Michael Tanji’s February essay on the growth of web-based, next-gen intellectual communities, shorn of the real world constraints and trappings of conventional think tanks ("Think Tank 2.0"), left me looking for a bit more on how new media augments intellectual life and enables more dynamic interfacing with the thinking public. Serendipity: Dan Drezner’s paper "Public Intellectuals 2.0".

My exposure to/involvement with blogging is a pretty recent development. It’s early days yet, but I’ve essentially been deploying it as part of a cross-pollinating thought experiment on international security (or at least what’s meant to  evolve into a cross-threaded, communicative blur of bloggers, belletristes, and scientists). The exercise is challenging in practical terms, and I have to wonder if something that looks and feels like an extended exercise in herding cats  will accumulate into anything even remotely resembling conceptual emergence.

One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is blogging’s ultimate role in and contribution to public debate, a concern inspired primarily by the level of commitment, energy and interest that it takes to do be successful at it (maybe "relevant" and "sustainable" are more apt descriptors). 

Drezner’s paper provides interesting and useful context:

Will the World Wide Web midwife a new Golden Age of public intellectual life? There are reasons to be skeptical. Members of the intelligentsia initially embraced broadcast innovations of the past – radio and television – as potential breakthroughs in the ability to contribute to reasoned discourse. As the contours of these media have developed, the failure of these utopian visions to come to pass has soured many on the marriage between technology and thought. Already, some have argued that the Internet will simply exacerbate the decline in discourse observed in other venues.

This essay takes the contrary position: the growth of online publication venues has stimulated rather than retarded the quality and diversity of public intellectuals. The criticisms levied against these new forms of publishing seem to mirror the flaws that plague the more general critique of current public intellectuals: hindsight bias and conceptual fuzziness. Rather, the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing have partially reversed a trend that many have lamented – what Russell Jacoby labeled the “professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals. In particular, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down – or at least lowers – the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.

I won’t try to summarize the paper. It’s an easy and well developed read, and he deftly triages and tackles the standard critiques of blogging qua intellectual distraction. Go read it.

Something that Drezner doesn’t address, and that I’d be interested to know more about, is the role of the non-academic practitioner in this intermediary pantheon of what he identifies (not unkindly) as "second order intellectuals", those that bridge/translate/mediate the communcative divide between conventional academics and the informed public. I’m intrigued, for example, at the number of serving members of military and other public services who blog at varying levels of technical and literary sophistication. I’m especially struck by anonymous international security bloggers… quite a few of whom read like intelligence insiders, and many of whom come equipped with first-order scholarly credentials.

Drezner’s subject is public intellectuals and the role of blogging, but surely this constitutes – exposes  – a curious additional feed in the weave of public intellectual discourse, one that might otherwise remain invisible, as it must have in previous era of communicative media.

More than that, many established bloggers are accomplished thinkers and communicators in their own rights, through a medium that stumps many conventionally trained and constrained academics. Building the blur.

Or, Bentham meets Sadr. Bryan Finoki’s got another fascinating post at Subtopia on the spatial dynamics of conflict in the built environment. This one cites a New York Times piece on the wall being built across Sadr City in Baghdad, describing it as the new "stage for perpetual war", a locus of violence in the area. "This was hardly unseen as the likely outcome," he writes. "After all, what else do these types of massive blast wall installations serve in the end but vertical stages for war?" A few publications in recent years have dealt with the idea of "good fences make good neighbors" approach to wall building and security. This is an interesting perspective. Finoki:

In some ways, the strategy of the wall seems much like the strategy of Iraq itself. It was a way to draw the fight to a specific location, thereby, in a chaotic sort of way, controlling its geography. Though the stated purpose of the Sadr Wall is to create a safe haven, of course everyone knew it was going to in the end facilitate full scale conflict there. Maybe safety zones are less the intent than using the wall as a magnet for fighting instead, creating safety zones elsewhere in the process?

Who knows, I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m hardly a military strategist. But maybe the area of the wall seems to be achieving what the Americans had hoped, not a safety zone but rather a new battlefield drawn into the light.

