dan collier

Malaria and how to beat it – The Economist reports on a study in 3 African countries that looked at the effectiveness of selling cheap mosquito nets versus giving away mosquito nets to mothers at health clinic visits. The free nets were more effective at preventing malaria in children. This finding may not stretch too far beyond mosquito nets, but I think it could be extended to healthcare in general. Despite well known risks, people without disposable income will forego preventative care. And it is cheaper for society to pay for prevention than treatment.

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Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad? – I thought this was a good article from The Independent (UK) as a counter point to the avalanche of “the surge is working” news reports. The reporter is a longtime Middle East correspondent and formerly was stationed in Lebanon.

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The Poetry of Roger Clemens – From free form to haiku.

“Glute”

I have strained my glute
On a couple occasions.
I wish I could tell you
How many occasions.
-Feb. 5, 2008, deposition

development &foreign affairs &links posted by: dan  @  17 Feb 2008 23:45 | Comment (1)

Today, I finished The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart. Last year, I read Stewart’s first book, The Places In Between, about his walk across Afghanistan in 2002. To say that I liked both books is an understatement, in these books Stewart presents invaluable knowledge about the world-at-large, and Muslim lands in particular.

Seyyed Rory, as he is known in Muslim lands, relates how success and failure in Iraq was fundamentally a local phenomena. Without stating it outright, he clearly believes all politics are local. He relates the following:

I did not agree with the governorate coordinators in neighboring provinces who felt fatally wounded by poor planning, ill-defined missions, insufficient resources, and little support. I believed that our small teams, fluid identity, and relative isolation were inevitable consequences of the invasion and, indeed, advantages. I was pleased to work without interference from Baghdad or London; our team was by now experienced, flexible, and energetic; we had good relations with other parts of the system and were able to acquire more money than we could manage and spend. If we now failed to help [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] build a functioning state, this would not be the fault of poor organization or grand planning at the center but rather a failure of local relationships.
p. 259

Only five pages and a week later, Stewart recounts the failure of the central coalition government to provide for the daily concerns of Iraqis.

In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget…. For the sake of a tiny sum of money – a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion – we were alienating our key partner and successor.
p. 264

Stewart was unable to obtain the funds from the Coalition Provisional Authority, and finally gave the Iraqi governor money from his own pocket.

Each chapter of The Prince of Marshes starts with a quote, most from Machiavelli’s “The Prince” (I reread The Prince earlier this fall and was pleasantly surprised to see its wisdom put to good use in this book). While the Prince of the Marshes refers to an Iraqi tribal sheik, the use of Machiavelli’s Prince seems refers to Stewart’s ambiguous feeling about his role as neo-colonial governor. One quote is:

For this may be said fo men generally: they are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers, avoiders of danger, eager for gain.
Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 17

Another chapter starts:

Many have imagined principalities and states that have never been seen, nor known to exist. However, how men live is so different from how they should live that a ruler who does not do generally what is done but persists in doing what ought to be done will undermine his power rather than maintain it.
Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 15

The front cover of The Prince of the Marshes carries the quote:

Off all the books I’ve read about the tragedy in Iraq, I think Stewart’s in the most likely to last.
Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Having been against the invasion from the start because I followed the news and watched carefully what Hans Blix was reporting, I have not felt the need to delve too deeply in the bellicose group-think that overtook Washington, D.C and London in 2003. However, I can certainly agree with Mr Weisberg’s assessment, because The Prince of the Marshes is a day-to-day account of dealing with Iraqi people crucial to the goal of a democratic and peaceful Iraq. When all the justifications for the Iraq War have been thoroughly refuted, the people of Iraq will remain the determining factor in the success or failure of US policy.
Tagged: books foreignpolicy iraq

books &foreign affairs posted by: dan  @  01 Jan 2008 22:59 | Comments (0)

A bizarre, unsolicited email from Gen. Petraeus’ spokesman – Glenn Greenwald, an author and blogger for Salon.com, received the linked email from Colonel Steven Boylan, the US Army spokesman for General David Petraeus in Iraq. It was sent in response to an article about the growing politicization of the Army in Iraq. It is striking that while the Marines are pressing to be redeployed outside of Iraq and all types of retired brass is urging withdrawl, the US Army command in Iraq is in lock-step with President Bush. Not just total agreement, but the same debatable talking points and semantic nonsense.

What is really interesting about General Petraeus’ spokesman’s email is that he follows it up by denying he sent it. Of course, it is simple to track the route email takes from sender to recipient. It is possible to fake email routing information, but I think it absolutely defies credulity that the US Army central communications offices in Iraq has such lax security that it is possible that this email is fake. I’ve studied network security and implemented security measures for communication protocols, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used for sending email. Fake emails are easily prevented at this point in time.

Based on the evidence available, there are three possibilities:

1) The US Army computer network in Iraq has been compromised from the outside. The Army’s network security is virtually non-existent and at any moment someone may fake, or spoof, an email to FoxNews from Gen. Petraeus stating “In ten minutes, we start bombing Iran. I love the smell of napalm in the morning! Love, DP”.

2) The Army computer network was compromised from within Central Command offices. The Army and/or the spokesman failed to take the basic security precautions necessary to prevent unauthorized communications attributable to the highest ranking commander in Iraq. While it is an obvious or blatant lapse of security, this is more believable then the first possibility. Either the actual sender will be easily found or FoxNews can still expect the good news (for ratings).

