Arms and influence

Back to our regularly scheduled programming

I've finally tracked down the problem I was having with the RSS feeds. The short version is, Web 2.0 technology is still a bit twitchy. Or, at least, the way one service provider (not Typepad) was handling RSS was being helpful in an unhelpful way.

Arms and Influence podcast #1

(Reposted) Politics and war. Book and game recommendations that fit this theme.

Download AI1.mp3

Technical difficulties

There's a problem with the RSS feed for Arms and Influence that is eating the time I would spend posting. Among other unfortunate side effects, the latest podcast isn't showing up in the iTunes Music Store. As soon as I the Typepad people help fix this problem, I'll get back to posting.

Podcast #2, production notes

Main topic:
Levels of strategy, grand strategy.

Books mentioned:
Luttwak, Strategy
Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment
Halle, The Cold War As History
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
Kagan, The Peloponnesian War

Games mentioned:
 Twilight Struggle
Pax Romana
Medieval: Total War (computer game)
Europa Universalis II (computer game)
Twilight Imperium

The links go to more information about these games. To purchase games that are in print, check out online game retailers, such as Boulder Games or Fair Play Games. Otherwise, eBay is your best bet for finding out of print titles.

I had some minor sound editing issues during this podcast, so the quality is not as good as it should be. This problem should disappear by the next podcast.

Arms and Influence podcast #2

Levels of strategy, grand strategy. Plus, the usual book and game recommendations.

Download AI2.mp3

Uphill in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan remains an uphill battle--quite literally, for the unit of the 10th Mountain Division profiled in this Salon article. Worth reading for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the work still left to be done. One of my greatest fears is that the Iraq hangover will cause many Americans to lose interest in Afghanistan, too.

Global terrorist incidents at a glance

Check it out--a nice use of Web 2.0 technology. Of course, the value of the tool depends on the value of the data.

Civil war mad-libs

Yesterday, I grumbled that American newspapers like the Washington Post cover the Iraq war from a purely American perspective. In other words, the subjects of these articles are American soldiers, American politicians and political appointees, or American problems. Unfortunately, winning any counterinsurgency war requires a deep understanding of the country where the civil war is taking place.

After I wrote that post, I realized that I left out an important qualification. American journalists often do write about the citizens of countries wracked by internal war. The content of these articles, while sympathetic to the subject, are largely useless.

It’s hard to speak of these articles in the plural, since they amount to re-wordings of the same story. Here is that Ur-article, presented in the “fill-in-the-blank” format that I can neither confirm nor deny reporters actually use:

___________ has lived in the village of ___________ for all [his/her] life. That was, until war came to the village. Today, ___________ lives in [a refugee camp/fear].

“I don’t know where I’ll go, or what I’ll do,” ______________ said, clutching his ___________, a treasured keepsake. “Nowhere is safe.”

___________ story is all too familiar, in this war that has claimed over ___________ lives. With the failure of negotiations between ___________ and ___________, there is no end to the violence in sight.

Still, ___________ clings to hope. “Every day I pray for peace,” [he/she] said. "It’s all I can do."

What’s wrong with that? At the very least, this kind of reporting draws attention to the conflicts themselves. Unfortunately, that’s usually where the information stops.

After arousing sympathy and horror, the next step should be a description of how these tragic circumstances came to be. Who’s fighting, and why? What is the current state of the war? How is the conflict likely to unfold? Is there anything the reader, or the reader’s elected officials, can do to nudge these events towards an end to the suffering of people like [fill in the blank]?

That’s why I spoke highly of Digital Diplomat’s post about the rivalry among Shi’ite factions in

Iraq, including SCIRI, the Army of the Mahdi, and the Shi’ite dominated government. It’s also why many foreign news sources do a better job of covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than the mainstream American news outlets. It’s also why it’s worth reading blogs by the citizens of these countries (here's a sample list from Iraq), soldiers deployed to these war zones, or even the occasional Middle East specialist, such as the widely-cited Juan Cole.

No one deserves a Pulitzer for going to Iraq and pointing a camera at the victims of a car bomb attack. Real reporting means talking to the Iraqis, understanding the political forces propelling the war, and writing clear, accurate, and useful stories. Otherwise, journalists are behaving like besotted doctors who think their job is to describe the symptoms their patients are suffering, without explaining the possible sources of their ailments. (“Wow! Look at the lesions on that guy!”)

Podcast #2 coming soon

I’ve recorded the next Arms and Influence podcast, so now I’m just doing the sound editing. I should have it posted tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.

The Shi'ite mess

Here's another excellent post from Digital Diplomat. In this case, Justin is discussing the political snarl among competing Shi'ite factions. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has pushed through the Iraqi legislature a bill that creates a semi-autonomous Shi'ite zone in the southern part of the country. Of course, that's the region through which oil exports pass into the Persian Gulf. Therefore, any group that dominates the new Shi'ite zone will have a great deal of clout.

Of course, SCIRI isn't the only Shi'ite faction around. The Army of the Mahdi has a different strategy in the great game of Iraqi politics:

As far as the Sadrists, the point of contention is that they will be marginalized in the political sphere. An independent southern Shi’ite autonomous zone will be controlled by the SCIRI and policed by its militia. Under the central government, Sadr’s alliance with the Da’wa party affords him a good deal of leverage and that leverage may well now disappear.

Since the Bush Administration has worked hard to make US interests hostage to the Byzantine relations among Iraqi groups, you'd think that journalists might be covering current events in Iraq in just the terms that Digital Diplomat describes. Instead, today's Washington Post Middle East section is dominated by American journalists writing about Americans. Here are the headlines, as of this moment:

• Majority of Americans Support Setting a Deadline for Troop Withdrawal, Poll Finds
• Marine Killed in Anbar Province
• No 'Brakes' on Iran Nuclear Effort
• Bomber Targets Baghdad College; At Least 39 Students, 9 Guards Die
• An Admonition on Intelligence

In other words, of the four stories ostensibly about Iraq, only one is really about Iraqis. Even that article is another article recounting another terrorist attack in another neighborhood in Baghdad. It is not a window into the political struggle that is driving the civil war, threatening to make the Iraqi constitution a waste of paper, and complicating efforts to fight insurgent groups like the ones who killed 48 Iraqis today.

Here's another parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: Americans talk about the war in a foreign country as if there were no people actually living there. At best, their supporting characters in a drama where the Americans play all the lead parts. The reality is exactly the opposite.