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By Elvin Lim

American foreign policy elites are now facing the difficult choice of deciding if our short-term goals are in fostering democracy in the Middle East, or in quietly propping up authoritarian allies in the region. Even if policy-makers have a choice, it not an easy one to make. Certainly, in the long run, democracy in the Middle East would likely remove the breeding conditions for terrorism and resentment towards the West, but in the short run, transitioning toward democracy is a highly volatile project and in the meantime our strategic interests in the region could be compromised.

That is why until September 11, 2001, there had been an unspoken consensus that democracy in the Middle East matters less than friends in the Middle East. It has certainly been easier for the United States to negotiate with Kings and dictators than they have with the unorganized masses. We are not alone in taking the path of least resistance. The Soviet Union and the British empire operated on the same principle, prioritizing predictability over democracy. Indeed, almost all the monarchies in the Middle East were created by the British, trying to replicate the balance of power called the Concert of Europe which had prevailed in Europe in the 19th century.

This top-down, and short-term approach to regional order and predictability had its consequences in crowding out the more sustainable, bottom-up approach. The result of imposing an authoritarian solution from above is that whereas countries in the West developed democratic institutions and traditions, countries in the Middle East were developmentally arrested, never allowed to develop the apparatuses of self-rule, including a system of government accountability, a separation and division of powers, codified laws, stable political parties, a free and open media, and an engaged and educated citizenry. The existence of a major resource, oil, made it especially difficult for countries in the Middle East to break out of their arrested development, because leaders propped up by oil revenue spent their energies defending their control of resources rather than fighting for the affections of the people. As a result, most countries in the region failed to develop electorally responsive mechanisms to allocate and check political power. By choosing democracy over predictability and the path of least resistance, the US and the West made it more likely that the Middle East would enjoy neither in the future.

September 11, and the war in Iraq it precipitated, temporarily blurred this conclusion because it appeared that we could seek democracy and predictability at the same time, or at least the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration promised. The relative success of the Iraq war blurred the zero-sum game between democracy and predictability by seeking the latter in the name of the former. But the temporary marriage between our commitment to democracy and predictability in the Middle East could last only as long as our commitment to the former was tentative and calibrated.

The uprisings in Tunisia, however, has put this marriage to the test. As the wave of protest spreads in the Middle East, some neo-conservatives are now realizing that they got more than they bargained for, and the instinct to return to short-term thinking in the US has returned. The US can take on the project of democracy one country at a time — starting for example in Iraq — but it cannot do this in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen all at once. Policy-makers and the elected politicians who appointed them have to worry about the here and now too. And that means thinking about the markets, oil prices, and friendly counter-weights to rogue regimes like Iran, which necessarily become more powerful as the authoritarian regimes around it crumble. With even the King of Bahrain now talking about reforms, and protests starting in the normally

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By Dan P. McAdams

In the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush launched an American military invasion of Iraq.  From a psychological standpoint, why did he do it? Bush’s momentous decision resulted from a perfect psychological storm, wherein world events came to activate a set of dispositional traits and family goals that had long occupied key positions in Bush’s personality. At the center of the storm was a singularly redemptive story that, around the age of 40, George W. Bush began to construct to make sense of his life.  After years of drinking and waywardness, Bush fashioned a story in his mind about how, though self-discipline and God’s guidance, he had triumphed over chaos, enabling him to recover the freedom, control, and goodness of his youth.  In the days after 9/11, President Bush projected this very same narrative of redemption onto America and the world.  Just as he had, with God’s help, overcome the internal demons that once threatened to destroy his own life, so too would America, God’s chosen nation, overcome the chaos and evil of Saddam and thereby restore freedom and the good life to the Iraqis.  Because the redemptive story had played so well in his own life, the president knew in his heart that the mission would be accomplished and that there ultimately had to be a happy ending.

I have been thinking a lot about George W. Bush’s redemptive story these days as I follow the U. S. midterm elections.  The big political story for the past few months, of course, has been the Republican surge and the rise of the Tea Party.  One of the strategies of embattled Democratic candidates has been to frame the election as a contest between them and Bush.  After all, the Democrats decisively beat the Bush legacy in 2008, and they would love to fight that fight again.  But I wonder if they have picked the right enemy.

Like such Tea Party darlings as Sarah Palin and Rand Paul, George W. Bush was a died-in-the-wool conservative.  Throughout his political career, he pushed for lower taxes, less government regulation, strong defense, and other favorites of the political right.  Like Glenn Beck and many other social conservatives, furthermore, he was emotionally in tune with an evangelical Christian perspective on human life and social relationships.  At a Tea Party rally in Anchorage, Alaska, Mr. Beck recently confessed:  “If it weren’t for my wife and my faith, I don’t know if I would be alive today.”  As governor and president, George W. Bush often expressed the very same sentiment.

