Arms and influence

Gadfly on the windshield

IN THE NEWS
I sometimes like what Christopher Hitchens has to say about world events. He's willing to be off-beat enough to defy mainstream opinion when it becomes brain-dead, and he has enough erudition to pull out some good historical examples (or counter-examples) when appropriate.

However, Hitchens' latest piece in Slate sounds like the work of someone who needs to keep proving his gadfly credentials, even when it means crafting a rebuttal to an argument no one is making. Right, Christopher, no two historical situations are ever completely analogous. However, when people compare the 1967 South Vietnamese elections to this weekend's Iraqi elections, all they're saying is, "The fact of an election will not end the insurgency." You don't need to compare the Iraqi insurgent groups to either the Viet Cong or the Khmer Rouge, then argue which is the better comparison. See, no one is actually comparing the insurgencies--they're comparing the elections.

I know, it's tough to always come up with a deliberately provocative position. This one really didn't work.

Dear Vice President Cheney...

IN THE NEWS

Dear Vice President Cheney--

As I'm sure you're aware, despite all the time you've been spending in undisclosed locations, the liberation of Auschwitz was one of the great moments of the 20th century. When Soviet troops threw open the gates of the most infamous Nazi death camps, some of the worst horrors ever seen in any century came to an end. It's hard to put the moment into words, so perhaps it's worth looking again at some of the photos of the liberated death camps. Whether you're looking at the piles of the dead, "stacked like cordwood" as many described, or the haunted faces of the survivors, you cannot help but weep.

Pictures matter, particularly in deeply important symbolic moments like the liberation of Auschwitz, or the remembrance ceremony sixty years later. We know that you don't see the vice president's job as purely symbolic, but it still has important symbolic elements, particularly when you represent the United States at a Holocaust memorial.

Therefore, I hope you understand why many people around the world were shocked by your strange attire at this important ceremony, probably the last major anniversary that any Auschwitz survivor will still be alive to attend. Surely someone on your staff could have found you an appropriate replacement for your parka, boots, and ski cap. To Americans and citizens of other countries, to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, you looked like someone who just didn't care how he appeared, as the representative of the United States, at the most solemn of occasions imaginable.

I hope that you have had a chance to reflect on this egregious mistake and will make the appropriate apologies.

Yours,

  --Tom Grant
     (Kingdaddy)

Interview with Ahmed Rashid

IN THE NEWS
Last week, Ahmed Rashid, the author of Taliban and other excellent books on the Middle East, militant Islam, and terrorism, appeared on NPR's Fresh Air. Rashid, as usual, had many useful observations, particularly about how Afghanis and Iraqis view the events in their countries that we normally see  through American eyes. It's well worth the time to go listen to this interview.

Detainee reviews ruled illegal

IN THE NEWS
A US District judge has ruled that the Pentagon's reluctant, half-baked legal reviews of Guantanamo prisoners are illegal. Since the US Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Defense cannot just leave people to rot in detention, on the grounds that some of them may be dangerous, the Pentagon has dragged its feet in reviewing the cases of individual prisoners and handling their legal challenges.

Even if there are diehard al Qaeda terrorists among the Guantanamo prisoners, this ruling is good news:

• Better to find out who really is a threat, and why.
• The fairness of our own judicial system is a key tool in our counterterrorism strategy. Even if our public diplomacy efforts are rather feeble, the example we provide about constitutionalism and the rule of law is far more important.
• If we want to convict terrorists in a US court, we should ensure that the evidence against them is not tained by torture and abuse.

I know I sound like a broken record on this issue, but the executive branch has to move faster on removing the Guantanamo blight.

Total Information Awareness

IN THE NEWS
Every once in a while, my two careers--first the counterterrorism/counterinsurgency studies, then the software industry--intersect. I look for the opportunity to put one set of skills at the service of the other, but it's surprisingly not as easy as you'd think.

For a moment, I encountered just such an intersection of these disparate worlds when I was in the car listening to an American Radio Works special about the expansion of surveillance since 9/11. Not surprisingly, the producers interviewed John Poindexter, the person who headed the Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative, a federal research and development looking for ways to fix some of the informational cracks that the 9/11 terrorist slipped through.

