Mything Iraq: The Invasion Was Swell

There are two related myths that drive the Iraq disaster deniers--the defenders of the Bush Administration--that the real problem was not the invasion but the aftermath.  "The invasion was swell, but the mission crept into an occupation and that was the big mistake."  Check out the discussion at foreignpolicy.com on this especially the claims made by Doug Feith.  I address the second claim elsewhere --that the US could have and should have avoided occupation*, but will address the first part here--that the invasion was dandy.

*  This, I guess, allows these folks to them be blameless for screwing up the occupation.  I mean, Doug Feith, really?  Really?  REALLY?

Again, the fans of the invasion argue that everything was going well until somehow the U.S. ended up owning Iraq and had to figure out what to do with it.  This ignores the reality that the invasion itself was a huge mess.  Yes, the U.S. military was able to overcome the limitations imposed by Rumsfeld (a small force, micromanaged from DC), bad weather, and the realization that helicopters are really vulnerable to get to Baghdad and not have to lay siege.  So, that all went well.  Well, sort of.

But that ignores the classic Clausewitz line that war is politics by other means, and we had plenty of politics in 2002-2003 that went quite poorly.  First, no weapons of mass destruction.  No real programs either.  Fans of the war like to glide past the reality that the supposed justification of the war was, well, just a wee bit empty.  Sure, the Bush folks wanted the war and wanted Hussein dead (mission accomplished indeed), but the entire war was justified not by Saddam's brutality to his own people (our concern about that is selective and inconsistent), not by bringing democracy to the region, or whatever else.  It was about WMD.  But nada.  Oops.  I remember being asked before the invasion what would happen if they found nothing, and I remember being at a loss of words.  Yes, me at a loss of words.  Hard to imagine.  Because even though I opposed the war, I figured that they could at least find some weapons program stuff, perhaps some chemicals or biological materials.  Nope.

ISA Blogging

If you are headed to the ISA, go to this event.  Meet me and a bunch of other bloggers who blog IR (broadly defined).

A Good Grilling

The US military deserves a good grilling for its handling of sexual assault, and Senator Gillibrand did a nice job here:


Her two key points:

• what does success look like?  Given the existing reality that there are tens of thousands of sexual assaults and only two hundred or so are prosecuted, it seems like the status quo is not so terrific--good order and discipline?  
• if the court martial rules x and the "convening authority" says not x, then we have a contradiction, right?

Together, these points are used to attack the key dynamic here--that the senior officer has complete authority to throw out convictions. It may be the case that there are good arguments to be made about unity of command or whatever, but clearly the system as it is currently designed is not working well in this area.  To say otherwise is to be in denial.

And, yes, given my previous rants about the US Air Force, I am most pleased to see it take the hit here.

Learning is Good But ...

Senator Rob Portman is getting praise today for switching his position on same sex marriage.  Woot!  He changed his mind once he learned his son is gay and that he should have the chance for lifetime love and all that.  How sweet!

I cannot help but be annoyed.  Not that he changed his mind.  That is swell.  Learning/evolution is great, but if our politicians can only learn from short-range empathy--when one's kin is involved--then I really am not that impressed.  Yes, it can take a heap of time for people to learn and adjust, realizing that they are on the wrong side of history.  Clinton just admitted last week that he was wrong to sign the DOMA legislation, but he was an opportunist then and now.  I doubt he thought DOMA was right, and his change of heart has less to do with gay relatives and more to do with not being President in 1994.

Must we assign one gay person to be a family member to each politician opposed to gay marriage?  What does this say about our larger political system?  Didn't we manage to get laws reversed on inter-racial marriage without politicians suddenly realizing they had black kids or kids in love with black kids?

Again, this is great that we have one more politician on the right side of history.  But the causal process here says something to me that does not fill me full of joy and happiness.  I wish our politicians had more empathy for those who they did not know.  But I guess I will settle for whatever it takes.

Update
This tweet expresses my views better than I can:

Eventually one of these Republican congressmen is going to find out his daughter is a woman, and then we're all set.
— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 15, 2013

Armed and Dangerous?

