I realize I'm about nine years too late to this argument by now, but I finally got around to reading Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations during the course of my paper on him for my "Ideas in American Foreign Policy" course, which has been one of many things keeping me preoccupied lately. Anyone who's interested can find the final draft after the break — it's a little book-reportish at points, and my conclusion was a little muddled since I'm still not sure what I ultimately think of Huntington's arguments, but maybe some will find it interesting.   more »

Mark Schmitt has a wonderful post that has an interesting set of comments (including from prak and Billmon). Although not explictly such, the post can be seen part of a related series The Decembrist has been publishing about how Democrats think and communicate policy.

The most recent installment is on the phenomenon of Democratic consultants and politicos of all ilks who are eagerly embracing the advice found in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.

You can get an idea of Mark's take on the Lakoff-phenomenon from the title of his Decembrist post: No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code." Yet this post is as much a defense of Lakoff as a take-down. He puts primary blame for the epidemic of silliness on the people doing the embracing, rather on Lakoff himself.

My comment at The Decembrist was sufficiently lengthy and "standalone" that I republish it here [minor edits made only for readability]. I'm rather pleased with the title I've given these remarks, even if I do says so myself.

---

My favorite Lakoff -- and where I think the best nuggets of insight are found -- are where he doesn't try to apply his cognitive approach to politics per se.

I'd reach even further back in time than Mark -- to the seminal Metaphors We Live By. It was one of the core applications of related ideas in Berger & Luckmann's equally seminal The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's "metaphors" were an epiphany. By now, the perspective they presented has been thoroughly incorporated into how Americans see things in their information marketplace, even if some of us aren't totally "fluent" yet in metaphors, narratives and frames. Certainly this stuff is mothers milk today for the successful marketing and advertising hacks Billmon's talking about, whether they work in the political sphere or are just flogging commercial products.

The research program of Lakoff and his co-authors over the past few decades, or of cognitionists (somebody help me out, what's the right term?) who are heavily influenced by his core ideas, is similarly rich with ways of understanding how the process of talking about what we think has such a reciprocal effect with the way we think, and even what we think/believe. Those concepts have endless application to politics.

The giant Lakoff-hug happening now just illustrates that we always need somebody to be the popularizer of these sorts of ideas. Most political hacks -- Democrats or Republicans -- aren't going to trawl through the rather dense pages of current debates on such relevant issues as epistemology, heuristics and decision-making in quick-time, and how all of that is being affected by the acceleration of the unintermediated horizontal flow of information and ideas represented by the internet.

We need the Malcolm Gladwells and James Surowieckis to do that for us, as in their week-long BookClub discussion in Slate earlier this month. But even that step isn't enough. We then we need another round of popularizing -- to take the concepts and insights that have been boiled down and reframed by the Gladwells et al and then show how they apply in a particular setting. In the case at hand, the realm of domestic politcs.

This process isn't somehow unique for the fighters and their managers in the arena of political combat. It's the same for the business managers and marketing professionals who apply new insights emerging from cognitive neuroscience and its various "liberal arts" counterparts -- whether linguistics, rhetoric, neuroeconomics, etc. The business-types have one big advantage over the political-types, however. The B-schools produce first-rate popularizers of these concepts. The B-school professors do the trawling for nuggets for the managers, and do the digesting, synthesizing and finding real-world case studies to apply these ideas.

Business types and politicos have this behavior in common: thinking they've found the guru and the silver bullet when all they've found is the "flavor of the month." A favorite object of B-school studies is the company that got screwed up by management's over-eager embrace of "lessons" taken out of context from the latest business-best-seller. So the fact that practitioners of Democratic strategy and communication think they have found the recipe for gold shouldn't come as a surprise.

I certainly agree with Mark that we need people who digest insights "...like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them." I also think he makes a very important point that it takes an old-fashioned cross-disciplinary "liberal arts" mentality to do that. We all pay a price for the narrowing academic professionalization/specialization of the humanities and social sciences.

