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Can We Invoke Godwin's Law?

by CKR

Godwin's Law:

If you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in.

I had thought that there was something about losing the discussion, too, but the link, which seems to be authoritative, indicates that there's more nuance and strategy than that to Godwin's Law.

What I'd like to know, and the link doesn't address, is whether invoking Neville Chamberlin and appeasement qualifies as a corollary of Godwin's Law. Looking at the formulation above, I think it does. Unfortunately, the latest and most public example requires responses. Olbermann, Kaplan, and Arkin have some of the best.

So the new Republican strategy is no more than a variant on the old Usenet flame wars, which continue, with the same unhappy results, on blog comment threads across the political spectrum.

Emotion is one thing, but dealing with our enemies is another. I'm wondering if we can develop another corollary of Godwin's Law in regard to "Islamofascism." Maybe

Tying the suffix -fascism to a prefix indicative of your opponent automatically ends the discussion?

There's a real danger here. If we want to know our enemy, we need more than labels. And we need to identify the enemy correctly. How about that cliche about circling the wagons and shooting in?

All this nazi stuff, and we can easily think of more spewing from the rightwing noise machine, is indicative of both a paucity of critical thought and a desire to demonize. It's too bad that our national leaders, if we can call the recyclers of Usenet's worst that, have decided to make it their theme for the next few months.

Iran and Israel and the Bomb

by CKR

Forty years ago, more or less, the United States was very worried about the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation. The subjects of that worry were, primarily, China and Israel. Avner Cohen has written a political history of Israel’s acquisition of the bomb, Israel and the Bomb and has made background documents available on line.

Cohen is primarily concerned with the development of Israel’s “opacity” with regard to its nuclear weapons program, but the history is instructive in many dimensions. I’m particularly interested in implications for US interactions with Iran. There seem to me to be several; I plan to present them one per post in several posts.

Acquiring nuclear weapons was in the minds of Israel’s leaders from the formation of the country in 1947. Nuclear weapons offered a path toward military superiority against numerically superior enemies, and a scientific program in pursuit of nuclear weapons was begun early in the country’s history. Scientists were trained in countries that had nuclear programs, and research was continued within Israel.

The step that was, in retrospect, unambiguously toward a nuclear weapons capability, was the acquisition of a heavy-water reactor from the French, constructed at Dimona in the Negev desert. Construction began in 1958 and plutonium production started in 1963; the Israeli history of the project is still classified, so those dates have been surmised by Cohen and others. By the 1967 war, Israel was able to assemble two nuclear weapons quickly.

Israel, a nation with many competent scientists, required nine years from beginning the construction of a plutonium-producing reactor to the assembly of nuclear weapons.

What did happen at LAX August 21? Is Gulf News right?

By PHK

It must be tough being an immigration officer these days. I wouldn’t want the job. But wouldn’t you think an I-20 from Claremont Graduate University, one of America’s most prestigious, issued to Saif Al Sha’ali, a returning doctoral student in Information Technology traveling back to Claremont, California with his wife and three kids would count for something? Or that this graduate student with only three semesters left to complete his degree was returning to campus from a three month vacation home in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)? It’s not like he was planning to attend flight school to learn to take-off, but not land.

If the English language UAE newspaper Gulf News has it right, our illustrious homeland security department detained this family of five at Los Angeles International Airport on August 21 until the UAE Embassy intervened on their behalf and enlisted the State Department to help spring them the following day.

Or if the Gulf News story is wrong, the US Embassy should ask that the record be corrected immediately. But doesn’t look that way. Not a word. In fact the American Embassy webpage in Dubai highlights aid to Lebanon, its upcoming Empost Express Visa Passback Service and Orientation for UAE Ministry of Higher Education-funded students leaving to study in the U.S. suggesting that all is well in the student and nonimmigrant visa issuance categories. The latest U.S. Embassy Dubai press release was issued June 12 and relates to breast cancer awareness. Nothing is included in the State Department's only press briefing posted after August 21. Clearly the Department has no interest in making the Al Sha’ali issue public – and none of the media present raised it themselves.

Swatting Bug(ti)s Won’t Pacify Baluchistan

By PLS

Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was blown up in a cave in the arid hills of Baluchistan, from which the veteran politician and ex-chief minister of the state was leading a rebellion against the energy policies of the central Pakistan government in Islamabad. At first it was thought that two of his grandsons had died with him (he was 79), but evidently not. This is not a good sign for the army or for Pakistan’s president Musharraf. The young Bugtis (or other members of a huge and politically important clan) will have to avenge their grandfather’s death. Honor has baseline importance in tribal society.

Pakistan, it seems, has opened war on a third front. There’s the eternal sometimes-cold-sometimes-hot war with India, including the proxy campaign via infiltrated insurgents in Kashmir and, more recently, the (I strongly suspect) terrorist-style bombings in Indian cities. There’s the desultory war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the mountainous areas bordering Afghanistan, sustained mainly to please the US, thus ensuring the flow of US aid to Pakistan, which (are you ready to laugh?) enables Pakistan to keep up the pressure on America’s brand new ally India. (Does George 43 ever project the tragic/ludicrous inter-connections and consequences of his pointy-headed pointillistic policies before he launches them?) Finally, there are the army operations in Baluchistan, which are likely to be less half-hearted than those in the Pashtu areas, since big natural gas money is at stake for Islamabad.

It’s a good thing that Pakistan’s southern border is the Arabian Sea. I can’t see war with the Maldives in the near future.

