2014 Spew in Review

Last week, I went through the stats of the Spew to see which posts got attention, which ones got comments, and how people found me here.  Today, on the last day in 2014, as I seek to break up the reading of many fellowship applications that I am reviewing, I want to review the year in Spew more directly--what were the topics I covered as the year progressed, which predictions were right and wrong, and so on.

This blog started more than five years ago as an exercise in narcissism.  With the publication of the new book, it became more than that--it became a platform for self-promotion!  Woot! Anyhow, the year was mighty good to me even as the world was crumbling.  Ok, to be clear, the world catching fire was good for my business--demonstrating the relevance of the new book since it covered the role of alliances and coalitions in managing hotspots and reminding us of the relevance of irredentism and xenophobia (thanks Putin).  I had much to write about over the year.  Let's take a look:

A Wired Candidate

Blogging, like comedy, is all about timing.  I just started re-watching The Wire as Frosh Spew has never seen it.  And then this hits twitter:

Obama adviser: Jeb Bush like 'The Wire' character http://t.co/mvnlVi0aHS
— KETV NewsWatch 7 (@KETV) December 31, 2014

The answers come quickly:  Omar?  Bunny Colvin?  Slim Charles?  One of the Sobotkas?  The Greek?  Ziggy (no, that was Jeb's brother). 

Harry Potter and the Endless Re-watch

The combination of HP on multiple channels in multiple countries and my nasty cold meant a heap of Harry Potter on TV the past few days.  I watched the first two movies in the US on Disney Family, part of the third and all of the fourth on Space in Canada, and the last four movies via our DVDs.  Time well spent.  I, of course, remembered the story and the deviations from the books pretty well, but some details and some reactions stood out.  My cold has wiped out my memories of the previous watching, but Erin Simpson (@charlie_simpson) has several nice tweets (as did I) during the festivities (she was watching independently from me, but our conversations crossed streams not unlike the magic emanating from dueling wands).*

* Ok, that is a bit much.  Blame my cold or the incredibly dusty room in which I watched the final Harry Potter movie (until the next one).  Oh, and some folks seemed surprised that folks who study national security love Harry Potter.  They must be new to my feed/blog.

 JK Rowling is a mean woman, as my wife always argues with heaps of death, gratuitous and not so much in the last book/movies.  One of the shocks this time was how much collateral damage Harry, Ron, and Hermione cause at Gringotts.  I blame the movie producers, as the book does not have heaps of goblins falling to their deaths or getting burned.  That was all prior to Voldy showing up, and were consequences of their assault on the bank.  They are as or more complicit in their deaths as Luke is with the construction workers on the Death Star.

I will always feel a chill when McGonagall orders Hogwarts to defend itself.  Maggie Smith was the underrated most valuable player of the entire series. 

I found it very appropriate that it was Hermione that knocked the werewolf off of Lavender Brown, her former romantic rival.  Poor Lavender.  Speaking of dead female Gryffindors, I guess I hadn't noticed that it was Parvarti Patil who Padma and Trewlawney were covering in the Great Hall during the timeout in the battle.  Again, JK is a mean woman....

As Erin noted on twitter, they really needed to do some contacts work or better casting--if it is all about Harry having Lily's eyes, make sure that Lily's eyes look a bit like Harry's, right?  Young Lily?  Not so much?  Older Lily? Maybe.

It got very dusty during the Snape memories scene--the series really is about love over hate.  Not just Harry vs. Voldy but also Snape vs. ... Snape.  The dusty conditions continued during the resurrection stone scene.

Always, always pause during the Voldy hugging Draco scene.


Neville's speech is great--watching the movies all over again, it is great to see Neville's progress from shy, awkward kid to hunk/hero.  My nieces have a severe love for this guy.

Two questions remain at the end.  Well, many as Erin was hardly satisfied by the 19 years later epilogue.  The first question is: would Harry really become an auror?  Would he continue to be fighting dark magic users?  Seems to me he had his fill by the end of the seventh book, that he had completed his mission and earned a peaceful life (to deal with his PTSD).  I like that JK had Ginny becoming a Quidditch player and then Q-reporter.  I guess Harry could not pursue quidditch after this, but perhaps a more apt occupation might have been ... professor?  Isn't Harry's best destiny to follow Dumbledore?  Harry's happiest moments in a dark year (Order of Phoenix) was teaching defense against dark arts to his friends.  He delighted in their success.  It seems to me that he would have been ideal to occupy that post for more than just one year at Hogwarts.  And publish or perish pales in comparison to dueling with the Dark Lord.

