Pondering Patriotism

I remember a key moment in my undergraduate education: in the Intro to International Relations class, we were discussing patriotism. The prof asked who was patriotic, and since this was Oberlin, only one person raised their hand. Me. So, I was asked about my flag-flying habits and the like, and I struggled to come up with examples of "patriotic" behavior. I certainly am not and was not a patriot in terms of thinking that my country could do no wrong, but I was, at the time, thinking that the US was something I was proud of and perhaps even thought it was not only a great country, but better than the alternatives.

What do I think now? Well, I cringe when I read parts of the health care debate where people refuse to consider the examples of other countries because the US is the greatest country on the planet and in history. While I am often critical of Canada in my entries here, I think I am pretty aware of many American weaknesses and past/present mistakes. As a political scientist, I like to think comparatively, which means that I see when the US is doing something that is inferior to that happening elsewhere--such as having a health care debate where death panels and the like are the foci. It does drive me crazy when Canadians only consider the American health care example, but drives me far more insane that many Americans cannot consider the examples of other countries because of the sense that whatever the US does is inherently better than the alternatives.

I think the discussion in the class focused on the classic question--would I be willing die for my country? And I gave a classically hedged response--it depends. Is the war a good cause or not? [Let's sidestep the discussion of just war and of just ways of fighting wars]

The example of the time was Vietnam, but today I would compare Iraq and Afghanistan. I could imagine myself enlisting to fight in Afghanistan, particularly in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 but not to fight in Iraq. And spending a year in the Pentagon during wartime made me value the values of these officers more deeply--duty, honor, love of country, etc.

But this raises the question of whether patriotism is unconditional--is love of country like loving one's kids? Given that the founders of the US, for all of their flaws (slave owning/condoning, etc), were focused on the role of reason in democracy and engaged in reasoned debate in the course of writing the constitution (Federalist Papers, etc.), I do think that the best way to be a Patriotic American is not to blindly support the country in everything it does, but to raise questions about the best courses of action and give enthusiastic support when it is warranted. And criticize and organize against a policy when it seems "unreasonable."

There are valid reasons to oppose the health care reform bills, and reasoning Americans can disagree about the merits of the various bills. But reasoning Americans should be able to learn from what other countries have done and borrow that which works well.

I still tend to think that the US is, ahem, a great country, and the proof is in the flows of people seeking to immigrate and what happens to them over the course of a few generations. Openness is the key, but a reasoned openness. We don't have to believe nor need to publicize the craziest conspiracy theories as being valid arguments. And it would be nice if the debate focused on the key realities of the various proposals and, just as importantly, the costs of continuing the status quo.

Then again, to paraphrase Dumbledore, as a great country, US mistakes are far greater.

The New Prof Speaks

Our former Attorney General was interviewed by the NY Times. Ug. TTU's new visiting professor seems as desperate for love and attention and oblivious to the counter-productive results of such an attitude as I was as a 14 year old boy seeking a girlfriend. Perhaps too much information, but you get the idea. I am not sure Judd Apatow could make a movie with this much repulsive awkwardness. Not even Ricky Gervais.

Has any law firm offered you a job since you left the White House?
Listen, I’ve had some interest and I’ve had some discussions, but there has been no offer made. In a tough economic climate, I can understand why a company or a firm would want to make sure that the investigations are complete and there is no finding of wrongdoing before they make a hiring decision.

Do you have a publisher for your book yet?
No.

Do you still talk to President Bush?
I have not spoken with the president since he left office.

Have you ever been tempted to pick up the phone and say hi to him?
I do, of course, think about our time together, and there are times when I think about doing that. But listen, I know that he has his life to live. I’ve got challenges and my life to live as well.

Health Care Reform Simplified

Here it is in just a few easy slides. Big punchline--White House should have focused the debate on reforming insurance industry, not health care. Who likes insurance companies? Only those who work for them.

Thanks to Steve Greene for the link.

Another Bad Movie Idea: I Know Nothing!

