"Too Fat to Fight"

Mission: Readiness, a collection of retired generals, admirals and other senior military officers issued their latest report this week and the accompanying press release should draw the attention of IR scholars interested in the Copenhagen School and securitization: "Childhood Obesity Endangers National Security." The news was particularly bad for my state:

...obesity rates among children and young adults in Kentucky are significantly higher than the national average. Weight problems have become the leading medical reason why young adults are unable to serve in the military, both in Kentucky and nationwide...

“Today, in Kentucky and across the country, otherwise excellent recruit prospects are being turned away because they are simply too overweight,” Major General [D. Allen] Youngman said.

The Louisville Courier-Journal summarized the report's bad news for local readers:

Holy Degrees of Freedom Problem, Batman!

Or, how do we compare the not so nearly like?  There is an obvious temptation to compare Libya to Syria and ponder why the US has not jumped into the fray now that Syria has started killing lots of people (to be fair, the piece does show how different the cases are).  Now, I am not a Middle East expert (and I avoid playing one on TV), but this is a handy opportunity to think about how we do comparisons and then maybe we can figure out what is relevant here.

In the first week of my big intro to International Relations class, I spend a bit of time explaining that there are few perfect comparisons in the world so that we must, indeed, compare apples and oranges.  I go on to show how similar the two fruit are in nearly every way save one, and then I bite into the unpeeled orange.  The point is to illustrate most similar comparisons and that we are always comparing apples and oranges.  I then go on to compare an apple and a frisbee*--a most different comparison--where the two objects share few common properties but both can be thrown.  I then compare Iraq to North Korea to suggest why one was, pardon the continued fruit obsession, low-hanging fruit.  One key difference was oil, but that was not the only one then (or now).

*  Some have used apples vs wolverines as the alternative to apples and oranges but a frisbee is far safer in the classroom, not matter who end ends up catching a disk with their face.

As a result of doing this every year, I have now started looking at things like Libya and Syria and think: how comparable are these two cases?  Is Syria more of an orange to Libya's apple or is it more frisbee-esque?  The similarities are obvious: two Middle East countries where the dictators are responding to protest by using force.  Asad does not have Qaddafi's fashion sense, but, otherwise, the two cases seem pretty similar.  So, it seems that we have a most similar comparison, but there are several differences between the two cases, so it is hard to tell which ones matter the most.

What are the differences?

The 2011 Canadian Election: I don’t even know

Last year I was much better at blogging about the UK General Election. I thought it was going to be incredibly boring, but then there was the rise of a third party in an unexpected way which changed the balance of power.

This year with Canada’s turn to re-stack the deck, I thought the election was going to be incredibly boring, but then there was the rise of a third party in an unexpected way which very well may change the balance of power.

It’s always a bit hard for me to gage the interest/reaction of Duck readers about the election. Apparently about 4.6% of the hits to the Duck are from Canada. So I don’t know if people know or care. Even the venerable Dan Drezner managed to tweet out “FT headline "Crowds Cheer Royal Newlyweds" rivals "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative" in its sheer banality” to which all I can say is, take off, eh?!

Over three posts I am going to reflect on the Canadian election: 1) the set up 2) what we have learned 3) the result (after the result on 2 May). Let the mindless speculation begin!

North Waziristan: Drones and Compellence

North Waziristan has witnessed 20 drone strikes in the first four months of this year, which is a relatively lower number than the previous year (in 2010 there were a record setting 104 drone strikes in North Waziristan or 8.67 strikes per month). The relative "silence of the drones" this year is mainly attributed to a lull following the imprisonment of a CIA agent, Raymond Davis, who was accused of murdering two men in Pakistan on 27 January. One day after the US paid diyya (thereby implicitly reinforcing sharia in Pakistan) to have Davis released there was a drone attack which killed 40-50 tribesmen attending a jirga near Datta Khel in March. Another 25 people were killed (reportedly including 3 women and 5 children) a few days ago. Yesterday, NATO helicopters violated North Waziristan's airspace creating panic amongst the residents according to Khyber TV.

In addition to targeting militants, these actions may be part of an attempt to once again increase pressure on the Pakistani military. The US would like to see a full scale military assault on North Waziristan led by the Pakistani army in order to root out the Haqqani Network, Al Qaeda, Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) and other militants fighting along side or under the Taliban banner. The Pakistani government, military, and intelligence services are all reluctant for a host of logistical, tactical, strategic, and political reasons.

New Breed of Chicken Hawks?

John Bolton writes in the LA Times, which unlike the rest of the world I read because where else could I find out who died in my neighborhood recently, that we must stay in Afghanistan forever! Until the job gets done. I have no particularly informed opinion about this, which is kind of sad, but I was amused by the response of a Times columnist, complaining that Bolton had no right to make such a proclamation given his dodging of the draft back in the Vietnam days. Oh, I mean his National Guard service. And he was even unapologetic about it, because, as he was once quoted, the war was already lost. I am sure that no soldier in the Afghanistan thinks that right now. Get back to work! John Bolton says the war is not lost!

The critique is of course true, and it got me to thinking: Is a chickenhawk the only variety of bird currently in the GOP? We have John McCain but he is half dead. Warner retired. After him, the only one with the credibility to tell young men and women to stay the course is Lindsey Graham. At one time the GOP was the party that loved to put American military heroes up for office. So sad. My hunch is that the individualism of the party, masquerading as "liberty" but really emerging out of the free market ideology that no one owes anyone else shit, makes the GOP particularly cowardly these days. This would explain the rise of chickenhawkery since the 1980s.

It also led me to thinking: Are chickenhawks more chicken than other times of hawks, not only concerning their own hide, but also everyone else's? Here I am referring to the outcry over relocating Guantanamo detainees to US soil. Everyone was SO SCARED! I have a hard time imagining the Grand Old Party of Eisenhower, as opposed to the Scaredy-Cat Party (SCP) we have today, freaking out about a couple of little terrorists behind fifteen feet of concrete on U.S. soil. Grow a pair. No one was asking us to be prison guards. In fact the people in that Illinois town wanted those jobs, which says something about how bad the economy is. You want to stay in Afghanistan? Fine. But if you are going to be the party of a strong defense, then act a little tougher, weenies. If people want to shepherd around suspected Al Qaeda operatives around a maximum security prison in shackles for a living, isn't that their right to choose? Isn't that the liberty you all want us to have?

Most Entertaining IR Scholar? None of the Above?

Steve Walt has a challenge:

...who are the most amusing, entertaining, or witty writers in the field of international relations and foreign policy? I don't mean books or articles that are "funny" because they are wildly off-base; I mean scholars who are a joy to read because their prose is lively, they offer amusing asides, and maybe even manage a laugh-out-loud witticism on occasion. And to narrow the field a bit more, let's exclude journalists (who are rarely all that amusing but usually have livelier writing styles).

Since I'm hosting Steve for a talk next week here in the Five Colleges, I have a challenge to Duck readers to come up with a stronger list than his readers can produce. I gotta figure that's a slam dunk for Duck readers...