The other question my daughter raised this evening: how did the Potters get that big stack of cash in their vault at Gringotts?  How did this family become so wealthy?  I joked that a family with an invisibility cloak handed down from one generation to the next would have ways of making money.  She was shocked that I would suggest that the Potters were a family of thieves.  Maybe not.  Just an old wizarding family with a big vault and a big cloak....   Pretty sure that while Harry broke the wand (in the movie, buried with Dumbledore in the book) and gave up the stone, the cloak stays in the family.  Anyhow, something to ponder as my daughter and I turn to a completely different epic take--that of Baltimore.

Ending the War? No, But More Than Just A New Name.

I didn't blog yesterday about the declaration of ISAF's end because I am still addled by a winter cold, but had some stray tweets that I would like to bring together today.

1. The war, obviously is not over.  It is not even over for the Americans since the US is leaving 11,000 troops in Afghanistan.  While most are doing training and providing logistics, some are Special Operations Forces, and will be allowed to engage in combat.  So, this is might mean the end of US (and other outside) conventional forces engaged in combat in Afghanistan, but it is not the end of combat for the US and other SOF providers.
2. This is not the first time that a mission has changed rather than ended.  The classic case is Bosnia, which went from the Implementation Force [IFOR] to the Stabilization Force [SFOR] after the first year, so that Bill Clinton's promise of a one year mission could be bet; and then it went from SFOR to European Force [EUFOR] to keep the promise that NATO went in to Bosnia together and would leave together even if it really meant that the US and Canada were leaving and the Europeans were stuck.  So, yes, missions changing names to give lip service to promises is nothing new.  The moves in Afghanistan this month are very significant indeed, but the desire to meet various promises means overselling the meaning of yesterday.  Resolute Support is NATO's new name for its continued role here, which is a lousy name, but looks good compared to the American replacement of OEF with OFS (oh for F's sake?): Operation Freedom's Sentinel. 
3. Which leads to more overselling.  We have plenty of speeches talking about completing the mission, accomplishing goals, and so on.  Obviously, Afghanistan is not in great shape, with 2014 being a year of many civilian casualties and much bleeding by the Afghan security forces.  It is not clear whether they can keep it up.  But one must say nice stuff as one takes down flags and hands over bases and such.  It may be the case that the Afghan forces can hold the line (as it were).  We don't know.  For most countries involved, the mission was more about supporting an ally than about accomplishing something in Afghanistan.  For these countries, the mission was mostly a success.  
4. Yesterday is similar to and distinct from the end of the US effort in Iraq in 2011.  We are leaving mid-war with the future very much uncertain, so that is similar.  But the US is not really leaving, as the 11lk left in country will be doing meaningful stuff, unlike the complete departure in Iraq in 2011.  One of the reasons I resist calling the effort in Afghanistan an occupation is that the intervention there, contra to Iraq, had much more support from key parts of the country.  So, the politicians in Afghanistan were actually trying to get their leader to agree to keeping the Americans around for as long as possible, which is very much distinct from Iraq, where it was politically impossible to support a continued American presence.  It is just frustrating that it seems like Afghanistan got the President it needed way late in the game (too early to tell, of course).
5. Finally, and most self-centeredly, yes, NATO and Afghanistan is still relevant.  Why?  Because I say so.  No, because the dynamics in the book apply to alliance efforts elsewhere and to coalitions everywhere (such as in the skies over Iraq and Syria), not to mention the comparative civil-military relations of advanced democracies are still in play and always will be.

Thriller Writing: Politics and Editing

There was some discussion of Tom Clancy's work last night on twitter, and whether it was his right wing politics that made his latter books bad.  I would say two factors mattered as much or more for him and for many authors in this genre, which were then exacerbated by his right-wing politics.

