The Media Research Center report on network television of Iraq is out:
Ever since the United States and an international coalition toppled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in the spring of 2003, the Iraq war has dominated network newscasts. Since then, there’s been a lot of undeniably bad news, as terrorists have launched a savage campaign to thwart efforts to establish democracy in a major Arab state. But are network reporters giving the public an inordinately gloomy portrait of the situation, as some critics charge? Are the positive accomplishments of U.S. soldiers and Iraq’s new democratic leaders being lost in a news agenda dominated by assassinations, car bombings and casualty reports?
The answer to both questions is: Yes.
Democratic Senator Lieberman’s Our Troops Must Stay: America can’t abandon 27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists is definitely a must-read. Here he tells it like it is, the good and the bad:
I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood–unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn.
Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.
There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before. All of that says the Iraqi economy is growing. And Sunni candidates are actively campaigning for seats in the National Assembly. People are working their way toward a functioning society and economy in the midst of a very brutal, inhumane, sustained terrorist war against the civilian population and the Iraqi and American military there to protect it.
It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East, which has long been a major American national and economic security priority.
Before going to Iraq last week, I visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has been the only genuine democracy in the region, but it is now getting some welcome company from the Iraqis and Palestinians who are in the midst of robust national legislative election campaigns, the Lebanese who have risen up in proud self-determination after the Hariri assassination to eject their Syrian occupiers (the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias should be next), and the Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Saudis who have taken steps to open up their governments more broadly to their people. In my meeting with the thoughtful prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, he declared with justifiable pride that his country now has the most open, democratic political system in the Arab world. He is right.
In the face of terrorist threats and escalating violence, eight million Iraqis voted for their interim national government in January, almost 10 million participated in the referendum on their new constitution in October, and even more than that are expected to vote in the elections for a full-term government on Dec. 15. Every time the 27 million Iraqis have been given the chance since Saddam was overthrown, they have voted for self-government and hope over the violence and hatred the 10,000 terrorists offer them. Most encouraging has been the behavior of the Sunni community, which, when disappointed by the proposed constitution, registered to vote and went to the polls instead of taking up arms and going to the streets. Last week, I was thrilled to see a vigorous political campaign, and a large number of independent television stations and newspapers covering it.
None of these remarkable changes would have happened without the coalition forces led by the U.S. And, I am convinced, almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if those forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.
The leaders of Iraq’s duly elected government understand this, and they asked me for reassurance about America’s commitment. The question is whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this. I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.
Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America’s bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.
The leaders of America’s military and diplomatic forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, have a clear and compelling vision of our mission there. It is to create the environment in which Iraqi democracy, security and prosperity can take hold and the Iraqis themselves can defend their political progress against those 10,000 terrorists who would take it from them.
Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground. The administration’s recent use of the banner “clear, hold and build” accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.
We are now embedding a core of coalition forces in every Iraqi fighting unit, which makes each unit more effective and acts as a multiplier of our forces. Progress in “clearing” and “holding” is being made. The Sixth Infantry Division of the Iraqi Security Forces now controls and polices more than one-third of Baghdad on its own. Coalition and Iraqi forces have together cleared the previously terrorist-controlled cities of Fallujah, Mosul and Tal Afar, and most of the border with Syria. Those areas are now being “held” secure by the Iraqi military themselves. Iraqi and coalition forces are jointly carrying out a mission to clear Ramadi, now the most dangerous city in Al-Anbar province at the west end of the Sunni Triangle.
Nationwide, American military leaders estimate that about one-third of the approximately 100,000 members of the Iraqi military are able to “lead the fight” themselves with logistical support from the U.S., and that that number should double by next year. If that happens, American military forces could begin a drawdown in numbers proportional to the increasing self-sufficiency of the Iraqi forces in 2006. If all goes well, I believe we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007, but it is also likely that our presence will need to be significant in Iraq or nearby for years to come.
The economic reconstruction of Iraq has gone slower than it should have, and too much money has been wasted or stolen. Ambassador Khalilzad is now implementing reform that has worked in Afghanistan–Provincial Reconstruction Teams, composed of American economic and political experts, working in partnership in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces with its elected leadership, civil service and the private sector. That is the “build” part of the “clear, hold and build” strategy, and so is the work American and international teams are doing to professionalize national and provincial governmental agencies in Iraq.
These are new ideas that are working and changing the reality on the ground, which is undoubtedly why the Iraqi people are optimistic about their future–and why the American people should be, too.
. . .
Please read the whole thing.
Personally, I hope Lieberman is the Democratic candidate for 2008.
UPDATE: California Conservative has an excellent analysis comparing Lieberman and Sen. Biden.
UPDATE: I can’t find any mention of Lieberman’s trip in the New York Times. However, AP has this Lieberman ‘Encouraged’ by Iraq Visit.