Although, we may have a problem -- google "entertaining IR books" (in quotes) and see how many hits you get. Not pretty. (fyi, it doesn't get any better if you unpack it to "entertaining international relations books")

For my money, Richard Betts has the most lively prose and sardonic wit. I don't know any one else who has called another scholar (Mearsheimer) a "party pooper" in the pages of Foreign Affairs (although outside the pages of Foreign Affairs is a different story).

As for blogging prose, no one can beat the posts by Stephanie or Brian here at Duck.

A Beast in the Heart of Certain Small Units

Excellent in-depth discussion of the Stryker Brigade in the New York Times. What's great about this piece is that the author goes into considerable depth to understand the structural context behind the so-called "Kill Team"'s campaign of recreational murder against civilians, and resist the seductive and typical "bad apple" story.

That said, I think this piece over-determines the impact of simply being in a conflict zone and under-emphasizes the significance of unit structure and culture. It's true that the longer a war drags on the greater the likelihood of some units 'going rogue' in this way. It's also true that certain field conditions - boredom, isolation, loss of one's comrades - increase the likelihood of atrocity. But within that context, some units commit atrocities and others don't. A number of studies, including this one from Sierra Leone, this analysis of rape warfare, and another study on IDF units that I can't yet cite because it's not yet published, demonstrate that it is variation in the composition and disciplinary culture of small units themselves that account for variation in atrocity. Large-unit commanders may have little control over what small units are doing, but they have considerable control over the composition and disciplinary culture of those units.

For my part, I'm more interested the following aspects of this story, which come later in the piece or are not discussed at all:

Shabby Sheik: Gaddafi's 'fashion' and cultural property

As much as the proposal to put Mummar Gaddafi’s outfits up for display at the Costume Institute of New York should be true in a fully just world, I would imagine that it isn’t.

Alas, the West shall be deprived of “four decades of Colonel Gaddafi’s superior dress sense”. And we are weaker for it.

However, this did get me thinking. Could Libya make a plausible case that Gaddafi’s outfits (which have been out-Gaga-ing Lady Gaga since well before she was born this way) are in fact ‘cultural property’ under the 1954 Hague Cultural Property Convention?

A puzzle in promotion: Petraeus at the CIA

This is a guest blog by Jarrod Hayes, who is is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy.

The New York Times is reporting that President Obama plans on moving Leon Panetta to the position of Secretary of Defense and David Petraeus to the position of CIA director. While the Panetta move is interesting in its own right (i.e., will Panetta have the force of will necessary to manage the DoD?), what I find far more interesting is the move of General David Petraeus to the CIA, a man whose credentials for leading the CIA at best require some creative argumentation. I find the move puzzling (hence the title) and would like to forward a possible explanation for the move as well a negative repercussion that could result. First, the explanation. In June 2010, when Obama fired then U.S. commander in Afghanistan Stanley McChrystal after insubordinate remarks by officers under McChrystal’s command came to light, the President was left with a problem. Seven months earlier, Obama had announced a large troop increase to Afghanistan as part of an effort to prevail in a conflict claimed to be vital to US national interest. What appointment could Obama make in replacing McChrystal that would be in line with the President’s contention that success in Afghanistan was of critical importance? The obvious answer was hero-of-Iraq-and-counterinsurgency-demigod Petraeus, and so the President demoted (lateral move?) Petraeus from Central Command Commander to head up the Afghan mission. However, the appointment presented its own problems. At the same time Obama announced the Afghan ‘surge,’ he promised to begin bringing home US troops after 18 months (~midyear 2011). Would Petraeus, a man now vested with an immense amount of military and security legitimacy, resist when Obama decided to pull the plug? If he did, the President’s political capital could take serious damage at a time when the campaign for re-election would be at a critical stage.

My challenge to the Drezner challenge: who would bother with us?

Stephanie has seconded below Drezner's challenge to name three books most useful for a President-in-waiting. Please obey her.

These should not be academic in nature because, Dan implies, politicians are not up to it intellectually. It is true. Politicians are not a smart lot. Often when I hear a "strategic logic of..." talk, I use the same tried-and-true joke: have you ever met a Congressman? It always gets a laugh because it 1) is probably true: so many political scientists spend their careers avoiding the people they are writing about and vastly overestimate the latter's cleverness, and 2) plays to the lowest-common-denominator: everyone hates politicians. In other words, it says something satirically while being coarse, kind of like South Park.

Nevertheless, we have a President in office who is not an idiot. Assuming that he had the mental agility and inclination, what would we have him read OF THE STUFF THAT ACADEMICS HAVE WRITTEN? This is my challenge to you. The problem is not only the sophistication of the audience; it is that practically every approach and research tradition I think of goes out of its way to minimize any role for agency in foreign affairs. We are telling them: you're not important. My biggest complaint with the field is that there is so little politics in international relations.

Let's go down the list.

Presidential Reading List: (After you probably get through the ones with 'Bacevich' on the cover)

Dan Drezner has issued a call to arms!... or to your library card:

"I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?"

I have a gut feeling that all of the answers are going to be grand strategy, grand strategy and some war on terror/Afghanistan. (Although, maybe I’m not being generous enough... but looking at the comments on Drezner's post, I don't think so.) So I’m going to suggest three books that touch on issues presented by ethical and political leadership as well as the war on terror, with a little bit of history thrown in on the side. Oh yeah – they’re all very good reads - Senators are going to be reading these things on planes, right?

(And for comparison, with an American IPE guy, Kindred Winecoff's take is here.)

1. Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea.

I think this book actually deserves its own post, let alone a mention here. It won (and very much deserved) the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize in 2010. Basically Demick interviews North Korean defectors who now live in South Korea about their experiences north of the 38th Parallel. But it’s not just a book about North Korea – most of the individuals in the book lived through the famine that struck the country in the 1990s. And gradually, as the story of the expats unfold, you learn what it is like to live through a famine – bonuses slowly disappear, soon the shelves aren’t stocked, and people begin to sell off their possessions to buy food on a dangerous black market. It gets worse – seeing increasing numbers of abandoned children at the train station, walking overtop of people literally starving to death – but in such a way that you’ve become numb to the suffering, so as to not be overwhelmed buy it. And eventually to see your family and friends die.

Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twice

I would like to be as snarky as Brian, but paying attention to Afghanistan is pretty darned depressing.  In the aftermath of the second (yes, second) prison break at the Saraposa prison, what hope is there for the counter-insurgency effort?  I posted initially on my blog about what the breakdown at the prison says about the effort: the feeble Afghan government, the limited ability of the international community to make progress, and the Taliban's ability to organize a big event.

But I was reminded of the bigger picture by a Canadian reporter, Graeme Smith, who reminds us that the real failure of counterinsurgency [COIN] here is not at the prison but outside of it.  Sure, some guards might have been bribed, but the key failure is that none of the folks in the neighborhood tipped off the government or the internationals.  Such a significant operation would have probably been noticed by some of the locals in an area that had seen much investment and had been very much under the control of the government and ISAF.

One of the recurring themes at my blog is that progress is best measured by information that we outside observers cannot really see--patterns in actionable intelligence tips from the people.  Are people betting with their lives?  Do they see the government and NATO as the best option in town?  Or are they intimidated enough by the Taliban not to give the counter-insurgents the info they need?  While there may be classified collections of data to suggest that the US/Canada/NATO/Afghan government is getting more and more good information to target the Taliban and detect roadside bombs and suicide bombers, clearly this prison break is one of those kinds of things that we would want to get info about beforehand.  And we did not.