But Bush was really different, too.  In tone and sentiment, George W. Bush was less like the angry Republicans who are fighting to take over the House and Senate on November 2 and more like, well, President Obama.  Both Bush and Obama embrace an unabashedly redemptive narrative about life and about America.  Bush’s life story channels the well-known American story of second chances and personal recovery.  Obama tells the quintessentially American tale of upward mobility and liberation, the black boy who grew up to defy all the odds and become president.  In both narratives, the protagonist overcomes early suffering to reach the Promised Land in the end.  Both men project the theme of redemption onto America, though in different ways.  Bush wanted to restore small-town American goodness and spread democracy to the Iraqis.  Obama wants to catalyze human potential and improve Americans’ lives through progressive government.  Both appeal to the discourse of hope.

And what about the Tea Party?  It is difficult to generalize, but most conservative candidates who have won the backing of Tea Party activists in this election season do not seem to be telling a redemptive narrative about American life.  Their political rhetoric instead has a harder edge.  Let’s take the country back from the evil forces who ar

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By Alia Brahimi

The air freight bomb plot should be understood as part of al-Qaeda’s pervasive weakness rather than its strength. The intended targets, either a synagogue in Chicago and/or a UPS plane which would explode over a western city, were chosen as part of the attempt to re-focus al-Qaeda’s violence back towards western targets and pull the jihad away from the brink.

Indeed, things haven’t worked out the way Osama bin Laden hoped they would.

Quoting such diverse sources as Carl von Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, Vo Nguyen Giap and Peter Paret, al-Qaeda strategists had repeatedly emphasised the pivotal importance of attracting the support of the Muslim masses to the global jihad. For Abu Ubeid al-Qurashi, the absence of popular support meant that the mujahidin would be no more than a criminal gang. ‘It is absolutely necessary that the resistance transforms into a strategic phenomenon’, argued Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, time and time again.

However, despite the open goal handed to bin Laden by the US-led invasion of Iraq and the increased relevance and resonance of his anti-imperial rhetoric from 2003-2006, he failed to find the back of the net. His crow to Bush about Iraq being an ‘own goal’ was decidedly premature. The credibility of bin Laden’s claim to be acting in defence of Muslims exploded alongside the scores of suicide bombers dispatched to civilian centres with the direct intention of massacring swathes of (Muslim) innocents.

Moreover, where al-Qaeda in Iraq gained control over territory, as in the Diyala and Anbar provinces, the quality of life offered to the Iraqi people was a source of further alienation: music, smoking and shaving were banned, women were forced to take the veil, punishments for disobedience included rape, the chopping of hands and the beheading of children. Brutality was blended with farce as female goats were killed because their parts were not covered and their tails turned upward.

In the end, bin Laden’s ideology, which relied first and foremost on a (poetic) narrative of victimhood, became impossible to sustain. Bin Laden’s project is profoundly moral. He casts himself as the defender of basic freedoms. He eloquently portrays his jihad as entirely defensive and al-Qaeda as the vanguard group acting in defence of the umma. He maintains that all the conditions for a just war have been met.

In reality, however, all of his just war arguments – about just cause, right authority, last resort, necessity, the legitimacy of targeting civilians – are based on one fundamental assumption: that al-Qaeda is defending Muslims from non-Muslim aggressors. As such, it is essential that (1) al-Qaeda stops killing Muslims and (2) al-Qaeda starts hitting legitimate western targets and the regimes which enable the alleged western encroachment.

The emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in January 2009 can be viewed as part of this end (much as the al-Qaeda-affiliated GSPC in Algeria formed in opposition to the moral bankruptcy of the GIA). Their publications favour targeted violence such as political assassinations and attacks within US military barracks such as that perpetrated by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood. Their most high-profile operations have been an assault on the US embassy in Sana’a, an attempt to assassinate the Saudi security chief Mohammed bin Nayef, and the bid by the ‘underpants bomber’ to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

In Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQIP) have internalised lessons from Iraq and are seeking to keep the population and the tribes on side. Their statements articulate the political and social discontent of the populace. The leadership seems to subscribe to bin Laden’s argument that violence must be used strategically and not w

By Susan C. Mapp

On December 23, 2002, the United States ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. This document defines a “child soldier” as a person under the age of 18 involved in hostilities. This raises the minimum age from the age of 15 set in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Neuroscience is now providing us with the tools to see what many have long suspected: the adolescent brain has not yet fully developed. In particular, the prefrontal cortex, which regulates complicated decision-making and calculation of risks and rewards is not yet fully developed. The American Bar Association used this knowledge in its support of the ban on the death penalty for minors.