The challenge for thriller authors, as opposed to mystery authors, is that one often needs some political dynamics to kick off and then complicate the crisis.  And politics is, perhaps like sex, hard to write in a way that is semi-realistic and yet still interesting.  It is no accident that Hunt for Red October is Clancy's best book--it has the least amount of political machinery required to move things along.  Red Storm Rising has a modest amount of incredibly stupid politics--that Soviet response to the loss of some oil production facilities would be to invade Europe so that it could invade the Mideast--but these political dynamics are mostly out the way early. 

The problem is that as the Jack Ryan series goes on, he gets deeper and deeper into politics, and politics is required to move things along more and more.  And Clancy sucked at politics.  Not just right-wing-ness, but just stupid, simplistic, often racist takes. 

The second factor that kicked in mightily is that big name authors get edited less and less as their success gets bigger and bigger.  Knowing what we know about Clancy, there is no doubt that as he became quite popular, his editors probably stopped doing much editing.  This is something my wife, a freelance editor, has long believed about most successful authors, knowing what she knows from the inside of the business.  I will always admire her big name clients for wanting her to work on their stuff--that they wanted to write the best they could and knew that more help was better than no feedback. 

Anyhow, Clancy (and others) could not write politics, and Clancy (and others) became less edited over time.  Once Clancy made Ryan President, the politics became ... unintentional humor.  And I stopped reading Clancy.

Twitter Outage Ambivalence

I often whine about losing access to the internet when I stay with my in-laws over the holidays.  This year was no exception, except that my forays to Starbucks was more limited due to a nasty cold that still plagues me.

This year I am more ambivalent.  I am still very much driven by the fear of missing out on stuff-- my self-diagnosed most significant neuroses.  Being off the net means that I am missing stuff that is going on--conversations on facebook and twitter, news at various places, silly stories at the usual websites, etc.  On the other hand, I was kind of glad not to be sucked into some discussions (whether civil-military relations applies to the NYC cop situation).  I do find myself being weak--being easy to troll, having a hard time avoiding engaging in arguments that I see in my feed.

Having a technological barrier that imposes costs (no wifi at the in-laws) can both be boon and bane.  I read and reviewed all the papers in the volume I am co-editing.   So, there's that.  I also plowed through a bunch of Michael Connelly mysteries.  But I missed my snark outlet.  It was nice to be able to tweet this morning this:

Does he start with himself? RT @CanadaNATO: Putin outlines threats to Russia’s security: http://t.co/FFm1TwIgqJ #FT
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) December 28, 2014

Of course, the big bane is that I do enjoy being connected to my friends, and hate being disconnected.  If I was healthy and could spend time at brew pubs over the holidays, maybe that would have lessened this sense of disconnection.  Instead, I was stuck.

Anyway, I am back, and ready to think aloud on the internet again.  Probably not a good thing ;-)

Happy New Year!

If I had a Time Machine

Nearly all time travel sagas seem to assert that the real timeline is less bad than the alternatives, so that even whacking Hitler in 1937 produces worse outcomes than WWII, genocide, and the rest.  Putting that aside, if we could go back in time, averting WWII would seem to be number one on most lists.  But would else would be in the top ten?  I ponder this as it is the 35th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which has begotten incredibly misery for nearly all involved:

• USSR would have collapsed anyway, but perhaps slower and with less costs imposed upon the generation that fought the war;
• the Afghans--paid a huge price during the Soviet invasion, during the civil war, under the Taliban and since 9/11
• the US: 9/11 might have happened anyway, but maybe not.  Without the generaiton of a generation or two of jihadists, maybe Al Qaeda does not develop as far, as big, as ambitious....  Who is Bin Laden if there is no Soviet occupation?
• Canada/Europe: ISAF was not fun for anyone.

The only actor that may have benefited from the Soviet invasoin might be the ISIS of Pakistan--as it empowered, forced the US to be dependent on Pakistan, and on and on.

so, what are the key decision points where I would direct a handy time machine?*  The assumption here is one can only change one thing.

* I am focusing only on 20th century and beyond, as we got really good at doing really bad stuff with industrialization AND moving too far back in time is likely to stress out the flux capacitor. 