I always say we have not been doing COIN for eight or nine years, so we have to have reduced expectations.  BUT this is a hunk of land with which the government and the international community have had much interactions and even control for the past several years.  Yet none of the locals warned the relevant folks.  If COIN does not work in the heart of Kandahar City, where there has been an enduring NATO and government presence, it says much about the larger effort.

Now, more than ever, it seems like a decent interval (between when we leave and when things fall apart) is all we can hope for.  This one event (well, the second time) achieved its goal--of sucking all of the optimism about ISAF's latest efforts out of the country.  The Taliban may be bad at governing and may be bad at marketing itself, but they do a mighty fine job of making the government and its allies look bad.

As always, Afghanistan is the land of bad alternatives.  Which one is the least bad now?

Terrorism: A Problem for Realists

Whatever version of political realism you are dealing with, the sovereign state is still central to its universe. Which is one reason realists are uncomfortable with any world view that accords 'non-state actors' a pivotal or even significant role.

I'm a huge fan of the work of political realists such as John Mearsheimer, Robert Pape or Christopher Layne, especially of their warnings against our own self-defeating behaviour. But there is a contradiction, or at least a tension in some of their arguments that deserves further thinking.

They argue that we have inflated the threat of AQ-style terrorism, which in reality is not fundamental and may be little more than a nuisance. On the other hand, they argue that this nuisance is significant enough that we should not maintain a forward-leaning military and strategic presence in places like the Gulf, partly because it radicalises opinion and fuels terrorism.

Quick Gitmo Post

Regarding the revelations in the latest diplo-document-dump, there are some good questions to be asked. Charli is wondering who actually did the leaking and Ben Wittes is concerned about the effect that this will have on not only the government, but the detainees themselves:

Should it most upset the government, for whom the story represents yet another devastating failure to keep important secrets? Or should it most upset detainee counsel, for whom this trove means the public release of huge amounts of unsubstantiated speculation about clients who have not been charged and against whom it is far easier to write down disparaging information in intelligence reports than it is to prove such allegations in court. For both intelligence and civil liberties reasons, there are very good reasons a lot of this material has not been made public.

I’m just going to say that there’s not a lot new here. As the New York Times itself writes:

The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

Early Questions About the Guantanamo Leak

... which hit the stands this evening via NYT, WAPO, the Telegraph and numerous other media outlets; courtesy of Wikileaks, many say.

Interestingly, NYT reports Wikileaks was not responsible for this release, claiming the documents were originally leaked to Wikileaks but were released to the media by "another party":

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

If not Wikileaks, who?

Stuff Political Scientists Like #3, the European edition: Post-Something-or-other

I have the suspicion that my fan base might be the choir, and I want to be sure I play it down the middle. I am sure that Duck readers are the kind of folks who can laugh at themselves.


European political scientists like post-positivism, also known as post-structuralism or post-modernism. Or at least non-European political scientists think those things are all the same. No one really knows. No North American political scientist has ever met a post-positivist political scientist. They might be hiding in the anthropology department, where it is safer, coming out to forage for food at night. That's the urban legend at least.

Post-positivism emerged out of a critique that science does not evolve on the basis of a greater ability to establish the truth, but rather to consolidate power over others. Knowledge always serves someone's interests. The fact that your car started this morning is a function of the fact that it hates the native people of Naturaloildepositstan who are being ruthlessly exploited by transnational oil conglomerates. The theory of internal combustion is an act of colonial repression.

Will the IRA blow up Will and Kate?

Unidentified ‘British security officials’ are telling journalists there is a possibility that sections of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could attack next Friday’s royal wedding in London. At an event I attended this week, Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security, warned that the three security threats facing Britain are Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism, violence ‘attached’ to student protests, and ‘Irish terrorists’ attacking the royal wedding. Mercer questioned the wisdom of holding a royal wedding so close to Easter, a time with historic significance for Irish republicans. The Easter Rising insurrection against British rule in Ireland began on 24 April 1916. The wedding date is also close to the 30^th anniversary of the death of republican prisoner Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike on 5 May 1981. Don’t we understand ‘how Irish terrorists think’, asked Mercer. Yet, talking informally to journalists in London, I discovered many didn’t want to raise the matter because it might appear to strike a negative note and alienate readers at a time many view as one of national celebration.

If there is a threat of violent attacks on the wedding – and it is unlikely security services would make details public even if there were evidence that there was a threat – what would be an effective way to communicate it? Where does the balance lie between informing and scaremongering? Government and journalists will face the same dilemma at the Olympics in a year’s time so it will be interesting to follow how it plays out in the next week. 

Does the Arab Spring show how strategic narratives work?

Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led projections of a sequence of events and identities, a tool through which political leaders try to give meaning to past, present and future in a way that justifies what they want to do. Getting others at home or abroad to accept or align with your narrative is a way to influence their behaviour. But like soft power, we have not yet demonstrated how strategic narratives work. We are documenting how great powers project narratives about the direction of the international system and their identities within that. We see the investments in public diplomacy and norm-promotion. We have not yet demonstrated that these projections have altered the behaviour of other states or publics. Does the Arab Spring show these narratives at work?

India: Choosing between America and Iran

India appears to be continuing to shift its West Asia policy away from a once budding partnership with Iran, which aimed among other things to stabilize Afghanistan. It is rumored that in late March, the Indian National Security Adviser, Shiv Shanker Menon, delicately delivered a message to the Islamic Republic that India's PM would not be making a state visit later this year (Telegraph [Kolkata] 3/10/11).

If the news reports are correct, the diplomatic maneuver comes only a few months after India abandoned the practice of paying for its crude oil imports from Iran through the Tehran based Asian Clearing Union, a central bank clearing mechanism, apparently under direct pressure from President Obama. India was so hasty in acceding to US demands that it failed to set an alternate mechanism in place or even to consult private petroleum importers. India asked Iran to find a set of banks that were not under US sanctions in order to reroute financial payments. For its part, Iran did not retaliate and continued to supply crude oil on credit to India until a new payment arrangement was agreed through branches of both countries' state owned banks in Germany. Iran is the largest single supplier of crude oil to India (importing ~$12 billion / per year), and India still has plans to invest heavily in Iranian oil and gas fields.

Russian political humor is back

Vadim Nikitin has an excellent run down. With a possible Putin - Medvedev face-off looming for next year's presidential elections, the campaign season has already begun. This trailer shows how it all might go down in 2012 and was featured on, of all places, the Russian Communist Party's website. The clip ends with "There's always an alternative: Communist Party of Russia."





Nikitin has translated the key points as they appear in the clip:

A teachable moment: "provoked by rebels"

In my seminar at Amherst College today, my students discussed the status of their final research papers, their research designs, and the use of sources. One student asked what were the rules for using quotes or pulling block text from other sources.