Article 7 of this document states that nations who are parties to it will cooperate in the, “rehabilitation and social reintegration of persons who are victims.” The Declarations and Reservations made by US related primarily its recruitment of 17-year-olds and noting that the ratification did not mean any acceptance of the Convention on the Rights of the Child itself, nor the International Criminal Court, thus indicating its acceptance of Article 7.

However, the United States frequently detains and incarcerates child soldiers. The United Nations has noted the “presence of considerable numbers of children in United States-administered detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan” (p.6). The New York Times states the U.S. report to the UN regarding its compliance with the Optional Protocol states that it has held thousands of children in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. The same report also states that a total of eight children have been held at Guantanamo Bay.

The United States is currently in the process of trying a child soldier who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past 8 years. Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier, Sgt. Christopher Speer. Omar was 15 years old at the time, well below the minimum age for child soldiers. The head of UNICEF, a former U.S. national security advisor, has stated his opposition to the trial:

The recruitment and use of children in hostilities is a war crime, and those who are responsible – the adult recruiters – should be prosecuted.  The children involved are victims, acting under coercion. As UNICEF has stated in previous statements on this issue, former child soldiers need assistance for rehabilitation and reintegration into their communities, not condemnation or prosecution.

The Paris Principles, principles and guidelines on children associated with armed groups, was developed in 2007 to provide guidance on these issues. Developed by the United Nations, it has been endorsed by 84 nations as of 2009, not including the United States. It states that “Children … accused

Our current Book of the Month is Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees by Deborah Ellis, which profiles the stories of 24 young Iraqi refugees, aged 8-19, told in their own words.

Two years ago, Save the Children Sweden and Inma Group South Lebanon worked with Iraqi refugee children in Lebanon to create short animated films. Read more about the project here and watch this video, which I found praticularly thought-provoking. The detailing is superb too – note the unhappy expression on the sun on the cover image…

Alia Muhammad Baker seems an unlikely heroine.  A quiet, unassuming woman, she works as the chief librarian at the Basra Central Library in Iraq.  In 2003, however, she is faced with an extraordinary challenge — how to save the books of her beloved library from being destroyed by the war with the invading forces of Britain and the U.S.  Alia has read books about the burning down and destruction of libraries in the ancient past — and she was horrified.  Now she faces the possibility of the very same thing happening to her library.  Can she save the books?  Read the graphic novel and find out!

Alia’s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq by Mark Alan Stamaty (Knopf, 2004) is the account of one particularly courageous woman’s fight to protect the books of her city and nation.  Yes, librarians can be super-heroes, and Alia is a prime example of the kind of courage and determination, as well as wit and presence-of-mind that it takes to save a library from imminent ruin.   Artist Stamaty — a cartoonist for numerous outlets like the New York Times Book Review, the Washingtoon Post and the Boston Globe — has created a short but revealing graphic novel about the plight of culture in times of war.  Books do need saving; they are the repositories of a people’s ideas, culture and art.  Alia, is indeed, a heroine of an extraordinary kind.  Stamaty’s clever combination of using comic-book art to outline the story of an unlikely ’superhero’ is brilliant and I hope he continues producing more graphic novels of this kind!

By Amanda H. Podany

In President Obama’s speech last December when he received the Nobel Prize, he observed that, “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease—the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.” This comment almost seems to need no supporting evidence; it’s just common knowledge and common sense. And, for the most part, it’s true. That point, though, about war being the way that ancient civilizations “settled their differences”—that isn’t in fact the whole story. Ancient kings could, and did, send their armies into battle against one another. But some of them also talked to one another, wrote letters, sent ambassadors back and forth between their capitals, and drew up peace treaties. Sometimes, as a result, they avoided war and benefited from peaceful alliances, often for decades at a time.

Recently, as is so often the case, the focus of American diplomatic efforts has been on the Middle East. In a recent meeting, President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reaffirmed the relationship between the US and Israel, then President Obama telephoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to voice his support for Abbas as well. Just days before that, Vice President Biden had met with Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq. It might surprise some modern political observers to learn that the invention of diplomacy probably took place in the Middle East over 4,300 years ago and that diplomatic interactions flourished there throughout the centuries of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, long before the era even of the Greeks and Romans. Affirmations of alliance and friendship similar to those spoken by President Obama and his allies in the Middle East can be found in ancient cuneiform documents between the kings of Egypt and Mittani (now Syria) and between the kings of Hatti (now Turkey) and Babylonia (now Iraq). And just as, today, President Obama relies on his envoy George Mitchell or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to set the groundwork for agreements among Middle Eastern countries and the United States, so ancient leaders depended on their envoys for exactly the same reason.