Charles Moore, writing for the Telegraph, reminds fellow Europeans of Israeli history, asking “are you happy to help direct the world’s fury at the only country in the Middle East whose civilisation even remotely resembles yours?“:
As a boy, I loved this narrative. I cheered as Israeli courage swept away the outnumbering Arabs who tried to destroy it again and again. I bought books about the Six-Day War, many of which carried pictures of glamorous female Israeli soldiers.
But then a different narrative supervened. People called “the Palestinians” began to be mentioned. Once upon a time, the word “Palestinian” had no national meaning; it was simply the description on any passport of a person living in British-mandated Palestine. During the 19 years to 1967 when Jordan governed the West Bank, the people there had no self-rule, and no real name. UN Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to leave territories it occupied in 1967, does not mention Palestinians; it speaks only of “Arab refugees”. Palestinian nationality came along, as it were, after the fact, a nationality largely based on grievance.
Since then, the story has grown and grown. Israel, which was attacked, has come to be seen as the aggressor. Israel, which has elections that throw governments out and independent commissions that investigate people like Sharon and condemn him, became regarded as the oppressive monster. In a rhetoric that tried to play back upon Jews their own experience of suffering, supporters of the Palestinian cause began to call Israelis Nazis. Holocaust Memorial Day is disapproved of by many Muslims because it ignores the supposedly comparable “genocide” of the Palestinians.
Western children of the Sixties like this sort of talk. They look for a narrative based on the American civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid. They care little for economic achievement or political pluralism. They are suspicious of any society with a Western appearance, and in any contest between people with differing skin colours, they prefer the darker. They buy into the idea, now promoted by all Arab regimes and by Muslim firebrands with a permanent interest in deflecting attention from their own societies’ problems, that Israel is the greatest problem of all.
Well, some will say, that is the way it is: Israel has abused power, and is reaping the whirlwind. I don’t want to argue today about the rights and wrongs of Israel’s actions, though I think, given its difficulties, it stands up better than most before the bar of history. All I want to ask my fellow Europeans is this: are you happy to help direct the world’s fury at the only country in the Middle East whose civilisation even remotely resembles yours? And are you sure that the fate of Israel has no bearing on your own? In Iran, the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes the link. The battle over Palestine, he says, is “the prelude of the battle of Islam with the world of arrogance”, the world of the West. He is busy building his country’s nuclear bomb.
RTWT. (ht: Powerline)
Tigerhawk’s campaign to keep the New York Times honest continues today. Here is the S&P500 five year trend, showing the market response to the liberation of Iraq. And don’t miss his links documenting the NYT tradition of front page coverage blaming Bush administration policies for every dip.
PS: I borrowed JP’s comment for the headline of this post - which gave me a much-need big laugh this morning!
Technorati Tags: NYT
Have you already read Tom Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map“, and the recently released “Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating“? If not, I think you’ll find this one hour video interview by Rep. Tom Feeney on “After Words” very worthwhile.
It’s unusual for TV interviews because Rep. Feeney has actually read the books. More unusual, he allows Barnett to explain his work.
Background for those who’ve not been following Barnett. Esquire editors wrote the following in the issue where they published Barnett’s first “popular” essay on the Core and the Gap, and how “Disconnectedness defines danger”:
FROM THE CONTRIBUTORS’ PAGE (p. 56):
Shortly after we wrote about military strategist THOMAS BARNETT in last December’s Best and Brightest issue, he gave the Esquire staff a presentation on his theory of war and globalization, just as he regularly does for government leaders as an adviser to the Department of Defense. We’ll never read the news the same way again. This month, Barnett delivers the same briefing to you in “The Pentagon’s New Map (page 174), in which he maps out America’s recent military encounters and predicts future ones based on patterns of global economic development. “We’re at a time period not unlike after World War II,” says Barnett, who is also a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. “We’re trying to ask the same great questions, like: How can a superpower today influence history for the better? We established this overarching ideology for so long that allowed us to justify anything, and that ideology was containment. In some ways, what I’m trying to argue is a new sort of containment—a containment of the new bad places and the desire to shrink them.”
FROM THE EDITOR’S LETTER (p. 58):
[excerpted]
But there is one truly special story in this issue—one that you’ll find in no other magazine. If you remember our December issue, the one we called the Best and Brightest, which was about people on the cutting edge, doing work that will improve our country and our world, you might remember Thomas Barnett. Tom Barnett is a war strategist. He puts the world—especially the parts of the world where terrorism and unrest are brewing—into context. He does this for the Secretary of Defense, and he draws conclusions about how best to avert or engage conflicts—and thus how to keep our country secure.