Since so many folks seem to be reading Alan Kuperman's stuff these days, I showed my students the Kuperman article that Patrick linked yesterday in which Kuperman argues the case of moral hazard in Libya. I asked them to pay close attention to the use of the quote from the New York Times:

By helping rebels, we thus increase the risk of retaliatory massacres or even genocide. Indeed, The New York Times reported that violence threatening Libya's civilians was "provoked by rebels." Aiding the Libyan rebels also encourages copycat uprisings in other countries, proliferating the risk of atrocities.

The piece later adds:

Indeed, Libya's rebels started the war knowing that they could not win on their own, and that their attacks would provoke harm against civilians, aiming to draw in outside support — and it worked....

I then asked my students to discuss how they interpreted the article and what they saw as the purpose of the NYTimes quote to the overall point. They concluded that since rebel provocation was so important to the argument, its inclusion added significant credibility and strength to Kuperman's thesis.

Note to readers before proceeding below -- spoiler alert....

Boys' Toys

The following word cloud from Crystal Smith's The Achilles Effect blog reflects the vocabulary commonly used for toy advertisements directed toward young boys (i.e. those toys in the 6-8 year old boy's section of the Toys 'R Us website were classified as "boys' toys"). While the data visualization was not meant as part of a rigorous study, it is nevertheless interesting anecdotal evidence pointing toward the ways in which gender stereotypes are shaped and/or reinforced, particularly when the word cloud is compared to toys targeted toward girls from the same age group. (Yes, I am aware that a wordle based on a word count cannot analyze a text or set of texts, but it can point toward interesting lines of inquiry.)

Should IR scholars care about advertisement to young boys? Maybe not, but maybe there is something to be concerned about if the process of gender construction leads to highly polarized (non-overlapping) ideal types. To borrow from an earlier post/Foreign Affairs article about the so-called "Lady Hawks" by Charli Carpenter, it may matter to IR scholars if social expectations about gender roles can be shown to frame policy choices. At the very least, these gender stereotypes do matter for domestic politics because they certainly influence the lens through which foreign policy decisions are often interpreted by spin doctors.

Stuff Political Scientists Like #2 -- The Strategic Logic of.... well, Everything

Before I begin, I should thank those who have offered encouragement to continue the series and note, to those few who have not, that this is satire. Like all satire, it is an exaggeration of things that nevertheless have a kernel of truth. I myself am guilty of some of these things, like collecting original data. It is not an indictment of the field of political science, only a send-up of its pretensions. OK, here we go.


Political scientists like discovering the strategic logic behind all political phenomena, reducing everything to the self-interested calculations of individuals. They particularly like finding the strategic logic behind those things that seem to defy rational explanation, such as mass killing or war. Or the European Union. That is because political scientists like taking the mystery out of anything that might possibly be fascinating, inspiring, enigmatic or thought-provoking. You should never leave a political scientist alone with your little kids. He or she will tell them the truth about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus just to watch the crushed look on their little faces.

The idea that the way people decide to blow themselves up for a political cause is the same way we decide to shop at Costco is somehow comforting to political scientists. They have discovered a law of human behavior and they can sleep better at night knowing that in the right circumstances we all might become genocidal maniacs. No one is better than anyone else. Political scientists are true egalitarians.

Political scientists generally think people act strategically to maximize their material resources, which is a fancy way of saying that everyone wants your stuff. And your wife is looking good these days too. Has she been working out?

Libya and the Threshold for War

Some questions about Libya.

To clear the decks, I'm instinctively uneasy with international interventions in civil wars, given the historical difficulties of keeping such interventions limited and the unintended consequences and moral hazards of such undertakings. Not to mention the burdens that states like the US and UK are now shouldering, with the constraints and pressures on our statecraft after Iraq and with Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, and the need to preserve what Walter Lippmann called a 'surplus' of power in reserve.

But the general strategic context aside, this post is about one specific issue flowing through it all: following on from Jon Western's excellent post on Libya and the dynamics of wartime atrocities, there is clearly an unsettled issue here of what the threshold for war ought to be. On both moral and prudential grounds.

Introducing myself

Hello, readers of the Duck!

Dan Nexon has very kindly invited me to do some guest blogging at this site.

Introducing myself in brief: I'm an Australian academic with an over-fondness for cigars. Working at King's College London at the Defence Academy, as a Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies. In September I'll be moving to Reading to take up a Readership in Strategic Studies.

My main interest these days is in the history and theory of US grand strategy, with an historian's background but also in a dalliance with IR. I guess I quite like Strategic Studies as a kind of inter-disciplinary twilight world, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

For those still reading, I've got another blog called the Offshore Balancer:
http://offshorebalancer.wordpress.com/

After experimenting with blogging, its the academically focused ones with a soulful character and a sense of humour that I like the most, like this one.

Anyway, looking forward to writing here and hopefully living up to the high standards of the Duck.

Political Geography Lesson 101

In my American Foreign Policy class, I typically try to find some time to engage students about Puerto Rico. After all, most of them never have cause to think about Puerto Rico's quasi-colonial status in the US geostrategic orbit. Some Puerto Rican nationalists seek freedom from US domination, but even progressive activist American students interested in global affairs tend to overlook the plight of Puerto Rico in favor of other concerns.

Apparently, beyond my students, more people in Louisville are now going to learn a little something about Puerto Rico's legacy. Cardinal basketball coach Rick Pitino agreed late last year to coach the Puerto Rican national team in this summer's Olympic Qualifying Tournament -- and in the 2012 London Olympic Games if the team qualifies.

However, Pitino apparently had multiple motives in making this deal. He thought that his Louisville Cardinal basketball team would travel to Puerto Rico, hold practices, and then play against the local "national" team.

The NCAA says no. Once every four years, college basketball teams are able to conduct extra (10, apparently) practices and play additional exhibition games if they travel to foreign lands to play local teams. The college team members get to see a bit of the world and the team benefits from some additional early preparation for the upcoming season.

So what is preventing Pitino from taking his team on the road?

Simple, right? The NCAA pointed out that Puerto Rico is part of the United States and is thus not foreign.

Un-Civil Military Relations

Starbuck's away and has various guest bloggers filling in at Wings Over Iraq. David Costelloe of Never Felt Better is among them, and his latest post is one more for my dataset on BSG analogies in Egypt commentary.

In particular Costelloe argues Egypt can learn from the flaws in Colonel Saul Tigh's character and the absence of civilian supremacy it represents:

Let’s break it down. He shows hesitance when handed some responsibility during a crisis, at the cost of lives (mini-series). He displays open contempt of the government in public (Colonial Day). He is the lead officer in the actual coup of the government (Kobal’s Last Gleaming). When he is thrust into command, he loses the fleet (Scattered), nearly loses the Galactica to a Cylon boarding party (Valley of Darkness), utterly botches a crowd control operation resulting in civilian deaths (Resistance), openly taunts the imprisoned President in front of the government (Fragged) and basically takes orders from his wife.

