News for June 19

Green Revolution, Cultural Clashes & National Security

Iran continues to be the flavor of the week when it comes to the news; however, it’s refreshing to see some news from the net providing alternatives to the limited coverage of the mainstream media.  We’ll pull a couple of interesting headlines from Iran before we reexamine the Clash of Civilizations thesis and look at the remnants of this now questionable theory in our own national security apparatus.

Andrew Sullivan gives some of the most cogent thoughts on the situation in Iran ala Khamenei’s speech.  His thoughts are both incisive and hopeful, while straddling a middle ground somewhere between defeat and unwarranted hope.

Thoughts On Khamenei’s Speech  |  Andrew Sullivan

I think we find one clue to why he rigged the vote count so crudely. His argument that a majority of eleven million was too big to allow for any irregularities suggests he believed that a big lie was the only one that would work. But if you utter a big lie, you had better hope it could persuade some.

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I fear deeply what is about to happen. But I also sense that the Gandhi-strategy of the majority is a winning one. If they can sustain their numbers and withstand the nightly raids, and if they can overwhelm the capital tomorrow in another peaceful show of strength, then they can win. And the world will change… Something is happening in Iran.

Facebook, Google Go Persian, Aiding Iran’s Activists  |  Danger Room :: Wired.com

Iran’s activists have been relying on blogs, Tweets, text messages, Facebook groups, and uploaded YouTube videos to share information with one another, and with the outside world. Late Thursday night, both Facebook and Google’s translation service added Persian language support, which should make it even easier for the Iranian opposition and its growing global network of supporters to connect.

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Almost immediately, supporters of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi used the new feature to begin translating his official site into English.

The interesting thing about the news of change in Iran is the strange relationship between the reformers and the west.  The debate continues in this country as to how the government should officially respond to the crisis while supporters of opposition leader Mousavi are translating his Facebook site to English.  As William Pfaff notes, this type of relationship clearly flies in the face of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis in his 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The War Between Civilizations That Never Was  |  William Pfaff :: Truthdig

An important change is evident in what since Samuel Huntington’s time has been mistakenly identified and manipulated as a war between Muslim and Western civilizations.

I say mistakenly for several reasons, one of them being that professor Huntington himself actually foresaw a war in which an alliance of Muslim and Chinese civilizations attacked the West, in an exaggerated Cold War scenario. (The Chinese are now on the side of the United States, where much of their fortune is tied up.)

I say manipulated because the Huntington thesis served the purpose of those Americans who believed in the inevitability of conflict with Islam as a whole—not just with individual states.

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The West was wrong about this being a war of civilizations, and so were the Muslims. George W. Bush’s Great War on Global Terror, against Islamic radicalism and Muslim terrorism, and the Great Fear that came close to paralyzing America after 9/11, and continues to preoccupy the American and West European governments, are both fundamentally due to a crisis inside Islamic civilization: a double crisis, of modernity and of religion.

Nothing could be clearer today in Tehran. Iran is convulsed by a struggle between its modernizing classes, reaching out to become part of a cosmopolitan international society, and to possess the respect of Western nations (if necessary, through the dangerous possession of nuclear weapons, as well as other evidences of Western modernity), and to be taken into the high councils of the modern world and be invited to participate in the rounds of international meetings where the Iranians no doubt think the world’s problems are today being settled over their heads and against their interests.

An interesting commentary on our understanding of the threat of terrorism also brings some insights from the academic study of risk management.  Reporting on the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to hire science fiction writers to conjure the most imaginative scenarios for a terrorist attack, Bruce Schneier muses over the possibility that we’ve overestimated the terrorist threat.

How Science Fiction Writers Can Help, or Hurt, Homeland Security  |  Commentary :: Wired.com

Think about this in the context of terrorism. If you’re asked to come up with threats, you’ll think of the significant ones first. If you’re pushed to find more, if you hire science-fiction writers to dream them up, you’ll quickly get into the low-probability movie plot threats. But since they’re the last ones generated, they’re more available. (They’re also more vivid — science fiction writers are good at that — which also leads us to overestimate their probability.) They also suggest we’re even less in control of the situation than we believed. Spending too much time imagining disaster scenarios leads people to overestimate the risks of disaster.

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Jørgensen does not believe risk analysis is useless in software projects, and I don’t believe scenario brainstorming is useless in counterterrorism. Both can lead to new insights and, as a result, a more intelligent analysis of both specific risks and general risk. But an over-reliance on either can be detrimental.

The remnants of both an overly simplistic approach to foreign policy and a perhaps overstate threat of terrorism remain evident here in our country.  New reports of government surveillance on U.S. citizens have surfaced that raise questions about the extent of government powers, and even the Obama administration is not free from criticism.

America accused of spying on millions of emails  |  Technology blog :: guardian.co.uk

In the latest in a series of intelligence scandals to hit Washington, details of a secretive email surveillance scheme are beginning to come to light – with fresh allegations reported in the New York Times.

The Times quotes one anonymous NSA analyst who claims that electronic messages sent to and from American citizens, and says that the former president – whose wife is now the country’s secretary of state – was among those targeted by the sweep.

The database system, called Pinwale, is used by America’s National Security Agency to intercept and examine huge volumes of email passing through American telecommunications networks.

Old Obama Vs. New Obama on Warrantless Wiretapping  |  John Nichols :: Alter.net

Obama told me five years ago that he wanted to emulate Feingold as a defender of civil liberties and the Constitution, especially when it came to matters of protecting the right to privacy that was so under assault during the Bush-Cheney interregnum.

After his election as the junior senator from Illinois, Obama did work with Feingold on a number of issues and joined the Wisconsin progressive in boldly and unequivocally asserting that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was “illegal”.

But now, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has asserted in a speech, and restated in a response to a reporter’s question, that Bush-Cheney warrantless wiretapping program “wasn’t illegal.”

We’ll wrap up the week with a look at the results of our attempts to sustain national security and their impact overseas.  This post not only highlights the crisis of refugees in Afghanistan, but issues a call to action.  The entire article is worth the read and their campaign for raising awareness is unique and intriguing.

Rethink Afghanistan  |  God’s Politics

An interview with a man and his children in an Internally Displaced Person (refugee) camp quickly devolves into a father desperately trying to sell his smallest child to the cameraman. “For God’s sake, I want to sell this child but nobody wants her. What can I do?… For God’s sake, I am poor, otherwise I wouldn’t give her for one million. I know nobody wants to sell their daughter, but I have to. She is innocent, but I am poor. I have nothing.”

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This is the kind of footage we saw, over and over again, as we cut and shaped the Rethink Afghanistan: Civilian Casualties segment. The first time I saw it, I was shocked. As a taxpayer, I was filled with shame that these Afghans have to choose between living in fear of U.S. airstrikes in rural areas or dying of hunger and cold in urban refugee camps. As a person of faith, my heart broke for the men who constantly fingered their prayer beads as they recalled the loved ones they had lost, and the parents and grandparents who cried out to God on behalf of their children and grandchildren.