Image via WikipediaUnconventional Thinking - Foreign PolicyIn Foreign Policy's first issue, published at the height of American exhaustion with the war in Vietnam, founders Samuel P. Huntington and Warren D. Manshel promised to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy in Washington. And with provocative essays from the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith -- who famously coined the term "conventional wisdom" and spent a career fighting against it -- and Richard Holbrooke -- who as a serving Foreign Service officer ripped the State Department as "the machine that fails" -- an insurgency was born.
Thomas Homer-Dixon ECONOMIES CAN'T JUST KEEP ON GROWING
- Homeland Security Hasn't Made Us Safer, by Anne Applebaum
- …And China Isn't Beating the U.S., by Daniel W. Drezner
- Understanding History Won't Help Us Make Peace, by Aluf Benn
- America Pressures Israel Plenty, by Leslie H. Gelb
- Actually, the Retirement Age Is Too High, by James K. Galbraith
- The Rich Really Don't Care About the Poor, by Carl Pope
- The Global Economy Won't Recover, Now or Ever, by Immanuel Wallerstein
- Sovereignty Is Far From Dead, by Nina Hachigian
- Democracy Is Still Worth Fighting For, by Morton Halperin
- Sometimes, the Conventional Wisdom Is Right, by Stephen Sestanovich
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That sounds like a pretty good 'come on'...but is sometimes shorted in delivery. Here's one where comments are worthwhile...and the essay is trash.
FP Survey ...Terrorism
Image via Wikipedia
From Esoul's comment
"The survey should have asked these expert about what changes need to be brought in counter-terrorism strategy to achieve the original objective of making US more safe from terrorist threats."
That should be 'to conform with the Mission Statement' for an operation which belongs with the rest of the lies outlined in Leading to War. There was a reason the 2003 National security Estimate from 2003 was kept from the public. 16 American Intelligence Agencies agreed unanimously that invading Iraq would increase terrorism.
Reasoning backwards and crediting people with the ability to use past experience to predict what would happen leads to only one possible conclusion...everything was planned and deliberate.
This is why citing Project for a New American Century and its game plan by the people who then took the reins of government is not Conspiracy Theory any more. It can now safely be called History.
The Documents file still has URLs for some of the particulars...and Notable Posts at both the file here and at my.opera.com/oldephartte/com tend to have some of the gems analyzing the real objectives of the Long/Resource Wars.
Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?
We would all like to think that humankind is getting smarter and wiser and that our past blunders won't be repeated. one can plausibly argue that human welfare improved as new knowledge challenged and eventually overthrew popular dogmas, including cherished but wrongheaded ideas, from aristocracy to mercantilism, that had been around for centuries.
Yet this sadly turns out to be no universal law: There is no inexorable evolutionary march that replaces our bad, old ideas with smart, new ones. If anything, the story of the last few decades of international relations can just as easily be read as the maddening persistence of dubious thinking.
Moreover, why do discredited ideas come back into fashion when there is no good reason to resurrect them? Clearly, learning the right lessons -- and remembering them over time -- is a lot harder than it seems. But why?
Pete7630 ... do not usually come from governments. They usually come from multi-national companies that bribe (lobby) whoever is in power. Eg. Haliburton.
Basben
Basben
As much as I usually appreciate Mr. Walt's writings, the basic premise of this article - ideas shape policy - strikes me as shockingly naive.
Interests - economical, social, military or otherwise - are the primary drivers of foreign policy. Any (conglomerates of) interests that gain primacy at any given moment will have no trouble at all producing and distributing the accompanying ideas to 'market' their interests.
Most ideas mentioned - the domino theory, the white man's burden, war on terrorism etc. - are nothing more than rationalizations of policies designed to further 'partisan' interests that have in themselves no clear rationale for society as a whole. To take these self-serving ideas at face value (and even lament their persistency) is to profoundly misunderstand what drives (foreign) policy in any form of government.
Only in highly ideological - and ideologically inflexible - regimes do ideas have real power in shaping policy, and these regimes are usually short-lived for this very reason: in the medium-to-long term, they tend to impede rational decision-making.
Interests - economical, social, military or otherwise - are the primary drivers of foreign policy. Any (conglomerates of) interests that gain primacy at any given moment will have no trouble at all producing and distributing the accompanying ideas to 'market' their interests.
Most ideas mentioned - the domino theory, the white man's burden, war on terrorism etc. - are nothing more than rationalizations of policies designed to further 'partisan' interests that have in themselves no clear rationale for society as a whole. To take these self-serving ideas at face value (and even lament their persistency) is to profoundly misunderstand what drives (foreign) policy in any form of government.
Only in highly ideological - and ideologically inflexible - regimes do ideas have real power in shaping policy, and these regimes are usually short-lived for this very reason: in the medium-to-long term, they tend to impede rational decision-making.