1. Pre-WWII, naturally.
2. Pre-WWI--if I remember correctly, the toll there was higher.  Plus it set in motion the USSR.  Russia was in deep need of a revolution, but a Communist one?  Yuck.
3. Vietnam off-ramp.  This would save a million lives or so in Vietnam, not to mention other places the US bombed.  And if it could avert the killing fields in Cambodia, yeah.
4. Avoiding Afghanistan.
5. Iraq 2003.
6. I don't know enough about China's Cultural Revolution, but since everything is big in China, big bad repression is really big.  Probably should be higher up.  
7. Six Day War: find a better ending so that it does not breed more and more conflict.
8. Prevent the killing of MLK: not sure how things would have worked out, but I'd like to think things would have been better with him than without him.
9. Provide Al Gore with better campaign advice....
10. Keep coke out of the Met's clubhouse  in the mid 1980s.

Climate change and stuff like that is harder to dodge with a time machine.....  so that is my top eight or nine (the 10th is a joke).  What is your top ten?

Happy NSFW Holidays

There is so much good TV these days, so let's go with one of the best shows giving us some holiday cheer:

Art Imitating Life, Stats Edition

I have long joked that I learned stats on the streets, as I did not leave grad school with a heap of experience or understanding of how to actually do quantitative analyses. 

Turns out that I am not alone:

Unlike @ResearchMark, I don't mind talking about it.

Blogging to be light while I reside with my computer-less, wifi-less mother-in-law over the holidays.   May the holidays and the New Year be happy and chock full of fun stats for you and yours!

Who Surrended In This Cyber Battle?

I am not a cyber expert, so take this with a grain of salt and consult Brandon Valeriano.

But anyone who says anything about the US submitting to North Korean blackmail (or whoever) seems to be making a fundamental mistake--Sony and the movie theater chains are not the US government nor do they represent the American people.

Maybe it is my twitter feed, but I have seen no one ... NO ONE... saying that yanking The Interview and then Team America out of the movie theaters is a good idea.  Media corporations often show very little courage when faced with pressure, so the Sony, Paramount, and the movie chains caved quickly.  That should not be that surprising given behavior in the past. 

But these are private actors, and thus far we have had no evidence that the US government told them to dodge, duck, dive, dip or dodge.  The US government has few options in its dealings with North Korea precisely because North Korea is a very isolated country by its own choice.  So, how do you sanction someone with which you have little/no trade?  There are no bank accounts to freeze.  And the US is already putting whatever pressure it can on North Korea to address other issues--its various aggressions towards South Korea, its missile and nuclear weapons programs, its role in the proliferation of these systems, etc.

We can hate what has happened, but the appeasement, the surrender to blackmail, this was not government policy.  We can find things wrong with the US stance on this or that, but this is corporate cowardice.  Point the finger where it belongs.

Anybody Got a Learning Curve to Spare?

This tweet has me miffed this morning:

CENTCOM's General Terry just insisted there have been 0 civilian casualties from the 1361 airstrikes vs ISIS since August. via @wjhenn
— Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) December 18, 2014

This statement could be true, but it is likely to cause more problems for the military than solve.  That is, it is unlikely that no civilians were harmed in the 1.3k strikes.  So why say "none"?  All it takes is for one to make General Terry look like a liar. 

The tendency to be overly optimistic and to downplay mistakes creates credibility gaps.  It may cause people to doubt not just the immediate statement but whatever else the military says.

So, I really wish  General Terry and other military officers to be a little less "we make no mistakes" and a bit more " we are doing really well but we are not perfect." 

Movies of 2015

Tis time to rank the year's stuff.  I have not posted as much pop culture stuff in 2014 (at least as far as I can remember) as I have been so busy flogging the book and doing other stuff.

1. The movie that surprised me the most, made me laugh the hardest, and nearly caused the entire family to have rib-muscle pulls was:  The Lego Movie.  Indeed, Everything is Awesome.
2. Guardians of the Galaxy.  Pretty close to the Lego Movie, but not quite as surprising.  A heap of fun, great action, great raccoon, great Groot.  
3. Captain America Winter Soldier.  Great action and major shift in the Marvel Universe. 
4. The second most surprising movie was The Edge of Tomorrow.  Not quite as terrific as CapAmerica 2: More Captain, Less America, but quite good.  And Team Spew loves Emily Blunt.
5. X-Men Days of Future Past.  A hard movie to make, but they did a very good job with a very crowded movie.   More Kitty would have been better, but I understand the choice to rely on the dude with claws.
6. Top Five.  Just saw it--found it provocative and very funny in short bursts.  Some great performances.
7. The Monuments Men.  Got treated poorly, but showed a dimension of the war of which I was previously ignorant.
8.  Godzilla was entertaining.

