Bush sits just behind Obama as he swears in, clapping politely, an inscrutable look on his face. Does he worry  that pulling out of Iraq will damage American superiority? Does he feel sad for the loss of oil company-tax credits? Maybe he’s shaking his head because he knows he was doing God’s work.

What was Bush thinking during eight years of presidency?

Why did he start two wars that could not be won? Why did he cut of all funding for stem cell research, sex education, and environmental research?  To me, he always seemed out of touch with reality, blatantly ignoring signals that things were badly wrong: impending environmental catastrophe, declining educational standards at home and the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and over one million casualties in Iraq. But everyone is sane in their own head. What was the utopia he thought to create?

My imagination always starts with myself. What do I want in the world? What are the perfect days made of? I have watched myself for years to see if I could learn what actually makes me happy, and these are some of the answers: Interesting work that feels useful. Using my body and staying healthy. My relationships with my friends and my lovers. And then, expanding outward: beautiful cities that build community instead of isolating us in a Sargasso sprawl. A culture that loves knowledge and curiosity. Celebrations of all sorts, from concerts to the Olympic games to pillow fights in the streets. Technology applied for efficiency, art and amusement. All this, and also the darker things that provide contrast: the undergrounds of culture where variety flourishes and perfects itself before bursting into the mainstream, a home for the nights we all suspected…

What about war, famine, disease, poverty?

Well, what of them? These things need to be addressed. We need to get serious about tracking the sorts of public policies and interventions the measurably reduce conflict, as certain international organizations working for peace at ground level already do. We need to understand what development means and how little we actually know, for we’ve failed in Africa for fifty years now. We should respond to domestic terrorism as a minor public health problem, not like some stupid school-yard affront to American dignity.

And yet: six billion people come home from work, from school, from the fields, or they  look up as someone walks through the door. Six billion people are asked by someone, anyone, “how was your day?” These days are made into lives and these lives are the only measure we have. What I want is for those days to be better. That’s the only measure of success I can imagine.

What did Bush dream of? What were the perfect days of the world he sought to create? And for who?

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/what-was-bush-thinking/feed 0 http://jonathanstray.com/coingraph http://jonathanstray.com/coingraph#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:22:08 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=258

Who is writing the major policies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what is the Obama administration likely to do? There have been many analyses and news reports of individual policies and events, but it’s hard to wade into this flood of information, and besides, how would I know who to listen to? In an effort to get some perspective on at least one major aspect of American military strategy, I decided to plot out all the authors of (public) counterinsurgency policy over the last decade, and the relationships between them, as evidenced by co-authorship of articles and papers.

The resulting network shows that the Obama administration is relying heavily on the talents of a group called the Center for A New American Security (CNAS), which has close ties to the authors of the most recent US Army counterinsurgency manual. This means that Obama is unlikely to break with the current military strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan — but even if he wanted to, could he? Counterinsurgency is difficult, and many, many people die when you do it wrong; you can’t simply make this stuff up, so the choices are necessarily among existing clusters of people and policy.

The graph also suggests that the only quasi-independent body of COIN policy is centered around the RAND Corporation, who may not hold a terribly different opinion. If this analysis is correct, then Obama cannot rapidly change the military’s course in fighting these wars, because there simply do not exist credible alternative policies at this time. His only options for change in America’s handling of Iraq and Afghanistan lie outside of the scope of military strategy — perhaps through high level political or economic interventions.

Counterinsurgency Policy

American troops are shooting at someone in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the designated enemy is not another army. After the Taliban was decimated in Afghanistan and Saddam’s main forces were defeated in Iraq, dozens of armed groups stepped up to fill the power vacuum in both countries, ranging from militias to (of course) terrorists. Beset on all sides, the US military lashed out, conducting increasingly intrusive operations in the civilian population, such as house-by-house searches. The bad guys were no longer wearing uniforms, and worse, there was often popular sympathy for them. The US military ended up shooting at the people it had claimed to be liberating.

At the start of these wars, the US military was poorly prepared in counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics, a product of the Cold War strategies and the painful memory of Vietnam, which was also a counterinsurgency war. In fact, the standard COIN manuals of that time (which you can now read courtesy of Wikileaks) were stagnant for 25 years until 2006, when a major review was undertaken by Lieutenant General David Petraeus and others. The resulting revision of the FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency Manual was widely publicized, in contrast to previous secret revisions, with co-author Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl even appearing on The Daily Show to discuss it. Clearly, this revision was as much about building public support and confidence at home as it was about an actual change in strategy. The whole manual has been extensively discussed elsewhere, but the core of the new doctrine is the notion that an insurgency is as much a political as it is a military problem:

The integration of civilian and military efforts is crucial to successful COIN operations. All efforts focus on supporting the local populace and HN [host nation] government. Political, social, and economic programs are usually more valuable than conventional military operations in addressing the root causes of conflict and undermining an insurgency.

