HerbEly

War is Declining: Part V

Outside the Beltway has a comprehensive posting on the decline of warfare over the past 20 years. For the moment, I'll quote Jame's Joyner's comment and add one of my own. Joyner summarizes the discussion:

Mack and Bay are onto something with their focus on the mass media's coverage of war as a key variable. Even though modern wars are fought with greater precision and far fewer casualties than their predecessors of even a quarter century ago, the Western public is increasingly hostile to war and its consequences. Seeing them unfold live and in color in their living rooms is surely a major contributing factor to that.

There are three themes to be explored:

• The reasons for the decline of warfare
• The reasons for the mainstream media's near total failure to report the story
• The religious dimensions of the story

The nature of warfare is changing. Church leaders, insofar as I can see, are unaware of this. Most of them are dedicated to their "prophetic role" in speaking against war and violence. This influences their politcal outlook but prevents them from paying listening to the voice of military professionals and poltical scientists.

More later, when I get back home from a wedding in Venezuela.

Christmas Reading

Thanks to my brother in law and author, Jerry Ritter, I spent part of my vacation reading American Brutus : John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kaufman. An excellent actor, Booth was a master of deception. Kaufman did a superb job of uncovering Booth's deceptions, botched investigations, and sloppy record keeping. The story reminds me of the advice given by a senior devil in Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. HIgh minded people are best decieved by appealing to their idealism. I can see this approach as Kaufman unravels Booth's background and motivations.

Catholic Carnival: the Year's Favorites

Catholic Carnival LXI: The Best of the Year. Jay has asked Carnival bloggers to send their favorite posts of the year. Check it out.

War is Declining: Part IV

Andrew Mack has an important op-ed piece in this morning's WaPo:

Seen through the eyes of the media, the world appears an evermore dangerous place. Iraq is sliding toward civil war, the slaughter in Darfur appears unending, violent insurgencies are brewing in Thailand and a dozen other countries, and terrorism strikes again in Bali. It is not surprising that most people believe global violence is increasing.

However, most people, including many leading policymakers and scholars, are wrong. The reality is that, since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other forms of political violence have decreased. The world is far more peaceful than it was.

Why has this change attracted so little attention? In part because the global media give far more coverage to wars that start than to those that quietly end, but also because no international agency collects global or regional data on any form of political violence.

You could have read a similar story here on August 30, 2004. Of course this does not mean peace on earth is arriving. It does mean that the nature of violence is changing. More about this after I get back from Venezueala - but look here for the challenge that this should present to just war theologians.

Great Quote

One morning during the 1991 Gulf War, I opened a local newspaper to a photo of a U.S. sailor sitting at a mess-hall table in the Middle East, food tray before him, head bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped under his chin. The caption read: "Weary sailor rests head on hands before eating." Once again, I realized why religious leaders of all persuasions have long charged that journalists are out of touch with mainstream culture. When it comes to covering the story of prayer in American life, historians have not done much better. They have generally avoided the subject, presumably because the evidence is hard to pin down. But James P. Moore Jr.'s impressive One Nation Under God marks a fresh start.

Washington Post book reviewer Grant Wacker starts his review of James P. Moore's Among the Believers: A History of Prayer in America. I haven{t read the book - and am on vacation, stealing a little time early in the morning to read the papers. I love the quote and feel that the book should be brought to the attention of my readers.

GetReligion Linkfest

Blogging gets light as we finish preparations for Christmas - I regard all this rushing around as part of Advent. I do want to call attention to some postings from GetReligion:

Mollie Ziegler calls the idea that Christmas is an attempt to "baptize" Saturnalia as something from Dan Brown.

Mollie wishes that Journalists would do their homework. Opposition to Christmas has a long history in the American republic.

She also wishes the press would report the religious motivations behind the move to teach evolution and ban teaching intelligent design from the public schools.

Merry Christmas everyone. I'll be posting occasionally during our time of celebration.

Threat Analysis 101

Sun Tzu wrote

Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.

During the cold war, military officers, academics, intelligence analysts, and journalists had fifty years to understand Soviet communism. That perspective contributed to the fall of the Soviet evil empire.

Today, we lack an equivalent perspective on Islam. Bruce Hoffman’s review of three books is an excellent starting point for establishing this perspective. The books are:

THE FAR ENEMY Why Jihad Went Global By Fawaz A. Gerges

THE GREAT THEFT Wrestling Islam From the ExtremistsBy Khaled Abou El Fadl

100 MYTHS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST By Fred Halliday

Even if, like me, you may not get through the books, please read the review.
Journalists, in particular, should take note of Daniel Pulliam’s advice on understanding the religious roots of terrorism.

NOTE: This post linked to Beltway Traffic Jam for 12/21/2005.

Wolf – Warning Weariness, Part V - Terrorism

Back in my days as an intelligence analyst, LT General William Odom warned us against “worst case” analysis. Intelligence can always write up an analysis of everything that the Soviets could do to a proposed US weapon. By ignoring real world constraints, intelligence could make the challenge of meeting the threat so great that it would bust the defense budget.

The phrase “reasonable worst case” became our watchword.

To put it another way: it is bad enough to be outnumbered 3 to 1. There was no need to write that NATO forces were outnumbered by “ten-foot tall” Russian soldiers.

This admonition came to mind when I read Larry Johnson’s The Myth of the Different Kind of War

"Christmas Wars" – Some Perspective

Devotee’s of the outcry against the “war on Christmas” would do well to read Harold Meyerson’s WaPo columnThe Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us. They will learn that Irving Berlin, a Jewish refugee from Czarist Russia, wrote many of our beloved Christmas songs as a celebration of a secular – and free – America.

Somebody Dropped the (intelligence) Ball

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell told BBC yesterday that he was

"deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us."

"What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced to us," (emphasis added)

On November 21st, Vice President Cheney said:

What is not legitimate and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible is the suggestion by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence.

So now we have two top level administration officials saying that Bush did not lie, but that the administration was misled by the intelligence community.

We still do not know who did the misleading. This blog has posted that midlevel intelligence officers had doubts about the sourcing of the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection and the Curveball reports of mobile biological agent production vans.
The Robb-Silberman Commission concluded that

The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.(emphasis added)

If we interpret “political pressure” to mean direct interference by elected or cabinet level officials, we are left with the conclusion that sub-cabinet level officials dropped the ball.

Even if that is the case, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell are all experienced, savvy executives who have been reading intelligence reports for decades. As columnist Alan Reynolds has noted, they could have given critical reading of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Had they, and the Senators who had access, done so, the administration might not have been misled. The NIE was a veiled effort to warn the administration that the case was not solid. Why was it veiled? Because "intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

If President Bush wants to correct the errors that led to this massive intelligence failure, he will look to intelligence leadership – and to his own.

NOTE: Linked to Beltway Traffic Jam for 12/19/2005.