Moving to Canada in 2002 means I keep learning about stuff in mid-story.  The latest news is that the Canadian Forces are being re-branded as the Canadian Armed Forces.  I never really knew where the old CF name came from, but it turns out that Prime Minister Chretien dropped the Armed from the original CAF.*  The easy joke would be that as he cut the military's budget, he also saved money by reducing their name.  But one can speculate about soft power and peacekeeping and all that.

* Correction: CF has been used prior to Chretien (thanks to Phil Lagasse for pointing this out to me).

The relevance is that the Conservatives are now using CAF again.  The key piece of legislation on Canadian defence stuff, the National Defence Act, apparently allows for both, so either name will do.  CAF plays well in the defence community as "“it does, in our small circle within the armed forces and those who are around it, give a sense of what we’re actually about.”"  During the early days of the Afghanistan effort, journalists would ask if the CF were trained for combat.  The answer, of course, was yes, combat was their day job.  So, I see the point that reminding folks about the A might not be a bad idea.

However, after so many years of killing and being killed in and near Kandahar, the CF has pretty well established it is a combat force, so there is little need to re-brand.  Still, with budget cuts and Harper's own inclinations to manage risk (message management?), there is little chance of significant combat (unless dropping bombs on those who cannot reply in kind counts) in the near future.  Perhaps there is a greater need for a CAF in an era of no deployments.

My preference? Well, I like the CF as it is.  The Forces sounds pretty cool to me and distinct.  Other countries have armed forces--Canada simply has the Forces.  But then again, I am new here compared to these institutions, and I have a keen fondness for Star Wars, so "Force" sounds good to me.

Bad At Chicken

For the past couple of weeks, we have seen story after story about how awful, how capricious, how counter-productive the cuts of sequestration are.  Well, yeah.  Of course.  The idea was to create a chicken game where both sides (Obama and the GOP in Congress) would be forced to compromise (swerve) rather than crash. 

But it didn't work.  They failed to compromise so we are the survivors of the car crash.  One problem here, and a foreseeable one, is that repetition (iteration) in Prisoner's Dilemma provides incentives for cooperation, but not so much so for Chicken if I remember correctly.  If you know you are going to playing Chicken over and over again with the same player, it makes sense to be insane/uncooperative in the first round so that you can the other side to give in then and all the way down the road. 

Of course, the other problem is that these two player games ignore the fact that there are games within games.  The GOP is divided, and faces the prospect of primary races against folks even less reasonable (hard to imagine?).  So, each Republican must position themselves as unwilling to compromise for fear of losing to some candidate who never had to make a decision that had consequences.  Lovely. 

So, I raise two possibilities: that the future of the game casts an unfortunate shadow on today's game or that the other games--the outbidding primary process--make the rational play for one's narrow concerns be irrational for the collective. 

If it is simply the case that these folks do not know how to play chicken, I provide this video to illustrate:




However, from outside observers, it looks more like this:

The Worst Union of Them All?

Would you believe that there are public servants who have contempt for the public they serve?  Ok, not so hard to believe.  And given that unions often exaggerate the worst tendencies/preferences of a minority of a group, we perhaps should not be surprised when the Quebec civil servants union displays much contempt for the Angophone minority.  The QC union representing those working in government want essentially to eliminate any obligation/instinct to assist the Anglophones dealing with tax problems or otherwise work in English with those who are not comfortable in French. 

“What emerges from these few testimonials is the obligation for frontline staff to provide services in English under pressure from citizens,” the union wrote.  “While they should feel supported by their immediate superiors [in insisting on working in French], employees fear the warnings and penalties that could follow.”  As the union sees it, a “shameful bilingualism” is invading the civil service, and union president Lucie Martineau said the Parti Québécois government’s Bill 14, which updates the language charter known as Bill 101, does not go nearly far enough to correct things. ...
What is remarkable is that the union representing civil service workers has enthusiastically joined a campaign aimed explicitly at reducing service to citizens.
“We must repair the gaping holes left by Bill 101 that allowed rampant bilingualism to infiltrate the public administration,” the union wrote.

WTF?  Oh, the joy of tyranny of the majority.  The people who serve the public do not want to serve a chunk of the public.  Lovely.   It is one thing to ask a public service to start learning a language to catch up to a new group of people who have moved into the country.  It is another to say: you know the folks who have lived here for centuries?  Screw them.

