The World is More Peaceful Now Than at any Time in simce 1950

Source: "OK, Haters, It's Time To Admit It: The World Is Becoming A Better Place"

The trend seems clear. The number of war and battle deaths is decreasing over time, no mater what region you look at -- given a long enough period of observation. The major periods of decreasing violence are: post World War 2. post Vietnam War, and after the dismemberment of the USSR

A brief timeline of war from the late 1970s to 1999 follows:

• In the late 1970s and 1980s there were the Afghanistan War and the Iraqi-Iranian War; the latter war ends in 1980; Great Britain and Argentina have a limited war over the Falkland Islands
• There are massive demonstrations calling for less Communist ideological regime in the Warsaw Pact nations in the early 1980s as well as demonstrations calling for reforms of the Chinese government.  Israel invades Lebanon.
• In 1985 Gorbachev succeeds to power in Russia, 
• In 1986 the Chernobyl disaster takes place, leaving a large footprint of radioactive gas west of the site in the Ukraine.
• 1987: the Iran Contra scandal become public.
• 1988: George H.W. Bush become U.S. president. Benazir Bhutto is chosen to lead Pakistan. 
• 1989: The Berlin Wall comes down. The beginning of the end of Communist government in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania can be perceived (perhaps in retrospect, better than at the time). Huge pro democracy demonstrations are held in Tiananmen Square in China. The Soviet Union withdraws its troops from Afghanistan.
• 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait igniting the Persian Gulf War. East and West Germany are reunited. The Cold War is officially ended as the U.S. and USSR negotiate arms accords. Nelson Mandela is freed. leading to a public process to normalize governance in South Africa. Leaders of 34 European nations proclaim a united Europe.
• 1991: The U.S. led alliance wins the Persian Gulf War. Communist hard-liners attempt to overthrow Gorbachev, but the coup fails. Gorbachev resigns as President. The USSR dissolves into 15 separate republics. The Warsaw Pact for military protection is dissolved. Boris Yeltsin is elected as the president of the Russian Republic. South African parliament overturns apartheid laws.
• 1992: Presidents Bush and Yeltsin declare a formal end to the Cold War.
• 1993: Clinton becomes U.S. President. The European Union is ratified. American soldiers die in Mogadishu, Somalia. Rwandan genocide begins. A Western multinational effort begins seeking to stop ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. President Boris Yeltsin's forces crush a revolt in the Russian Parliament. South Africa adopts a majority rule constitution.
• 1994: Ethnic cleansing continues in the former Yugoslavia. In Rwanda, Hutu militias kill up to a million Tutsis. South Africa holds its first interracial, one-man-one-vote election and Nelson Mandela is elected president. Russia attacks the republic of Chechnya after Muslims there attempt to secede.
• 1995: Fighting escalates in Bosnia and Croatia. At the end of the year, combatants sign the Bosnian peace treaty.
• 1996: Taliban Muslim fundamentalists capture Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Later al-Qaeda terrorist training camps are set up. Iraqi troops fire on Kurdish positions in the north of the country. The U.S. warns Iraq, attacks Iraq's air defenses and declares a "No Fly" zone in the north of the country. Refugees in Rwanda and Burundi are caught up in new fighting and killings.
• 1997: 
• 1998: In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Accords promise peace and political power sharing. Violence in the former Yugoslavia continues until NATO reaches a settlement with President Milosevic in October.
• 1999: NATO air strikes move to Kosovo. In May, Serbs agree to pull troops out of Kosovo. Israeli prime minister Ehub Barak and PLO leader Yasir Arafat announce peace accord. 
• 2000: Palestinian and Israeli violence explodes into the "intifada."
• 2001: On September 11, terrorists attack the World Trade Center in New York.
• 2002: Israeli tanks and warplanes attack West Bank towns in retaliation for 14 suicide bombing incidents. 
• 2003: In March, the U.S. and Britain launch war against Iraq. Within a month, Baghdad falls. By July, the war is costing $3.9 billion a month. Saddam Hussein's sons are killed in a firefight, but their father remains at large. In December, Saddam Hussein himself is captured by American troops. Israel retaliates for suicide bombings by killing top members of Hamas. Other militant Palestinian groups formally withdraw from a cease fire. Bush's "road map" to peace collapses.
• 2004: Iraq weapons investigator David Kay resigns saying there is no evidence that Iraq ever had weapons of mass destruction. U.S. media release graphic photos of American soldiers abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Protests erupt all over the world. In June, the U.S. hands over power to an Iraqi interim government led by Iyad Allawi. In November, U.S. troops launch attacks on Falluja. Spain is rocked by terrorist attacks, and al-Qaeda claims responsibility. NATO formally admits seven new countries from the former Soviet block. Sudanese rebels and the government reach accord to end the 21-year-old civil war. But in a separate war in western Darfur region, the killing continues. Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan admits he sold nuclear weapons designs to other countries, including North Korea, Iran and Libya. UN weapons inspectors tell Iran to stop enriching uranium. Iran claims they are building only peaceful uses for nuclear power.
• 2005: In Iraq, elections are held to select a national assembly; Iraqi voters turn out again in October to ratify a new constitution. In December, 11 million – 70 percent of those registered – vote to elect their first permanent Parliament. The European Union abandons plans to ratify the proposed European constitution by 2006 after both France and the Netherlands vote against it. London is hit by Islamic terrorist bombings, killing 52 people and wounding 700. The Irish Republican Army announces it is officially ending its violent campaign for a unified Ireland and will instead pursue its goals through the political process.
• 2006: In January, President Bush announces he will send a "surge" of 20,000 more troops to Iraq in addition to the 130,000 already there. In Iraq, violence between different sects increases. In November, voters elect Democratic Party majorities in both the House and the Senate, largely due to opposition to the war in Iraq. Defense Donald Rumsfeld steps down and is replaced by Robert Gates. Iran removes United Nations' seals from its uranium enrichment plant and production of the fuel is resumed. 
• 2007: The top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Patraeus, says the troop "surge" is working, reducing sectarian killings in Baghdad and across the nation. At a hearing at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confesses to planning the September 11 Al Qaeda attachs on the World Trade Center. He also claims responsibility for a number of other terrorist acts.