By now, we've all heard about how, in 2001, different federal agencies--the FBI, the CIA, INS, and so forth--had bits and pieces of information about the al Qaeda hijackers. None of them had the complete picture, so the warning bells weren't ringing, or not loudly enough. Aside from human barriers, such as the FBI's signature unwillingness to work with other agencies, there were technical obstacles to building a complete picture about Mohammed Atta group's members and plans. Where the FBI maintained one database of information, the FAA and other agencies all had their own, separate repositories of information.

Aha! I thought. Here's a classic problem for people in my current field, database applications. The challenges for linking these databases together are often hard, but they're well-known--as are the solutions. The US government could never achieve a "God's eye view" of every possible threat, but perhaps it could better pool and analyze data from different sources. The privacy issues are significant, but again, people who have built software based on databases have tackled these problems already. Just as your bank and credit card companies have information "firewalls" when they share information with one another, so too could the federal databases tracking terrorist suspects.

While the details around connecting databases with one another may have dry details understood only by specialists, the basic challenges are rather simple to understand. For example:

• Information is often out of date. Whenever a suspect moves to a new address, changes cell phone carriers, or receives a wire transfer from overseas, someone has to enter the new information, or an automated system of some sort has to send the update to the database. Both ways of updating information are prone to failure. Law enforcement agents are slow to type new information into the system, or the automatic updates don't happen as scheduled.
• Different databases record the same tpe of information in different ways. Every database is like a file cabinet: how you organize information may not match the ssytem someone else might devise. There might be standard, obvious categories for some things--medical and dental records, credit card receipts, etc.--but others, like school records, might not be so obvious. Similarly, what type of information different federal agencies store, and the categories they use, may not match what other agencies have devised.
• Different conventions for the same type of information. In one office, people may flag documents that are urgent by putting red Post-It notes on the front page. Others might put them on the top of the pile. Similarly, a database for one federal agency might flag the possible risk a suspect poses to national security on a 0-to-5 scale, with 0 being the most dangerous person to watch, whil a different agency might develop a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most dangerous.

While these problems might sound trivial, imagine dealing with them across several complex databases, including different versions from different software developers, some so old that they are not still supported, containing millions of individual records...

I'd expect to hear that federal officials were struggling with these sort of challenges. I didn't expect to hear that the person in charge of a program that was supposed to be working on these problems didn't understand the basics of them. Here's what that person, John Poindexter, said in the interview:

Because of the problem that we talked about earlier, of having the signal out there in all of this noise about innocent transactions, we recognized from the very beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue. And, so, in addition to working on the technologies to find information, to find the signal in the noise and to make sense of it, we also began working on technologies that would protect the privacy of innocent people. I have this concept of what I call a "privacy appliance," which is a device that sits on top of a database of information. And, the appliance does several things. It accepts the query from the user, and checks.

Um. Er. Ahem. This technology already exists. In fact, it has been a standard part of database design for decades. The mechanism in question is called a view. Take any type of information in a database--say, the bank transactions of a suspect--and filter out all but the essential information that can be safely shared without violating the privacy rights of the individual in question, or the other people who send or receive money from this person. (After all, it may turn out that they're all innocent of any wrongdoing.) Give this distilled view to an FBI agent, who can then decide whether further investigation, requiring legal authorization to get further details, is required. This scrubbed, limited set of information is called a view in database parlance.

And yet, the person who was running the Total Information Awareness program apparently thought a brand-new appliance was required to do what database views have accomplished for decades. As I said, Ahem.

Freedom abroad, then freedom here

IN THE NEWS
I'm late to the ball when it comes to analyzing Bush's second inaugural speech. However, I think it's not too late to point out a statement he made that (1) didn't get the attention it deserved, and (2) is highly uncharacteristic of any presidential address of which I'm aware:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

Other presidents have argued that the US national interest includes the spread of democracy and the rule of law to other countries. These men have had stated different reasons why this policy was important, and some (like Woodrow Wilson) emphasized it far more than others. However, I can't find any president who has ever said that we don't want fewer tyrannies and more democracies abroad.

I can't find in my brief research on the topic any statement that liberty at home is contingent on liberty abroad. In fact, in many famous examples, US presidents have stated exactly the opposite. Washington's farewell address includes the following famous passage:

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.