I'd add that it's not just a matter of finding people with the right breadth of mind to do the digesting and thinking for the vast majority of us who aren't going to do it ourselves. I'd suggest an equally important part of the overall problem is the absence of a group of competent popularizers who can do the same thing for politics as the B-school professors do for business and marketing.

As Mark points out, it's really rather unfair to Lakoff to expect him to be intellectual innovator, applied research scientist, and popularizer all in one. Unfortunately, I think Lakoff's not applied some lessons from his own important work to himself. But he's not the first intellectual to be blinded a bit by the bright lights of the public stage.

Maybe while we're talking about expanding Democratic-oriented policy centers and think tanks we should add a "Policy Center for Epsitemology and Rhetoric" to do the popularizing?

From ArmsControlWonk comes news of an interesting-sounding new book entitled Code Names:

The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today.

From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand.

Regular readers of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News may already be familiar with issues of overclassification in American government, but in my first Homeland Security class on Tuesday, I got a bit of a first-hand account of it from my professor, who was a former Air Force intelligence and CIA officer for many years. Part of your training as an officer involves learning the process of classification, and not suprisingly in the CIA's secrecy culture (where even widely known information like the intelligence budget is never "confirmed") it is an extremely easy thing to do: your officer sitting at a desk stamps the top and bottom of the document with "Secret", and then adds on the line the reason for classification, which comes from a list of various coded categories. The biggest is, not suprisingly, the catch-all in-the-name-of-national security category, although he said that a newly popular one these days was "Sensitive But Unclassified" — information which people have been actually prosecuted for distributing, even though it is not technically "secret". And as for at what future date the classification of material can be later reevaluated, "ImpDet" — Impossible to Determine — is literally built into the stamps they use.

This is all on the first day, so I only have broad anecdotes to share right now, but I think it's going to be an interesting class. (P.S. to Nadezhda - Can you add new categories for my four new courses this semester? Thanks!)

Tomorrow is the first day of my last semester as an International Relations student at Boston University. My courselist as originally laid out here has since been updated; the revised version with accompanying booklists and syllabi outlines (principal required texts only so far; there are several other shorter excerpts and recommended readings for most of the classes that I've ommitted) is below.

   more »

This evening I was finally able to set aside the time to finish up Stephen Cohen's recent book The Idea of Pakistan. In this post I aim to summarize his key conclusions and in the process offer a review of the work.

As the title of this post suggests, The Idea of Pakistan is intended primarily as a guide to the political, social, and economic makeup of the country, its major political actors (the military, the Establishment, the Islamists), and the future trends and issues that the Pakistani and American leadership confront when making policy. Each of these topics are capable of sustaining multiple books of their own (and have), but Cohen's ability to provide a comprehensive briefing on each subject makes this a valuable introductory resource for readers new to the country. Since this information is presented categorically rather than chronologically, it can be at times difficult to hold all the factors operating at a particular point in time in your mind when reading on a different section, but Cohen compensates for this fairly well by starting off the book with an account of Pakistan's history from the struggles of Partition and the founding of the state to the coup that installed Pervez Musharraf in 1999, then going deeper in the subsequent chapters.

A well-balanced book (hey, this is the Brookings Institute we're talking about here), Cohen offers what are in my view key assessments on the following subjects (not, it should be noted, an exhaustive list):
   more »

For Broadway and the heyday of musical comedy -- America's unique contribution to theater. When the stars of stage were household names; when there was magic in the theater addresses and you knew not only the lyrics but the dialogue by heart; when you devoured the bios of the producers and directors, the composers and lyricists on the front of Playbill and combed the back of the program to find the name or photo of your favorite dancer in the chorus. When the opening reviews were eagerly awaited not just by readers of the NYT, but across the country in the weekly news magazines and the Sunday papers.

