Month: February 2007

Meow.

The chaos in Iraq now sees Sunni terrorists using explosives with chemical components. There is such hideous irony here: we invaded to stop a dictator giving chemical weapons to terrorists. But the result of the botched, under-manned occupation is that the terrorists no longer need the dictator to get them. As for the surge, it’s whack-a-mole time again:

The geography of the attacks on Tuesday and today — all in the outer ring of neighborhoods around the capital — suggested that the new Baghdad security plan may be pushing violence out to areas outside Baghdad’s central neighborhoods.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief American military spokesman in the capital, said that military officials have found that as killings and bombings have decreased in Baghdad proper in recent weeks, the fringe areas have seen an increase. Top commanders were considering moving at least one brigade to Diyala Province north of Baghdad, the site of vicious battles between Sunni insurgents and American and Iraqi troops.

The police state gains ground in the UK:

For its report the spy watchdog monitored 795 bodies, all of which were empowered to seek out communications data. These included MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the signals intelligence centre in Cheltenham, as well as 52 police forces, 475 local authorities and 108 other organisations such as the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority. Between them they made 439,000 requests for communications information over the 15-month period.

The Home Office said that the total number of such requests, which includes information on e-mail addresses and lists of phone numbers, had not been published before. It was unable to say if this represented a huge increase in data collection.

Gulp.

In a nutshell. Oh, for the days when conservatives could agree on something.

Dick Cheney’s response to the news that Britain is withdrawing some of its troops from Iraq was interesting. Here it is:

"Well, I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well. In fact, I talked to a friend just the other day who had driven to Baghdad down to Basra, seven hours, found the situation dramatically improved from a year or so ago, sort of validated the British view they had made progress in southern Iraq and that they can therefore reduce their force levels."

Remember that, according to Cheney, the entire war has been an enormous success so far. My bet is that the phony peace prompted by the surge is designed to give Bush and Cheney a moment around May to say about all of Iraq what Cheney has just said about the south. It’s fine. We won. We’re redeploying. But only the Democrats want to retreat. Remember: the facts in Iraq are irrelevant to Cheney. What matters is domestic politics. And he’s setting himself up for a declaration of victory relatively soon. At least one other person on earth will pretend to believe him.

Some Brits speak up for their ally.

The stereotypes about brainiac, sex-free old maids are well overdue for retirement.

Gary Rosen has some sensible things to say on the current intersection of faith and politics in the culture. As my book makes clear, I’m a defender of people of faith being fully engaged in political debate. Of course our religious views will influence our politics. But the crude invocation of Biblical authority or the recourse to a theologically-based "natural law" – without an attempt to translate such arguments into secular terms that non-believers can understand and engage – is dangerous to democracy. It is, in effect, an end to politics in a religiously and philosophically diverse modernity. Christians have vital things to contribute to public debate. But Christianism – the conflation of faith with politics – is a threat to such debate.

Islamists are trying to ban the flying of kites in Pakistan. But they may not be the worst threat to the tradition, especially during the festival of Basant which welcomes the spring. Money quote:

Basant’s kite flying may have promoted social harmony and moderate society in the past. Unfortunately it does just the opposite today.

Over the past decade, Basant has been hijacked by kite-flying fanatics. Cut throat kite-flyers have been using metal twine. The aim: to cut opponents’ kite wires. The collateral damage: hundreds of slit throats. A beautiful cultural tradition has degenerated into a murderous sport. Reports say that hundreds have been killed or wounded when their throats were cut by razor-sharp kite twine.

Mary Poppins meets Quentin Tarantino.

Here’s a fascinating discussion of the way we human beings make judgments and decisions. It’s especially useful when thinking about how many of us badly miscalculated Iraq’s pre-war WMDs and even how to grapple with the costs and risks of acting now to prevent or ameliorate climate change. Humans like certainty. In areas where we know least we are most intent on it. An experiment unpacks how:

Camerer’s experiment revolved around a decision making game known as the Ellsberg paradox. Camerer imaged the brains of people while they placed bets on whether the next card drawn from a deck of twenty cards would be red or black. At first, the players were told how many red cards and black cards were in the deck, so that they could calculate the probability of the next card being a certain color. The next gamble was trickier: subjects were only told the total number of cards in the deck. They had no idea how many red or black cards the deck contained.

The first gamble corresponds to the theoretical ideal of economics: investors face a set of known risks, and are able to make a decision based upon a few simple mathematical calculations. We know what we don’t know, and can easily compensate for our uncertainty. As expected, this wager led to the "rational" parts of the brain becoming active, as subjects computed the odds. Unfortunately, this isn’t how the real world works. In reality, our gambles are clouded by ignorance and ambiguity; we know something about what might happen, but not very much. (For example, it’s now clear just how little we actually knew about Iraq pre-invasion.) When Camerer played this more realistic gambling game, the subjects’ brains reacted very differently. With less information to go on, the players exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is believed to modulate activity in the amygdala. In other words, we filled in the gaps of our knowledge with fear. This fear creates our bias for certainty, since we always try to minimize our feelings of fear. As a result, we pretend that we have better intelligence about Iraqi WMD than we actually do; we selectively interpret the facts until the uncertainty is removed.

My italics. I think the relationship between fear and the need for certainty is strong. It certainly clouded my judgment after 9/11 and before the Iraq war. And I think extreme fear in the face of globalizing modernity is the deep engine for the rise of religious fundamentalism right now – both Christian and Muslim. In fact, that’s the key argument of my book. And the antidote to such fear? A combination of reason, doubt – and existential nerve.