Just to continue a running theme into the ground, let's consider an alternative source of bad movie ideas: re-makes. The big new remake is Red Dawn, which was a perfectly silly movie for the early 1980's/2nd Cold War era--Latin American countries fall to Communism and the US is invaded by Soviet and Cuban troops through Mexico. They are stopped at the Mississippi and the Rockies, with high school kids (led by Patrick Swayze, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen and C. Thomas Howell) leading a band of guerrillas self-named Wolverines reaking havoc in Colorado. A fun though pretty stupid flick.

So, there is a remake in progress, and my Facebook friends are pondering who the enemy might be this time with China as the likely answer. But really, this movie belonged in an era where the President was calling the adversary the evil empire and talk of civil defense (including digging a hole and then placing a door over it as a possible quick bunker) dominated the day.

What other movies can we bring back, making a silly premise absolutely absurd?

Well, they already did McHale's Navy. How about Hogan's Heroes? One of my absolute favorite TV shows. In today's context, one could go in two directions
--where Guantanamo is Stalag 13 and the Americans play the roles of the Germans in the original series
--or the Taliban have a prison based somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, and the plucky crew of American/Canadian/British/French/Dutch/Danish (and perhaps one ironic German) soldiers/officers are constantly undermining the efforts of their wacky/stupid Taliban guards. Perhaps Al Qaeda types will play the visiting scary but not so bright visiting superiors like the Gestapo (Major Hofstader) did in the original series: "What is this man doing here!!!!???"

I would choose the latter as it would play much better in the American marketplace. Indeed, we can play with stereotypes, with the American officer as a bit more hard-charging (but still trying to romance every Afghani woman around--a bit more challenging than Hilda and Helga); the long-haired, peace-loving Dutch soldier, the snarky Canadian more upset about losing ice-time and missing Tim Horton's than the progress of the war (perhaps played by a French Canadian woman?); the German soldier always staying behind to man the radio since his rules of engagement make him a liability in the field (just as Kinch's race made it hard for him to masquerade as a German during the original series); and so on.


PS It sounds really bad, but might be good category: Disney is making an Anne Frank movie--written by David Mamet. This could be really good or really bad....

Worst Movie Idea of the Millennium of the Week

A Lego movie? Don't get me wrong. I loved playing with them as a kid (really only played with them when I visited my cousins--too late for me, I guess) and wish my daughter had been more into them so I could have played with them in my 30's. But this just reeks of Hollywood having lost its imagination. Just as a really cool non-Hollywood movie appears, District 9, we have the dumpster-diving of the mainstream studios. And I am a big fan of big Hollywood movies, as this blog has repeatedly demonstrated.

I guess I could be a Hollywood producer with ideas like:

1. Tinkertoys--The plot focuses on desperate efforts of a few heroes to build the frames of buildings, which, for some obscure reason are needed for national defense.
2. Lincoln Logs--A battle between lumberjacks and environmentalists, resolved when both sides see the need for some selective harvesting to build greener houses.
3. Twister--A slasher flick. Sure, it all starts out as fun and games, but someone has planted mines under selected spots on the mat and the game because one of Russian roulette!
4. Operation--A patient comes in the hospital with multiple injuries, but the patient is booby-trapped and the doctors must take care not to set off the bombs as they try to save the patient.

Any other awful ideas?

Must Read: Learning about Past and Future Native American History

As an online gambler dependent on computer servers largely based on First Nations (Canadian equivalent of Native Americans, more or less) territory, I found this series to be must reading. We, I think I can generalize here, are poorly educated about the past and contemporary history of those who lived in North American before all those pesky immigrants illegally (or not) migrated to North America.

This series has two people with Native American ancestry visiting at least one (series is but young) casino on a reservation in California.

Anyway, to argue that it's "unfair" that we were "given" casinos is as silly as lamenting that it's unfair that the U.S. government "gave" Canada much better strip clubs and, out of pity, "gave" Sweden great health care and beautiful women.

A lot of people from different classes and ethnicities and walks of life. And all of us, together, keep on giving and giving and giving, even if all of us don't win, and certainly never all at once.

