Last Friday, Charli Carpenter announced that Jon Western, Five College Associate Professor at Mount Holyoake College, has joined the blogging team at Duck of Minerva. Western featured prominently in Samantha Power’s Pulitzer-winning book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide; she describes how he, and others like him, resigned in protest from the US State Department in the mid-1990s. Western’s first post at DoM, not to mention his work on humanitarian intervention, suggest that the blogosphere and the discussion on Afghanistan have just been elevated. One worth watching.
Tag: media
Omnivore 18/09/09
Pick Your Policymaking Metaphor, Dan Drezner, Foreign Policy
Marine Generals to Cheney: Knock It Off, Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy
Afghanistan Vs. Iraq Media Coverage, Katherine Tiedemann, Af-Pak Channel
3B Or Not 3B, Steve Coll, Af-Pak Channel
Tragic Fate Of Afghan Bomb Survivor, Mustafa Saber, IWPR/Afghan Recovery Report
Balkh Businessmen In Panic Over Abductions, Ahmed Kawoosh, IWPR/Afghan Recovery Report
Time Running Out For NATO In Afghanistan: British General, Richard Norton-Taylor & David Batty, The Guardian
From the Bridge: Flying Across the Atlantic, Admiral James G. Stavridis, Allied Command Operations Blog
Who Quips Best, Wins
More from the blogosphere on Rory Stewart, who may or may not have designs on 10 Downing Street. But first: why is an interview with him that was published at the end of July only getting blogplay now? Odd.
His public displays of expert-itis have apparently tickled some funny bones. The passages in question come from Emily Stokes’ interview with Stewart, published in the Financial Times on 31 July, and from his more recent comments in Senate hearings yesterday.
Stewart, in July, on driving a car off a cliff as policymaking analogy: “It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says …’”
Stewart, yesterday, on cat-beating as Afghanistan strategy: “We’re beating the cat,” Stewart said, “and when you say, ‘Why are you beating the cat?’ you say, ‘It’s a cat-tiger strategy.’ But you’re beating the cat because you don’t know what to do about the tiger.”
Spencer Ackerman reports that Stewart “has one advantage over his fellow witnesses” at the Senate hearings: “he’s better with quips.” Matthew Yglesias writes “you shouldn’t just listen to the guy who has the best jokes, but I think these are good points.” Dan Drezner thought the cliff-driving image was “really funny” and “true a fair amount of the time”, but he wasn’t “sure that metaphor holds up all of the time.” His alternative:
From the policymaker’s perspective, getting outside advice is like trying to figure out which railroad track to take if you’re driving a train. There are three options ahead, and for myriad reasons each of the possibilities carries some risk. So you go place an emergency phone call to the head of Harvard’s Department of Railroad Studies to get a recommendation. His advice? “Why don’t you go off-track?”
“Sometimes,” Drezner suggest, “the outside advisor is right to make policymakers question core assumptions.” But “sometimes a policymaker has neither the time nor the political capital to go back to first principles. Sometimes they just need to know what is the least bad policy option. And I guarantee you that having an academic tell them, “they’re all bad policy options” is of no use whatsoever in that moment.”
That’s fair. For Drezner’s analogy to be true-to-life, though, said policymaker would be directing his query on railroad issues to a more appropriate source of subject matter expertise. Like, say, the Department of Maritime Statistics.
Meanwhile, there was this one about the drunk looking for his car keys under the lamp post because that’s where the best light is…
Do You Think I Should Be Prime Minister?
I’ve always been a fan of Rory Stewart’s writing. His spare prose sits well, and I can appreciate his criticism of internationals parachuted in to fix cultures of which they have neither experience nor knowledge. I’ve never been overly sympathetic of his critics, who deride his colonial profile, his precociousness, or his view from the weeds. His style works well as a source of engaging reading material. As bona fide expertise, though, a lot of it – his ideas, and his qualifications to offer them – rubs the wrong way. Emily Stokes’ interview with him, published in the Financial Times at the end of July, doesn’t paint a flattering portrait… and raises some questions as to how connected he his with the realities around him. Or how disconnected he is from them.
Maybe that’s just the way FT decided to portray him. I don’t know the man, except from what he’s written, so difficult to say. You be the judge. It would be interesting, though, to see how political life in Britain would treat him.
“Do you think I should be a politician, Emily?” he asks. I say why not. “Do you think I should I be prime minister?” I tell him that I think he should try being a politician first. Stewart clearly has some concerns about how he would be received as an MP in Britain. Will people be prejudiced towards him because he went to Eton? Does he come across too earnest in interviews? Should he be more light-hearted? Does an MP need to support a football team? Stewart is better at observing ancient Afghan traditions than modern British ones; he doesn’t know a thing about football. The only advice I can think of seems to come from his own book – to keep acting on his feet, and to bear in mind that no one, not even Rory Stewart, can be an expert on everything.
Read the rest here. H/t Kenneth Payne.
Stephen Farrell’s Account of His Kidnapping
Stephen Farrell, the British New York Times journalist kidnapped for four days last week, has written a candid and vivid account of the ordeal and his rescue. Gripping.
MICHAEL A. INNES 