This timeline is summarized from a more detailed one.

How is the IS doing in its effort to install a Caliphate?

The Economist has a new article on the Islamic State, which includes this map:

The article states:

It looks as if it has set expectations too high. Since last August its expansion has stalled, and it has been beaten back across much of Iraq (see map). That is why, in Najaf and to an extent Baghdad, the fight against IS no longer feels like a struggle for survival, more like yet another war. The revenues IS depends on have been reduced. And there is some evidence of increased unhappiness within the territory it holds, and among its own members.

The coalition against IS that was put together by America after Iraqi prime minister Nuri-al Maliki left office in August 2014 now numbers some 60 countries; it typically carries out a dozen air strikes a day. America has given weapons to the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmerga; it is training Iraqi soldiers and says it is gearing up to do the same for a small force of anti-IS rebel fighters in Syria.

You might compare the areas affected by the Islamic State with the areas of low population density in these maps:

Population Density Map of Syria

Source

 Population Density Map of Iraq

Source

The point is that there is an big desert with little population that covers much of eastern Syria and western Iraq, and that influence in these areas affects relatively few people and relatively little economic activity.

The population density is greater along the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers, and indeed the IS control is most notable along the Euphrates.

I suspect that a part of what is happening is a battle of Sunni forces against the Shiite controlled government in Iraq and the Alawite (school of the Shiite Islam) controlled Syrian government. Thus areas of these countries with relatively large Sunni populations tend to be shown as supportive of the IS.

In most of Iraq, though, the bulk of the fighting is being carried out by Iranian-backed Shia militias. When the IS onslaught was at its height Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shia Islam’s leading clerics, issued a fatwa calling on Shia men to join the Hashid al-Shabi, an umbrella organisation of mainly Shia volunteer militias. At least 100,000 have signed up. 

Iran has given cash and weapons to the Hashid al-Shabi; though the militia group nominally answers to the Iraqi government it is to a great extent an Iranian concern. Iran also has a lot of influence on the American-trained army, grossly run down and rendered sectarian under Mr Maliki, and has sent it advisers including Qassem Suleimani, the head of its elite Revolutionary Guard. Thanks to General Suleimani’s handiwork, Baghdad is now well fortified, and aircraft can fly in and out in safety. A 12-year curfew has been lifted, allowing Iraqis to linger on the banks of the Tigris smoking shisha pipes into the early hours. Malls and cafés are buzzing. The atmosphere is more relaxed than at any time since the American-led invasion of 2003........ 

The Kurds have taken back everything they consider Kurdistan. Their front line is supported by air power and well fortified: “It’s like world war one along that 1,000km-long border,” says one diplomat. Sorties by IS sometimes penetrate the line—there was a ferocious attack on Kirkuk in January—but they rarely get more than five kilometres into Kurdish territory. 

All told, IS has been stripped of some 13,000 square kilometres of land, reducing by a quarter what it held at its peak. American officials reckon some 1,000 fighters were killed in just the battle for Kobane, a Kurdish town on the Syrian-Turkish border that IS tried to take for months without quite managing it. Seventeen of its top 43 commanders have been felled, according to Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi analyst of IS in Baghdad. But for all the losses fighters on the front line say there is no sign that IS is running short of men. Recruitment seems to be keeping up.

Colin Powell on information for decision making

Everyone knows the old adage: bad news, unlike wine, doesn’t get better with time.

I am going to quote at length from Colin Powell's article The Daily Beast:

You can’t make good decisions unless you have good information and can separate facts from opinion and speculation. Facts are verified information, which is then presented as objective reality. The rub here is the verified. How do you verify verified? Facts are slippery, and so is verification. Today’s verification may not be tomorrow’s. It turns out that facts may not really be facts; they can change as the verification changes; they may only tell part of the story, not the whole story; or they may be so qualified by verifiers that they’re empty of information. 

My warning radar always goes on alert when qualifiers are attached to facts. Qualifiers like: My best judgment ... I think ... As best I can tell ... Usually reliable sources say ... For the most part ... We’ve been told ... and the like. I don’t dismiss facts so qualified, but I’m cautious about taking them to the bank. 

Over time I developed for my intelligence staffs a set of four rules to ensure that we saw the process from the same perspective and to take off their shoulders some of the burden of accountability:

• Tell me what you know.

• Tell me what you don’t know.

• Then tell me what you think.

• Always distinguish which is which.

What you know means you are reasonably sure that your facts are corroborated. At best, you know where they came from, and you can confirm them with multiple sources. At times you will not have this level of assurance, but you’re still pretty sure that your analysis is correct. It’s OK to go with that if it’s all you have, but in every case, tell me why you are sure and your level of assurance.

Tell me what you think. Though verified facts are the golden nuggets of decision making, unverified information, hunches, and even wild beliefs may sometimes prove to be just as important.

image source

Most of us don't have the Department of Defense with its huge staff and complex bureaucracy providing us with information (much less the entire foreign policy establishment of the U.S. government) but the approach seems to be worthwhile.

If you are making an important decision, it might be worthwhile making some lists:

• What you think you know, how you know it and how confident of each assertion;
• What you think you want to know that you don't know, how much you want to know it, and how hard it is likely to be to find out;
• What you think, why you think it, how likely each thought might be, and whether to change something from this category to one of the categories above.
• Being sure to distinguish which is which.