Read and then react.

Where is the 21st Century Don Draper?

Yesterday, I posted a bit about the impact of the internet on advertising--perhaps anticipating the return of Mad Men in the aftermath of my Harry Potter obsession. Today, Salon has a great piece about the realities of advertising and what happened to the business in the 1960s. Turns out Sterling Cooper is much further behind the times than is already portrayed as other firms already had women in key positions, but also as the business changed to focus less on wordy ads and more on emotional ones.

I closed yesterday's post with a speculation that I did not develop particularly well--that with the rise of the internet, advertising would decline in cost. As someone with no advertising expertise or business experience, let me continue my uninformed speculation. Advertisting, as I have always understood it, exists because the assumptions of the market are wrong--that we don't have perfect information about the goods and services we seek, so intermediaries can spring up to tell us which products are more desirable (and, also, we can be persuaded to re-think what we desire). It might be the case that we are getting closer to perfect, cost-free information with the internet. It is far easier to advertise online via craigslist or one's own website to sell stuff including real estate. This is what is killing the newspapers and what may transform television.

But if it is easy to advertise without sophisticated ad campaigns, we should expect smaller and less expensive advertising companies who can figure out how to ease one's entry onto the net. This should lead to less expenses for businesses seeking to advertise and cheaper products as a key expense declines. We are already seeking companies drop sponsorships of golf tournaments, rights to their names on stadia, etc.

Ah, but there is a catch. Too much information is not perfect information. There will still need to be experts who can get a key message heard above the cacophony. So, ultimately, advertising companies will not go away, but will have to transform themselves to do better in this information-rich environment. So, I guess I am not saying, Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be Ad People (or Mad Men, who, according the Salon piece, died out a long time ago). But we are, as the Chinese proverb goes, living in interesting times.




PS The image was made using amctv.com's make yourself a Mad Men game--I am the one with the beard.

It All Depends on the Question You Ask [Updated]

Marc Lynch has a great post on Afghanistan--questioning not about how to do COIN the best but whether that is the best choice for the US. Does it make sense for the US to try to do "armed state-building" as Lynch puts it? Or would a more minimal strategy of keeping enough forces in or around Afghanistan to deny it as a haven for Al Qaeda be the right way to go?

Having just spent 20 minutes or so on a radio station or two in Alberta arguing that the Canadians should stay in Kandahar, I have to spend some time thinking of how to reply to Marc's question.

Lee Hamilton, former head of the House Foreign Relations committee, among other jobs, posted an op-ed today with a similar set of concerns:

Strategically, there are two broad and fundamental questions to be answered. First, how will our departure impact our regional and security interests over the next decade and longer? And second, is this type of war really the best use of American power and resources in today's world?

Good questions. But then Hamilton concludes with them--he provides no answers. Ug.

Still need to think about these questions..... More to follow


PS Things not so good in Iraq.

Mad Man? You betcha.

The internet has done much good, but it has undermined conventional media by providing alternative ways to advertise. This article, which reviews a couple of books, suggests that television is in deep trouble, and could follow the newspaper industry into the abyss.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Yes, I am a TV addict. It is bad enough that we are stuck with endless reality tv programs and five nights of Jay Leno. But if we lose the good programs because they require heaps of cash that advertisers will not put up anymore, then we will be quite sad indeed. Pop culture will have a huge hunk of its heart ripped out.

The only comfort I can take in this, besides the additional time I would have to download inferior crap online, is that there will be a few enterpreneurs who will figure out how to make money by offering up good tv programs. Of course, that will mean we will have to pay for it, but we will be able to save money as well when all of our products no longer have big advertising budgets built into their costs.

Beware of Dragons!

Any internet activity at all can raise all kinds of risks. Blogging is clearly one of the more likely ways one is going to find unwanted attention. Thus far, this blog has not been problematic. However, I did dip my waters into the Political Science Rumor Blog, and posted under my own identity as opposed to anonymously. There had been much wild speculation about jobs at McGill as well as folks pondering whether a degree at a Canadian univ. such as McGill would help or hurt on the American academic job market.