He assaults a member of the media who is interviewing him (Final Cut). He later attempts to rig the Presidential Election in favour of Roslin (Lay Down Your Burdens). He takes the lead in a Kangaroo court that murders several people in the aftermath of the New Caprica escape (Collaborators). He begins to stir discontent among the crew (Torn). Despite being the XO, he ends up secluding himself in a drunken stupor that borders on a mental breakdown (Hero). He gives evidence at the trial of Baltar in a clearly drunk state (Crossroads). He hides his true nature as a Cylon from Adama and the government (“He That Belivith In Me”). He engages in an extremely inappropriate relationship with a Cylon prisoner, resulting in her pregnancy (Sine Que Non).

Oh, and of course, the drinking. Tigh is frequently drunk on duty and openly drunk off duty, resulting in a snappish attitude and disrespect towards fellow officers and crewmen.

Now, anyone of those things should be a dealbreaker. Tigh is a fairly appalling officer, his brief moments of competence not really making up for all of the above.

But the problem is that the Fleet is a sham-democracy, one that is fully under the thrall of the military. Roslin, despite being the Commander-in-Chief (unelected), hasn’t anywhere near the power to actually effect any change aboard the Galactica. When it comes to military matters, she is, by and large, a rubber stamp. William Gladstone said, on being a state leader “One must be a good butcher”. Perhaps the most well regarded President in history, Abraham Lincoln, was famous for replacing incompetent and ineffectual commanding officers. Laura Roslin is not Lincoln, and does not have the power to be.

...The Fleet is not a free society, it’s a military oligarchy.

Now I agree with nearly everything in his description of Tigh, and I agree Egypt has much to figure out as it configures its unique brand of civil-military relations, but I don't agree this means the show as a whole argues for a military oligarchy rather than civilian rule.

Standing Up for Multiculturalism? or “Where I find myself agreeing with the Prime Minister of Canada and that the dirt won’t come off.”

I am very, very ethnic.

For those of you who weren’t following Canadian politics this week (I’m assuming that’s 98% of the Duck audience) the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC or “Tories”) took a lot of flack this week for calling up supporters and asking them to wear “ethnic” costumes. This is, of course, to make the Tories look more diverse and possibly have another colour of hair in their audience than white. The flack, in my opinion, is well deserved – minorities are not well staged photo-ops. They are, however, a group that all political parties have tried to reach out to.

Liberals have traditionally had much success in the Greater Toronto Area, and other major urban zones by promoting immigration (or at least seeming to) such as policies which reuniting families when one member has come over. But, at the same time this has caused a certain amount of concern and resentment among Canadians (I’m referring especially to Anglo-Canadians, Franco-Quebeckers in a moment) who see “ethnic” communities being established that do not integrate, want to change Canada or, at worst, support illiberal policies and groups.

Whither NATO?

Steve Metz concludes a sharp piece on NATO thusly:

It is time for this debate over NATO’s viability to take place. While NATO may serve as an institutional reminder of the shared democratic values of the Atlantic community (and NATO’s not-so-Atlantic new members) and help with interoperability between its members’ military forces, the Alliance, in its current form, has proven it cannot lead and execute complex, sustained operations in today’s world. Three strikes in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and now Libya may not be enough to put NATO out of business, but it certainly should be enough to place the question of its value on the table.

He rightly points out many of the problems when NATO is involved in an operation--conflicting goals, restrictions on the troops (my fave topic of caveats), and so on.  However, while I have raised many questions about the limits of NATO in my blog and in work underway, the question is really not NATO or not but NATO versus what else?  That is, we need to consider what we expect NATO to do, whether it meets, exceeds or falls short of our reasonable expectations, and what would replace it.

Benghazi: What were the signs?

Why did the Obama administration really intervene in Libya? Andrew Sullivan and Steve Walt both reject the administration's claims (again) that we were on the verge of a mass slaughter in Libya if Qaddafi's forces had been allowed to move into Benghazi. Walt also wants us to read Alan Kuperman’s op-ed “A False Pretense for War?”

As usual, Kuperman has an interesting take: First, he argues that there was no credible evidence of an imminent slaughter in Benghazi – and that, in fact, the signs point in the opposite direction – that Qaddafi has shown restraint with respect to attacking civilians. And second, because of this restraint, he contends we can infer that the real reason for the intervention was not humanitarian, but political -- to save the rebels from defeat. Sullivan concludes something similar -- that the Obama administration engaged in "fear mongering" to justify the war.

A couple of responses: On the first point, all of us agree that we don’t know for certain what would have happened in Benghazi because history was altered on March 18. This means that the evidence about what Qaddafi’s forces have done since March 18 doesn’t tell us much – for example have his forces shown restraint in Misurata because they are not predisposed to attack civilians, because they are not yet in a position to wage mass reprisal killings, or because they are being deterred by NATO? None of us know at this point. But, this is somewhat besides the point. We have to go back to the days in the run-up to the March 18 Security Council vote to analyze the situation as it looked from that point.

Stuff Political Scientists Like #1 -- Original Data

In the tradition of the satirical website, Stuff White People Like, I offer you the first installment of Stuff Political Scientists Like, which I will offer in irregular installments if political scientists like it. This seemed only appropriate since in the words of the author of that website: "It is important to note that a high percentage of white people also get degrees in Political Science, which is pretty much like arts, and only seems to have the word “science” in it to make white people feel better about themselves."

Political scientists like "original datasets." The topic is really unimportant. They simply want to know that you have spent copious amounts of time collecting new information about something or another. Political scientists are scientists, but they have become increasingly like entomologists. Your data set, however, should be machine-readable, not fastened by pins in a display case. That would inhibit its replicability. (See below.)

New datasets are important because they take time away from developing new theories. Political scientists, particular international relations experts, have grown tired of theories. They are all "non-paradigmatic" now with no prior assumptions or biases whatsoever. Everyone is getting along great. Theory was once something done by people on the East and West Coast in the days Before Fearon (BF), but it has been successfully eradicated from all places except the Continent. And no one understands what they are saying anyways.

Ideally your original data allows you to make an interesting argument, but this is not really crucial either. If it allows us to finally know something that is incredibly obvious but that we could not prove before, this is more significant. Like suicide bombers tend to blow up more people than non-suicide bombers. Or people fight harder for vital interests than for less vital interests. That'd be great. In your cover letter to academic jobs, you should begin, "Using an original data set, I ...." You will get an interview.

Another reason that the argument does not really matter is that political scientists really do not have enough data themselves. Their data is terrible. They want yours. Hand it over. Now. They'll make it work for something.

Although the topic is unimportant, data collected in the most dangerous places on earth is best of all. This is because of something that political scientists increasingly like -- intrepid field research. However, a year in the library basement coding Keesings archives' entries will do in a pinch if you cannot get a grant or do not own a gun.

You should know that collecting original data has its downsides. First, your original data must be accessible to others so that they can replicate your utterly noncontroversial findings. Political scientists do not trust you.

Second, after the warm glow it creates in others begins to fade, political scientists will begin critiquing your data. They don't like how you excluded cases with less than 500 battlefield deaths. There are selection effects (see future entry in stuff political scientists don't like). Your codings are questionable. They do not like how it is ill-suited for purposes for which it was never intended. This is the price of your public service. (See Ted Gurr.) But don't worry. They will keep using your data because political scientists really do not like collecting new data of their own. This comes with the added bonus of citations, which is another thing that political scientists like.

What/When/Where is "War"?