3) Col. Steven Boylan, the personal spokesman for Gen. Petraeus, is a moron and lying.

I know which one I suspect. But whichever one it turns out to be, this incident seems to explain perfectly why the US is losing in Iraq. That is: wishful thinking (#1), poor planning (#2), and dishonesty (#3).

foreign affairs &technology posted by: dan  @  28 Oct 2007 21:14 | Comments (0)

4 suicides – Interesting art on a delicate subject. Blublu.org has lots of great street art photos listed under “Walls“. Here are a few of my favorites(1, 2, 3).

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Joint Failure – I’ve posted before about Andrew Bacevich. In his recent “Ideas” piece for the Boston Globe, he questions the suitability of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as currently established. In this piece he reviews the problem, claiming that the problem started early in the history of JCS.

Although himself a five-star general, Eisenhower railed in private throughout his presidency about members of the Joint Chiefs conspiring to undermine his policies whenever they happened to collide with cherished interests of the military services. His Farewell Address, warning that the “military-industrial complex” could well “endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” amounted to a tacit admission that as commander-in-chief he had lost control of his generals.

The problem more recently is generals that were unable or unwilling to offer honest and forthright advice to policy makers. I heard Bacevich on NPR’s On Point this morning discussing possible alternatives to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Seemingly humble and wise, he appears to be more interested in starting the discussion than providing easy answers. In another recent editorial for the LA Times, he slams the ’08 candidates offering the sound-bite solution of increasing the size of the military to fight fundamentalist terrorism.

art &politics posted by: dan  @  20 Jun 2007 0:26 | Comments (0)

The Semiwarriors – An essay by retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and current Boston University professor of international relations Andrew J. Bacevich was published in April. Mr. Bacevich’s son died this week in Iraq.

In this article, Mr Bacevich argues that a long-term movement toward constant conflict and the rise of an imperial American presidency go hand-in-hand. It is particularly heartening to read a complete rebuke of the Bush Doctrine from a conservative scholar.

The Big Lie propagated by the architects of the Iraq War is not that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction nor that he was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden; it is that they possessed a secret formula for keeping America safe, the essential ingredient in that formula being a mandate to engage in open-ended war. Although the semiwarriors advising Bush fancied that they had discovered something original, they were really peddling the same elixir concocted by James Forrestal some six decades ago. Having drunk deeply of that elixir, President Bush is now left holding the bag, with others–chiefly young soldiers and their families–picking up the tab.

After reading this article, I had to read Eisenhower’s farewell address again (with video).

Bill Moyers’ asks his readers if there is something in the DNA of foreign policy elites. When I saw that interview initially, I thought the question sounded like an excuse.

foreign affairs &politics posted by: dan  @  16 May 2007 23:20 | Comment (1)

Depending on your point of view, thirty-two years ago today was the Fall of Saigon or the Liberation of Saigon. Yesterday, I believe coincidentally, Richard Posner and Gary Becker posted about why there have not been more violent protests in the US to attempt to end the Iraq war. It is a subject that I’ve been pondering for a while too.

Becker’s argument is that the absence of a draft is the decisive factor in the level of violent protest against the Iraq war compared to the war in Southeast Asia. The lower number of causalities also lowers the impact of the war. Posner does not dismiss conscription as a factor, but points to five other factors he believes are equally or more important. To summarize, they are:

1. The opponents of the war in Iraq have the support of one of the two political parties.

2. The opportunity costs of time are higher today than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s for potential protesters (i.e. higher wages, a higher percentage of employed females, more competitive colleges, higher long-term cost of short-term protests).

3. The great expansion of the electronic media, including the advent of blogs, gives people outlets to blow off steam that are much cheaper, in cost of time, than street demonstrations or acts of violence.

4. Lessons learned. The violent protests against the Vietnam war probably did not shorten the war, but instead helped Nixon become President.

5. For Vietnam war protesters, the war was a symbol of deeper and broader problems with the United States and the entire Western world. Today most of those with anti-war views blame the Iraq war on the incompetence of the Bush Administration.

I find it interesting that the Old Masters limit the discussion to violent protest in response to war. Is the implication that violent protest is more effective than non-violent protest? I think Becker is correct if we consider only violent protest. If the government wanted to draft me or my children for such a misguided cause, I may be provoked to more drastic actions than posting Jon Stewart’s armchair analysis on a blog. Posner’s first four points are valid, my impression is that the fifth is probably not valid for today’s potentially violent protesters.

Posner seems correct regarding the idea of a variety of factors that diminish the overall potential for protest. If aggressive police responses to (or provocation of) violent protests have increased, the costs of protesting in general, and protesting violently in particular, have also increased. Higher costs, even without diminished chance of successful protest, would be a disincentive for protest. Certainly, there is little hope for successful outcomes to protests today.

I wonder if the relative success of the non-violent civil rights era protests has impacted the willingness of subsequent generations to engage in violent protests. For those protesting the Vietnam war, Martin Luther King was a contemporary. For the next generation, he is a saint. Hopefully in 30 years we’ll be able to look back and see that non-violence was also the right tactic today.

foreign affairs &politics posted by: dan  @  30 Apr 2007 23:18 | Comments (0)