Some interesting follow-up on Hezbollah communications.  The issue’s been addressed in Brigitte Nacos’ recent CTLab essay on terrorist media power, John Mackinlay’s thoughts on insurgency and the propaganda of the deed at KCL’s Insurgency Research Group (as well as subsequent IRG posts here, here, and here), and IRG member Andrew Exum’s elaborations on same at Arab Media & Society. The French site geopolitique.com has now posted a map of Hezbollah’s telecoms network in Lebanon. According to the write-up on the site, the map had been compiled by Lebanese security services using data provided by Hezbollah opponents in the country, and has been in circulation for a few months. The network apparently extends from Beirut’s southern suburbs into South Lebanon, but not to the East of the country.

H/T to Blacksmiths of Lebanon. 

A fascinating piece in this week’s New Yorker on "Virtual Iraq" – a virtual reality sim environment for working out the post-traumatic stress disorders of Iraq combat veterans. The article references the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, where the project is hosted, as well as several precursor efforts, a more primitive "Virtual Vietnam"  among them. There’s a 2005 Defense Update report on the program here. Talk about persuasive technology. This, from the writer:

The first time I put on a head-mounted display and headphones and entered Virtual Iraq had been in this same room, at Walter Reed, a few months earlier, after Rizzo presented preliminary results from a study site to a small gathering of military officials. Rizzo was having trouble linking his laptop’s PowerPoint presentation to the Walter Reed audiovisual system, and he had to speak without notes, often from a crouch behind the podium as he picked through a jumble of cables searching for one that was live. “The last one hundred years, we’ve studied psychology in the real world,” Rizzo told the group. “In the next hundred, we’re going to study it in the virtual world.” He threw out some numbers. Of the five subjects who had completed treatment, four no longer met the diagnostic criteria for P.T.S.D. A fifth soldier showed no gain. (To these he would add, a few months later, the results for ten others, eight of whom had got better. Of the six research sites, San Diego was the first to have preliminary results.) After talking more generally about the features of Virtual Iraq, Rizzo invited everyone present to the fourth-floor psychiatric wing to try it out.

Although I had seen Virtual Iraq in one dimension on a computer monitor, encountering it in three dimensions, with my eyes blinkered by the headset and my ears getting a direct audio feed, was different. It still felt like make-believe, but I was fully engaged. Rizzo placed a dummy M4 rifle in my hands, and guided my fingers to a video controller fixed to the barrel. (By design, patients who use Virtual Iraq do not fire weapons; the M4 is a mood-setting device, for verisimilitude.) One toggle moved me forward, another moved me back, and a third sped me up or slowed me down. Because the display tracked with the orientation of my head, whichever way I moved determined not only what I saw but where I went. I pressed the forward button and strolled down the market street and, at Rizzo’s instruction, turned at a doorway and entered a house. Inside were two insurgents, one on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back, the other dead on the ground. A baby was crying. I moved on.

The next time I put on the headset was in Marina del Rey, California, at an Institute for Creative Technologies lab space called FlatWorld, most of which was given over to life-size “mixed reality” worlds that could be negotiated without special equipment. (It was so realistic that when a virtual insurgent popped up across the virtual street from the virtual building in which I was standing, his bullets made successive holes in the virtual wall behind me and seemed to shower plaster dust through the air.) The Virtual Iraq design team, two artists and a programmer, worked out of FlatWorld, and it was their system, with the most recent improvements and additions, that I was using. This time, Rizzo sat me in a chair placed over a bass shaker, which is also known as a tactile transducer, a device that transmits the feel of sound. I slipped on the display and the headphones, and Rizzo pressed some keys on his computer and made me the driver of a Humvee, with a soldier in desert fatigues sitting next to me and another in the back. (Because the gunner was in the turret, when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw only his boots and his pant legs.) As soon as I started up the vehicle, the floor under me began to vibrate and my ears filled with the hum of tires on pavement. Suddenly, a gunman appeared on the overpass above me and started to shoot. Off to my right, a car burst into flames. Half a second later, the explosion entered my body through my feet and ears. It was startling, the way any unexpected loud noise is, but it wasn’t frightening. Even when the guy in the seat next to me was shot, and his shirt sprouted a red bloom, it wasn’t frightening. I had never been to Iraq. I had never been to war. The scene did not conjure any memories for me, traumatic or otherwise. It was, as JoAnn Difede said of stairs on September 10th to a person who worked in the World Trade Center, neutral.

