Important, from Mark Dawson at Ethnography.com.

 

On 3 July, The New Republic‘s TNR Conversation with Josh Patashnik hosted the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes, author of the recently released Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in an Age of Terror (Penguin Press, 2008), and the New America Foundation’s Andrew McCarthy, author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

There’s a crisp transcript of the discussion that’s nice and readable, but for the full flavor, listen to the audio, which is much longer and captures much more of the respective authors’ responses and elaborations. It kicks off on the recent case of a Chinese Uighur Muslim held at Guantanamo, resolution of which revealed "no evidence that would qualify him as an enemy combatant."

Among other things, TNR’s three-way gets into the political context of and for jus ad bellum after 2001, and the politicization of the recent Boumediene Case on habeas corpus rights. The most telling line in the encounter, from Andrew McCarthy: "Rather than having what is probably a not-very-useful argument over what the parameters of the battlefield are, we probably should be much more focused on who it is that we’re fighting and under what circumstances they should be brought into the system."

Good on the complexity of battlespace parameters.  Bad on suggesting that defining it’s probably not useful. Tell it to those  who get caught in the "middle", wherever that might be these days. There’s a big difference between useless and difficult, the latter hardly a justification for not bothering. That’s not what either author’s arguing, but they miss an important implication of their own work: the spatial variables that shape and inform the physical disposition of insurgents and terrorists are central to battlespace regulatory regimes.

 

A while back Tim mentioned a great new blog by NYU political science doctoral student Drew Conway, entitled Zero Intelligence Agents, which asks the question “How can the social sciences, mathematics, and computer science combine to affect national security policy?” Indeed. I’ve been meaning to add it to the CT-NET COINLAB page for a while. It’s there now. Go read.

Chris Albon‘s intelligent and focused weblog, War and Health, deals with armed conflict, public health, and human security. Worth reading. I’ve just added it to the CT-NET COINLAB page.

 

I took my revenge after a hundred years, and I only regret that I acted in haste.
-Pashtun Proverb 

A few weeks ago CTLab’s esteemed Managing Editor tagged me with the equivalent of a chain-letter. Now normally, this is the kind of thing I flush down the toilet with extreme prejudice, and walk briskly away, whistling a merry tune as I go. In this case, I thought it better to lie in wait, lull my tormentor into a complacent stupor, and then pounce. And so it goes. 

The rules are simple:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Because we’re a creative and irreverent lot, recipients sometimes add new rules, like here, or duck full compliance, like here. So I do both, adding rules 6 and 7, thereby completing the meme and killing it dead in one fell swoop.

6. Introduce a martial proverb.
7. Create a feedback loop and spike the meme.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Rule 1 – Check
Rule 2:

1. I served four years in 1st Bn Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. With a name like that, you HAVE to be hard. I spent another few years in the Canadian Army doing something else.

2. I’ve followed a non-traditional educational and professional trajectory, yet despite all that somehow ended up doing exactly what I always figured I’d be doing, through a series of unlikely but fortunate circumstances that could have been neither predicted nor planned for. Go figure. Call me a queue-jumper.

3. I rescued my three year old dog Rufus, who looks like a golden retriever but is really a street mongrel, from the blown out shell of  a house in a frontline suburb of Sarejevo. He was eight weeks old at the time.

4. I have a thing for brainy Irish-American redheads.

5. I once stood smack in the middle of a very large, partially excavated, secondary mass grave site. The stink of decay was heavy and cloying. All women and children. And that’s what makes me a true believer.

6.  I like it when it rains. I especially like running in the rain. I also like running in -25, with at least several inches of snow on the ground. I’m Canadian, what did you expect?

7. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration… 

Rule 3 – Check (refer back to Rule 1, elaborated below)
Rule 4 – Check
Rule 5 – Check (see top of post – that’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Yes, Kipling, this is a COIN blog after all)
Rule 6 – Check (see the beginning of this post)
Rule 7 – Check (refer back to Rule 1 through Rule 3, elaborated below, and supported conceptually by the Rule 6 meme)

TAGGED:

1. Tim Stevens
2. Tim Stevens
3. Tim Stevens
4. Tim Stevens
5. Tim Stevens
6. Tim Stevens 
7. Tim Stevens 

Done. You can all thank me later for sparing the web more chain-meming. And Tim can thank me for creating excessive superfluous links to Ubiwar. But the MEME DIES HERE…

Now get back to work!