The funny thing is that Quebec's bilingualism always seemed quite selective to me--very bilingual when it wanted my money (tax forms, parking/speeding tickets) and very unilingual when it came to grant applications and the like.  Why would Quebec want to make it harder for Anglophones to pay their taxes?  

To lobby to deny Anglophones from getting government services?   Just awful.  Democracy is such a wonderful thing, but we need basic protections to protect the minority from the majority.  Quebec does not seem to care about tyranny of the majority when they are the relative majority. 

So Much Squee!

I am not blogging much this week, as I am accompanying Teen Spew as she checks out Ontario universities.  Today was Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.  It is my Canadian home away from away from home--my third most visited Canadian city/town.  The folks were friendly and informative.  They made a great impression.  We shall see what becomes of it.

But instead of any real thought, all I can do is provide this:


chock full of cuteness, not unlike the students at Queen's trying so hard to impress (and succeeding).

On to Toronto!

Too Many Political Scientists?

Check out this figure:

Law and Courts

Will Moore (who posted the link first), Christopher Zorn and I have been tweeting about this.  To me, this looks awful, given how the academic job market has been, especially of late.  Will suggests this is a post 9/11 thing, which implies that more interest in government, government jobs and such may be playing a role here.  Christopher suggests that the numbers include folks entering MPA programs--Master's in Public Administration.  This depresses me further, because we have seen heaps of government job cuts the past few years. 

What is going on?  I have no clue, but the bump from 2008 to 2009/10 levels might be as folks flee the law school market.  We know that one is collapsing.  Overall, we have seen a near-doubling of people in MA/MPA/PhD programs in Political Science/Public Administration in a bit more than a decade.  Does the Dept of Homeland Security require MA's?  Department of Defense?  Are these all new military officers needing some extra PME (professional military education) in the enlarged military? 

I surely hope that this MA figure is really just that--MA figures and do not stand for a similarly upward trend in political science PhD students.  That would suck bigtime for the profession.  Given the stability in Anthro and Sociology along with the relatively steady increase in Econ students, it could very well be that the big change is at the MA level and not the PhD level.

Ah, too much and too little information all at once.  Any better guesses than mine?  And yes, that would be any guess.

Paying for Academic Job Market Advice? Just Say No

How do we know the job market is broken for academics?  Because people are willing to spend money hiring advisers.  Really.  This article documents the costs of being on the market these days.  To be clear, this piece is deceptive and unrepresentative.  But as a result, it is representative.  Huh?  How does that make any sense?

Because the academic job market is so tough, it is poorly understood, and people then perhaps over-think what it takes to succeed.  Plus some stuff has changed, some has not.

First, let's talk about the biggest expense: conference travel.  In some fields (not political science), going to the national conference is a must as there are interviews there that weed out many folks or even perhaps choose the winning candidate (I have no idea how those fields operate).  The reality is that whether one is marketing at a conference or not, going to conferences is the cost of being a professional professor.  Aspirants need to go to learn how to profess--how to present research, what research is hot, to network outside of the presentation rooms, etc.  Going to the interviews should be just one part of a much larger and essentially required event.  The change may be that there might be less $$$ support for students to go to such events.  My students got some money from my departments, but did pay a fair amount themselves.  They tried to save money (sometimes) by splitting rooms, staying off-site, etc.  Universities have cut travel support for professors as well as for students, so getting grant money or covering the costs oneself (tax deduction) is a way of life.  If you don't want to go to conferences, don't join the profession which is an inherently social enterprise.  Sorry, but that is just the reality.

Second, do NOT pay for advice.  Your adviser should be advising you.  Whether your adviser is up to the task or not, there are other sources of free advice--peers, past graduates, other professors in the department, people you have met at conferences or even twitter pals (I provided some advice this year to a twitter pal who got a new job, and I am most pleased with the outcome).*

*To be clear, the person deserved the new job--I doubt my advice had anything to do with his/her success.

The reality is that there is actually less mystery to the process, so that a paid adviser really is not going to pierce the veil of the job market much better than other folks.  Sure, you can buy a book or two, but do not pay an adviser.  That is, unless you give me chocolate chip cookies or good beer.  I am cheap that way (no wine, please).