Of course, putting the information on which a decision is to be based is only the first step. It is then necessary to make the decision, and to implement the decision.

(Tim Sloan / AFP-Getty Images)

Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State when we invaded Iraq, points out that the Bush administration did not take to heart his comment, "if you break it, you own it." He points out that the plans were not implemented that would have kept the Iraq military sufficiently in place to maintain domestic order, and would also have kept most of the lower level Baath Party members in place in their jobs in schools, hospitals and government agencies. Had those plans been implemented, we might have avoided years of involvement in insurrection in Iraq.

After the Conflict: Nation- Building and Corruption

I quote the summary of the report:

Globally, there are 26 ongoing armed conflicts and nearly one sixth
of the world’s population lives in so-called ‘weak governance’ zones.1 In 2009 alone, the United Nations estimated that 42 million people were displaced due to conflict and persecution.

The scale and scope of the challenge to end violence and rebuild countries cannot be underestimated. Corruption poses a unique set of obstacles to reconstruction and recovery in countries suffering the aftermath of violent conflict, whether internally or externally sparked. 

In a post-conflict context, corruption undermines state legitimacy and can undo the process of reconciliation, leading to a return to violence. The manifestations of corruption are various and may be perceived differently in different countries depending on the local norms and rules about corruption. 

Yet there is one common lesson on corruption that applies to all post-conflict countries: tolerating corruption erodes the prospects for sustainable stability and nation-building. Corruption destroys the idea that there can be a fair power sharing agreement, collective peace and trust.

In general, conflict is very bad for development, and donor agencies are faced with the rock of people in great need and the hard place that their efforts to help will probably be diluted by corruption and partially reversed by future problems.

Specifically, our expectations for post conflict conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan should be modest and conditioned by experience in other post conflict situations around the world.

Updated Estimate of Iraqis Killed in the War

Iraq Body Count has been keeping a running account of the reported deaths of Iraqis from violence during the Iraq war. The Wikileaks publication of some 400,000 military reports from that war provide another source of data on these deaths. As shown above, there are Iraqi deaths previously noted in the Iraq Body Count inventory that were not included in the Wikileaks information and vice versa. Iraq Body Count has used the two sources therefore to estimate the total number of Iraqis. As a preliminary estimate based on this work, Iraq Body Count now estimates 150,000 Iraqis killed by violence during the war to date.

This new count corresponds somewhat with the World Health Organization estimate of 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq made about two years ago.

A controversial study, published by The Lancet after peer review in 2996, concluded that "as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 (392,979 to 942,636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war". Note that the "excess deaths" would include not only deaths from violence, but also deaths from disease, malnutrition or lack of adequate medical care that would presumably have been averted had there not been the war.

We will probably never know the true number of Iraqi lives that the war has cost, but surely that number dwarfs the deaths in the coalition forces and represents a huge tragedy for the Iraqi people.

Iraq and Afghanistan

The papers released from Iraq and Afghanistan on Wikileaks seem to indicate:

• that the direct collateral damage to civilians from military activities in the form of people wounded and killed has been very severe. This does not count of course the indirect collateral damage of people who have gotten sick who would not have, sick people who did not receive care, people who have lost jobs they would otherwise have had had, etc.
• that there have been severe infringements on human rights. not only those at Abu Ghraib but others committed by our allies.
• that the role of contractors in the wars has been greater than had been realized, and that the behavior of some of those contractors has been more problematic than had been made public.

We know that the war has gone on for a very long time, that it has been very expensive, and it has carried major costs in terms of the reputation of the United States abroad and the debts we own in our foreign policy. We also know that the "nation building" efforts have failed to install effective and honest governments nor have they successfully installed democratic institutions. The economies of Iraq and Afghanistan are a mess.

I conclude that President Obama's policy of withdrawing from the two wars with all deliberate haste is the right one, and of course that withdrawal will be a major step in putting our economic house in order. That policy may be the greatest achievement of the Obama administration.

If we broke it, do we have to fix it?

Supposedly Secretary of State Powell invoked the "pottery store rule" for President Bush with respect to the proposed invasion of Iraq, "If you break it, you buy it". That has gotten morphed into "If you broke it, you have to fix it" for both Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't think foreign policy should be based on simplistic slogans. What exactly is the moral obligation of the United States in these countries?

I suspect that it is different in Iraq than in Afghanistan. In both of course the United States was a principal member of a coalition that forced regime change. In Afghanistan the coalition was primarily composed of Iraqi forces that opposed the Taliban and the Taliban regime had actively supported the Al Qaeda network that was responsible for the 9/11 bombing. In Iraq the coalition was primarily foreign forces and there seems to have been no connection of the Saddam Husein regime with either Al Qaeda or 9/11. The different circumstances would seem to imply different responsibilities.

What does it mean "to fix" the situation left by the invasion? What is the range of feasible possibilities? What are the preferences of the people of these nations among feasible possibilities, and is there even a way to judge feasibility? How much of the responsibility for fixing things lies with the governments and peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, how much with the coalition, and how much with the United States? What does the United States do if the partners in rebuilding are not pulling their weight.

I suspect that political leadership will be required to mold public opinion to do the right thing. I hope that our political leaders are debating the issues put forward in the paragraphs above in order to see the morality of our responsibility as well as the economic imperatives, the foreign policy objectives and the political opportunities.

Perhaps They Should Have Read History

Thomas Ricks has been making the rounds of talk shows with his new book, The Gamble. I have heard him make the point that a survey of people being held in Iraq for anti-American activities frequently reported when asked that they did so for the money; that was the rationale for paying tribal groups to join the American side rather than fight as insurgents.