That brief frisson that comes as the lights dim and the orchestra launches into the overture hit me for a moment when I read that Jerry Orbach had died. For me, Jerry Orbach was the epitome of that Broadway -- the great male counterpart of the female legends who made musicals come alive, who let you suspend disbelief and be transported to an imaginary world for a couple of hours. Not the glamorous leading baritones of Rogers and Hammerstein, with their moving melodies, who were the romantic foils for the sassy or brassy leading ladies or the blossoming ingenues. No, Orbach was the "journeyman" Broadway star who created some of Broadway's most memorable characters by his attitude, his natural jazzy rhythms of speech and saunter, by the seamless shift of voice and movement from actor to song-and-dance man and back again. By the contagious joy he infused each of his roles and the players around him.

The Glittering Eye offers an appreciation of Jerry Orbach's special contribution -- both the artist and the colleague -- and notes his passing is an end of an era.

There are certainly substantial differences in the motives and means of intervention by leading nations today in failed states and regions of conflict when compared to those of the imperial nations of the colonial era. But many of the issues confronting both groups are similar, and there may be some broad lessons to be learned from the experiences of the colonial powers.

So argues a new book by an associate professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, Kimberly Zisk Marten. Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past compares the colonial activities of the United States, Britain and France at the turn of the 20th century with the post-conflict peace-keeping/peace-building operations of the 1990s (Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor). Her study does not extend to the conflicts of this decade in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reviewing the book in AsiaTimesOnline, David Isenberg sets out Marten's central observation and its broad implications for adjusting the policies and approaches of the intervening states. The intervenors have, typically, multiple objectives which may often be somewhat in tension, if not out-and-out mutually inconsistent. And of course the intervenors are operating under constraints, both internal to their own domestic politics and capacitites to act abroad and to the international arena. Isenberg, with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq summarizes the argument as follows:

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Marten's view, represent an oxymoron, or as she more politely phrases it, an "intertwined set of problems". It is the desire by the international community to avoid being tarred with the imperial label while attempting to exert what amounts to political control over foreign societies, and the need to encourage multilateral participation to achieve legitimacy while avoiding inconsistency.

Looking at past experience, both colonial and the most recent decade:

Among Marten's findings are the following:

• Powerful states in both eras have lacked the political will that would be necessary to gain control over political development in foreign societies;
• military organizations are one of the factors contributing to the lack of clear direction we find on the ground; and
• when properly directed to do so, disciplined soldiers can do a good job of providing public order.

The meaning of all this is that peacekeepers should try to limit their goals but expand their expectations of what military forces can reasonably do. Specifically, rather than trying to transform foreign societies, peacekeepers should be directed toward providing security and preventing anarchy in unstable regions of the world. [emph supplied ed.]

Shares some important observations with what Gen. Zinni has been talking about. Though I think both he and Thomas Barnett would say that, given the hyper-kinetic nature of today's combat, the US soldier or Marine who's at the tip of the spear or engaged in days of intense urban combat probably shouldn't be called upon to switch to a policing function within 24 hours of major combat operations.

Perhaps a fit with a somewhat less ambitious version of Barnett's SysAdmin? Martens' caution of not trying to use the force which "enforces the peace" to also transform the local political society is one that should be taken seriously.

[UPDATE 11-19-04] For a very interesting review of Marc Sageman's book, as well as of a more scholarly monograph on Afghan-Pakistani terror links by Mariam Abou Zahad and Olivier Roy, see Steve Coll's piece from Washington Post Book World, August 2004.

---

[UPDATE 11-20-04] A fascinating look at the radicalizing process in French jails for the growing population of Muslim prisoners in this article from NYT earlier this month by Craig Smith.

From the standpoint of growing self-critiques of French failure to integrate its Muslim population, particularly following the recent murder of the Dutch artist, the article is a searing indictment. It also is suggestive of why concerns about the effects of high US incarceration rates for low-level criminality should not be dismissed lightly. It further underlines some of the observations above about the Salvadoran deportees who have found their way into Mara Salvatrucha, etc.

