Archive for the ‘war’
Domestic Psyops
I should have created a psyops category a long time ago. This story is no joke, and required reading.
Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.
These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”
Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.
Pentagon sought to build “gay bomb”
No joke. More here. I thought about commentary…then I left it alone. Something like this speaks for itself.
Multi-polarity and Urban Drug Wars
I got this story from Prometheus6. Ignatius’ central argument here is based on something he picked up from IR specialists in political science–over time multi-polarity becomes stable, in some ways as stable as a bi-polar world with only two superpowers. But that transition is a bitch.
We’re in the middle of the transition right now, and it’ll probably get a lot worse before it gets better.
Reading this story made me think of a conversation I had last night at a retirement party for our outgoing Department Chair, Matt Crenson. Crenson is an urban politics specialist, and is as much a part of the Baltimore landscape as Cal Ripken. In talking about The Wire and about how to embed it in my fall Urban Politics class, we started talking about the drug war and Crenson noted that the major reason for the high rates of drug inspired violence was that there was no major drug dealer. The Baltimore drug-gang landscape is itself moving towards a multi-polar reality but has not quite reached it yet.
There’s been some work examining gang warfare from an IR perspective. Most notable here is Errol Henderson and Russell Lang’s piece Reducing Gang Violence: Norms from the Interstate System:
“Since the relations that exist among territorial urban gangs bear some important structural similarities to the decentralised interstate system, we contend that the expansion of the norms that already appear in both systems, such as respect for spheres of influence, reciprocity in cooperative exchanges, and the observance of treaties, can serve as the basis for moderating intergang conflict. We suggest intervention and mediation strategies that seek to institutionalise the conflict-dampening norms within the intergang system.”(taken from the abstract)
I’m pretty the link above won’t work unless you have an educational account. If you’re interested in it, email me offline and I’ll see what I can do.
Photography and the Horrors of War
For those of us born before the seventies very few of us can think about Vietnam without thinking about either this image or this one. But for me, the picture that will represent the Iraq War is here. What type of conflict is worth the sacrifice this husband and wife made? I’ve been thinking about what black freedom would look like if I captured it on film. I now know what sacrifice looks like.