On page 174, Barnett has annotated the world. More specifically, the world’s hot spots and the likelihood of war in each of those places. For the first time, someone with a position in the government explains what we’re really undertaking when we go to war in Iraq. It’s not just about disarmament. Rather, the United States is redrawing the map of the region, we are shrinking the Gap (to use Barnett’s term), we are changing the course of history by adopting a good-offense-is-the-best-defense strategy.
This is an entirely unprecedented look inside the thinking that will guide our defense strategy over the next five to ten years. It’s a fantastic and challenging story. In November, Barnett came and presented his philosophy of global conflict to our staff. It was amazing and kind of breathtaking. It made each of us feel as though we had a slightly better grip on some of the most frightening issues ever to face our country and the world. I hope it has the same effect on you, making your life a little better.
—David Granger
I missed this Ignatius column from last December, but today came across a reference to the op-ed while reading Tom Barnett’s new “Blueprint for Action : A Future Worth Creating”. Regular readers already know that I think “The Pentagon’s New Map” made a very important contribution to geopolitical strategy. More on Blueprint for Action after I finish the book. Ignatius wrote:
It hasn’t been reviewed by the New York Times or The Post, and it’s little known outside the military. But the red-hot book among the nation’s admirals and generals this holiday season is a work of strategy by Thomas P.M. Barnett called “The Pentagon’s New Map.”
Imagine a combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Karl von Clausewitz on war and you begin to get an idea of where Barnett is coming from. His book tries to rethink strategy for a post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world caught between order and anarchy, self-satisfaction and rage, prosperity and ruin.
Barnett’s central thesis is that today’s world is divided into two categories: the “Functioning Core” of nations connected to the global economy and prospering as never before, and the “Non-Integrating Gap” of nations disconnected from the matrix of wealth and progress and therefore spinning toward chaos. Most of America’s military interventions in recent years have been in the Gap, notes Barnett, but we have failed to understand that we face a common enemy there. . .
Barnett doesn’t see America’s role as a neo-imperialist global centurion. Instead, he argues, the U.S. goal must be to promote “rule sets” that are shared by Core and Gap alike. “All we can offer is choice, the connectivity to escape isolation, and the safety within which freedom finds practical expression,” he writes. “None of this can be imposed, only offered. Globalization does not come with a ruler, but with rules.”
Barnett has been tinkering with these ideas since the late 1990s, but they came into focus, not surprisingly, after Sept. 11, 2001. Three months later, he was giving the first versions of a briefing that has now been heard by hundreds of senior military officers. His concepts have spread so fast among the military brass that when I was in Bahrain two weeks ago, I heard a Barnett-style briefing from the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, Vice Adm. David Nichols. He outlined a strategy of encouraging countries in the Middle East to move toward “connected” economies, orderly “rule sets” and democratic political reform.
A continuing puzzle (to me) is why Barnett’s work is so often discussed in the context of military strategy. The applications there are clear, but the strategy is in no way purely a “military strategy”. My take is the genesis of the Core/Gap concept was Barnett’s role in the Cantor Fitzgerald Economic Security Exercises. Very sadly, the Cantor Fitzgerald principals who initiated that study-series perished in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Otherwise we might be hearing more commentary from the Wall Street community.
That Barnett’s thesis is compelling derives from a sound understanding of the economics that drive globalization - and the simple desires of families to improve their lives.
Barnett’s website and blog are a remarkable resource.
Michael Barone titled this post Must Reading:
I don’t normally look to Esquire for information about important changes in public policies and institutions. But the July Esquire has at least one such article, by Thomas P. M. Barnett (The Pentagon’s New Map) on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Barnett is one of the most interesting strategic thinkers around, and his article told me a lot I didn’t know. . .
The Esquire article is accessible here “Donald Rumsfeld: Old Man in a Hurry”
Barnett has posted on his blog the transcript of his Rumsfeld interview (research for the article). Very interesting.
Austin Bay comments on shifts in Arab sentiment away from jihad towards political realism, including a number of useful reference links, such as the 24 Nov Economist article.
The irony: as a political-cultural victory nears, American neo-isolationists demand retreat.
Steven Waldman writing in Slate last year:
As you may already know, one of America’s two political parties is extremely religious. Sixty-one percent of this party’s voters say they pray daily or more often. An astounding 92 percent of them believe in life after death. And there’s a hard-core subgroup in this party of super-religious Christian zealots. Very conservative on gay marriage, half of the members of this subgroup believe Bush uses too little religious rhetoric, and 51 percent of them believe God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the prophecy about the second coming of Jesus.
Liberals could read these statistics and sneer about “those silly Republicans” were it not for the fact that it’s the Democrats who hold these beliefs. And the abovementioned ultrareligious subgroup is not the so-called “Religious Right” but rather the so-called “African-Americans.”