Washington then continues:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

And he doesn't stop there. After taking pains to outline other reasons why the new American republic shouldn't involve itself more with Europe than what is minimally necessary to preserve American commerce and the integrity of its borders, Washington closes this section of his farewell address with the following:

There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

Of course, after World War II, the United States did involve itself quite deeply in European affairs. Once the Cold War made American decision-makers worried about threats from other corners of the globe--Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and so on--the United States became more interested in the internal politics of more nations than it had ever cared about. (The obvious exceptions, of course, were Latin America, the Caribbean, and to a more limited extent, the Philippines and China.) By the time John F. Kennedy made his inaugural address, the United States had left Washington's warnings about foreign entanglements far, far behind.

No president, however, ever differed from Washington on an important point of national consensus: regardless of what happened in the rest of the world, the American political experiment had to stand or fall on its own. American democracy, liberty, and constitutionalism could be an example to the world. However, these fundamental elements of "the American way of life" never depended on how effectively we spread them to other countries. Even the crassest moments in American foreign policy, such as dollar diplomacy, never implied that the election of an alderman in Poughkipsee or Pocatello somehow depended on the fortunes of democracy in Paraguay.

On this point, the closest parallel I can draw between Bush's second inaugural and a similar speech is Kennedy's inaugural address, in which he alluded to the "long twilight struggle" of the Cold War. Then, the concern was "wars of national liberation" that were led or could be subverted by communists friendly to our Soviet enemy. The United States was in danger, Kennedy argued, from unexpected corners of the globe, in guerrilla wars that were only "little" to those who underestimated the threat. Today, Bush and other American leaders, both Republican and Democrat, are making the same argument about terrorism. But no one that I can find, including Kennedy, has ever before said that "[t]he survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Here's what Kennedy actually said in the "twilight struggle" part of his speech:

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Not quite the same statement as Bush's. Kennedy, like every other president before or since, except Bush, has said that American democracy is completely in our own hands.

All quiet on the Western front

IN THE NEWS
Life intruded on blogging, mostly in the form of a huge writing project I had to finish for my new job. I have a mental backlog of topics that I want to address--more perspectives on revolutionary warfare, the inevitable posts about Iraq, etc.--so I'll be doing my best to catch up to where I should be. Forgiveness, please, if I talk about one or two "old" topics, such as what Bush said in his second inaugural speech.

I'll also be catching up on comments you may have left. Sorry for the delay in replying.

The evolution of revolution

THEORY

In the 20th century, the question of causes dominated discussions about revolution among historians and political scientists. What caused the Russian Revolution? Whose theory of revolutionary ignition made more sense? Are there discernable warning signs that a revolution like the one that occurred in Iran is about to happen in Iraq?

Causation may have been the 20th century's concern, but before then, etiology—the predictable course that revolutions take, once they begin, was the more common topic. Many ancient philosophers, such as Socrates, believed in a cycle of revolutions, including monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic phases. Edmund Burke objected to the French Revolution because, he argued, once revolutionaries threw aside prior laws and traditions, nothing restrained the most violent, unscrupulous leaders from rising to the highest reaches of power. Marx and Engels focused more on explaining where the revolutions that drove societies from one "mode of production" to another (for example, from feudalism to capitalism) than they did describing "the revolutionary moment."

All of these thinkers, however much they disagreed on other issues, had a common and somewhat pessimistic view of how much individuals could steer the course of a revolution once it began. In Book V of The Politics, Aristotle describes how states with different "constitutions" (in his terminology, the type of regime, such as an oligarchy) have defects that, if unchecked, inspire particular kinds of revolutionary forces. Oligarchs, for example, can't help but oppress the larger population, which can create the mass outrage that explodes into popular revolution. Members of the same oligarchic faction develop rivalries and resentments that can lead to coups and civil wars. Some oligarchs are smart enough manage these risks, tempering these rivalries and avoiding excessively oppressive measures. Smart oligarchs may stay in power longer than others, but that's not the same as saying they can achieve total mastery of their destinies. Heraclea, Cnidos, Erythrae—Aristotle names several oligarchies that failed, despite the best efforts of the oligarchs.