Like modern envoys, these ancient ambassadors traveled to foreign lands, accompanied by translators and assistants. Like Mitchell or Clinton, the ancient officials often found themselves walking the line between assertiveness and compromise, between representing their government and taking a measure of control in negotiations, between accepting formal gestures of friendship and not wanting to be seen as favoring one ally over another. Fortunately for us, they left copious records of their diplomatic encounters.

For example, 3,350 years ago, a man named Keliya represented the king of the Mittanian Empire, in ancient Syria, traveling regularly to the court of the powerful Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III. Prior to his time, Egypt had been an enemy of Mittani for almost a century, starting around 1500 BCE. Egyptian kings had invaded Mittani, looted cities and taken back prisoners and booty. Mittani, in turn, was no vulnerable victim. It too had been expanding aggressively into neighboring lands. But around 1420 BCE the two lands made peace and instigated an era of extensive diplomatic contact. Other former enemies of Mittani—Hatti in what is now Turkey, and Babylonia in what is now Iraq—joined in as well. The great kings saw themselves as “brothers,” or equals, and they relied on their ambassadors, like Keliya, to keep communication open between them. Thanks to such men, what ha

David Kilcullen is a former Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Patraeus in Iraq as well as a former advisor to General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Kilcullen is also Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and the author of The Accidental Guerrilla (2009). His new book, Counterinsurgency, is a no-nonsense picture of modern warfare informed by his experiences on the ground in some of today’s worst trouble spots–including Iraq and Afghanistan. In this excerpt, Kilcullen shares a few insights as to how progress in the Afghan campaign can be properly tracked and assessed.

WHY METRICS MATTER
In 2009 in Afghanistan, ISAF seems to be in an adaptation battle against a rapidly evolving insurgency that has repeatedly absorbed and adapted to past efforts to defeat it, including at least two previous troop surges and three changes of strategy. To end this insurgency and achieve peace, we may need more than just extra troops, new resources, and a new campaign plan: as General Stanley McChrystal has emphasized, we need a new operational culture. Organizations manage what they measure, and they measure what their leaders tell them to report on. Thus, one key way for a leadership team to shift an organization’s focus is to change reporting requirements and the associated measures of performance and effectiveness.

As important, and more urgent, we need to track our progress against the ISAF campaign plan, the Afghan people’s expectations, and the newly announced strategy for the war. The U.S. Congress , in particular, needs measures to track progress in the “surge” against the President Obama’s self-imposed eighteen-month timetable. To be effective, these measures must track three distinct but closely related elements:

1.   Trends in the war (i.e., how the environment, the enemy, the population, and the Afghan government are changing)

2.   ISAF’s progress against the campaign plan and the overall strategy including validation (whether we are doing the right things) and evaluation (how well we are doing them)

3.   Performance of individuals and organizations against best-practice norms for counterinsurgency, reconstruction, and stability operations

Metrics must also be meaningful to multiple audiences, including NATO commanders, intelligence and operations staffs, political leaders, members of the legislature in troop-contributing nations, academic analysts, journalists, and–most important–ordinary Afghans and people around the world.

We should also note that if metrics are widely published, then they become known to the enemy, who can “game” them in order to undermine public confidence and perpetuate the conflict. Thus, we must strike a balance between clarity and openness on the one hand and adaptability and security on the other.

SHARED DIAGNOSIS
Because

In What Makes Civilization?, archaeologist David Wengrow provides a vivid new account of the ‘birth of civilization’ in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). These two regions, where many foundations of modern life were laid, are usually treated in isolation. This book aims to bring them together within a unified history of how people first created cities, kingdoms, and monumental temples to the gods. In the original blog post below, David Wengrow writes about that isolated view of the Near and Middle East.

To talk of civilizations is not just to describe the past. It is also to reflect on what is different about the societies we live in, how they relate to one another, and the extent to which their futures are bound up with traditions inherited from previous ages. The ancient Near East—including Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and Egypt—occupies a uniquely paradoxical place in our understanding of civilization. We freely acknowledge that many foundations of modern civilization were laid there, along the banks of the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. Yet those same societies have come to symbolise the remote and the exotic: the world of walking mummies, possessive demons, unfathomable gods, and tyrannical kings. What is the source of this paradox? For answers we usually look to the legacy of the Old Testament, and the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. But as part of a generation that was no longer obliged to read the ‘Classics’ at school, I find something unsatisfying about the idea that we have simply inherited the cultural prejudices of the ancients, as though by osmosis.

