by Alex Evans | Feb 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoZeZprXnDg]
A propos of David’s recent posts on lax security surrounding Barack Obama, American voters can at least take heart from new research from Harvard University, which finds that the effect of assassination attempts in democracies – either successful or not – is negligible. In autocracies, on the other hand, they can have a decisive effect. Michael Moynihan in The American has the details:
In “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” Olken and Jones looked at the effects of political assassination, using a strict empirical methodology that takes into account economic conditions at the time of the killing and what Olken calls a “novel data set” of assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, between 1875 and 2004.
Olken and Jones discovered that a country was “more likely to see democratization following the assassination of an autocratic leader,” but found no substantial “effect following assassinations—or assassination attempts—on democratic leaders.” They concluded that “on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy.” The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.”
by Richard Gowan | Feb 23, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, UK
Further to my rant against the legion of poltroons who have made comments on Kosovo on the Guardian website, Martin Kettle has restored my faith that there’s still some room for nuance on the British Left:
Surely British liberals have room for more than one idea in their heads at a time. How can a sense of shame over Iraq really justify getting into an anti-Kosovan menage a trois with Vladimir Putin – the Slav Ahmadinajad – and with the Islamophobic states of the southern Balkans? How can liberals from a country that was forced to concede the independence of Ireland, our very own Kosovo, less than a century ago – a move which their predecessors championed – now become ideological fellow travellers of Putin and Hu Jintao?
Britain was right to play its part in the Kosovo intervention. We have to stick with the consequences. And we have to uphold the difficult principle of humanitarian intervention now and in the future, as circumstances arise – as they well might under President Obama. Don’t throw the interventionist baby out with the post-Bush bathwater. The world is a difficult place – but we don’t make it any easier by pulling up the drawbridge, hoping it will all go away and then wringing our hands when the next call for justice goes unheeded.
by David Steven | Feb 23, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
Yesterday, I blogged on Dallas’s bid to stage another high profile political assassination. Now the Secret Service has tried to explain its decision to let people into an Obama rally without searching them for weapons.
“There were no security lapses at that venue,” said Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington. He added there was “no deviation” from the “comprehensive and layered” security plan, implemented in “very close cooperation with our law enforcement partners.”
Zahren rebutted suggestions by several Dallas police officers at the rally who thought the Secret Service ordered a halt to the time-consuming weapons check because long lines were moving slowly, and many seats remained empty as time neared for Obama to appear.
“It was never a part of the plan at this particular venue to have each and every person in the crowd pass through the Magnetometer,” said Zahren, referring to the device used to detect metal in clothing and bags.
He declined to give the reason for checking people for weapons at the front of the lines and letting those farther back go in without inspection.
“We would not want, by providing those details, to have people trying to derive ways in which they could defeat the security at any particular venue,” Zahren said.
So, bottom line: if you fancy killing Barack, just make sure you arrive late.
by David Steven | Feb 22, 2008 | Conflict and security
Lax security has already given the world one political martyr this year – let’s not have another one, eh?
Security details at Barack Obama’s rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department’s homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order — apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service — was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena’s vacant seats before Obama came on.
“Sure,” said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a “friendly crowd.”
by Richard Gowan | Feb 20, 2008 | North America, Off topic
Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
And here’s the equivalent from Clinton’s speech the same night:
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
