by David Steven | Nov 1, 2008 | North America
Obama’s ground game continues to be where the action is – and it’s taken him deep into some very red states:
Almost as soon as Sen. Barack Obama declared that he was running for president, Chrisi West signed up to volunteer. The Fairfax County resident was dissatisfied with the status quo on income inequality, domestic violence and the Iraq war. What she heard from Obama during his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and what she read in his book “Dreams From My Father” convinced her that he — with her help — could turn dissatisfaction into action.
So West, 29, took her first step into politics. She went to Obama’s Web site, set up an account and began an almost two-year journey through a new kind of grass-roots campaign, centered largely in her electronic world. She met like-minded supporters, began organizing and helped build a network of volunteers with a reach so vast that, in a Washington Post poll released this week, more than half of voters surveyed in Virginia said they had been contacted by the Obama campaign about supporting the Democrat in his bid for the White House.
If Obama becomes the first Democrat in 44 years to win the state, it will be in large part because of the Chrisi Wests of the world. They have sent e-mails, made phone calls and knocked on doors. They have texted and Twittered. And the Obama campaign has helped make it happen by speaking the language of cellphones, text messages and e-mail accounts — and by giving thousands of young Americans who communicate this way the power to participate.
That participation has reached a crescendo in recent days, with Obama volunteers taking to the phones in such volume that more Virginians who are likely to vote have heard from them than not. More than 10,000 volunteers are working for Obama in Virginia, according to the campaign. They appear to be making a difference: According to the Post poll, Obama had a 75 to 22 percent advantage among likely voters who had heard from his campaign in person, on the phone or via e-mail or text message but had not been reached by Sen. John McCain’s campaign.
“We have so many amazingly dedicated, just generous volunteers,” West said. “It’s just crazy how this whole thing grew, honestly.”
Grass-roots activity in Virginia for McCain appears to be less energized. A recent two-day swing through every Northern Virginia campaign office for both candidates found crowds of volunteers for Obama on the phones, being trained to canvass and passing out signs, stickers and other material. McCain’s offices were universally quiet, in some cases with just one or two field workers sitting at a counter or table and little foot traffic. This week, just days before the election, Obama’s Web site advertised more than 300 events in Northern Virginia; McCain’s advertised seven.
by Charlie Edwards | Oct 22, 2008 | Conflict and security
William S Lind suggests that beyond Afghanistan, the Fourth Generation future belongs neither to al Qaeda nor to the Taliban but to two more sophisticated models, Hezbollah and the Latin American drug gangs (I would add other criminal networks and piracy too). He writes:
Both can fight, but fighting is not primarily what they are about. Rather, both are about benefiting their members with money, services, community, identity, and, strange as it may sound, what passes locally for good government. Even the drug gangs’ governance is often less corrupt than that of the local state. Both of these 4GW models can fall into the fatal error of alienating the local population, but the tendency is not inherent. While Hezbollah is religiously defined, it seems to appeal well beyond the Puritans, which means it can give orders Puritans will not obey. The drug gangs’ principal faith is in making money, and few faiths are more broadly latitudinarian. In Iraq as elsewhere, the fading of the al Qaeda model is being balanced not by the rise of a new state but by the adoption of other models of 4GW. So far, as best I can determine, no foreign intervention in a Fourth Generation conflict has succeeded is re-creating a real state (you can add Ethiopia in Somalia to the long list of failures).
With that in mind it is depressing to read that the newly appointed commander of Nato’s anti-piracy patrol off the coast of Somalia says it will be difficult to defend ships from pirate attacks. This at a time when Nato is sending seven frigates to support US navy vessels already there, and India and several European countries have said they will also mount anti-piracy patrols.
“The time that a pirate unveils himself to the time that he’s onboard ship is such a short period of time,” says Admiral Mark Fitzgerald
Cynics might suggest that this is a careful piece of expectations management (think about the failure of SOCA as another example of how a Government over promises/ but under delivers), but it’s no wonder that NSAs (non state actors) are able to leverage considerable influence in proportion to their size and capabilities when the bureaucracies are not necessarily constrained by current laws/rules but by process of implementing them. The rules of engagement are still being debated by Nato – and if I were a betting man I would suggest that such rules are unlikely to be in place before the NATO task force has to respond to its first attack.
In his interview with the BBC Admiral Mark Fitzgerald also raises a rather more worrying issue*. Given how busy the sea lanes are, he asks: How do you prove a guy’s a pirate before he actually attacks a ship?
Some possible suggestions below:
*TiC
by Charlie Edwards | Oct 20, 2008 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
The soldier-scholar General Petraeus is launching a major reassessment of U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region, the result of which will be a new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia.