Most people today, I would have thought, are more likely to encounter the ancient Near East through the lens of Hollywood than through the biblical and Greco-Roman literature that informed the views of earlier generations. Still, when the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003, eight decades after its foundation by the British diplomat and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, our newspapers proclaimed ‘the death of history’. The headlines, for once, were in my opinion proportionate to the truth. Ancient Mesopotamia and surrounding parts of the Middle East were the setting for some of the most momentous turning points in human history: the origins of farming, the invention of the first writing system, of mechanised transport, the birth of cities and centralised government, but also—and no less importantly—familiar ways of cooking food, consuming alcohol, branding commodities, and keeping our homes and bodies clean. That is what archaeologists and ancient historians mean when they talk (a little coyly, these days) about ‘the birth of civilization’, 5000 years ago, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

As somebody who researches and teaches the archaeology of the Middle East for a living, I have often been struck by how little Mesopotamia is discussed outside a small circle of academics, by contrast with its ever-popular neighbour on Nile. Even less widely known are the other great urban centres of the Bronze Age: in the Indus Valley, the oases of Central Asia, on the Iranian Plateau, and along the shores of the Persian Gulf. Contrary to what most people think, the discovery of ‘lost civilizations’ did not end with the Victorian era. It has been going on, quietly and steadily, amid the turmoil of the 20th century, through fieldwork in remote and sometimes dangerous areas, and through the equally important work of analysis and translation that takes place in universities and museums. Why are the results of this steady increase in our knowledge about the ancient world not better known?

Academics and curators must themselves carry a c

Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

Recently Tim Parsons, Professor of African History at Washington University and author of Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall, stopped by Oxford with his wife Ann. In the following podcast Ann asks Tim a few questions about his book and what empires past can tell us about the present.

Michelle Rafferty: Today we have a special treat here at Oxford. I’m here with Tim Parsons and his wife Ann Parsons, and Ann is actually going to interview Tim. Here we go.

Ann Parsons: Your specialty is African History. What motivated you to write a book about empires worldwide?

Tim Parsons: Well in the past as a social historian of Africa I’ve written books about common people, which means I write about how common people live their daily lives, and in this case, in studying East Africa, I’ve looked at how East Africans, average people, experienced empire. And one of the things that troubled me is in the last ten years we’ve heard a lot about how empires can be benevolent, civilizing, how they were forces for global order and security, and how then the way to solve the problem of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the global war on terror, was that the United States should impose an empire from above, and that this would be the way to restore order to the world. And as someone who has studied empire from the bottom up, that I see the true realities of empire, I knew from the start in 2003 that this was a very bad idea. One of the things that I felt I had to do was make this case, I had to actually talk about empires historically, to go back in time and to see if what I know about the British Empire in East Africa held true all the way back to the Roman Empire because that’s what many of the current proponents of empire now, cite.

Ann: So then what do these historical empires tell us about the present?

Tim: Well, first of all they us that it’s really a very bad idea to cite ancient civilizations as examples for modern American foreign policy. In others words, empires, if we go back 2,000 years to the Roman Empire, if we even go back to the 15^th century Spanish Empire in the Americas, yes those empires did last a long time, but one of the reasons why they did is because things were very different back then. The communication was much slower,  transportation was much slower, they were largely agrarian societies when literacy was not very widespread, and most identities, which means how people identified themselves, were local and confined to the village level. And in those times it was very easy to conquer many villages and then to impose rule from above. So that made these empires appear much more stable than they actually really were. And what you find out,  if you at the history of empire over time, you see that the lifespan of empires gets shorter, and shorter, and shorter, to the point, as I argue in the book, that empires today don’t exist.

Critics on the left of American policy in the last maybe 50 years have branded the United States as a new empire, as the new Rome because they don’t like American foreign policy, because they don’t like the exertion of American force around the world. And that’s a problem I think, because by calling the United States an empire they are missing the true definition of empire. An empire is direct formal rule. They fail to recognize that it’s not the question of whether the United States is an empire or not, it’s that they should point out using empire as a model is a very bad idea because empir

John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we see how Alice in Wonderland mirrors our own political world.  Read other posts by these authors here.

That is what the playing card Queen of Hearts in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, (and in all previous versions) shouts, a flippant order to decapitate everyone and anyone who dares show her any insolence, no matter how trivial the offense. The movie is a reminder of the excesses and abuses of authority. It exposes the often illogical and dangerous decisions that emerge from unaccountable rulers. There are many signs that Alice would encounter these same dangers in America today. Two congressional events from last week come immediately to mind. One was the passage of a bill to prevent the torturing of American school kids and the other was the introduction of a new bill that would require government authorities to treat anyone arrested as if they were already guilty.