He also said that part of the change in tactics was for the American military not to fight for territory that they would not hold if won.

It seems to me that the ancient Persians, the Byzantines and many others were experts at splitting their enemies by making payments to one group to join in fighting against the other. History is full of people who came to grief conquering and reconquering people and territory that they could not hold.

Am I missing something?

"Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials"

Image source: Cazhenshaw’s Weblog

Source: Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post, December 12, 2008.

Excerpt:

In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military......

The administration's policies and the resulting controversies, the panel concluded, "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Click here to see the website for the Committee Report.

Comment: This blog focuses on knowledge, and in that respect the conclusion that the administrations policies "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence" is most worthy of note. It seems clear that those policies have been responsible for many people joining insurgencies and terrorists to fight against the United States. Even if that were not true, they are morally wrong. Thanks to the Senate Committee for the investigation, and thanks especially to John McCain, the ranking Republican, for not covering up the mistakes of the Republican administration. JAD

"Yes Men: What happens when the president's advisers don't speak up."

Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and President Bush
cringe as Bob Woodward holds his finger to the wind.
Illustration by Philip Burke via Vanity Fair

Josiah Bunting III reviews Bob Woodward's A Secret White House History 2006-2008 in the Book World section of today's Washington Post. I want to quote extensively from the review because it makes important points with respect to the use of knowledge in governmental decision making:

(I)t is a study of what happens when men and women, charged with leading the country in wartime or with counseling those who lead, do not tell each other what they really think. White House advisers are faithless to their responsibilities if they withhold their conclusions and convictions from those they serve, or from their colleagues. It is a toxicity that, by Woodward's account, infected the whole grim process......

Here are earnest, ambitious, tired (the pace of work is unremitting and furious) people trying to make sense of the war the country is prosecuting and why their strategy is not working. Many feel constrained from speaking freely by rank and hierarchy. Specialized expertise seems to have trumped the judgment provided by experience and common sense......

Inevitably, many readers will wonder how other presidents would have handled this war; in this, the sixth year of U.S. ground combat in Iraq, accounts of earlier wartime administrations have new resonance. Two spring readily, and uneasily, to my mind. As Doris Kearns Goodwin makes clear in Team of Rivals, Abraham Lincoln presided over a famously contentious wartime cabinet: Outspoken counsel was expected, even demanded. And in his biography of Gen. George C. Marshall, Forrest C. Pogue recounts the advice that Marshall received from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau about how to deal with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "Stand right up and tell him what you think," Morgenthau said. "There are too few people who do it, and he likes it."

Comment: I think Bunting is right about the importance of those around the president being frank about their positions and indeed arguing them seriously. I also think it is harder to do so than most people might think.

My year in the White House, long ago, was in a much less complex time and role that Woodward described, but I can attest that the pace of work it fantastic and people are tired. When you have a chance to affect U.S. national policy which in turn affects the whole world, you tend to take the extra step; everyone around you does as well, and the the result is a tremendous work ethic.

It is a platitude that it is hard to tell truth to power. You might think that is due to people protecting their careers by avoiding annoying the boss (or the boss' boss' boss). That is true, but there are other problems as well. I think you actually tend to believe the things the "Alpha dog" in the pack believes. It is also hard for a regular person to stand up to the egomaniacs that often inhabit the higher ranges of our government. Then of course, a reasonable person confronting a situation as complex as that in Iraq or Afghanistan should feel uncertainty about his/her conclusions and diffidence in their presentation is a form of communication about that confidence level. JAD

I also note in the article the following:

Woodward states few conclusions directly. He describes the symptoms in detail, but hands off to his readers the burden of diagnosing what went wrong. Moreover, he rarely mentions the heavy costs of misjudgment: Two continents away, 19-year-old Americans were dying while grand strategy was being debated around conference tables in air-conditioned rooms in Washington. (emphasis added)

Comment: How about the tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have died, the millions who have been forced to leave their homes and take refuge from the violence, the sickness, injuries and suffering of tens of millions of these people? The chauvinism of the author in assuming that only the young American soldiers are worth considering is both breathtaking and all too frequent in American thinking. JAD

Empire of Trust of Conquest: How to Plan and Decide

Source: "The Petraeus Doctrine," by Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic, October 2008.

There is a debate going on in the military as to the likelihood of different kinds of missions in the future and how to best prepare for that future. The author identifies two camps as polar extremes in the debate:

• One believes that the experience in Iraq and Vietnam required U.S. military capacity to protect civilians and to change entire societies in order to stabilize them, and that the military should prepare for more such missions in the immediate future,
• The other continues to advance the Powell Doctine which emphasis on overwhelming force, assuming that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent, fought by a coalition of allies.
  

The prototypical proponent from the second camp believes:

that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.

"The Long War" prospect, calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, appears to imply political objectives of democratic transformation or imperial domination: thus the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades.

In a world with an increasingly self confident Russia and China, the lack of a military capable of fighting an old-fashioned conventional war has obvious military and diplomatic risks.

Where should we institutionalize nation building capacity?

Hubert Humphrey, in his last days, sought to consolidate the various organizations implementing portions of U.S. foreign assistance into one agency reporting directly to the President. In that long distant time, the U.S. Agency for International Development was involved in nation building, and Humphrey saw the need to integrate all the nation builders into one civilian agency. The intervening years have seen a limitation of our foreign assistance to much more modest objectives, with a corresponding elimination of those from the civilian agencies who thought in terms of the big picture of nation building.

Thus there is a real possibility that the United States will develop a policy in which our military power is focused on the Long War and nation building, and our civilian development assistance community is limited to marginal roles, especially in support of the political objectives of the State Department.