There's an old, old question peeking around the edges of this discussion of revolutionary etiology: What decides the outcome of major events, the leaders involved or impersonal historical forces beyond their control? This question arises in many different contexts, from Tolstoy's War and Peace to John Ellis' Brute Force, an argument for the "inevitability" of Allied victory in World War II. You don't have to find a final answer to this question to see that revolutions take natural courses, passing through similar, predictable phases. Whether human beings can slow down or stop this revolutionary progression is a separate issue than whether events tend along a familiar trajectory.

Although 20th century thinkers spent more time on causation than etiology, a few students of revolution did take a stab at describing what these predictable phases might be. You might not have heard their names before—perhaps, in part, because the course of evolution is such a sketchily-addressed topic. The two I'll mention here, Crane Brinton and Lyford Edwards, have very similar theories of revolutionary etiology, so it's fair to discuss their two books on the subject together.

Both Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution and Lyford Edwards' The Natural History of Revolution use the "great revolution" of modern times—the French and Russian revolutions most prominently, but also the English Civil War and the American War of Independence—as case studies. To paraphrase and summarize Brinton and Edwards a bit, here's what they see as the normal course of revolutions:

• A period of unrest and uncertainty preceding the revolutionary outbreak.
• A catalytic event that starts the revolutionary motor.
• The collapse of the old order, followed by a period in which moderate factions hold the reins of power.
• The failure of the moderates, followed by the radicals' seizure of power.
• A reign of terror, which the radicals justify in their minds by the slow pace of
• revolutionary transformation.
• The exhaustion of the terror campaign.
• A period of "cooling down," during which the radicals may or may not lose power.
• The return to normal politics, signaling the end of the revolution.

Both Brinton and Edwards argue that the politics of the revolutionaries is irrelevant to the course of the revolution. You can trace the same road through these predictable phases of revolution, whether you're talking about the Nazi seizure of power, the Iranian revolution, or the history of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua,

PRACTICE

If you think revolutions follow a predictable path, you're left with an obvious question: is Iraq fated to follow the same course? Are the number of troops the United States and its allies deploy, the amount of aid sent to the Iraqi government, and the recent elections all irrelevant to what will happen there, regardless of our efforts?

I don't find the argument about historical inevitability convincing. Revolutions often fail, as did the Sandinistas' revolutionary regime. Leaders can unleash long, bloody reigns of terror, such as the terror famines and the great purges under Stalin, or they can be relatively short and less violent, such as the Iranian mullah's consolidation of power. Certainly the repressive measures that the Revolutionary Guards and other instruments of that consolidation were brutal and destructive, but they never reached Stalinesque proportions. History with a capital "H" may propel societies through these revolutionary phases, but how quickly, and what happens during them, is something that human beings can affect.

Iraq may be passing though exactly the phases that Brinton and Edwards describe. If we're trying to support a moderate regime, it may be at enormous risk, for all the reasons moderates have failed in other revolutions. The radicals are usually better organized and motivated than the moderates. As long as the moderates are in power, they bear the blame for whatever failures or mistakes the new government commits. Many people frustrated with these setbacks join the radical faction, with either enthusiasm or resignation.

In short, the short-lived seizure of power in Fallujah by the Army of the Mahdi, one of many radical factions in Iraq today, may have been a harbinger of things to come in the rest of Iraq. So, too, was the disgust of many living in Fallujah with their "liberation" by the radicals, and the repression that quickly followed.

Unfortunately, the residents of Fallujah were furious with the American "liberation" as well. How we fight this war in Iraq does matter—we and the Iraqis are not merely leaves blowing in a revolutionary gale. We can see where events may lead, and respond accordingly. Sometimes, we may be able to cut short one of the phases of revolutionary cataclysm; at other times, we may have to merely ride them out.

The Iraqi elections run along a revolutionary knife's edge. If, as the Bush Administration argues, elections will build an intimate connection between the voter and the government, that bond may just as easily make matters worse as better. If Iraq is passing through the stage of moderate rule, the elections may become the symbol of what the "new Iraq" is supposed to be. In other words, the elections may frame what the current "regime of moderates" is supposed to be: broadly representative of all Iraqis, regardless of religious outlook, ethnic background, clan affiliation, political ideology, or any other identifying characteristics. If the elected government doesn't seem representative, or fails to deliver equal justice, reconstruction, and security to all groups in Iraq, the moderates in power may find themselves facing more outrage and frustration than if the elections had never occurred. The elections, therefore, may undermine the moderates at this critical phase in the transformation of Iraq, not help them. Few can blame a provisional government for not being completely representative of a fractured, fractious country. Everyone can blame a new set of leaders in Baghdad and their American patrons if elections fail to produce a more representative, responsive regime than the interim government.