On March 3, 2010, the House passed HR 4247, Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act. The bill is designed to prevent the occurrence of torture in schools, including forceful restraints, seclusion, and beatings. Hundreds of U.S. children have suffered from such physical and mental abuse, resulting in countless injuries and death in many states, according to the General Accounting Office. What is most interesting about this new law is that so few Republicans voted for it. The final vote tally was 238 Democrats and 24 Republicans voting for the bill. The overwhelming majority of Republicans, 145, voted against. The reasons Republicans gave for voting against the bill were that not enough information was available about the prevalence of such school torture, the need to protect state’s rights, and their reluctance to impose federal guidelines on private schools. These are all legitimate concerns. I would wonder, however, why such concerns trump something as insidious, shocking and unconstitutional as the use of torture on children in our schools? Why are we so casual about burying our children alive, as Charles Dickens once described solitary confinement?

Another curiosity from last week appears to spring from the same odd rabbit hole that Alice fell into. Senators John McCain and Joe

By Lana Goldsmith, Intern

Richard Archer is Professor of History Emeritus at Whittier College.  Current events in Iraq have caused him to hark back to an earlier time in American history when ours was the occupied country. In this post, he uses an excerpt from his book, As If an Enemy’s Country, to discuss the Boston Massacre and his theory on the soldiers’ actual intentions.  The Boston Massacre occurred on the night of March 5, 1770, read more about it here.

One of the joys of historical research is the unexpected discovery. Sometimes a new understanding of seemingly familiar material comes from events in our own lives. In 2003, for example, when I was well into studying why Boston was in the forefront of the movement toward the American Revolution, the United States went to war with Iraq. I immediately was sensitized to the importance of an occupation and old documents suddenly had new meanings.

A similar experience came while I was investigating the Boston Massacre. Previous accounts gave the impression that the soldiers had mindlessly fired their weapons. Whether there was an order to fire or not (I conclude not), the standard story simply stated that the soldiers discharged their muskets and five people died and another six were wounded. Much to my surprise as I read depositions and trial testimonies, several witnesses charged that some soldiers fired at specific individuals. The evidence isn’t definitive, but it certainly opens the possibility of murder, as the following excerpt from As If An Enemy’s Country demonstrates:

There looms the possibility that some of the soldiers killed or attempted to kill particular people deliberately. Sailors and soldiers had fought with each other nearly from the first day of the occupation, and Friday’s ropewalk fray still was fresh in the minds of soldiers of the 29th Regiment. Even in the moonlight, the sailors’ attire distinguished them from the rest of the population. Two of the five men who died in the massacre were sailors, and one was a ropemaker who had fought with British troops on March 2. Another sailor was among the six who were wounded but recovered. It is equally possible that the victims were shot randomly. After all, the proportion of sailors and the ropemaker who died approximated the proportion of sailors and ropemakers in the crowd. Most of those who were killed or wounded were shot from a distance where visibility, even with moonlight, was limited and the accuracy of muskets was imperfect.

The deaths of Attucks and Gray, however, require special attention. Both of those men stood in close proximity to the grenadiers, and they would have been recognized as a sailor and a ropemaker. The unusually tall, dark Crispus Attucks stood out still more, particularly at a distance of no more than fifteen feet. Two bullets, from one or two muskets, simultaneously struck him in the chest. Whether the responsible soldier or soldiers intended to kill him may never be known, but there can be little doubt that one or two aimed at him. Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but the only other victims who received two bullets were the sailors James Caldwell and Robert Patterson.

The evidence that Samuel Gray was intentionally killed is stronger still. In a deposition Charles Hobby claimed that one of the grenadiers ‘at the distance of about four or five yards, pointed his piece directly for the said Gray’s head and fired. Mr. Gray, after struggling, turned himself right round upon his heel and fell dead.’ Edward Gambett Langford, in his testimony at the soldiers’ trial, identified the shooter as Matthew Kilroy, one of the grenadiers fro

John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we learn about torture.  This post first appeared here.  Read other posts by these authors here.

So, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney admitted last week that he “is a big supporter of waterboarding” and torture. This was not the first time he admitted as much. Back in 2006, he told conservative talk show host Scott Hennen that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed amounted to no more than a “dunk in the water.” Torture, Cheney said, was a “no-brainer” if it permitted authorities to collect actionable intelligence. Torture, Cheney has insisted, “it saves American lives.” Moralists among us can oppose this with the proverbial “the ends should not justify the means.” Conservatives usually place themselves in this camp on many other issues. Why do they insist on torturing, then, given how it a real violation of their moral principles? Why do they also reject the fact that most military and intelligence experts argue that not much actionable intelligence can be gathered by torture? Even Napoleon understood that. In 1978, Napoleon wrote his Major-General Berthier in Egypt that the:

“barbarous custom of whipping men suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this method of interrogation, by putting men to the torture, is useless. The wretches say whatever comes into their heads and whatever they think one wants to believe.”

Most governments have rejected torture since the late Middle Ages precisely because it is not only immoral but also not effective. And yet U.S. government agents interrogated Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed over 266 times. The only actionable intelligence Zubaydah provided apparently came in the first hour when long time FBI agent Ali Soufan interrogated him using traditional, non-coercive techniques. Zubaydah stopped talking when CIA a

John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we learn about last Friday’s Department of Justice report.

On February 20, 2010, two Bush administration lawyers, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his deputy John Yoo, were cleared of professional misconduct charges by the Justice Department. As senior advisors in the Office of Legal Counsel–the executive office that provides authoritative legal advice to the president and the executive branch–they wrote legal opinions later known as “the torture memos” in the early years of the Bush administration. The opinions essentially redefined and authorized torture through contorted readings of the Convention Against Torture, domestic anti-torture statutes, and the Geneva Conventions. Yoo wrote in one 2003 memo to the Pentagon: “…as long as the interrogators do not intend to murder the detainee, they will not have run afoul of section 113(a)(l)…the intent to torture appears to be the most relevant…the interrogator would have to intend to cause other severe physical pain or suffering or to cause prolonged mental harm. Absent such intent, the interrogator would not have committed assault with intent to torture…Section 2340 makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the pain or suffering must be ‘severe.’ The statute does not, however, define the term ‘severe.’”

Yoo and Bybee also argued that the president’s powers were virtually unlimited in a time of war and that Congress, the courts, or established law could not check or balance him—even if he decided to use torture. Indeed, when a law professor asked John Yoo whether the president could legally “crush the testicles of a person’s child,” Yoo responded that no treaty forbid it and that it depended on “why the President thinks he needs to do that.” Even though ethics investigators in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility had called for disciplinary action against Bybee and Yoo—including possible disbarment–the Deputy Attorney General rejected their recommendations.

In 2001 and 2002 the Vice President’s Office and the CIA were pushing for legal opinions that would protect agents from culpability for methods such as near-suffocation and drowning of detainees, putting them in painful stress positions, subjecting them to weeks of sleep deprivation, slamming them against walls, and shutting them in claustrophobic boxes. Consider the cold, clinical language of this December 2004 CIA fax to the Office of Legal Counsel, titled “Background Paper on CIA’s Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques”: “Current OMS [the CIA’s Office of Medical Services] guidance on the duration of cramped confinement limits conf

I put the boot in today.
Woodcut with digital colour. 20cm x 30cm. Click to enlarge.

Hans Blix never found the Transitus of Nork.
Pen and brushpen and watercolour. A4 size. Click to enlarge.

This is the unlucky card in the set.
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Pen and ink with watercolour 14cm x 20cm. Click to enlarge.

"In April 2004, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division were on a routine patrol in Sadr City, Iraq, when they came under surprise attack. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, 8 Americans would be killed and more than 70 wounded. Back home, as news of the attack began filtering in, the families of these same men, neighbors in Fort Hood, Texas, feared the worst."

Martha shares the terror of the unexpected of the patrol and in the lives of families left at home. She spares no description of the attacks.

ENDERS Rating: War is brutal and a high cost. This makes me again wonder if I am worth it.

Martha Raddatz's Website

Feynman or Genesis, you pays yer money and you takes yer choice.
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Large stone sculptures and reliefs were a striking feature of the palaces and temples of ancient Assyria (modern northern Iraq). An entrance to the royal palace of King Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC) at Nimrud was flanked by two colossal winged human-headed lions. A gigantic standing lion stood at the entrance to the nearby Temple of Ishtar, the goddess of war. Painted in Room 6 at the British Museum, London. You need permission to use paints, but pencil is allowed without a permit.
Watercolour 18cm x 25.5cm. Click to enlarge.