I learned quite a few new things about military law and the rules of war at the Cornell Bombing Workshop I attended last weekend (political scientists who study war law often do when sitting down with actual military practitioners and international law professionals). A short round-up of additional insights will follow, but this one merits a slightly longer post: the International Law Association has released an expanded report on the definition of armed conflict that, if it is picked up on in war law jurisprudence, may change how we think about the legality of things like targeted killings or asymmetric battlespace.

Can Elmo Save Pakistan?

In the latest attempt to project its "soft power" in South Asia, the US government has approved a $20 million project to bring a local adaptation of Sesame Street to Pakistan. Time magazine notes:

"'The idea is to prepare and inspire a child to go on the path of learning,' said Faizaan Peerzada, a collaborator on the Pakistani version of the show. "This is a very serious business, the education of the children of Pakistan at a critical time." Their main messages will be of acceptance and empowerment, to sway youngsters away from religious extremism and promote growth."

The Guardian writes that "The show will have strong female characters and carry an implicit message of tolerance but will feature no pro-American propaganda or overt challenge to hard line religious sentiment," (Guardian, 4/7/2011).  Airing on PTV, "Sim Sim Humara" will reach only 3 million children in their homes (approximately 16 million households or 68% of the population own a television in Pakistan), but there are plans to use a radio version of the show and even mobile TV vans to reach remote areas, with an ultimate audience of around 95 million people.

Deploying adorable muppets is likely to be a welcome change of pace from previous American attempts to shape the educational content of Pakistan (and particularly Afghan refugees living in Pakistan).  During the anti-Soviet resistance until 1994, the US spent $51 million creating children's text books filled with "violent images and militant Islamic images."  Children were taught to count with "images of tanks, missiles, and landmines," in the hopes of raising a generation geared to join one of the seven anti-Soviet resistance parties (Washington Post 3/23/2002). The American textbooks were so militant that the Taliban used them to educate another generation of Afghan refugees and returnees (although they took the time to scratch out the faces of all the human characters). After 9/11, the Bush administration spent millions more creating a new version of the same textbooks but without images of weapons and warfare.  Nevertheless, the religious content of the books was retained. According to the Washington Post (3/23/2002) UNICEF attempted to buy up the old militarized version at a cost of $200,000.

"I Don't Care What You Believe In, Just Believe In It."

Although reports that he is insufficiently feminist appear to have been exaggerated, Joss Whedon does appear to be insufficiently Browncoat. Or so it would seem since he recently blocked the first fan-based effort to acquire the rights to a television series by nixing Unstoppable Signals’ movement to revive Firefly, the one-season hit space western whose film sequel Serenity just beat out The Empire Strikes Back for Best SciFi Film of All Time at io9.

(If you need more background on the show and its connection to post-9/11 global political culture, start with this and follow the links.)

This latest fan effort to resuscitate the show was sparked after lead actor Nathan Fillon stated in an Entertainment Weekly interview:

”If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to Firefly, make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet.”

Is Peace Enforcement Cool Again?

In prepping for a fortuitously timely class session on humanitarian intervention, I reread Madeline Albright's op-ed from 2008 on the "end of intervention." The claim, which I bought at the time, was that the perceived illegitimacy of the Iraq War had resuscitated the norm of state sovereignty, which had taken some hits since the end of the Cold War. Implicit in the piece was that the invasion of Iraq had disillusioned formerly "liberal hawks," particularly as Bush's rhetoric had been so instrumentally idealistic. I never bought that neoconservatives are really concerned about human rights. They like beating up on dictators who give us trouble, who just happen to be bad guys. However, I think that enough folks believed it that it gave humanitarian intervention a bad name.

If Albright was right at the time, boy it appears that the pendulum has swung the other way quickly. Of course we have been through this before. After the Cold War, everyone was gung-ho to smack around nasty warlords, until Somalia and Bosnia. The UN retrenched into traditional peacekeeping, as it had been practiced during the Cold War. Then Rwanda happened and we got tired of getting jerked around by Karadzic and Milosevic. The 1995 and 1999 NATO bombings in the Balkans seemed to make the liberal hawks more confident that one could use force to do the right thing, even if there were some real doubts during the Kosovo operation as to whether air power would work alone. That was probably the peak of the belief in peace enforcement. Then, Iraq.

Now, in just the space of a few weeks, a UN-authorized operation in the Ivory Coast has deposed Gbagbo, who was fighting a civil war against the elected President, Ouattara. It is not like the latter was leading a non-violent movement like Rugova in Kosovo. But the international community took sides and bombed Gbagbo's house. The brother's crib! And of course NATO is still at war with Libya with Security Council authorization.

Despite all the risks, I am pleased with these developments, as I always thought that liberal hawks had nothing to apologize for in Iraq. That was not the kind of war that they really had in mind. Liberal hawks believe in military operations in which human rights protection and democracy are really the main driving forces, even while recognizing that there are always ulterior motives as well. Any fool could see this was never true of the American invasion of Iraq. Even if one does not personally support these two particular operations, at least we should accept the principle that we do have the right to step in should the international community endorse the operation. Even if wasn't always the case, such as in the bad old days when big countries just willy-nilly took over small countries, the norm of state sovereignty is today ultimately more harmful for human rights than the responsibility to protect or peace enforcement.

Horrorphilia (Or ... I couldn't resist weighing in on the zombie debate)

Though I clearly swim in the shallow end of the pool of those who think about Zombies in International Relations - in fact, I learned what a zombie is from Dan Drezner's book. At the same time, I can't really resist a brief observation on the popularity of the Zombie book, and follow-up journal articles, blog posts, and ISA panels. I don't mean this to engage all of the relevant issues, but can't resist a few reflections.

Dan Drezner asks what the global political community would look like it the undead walked among us. What if the undead were aggressive attackers looking to exterminate humanity? How would people react? How would states? What would (mainstream) International Relations theory have to say about the security threats posed by Zombies? About the differences between zombies and humans? How might IR theory suggest ways to minimize, or potentially eliminate, conflicts and or injustices brought about by the presence of zombies among us?

While we're at it, why not take seriously the claim that Harry Potter's world intertwines with our own? Why not celebrate IR analyses of wizardry, the majestic, and the fantastic? Why not explore what facets of the young (then teenage) Harry Potter's world are reflective of (and reflected in) our own world? What are the muggle sports between states? IR theorists fantasize about wizards and their magic(s) enthusiastically, along with the Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, UFOs, Enders Game, and other "hip" pop culture stuff.

These questions, asked in a tongue-and-cheeck if not satirical way, are comfortable questions among a new generation of IR theorists, who engage IR as if zombies walked among us in journals, on blogs, and on panels - in the same rooms, on the same websites, and on the same table of contents as discussions of the capitalist peace, offshore balancing, institutional design, bureaucratic politics, and the normal business of IR theorists/the mainstream on the discipline.

However cool ... (through feminist lenses), I'm concerned. Why? ...