Two major themes have emerged from some of the initial brainstorming:
1. A Government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
2. Leveraging diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war.
Interestingly:
In appearances this month in Washington, however, Petraeus has sought to manage expectations of any repeat of the Iraq performance in Afghanistan – often suggested by Republican presidential candidate John McCain – stressing that Afghanistan is not Iraq, and that while some concepts are “transplantable,” Afghanistan has daunting challenges likely to require a far lengthier effort.
As befits a soldier-scholar Petraeus is now recruiting a brain trust of advisers, to join his Joint Strategic Assessment Team – led by a longtime adviser, Col. H.R. McMaster. Experts will be handpicked from State Department, Pentagon and other civilian and military officials as well as from outside. To begin with the 100 people, will be split into six subregional teams, tasked with investigating the root causes of insecurity in the region with the goal of finding solutions that integrate military action, diplomacy and development work. Experts currently touted to join the assessments group include: Shuja Nawaz, Ahmed Rashid, and Clare Lockhart.
by David Steven | Oct 14, 2008 | North America
More bad news for McCain. The Huffington Post leads with an article on links between the head of his transition team and Saddam Hussein:
William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.
The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.
Read the whole thing.
by Alex Evans | Oct 6, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
Two excellent columns in the FT last week explored the extent to which the credit crunch is a crisis of trust – and not just in the obvious sense of whether you trust your bank to be able to pay you back your deposit, or whether banks trust each other as counterparties.
As Chrystia Freeland notes, one dimension of the broader crisis of trust is the collapse of faith between electorate and political establishment in the US, seen in vivid colour in the House of Representatives’ initial refusal to approve Paulson’s bailout. For all that “the nearly unanimous verdict of what we might once have called the wise men in both parties, in government and in business, in academia and in the so-called MSM (mainstream media), was that the Paulson plan definitely, absolutely, undoubtedly should be approved”, 228 members of Congress – and countless voters on the phone to their offices – “decided they didn’t believe their country’s political and economic establishment”. She continues,
Americans have good reason to distrust their elite. The country’s political rulers, led by George W. Bush’s strong-arm White House, have made it easy to believe that the US government just doesn’t work. From Katrina to the war in Iraq (at least before the surge), to the budget deficit, to the lack of a national energy policy, Washington doesn’t seem to be delivering very good value to its citizens.
Nor do the nation’s business leaders appear particularly trustworthy at the moment. Even before the credit crunch bit, median wages were stagnating while the incomes of the super-rich soared, creating a gap bigger than at any time since the Gilded Age.
All of this makes the nation’s widely felt, bipartisan impulse to just “kick the bastards out” easy to understand. [But] here’s the rub: the current financial crisis is global, fast-moving and fiendishly complicated. It is precisely the sort of thing it takes selfless, sophisticated technocrats to fix. But, even if America can find the necessary, honourable financial wizards – no mean feat – can it bring itself to trust them?
Luke Johnson, on the other hand, explores the collapse of trust that led to the credit crunch in the first place. Most commentators, he notes, blame Wall Street for the crisis – and yet,
…the heart of this wealth destruction is a collapsing subprime property market. And in that dark and catastrophic place, I suspect that there have been more lies told than by all the world’s bankers put together. It is inconceivable that the many thousands of realtors, mortgage brokers, valuers, developers, builders and other members of the great daisy chain were not in on the game.
Moreover, the homeowners themselves were also willing participants. Many lied to get mortgages and paid more for properties than they could afford, thinking they would flip them for a profit – because property only goes up in value, right?
We may be witnessing the greatest financial fraud of all time – on many levels. Western societies have been guilty of living beyond their means, and the reckoning we face is a sobering jolt. As they say: I have seen the enemy, and it is us.
The breakdown of trust in financial services is fraying the basic systems we rely on to conduct our daily lives. If citizens cannot rely upon multinational banks to safeguard their money then our way of life will grind to a halt. So many participants – executives, regulators – appear to have been negligent and some perhaps worse. In this miasma, who is delusional and who is deliberately misleading? Many of the players are themselves the losers: the staff of Lehman Brothers held $10bn worth of their own shares – now worthless.
The biggest victim in the whole shambles is not the foreclosed householder, the sacked investment banker or the devastated shareholder. It is our self-confidence and belief in the institutions that help fund almost everything.
The current collapse of trust in institutions is not new, and has been well documented for a while now. But we’ve rarely seen the effects of that collapse in quite such sharp relief, or in quite so many dimensions, as during the current financial crisis.