Richard English was born in 1963 in Belfast, where he is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University. He is a frequent media commentator on Irish politics and history, and on terrorism, including work for the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NPR, Newsweek and the Financial Times. His latest book is Terrorism: How to Respond, which draws on over twenty years of conversations with terrorists themselves, and on analysis of a wide range of campaigns - Algeria, Bader Meinhof, The Red Brigade, ETA, Hezbollah, the IRA, and al-Qaeda - to offer both an authoritative, accessible analysis of the problem of terrorism, and a practical approach to solving it. In the original post below, Professor English lays out what he sees as the seven key elements in responding to terrorist violence.

This summer’s fatal terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Spain and Iraq in their various ways reflect a paradoxical reality: despite the unprecedented efforts made since 9/11 to combat terrorist violence, the terrorist problem remains at least as prevalent as it was before the commencement of the ‘War on Terror’.

Indeed, the situation has in some ways grown worse. The number of terrorist incidents recorded globally in 2001 was 1732. By 2006 – five years into the War on Terror – the figure had risen to 6659. The monthly fatality rate from terrorism in the years immediately preceding 9/11 was 109; in the five years after 9/11, the monthly death-toll from terrorism rose to 167 (and this excluded deaths from attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq – with those included, the monthly death-toll rose to 447).

Of course, there are no easy solutions to the terrorist problem. The longevity of this form of violence is a testament to that. But this long history of terror is, perversely, a tremendous resource as we seek to deal with this global, murderous challenge. For we do, in fact, have a huge body of experience to draw on as we consider how best to deal with the terrorist threat. There are – or should be – a long list of ‘known knowns’ in terms of what we should and should not do about terrorism.

The difficulty tends to be this: each state faces each its own new terrorist crisis in effectively amnesiac fashion. Depressingly for those of us who research the history of terrorism, the same mistakes tend to be made each time, as though the lessons required re-learning. I remember a conversation with a scholar in Washington DC in 2006, in which I suggested that the US might have learned far more than it apparently had about how to deal with terrorism, from historically-informed scrutiny of what other states had been through. ‘Ah, but we have to see our own crisis as exceptional,’ I was told. This is, perhaps, true enough as a depiction of prevalent opinion. But it is no less depressing, and damaging, for that.

In 2003 I published a history of the IRA. At that time, the IRA was in the process of leaving history’s stage just as the post-9/11 crisis meant that terrorism itself was becoming a global preoccupation as never before. So it seemed worthwhile to try to set out the lessons of history – Irish, but also drawn from other settings – in a systematic and accessible way, to try to address the problem of what we should do when the next terrorist crisis strikes.

My argument as a result of that process is that we can only effectively respond to terrorism if we learn the lessons of terrorism’s long history, but that we can only learn those lessons if we adopt a proper means of explaining terrorism, and that we can only explain it if we are honest and precise about exactly what terrorism is in the first place. So, what is terrorism? Why do people resort to terror? What can we learn from terrorism past? How should we respond?

The seven key elements in a response to terrorist violence, as I see them, are:

First, learn to live with it. Politicians have all too often tried to give the impression of a resolve to uproot terrorism altogether, which is self-defeating and unrealistic. Individual terrorist campaigns will come to an end, terrorism itself will not, and our best approach is to minimize and contain it.

Second, where possible, address the root causes and problems which generate awful terrorist violence. This will not always be possible (neither the goals of the Baader-Meinhof group nor of Osama bin Laden could be delivered). But there are moments in history when effective compromise can be reached, normally after terrorist groups themselves recognize that their violence is not bringing anticipated victory, and that a turn to more conventional politics makes sense.

Third, avoid an over-militarization of response. There is an understandable temptation after terrorist atrocities to respond with military muscle, and this can have beneficial effects. It has also, on very many historical occasions, back-fired, with rough-handed military action and occupation stimulating that very terrorism which it was intended to stifle.

Fourth, recognize that high-grade intelligence is the most effective resource in combating terrorist groups. From 1970s Germany to 1990s Northern Ireland there have been many cases where intelligence has decisively aided the constraining of terrorist campaigns.

Fifth, adhere to orthodox legal frameworks and remain wedded to the democratically produced framework of law. All too often the Abu Ghraib pattern has been evident, with the state transgressing the line which distinguishes its own legal activity from illegal brutality: such transgressions tend to strengthen rather than undermine terrorist violence.

Sixth, ensure the coordination of security, financial, technological and other counter-terrorist efforts, both between different agencies of the same state, and between different states allied in the fight against terrorist violence.

Seventh, maintain strong credibility of public response. Any resort to implausible caricatures of one’s enemies will prove counter-productive among that constituency which is potentially supportive of terrorist violence but likely – if presented with credible alternatives – to recognize the futility as well as the appalling bloodiness of terrorist action.

All of the above points were ignored during the post-9/11 response of the War on Terror, and each of these errors has made our current position more difficult.