More blogfare on lawfare

In my Friday post I forgot to give a shout out to Ben Wittes and the Lawfare Blog who have been writing about this since last fall. In particular, they had an excellent series of posts on the concept (but way of a discussion of the Rule of Law in by Brigadier General Mark Martins (in Centcom and apparently in Afghanistan) on the concept here, here and especially here. (He offers his own interpretation of “lawfare as COIN”). It’s a very interesting discussion and highly relevant for those interested in these issues. (Although late to the party, I do mean to write my own response to this – although he lawfare blog has that too.)

However, I’m here because my mortal enemy Charli Carpenter has an excellent post in an ongoing discussion of lawfare. Rather than more speculating over the meaning of “lawfare”, she resorted to asymmetric tactics and just went and asked Charles Dunlap, originator of the term. (While I’m inclined to believe that this was a distinctly unfair advantage, unlike war, all is fair in love and blogging.)

Music with a conscience from Ivory Coast

Some late Friday night blogging... Music tells us a lot about different places around the world and I love to collect it from my students and use it in the classroom. Worth noting that Ivory Coast has long had a great, socially aware, music scene. Zouglou started during the student protest movements in the 1990s (the protests initially began over the rolling electrical blackouts during the exam periods but spread to broader political demands). The music genre has gained widespread following in Europe especially with the popularity of Magic System. Soum Bill and Les Salopards may be a bit less well known but their music is edgier and more overtly political. The music video last year from their song, Vive le maire, blended satire with criticism of the socio-economic injustice and corruption. Here's Soum Bill's solo Qui Saura -- a hard hitting social commentary:

Buffy, Feminism, and the Importance of Paying Attention

Natasha Simon at The Mary Sue argues that Joss Weedon Whedon's shows are insufficiently feminist. Shani O. Hilton says most of what needs to be said about Simon's odd reasoning, particularly with respect to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But she misses one crucial point that, from my perspective, renders Simon's interpretive skills highly questionable (via).

Simon writes:

Buffy, for all her killing vamps and breaking stuff, is rather a weak character. Let’s consider that she, as a Slayer, descends from a line that was literally created by men – a formation that stems directly from the male anxiety over an inability to create life the way that women do. And inherently problematic is the idea of the Watcher, a predominantly male presence that is the male gaze made manifest – a source of constant looking that is an explicit form of control.

I'll admit that Buffy's seventh season was a (sometimes horrifying) mess, but the fact that Simon knows that the Slayer line was "literally created by men" suggests that she watched it. And therefore has no excuse for apparently failing to notice the entire point of that season: to use these aspects of the Buffy universe to criticize patriarchy.

I mean, for frak's sake, the Big Bad of the season -- the First Evil -- works through Caleb, a personification of misogyny. Weedon makes clear that the creation of the Slayer, the magic used to prevent the existence of more than one Slayer, and the institution of the Watchers themselves are part of that evil -- a control mechanism to keep women down. The show ends with the lifting of that magic, and the sudden (literal and metaphorical) empowerment of countless numbers of theretofore "potential slayers." The defeat of the "First Evil" is rendered coterminous with a massive blow against patriarchal domination.

Hmmm. What could that imply?

Bombs. Away.

I will be a attending a workshop at Cornell University on bombing norms for the next few days. (Presumably after I get back, I'll never again bomb anything I'm not supposed to.)

On this note, readers may be interested to have a look at this new memorandum Stephanie mentioned from Human Rights Watch on incendiary weapons, which follows up on an earlier report by HRW's Arms Division. The campaign I've been tracking for the paper I'm presenting is on a slightly different problem, "explosive weapons," (their latest report is here) but I'm happy that HRW is outlining the specific issues with incendiaries as they are mentioned in humanitarian law but with so many loopholes that there is essentially no stigma against using them thus far:

Protocol III allows ongoing use of incendiary munitions in ways harmful to civilians due to definitional loopholes and narrow regulations. Its definition, which looks only at the primary design of a munition, fails to cover some incendiary munitions, such as white phosphorus, that are not "primarily designed" as weapons yet cause unacceptable civilian harm. In addition, the protocol's key regulations apply only to use in populated areas and are weaker for ground-launched than for air-dropped models.[2]

Regardless of their type, targeting, and delivery mechanism, however, incendiary munitions cause cruel and lasting injury to people as well as start fires that can destroy property. The munitions produce exceptionally painful thermal and respiratory burns, which can lead to complications such as shock, infection, and asphyxiation. People who survive often suffer long-term physical and psychological damage.

A question I'm now thinking about is whether the two separate campaigns - against explosives and against incendiaries - will complement or work against one another.

How fares "lawfare"?

There has been so much going on with the international law front, it’s kind of hard to know where to begin. In sum:

• The Obama administration has decided to put Khalid Shiek Mohammed on trial at Guantanamo rather than New York City.
• The Obama administration has released a legal opinion on the Authorization Use of Military Force in Libya.
• The ICRC is concerned over unexploded ordinance in Libya (UXO).
• The ICRC will be releasing it’s update to the International Customary Law study very soon. (Register here!)
• Human Rights Watch doesn’t like incindiaries. (Surprise!)
• Richard Goldstone has backed down from some of the claims in his eponymous report (written with three other international lawyers) which criticized Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Lebanon.

Oy. No shortage of things to blog about. So let’s go meta, shall we? (With the hope that they’ll be a chance to return to some of these in the next couple of days.)

International law is still hot. It’s the old and new black. We’re getting our law on. I-Law is in the hizz-ay.

Why We Fight?

Steve Walt asks an interesting question: Is America addicted to war? He gives five reasons why we find ourselves in constant war:

1. Because we can
2. Because we have no serious enemies
3. The all volunteer force
4. It's the establishment stupid
5. Congress has checked out

The first three and the last point all speak to the limited international and domestic structural constraints the United States faces on the use of force. The fourth speaks to the agency involved. On this point he argues:

the foreign-policy establishment is hard-wired in favor of "doing something." Foreign-policy thinking in Washington is dominated either by neoconservatives (who openly proclaim the need to export "liberty" and never met a war they didn't like) or by "liberal interventionists" who are just as enthusiastic about using military power to solve problems, provided they can engineer some sort of multilateral cover for it. Liberal interventionists sometimes concede that the United States can't solve every problem (at least not at the same time), but they still think that the United States is the "indispensable" nation and they want us to solve as many of the world's problems as we possibly can.

What the hell is going on in Europe?

So I spend a few years writing a book on American foreign policy and stop paying attention to European politics, only to return and find the whole thing in chaos. I am finding three developments going on in Europe fascinating (if despicable and disgusting).

First, the Financial Times recently ran a story on Sarokozy's plan to launch a debate in France on the importance of secularism, which is really just a way to pick on Muslims and draw votes from the National Front, who have been doing very well lately under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter. (As an aside, how much of a right-wing badass can you be with the first name Jean-Marie?). OK, this is cynical but it is also really interesting for anyone who knows anything about French history. Secularism was one of the, if not the, central political and social cleavage in France for a long, long time, tied up in divide between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces. And of course there was the Dreyfus affair. But this time it is right that is pushing for more secularism, an issue which has historically belonged to the left. Of course this is not really genuine. It is a way of picking on Muslims and trying to force them to assimilate. It is the intolerance of tolerance. But it shows you how in France, secularism is so firmly established that PTJ might call it a "rhetorical commonplace," and it can be picked up and twisted in new ways.