Third, interfolio apparently sucks.  The per cost adds up.  The bad news is that universities used to cover these costs--my packages of recommendation letters and transcripts were sent out by UCSD long after I left.  These days, with budget cuts, departments do this less.  The good news is that more departments now accept letters via online systems or email, so it makes it easier for a recommender to send out a bunch of letters.  Just do not give profs the job of mailing stuff--we suck at envelopes, mailing and other basic tasks that require being organized. 

Fourth, don't major in English lit. Someone entering a Phd program in English lit in the 21st century should know that the job market in that field will be mighty tough.  Sorry, but it is true.  I worry about political science aplenty, and caution students who want to head on to grad school.  I wonder what English profs are telling aspirants other than RUN AWAY.

Am I blaming the victim here?  There is plenty of blame to go around--that universities have followed incentives to produce more PhDs while cutting back on tenure track positions;' that departments work on many things but often not so much on getting their students placed; that plenty of professors are truly crappy advisers, refusing to read their students' stuff, giving lousy, out of date advice for the job market, and committing other crimes and misdemeanors; and students will often obsess about that which they cannot control instead of doing what they can.

What can students do?  Work really hard, publishing before they go on the market.  Work creatively, so that their ideas stand out.  Be as well trained as possible so that one has the appropriate tools for the question (and I am a firm believer that the question determines the tools).  Take a look at the CVs of those who get jobs--not just the content but the style, and check out the helpful blogs on such stuff.  Seek out advice from many sources, not just one.  If your adviser sucks, get a new one.  Either formally or informally.  Build networks of friends in your department and beyond so that you can get advice and not just groupthink.  Do not believe what you read at the job rumor sites.

The academic job market is hard, it takes a great deal of patience, it requires a heap of self-awareness, confidence (well, faked confidence that is short of arrogance), luck and more.  I am so glad I am not coming out of grad school today as the competition is mighty stiff.  I did finish my PhD at a really bad time (just not as bad as this time), it took me three years to find a tenure track position, and it was in Lubbock.  But my journey has been a rewarding one, ultimately.  Even it took three years to find any ultimate in Lubbock.

Good luck.


 

The Walking Prisoner's Dilemma

Last night, the Walking Dead embraced the prison the crew has been inhabiting for some time by simulating the Prisoner's Dilemma. 


Spoilers below

Sunday SIlliness: Game of Thrones Edition

Why have children?  Well, eventually it pays off.  In this case, my daughter found this:

Next Steps in VoterFraudFraud

Doonesbury says it so well:

Yep, if you cannot appeal beyond a narrowing portion of the electorate, change the electorate.

Saturday Silliness: Dating in the 21st Century

Mucho glad I am not single for many reasons (including some that have to do with Mrs. Spew), but here is another one:

Writing For Free: It's Academic

The topic of writing and compensation has seemed to become a bit viral in the past week or two.  In the pundit/analyst-sphere, the Atlantic took some hits from folks for asking for pieces for free or nearly free.  See this exchange between a freelance writer and the magazine/outlet and then see this piece for a good set of links.  In the book world, this has come up a bit differently.  Apparently, Random House has a few imprints that have new contracts that eliminate advances and ask the writers to wait for their share of the profits once the book's unspecified/unrestricted costs are all covered.  John Scalzi (who wrote the uber-wonderful Redshirts) is not pleased.

I see much merits in Scalzi's arguments and those by the freelance writers who feel exploited.  Yet I write for free.  I write a lot for free.  Sure, the Spew is free.  I have not set this up for ads as I don't expect to have enough traffic to make sense to advertise.  Sure, the academic journals we publish in do not pay us.*  I am just glad I am not paying to have my stuff published in journals--in some fields, the journals do charge a price for submitting pieces. Journal of Politics did that for a while--a nominal fee that was quite galling.  I would not expect to be paid to publish in journals since we are supposed to be disseminating our knowledge via scientific outlets.  Publishing is essentially a job requirement, so my day job pays me to write and to publish, so I get paid for my writing that way. 

* There is a big movement these days to ungate the academic journals, which I do think is swell.  However, as a sidenote to this Spew, I would just say that this would not really lead to heaps of non-academic engagement.  Our journal articles are written for academic audiences.  If we want non-academics to understand what our articles are about, we need to do other stuff, like blog, to convey our findings.  Non-academics are not going to read fairly indigestible stuff even it becomes free and ungated.