So, I entered the fray and after anonymous posts seemed to get no respect, I posted as myself to be clear about a job search we were having at the time. In doing so, folks then raised suspicions about my presence and my posts. Which raise the question whether the internet generation is actually so cynical of what they see online that they seek nefarious motives everywhere?

But, my alternative would be to remain silent, and there is little I do worse than keeping quiet.

But What I Really Want to Do Is Direct

Interesting piece on Bobcat Goldthwait. He is directing and writing some interesting movie projects, and his standup now is just to finance his movies. Indeed, he seems to be reluctant to do standup. Which is too bad, as he absolutely killed at the Just for Laughs festival. We saw him at the "All-Star Gala" where only Louis CK came close, and he blew away John Cleese, Paul Rodriguez, Louie Anderson, Caroline Rhea, etc. He combined material with some great reactions to the evening's events. Just a great performance--best of the fest, including the other shows we saw.

If This Is What We Are Doing Well

Previous post addresses governance in Afghanistan, something that everybody has been admitting has been going poorly. In my trip in December 2007 and everywhere else, I have consistently heard that the training of the Afghan National Army is going well. Yeah, ok. Not so much. This is bad news--counter-insurgency works best if done by the locals, but if the locals are making little progress, then that is bad news. Of course, this takes time, and the international community has only gotten serious about doing COIN and building the ANA since perhaps 2006 or 2007---only a couple of years. If we can put in another ten years, then perhaps enough progress will be made.

But, do we have that kind of time? Canada does not; the Dutch do not. The US, despite all of the gnashing of teeth about this being Obama's war, probably does have that kind of time. 9/11==Pearl Harbor. That makes all the difference in the world. Still, there is a need to demonstrate progress, hence the concern about metrics. Making this theatre THE show in US foreign and defense policy is the right move since this is the priority and it does have domestic support. It does raise the stakes, which is actually a good thing as that will concentrate the minds of the folks in the Pentagon and elsewhere.

But our eyes must remain open so that we can see where we are going and what we have left to do.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

Afghanistan's presidential election is showing how democracy can be, well, undemocratic and de-legitimating. Electoral competition can provide greater accountability, but this is not always the case. Karzai, to win the election, has co-opted his competitors and apparently sold out to the warlords. This effort, combined with his stances on collateral damage which have weakened support for the ISAF effort inside and outside the country, may mean that rather than gaining little progress in the governance part of the effort, we may be moving backwards. Forget the "may," Afghanistan is moving backwards on governance--which is the heart of any successful counter-insurgency effort.

Quote of the Day

"Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." from the WP.

I have already addressed this earlier, but it does seem to be going further and further down the rabbit hole. Let's all this say it together: Sore Losers!

Measuring Metrics

The Obama Administration is behind in developing "metrics" of success for the mission in Afghanistan. They apparently want to get it right. I am not surprised as there is no consensus among experts on counter-insurgency about how to measure success. The article cited here criticizes my favorite metric--the rate at which the indigenous population gives actionable intelligence to those doing COIN. It did not perform too well, as violence was increasing at the time that the "rat rate" was trending favorably.

However, to be clear, violence, as I think I have said before, is a lousy indicator of anything. It does matter politically here and there, but violence can increase or decrease for a variety of reasons, many unrelated to progress on the ground.

I considered last year to apply for one of the mega-grants the US Dept of Defense was setting up to do exactly this--to figure out how to measure progress (or regress) in Afghanistan. I decided not to apply for several reasons: it would distort my research agenda for years; the probabilty of success was low for a grant that would require a lot of work; and it was far enough way from what I really know well that I would have a hard time designing the proposal. And now, as it turns out, the government is spending a great deal of effort on this.

Two other takeaways from this article--this administration does not mind learning from the previous one, and would rather be a bit late and get something right.

