then they went into battle
Best sentence(s) of the day, from
Greg Sheridan on United 93:
The passengers' reactions offer a reassuring glimpse into the civic heart of a Western democracy. This is not a plane load of trained soldiers, just ordinary folks, about their ordinary business.
Exactly why democracy, society and more importantly, civilians, need to be better engaged in the war on terror. At all levels.
A thought from left-field
Perhaps the solution to Bruno Latour's
Aramis was actually Walt Disney, as a sort of great man theory of infrastructure planning:
But more than this, the sheer concentration of different forms of mechanical movement means that Disneyland is almost the only place where East Coast town-planning snobs, determined that their cities shall never suffer the automotive 'fate' of Los Angeles, can bring their students or their city councilors to see how the alternative might work in the flesh and metal--to this blatantly commercial fun-fair in the city they hate. And seeing how well it all worked, I began to understand the wisdom of Ray Bradbury in proposing that Walt Disney was the only man who could make rapid transit a success in Los Angeles. All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.
Reynar Banham, quoted by the marvellous
Virginia Postrel.
constructing the war
Evidence of the media war being run by Hezbollah, staged to reinforce the preconceptions of the '
bleeding-heart ignoramuses'. But it's not that all are ignoramasus...many are quite deliberate. Of which Seymour Hersh--and I'll not dignify his latest rant in the
New Yorker, in a column laughingly labelled 'Fact' and typically anti-Bush/Cheney, anti-Israeli, with a link--is a particularly invidious character. In Sy's world, the fault always lies with the US, particularly the Bush Amdinistration, and by extension, Israel. His world typically is constructed from quotes and words of wisdom supposedly from a range of unidentified officials, consultants, academics and experts--one would have thought the latter in particular would be keen to be recognised--and presented as Truth, inevitably Damning Truth. Whatever happened to transparency and responsibility in journalism, Sy? The same question should be put to the editors of the
New Yorker, who allow him to peddle such crap. And why cannot Hersh turn that same supposedly beady eye on the machinations of Iran, Syria, North Korea, even China? Perhaps he lacks the courage, fortitude and moral spine to confront the real problems of the world, when he can construct his own, as per Hezbollah, from the comfort and security of the same West he so easily damns.
Hez 1; AQ 0; civilisation ?
Looks as though AQ is trying to
deal itself back into the equation. Which makes this piece by
Bernard Haykel rather prophetic.
AQ can't outdo Hezbollah in simple conventional terms. Hezbollah has to rank as possessing the largest conventional capability outside the nation-state system (the FARC may give it a run for its money). AQ's expertise and claim to fame, however, lie in a different domain, ie the terrorist spectacular...in the West. With al-Zawahiri's declaration, pressure and expectation will be on AQ to deliver.
Jobs, and seats, trump need and shape
Nick Stuart is partially right: ever since we started building them here, decisions on ships have had little to do with strategy. The real calculus has been about seats, particularly in South Australia and the rustbelt.
Health systems, dynamists and stasists
Another case of
dynamists versus stasists.
It's fashionable these days for us in Australia to sneer at the US health system. For certain, it has serious problems, and factoring in the cost of medical insurance into travel plans to the US is essential. But
Michael Porter does have a point,
Reforming the U.S. system does not require a top down, big bang, government-led regulatory change.
Governments can help, he says, for example, through 'removing restrictive and unnecessary impediments to competition' that work against helping patients--that is removing impediments to competition and getting things done.
Okay, he's optimistic. Still, in contrast,
In other countries such as the United Kingdom or Germany, government is far more directly involved in delivering healthcare. In these countries, change will be highly political.
The same applies here, of course--just look at the way health care is being bounced between federal and state politicians, even as current systems (yes, I'm thinking of that disaster, QLD Health) fail. We can see the same happening in education: as the quality of state school teaching and learning environment declines, it's also become a political football. And parents, myself included, are voting with their feet and wallets (to which there is a triple whammy: fees, taxes and the GST).
So. Can we free these up? Let new systems emerge dynamically? Not bloody likely: both parties are at heart stasists. The ALP's beholden to white collar unions, including teachers, nurses and public servants (from which they also get a nice, neat voting block); and the current conservative federal government has found that it, too, likes big government and social engineering. Whatever happened to classical liberal values in this country?
Shooting itself in the foot
Jason Weisburg has an
excellent piece at Slate on why the NYT shouldn't have published on SWIFT:
To run with a story with the potential to cause significant harm to the national interest, I'd argue, an editor needs one of two things: a solid claim of public interest, or a sound basis for thinking that a story won't in fact damage national security. In the case of the SWIFT story, editors at the Times were notably weak in both suits.
concluding, that while Administration arguments weren't as strong as they should have been--
The stronger point is simply that we shouldn't tip our hand to people trying to kill us---
To publish or not to publish a story like this is seldom an easy decision. But given its relative unimportance to most Americans and Europeans, the absence of apparent wrongdoing on the part of the government, and the potential for it to be helpful to terrorists, the Times might have been wise to put this one on the spike.
Grant McCracken points out the NYT is doing
damage to itself on other fronts:
Recently, the New York Times (NYT) engaged in product development that has quite marked implications for its brand. It what we might call the "Times File debacle," the NYT violated reader trust, and, in the process, destroyed brand equity.
It was once possible to save an article from the electronic version of the NYT. I must have saved 10 or 20 articles to "Times File" this way. Yesterday, I discovered they were gone. In the place of my Times File was an invitation to sign up for Times Select, at a cost of around $50 a year.
......