When it comes to books, I am one for four in getting advances (not the first book and not the new ones).  One could argue that books are like journal articles--disseminating knowledge and a job requirement.  More importantly, we academics are desperate to get our works published in the best, most visible presses.  So, we sell our work for cheap.  Not for free, as we do eventually get paid, but since our sales are so low (measured in hundreds, perhaps a few thousand unless we write about Zombies or otherwise produce a hot textbook) that the amounts are often very small indeed.  Kind of hard to demand advances if the book ekes out only a small profit.

How about the medium that started this conversation--online magazines (and perhaps also print journalism)?  I am cutting back a bit on how much I do for free.  I post regularly at a few blogs that are free, and I have a regular column at CIC which does pay a bit.  I tend not to submit op-eds to newspapers anymore since CIC is a good outlet, they pay and newspapers do not.  And newspapers are uncertain and take forever to get back to you.  I will occasionally write for free for an outlet if it has an audience I want to reach.  I just got invited to write for a military-industrial complex magazine, and it will be fun to send an uncomfortable opinion in that direction.

So, I do feel a bit of guilt providing free content at a time when freelancers are under heaps of pressure.  But there is a big difference between those folks and myself.  Dissemination is part of my day job, and reaching beyond academic audiences is now an increasingly significant expectation.  Still, I will try to be conscious about not giving my writing free to outlets that are likely to be exploitative (Huffington, anyone?). 

Les Xenophobes

Sure, I have written about the upside of xenophobia (that hate of others might serve as a brake on war if the consequence of that war might be the inclusions of many "others" into one's political system).  But I am not a fan of it, especially when it is so very unnecessary.

Are the Anglophones of Quebec a threat to French in Quebec?  No.  The threat to French would be things like the internet, the U.S., and the 21st century economy.  So, see if the following changes to Bill 101 make any sense at all for protecting French from these forces:

Courtesy of the CBC

How does any of this protect French?  Oh, making it harder for Francophones to learn English in CEGEPs (the free colleges in between high school and university) will make it harder to compete in the world economy, but will it do anything else?  Will giving yet more powers to the language police prevent Quebeckers from being stuff at amazon.ca (the Canadian version of Amazon.com)?  The reality is that French does dominate the marketing of goods in Quebec, although folks can still buy stuff in English.  And, yes, microwave machines may have on and off switches. 

This is just stupid on a stick.  But it probably plays well to the PQ's non-Montreal base. 

Have I said lately how glad I am to have left Quebec?  Probably.  And, yes, Quebec was a significant part of why I left McGill.  Not the entire reason as Carleton/NPSIA is a great place for me to do my work, that Ottawa has many attractions, but, yes, I did not enjoy this particular dimension of Quebec.  Moreover, this nationalist politics not only had implications for the marketplace, but for the entire political system.  The PQ has long competed not on providing good public service but on nationalist issues, which provided a very nice environment for corruption to grow and for the infrastructure of Montreal to fall apart.  There are so many ways that this language politics stuff sucks even if it kind of makes sense from a cynical "how to we best breed ignorance and thus support for our party" kind of way.

I do believe there is a French phrase for all of this: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Breaking Bad, 1995 style credits

As the time approaches for the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad, I am sure we will be seeing more things like this:

Counter-What? Not Very Intuitive

This article discusses the importance of doing counter-intuitive work in the social sciences:

We love our counterintuitive findings. And for fields such as psychology, they’re almost a necessity. If new conclusions already gel with our beliefs, goes the common refrain, why was precious taxpayer money ever wasted on the study in the first place? (I find the prospect of a society populated by commenters on most social science articles chilling.) Never mind that because our beliefs are not immune to prevailing worldviews, what we find intuitive has almost certainly been shaped by the past observations of—you guessed it—social scientists. And never mind that despite the ease with which new findings morph into old news, many established psychological phenomena still aren’t intuitive.
The counterintuitive has its place. But our love affair comes at a cost. It leaves little room in the public consciousness for social scientific work that is incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions—those fragile social and mental habitats upon which decisions turn. In other words, it leaves little room for most of social science.