Bahrain's Base Politics

Alex Cooley and I have just published an article at Foreign Affairs Online on Bahrain and the politics of the US overseas basing network. An excerpt:

U.S. policymakers have long struggled to reconcile their support for friendly authoritarian regimes with their preference for political liberalization abroad. The ongoing upheavals in the Middle East, like so many developments before them, shine a bright light on this inconsistency. In Egypt, the Obama administration struggled to calibrate its message on the protests that toppled longtime ally Hosni Mubarak; in Libya, it leads a multinational coalition intent on using airpower to help bring down Muammar al-Qaddafi; and in Bahrain, the United States stands mostly silent as Saudi troops put down popular protests against the ruling al-Khalifa family.

Washington's balancing act reflects more than the enduring tensions between pragmatism and idealism in U.S. foreign policy. It highlights the specific strains faced by defense planners as they attempt to maintain the integrity of the United States' worldwide network of military bases, many of which are hosted in authoritarian, politically unstable, and corrupt countries. Now, with the "Arab Spring" unfolding, even U.S. basing agreements with some of its closest allies are vulnerable.

Social Science and Bush Policy Towards Iraq

 I have already posted at the Duck and also at my blog on the spat between Tom Ricks and Peter Feaver.  Today, Feaver responded to Ricks.  I don't want to get into the he said/he said debate.  I just want to raise one point and then develop it a bit:

Feaver is not really doing social science here.  He is seeking to explain why a particular decision happened, but he is missing a huge opportunity to develop a general understanding of Presidential behavior about the deployment of troops.  He is only focused on the surge, and his narrative suggests that Bush was making some good, tough decisions to push the surge even when some (not all) of the senior military leadership opposed it.  The problem here is that Feaver could have asked a slightly different question, which would have been more interesting and more relevant beyond who gets credit for the surge: what explains the variations in Bush behavior from genial, go along, let Rummy mismanage the war to the tough decider?  In the Feaver story, Bush is pretty sharp especially with the implicit comparison to the doofus who got the US into a land war in Asia (at least Obama is getting us into an air war in Africa--no wise aphorisms about that).  So what explains that?

Let me suggest a comparison across cases: Clinton in 1995, Bush in 2006/7, Obama in 2009: all three Presidents faced roughly the same decision: to expend significant political capital to pull out troops (European for Clinton, US for Bush, US and essentially NATO+ for Obama) in a questionable, somewhat failing war effort OR reinvest with additional Americans and effort.  Once Bill Clinton committed to his European pals that he would use US forces to extract them from Bosnia if necessary, the choice of using US troops to enforce a peace became much more palatable.  With Bush facing a huge defeat in Iraq, the choice to invest just a bit further with some new generals (Petraeus and Odierno) and a new SecDef Gates and more troops, the decision was easier.  Obama did not want to send more troops into Afghanistan, but ultimately chose to do so as a last chance to find some success.

What does this scream?  Prospect theory, baby.  Gambling to avoid losses is a basic tendency according to the cognitive psychologists.  We are more risk acceptant when it comes to avoiding losses and more risk averse when it comes to gambling for gains (Jack Levy has several good pieces on this stuff including this one).  I am no expert on psychological approaches to foreign policy and international relations (that's Brian's gig), but it seems to me that we have a fairly simple (dare I say parsimonious?) explanation of Presidents making decisions about the deployment of force that is consistent across continents, economic times (good or bad), uni- or multi-lateral efforts, and so on.

The key is to think about the variation within the Bush Administration (a most similar comparison) or perhaps the similarities across Administrations (most different, more or less).  The spat between Ricks and Feaver is on the details of one case, but we can learn far more by comparing.

A Reply to the Reply: Jean Elshtain, Gender, and IR (Part III)

Part 3 (of 3) ...

In concluding, Elshtain characterizes my essay as “overreach,” “hyper-theorizing,” and “prosaic,” arguing that (like “the entire post-structural arsenal”), “when you get down to the nitty-gritty, things slip through your fingers.”

Its true that my essay discusses more than it could ever back up – because the essay is not a research essay or an original work, so much as it is an accounting for, and asking for recognition for, hundreds of books and thousands of articles that provide evidence for the points mentioned in it which are categorically ignored in Elshtain’s discussion of Waltz’s levels of analysis, to which they are crucially relevant, especially insomuch as Elshtain is(/claims to be) talking about gender.

This is evident in Elshtain’s discussion of the positive contributions of “women scholars” (which I was unaware was a theoretically significant category) in history and anthropology (presumably as opposed to political science/international relations), because those scholars “spend time researching questions, reading vast amounts, trying to sort out how things really worked – whatever the big theories said about them.” Again, this can only be argued by someone who hasn’t been reading feminist IR – in addition to the AMAZING empirical books that I read in graduate school (Kathy Moon’s, Charlotte Hooper’s, Lisa Prugl’s, Jacqui True’s, Brooke Ackerly’s, Lisa Prugl’s, and Christine Chin’s, I believe, all dissertation books), I have had the opportunity not only to do, but to read, hard-nosed, ethnographic research based on years of field work. Reading books for the Oxford Series in Gender and International Relations, the great majority of feminist books in Political Science/IR are deeply empirical, highly sophisticated, and highly complex – things that my article-length summary of twenty years of contributions necessarily could not be.

But Elshtain could see this if her argument were more than a careless, disengaged polemic.

Dan Drezner Denies Being a Cylon, Professes Love for Mainstream IR

We also talk about Libya, R2P, Wikileaks, gender, and why Dan should give critical theory a second chance despite how they left things.

Posner, Dunlap and Lawfare

Eric Posner had a recent piece in The National Interest on the concept of "lawfare," in which he appears to define "lawfare" as efforts to undermine powerful states' foreign policy goals by holding them accountable to international norms (he lumps Wikileaks and Human Rights Watch together as two such entities), then to say that NGO activity in this area isn't really "lawfare," (well duh) and then goes on to say (conflating NGO activity with lawfare) that actually, the non-state sector is so powerless that really, states like the US shouldn't worry too much about all this "lawfare."

Lawfare is both the efforts of enemy nations, terrorist organizations and their supporters to counter American military superiority by threatening U.S. policy makers and soldiers with prosecution and civil litigation, and the pressure brought to bear by NGOs who take to the media marketplace insisting that international law places sharp limits on military action.... But the very idea of lawfare is perplexing. How can “law”—a set of rules applied by unarmed institutions like courts—stand up to bombs and missiles? The answer is that it cannot. Laws do not enforce themselves. If a weak country cannot coerce a more powerful country through force of arms, then it cannot coerce the other country with law either. The lawfare threat is greatly exaggerated.... NGOs advance interpretations of the law, but their interpretations do not have any legal authority, nor can they make, change or enforce the law. WikiLeaks and other media do not demand legal compliance. All they do is push toward transparency and the curtailment of military operations that generate grisly images. In the end, these are political, public-relations and technological threats, not legal ones.

A number of blogs I respect, including the Lawfare Blog and the International Jurist have been surprisingly uncritical about this piece. Rob had some thoughts on this back when the essay came out. For my part, I'd just like to add three things: