POW: Louise Richardson

The UC Berkeley Post-9/11 Foreign Policy Class had a good lecture(the one from 9/17) by Louise Richardson on the motivations of terrorists. Much clear thinking about a topic that receives too little. A complimentary podcast can be found in the same class a year ago when they had Robert Pape speak(2/16 lecture) about suicide bombing in particular.

The critical point I think is that terrorists are not speaking to their victims- they're speaking to someone else. A lot follows from that.

POW: Cass Sunstein

The Carnegie Council has an interesting podcast of a lecture by Cass Sunstein on the semi-famous Colorado experiments. Those experiments tested group decision making dynamics, and showed how like minded groups tended to become more extreme as a body as time went on, the 'echo chamber' effect. Sunstein discusses the consequences of these experiments with respect to political discourse, terrorism, and blogs. A short description of the experiment by Sunstein is here.

The thing I found most interesting was the application to terrorism. Al Qaeda is described as an echo chamber, wherein discourse is deliberately pushed to the furthest extremes (normalizing suicide bombing, for instance). Combating terrorism then requires breaking up the echo chamber, pushing dissonance, not just differing information but a differing dialog. Tricky and interesting stuff.

Supreme Court Transcripts and Opinions

I came across a resource page for the Supreme Court, including oral argument transcripts and opinions. Arguments go back to the end of 2000, opinions start in 2004. Nice if you want to dig into Kelo or Ramdan.

UC Berkeley Podcasts

Berkeley has started their fall semester, and that means a whole new batch of podcast courses to choose from. My choices: Nutrition, Ancient Mediterranean History, and a PolySci Colloquium. Not sure about that last one, but what the heck.

Book Analysis and Notes: Losing Iraq

I finished reading Losing Iraq and put up some notes. I had low expectations for this, and was actually pleasantly surprised by the material on the Kurds. The rest was plain vanilla, but at least it was well written.

My basic questions going in:

- How well prepared at the outset does the author think we were? Does he put stock in the joint planning committee work? I've heard that panned in numerous contexts.

Answer: I got the sense that Phillips blamed the lack of pre-war planning and particularly the lack of a reality-based concept of Iraqi government. He didn't condemn the opposition comittee, but he didn't try to hide the fact that it was basically useless. That's in contravention to the myth that the State Department had all these great plans that the DOD tossed. Not to excuse the DOD, who were operating in fantasy land.

- What does he consider the worst errors, and who was responsible?

Answer:

1) Cheney and his people, for assuming authority but not responsibility over the opposition groups, and generally making things worse.

2) Chalabi, for lying about his support in Iraq.

3) Zalmay Khalizad, for preventing Iran from playing a legitimate role in Iraq early on when it could have made a difference.

Phillips cited an Iraqi academic as being a smart guy, I'll see if I can find anything he wrote post-war.

Book Analysis and Notes: Social Life of Information

I've added some notes on the Social Life of Information, by Brown and Duguid. I still don't really remember why my Dad recommended it. The book had a lot of goodness, showing how social context and interactions affect the absorption of information, and that the internet can't be all things to all people because of this. There is also a certain amount of jargon (deconstructing the 6 D's) that I didn't care about.

Mostly I felt a lot of nostalgia for the 90's while reading this- a time of near infinite possibility and no fear.

Cause and Effect: MN Bridge Collapse

I saw two good columns reflecting on the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Stephen Flynn lays out the numbers on underinvestment in infrastructure in the US. Arnaud de Borchgrave points out the obvious fact that we've been sending tons of money to Iraq that could have been put to use here.