Didn't see that many movies this year.  We tended to save the comedies for watching at home and then forgot to catch them.  Lots of travel got in the way, I suppose. I did watch many bad movies on planes this year, as I tried a new strategy of watching movies I would otherwise never see.  It worked. 

Speaking of bad movies, I guess the worst movies I saw were 3 Days to Kill and the Jack Ryan movie.

The movie I most want to see, having missed it?  Zombeavers?  Dead Snow 2? Life After Beth? YEs, more zombie movies....

Blogging in 2014

If there is one clear trend in my blogging, it is that I am doing less of it.  Why?  Mostly because I am fried from having committed not just to other online outlets but that I have been juggling (and dropping) too many projects/responsibilities.  Since blogging is purely voluntary, it tends to take the hit when I am busy. 

Still, it was an interesting year, so I will review it via the most trafficked posts, the most commented posts and then whatever I fancy:

1. Navel-gazing might be the theme of the year as the most visited post was one about blogging:  is blogging inherently unprofessional. This post went viral (well, for one of my posts), got re-posted at Duck of Minerva and a bunch of other places.  It hit a chord not just because I was fighting the Man as embodied by the ISA, but that it seemed most strange to most people that an organization representing the profession of IR scholars would diminish blogging.  Seems so 2003.  The good news is that the proposal I fought got put on ice.
2. The second most popular post was one that took a quote from the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about a plan to invade Canada and ran with it.  People always seem to enjoy speculation about an American invasion of Canada.
3. I spent the year promoting the NATO and Afghanistan book, so I cannot help but be very pleased that my third most visited page was the playlist.  Yep, I crafted a list of songs that fit thematically with the chapters of the book.  With the forthcoming publication of the paperback (with new intro) of For Kin or Country, I will have to come up with another playlist, I guess.
4. A 2013 piece is actually fourth: I wrote about comparative xenophobia that still seems to be getting traction. It was an attempt to address a WashPo blog post about polls about racism and tolerance, and I guess those topics are still relevant in 2014.
5. I find it strange that a short post explaining an acronym, for your situational awareness, keeps getting hits even though it was posted in 2011.
6. An old post (2013) pondering why adjunct profs stay in the business keeps getting hits as well.
7. An old post (2013) that considers people paying for academic job market advice and rejects the idea that anyone should pay.  Well, the job market still sucks, advisers still underperform and yet it is still a bad idea to pay a person for advice when there are plenty of people offering advice for free (this blog and Duck of Minerva, for instance).
8. An old post (2011) about whether to go to grad school or not.
9. I got into an argument with Tom Ricks of foreignpolicy.com about whether scholarship on international security is policy relevant.  I said: hell, yes!
10. An old post (2013): mama, don't let your kids become political scientists.  This presented some APSA charts showing how dismal the job market is in my field.

The next most popular page is one promoting the book.  Woot! 


What can we conclude from this?  That my best days of blogging are far behind me, with four pre-2014 posts in my top ten for this year?  That the most popular posts are those that are most depressing about academia?  Hmmm.

I tend not to get many comments on my posts.  The ones getting the most comments:

1. The post on American invasion plans not only got much traffic but much discussion. 
2. Are blogs inherently unprofessional got much discussion too
3. A pox on both their houses:  hardly surprising that a rare post on Israel-Palestine gets some folks commenting.
4. An exchange on the sham-tastic referendum in Crimea
5. A progress report on the ISA blog situation

How do people find their way to my blog?  The first three are a magnitude more traffic-producing than the rest.

1. Twitter
2. Directly (whatever that means)
3. Google
4. Facebook
5. Poli Sci Rumors
6. The BBC.  Really? 
7. Duck of Minerva
8. My page at www.stevesaideman.com
9. Lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com
10. Outsidethebeltway.com

The next biggest sources are Aljazeera.com, washingtonpost.com, bing, ricks.foreignpolicy.com, Political Violence at a Glance, and The Globe and Mail.