Without the premise that ideas shape policies, the entire article becomes self-defeating: bad ideas emerge and persist despite their logical flaws and empirical refutations precisely because they are propagated by interests (military, bureaucratic, industrial, financial or combinations of these). And these disingenuous defenses are needed because these ideas are generally in opposition to the interests of society.
When Walt addresses the matter of cui bono, he only considers the question why bad ideas persist after having been proven dysfunctional. Not how they came into existence in the first place. It's a valid line of inquiry, but not one that traces the genealogy of bad ideas, so to speak.
Yet what the ideas mentioned have in common is the fact that their probability is low in the first place: even at their inception, history did not provide a grain of evidence to the theory of falling domino's (i.e., a chain reaction of states succumbing to a new and uniform ideology without conquest), nor to the notion that nation-states would subordinate self-interest to some mission of civilizing other peoples (the white man's burden), nor to the possibility of 'warfare' against a particular mode of combat (war on terror).
So why do these ideas seem to gain a foothold among decision makers despite their initial weakness? Because decision makers deal with interests, and the ideas are only generated as rationalizations for the pursuance of these interests against those of society.
In fact, the more the latter are opposed to the former, the more aggressive the dissemination and propagation of the accompanying ideas needs to be. And because the interests of society are comparatively weakly represented in the conduct of foreign policy, faulty ideas of this kind are particularly prevalent in this field.
Tallyrand08
When Walt addresses the matter of cui bono, he only considers the question why bad ideas persist after having been proven dysfunctional. Not how they came into existence in the first place. It's a valid line of inquiry, but not one that traces the genealogy of bad ideas, so to speak.
Yet what the ideas mentioned have in common is the fact that their probability is low in the first place: even at their inception, history did not provide a grain of evidence to the theory of falling domino's (i.e., a chain reaction of states succumbing to a new and uniform ideology without conquest), nor to the notion that nation-states would subordinate self-interest to some mission of civilizing other peoples (the white man's burden), nor to the possibility of 'warfare' against a particular mode of combat (war on terror).
So why do these ideas seem to gain a foothold among decision makers despite their initial weakness? Because decision makers deal with interests, and the ideas are only generated as rationalizations for the pursuance of these interests against those of society.
In fact, the more the latter are opposed to the former, the more aggressive the dissemination and propagation of the accompanying ideas needs to be. And because the interests of society are comparatively weakly represented in the conduct of foreign policy, faulty ideas of this kind are particularly prevalent in this field.
Tallyrand08
Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein, Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 51, No. 4, 1999
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs - activists who manipulate the content of public discourse - strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risks associated with production, consumption, and the environment, Professor Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cascades and suggest reforms to alleviate their potential hazards. Their proposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better insulation against mass demands for regulatory change and an easily accessible scientific database to reduce people's dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.*
( * or Not ! )
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs - activists who manipulate the content of public discourse - strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risks associated with production, consumption, and the environment, Professor Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cascades and suggest reforms to alleviate their potential hazards. Their proposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better insulation against mass demands for regulatory change and an easily accessible scientific database to reduce people's dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.*
( * or Not ! )
Why Washington's support for online democracy is the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet.
A year ago this January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage at Washington's Newseum to tout an idea that her State Department had become very taken with: the Internet's ability to spread freedom and democracy. "We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights"
The only big move that the State Department did make was granting $1.5 million to Falun Gong-affiliated technologists based in the United States to help circumvent censorship -- a step that instead angered Falun Gong's numerous supporters in Washington, who had originally asked for $4 million.
By aligning themselves with Internet companies and organizations, Clinton's digital diplomats have convinced their enemies abroad that Internet freedom is another Trojan horse for American imperialism.
Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don't talk about promoting Internet freedom. Her Newseum speech was full of analogies to the Berlin Wall and praise for Twitter revolutions -- vocabulary straight out of the Bush handbook. To governments already nervous about a wired citizenry, this sounded less like freedom of the Internet than freedom via the Internet: not just a call for free speech online, but a bid to overthrow them by way of cyberspace.
The lessons of the first Freedom Agenda should have been instructive. After youth-movement-driven "color revolutions" swept Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, Bush openly bragged about his support for such groups and vowed to help the new pro-democracy wave go global. The backlash was immediate. Countries like Russia, which had previously been relatively blasé about such activism, panicked, blocking foreign funding to civil society groups and NGOs and creating their own pro-government youth movements and civil society organizations. The end result in many countries was a net loss for democracy and freedom.
( Which is ironic. The best antidote to the endless blather promoting fairytales is the cold factual skepticism of those who realize the whole promotion is a farce and snare for the unwary. )
Shooting throws spotlight on state of U.S. political rhetoric
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik in Tucson used a nationally televised press conference to condemn the tone of political discourse in his state. He charged that public debate is now "vitriolic rhetoric," which has rendered Arizona "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeDupnik suggested that such rhetoric can have deadly consequences."We need to do some soul searching," Dupnik told reporters. "It's the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.
"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this county is getting to be outrageous. Unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital," Dupnik continued.
"We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry," Dupnik said.
WikiLeaks demands Google and Facebook unseal US subpoenas
WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of any US subpoenas they may have received after it emerged that a court in Virginia had ordered Twitter to secretly hand over details of accounts on the micro-blogging site by five figures associated with the group, including Julian Assange.
"Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into WikiLeaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain," WikiLeaks said in a statement.
The court issuing the subpoena said it had "reasonable grounds" to believe Twitter held information "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation".
It ordered Twitter not to notify the targets of the subpoena – an order the company successfully challenged.
The court order crucially demands that Twitter hand over details of source and destination internet protocol addresses used to access the accounts, which would help investigators identify how the named individuals communicated with each other, as well as email addresses used.
The emergence of the subpoena appears to confirm for the first time the existence of a secret grand jury empanelled to investigate whether individuals associated with WikiLeaks, and Assange in particular, can be prosecuted for alleged conspiracy with Manning to steal the classified documents.
The subpoena itself is an unusual one known as a 2703(d). Recently a federal appeals court ruled this kind of order was insufficient to order the disclosure of the contents of communication. Significantly, however, that ruling is binding in neither Virginia – where the Twitter subpoena was issued – nor San Francisco where Twitter is based.
( 'Ultra Vires' is supposedly a ruling on limits to a court's powers. Some should contend that U.S. courts and government recognize no such limitation. Proof of that would be the 'BiLateral Immunity Agreements' which insulate U.S. War Criminals from prosecution...prudent for those who train repressive governments in the methods of state terrorism. But of course...the biggest convenience of having rules for your convenience...is that you ignore them with impunity if you can. )
The School of the Americas
World War II was the "good war". After that conflict, most Americans believed that US intentions in the world were noble -- the US was the punisher of aggression and a warrior for freedom. This image was for generations of Americans the measure by which they judged their country in world affairs. The war in Vietnam ended the illusion that America was always on the "right side". Today, America's image as a defender of democracy and justice has been further eroded by the School of the Americas (SOA), which trains Latin American and Caribbean military officers and soldiers to subvert democracy and kill hope in their own countries.
Founded by the United States in 1946, the SOA was initially located in Panama, but in 1984 it was kicked out under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty and moved to the army base at Fort Benning, Georgia. Then-President of Panama Jorge Illueca called it "the biggest base for de-stabilization in Latin America," and a major Panamanian newspaper dubbed it " The School of Assassins."
The United States, the International Criminal Court, and Bilateral Immunity Agreements: Explaining the Resistance of Weak States and Consequences for American Foreign Policy
As Activists Plan Protest for 9th Anniv. of Guantánamo, Former Gitmo Commander Subpoenaed in Spain over Prisoner Torture
The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a request Thursday asking a Spanish court to subpoena the former commanding officer at Guantánamo Bay, Major General Geoffrey Miller, over the alleged torture of four Guantánamo prisoners. Last month, CCR also asked another Spanish judge to prosecute six former Bush administration officials who authored the legal memos authorizing the torture of foreign prisoners.
Prisoners at Supermax Ohio Penitentiary Begin Hunger Strike to Protest 17+ Year Solitary Confinement
Four prisoners in the supermax Ohio State Penitentiary have launched a hunger strike to protest what they call their harsh mistreatment under solitary confinement. The prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Namir Abdul Mateen—were sentenced to death for their involvement in the 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio. For over 17 years, they’ve been held in 23-hour-a-day solitary lockdown.
U.S. to Host World Press Freedom Day in 2011
( The comedy never ends )
The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 - May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.
The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.
Highlighting the many events surrounding the celebration will be the awarding of the UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize at the National Press Club on May 3rd. This prize, determined by an independent jury of international journalists, honors a person, organization or institution that has notably contributed to the defense and/or promotion of press freedom, especially where risks have been undertaken.
- 07.01.11
- 06.01.11
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( Could you exceed that irrelevance ? Is it possible ? )
How to Be a Karma Yogi (Religion of Love)
One community’s response: help starts at home
‘The Comeback Kid’ and the Kids Who Won’t
President Barack Obama signed a slew of bills into law during the lame-duck session of Congress and was dubbed the “Comeback Kid” amid a flurry of fawning press reports. In the hail of this surprise bipartisanship, though, the one issue over which Democrats and Republicans always agree, war, was completely ignored. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, and 2010 has seen the highest number of U.S. and NATO soldiers killed.
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