I found the reference to the above Waldman piece in Prof. Paul Bloom’s new piece in the December Atlantic Monthly - a fascinating survey of recent infant development research that may explain the wide-spread belief in the supernatural:
Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.
Bloom (a professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale) includes a number of surprising observations from sociology - quite different than the usual media framing:
The United States is a poster child for supernatural belief. Just about everyone in this country—96 percent in one poll—believes in God. Well over half of Americans believe in miracles, the devil, and angels. Most believe in an afterlife—and not just in the mushy sense that we will live on in the memories of other people, or in our good deeds; when asked for details, most Americans say they believe that after death they will actually reunite with relatives and get to meet God. Woody Allen once said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Most Americans have precisely this expectation.
But America is an anomaly, isn’t it? These statistics are sometimes taken as yet another indication of how much this country differs from, for instance, France and Germany, where secularism holds greater sway. Americans are fundamentalists, the claim goes, isolated from the intellectual progress made by the rest of the world.
There are two things wrong with this conclusion. First, even if a gap between America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.
Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers. Consider Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. But four out of five Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after death.
Where does this belief in the supernatural come from? According to Bloom, it derives from a genetic duality: one for understanding the social world, one for the physical world:
For those of us who are not autistic, the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. The biggest consequence has to do with the way we think of ourselves and others. We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. . .
Here’s an example of some of the research on children:
In a significant study the psychologists Jesse Bering, of the University of Arkansas, and David Bjorklund, of Florida Atlantic University, told young children a story about an alligator and a mouse, complete with a series of pictures, that ended in tragedy: “Uh oh! Mr. Alligator sees Brown Mouse and is coming to get him!” [The children were shown a picture of the alligator eating the mouse.] “Well, it looks like Brown Mouse got eaten by Mr. Alligator. Brown Mouse is not alive anymore.”
The experimenters asked the children a set of questions about the mouse’s biological functioning—such as “Now that the mouse is no longer alive, will he ever need to go to the bathroom? Do his ears still work? Does his brain still work?”—and about the mouse’s mental functioning, such as “Now that the mouse is no longer alive, is he still hungry? Is he thinking about the alligator? Does he still want to go home?”
As predicted, when asked about biological properties, the children appreciated the effects of death: no need for bathroom breaks; the ears don’t work, and neither does the brain. The mouse’s body is gone. But when asked about the psychological properties, more than half the children said that these would continue: the dead mouse can feel hunger, think thoughts, and have desires. The soul survives. And children believe this more than adults do, suggesting that although we have to learn which specific afterlife people in our culture believe in (heaven, reincarnation, a spirit world, and so on), the notion that life after death is possible is not learned at all. It is a by-product of how we naturally think about the world.
Bloom also presents evidence that we’ve evolved to be creationists - humans have a genetic disposition to see purpose, intention, design that is not there:
In 1944 the social psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel made a simple movie in which geometric figures—circles, squares, triangles—moved in certain systematic ways, designed to tell a tale. When shown this movie, people instinctively describe the figures as if they were specific types of people (bullies, victims, heroes) with goals and desires, and repeat pretty much the same story that the psychologists intended to tell. Further research has found that bounded figures aren’t even necessary—one can get much the same effect in movies where the “characters” are not single objects but moving groups, such as swarms of tiny squares.
Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University, was the first modern scholar to notice the importance of this tendency as an explanation for religious thought. In his book Faces in the Clouds, Guthrie presents anecdotes and experiments showing that people attribute human characteristics to a striking range of real-world entities, including bicycles, bottles, clouds, fire, leaves, rain, volcanoes, and wind. We are hypersensitive to signs of agency—so much so that we see intention where only artifice or accident exists. As Guthrie puts it, the clothes have no emperor. . .
It’s not surprising, then, that nascent creationist views are found in young children. Four-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions (”to go in the zoo”) and clouds (”for raining”). When asked to explain why a bunch of rocks are pointy, adults prefer a physical explanation, while children choose a functional one, such as “so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy.” And when asked about the origin of animals and people, children tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults raising them do not. Creationism—and belief in God—is bred in the bone.
Back to the meaning of “accident” in the title, Bloom is referring to “accident” as in each increment of evolution - some of those accidents must account for the “wired” predisposition to a belief in the supernatural:
Enthusiasm is building among scientists for a quite different view—that religion emerged not to serve a purpose but by accident.
Technorati Tags: Evolution, Creationism, Religion
Yikes! We were astounded when we learned that Australians and New Zealanders spend about 2% of their disposable income on gambling. In this Atlantic Monthly article we learn about U.S. gambling, in particular on slots. E.g.,
** 25% of American adults now list gambling as their No. 1 entertainment choice
** gambling took in $48 billion in revenues last year
** 70% of that take was by slots
** there are twice as many slots as ATMs
Remarkable.
Technorati Tags: Gambling
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