I hope to re-gain momentum in 2015, but may need help from my readers.  Poke me, prod me, getting me thinking.  And thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting on my stuff this year.  I never expected to have much of an audience---that this was supposed to me just thinking aloud.  Have a great 2015.

Embracing the Pyromania of The Festival of Lights

I tend not to write about Judaism here, as I have a pretty ambivalent relationship with the religion in which I was born and the ethnic identity that I cannot escape.  But it has come up a lot the past few days and with Hanukkah starting tonight, it felt time to have a few thoughts on Jewish stuff for a change.

First, the big news, of course is this:

Of course, Ravenclaw... what else would you expect? RT @jk_rowling: .@benjaminroffman Anthony Goldstein, Ravenclaw, Jewish wizard.
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) December 16, 2014

JK Rowling had been asked if there were any Jews in the world of Harry Potter.  That she could only come up with one seems a bit low, but then again, one kid out of the named characters is not that bad, since Jews are about .5% of the British population. Given stereotypes about Jews being smart and clever and all that, of course, the one Jew is on the house dedicated to the brainy kids at Hogwarts.  So, is JK playing with stereotypes?  Maybe so, but the odds are really one in four anyway.

Second, my favorite tweet of the day was this:

Oh, Ruble Ruble Ruble, if I'd made you out of clay, Oh, Ruble Ruble Ruble, you'd be worth more than you are today. #HanukkahSongs #remix
— Ben Kesling (@bkesling) December 16, 2014

Yep, taking the dreidel song and using it to make fun of Putin's problems is just fantastic.

Ok, the real discussion over the past day has been this Vox post about whether one should expect Muslims to always disavow and condemn acts by Muslims.  I posted on my fb page, and it led to a really interesting discussion about what we expect of ourselves and of others.  A Jewish contributor suggested that it is the job of Jews to condemn fellow Jews for doing stuff that besmirches the religion, but perhaps it is not fair to expect that of others.  My stance is a pretty belligerent one: acts by individuals are acts by individuals and should not be read as saying anything about the identity they claim to represent, and that we should not expect anyone to have to condemn the acts of members of their group.  Of course, this wildly contradicts much of my work on ethnic conflict that assumes that groups act as groups.  Oops.   I will have to square that circle someday.

Anyhow, on this first night of the most socially constructed holiday (Hanukkah was never really that much of a holiday until Jews had to develop an event to compete with Christmas--at least that is far as I know), if you are celebrating the festivities, enjoy your pyromania.  I certainly did as I grew up.  And enjoy the family, the fun, the latkes and the gifts--which, contrary to stereotypes and jokes, are not just socks and underwear.

Virtual Path Dependence

Saw this figure tonight from the Washington Post (thanks Theo F)--top twenty websites since 1996:

Multi-tasking Empathy?

Australia is going through a difficult situation today as a self-described sheik/lunatic has taken hostages.  There is something positive going on: a movement with the hashtag #illridewithyou.  The idea is that Aussies are calling out to those who wear religious garb and saying that if you are worried or concerned that you might get some backlash, that they would join that person's commute.

This makes a great deal of sense since events like these bring out the bigots--who tend to be ignorant, of course.  In the aftermath of 9/11, I remember a Sikh (not a Muslim) who got attacked because some ignorant bigot attacked.  As Australia already has a problem with anti-immigrant fear/hate/xenophobia, it is likely that some yahoo will attack a Muslim or a Sikh or some other Other.  So, this is really the perfect time for this spontaneously generated movement.

One of my twitter followers disagrees, arguing that people should be caring about the hostages who are still in crisis.  My response: does this person have a spouse and a kid or two kids?  Because I am pretty sure you can care about two or more things at once.  And people should care both about the people who are in harm's way and the people who are in harm's way: the hostages and those who share some identities with the perpetrator.  Our hearts are big enough, right?

Torture Apologists?

Brian McFadden is throwing with heat this morning:

Re the last panel, I have mixed opinions about drone strikes.  I am appalled and ashamed that the US tortured.  I also understand that it does not work at all. 

Drone strikes?  If one is at war, then why not discriminately target those who are using force against you and your allies?  I hate the signature strike type missions (where a set of behaviors makes someone a target), but targeted killings?  I prefer targeted killings to untargeted killings (which is what we would call Pakistan's counter-insurgency tactics).  Drones are just one form of targeted killings by the way--they just have bad PR.  People killed from a missile launched from an F-15 are just as dead. 