This is hardly a new idea, as FM 3-24 freely admits, but — as one interpretation of the new manual and the publicity surrounding it goes — it represents a fundamentally new role for the military, who are now faced with a problem that cannot be solved by force. Depending on who you believe, the decrease in violence in Iraq over the last two years may be due to these radically new policies, the surge, or other factors entirely.

Three years later the US is still in Iraq, and Afghanistan — if anything, an even messier place — is finally starting to return to public consciousness. Obama has to make some decisions about these military strategy in these wars. What will his answers be?

Social network analysis can help us answer this question because ideas always live among a community of minds; those who develop ideas together tend to share them. The clusters in a social network are therefore proxies for distinct worldviews, or possible answers to a question.

COIN Policy Social Network

Without further ado, here is the social graph of those writing public counterinsurgency policy over the last decade (click for a larger image, or pdf).

Each node is a person, and an edge is drawn between any two individuals who collaborated on a document, or worked in the same group — hopefully a reasonable proxy for policy similarity. (Although this is a “social” graph, merely having been in the same place at the same time does not count as an edge.) I have assigned colors to larger clusters: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) think-tank is red, the authors of the revised FM 3-24 are green, and those from the RAND corporation are Cyan. CNAS and the FM 3-24 authors overlap in the person of John Nagl, in yellow.

Crucially, Obama (in blue) has selected Michèle Flournoy as his top Pentagon appointment, and Flournoy founded CNAS. There are other CNAS links: Colin Kahl was a military advistor to Obama during his campaign, and Lt. Nathaniel Fick spoke at the DNC in August in support of Obama. Fick and Nagl also recently co-authored a major policy paper on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which includes  an interview with Petraeus, another FM 3-24 author.

In other words: CNAS has adopted the military’s FM 3-24 strategy, and Obama has adopted CNAS. Therefore we should expect little change in the way that the military component of the American wars are currently prosecuted.

One of the advantages of CNAS is that it reprsents a unified, proflific, and highly visible body of strategic and policy thought. For Obama to choose another course, there has to be another course to choose. There are individual critiques of the Nagl/Fick position such as this by Afganistan social scientist Christian Bleuer, individual detractors such as the experienced but often wonky Edward Luttwak, and even the very sharp and compassionate Samantha Power, who was part of the Obama campaigin until (apparently) she referred to Hillary as “a monster.” But what Obama needs is a credible body of alternative policy.

Counterinsurgency as “Good Governance”

There is only one other major cluster on the graph. The  RAND Corporation (in cyan) is of course old-school defence establishment, but, unlike the FM 3-24 authors, they are not actually military. They have written a number of counterinsurgency documents since the start of the Iraq war, such as a long report by O’Connel and Pirnie which is summarized here. The RAND reports do not differ all that sharply from the Petraeus/Nagl policies, except that they see counterinsurgency as fundamentally more than a military operation:

Strategy should be developed at the highest level of government, by the President, his closest advisors, and his Cabinet offcials, with advice from the Director of  National Intelligence and regional experts, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Stfff, and unified commanders. … Counterinsurgency is a political-military effrt that requires both good governance and military action. It follows that the entire U.S. government should conduct that effort.

This is exactly the sort of “nation building” that Bush had hoped to dispense with. If implemented thoroughly, it might also amount to little more than a classic colonial government. To this I can only say: what did you expect when invading a foreign country?

About Building the Graph

This graph represents four days of very manual web-surfing, and it is very much a work in progress. Starting with Fick and Nagl, each name was googled on the web, in the news, and in scholarly publications,  and the top 20 or so results in each category were read to determine co-authorship of policy papers and organizational affiliations. Two people were connected if they had ever co-authored an article together, or worked in the same group at the same time. Doubtless, there are connections that I have missed, such as some of the other authors on today’s New York Times blogs piece which I will have to add. Also, because this process was so time-consuming, I had to make many choices not to include individuals or follow links. It is therefore entirely possible that the graph I have drawn is actually embedded into a larger network in such a way that it invalidates my conclusions; or that there is a credible cluster of people working on alternative policy that I simply never found (but then again, Obama hasn’t found them either.)

The graph proper was built by collecting a text file of web references, and manually entering people and  connections in a .dot file for use with Graphviz. Again, this took days — I cannot stress how manual the process was. These difficulties highlight the dire necessity of better information visualization tools for journalism.