However, Baluchistan borders on Iran,

The Rhino and the Odd Couple

By PLS

John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, has been calling for radical reform of that body—when he hasn’t been advocating its complete dissolution. Seems he’s got company now. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad also thinks the UN is an anachronism.

The two do disagree on an interesting point. Ahmedinejad thinks the US and Britain have too much power—eg, the veto on the Security Council. Bolton thinks the US has too little power to work its will through the UN.

There’s another divergence. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proposed a public debate and/or conversation with his American counterpart. George W. Bush’s official position, one frequently restated by John Bolton, is that he doesn’t want any conversations with Iran, let alone its president, not even about nuclear issues, until Iran capitulates to American demands to turn off those centrifuges—although some more or less unacknowledged conversations at variously lower levels have perforce been taking place.

It’s a headline grabber, that Bush-Ahmadinejad public debate proposal. So were the Ahmedinejad meetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

A year ago Western commentators were astonished that such a lightweight had been elected president of Iran. (JB and GWB note: elected. In a process deemed essentially fair by international observers. That’s called democracy, more or less.) Now Margaret Warner of the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer is reporting from Iran that Ahmadinejad has astonishing charisma, speaks effectively without a script and performs like a pro during news conferences. Imagine, then, what would happen if George Bush actually accepted the debate challenge. He’d be creamed.

Tuesday Baby Lizard Blogging

by CKR

Another busy day, so here's just one photo. If I have time later, I may post more, and I have a more substantive series under construction.

I was weeding the luxuriant growth in my flowerbeds that the rains have encouraged, and this little one and two sibs got scared out. She's smaller than the one I showed you last year, but I did get a close enough look to be able to appreciate how perfectly she's formed--stripes just like an adult's. You have to click on that photo to see the detail.

My desert four o'clock is blooming! I hadn't expected it this year and had just sort of left it alone, but I checked on it the other day when I was weeding. Those photos might be next week, but that may let it develop a real crown of blooms.

The Suggestion Box - Updated 08/29/06 and 8/31/06

by CKR

I thought that the old-fashioned low-tech suggestion box might have gone the way of floppy disks and vinyl recordings, but a quick Google Image search tells me that it’s still very much alive: over ten thousand hits!

Many of those hits, of course, show the good old wooden box, a slit in the top, locked or marked confidential. We all know it’s been updated electronically, too, and there are graphics for that as well. There are even suggestion boxes in multiple languages.

There are sites that sell suggestion boxes (won’t link to those; we don’t do ads on WhirledView) and cynical cartoons on suggestion boxes, although not as many as I expected.

There must be reasons for such staying power. Many of the graphics feature lit-up light bulbs to symbolize bright ideas. You can buy posters making this point as well. Many of the headings are exclamation-pointed! There is this theory that good ideas come through suggestion boxes, and we hear stories to reinforce it.

Another theory is that suggestion boxes provide management with feedback. This becomes the subject of parody and cynicism when management continues its counterproductive activities and ignores the suggestions. I thought I’d see more cartoons about suggestion boxes with no bottom situated over a wastebasket, but there weren’t many, suggesting perhaps that hope springs eternal.

There are variants on the suggestion box, one of which is the ombudsman. This is a real live person who is supposed to take complaints and search out the truth or come up with a solution. Upon finding that whatever they had been doing earlier had not protected them from reporters who made stories up out of whole cloth or turned out to be peddling propaganda for a dishonest administration, our newspapers of record, the New York Times and the Washington Post, created ombudsman posts.

A great public diplomacy plan - but where's the credibility?

By PHK

Yesterday I read Army Colonel Ralph Baker’s “The Decisive Weapon: A Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations,” in the May-June 2006 Military Review. I understood that Baker’s article was excellent and had printed it out shortly after it appeared, but other things – like the opera, oboe practice, meetings, parties and various out of town visitors - intervened.

Baker’s is one of the most sensible, pragmatic articles I have read recently on how both U.S. public diplomacy – yes, public diplomacy – and “information operations” in US military jargon should be conducted. In fact, the model that Baker outlines strikingly resembles that used in U.S. Embassy public affairs offices prior to 1999 or at the very least during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath when there were such things as functioning public diplomacy country plans.

If I was involved in training an incoming State Department class of junior officers, I would include Baker’s article in the must read list. I would also invite Baker as a speaker. In fact, I’d probably add his article to more senior embassy officer training because many of the lessons learned and antidotes described are equally applicable to US embassy public affairs efforts.

Yet, why it should have been left up to Baker to devise this plan and implement it on his own – and what happened in Baghdad after he left in 2004 as the situation has turned from bad to worse – are questions that beg for answers.

Regardless, let me highlight a few of Baker’s recommendations which I think are equally valuable for successful public diplomacy as for military information operations:

1. tell the truth so that the people you talk to can develop trust and confidence in your message;
2. you have no influence over the media (that includes critical or “hostile” media like Al Jazeera) if you do not talk to them;
3. know the society and culture in which you operate and engage – in particular - the people who can influence the opinions of others and also understand what they are saying;
4. use different communications forms to reach different audiences at different times;
5. tailor themes and messages to specific audiences, keep them simple and don’t be afraid to repeat them;
6. be able to respond rapidly to untoward and unforeseen events;
7. develop a set of criteria to measure effectiveness and use the information to devise more effective responses; and
8. obtain personal commitment from all leadership levels and make sure that this personal commitment is well understood by the staff who implement the plan.