A Generation of Movie Fans Weep

I think my facebook friends have more status updates and links to John Hughes than they did to Michael Jackson, but I could be wrong. It is clear that Hughes had an amazing run as a director and more so as a writer. He only directed (according to imdb.com) eight movies, but these included two of the most important teen movies not just of the 1980s but of all time--Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (others also rate Sixteen Candles quite highly). He also wrote the Vacation movies, the Home Alone movies, and even the most recent Drillbit Taylor.

Breakfast Club deliberately played with the stereotypes and tropes that lesser high school flicks just run with and helped make more than a few careers.

Ferris Bueller is one of the most re-watchable movies of all times, with heaps of great moments, and actually some important messages built in, including one that seems to be the destined to be his epitaph:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Well, we certainly did not miss his life while he was around, and his contributions are going to outlast us all.

Canada and Afghanistan in 2011 and beyond

I get asked fairly frequently by all kinds of folks, including as I warm up for ultimate, what is Canada going to do in 2011--pull out of Afghanistan entirely or what? Well, apparently, I am not the only one who is curious about it as the new Secretary General of NATO and former PM of Denmark, Anders Rasmussen, has asked Canada to stick around.

There are two questions here: what is Canada going to do and what it should do?

1. Will Canada stick around? Depends on the next general election. If it occurs before 2011 and produces a Conservative majority (not likely), then Canada might keep its forces in Kandahar. If there is yet another minority government, then Canada is quite likely to pull out most, but perhaps not all of its troops. I concur with THE Canadian military historian, Granatstein that Canada is likely to keep its Provincial Reconstruction Team and probably the mentors to the Afghan military (OMLT's or omelets), as these are not so costly, not very visible, less risky, yet can have a big influence. This gives Canada and the PM of the day the ability to say that we are still helping out, providing key resources for the stability and reconstruction of Afghanistan and yet meet the domestic requirement reduce the big costs and casualties that the current mission incurs.
2. Should Canada stick around? I always admit that it is hard for me to say since I am an American, so only tax dollars and not my family is at risk in the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. Also, I am admittedly biased, given where I was on 9/11. With those caveats, let assert that Canada should keep its forces in Afghanistan. Why? Because Canada is making a difference in an important part of the world, and that matters in two ways--directly on the ground but also it increases Canada's status in the world. Canada has more influence in Afghanistan and elsewhere because its soldiers are doing what others are unwilling to do. Further, it seems to be the case that the Canadians have done counter-insurgency better than the Americans at least until lately (meaning the US has gotten better). It is hard for me to tell Canadians that they should let some soldiers die in a far off land for Canada to have more influence, but if Canada can influence events so that policies and outcomes conform with Canadian values, perhaps it might be worth it.
   

Of course, the mission is costly, and we have seen many rotations and many lives disrupted. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have longer and fewer rotations. While the senior Canadian officers serve for longer periods, each battlegroup is there for only six months. That is longer than many allies, but perhaps a year might make more sense--less cost in shipping units over and back, more local knowledge and relationships built, greater expertise, better situational awareness, etc.

Ultimately, it is easy for me to make politically impossible recommendations--Canada is not going to do what I recommended. My best guess is that a small Canadian force is going to stick around and have to rely upon the Americans to provide security. Not a horrible outcome, but disappointing nonetheless.

A Book I Have Read but Not A Book I Have Read Myself

I briefly mentioned this before, but a favorite distinction of mine is: a book that I have read but not a book I have read myself. The idea is that there are books that we know the substance of without having to read them, and then there are books that one has actually read. In the former category, at least for me, are often books that I know are, well, bad or wrong, so I don't waste my time reading them.

In this category for quite sometime was Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, which defined many people's views of the region in the early 1990s. Basically, it argues that the people of the Balkans have always hated each other and always will, so there is little that you can do about it. Indeed, it could have been written by the guys who wrote the classic Star Trek episode of the ethnic conflict between the white/black people and black/white people "You mono-chromes just don't understand!" I knew it was a bad book, creating stereotypes that had little to do with reality and would be the bad basis for policy, such as all Romanians are theives. So, I didn't read it. That is, until just before I joined the Joint Staff for a year. It was on their reading list for newcomers, and so I reluctantly read the book, and it confirmed two things--that I was right about how bad the book was, and that reading it was a waste of time. The good news: as the intellectual in that branch of the Joint Staff, I got to revise the reading list. And Balkan Ghosts, at least temporarily, was no longer required reading.