Thomas Madden, in his new book Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World suggests that the United States is in fact established a an "empire of trust" through the creation of powerful networks of allies, and extending an umbrella of protection based on its own military strength and the strength of its coalition to those imperiled states that sought its aid. The provision of development assistance focusing on nation building by civil authorities when invited by developing nations is consistent with that empire of trust. A nation building military, involved in long term occupation to following invasion and conquest, in order to stabilize a new government allied to the United States is consistent with an empire of conquest.

It is important that military experts put forward the implications of each strategy. In the United States, it is even more important that elected civilian authorities decide on which strategy will actually be used. If we have a military designed and capable of the Long War, it is likely that we will have an administration sooner or later that will use it to try to transform the United States into an empire of conquest.

A comment on the process of analysis

Bacevich notes in his article:

The military remains a hierarchical organization in which orders come from the top down. Yet as the officer corps grapples with its experience in Iraq, fresh ideas are coming from the bottom up. In today’s Army, the most-creative thinkers are not generals but mid-career officers—lieutenant colonels and colonels.

First, I don't see the lieutenant colonels and colonels as "the bottom" but rather a key mid level in the military organization. In my experience, large complex organizations often, indeed almost always, delegate policy analysis to this level. The top administrators are, I suppose, to busy with the running of the organizations, and are necessarily dealing with a broad range of issues and concerns. Indeed, often the best policy analysts are ill suited by temperament for senior administrative posts in large organizations. (In scientific laboratories it is in my experience not uncommon to have a chief scientist and a chief operating officer, working closely together, to obtain complementary skills of administration and investigation.)

The issue in organizational design and managing large organizations is to get both the good administrators and the forward thinkers to do what each does best, and to get the two to listen to each other.

As we face the election in November, it is hard to see which future each candidate would be more likely to foster. I think, however, that Obama is likely to opt for the United States aspiring to be an empire of trust, and McCain is likely to opt for an empire of conquest. McCain has called for the Long War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama knows from his experience in community development how very hard it is going to be to change culture.

Arabs don't believe Bush, What a surprise

The New York Times has a piece by Michael Slackman that says that Muslims in the Middle East are very likely to believe that 9/11 was part of a program by Israel or the United States to build support for anti-Muslim activity -- a program that led to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first thing to say is that there is a certain credibility to the story. I believe that the Bush administration used charges that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and was meeting with Al Qaeda to justify the invasion of Iraq, at a time that the senior members of the administration should have and probably did know those charges were unsubstantiated and probably false. At the very least the U.S. government refused to accept the declaration of war from the Japanese Ambassador until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and there is a certain credibility in the story that the Roosevelt administration did not act on prior information because it needed an overt attack to justify entering the war on the side of the allies. The explosion on the Battleship Maine was used as a reason to go to war with Spain and as far as I know it is still not known if it was in any way the result of sabotage. The Bush administration has bugged people illegally (as the Nixon administration did the Democratic National headquarters) and seems to have been bugging the current government of Iraq (our allies) as it did the delegations of our allies to the negotiations on the founding of the United Nations, in all probability lying about all that bugging to cover it up. While I do not think it is credible that the Bush administration nor the Israelis would crash airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon for propaganda, I can see how others might reasonably give credence to the story.

The story apparently has passed from person to person in the Arab world much like an urban legend. People there, as here, often do not take the time and effort to validate information that they receive, and in this case would have no way to do so. They make judgments on the basis of the trust that they have in the source, the credibility of the story being told (internal consistency and consistency with other information that they have), and the emotional appeal of the story. The story attributing 9/11 to a U.S. and/or Israeli conspiracy has lots of the hallmarks of something that would be widely and rapidly spread by the "urban legend" processes. It is quite memorable, and likely to be told and retold, and was likely to be brought up in conversation often in the aftermath of the shock felt around the world by the images of the falling towers. Moreover, it would appear consistent with the invasion of a people on false charges, the mistreatment and torture of Muslims in Abu Grheib, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages by the Israelis, etc.

Of course, in contrast to the urban legend, in this case the man in the Arab street has to choose between two conflicting stories -- the U.S.-Israel conspiracy story from his friends and acquaintances and the Al Qaeda conspiracy story told by the U.S. government and the government controlled media available in his Arab country. Once Radio Free Europe and other U.S. government media had and deserved the trust of their audience. The Bush administration has both undercut those programs and in its Public Diplomacy initiative has cast doubt on that the purpose is dissemination of information rather than propaganda. Moreover, people tend to find their friends and acquaintances worthy of trust, and in the Arab world have learned to distrucst the official media.

The U.S.-Israel conspiracy story also differs from urban legends in that it may well have been spread deliberately by networks of anti-American and anti-Israeli organizations in a campaign of disinformation. These network sources might have been considered quite credible by the individuals with whom they planted the story and who began the chains of distribution of the story.

I recently read "Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe" by Emily Oster. She shows a strong correlation between bad weather in Europe and the burning of witches. More witches were burned when the weather turned bad long enough to reduce crop yields. She infers that the social and economic trauma caused by the crop losses led people to accept stories of malevolent, magical behavior that they would not otherwise accept. There are similar theories that the pandemics of the middle ages spawned superstitious behavior on a very large scale, including pograms against the Jews and other groups chosen as scapegoats.

Thus it seems reasonable to me that the 9/11 story circulated and gained believers in part because of the difficult and worsening economic and social conditions experienced by so many Arabs. It is no wonder that they might seek scapegoats, and indeed powerful outside influences with malevolent intensions.