The issues here are complex, but when I think of drone strikes or targeted killings, I think about the alternatives.  When it comes to torture, this is not required.  Why?  Because torture is wrong, it does not work, and it undermines US security in numerous ways.  One does not have to be a pacifist to abhor torture. 

Revise and Resubmit Your Headline

Something was wrong on the internet yesterday.  Really!  I saw this article and was provoked:

The article itself had a very interesting discussion of what the Canadian Special Operations Forces are doing in Iraq.  The title annoyed me greatly.  For one, the article was mostly about the SOF and not about an extension.  For another, this is not really news.  That is, the status quo since the vote was taken a few months ago is that the mission would be for six months with the possibility (probability IMHO) of renewal, just as Canada renewed its participation in the Libya mission twice and just as (albeit more controversially) the Kandahar mission was renewed twice--in 2006 and 2008.

When I went back to look at the piece later, its headline had changed to this:

Other than the title change, it is pretty much the same article.  Indeed, the link still has the old title.  Does that mean that someone at the G&M was listening to me?  Or that a different editor got his/her hands on the article?  Or that Steven Chase complained when his article was headlined incorrectly?  I have no idea.

The bigger news here really is that the SOF talked to a reporter and actually gave more than vague answers.  Unlike US SOF (especially SEALs), the Canadian SOF tend not to talk and the media tend not to cover them closely.  So, this is quite interesting in and of itself.  One could wonder whether the SOF folks were asked to be more transparent by the government (unlikely, given this government) or were speaking out anyway because they felt like it (maybe, maybe not).  The other key item here is what they are doing/where they are doing it--not on the frontlines, mostly training a specific set of skills to improve the Kurds' ability to fight.  Not mentoring/embedding on the battlefield, and certainly not running and killing daesh fighters (unlike the British SOF).

The lesson here is, as always, the writer of the article does not write the headline.

Travel Observations, edition 37

On my way back to Ottawa after a productive few days in The Hague.  What have I learned/re-learned/observed?

• My habit of watching bad movies on flights works out pretty well.  Stuff that I really want to see I will see with Mrs Spew via netflix or our Canadian movie channel.  Bad stuff?  Probably not, so why not see Hercules, Into the Storm, Maze Runners, The Other Woman, and their ilk?  They are not good movies but they are entertaining/diverting.  Indeed, Leslie Mann proved yet again that she is very funny.  
• I remain a big fan of Nexus (had the right passport this time) as it allowed me to GOES through the passport line in Newark quickly.  Also love being TSA prescreened---keeping shoes on, computer in bag, belt on body--so much less trouble.  On the other hand, the US Embassy in Ottawa has done too good of a job promoting NEXUS as the machines in Canada had a long line (maybe two machines are not quite enough).
• Time while traveling is relative but still felt wrong to booze up at the lounge (gold status pays off!) in Amsterdam.  On the other hand, a beer garden for lunch in Newark?  Please... with a nice view of NYC.
• I remain a big fan of Indonesian food which I almost only get in the Netherlands--not much in Ottawa or in Montreal.  
• Something always happens when I am gone.  We have had furnaces crap out. This time, not just a heap of snow (Mrs. Spew got by without New Snowblower 101), but also possessed toilets, gurgling not unlike the fireswamp.  Thus far, no ROUS's but we shall see.
• I lost a second neck pillow.  Damn, must staple these things to the back of my head. 
• Oh, I am finally giving into electronic submissions of papers.  The final paper for my Civ-Mil class was due the day I landed in Amsterdam, so I had the students send them to me via email as pdfs.  I found it actually easier to whip through the grading of about half while flying back, as I could read them on my ipad (which I no longer have to turn off when taking off and landing).  

  I do need to keep learning, as I do keep on traveling.  As soon as I got home, I got a new invite to go to Belgium in April.  I will not be driving around Brussels this time.... that is one lesson I learned from the last time.

Ferguson Funnies: oh Why did SNL Not Use This?

Pretty sharp take on Ferguson got left on the cutting room floor (also known as youtube these days):


Too soon?  Not for the song at the end....