Anyhow, this is lots of explanation for a short post--Salon has an interesting review of a really cool book that examines a key Native American city that was huge by pre-Columbian standards, just outside of where St. Louis is today: Cahokia (which is the name of the book as well).

As Pauketat puts it, even at the time the diggers understood they had found something momentous. "There, in the middle of North America, more than five centuries before European armies and diseases would arrive to take their own murderous toll, was evidence of large-scale acts of premeditated violence." In retrospect, Pauketat sees an even more important conclusion emerging from Mound 72 and other Cahokia excavations: evidence of a metropolitan Native American society "characterized by inequality, power struggles and social complexity." These people were neither half-feral savages nor eco-Edenic villagers; they had lived and died in a violent and sophisticated society with its own well-defined view of the universe.

Nice to know that there is still interesting archaelogy being done today with or without a fedora and whip.

Crying in Baseball

With the induction of players in the Baseball Hall of Fame every July, the same two issues come up: Pete Rose and the folks who took performance-enhancing drugs. Hank Aaron recently asserted that Rose should be allowed in the Hall of Fame. David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez join A-Rod in the club of folks outed for the 2003 failed tests despite promises of secrecy. What to make of all this?

I have a pretty clear view of Pete Rose and a less clear view of the PED guys. The difference is one of official/unofficial tolerance and the resulting incentives. Pete Rose gambled on baseball, something that has been taboo since the Black Sox scandal. It has long been clear that gambling on baseball would lead to severe consequences. So, while his personal demons--that he is a gambling addict--may have led him down this path, I find the consequences of exclusion from the Hall to be proportionate to the crime. He is a free man and can do what he wants, but we are not obligated to let him join an institution just because he really wants it. He did the crime, and I have no problem with a lifetime ban for those who gamble on the game. It is always a bit silly to speak of the integrity of the game since we don't have such high falutin expectations for folks elsewhere, but managers gambling on the game is a threat to the game.

What about PED's? Well, there is a big difference between Major League Baseball's attitude towards gambling and its stances on PEDs. It is pretty clear that all of folks involved looked the other way. This is problematic because it created essentially a multi-player stag hunt (typical game theory example): cooperation works as long as everyone cooperates, but the cooperative effort will fail if just one or two people bail out. Knowing that and having some basic distrust for one's partners, there is a strong temptation to bail out or else be left with nothing. [One could consider this to be a many player prisoner's dilemma as well]. The key here is that since there was no effort to find or sanction PED users, players who competed with them felt that they were at a disadvantage and would be penalized in the competitive marketplace if they did not do take the PEDs themselves.

Does that mean that juicing up is ok? Um, no. It was still illegal and still challenges the game's integrity, but the league has as much responsibility or more than the players. Organizations and governments are built to deal precisely with these situations--where individual incentives lead to collectively suboptimal outcomes. So, the burden here is not solely on the players, and so we need to consider how to penalize people for past behavior when that past behavior was expected and not sanctioned. Giving the PED-era players a special part of the Hall of Fame--perhaps the Tainted Wing--might be a way out.

And, of course, one of the strange-nesses of all of this is that baseball gets all of the attention, but football is a game of mutants. I guess despite baseball's fallen status as the national pastime we still have higher expectations. Somewhere, Kevin Costner is probably crying. Or planning another baseball movie. Wanna bet?

Health Care Reform Redux

Since I don't know much about the health care reform legislation, here's a link to a set of myth-busters. The quote below suggests that the opponents are desperate:

"If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare done by the government," conservative economist Arthur Laffer told CNN this week."

Ummm. Yeah. Medicare and Medicaid are government programs. Duh!!!