If this analysis is reasonable, it suggests a multipronged strategy to overcome the myth:

• First, trust in the communications from the United States must be reestablished, both for that from the Government and from private sector media. Advertising can help, as can sweeping clean the offending adminstration with "new brooms", but much more important is being trustworthy.
• We may encourage our allied governments in the Middle East to work harder to reestablish trust from their own people both in their official pronouncements and in the state controlled media.
  
• It may be helpful to desseminate the counterstory to the myth via networks in the Arab world who are trusted by Arabs and who believe our story, serving as a counterbalance to the disinformation of our adversaries.
• We can seek to combat the anti-American and anti-Israeli networks spreading disinformation, as the Bush administration and its allies have been doing (including by denying them funds).
• We can also seek to ameliorate the desperate conditions in which the Arabs too often live, conditions which encourage them to seek scapegoats and to disseminate and believe conspiracy stories.
• We can, over the very long term, promote the development of new institutions in developing nations that distribute reliable information, including a free press, a publishing industry, free mass media, libraries, etc.
  
• We can also promote education which will help wean people from the traditional institutions disseminating superstitions as often as facts, substituting these more modern institutions for the dissemination of high quality information.
  

Is the Rice pot calling the Russian Kettle Black?

"Russia overreached, used disproportionate force against a small neighbor and is now paying the price for that because Russia's reputation as a potential partner in international institutions, diplomatic, political, security, economic, is frankly, in tatters," Rice told NBC's Meet the Press
Yahoo!News, August 17, 2008

Surely the United States is now paying more than the Russians in terms of our reputation because the Bush administration has used disproportionate force against a smaller nation and has eschewed its international partnerships in favor of unilateral actions.

The United States built enormous strength during the 20th century. Of course, the U.S.military power was built during the century, but even more important was the coalition of allies that it constructed and the trust it built within the community of nations. The people of the United States are anti-imperialistic, and during the 20th century the United States led the community of nations in its support for self determination of peoples, democracy, and human rights, and catalyzed an unprecedented global effort to reduce poverty.

The United States Government overcame popular antiwar sentiment to participate in World War I and World War II on the sides of the winning coalitions, doing so without goals of acquisition of land or wealth. President Wilson, unsuccessfully, in the aftermath of World War I and various U.S. leaders, more successfully, after World War II sought to develop international institutions that would prevent future wars among nations. Especially in the aftermath of World War II, the United States not only helped our allies to recover, the nation also went to the aid of the defeated enemies building strong and enduring alliances with them.

In the wars in Korea, Viet Nam and Desert Storm in Iraq the people of the United States and our allies believed that we entered on the parts of peoples attacked by other countries, and without imperial goals. In the latter part of the century the United States played a key role in building regional treaty organizations for mutual security. It also sought and achieved a series of landmark agreements for the control and reduction of weapons of mass destruction. In other situations, such as when Americans were held hostages in Iran or in terrorist attacks in the 20th century, the United States showed restraint, seeking always to make the response proportional to the attack, negotiating when possible. While mistakes were made, I believe that there was a justifiable global belief in American exceptionalism in international affairs.

Over the 20th century the United States built what Thomas Madden has termed an empire of trust. The result was an extraordinary national security, built not only and I would say not principally on America's considerable military might, but also on the trust of a global alliance of nations and peoples, linked through institutions built during the 20th century to meet the needs of security in the global system built in our newly small world.

The Bush administration has done great damage to that trust which so enhanced our national security. It has done so by refusing to participate in international negotiations such as those on climate change, and by an explicit policy of unilateralism. Most especially it has done so by using disproportionate force against Iraq, which it falsely accused of building weapons of mass destruction and negotiating with Al Qaeda. In six years of occupation of Iraq, the people of Iraq have suffered immeasurably more than have the people of Georgia during the current Russian incursion. That is by no means to minimize the pain and suffering of the people of Georgia, but simply to wonder about Secretary Rice's understanding of the international actions of the Government of the United States during the administration which she has served as National Security Advisor to the President and Secretary of State.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

Robert Burns: To a louse

Military Social Science Funding

According to today's Washington Post:

The Pentagon's $50 million Minerva Research Initiative, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and warriors, will fund social science research deemed crucial to national security. Initial proposals were due July 25, and the first grants are expected to be awarded by year's end.

But the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which includes professors from American and George Mason universities, said dependence on Pentagon funding could make universities an "instrument rather than a critic of war-making."

In a May 28 letter to federal officials, the American Anthropological Association said that it was of "paramount importance . . . to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence" but that its members are "deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest."

Here is a Wired Blog post with more information.

Comment: I lived and worked in Chile in the 1960's as a Peace Corps Volunteer and Ford Foundation Consultant, and am more aware than most Americans of the disaster that was the DoD-run Camelot program (to study the sources of political unrest and revolution in developing nations). In my years 20 years in science policy and research management in USAID I was very aware of the draconian limits placed by the Congress on social science research to prevent a recurrence of the Camelot type disaster.

I agree that social science research is hugely important. I also think that the idea of having social science experts (with relevant cultural experience and knowledge) advice our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is important, both at the strategic and at the tactical level. Certainly the military needs help to understand how to use such advice, but I would see American social science as having a responsibility to offer such advisory services.

However, I am concerned about the allocation of funds among U.S. Government funding agencies for social science research relating to foreign policy. A $50 million initiative is pretty small when compared to the DoD budget, but it is a lot compared to the total of U.S. social science research funding available for international work. I would like to see more social science funding in agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development with this international orientation--especially NSF. I think investigator initiated research in this field is especially valuable. JAD

Ethnic Palestinians in Trouble in Iraq

Refugees International reports that "34,000 stateless Palestinians have lived in Iraq since 2003. Since the beginning of U.S. military operations in Iraq, many suffered persecution at the hands of the Iraqi government and other armed groups. More than 3,000 fled to the Syrian-Iraqi border, where they live in makeshift tents in the desert with limited access to basic services. Syria refuses to allow them to enter its territory and only a few have been resettled, mostly to Sweden and Chile." It is now planned "to move these people to relocate this population to pre-fabricated housing in a Khartoum neighborhood, with no path to citizenship."