But more than time, attention and choice is lost. Intellectual opportunity was also destroyed. How many potential ideas and understandings were contained here? This is impossible to calculate. But I resent the the assumption on the part of the Times that this value was their's to destroy. These few articles represented an opportunity for pattern recognition. Their loss represent an act of pattern decognition. Pattern decognition? From the Times?
I suffer modestly. The Times suffers massively. They have just sent me a message. They don't care about my intellectual capital. They presumed to call this, to make this, worthless.
So problems for the NYT not simply in terms of content but user-friendliness. The first is arrogance in terms of its judgments about what's best for national security, and the loose standards they apply (while holding others to much higher level). The second is their failure to gets to grips with the user in the globalised, demassified world of
Davids...and not a little arrogance, again.
Undermining democracy
Once upon a time, it seemed that the
NYT thought that programs like SWIFT were fundamental to fighting the war on terror. Which kinda makes its decision to publish worse, lending weight to
Wretchard's interpretation that the NYT is simply infantile on matters on national security. All care and no responsibility. It's all to easy to say: leave these things to the adults, kids.
But a democracy works by institutions, individuals and organisations doing the heavy lifting across the board. The NYT has fallen into the trap it, and others, so readily accuse the government and security agencies of doing: undermining democracy. By failing to take its responsibilities to society seriously--and I'm dumbstruck at the arrogance of the NYT passing judgment on national security issues about which it has little information, less expertise and no consideration of the responsibilities of a government to society--the NYT happily weakens freedom of the press as a pillar of a democratic society.
See also the
letter from Treasury Secretary Snow to NYT editor Keller: spot on.
SWIFT and the misalignment of the press
In the latest edition of
Parameters is an article by Shawn Brimley,
'Tentacles of Jihad: Targeting Transnational Support Networks'. Brimley points out that in the current war
The ways in which our enemies learn and adapt to pressure, as well as recruit followers and resupply combatants, offer important insights into the nature of the conflict. Using safe houses, smuggling rings, secured communications, and personnel who connect individuals to training and support networks, our enemies benefit from an interconnected global system that enables violent groups and handicaps intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
That means that
Understanding and successfully targeting the service and support networks of terrorist groups is a prerequisite for successin the long war.
Now it is quite possible that the reporters and editors of the NYT misunderstand the nature of the war we find ourselves in--a number of professionals in the field of international security and defence still have difficulty in adapting to the new strategic paradigm. One would have thought, however, that they would make an effort in reading up on the topic.
Even so, it doesn't take much to realise that cutting off supply, including financial supply, to terrorists would be a high priority. Similarly, tracking supply chains, including through financial transactions, may help identify and locate terrorist groups, as well as providing some possible indicatation of possible attacks. Doing so covertly--without the knowledge of the enemy parties--means that the enemy's activities is more likely to be evident, and that the enemy, thinking they are secure, is less likely to change their modus operandi. In other words, the SWIFT program tracking international banking transactions would help provide key strategic and operational intelligence and assist in actively countering terrorist activities. But that doesn't seem to have occured to the NYT editors, bless their cotton socks, given their
exposure of the program on 23 June.
That Administration officials worked hard to dissuade them from publishing should have suggested that perhaps there was something to keeping the program under wraps. But even that seems to have had the opposite effect, convincing the NYT that they had something of real value--but the nature of the value, in their terms, could be realised only if they published. It's possible, too, that Administration interest in keeping the story from publication had been read as an attempt by the Administration to keep hidden yet more misdeeds--a red rag to any journalist with a whiff of a Pulitzer in their nostrils.
Roger Simon blames the myth of the Big Scoop:
the Big Scoop is one of the great myths of our post-Watergate times. Almost always it is simply handed to you. It takes no guts whatsoever or even, in many cases, much legwork.
Getting the scoop is not reflective of journalistic expertise. It's what the NYT decides to do with the scoop that reflects their motivations, their interests, and how they see their role in society. Clearly, to the NYT, the scoop at best is about branding in the marketplace--the leaker went to the NYT, because of its brand, rather than a local rag. And at worst it's about ego. (And sure enough, others that want to maintain their place in the top pack, the WaPo, LAT and WSJ, hopped on board.) The NYT
response to criticism over its decision to publish can be described at best as wilfully disingenuous. And it reveals how misaligned the incentives of the press are with both society and national interests--the same national interests which allow the presence of the media and value freedom of the press.
I doubt I can argue the point better than
Armed Liberal--read the whole thing, as he illustrates clearly the differences in their sense of obligation to society between journalists and soldiers:
I think, in simple terms, that they have forgotten that they are citizens, and that they have an obligation to the polity that goes beyond writing the good story.
In such cases, the knee jerk response from the media, when their actions are criticised--as though they should be immune from criticism--is to cry 'freedom of the press'. That's a furphy. 'Freedom of the press' is used as both armour and justification for all manner of behaviour, just as 'academic freedom' is used to justify often questionable behaviour in the academy. Both journalists and academics forget, conveniently, that such rights are
held by society not the individuals, or organisations. Universities and media organisations have been deputised those rights--they do not 'own' them--and as with all priveleges are expected to exercise them responsibly and in the interests of society. That's far from evident in this case.
In Australia, we are by no means unaffected by the leaking of the SWIFT program by the
NYT,
WaPo, LAT and WSJ. Unfortunately, the same self-appointed principle of exclusion is held by many in the media in Australia. Here, the
ABC ran it as a press freedom story, and didn't bother to interview anyone with knowledge of the SWIFT program and its value to tracking terrorist funds. No, we got to hear from a chap from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, no less. By virtue of distance, the principle of exclusion manifests itself in an anti-American bias, no matter that Australia shares the same interests and concerns as the US, and benefits directly from the heavy lifting done by the Americans.
