Field Notes, First Drafts, & Foreign Correspondence
Or at least, the strings… Rob Crilly’s got some common-sense tips on how to be a stringer for media outlets – especially relevant in an age of spare budgets and lean news organizations, when the staff foreign correspondents are becoming an increasingly rare breed.
Though I take exception to eliminating the middle initial from my professional name. If I didn’t include it, then every time someone googled me they’d come up with this much better known individual…
“Lithuania is currently embroiled in a bizarre and deeply confusing political controversy,” writes Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald, “which reveals what happens when a country becomes gripped by extremist ideologies.” He’s taking a sarcastic swipe at last week’s allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency built and operated one of its secret prisons on the outskirts of Vilnius. Greenwald’s piece isn’t high wit, but it makes for an apt exercise in contrasts: between perceived secularisms and fundamentalisms, and between the Obama promise of change and its subsequent maturation as it’s been confronted with the demands of realpolitik.
I especially liked the double-entendre reminder of former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld’s curiously mutilated view of the lessons of history.
Emma Sky, on working as General Ray Odierno’s advisor in Iraq: “I’m experienced in working in different cultures. The most alien culture I’ve ever worked in is the U.S. military… I was used to working in the humanitarian space, the diplomatic space. I came to Iraq and that space, the military, is all over it.”
Read the rest here.
Christopher Coker of the London School of Economics and Political Science (I always want to render the “and Political Science” in parentheticals, for some reason) has an interesting review of two new books in the Times Literary Supplement: Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars and James Fergusson’s A Million Bullets. It’s a short review, but it’s a more accurate, and apt, characterization of the two authors’ subjects (Iraq and Afghanistan) than I’ve read anywhere else. This blurb on NATO struck a chord:
Traditionally soldiers have read books to orientate themselves, either to make sense of their personal experience of war or to have a greater understanding of the larger picture, “what it’s all about”. Churchill tells us he was spurred on to study by catching himself using a good many words, the meaning of which he could not define properly. What would he make of war today? As Matthew Parris pointed out in The Times, the NATO mission in Afghanistan is a semantic nightmare: “agent for change”; “assymmetric means of operation”; “capacity building”; “conditionality demand reduction”; “injectors of risk”; “kinetic situation”; “licit livelihood”; “light footprint”; “partnering and mentoring”; “reconciliation and reintegration”; “rolling out a touchdown approach”; “upskilling”. Today’s soldiers (or “stability enablers” as NATO prefers to call them) are lost in jargon. It represents both a lack of real conviction in policing the frontier, an embarrassment about war itself, and a confusion about the operational purpose, which always seems to be changing. Afghanistan is a tactically, not strategically, driven war as objectives and goals are recalibrated (usually downwards) according to success or failure in the field.
Read the rest here.
President Barack Obama is, apparently, less than thrilled at the leaky process surrounding the development of a new AfPak policy (or PakAf or whatever the policymakers decide to eventually rename it). He’s agreed that the leaks are a “firing offense”, and he’s “angrier than Bob Gates about it.” I tried to put some of the shenanigans in context, but Peter Feaver does a much better job when he explains that, justified though Obama’s concerns might be,
The longer the review drags on, the more unrealistic it is to expect that the process can continue to be leak-free. The president is right to want to deliberate leak-free, and the president has the right to extend the process as long as he wants, but at some point — and I don’t know when that point is, but now that we are around day 92 82 since McChrystal initially filed his report, we can safely say we are past that point — the blame for the leaks must be a shared matter.
MICHAEL A. INNES 