Chess Programs as Models of War Planning

Chess has been seen as a game based on war, and chess programs have been used for decades to demonstrate the power of computers and "artificial intelligence".

Each side has sixteen pieces and each has a very limited number of discrete moves at any time. Say a player has 30 possible moves at each turn. Then (order of magnitude) a move and response involves some 900 possibilities. A game may last 30, 40 or even more moves. Thinking five moves ahead would then involve considering specific possibilities out of a total of about 10,000,000,000,000. For even the fastest computers, complete enumeration is not possible.

As actually played, the game is still more complex. Each player has only a limited amount of time for the game, and is thus required to allocate time effectively so that more time is available to think about more difficult or complex move combinations.

Note especially that one sometimes sees chess masters playing a large number of games simultaneously, and indeed winning the large majority against a crowd of strong players. In that role, the master must allocate attention among many games so as not to keep each other opponent from waiting too long between moves.

Computer programs that successfully challenge human players not only have stored opening gambits of standard moves and their responses, but also have heuristic rules for generating moves to be considered, and heuristic rules for evaluating positions. The programs modify the weight attached to these rules according to the stage of the game.

Thus, although games always end in wins, losses or ties for each player, the computer programs only really focus on attaining winning positions or avoiding losing positions in the very end of their analysis. Most of the time the computer programs are involved in balancing large numbers of objectives, developing moves that advance one or more of those objectives, and evaluating likely positions against that array of changing objectives.

Like chess, opponents in wars act independently, and one's opponent seeks moves that counter one's intentions. Unlike chess, when one decides on a move, the result is not deterministically but only statistically related to ones decisions. Things seldom go just as planned. Moreover, the fog of war keeps one from always knowing immediately the response of the opponent to one's move. Thus, like chess playing programs, it seems to me that strategy and tactics in war must deal with large numbers of objectives, with the balance among them changing continually. Unlike chess, there are many more alternatives possible for each protagonist, often more than two protagonists, and much more uncertainty between decision and result.

Like a chess master playing many simultaneous games of chess, a national war leader is involved not only in one conflict, but in many theaters simultaneously. These include domestic policy, political policy, and many arenas of foreign policy. The leader's attention must be distributed among the plans for all of these in order to make timely decisions in each. Unlike the chess master, the many theaters of action are all interrelated. Thus failure in war will affect domestic policy, politics, and foreign policy in other arenas.

Iraq policy is now very complex. There are many factions within Iraq, and many external forces supporting one or another of the Iraqi factions. The strategy and tactics in the war in Iraq are themselves complex, shrouded in uncertainty, and influenced by inventive opponents. But they are vastly complicated by the overall problems in the Gulf, in the Middle East, in international economic policy, in the effort to contain and end international terrorism, and in the need to work on global systems problems such as global warming, not to mention domestic U.S. policy.

So is the goal in Iraq oil, or stability in the Gulf, or stability in Central Asia, or amelioration of the treats to Israel and the Middle East, or democracy, or combating international terrorism, or still other objectives? Tha answer is, I hope, "yes".

There is a saying. "When you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging." True, but I would note that when you have been digging a hole deeper and deeper for years, it may not be all that simple to get out once you have "stopped digging". When you are deep enough, you have to worry about the walls caving in on you as you try to escape. If you don't want to be in a hole, it is probably best not to start digging in the first place!

Senate Unveils New Reports on Pre War Intelligence and its Use

I quote from Senator Jay Rockefeller's release describing the reports.

The Committee’s report cites several conclusions in which the Administration’s public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include:

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

The (second) report found that the clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranians in Rome and Paris were inappropriate and mishandled from beginning to end. Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz failed to keep the Intelligence Community and the State Department appropriately informed about the meetings. The involvement of Manucher Ghobanifer and Michael Ledeen in the meetings was inappropriate. Potentially important information collected during the meetings was withheld from intelligence agencies by Pentagon officials. Finally, senior Defense Department officials cut short internal investigations of the meetings and failed to implement the recommendations of their own counterintelligence experts.

Comment: Jon Stewart on the Daily Show pointed out the failure of the media to cover a major Congressional report documenting the failures of the Bush administration to level with the public on the reasons for going to war. Even he did not cover the blast leveled by the Senate on the intelligence procedures used by the DOD under the Bush administration. Arghhhhh! JAD

Information and the Administration

Scott McClellan's book raises the issue of what information the Bush administration should have communicated in the run up to the Iraq war. One would hope that there would have been a very complete communication of information up to and within the White House contributing to such a decision.

We all understand that the rules of rhetoric imply that the information that the administration communicates to the public to bring the public along with its policy will be different that that used internally in the administration in making its decision. Obviously, the decision makers should use more information than the public will absorb. Moreover, any administration must consider the domestic political implications of foreign policy decisions in ways that it need not communicate to the public. While there must be a selection of information to communicate, there should be limits on that selection. False information should be used seldom if ever, and only if there is an overriding national need. (Remember that false information was used to confuse the enemy in the run up to the invasion of Europe during World War II.) Similarly, we feel that there is a requirement for fairness in the selection of information, not withholding information that the public "should" have access to.

There is also a question of what information should be shared with different groups. In our system with checks and balances between the branches of government, full and accurate information should normally be shared between Congress and the Executive branches. In areas in which the judiciary serves as a check on executive power, complete information relative to the judiciary responsibilities should be made available to the courts. Indeed, there is a need for information to be shared between the elected and appointed officials of the executive branch and those in the civilian bureaucracy and military who are charged with implementing policy.