---

A couple of months ago, Bondra pointed out for us the potential for disaster lurking in the growth of Central American gangs and the increasing indications of some linkages with Middle Eastern terrorism and Al Qaeda.

The expansion of the geographic zone of attention is part of the broader recognition that the nature of "the Al Qaeda threat" is continually morphing. As Peter Bergen argues, it is not simply an organization anymore but is also a movement; that those it inspires are as or more likely to come from Europe as from majority-Muslim countries; and the means, methods and networks used to harm the US and "the West" more broadly are likely to be far more varied than what we've come to think of as the "classic" Al Qaeda modus operandi.

Of particular concern in the Western Hemisphere is El Salvador's Mara Salvatrucha. The LA Times' Kevin Silverstein has a new piece focusing on the domestic problems for El Salvador presented by the gangs, their links to the prison population in the US, especially California, and measures being taken by El Salvador to crack down on the gangs.

Government officials, including Deputy Citizens' Security Minister Rodrigo Avila, blame the violence at least in part on the deportation of nearly 12,000 Salvadorans with criminal records from the United States since 1998. Many are prison-hardened former gang members in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities who were sent back here as illegal immigrants.

"The deportations are at the core of the problem," Avila said. "Gangs here now copy the whole L.A. gang culture, the way they talk, the clothes they wear and the absolute ruthlessness."

Many deportees simply join their counterpart gangs here upon arrival, often gaining leadership roles because they are generally the most violent in the ranks, National Civil Police Chief Ricardo Menesses said in an interview.
[...]
The brutality of the gangs' crimes is increasingly horrific. [...]In September, M-18 members attacked a teenage girl in San Salvador, stabbing her in the neck and abdomen before beheading her, police said. Gang rivalries were at the root of the killing of a 16-year-old mother here last year. Gang members also killed and dismembered her 5-month-old daughter.

A number of organizatons have protested the heavy-handed tactics being used as ultimately counter-productive, and their calls for a different approach seem to have had at least a modest effect. Indiscriminate roundups had earlier resulted in all but a small percent of those brought in by the authorities actually being arrested and charged with criminal activity. More recently, the government's operations seem to be better targeted and, they claim, producing results in reduced homicides and fewer "no go" areas. And the general Salvadoran public is supportive of most anything that will limit the impact of the gangs on their lives.


The most troubling part of the story, from my view, is the dimension of alienation described, and the role of the gangs in offerng an identity to deracinated young men. They are certainly of quite a different class in terms of family income, education and social status from the alienated young Muslim migrants described by Marc Sageman (Understanding Terror Networks) as the primary energy source for Al Qaeda-type groups in Europe. But there are some unfortunate similarities as well, including the strong group identity that appears to "justify" incomprehensible levels of violence against "enemies" of the group.    more »

Timothy Garten Ash, duly celebrated author of Free World, needs to pay his web hosting fees. Here's the message I got when I went to his site, FreeWorldWeb.net:

This Web site is temporarily unavailable, please call back later.

The Web hosting account holder should contact the server administrator at Hosternet immediately.

Better get on that, Timbo.

Tuesday I attended a presentation by Tyler Hicks, staff photographer for the New York Times (BU COM '92), and pride and joy of the photography department here. For good reason: Hicks has taken some amazing photographs over the past three years, a witness from the ruins of Ground Zero to the mountains of Afghanistan to Iraq, before, during, and after the invasion.


As a slide show of his work, the presentation didn't lend itself especially well to blogging, but you can find some of his pictures (some of which may be familiar to Times readers, but many of which I don't recall having seen before now) on display at the Times website. He also has a book out, with accompanying essays by NYT reporters John F. Burns and Ian Fisher, Histories Are Mirrors: The Path of Conflict through Iraq and Afghanistan. Powerful stuff.