[Update: this work has come to the attention of the COIN community, in particular the folks at Abu Muqawama who were kind enough to discuss what it might mean. Aside from the fact that the original version contained not one but three misspelled names (calling Mr. Flick!) they have pointed out that many important people and links are missing. No doubt -- as I discuss above and in my response on AbuM. I'd like to stress that this is a work in progres, but I would also like to ask those in the know if they feel my conclusions on this restricted graph are substantially correct even so. -- js]

Let me tell you about the Democrats’ superior economic policy. Let me offer you a history lesson about sparring Muslim sects. Let’s talk about the ideal character of a judicial nominee. No– wait. I apologize. I’m sorry. You don’t talk that way on a date. I’m a geek, an academic, a weirdo elitist intellectual. I’m attending a talk on green energy policy tonight; I sit at the front of classrooms and try to learn foreign languages, just like my man Obama. We sit at the same lonely table at the cafeteria. I bet he hides his despair at the idiots around him better than I ever did.

Biden tried to make sense. He radiated competence and experience. He talked to his peers. The voters are not his peers. They never studied law, they’ve never left the country. Palin said “soccer mom” and the Temple crowd booed. This crowd of young, educated, liberal, relatively affluenct West-Coast voters — my peers — they raged at the cheap shots. Me, I nodded in silent assent. Good move, Sarah. She’s the annoying and pretty girl who answers all the questions right in Soc. class. You know she’ll go far.

“John McCain is the man we need to leave…I mean lead,” she said, and the rest of the class erupted into hoots, throwing spitwads. Are we in this just to make ourselves feel better?

Because this was not a debate, this was sales. This was not aimed at those who take public policy seriously. This was aimed at the 25 year-old girl who works in retail all day before collapsing into her couch to watch American Idol with her boyfriend. This was for the working stiff who’s just too tired to peruse the dismal headlines at the end of the day, and goes straight to the sports section. Palin winked at the housewife whose husband works for the pharaceutical industry. I’ve been calling voters, and I know: we in San Francisco are the geeks. We’re the outcasts. What we think of the debates is irrelevant.

All it’s going to take for the Republicans to win the election is one good cheap shot on October 30th. Obama’s lead is deadly slim, when you actually read the error bars, and impossible though it may seem, something like a fifth of voters still haven’t made up their minds. This is why I don’t care to encourage Obama; I want to know my adversaries. I want to celebrate the honest talent of that girl with the perky smile who you just know is going to end up doing public relations — welcoming attractive and connected people to all the best parties — while the rest of us well-intentioned technocrats work the grey cubicles for one more generation.

[ if you'd like to talk to real voters yourself, please join me in phone banking this Sunday. ]

I’ve seen the world and I’ve lost religion. I know that no single victory will save us. Also: no one ever does anything for completely selfless reasons, and it’s a mistake to think that they should. This is the only standard I think I can actually live up to, and it’s more honest anyway: saving the world is just too easy a way to feel good about yourself, to feel different and special, or to forget the girl who dumped you.

Nonetheless, I spent four hours yesterday afternoon calling voters for Barack Obama. I did not expect to feel good about it. I do not even really expect that it will make a difference. But it seems a bloodless sort of way to support the world I want to live in. Also – and this is the real reason – I was damn curious. About myself, mostly.

I’ve seen better and worse governments, and while they all seem sort of fucked, some are far more fucked than others. In the United States, no one is getting shot for their politics, and that’s not nothing. Not every country is like this. That is civilization, my friend. That and clean water. So it’s easy for me to believe that the system isn’t completely screwed. My toilet flushes. Seems like a minor thing, until you don’t have it and people start dying of cholera. True story.

I don’t need people to believe. I don’t believe myself. I just want a president who at least talks about sustainable energy and universal health care. I don’t give a shit that the guy’s charismatic, other than the fact that it’s an asset in his game. I just want to live in a certain world, and I think that Obama will bring us closer to it. Fun fact: while Obama’s domestic support is around 50%, something like 80% of world citizens want him to be president. Curious, isn’t it?

So I stepped into the system and made those calls, because I wonder just how far within the status quo it’s worth working. And I wonder how I’ll feel about participating in utterly mainstream politics, the CNN circus. I called voters in Nevada and tried to convince them to vote for Barack Obama, and I did it mostly because I wanted to see how I felt about myself at the end of the day.

This made me somewhat reckless on the phone. And that made me real, because I could say whatever the hell I wanted. I’m still working out what that is.