There are different requirements for communication with allies, neutral countries, and enemies.

I would criticize the Bush administration's handling of communications issues prior (and during) the war, but it does not help to do so unfairly or badly. Of course the White House public relations staff should have sought to build public support for the war, once it had made the decision to go to war. The president is expected to lead in that way. Of course it should select information to communicate to the public in that effort to build support. The issue is whether it abides by standards that the public would deem to be fair and honest in making those selections.

The Rosy Image in the Retrospectoscope

I saw two experts on TV yesterday talking about their experiences in Iraq. Paul Bremmer appears still proud of the accomplishments of his staff when he directed the Coalition Transition Authority. He made me realize that some of those staff members indeed deserve the greatest admiration. The effort to replace the prewar currency with new dinardenominated currency, for example, was an enormous undertaking and its completion in a few months speaks well of some of the logistics workers. Thousands of small reconstruction projects were completed successfully, and the people responsible for them too deserve our respect. We are mistaken to believe "that all good things go together"; it is equally fallacious to assume that "all bad things go together". We may conclude that Bremmer's program as a whole was unsuccessful, while also crediting many of its components with success.

Col. H. R. McMaster, one of General Petraeus' brilliant colonels, gave a remarkably clear retrospective view of the evolution of the conflict in Iraq. He made some points with which I agree very clearly. He said that the right tactics at one time may well not be right at a later date, since circumstances change and the opposition changes tactics in response to our successes. He said that it is impossible to predict the course of the war in detail in advance with any accuracy (noting that one never fully understands the enemy at the beginning of a war, and I would suggest that one may equally not understand your own side).

In listening to McMaster, I was reminded that the human mind imputes a rationale on past experience that is convincing but that is not necessarily correct. If you put people to the task of predicting a sequence which (unknown to them) is being produced by a random number generator, they will impute a chain of purposeful reasoning to rationalize the past sequence. Of course the opponents in Iraq have motives, but they may not be the motives that we impute to them subsequently. The post hoc interpretation of history is unscientific in that it can not be effectively tested and falsified. Only further experience, information and/or analysis can prove an interpretation of the past to be incorrect. Col. McMaster is obviously brilliant and articulate, which makes it all the easier to believe his analysis, but that analysis may of course still be incorrect.

Paul Bremmer too is a brilliant and articulate man. I think he is honest in his belief in the successes of his efforts in Iraq, and I also think that many of his decisions had very unfortunate results. He too is seeking to put a rational explanation of the past experience in Iraq, and his analysis must be affected by biases, of the kinds he shares with all people. He went to Iraq with a strong ideological position which had made him successful in his earlier career, and committed more of his personal capital to Iraq than any but a very small number of Americans. How could he not interpret his experience in terms of that ideology and commitment?

We have little choice but to try to understand the past and project its meaning as we plan for the future. To do justice to Col. McMaster, I think he understands that projection of past trends is always subject to new departures from those trends, and that while one tries one's best to understand the situation, one must always acknowledge that one's understanding may be inadequate and try to be prepared for the unexpected.

Of course, in criticism of the reconstruction of the past by others in light of our own reconstruction of the past, we must realize that we too are subject to the same kinds of biases and uncertainties in our own reconstruction, and indeed Bremmer and McMaster are men to be credited with insight and experience who have spent a huge amount of time thinking about Iraq.

There is a reason that the scientific method depends on falsifiable hypotheses, the collection of experimental evidence to test hypotheses, replication of results, peer review of the experimental process and of the analysis of results, and considerable effort to assure that the interpretation of the data does not extend too far into the hypothetical. Scientists are fortunate that they do not do their experiments with an opponent seeking to lead them astray and to assure that the results of future experiments do not replicate those of past experiments.

Iraq exemplifies a key element of decision making

The initial decision to invade Iraq was followed by a series of decisions. A relatively small force quickly destroyed the Iraqi military capacity and took Baghdad, but failed to stop the looting and destruction of government building, as well as the dissemination of Iraqi weapons to the public. There followed decisions to disband the military and effect a deep de-Bathification which have been linked to the initiation and/or strengthening of the insurgency. The decision to have a brutal liberalization of the economy resulted in lots of consumer goods, but also a lack of productive jobs. The decisions on the management of the occupation lead to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and a great deal of antipathy among Iraqis toward the occupying forces. Other decisions, such as the development of a new constitution, the timing of elections, the attacks on Fallujah and their conduct have been challenged as leading to a worsening of the situation. Of course, these decisions were also subsequent to decisions about the coordination of Iraq policy in the U.S. Government and Coalition, and decisions about the people to put in charge of the occupation who made or influenced many of the subsequent decisions that proved unfortunate.

I would say that the opening decision may have looked better after half a decade had the subsequent decisions been different, and thus the course of the occupation and "nation building" been different and perhaps more positive. (Indeed, once U.S. foreign policy institutions contained thousands of people who had thought long and deep about nation building, and who had decades of experience, but they had all gone due to the decisions to weaken those institutions.)

The point I would make is that the decision to go to war almost guarantees that many subsequent decisions on the conduct of the war and the subsequent search for nation building and peace will be badly made. Sometimes people ask about "the plan B" -- what will you do when things go wrong.

Chess players in the opening focus on building a strong position in the opening game, avoiding high risk initial gambits that offer the chance of a quick win but the threat of an eventual loss if mistakes are made and capitalized by a clever opponent. Perhaps in foreign policy, too, the best approach is to build a strong position in whih the country can respond to the unexpected, as well as to tactical moves that go wrong.