I had seen, though, what might happen if it triggered an emotional response, when an actor named Ed Aristone, who had been cast in a movie about the Iraq conflict and wanted to get a sense of what combat was like, put on the head-mounted display at FlatWorld and found himself in the midst of a war. Rizzo cued up car bombs, shouting soldiers, ambient city sounds, blinding smoke, inert bloody bodies, the call to prayer, a child running across the street, the cough of an AK-47, snipers, a nighttime gale—all ten plagues and their cousins at once. Aristone started to sweat. His heart was racing. His hands were numb. He was having a hard time holding the rifle. His face went white. He bit his lips. After ten minutes, he said he’d had enough.

Halpern, Sue. "Virtual Iraq: Using Simulation to Treat a New Generation of Traumatized Veterans." New Yorker (19 May 2008).

Speaking of havens… a few recent items have popped up on transnational smuggling and trafficking. The first is short and crisp, and maybe a little light, despite it’s heavy subject. The second is outstanding, and worth careful attention for all sorts of reasons. The third piece has depth and texture, at times hopeful but ultimately sad.

This, in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly, on uranium smuggling:

What we know we don’t know about the state of Russian nuclear material is frightening enough. But what if these three would-be traffickers had been not bumblers but professionals—interested not in money but in ideology, focused on accumulating enough bomb-grade material to assemble a nuclear weapon that could kill millions of people? What if they had avoided border posts altogether and detoured through unmonitored mountain passes, or had chosen to cross the thousands of miles of porous, underpoliced borders Russia shares with countries like Kazakhstan?

Unfortunately, if the stories of Oleg Khintsagov, Garik Dadayan, and Tamaz Dimitradze suggest anything, it is that the answers to such questions may soon no longer be hypothetical.

This, in the 18 April 2008 Jane’s Intelligence Review, on arms trafficking pipelines in Latin America and South Asia:

The arrest of alleged veteran Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout in Thailand on 6 March marked a major success for ongoing efforts to disrupt global arms trafficking routes.

Bout, who has been nicknamed the Merchant of Death for the number and size of his suspected arms deals, was allegedly planning to sell 100 Russian Igla surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to self-avowed Marxist-Leninist Colombian insurgent group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia: FARC).

SAMs are the most sought-after type of weapon for FARC insurgents, who want them to shield their drugs operations from United States and Colombian aerial assets. The missiles were allegedly to have been shipped from Bulgaria to Nicaragua, and then parachuted over Colombian rebel-held jungle territory from an aircraft bound for Guyana. However, the presumed FARC buyers who attended the string of meetings held in Curaçao, Copenhagen and Bucharest by Bout’s alleged associate, Andrew Smulian, to arrange the deal were actually undercover agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Following these meetings and an alleged exchange of emails discussing the proposed deal, Bout was arrested in Bangkok by Thai police. He now faces an extradition request from the US where he faces charges of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organisation. Smulian was arrested in New York on 12 March and charged with assisting terrorism. They both deny the charges against them.

Bout’s detention in Thailand is the second arrest in nine months of an alleged high-profile arms dealer attempting to supply SAMs to the FARC. Monzer Al-Kassar, a Syrian known as the Prince of Marbella, was arrested in June 2007 at Madrid airport. The DEA alleges that Al-Kassar offered to supply the FARC with 15 Strela II SAMs – an earlier version of the Igla – as well as 7,700 Kalashnikov assault rifles.

The weapons were allegedly to be shipped from Bulgaria and Romania aboard a vessel from Greece, and the deal sealed with a false Nicaraguan end-user certificate. Al-Kassar has also been charged with conspiring to supply arms to a terrorist group, and the US is seeking his extradition from Spain.

The Al-Kassar and Bout cases highlight the continuing flow of illegal weapons in the world, and the trends in supply and demand in South America and Asia. The following article details these regional shifts.

This, in the 5 May issue of the New Yorker, on human trafficking:

…Transnistria is a lawless backwater, and very few international aid groups have a presence there. Viktor Bout, the reputed arms trafficker, who is in jail in Thailand, operated from Transnistria, and mobsters from Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova go there to hide.

There’s more. Go read them. 

Finnegan, William. "The Countertraffickers: Rescuing the Victims of the Global Sex Trade." New Yorker (5 May 2008).

Sheets, Lawrence Scott. "A Smuggler’s Story." The Atlantic Monthly (April 2008).

Webb-Vidal, Andy, and Davis, Anthony. "Lords of War: Running the Arms Trafficking Industry." Jane’s Intelligence Review (18 April 2008).