by David Steven | Nov 3, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
The Sunday Times in its lead editorial:
Is no news good news or bad news? In Iraq, it seems good news is deemed no news….
The instinct of too many people is that if Iraq is going badly we should get out because it is going badly and if it is getting better we should get out because it is getting better. This is a catastrophic miscalculation. Iraq is getting better. That is good, not bad, news.
Victor Davis Hanson:
In the recent silence about Iraq (apparently no bad news is no news at all), we fail to appreciate that we are witnessing one of the most dramatic turnabouts in a war in our history, comparable to the 90 day radical change from June to September 1864.
Both expect the Democrats to suffer. The Times:
The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster.
Davis Hanson:
There will be fundamental political adjustments… [such as] having the entire leadership of the Democratic either ignore Iraq, claim the victory was not worth the commensurate cost of the last four plus years, or take proprietorship over Gen. Petraeus’s success…
If Iraq is stable by spring of next year, the entire political landscape here at home will be altered.
by David Steven | Nov 3, 2007 | North America, South Asia
According to the BBC, the long-awaited state of emergency in Pakistan has finally arrived:
Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has declared emergency rule and suspended the country’s constitution.
Troops have been deployed inside state-run TV and radio stations, while independent channels have gone off air.
Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who condemned the moves, has reportedly been sacked and is being confined to the Supreme Court with 10 other judges.
It comes as the court was due to rule on the legality of Gen Musharraf’s re-election victory in October.
Alex’s colleague at New York University, Barney Rubin is live-blogging the coup:
So far it looks like the Army has kept the politicians out of Islamabad by arranging for PIA to go on strike on Friday, when they are all in their constituencies. So far it is calm. I’ll report as I can.
Key question is how the US administration will react. If you listen to John Bolton, you get the impression that at least some of his old colleagues will be quite relieved:
Musharraf is rightly faulted for many things, especially inadequately purging the army of Islamic militants and a listless pursuit of al Qaeda, but does anyone seriously argue that politicians will better harness Pakistan’s military?
With a nuclear arsenal up for grabs, the stakes in Pakistan are high. Bolstered by the Bush administration’s evident support, the politicians continue to try to force Musharraf out, which likely will be hailed as a triumph of democracy.
That may be, but I am far from certain that elected civilians running Islamabad will make us safer from a loss of command-and-control over those nuclear weapons, or from the danger that they will come into terrorist hands. This is a risky way to experiment with democratic theory.
Update: Benazir is in Dubai. Will she head back to Pakistan? No, says Zubeir Bashir, a spokesman for her party:
She can’t go back to Pakistan now due to the state of emergency. If she goes back they would arrest her.
Yes, says her husband:
“(She’s flying back) tonight, yes of course,” Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari told Reuters by telephone from Dubai, saying she was already on the plane.
Update II: Text of the proclamation of emergency is here. Radicals and judges get equal blame:
WHEREAS there is visible ascendancy in the activities of extremists and incidents of terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, IED explosions, rocket firing and bomb explosions and the banding together of some militant groups have taken such activities to an unprecedented level of violent intensity posing a grave threat to the life and property of the citizens of Pakistan;
WHEREAS there has also been a spate of attacks on State infrastructure and on law enforcement agencies;
WHEREAS some members of the judiciary are working at cross purposes with the executive and legislature in the fight against terrorism and extremism thereby weakening the Government and the nation’s resolve and diluting the efficacy of its actions to control this menace…
by Alex Evans | Nov 3, 2007 | Influence and networks
I’m having a lazy Saturday morning in my kitchen, and pottering through Erik Davis’s gloriously out-there tome Techgnosis (it says on the blurb: “writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervour have always permeated the story of technology”. Being only 17 pages in, I can’t tell you yet whether he achieves this goal; but I’ve laughed out loud twice with sheer delight, so things are looking promising.)
Reading his musings on the Greek god Hermes, it strikes me that here is a deity who (in contrast to the average 21st century ministry of foreign affairs) does not want for a robust theory of influence. Instead of sending our new diplomatic recruits off on rather dry training sessions like this, they should be dispatched to study the relevance of the Hermetic archetype to their craft:
Of all the godforms that haunt the Greek mind, Hermes is the one who would feel most at home in our wired world. Indeed, with his mischievous combination of speed, trickery and profitable mediation, he can almost be seen as the archaic mascot of the information age. Unlike most archetypal figures, who lurk in the violent and erotic dreamstuff beneath the surface of our everyday awareness, Hermes also embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies “as fleet as thought”, an image of the daylight mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands, but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals.
You see how ahead of his time young Hermes is? Not only is he already fluent in social network analysis as a core tool for his brand of diplomacy, but he understands that the content that flows through these networks is not just rational analytical discourse: much more fundamentally, he recognises a broader spectrum of “words, images, songs and signals“. This is not a diplomat who considers the (shudder) core script part of his communications arsenal.
[While] Apollo can be considered the god of science in its ideal form – pure, ordering, embodying the solar world of clarity and light – Hermes insists that there are always cracks and gaps in such perfect architectures: intelligence moves forward by keeping on its crafty toes, ever opening into a world that is messy, unpredictable, and far from equilibrium. The supreme symbol for the fecund space of possibility and innovation that Hermes explots is the crossroads – a fit image as well for our contemporary world, with its data nets and seemingly infinite choices.
So Hermes is a trickster, too – and a thief. Sure, he’ll use engagement or shaping strategies, that respectively catalyse or focus a debate, when he needs to; but he’s equally willing to use disruptive (or, dare one speculate, even destructive) strategies when the nature of the debate is not to his liking.
Moreover, he understands that public diplomacy takes place in a context of complexity and instability, where not only the list of players but the very rules of the game are in a constant process of flux. This is a diplomacy that takes place not in the august, Apollonian surroundings of diplomatic receptions on the Ambassador’s veranda or the Locarno Rooms at King Charles Street, but in altogether messier ‘in-between places’, where the role of the diplomat him/herself is constantly adaptive, changing and unstable. And, as Davis goes on:
Crossroads are extremely charged spaces. Here choices are made, fears and facts overlap, and the alien first shows its face: strange people, foreign tongues, exotic and delightful goods and information. Crossroads create what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal zones”: ambiguous but potent spaces of transformation and threat that lie at the edge of cultural maps. Here the self finds itself beyond the limits of its own horizon. “Through Hermes,” the mythographer Karl Kerenyi writes, “every house becomes an opening and a point of departure to the paths that come from far off and lead away into the distance.”
Ah: give it up for Hermes. He’s all about understanding that ‘in here / out there’ distinctions break down altogether in a world of networks and crossroads. In David and my forthcoming paper The New Public Diplomacy: towards a theory of influence for 21st century foreign policy, we quote the author Michael Gibbons, who argues that the kind of innovative policy entrepreneurs that we need more of in today’s foreign ministries are constantly ‘burrowing out’ of their organisations in search of the ‘grey spaces’ where they meet up with like-minded collaborators.
Being able to do that effectively absolutely relies on being willing and able to participate in conversations fully: not just deploying key messages, but understanding conversation as a fundamentally two way process, in which both sides change and evolve as a result of the conversation (something conspicuously absent from, say, the Karen Hughes school of public diplomacy). So when David Miliband calls (rightly) for a new diplomacy, is that Hermes we can discern just behind his shoulder, whispering mischievously – “there’s nothing new under the sun”?
