CIA Steps Up Drone Strikes on Taliban in Pakistan.”  That story re-emphasized the open secret that Pakistan has become the new Cambodia.  Like that other unfortunate nation, Pakistan is being targeted because another of America’s wars is not going well.  But rather than accepting the original war’s folly, our military and civilian leaders, in their consummate wisdom, have expanded it to nearby countries.  Supposedly, it is these nations’ failures to control their populations and borders that explains the war’s failures.

A gulf in understanding?

Last week I participated in a workshop at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in Doha, Qatar, which brought to an end the ESRC’s Radicalisation & Violence programme of research projects, led by Prof. Stuart Croft. I was one of several researchers invited to present recent research on ‘terrorism, resistance and radicalisation’. My fledgling experience of academia has thus far been that debates rarely get politicised. It is noteworthy when it happens, triggering a visceral thrill or horror as we depart from our scripts of professional civility. The Radicalisation & Violence programme has been politicised from the outset. Anthropologists and sociologists were unhappy that researchers might apply to carry out fieldwork in dangerous regions, that the FCO was offering some funding towards the programme and hence it was ‘state-sponsored’ to an extent (although so is the ESRC), and nobody carrying out research could be unaware that in the UK in the 2000s people at universities were being arrested for having ‘radical’ material on their computers, even if they were carrying out legitimate research. It is no surprise, then, that the concluding event retained this political edge. Talking about terrorism in this particular region could not be otherwise.

Homeland Security Heads Roll in Pennsylvania—But the GWOT Keeps on Rolling

 Two weeks ago, I wrote about Pennsylvania’s Perverted War on Terror.   This week the state’s Homeland Security Director James Powers, Jr. resigned.  Governor Ed Rendell had refused to fire him, saying Powers was not the only one responsible for hiring the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR).  True, enough:  Rendell had command responsibility, and Robert French, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, apparently had oversight too (neither has resigned).  But it appears that Powers was the person who okayed the $103,000 contract that resulted in numerous “intelligence reports” on everyday political activities here in the Keystone State, including environmental meetings against natural gas drilling—then passed some of those reports on to natural gas companies.  

In his resignation statement, Powers still seems confused—not about our country’s First Amendment this time, but about his former office’s responsibilities.  He wrote that “the primary goal of commonwealth preparedness strategies” and “our greatest challenge” is "to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from incidents resulting from all hazards (terrorism attacks, major disasters and other emergencies).”  With such an unlimited conception of homeland security’s role, it is little wonder that his department happily paid ITRR for its “intelligence reports.”  Of course, the far bigger scandal remains the “global war on terror’s” waste, hubris, and threat to our liberties.

Fun and Games in Delhi

The Commonwealth Games begin tomorrow in Delhi, which offers a good excuse for some thoughts on two neglected topics in contemporary international relations – India and the Commonwealth. With 54 nations involved the Games are a major international sporting event, and were bid for by India as a way of demonstrating their emerging significance in the world, a kind of Olympics in a minor key that would do for the Indian bit of the BRIC nations what the Beijing Olympics did for China. To put it mildly, things have not quite worked out as intended. Some twenty plus firms were involved in the construction of facilities, corruption was near universal, and ten days ago the athlete’s village was still under construction and filthy. A small bridge collapsed injuring dozens. Part of the roof of the weightlifting venue fell down. A heavy Monsoon rain has led to dengue fever being epidemic in Delhi and – you couldn’t make this up – two days ago the Chief Medical Officer for the games went down with suspected typhoid. A plague of frogs is the obvious next step. In the insult to injury category, the Pakistani team have complained about poor security, a complaint that does seem to be justified; an Australian journalist strolled round the village with an imitation bomb in his rucksack without being challenged. A games official managed to make things worse by suggesting that complaints about hygiene and cleanliness reflected western standards which weren’t appropriate, a position that many Africans and Asians found rather offensive – strangely, their athlete’s didn’t appreciate the idea that they were OK with their beds being smeared with doggy-doo.

The Case Against the Case Against Blast Weapons

A (way) while back Charli posted a link to a report by Landmine Action. The short version is that it is calling for a ban on so-called ‘blast-weapons’ as a method of warfare.

From the outset I’m going to admit that it’s simply not easy to defend things that can blow innocent civilians to smithereens. And I don't intent to defend the weapons themselves as some kind of fabulous invention. I do, however, wish to take on some of the thinking and insertions in the report as I think that 1) the report is problematic; 2) that there may actually be a case for not banning such weapons – possibly even humanitarian ones. Instead, states AND humanitarians should look to regulation as a more effective alternative.

My response ended up being longer than what I thought so I’m going to attempt to do this over the course of a few posts. I feel that this is important because next year (2011) marks the next round of discussions on the Convention on Conventional Weapons where it is likely that proposals to ban such weapons will be discussed. At recent CCW meetings the inability of ‘militarily significant states’ and restriction-inclined states to agree on bans of certain categories of weapons have lead to separate treaty regimes – famously the 1997 Ottawa Landmines Treaty and the Cluster Munitions Treaty. While the CCW does not get a lot of love or recognition, it will be important for government lawyers and humanitarians to think through these issues now.

Negotiating with the Taliban

He's not alone, of course, but scholar Gilles Dorronsoro is quite pessimistic about the Afghan surge and ongoing counterinsurgency campaign:

The current counterinsurgency campaign shows little signs of accomplishing its mission. The surge is not enough to reverse the Taliban’s gains, or the quick decline of the Karzai government. Pakistan’s lack of support makes the Taliban sanctuary there a major strategic problem.

More troops and the latest strategy have failed to make progress. The war is not conclusive in the south — where stabilization could take years—and the Taliban is gaining momentum in the north.

Instead of being able to begin a withdrawal next summer, the United States could be forced to add more troops just to hold ground and compensate for our allies’ progressive withdrawal. Never mind turning back the Taliban’s gains.

He concludes that negotiation with the Taliban toward political solution is the only option. What are the prospects for negotiation -- and for a successful outcome?