POSTSCRIPT: The term etiology was my doctoral advisor's favored way of phrasing this issue. I also have Harry Eckstein to thank for showing me how important—and, unfortunately, neglected—revolutionary etiology has been.

Going to the source

IN THE NEWS
It’s old news by now, but the Bush Administration has officially abandoned the search for weapons of mass destruction. There was no surprise when Administration spokespeople didn’t quite admit abandonment, continuing to murmur about the possibility of WMDs smuggled in the dark of night into Syria or Iran. However, we all know what the moment means—including when the Administration blamed the termination of the WMD hunt on the extreme danger to the team looking for them. That’s not the only way in which the occupation has trumped the original cassus belli.

Either Saddam Hussein was engaged in one of the most reckless bluffs in history, or his aides deceived him into thinking he had weapons (or a weapons program, or something) that was sheer fantasy. While the Bush Administration made a poor case for attacking Iraq, in truth, Saddam Hussein did a poor job of defending himself.

Perhaps Hussein had so few weapons that he could hide them (something I don’t find credible, based on the available evidence), or he had only a hope of reviving the WMD program (and even that isn’t altogether clear). The basic question is the same: Was the invasion justified?

That’s roughly the same question as, Was containment still the better policy than invasion? If, after gambling away what good will and credibility the United States had left on Iraq, miring our military in a strategically defensive war, distracting both civilian and military resources away from the global counterterrorist campaign, and driving the federal budget even further into the red, doesn’t convince you, let’s take a look at an obvious historical parallel that I’m surprised hasn’t been discussed yet: Cuba.

Cuba symbolizes an invasion that the United States could have executed, but didn’t. In many respects, the shadowy threat was the same. Cuba was home to Soviet WMDs for a brief period, until the United States forced their removal. The communist regime in Havana was giving considerable training, financial, military, and moral support to like-minded insurgencies across Latin America. (In that sense, Castro did far more to threaten the United States through unconventional war than Hussein ever did.) Castro was adventuresome to the point of, to the surprise of nearly everyone, deploying Cuban troops to Angola’s civil war. He was ruthlessly repressive at home, wrecked his nation’s economy, impoverished economically and intellectually at least two generations of Cubans, and in the end, is still working to ensure the monstrous train wreck that is the Cuban Revolution does not die with him. Even if he were no tyrant, however, the United States had every reason to remove him.

Which, of course, it tried to do, in every way short of sending in the Marines. The Bay of Pigs, the assassination plots, the economic embargo, the aggressive counterinsurgency campaign in every Latin American country where the Cubans aided the insurgents—some of these measures “worked,” in the sense of limiting the Cuban threat, and some backfired. For example, the CIA plots to kill or just humiliate Castro begat the Church Committee hearings, which begat the very tough restrictions on covert action which post-9/11 Americans often bemoan. Despite our own missteps, the threat remained, as a vocal exile community reminded US politicians daily. If the Bush Administration was eager to embrace the Iraqi exiles, they never feared them the way American elected officials (especially those in Florida) worry about what the Cuban exiles might do to their re-election prospects.

And yet, the United States never invaded, even after the dying Soviet Union signaled its disinterest in its former Cuban proxy. Every Cold War president, Democrat and Republican, had the option of “going to the source” in Cuba. With historical hindsight, plus the continued release of new documentary evidence, it’s clear that the risk of nuclear war with Cuba’s Soviet protector, while never zero, was certainly never as high as the general public assumed it was at the time.

Apparently, Castro was contained enough for American foreign policy. Castro never lost his revolutionary fire, but it certainly burned less and less over the years. After repeated efforts to help topple South American governments failed, the Cuban government largely gave up more than a desultory effort to spread its revolution to other countries. Castro would never have been our friend, but as an enemy, his barking and snarling became less frightening over time.