Excellent points.  The pressure to be counter-intuitive can be counter-productive, as one twists their work to present it as "surprising... ta da!"  Looking back, I have found myself socialized into thinking being counter-intuitive is the uber-thing.  My first book found that ethnic ties drove foreign policy towards ethnic conflict elsewhere.  Not exactly surprising.  Yet that was not the conventional wisdom back in the day.  Nay, the conventional wisdom was that countries did not support secessionist movements elsewhere if they faced such folks at home.  People still buy that crap, which means they didn't buy my book.

Adventures in Mentoring

After presenting my take on Smart Defence yesterday at the U of Toronto, I spent this morning chatting with a friend's grad student. It has been awhile since I gave my advice to a phd student about how to approach the job market, as my last bunch is employed, and my new ones are not close to being done.

This chat reminded me of the iron law of dissertations: just because you learned something does not mean it belongs in the dissertation.  In this case, it applied to me-- not everything I learned while researching the NATO-Afghanistan book belonged in that book.... Or my next one but the next one will definitely make use of some of that stuff.  

 The biggest point that I emphasized was that one must always keep in mind the short and long games at the same time.  That the publication process is a long one so if one just focuses on what it takes to do well next fall, one might not submit stuff now to help improve one's record for the following fall in case one is not successful.  Better to spend a few weeks now to polish a piece and submit it so that it sits on someone else's desk rather than on one's own.

In the course of this conversation, I realized that my last three students did not do what I recommended (PUBLISH much) before they went on the market.  Then I had lunch with one of the these folks, who was just returning from some place dangerous and, more importantly, chock full of really interesting questions and ideas.  I don't know how I avoided stifling her creative curiosity or that of her sisters-in-crimeresearch, but I am pretty sure that was the key to their success.  That they zestfully pursue interesting questions in ways that knock the socks off of folks.

  I am lucky enough to take credit for their success, not to mention being wildly entertained by their adventures since leaving the nest. Makes the wading through reams of rough drafts of chapters, even (yuck) lit reviews, worth it.

Rank Rankings continued

I have never been a big fan of rankings of universities and programs, but I will take responsibility for this one.  You see, last year McGill was ranked 25th in the world and now it is 31st.  What changed?  I left.  Sure, I thought that my departure might cause McG to move down one spot in the rankings, maybe two, but six?  Wow. I would say I am sorry, but I am loving Carleton and Ottawa.

Seriously though, this change is both irrelevant and significant.  They are irrelevant as they will not affect anything directly--it will not change the students that apply, it will not affect the school's ability to hire faculty and so on.  Rankings matter most to media and to the administrative folks. 

The rankings are significant because McGill is under stress--that the funding system in Quebec is more broken than funding of universities in the rest of North America--and that is saying something.  The attempt to raise tuition failed when the Liberals lost the election to the pandering Parti Quebecois.  The PQ has now found out that the entitled student movement will fight even token increases.  Of course, the funny thing is that these students are not fighting cuts in how much Quebec spends on universities.  Which directly contradicts the premise of a free higher university education--that dream depends on more government money (which comes from unicorns, I guess) going to universities, not less.  Anyhow, McGill does face a very dark future, as it must face more and more cuts even in the middle of the fiscal year, and with members of the PQ saying ominous things about balancing university spending (less for McGill, in other words). 

The reality is that not that much changed in who taught at McGill (other than my departure) between last year and this year, not much changed in the quality/quantity of research, not much changed in the quality of the students (the students there are terrific).  But the reputation of six schools improved relatively to McGill.  The thing to keep in mind here is that reputation is (dare I say it?) a social construction.  It is not real in the sense that x number of pubs plus x number of Phds plus whatever other factors produce rank x.  No, it is about how the community of the rankers feel about the various universities.  Usually, we do not see much dramatic change from year to year because people do not change their opinions much and do not tend to do much research when they face such surveys.  But McG has been in the news--the protests, the cuts, how Quebec and the PQ are aiming directly at this island of English excellence--so it may have swayed some perceptions. 

The really important thing is that the cuts will continue---and they will affect the quality of the place, perceived by the world or not.  And that is sad and unfortunate and unnecessary.  But who said that Quebec public policy was anything but sad and unfortunate .....