Omnivore 12/10/09

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

Statement by the NATO Secretary General on the Nobel Peace Prize, NATO Newsroom

NATO Secretary General Goes to Air Policing Base in Lithuania, NATO Newsroom

NATO Secretary General Visits Estonia, NATO Newsroom

NATO Secretary General Condemns Kabul Bombing, NATO Newsroom

SACEUR Speaks at RUSI, Public Affairs Office, Allied Command Operations

15 Things For Leaders, Admiral James Stavridis, From the Bridge/ACO Sitrep

The Danger of Delay in Afghan Policymaking, Bruce Riedel and Bernard Gwertzman, Brookings Institute

Taliban Cannot Be Split From al-Qaeda, Obama Warned, Philip Sherwell, Daily Telegraph

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 7 Comments

No, that’s not a joke. This, from the NYT: 

OSLO — In a stunning surprise, the Nobel Committee announced Friday that it had awarded its annual peace prize to President Obama“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” less than nine months after he took office.

Urmmm…. OK, I guess.

Hunh?

[UPDATE]: I saw this a couple of days ago. Waaaaayyyy too timely to be coincidental. The word must have been floating for a while before today’s announcement. Based on the standards by which Ghandi was famously ommitted, I’m still scratching my head over this…

Drezner Picks on Historians

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 6 Comments

Thanks to Dan Drezner for exposing Tom Coburn’s ridiculous initiative to cut National Science Foundation money to political science… except in Drezner’s nightmare vision of a world without political science funding, historians would be one of the few remaining sources, along with (parodying Coburn) “CNN, pollsters, pundits…candidates, and political parties”, of knowledge about political behavior.

Horrors.

As an academic discipline, history is sometimes considered an art, sometimes a “science”, which says more about the intended readability of the discipline’s output than anything else. In terms of philosophies and practice of history, there’s a disciplinary truism, wie es eigentlich gewesen – telling it like it is – that many would argue is more “empirical” (not quantitative, which is something else) in its reading of evidence and “scientific” in its rigorous adherence to scholarly method, than a lot of the political “science” that gets pushed out. Lumping historians in with the media and punditocracy  is just as silly as Coburn’s argument that knowledge of political behavior should be limited to those fields.

Omnivore 09/10/09

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

Testing Obama’s Doctrine, David Ignatus, Washington Post

Civilian, Military Officials At Odds Over Resources For Afghanistan, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post

Taliban Announces That It Poses No International Threat, Jason Burke, Guardian

This Week At War: Where is Jones? Robert Haddick, Foreign Policy

Britain’s Strategy, Britain’s Place, David Betz, Kings of War

NSF Political Science Program vs. Human Terrain System, Drew Conway, Zero Intelligence Agents

The Kind of Program A City Is, Adam Greenfield, Speedbird

Former Agent Exposes Communist Regime’s Methods of Infiltration in the West, Xin Fei, The Epoch Times

The “Better Comparison”

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

Interesting verbiage, here. In the discussion of what Washington’s reading these days to try to figure out what to do next in Afghanistan, the focus seems to be on institutional lessons learned. While Josh makes a good point on what to read, the more interesting one, I think, is how some comparisons are being described as being more appropriate than others:

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), long an advocate of the narrative detailed in “A Better War,” warned that while Vietnam may appear to have some parallels to Afghanistan, the better comparison is Iraq, where many of the same commanders now managing the Afghan war learned the value of surging more troops into a battle zone. “Vietnam fell to a conventional invasion of the North Vietnamese military,” Mr. McCain said. “The closest parallel to Afghanistan today is Iraq, the strategies that succeeded and the generals that succeeded.”

So, if we want to learn anything, we apparently need to find the case study that’s most similar or closely related to the one we’re interested in. Hmmm. Not sure how that’ll result in new knowledge. More like a recipe for reinforcing what we already think we know. Comparative case studies can certainly help establish generalizable observations, but that doesn’t mean they have to have identical characteristics.