You could easily make the same case for Saddam Hussein, a revolutionary at heart who eventually settled on survival as his ultimate aim (and, if you listened to his rhetoric, proof of his alleged strength). If you’ve never watched the video of the Ba’ath party meeting after his 1979 coup, when the assembled party leaders sweated and trembled as Hussein coolly sent many of them, one by one, to the firing squad, you’ve never experienced just what sort of revolutionary Hussein was. You can never know the heart of a Stalin or a Hussein, but you can watch them do a very convincing job of carrying out classic revolutionary terror. Hussein’s purge is even harder to watch or read about than the Moscow show trials, if that is to be believed. Whether he depended on revolution as a fig leaf of respectability, or he genuinely believed in the secular transformation of the Middle East the Ba’athists were attempting, Saddam Hussein depended on harnessing revolutionary forces, driving them to their bloody conclusion. To the extent that Hussein's revolutionary fervor made regular imbroglios with the United States an easy way to polish up his anti-Western credentials, yes, he would continue to be a "threat," but perhaps of a very limited sort.

Like Castro, Saddam Hussein would never be the United States’ friend. But was he contained enough? Why was it possible to live with the continued risk of Cuban shenanigans—helping the Soviets sneak nuclear arms back into Cuba, training and funding anti-American revolutionaries in the Western Hemisphere, helping turn other regional conflicts like Angola’s into Cold War confrontations—but the United States could not tolerate the smallest iota of risk from Iraq?

If you want to invoke the ghosts of 9/11, remember for a moment what the Cold War was like. Remember when we lived under the daily threat of nuclear war—something far worse than 9/11, or 9/11 times ten. And remember, too, how we stopped short of the sunny beaches of Cuba, when we had the chance to “go to the source.”

Innumeracy and insurgency

IN THE NEWS

Numbers can inform, mislead, or stagger us into incomprehension. When you hear the statement, Almost a million Union and Confederate soldiers died in the American Civil War, more than all previous American wars combined, you can't help but be horrified. When you view the dark panorama of the dead at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, DC, coldly listing the approximately 50,000 Americans killed in that distant conflict, a chill passes through you, no matter how hot and humid DC might be the day you visit. The memorial doesn't list the over 150,000 American men and women wounded in Vietnam, some in the most disfiguring or debilitating ways imaginable.

But what do these figures really mean? Numbers need a context with which to anchor them. Otherwise, impressive or trivial, the numbers gradually drift away from our understanding.

As of today, 1,340 Americans have died in Iraq. That's a sad statistic, but what bearing does it have on the war effort? Aside from the brute mechanics of war—how many soldiers, how big a country, how many daily operations conducted by how many US divisions—the important consequence of 1,340 dead is the effect it has on the American political system's determination to continue fighting that war.

Of course, those are numbers and their consequences that matter to Americans. They won't win or lose the war, however. The comparable number that has deeper meaning for what happens in Iraq's internal war is the number of Iraqi dead—now estimated at over 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion in April, 2003.

That, too, is a staggering number to contemplate. But what does it mean? How many Iraqis will die before "war weariness" becomes an important factor, as it has in many other internal wars? (See the exhaustion of the combatants and the populations in El Salvador and Nicaragua' recent conflicts for an example.) And is the figure even accurate?

To our shame, we don't know. The war we're fighting in Iraq depends on understanding Iraq, in the deepest sense possible. The United States has staked its blood and treasure after the 9/11 attacks on the Iraq war, but we lack the basic numbers that provide only the first, but vital, step towards understanding.

The 100,000 figure may be itself wildly inaccurate. Since it uses a common algorithm used in epidemiological studies to estimate the spread and lethality of disease, it has inherent problems applied to the Iraq war. In fact, asthis article by Fred Kaplan of Slate argues, it may be altogether worthless. Other sources exist, such as the painstaking work done by the authors of the Iraq Body Count web site, who have compiled all mentions of civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion.

Which estimate should you believe? For now, I'll use both as a point of reference. Kaplan adjusts the Iraq Body Count estimates slightly upward. I agree, particularly since you somehow have to include not just civilians, but Iraqi insurgents, soldiers, and police in the statistic. Therefore, the high estimate (believe it or not) is 100,000, and the low estimate is 30,000 (the highest number Kaplan can believe).

Aside from inspiring our sympathy, what good is the number? To be coldly practical for a moment, does the high or low  estimate tell us anything about how well the war is going, for our own foreign policy interests?

If we only talk about Iraq, it's hard to say. However, if we look at the effect war deaths have had on the politics of other societies, we might be able to glean a little bit of understanding.

The United States has had experience with politically calamitous wars. The Civil War, of course, had different effects on different parts of the country. For the North, Union casualties became a kind of blood pact, deepening determination to re-knit the sundered nation and free the slaves. For the South, the war dead became part of a painful process of honoring its fallen cavaliers, while having to accept the edicts of the government who killed them. World War II, "the good war," might tell us something about the sacrifices the country is willing to make when the country is united around a cause. In contrast, the Vietnam War shows how large a much smaller number of casualties can loom in the collective psyche when there isn't broad consensus and support.

World War I has its own story to tell. The trenches in France and Belgium swallowed up a generation of French and British youth, creating a political malaise that afflicted both countries for decades to follow.

We have our points of comparison—Iraq, the US Civil War, WWI, WII, Vietnam—but we don't have any theory. Without arguing the merits of a particular hypothesis, let's just take one as a given for the moment. This posting is about the lack of signposts, not their accuracy. So here’s our working theory:

As the number of war deaths mount as a percentage of national population, the political effects mount. When there is broad support and consensus, the effects are not calamitous; when there isn't, the will to continue the fight may collapse for one combatant, or both.

On that last point, I was thinking about Britain's stand against Nazi terror bombing, both during the Battle of Britain and later, by V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks. Even civilian casualties can actually stiffen resistance, when there's already a strong, nation-wide determination to defeat an enemy.

Before showing the numbers, I'll add one more variable worth tracking. We're really talking about the shock value of casualties: how many of our friends, family, and acquaintances die; the mounting horror of further deaths; the grim determination that either the deaths need to be justified, or the killing needs to stop. Shock value may not be captured by looking at casualties across the entire course of the war—perhaps a smaller time interval than several years is needed to capture the amount of carnage with which people are trying to emotionally and intellectually grapple.

OK, enough introduction. Here's the table:

                                 
                                                                                                                                                         

		TOTALS				PER MONTH AND YEAR
Combatant		Killed	Population	% of population		Months of war	Killed per mth	Pop % per mth	Killed per yr	Pop % per yr
Iraq, 2003-2005, high		100,000	25,374,691	0.39%		21	4,762	0.02%	57,143	0.23%
Iraq, 2003-2005, low		30,000	25,374,691	0.12%		21	1,429	0.01%	17,143	0.07%
US,   Civil War		558,052	34,300,000	1.63%		48	11,626	0.03%	139,513	0.041%
US,   World War II		407,316	133,500,000	0.31%		44	9,257	0.01%	111,086	0.08%
US,   Vietnam War		58,168	204,900,000	0.03%		90	646	0.00%	7,756	0.00%
France,   World War I		1,357,800	45,000,000	3.02%		48	28,288	0.06%	339,450	0.75%
Great     Britain,   World War I		908,371	46,331,548	1.96%		48	18,924	0.04%	227,093	0.49%

The numbers include dead, but not wounded. In case you're wondering, the British casualties include English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish soldiers.

What can we conclude? Looking at the high and low estimates for Iraqi dead, the number of casualties is significant. The Iraqis aren't dying at the same rate as the French and British in WWI—but do they need to? Their casualties as a percentage of the Iraqi population are already as large, or twice as large, as the US casualties in WWII. American casualties in Vietnam, as a percentage of population, shrink to insignificance compared to the Iraq war dead.

The war dead—civilian, soldier, and insurgent alike—are likely to have a major effect on the politics of Iraq. If you trust the hypothesis I posted earlier, in which the effect depended on the amount of consensus over a single war aim, the prospects aren't good. Remember, though, it's just a hypothesis. However, it's better than having no theory to guide you, even if it turns out to be flawed. It's also better to have some numbers, rather than none, to feed into that theory, even if you have to be very circumspect about their accuracy.

What's the moral of this story? Numbers, like the dead, cannot speak for themselves.