In his new book, Beyond a House Divided: The Moral Consensus Ignored by Washington, Wall Street, and the Media, Carl Anderson examines a mountain of polling statistics and has some surprising news. Anderson writes, “In dealing with many high profile issues, we have found consensus where conventional wisdom would have us believe it is most unlikely: on the issues of religion in public life, abortion, marriage, and the role of government, among others.”
Anderson writes that Americans, by a margin of nearly two to one, share a common moral compass and are, as a result, at odds not with each other, but rather with governmental, media, and financial institutions. We care much more about right and wrong than we do about right and left.
. . . . . . .
While documents like the Manhattan Declaration are regularly smeared as the work of partisans and extremists, quite the opposite is true. Carl Anderson’s book makes the clear case that if you believe in restricting abortion, in traditional marriage, and in other traditional values you are, whether Republican, Democrat or Independent, part of the great American consensus.
It reminds me of what Sociologist Peter Berger used to say: If India is the most religious nation in the world, and Sweden the most irreligious, America is a nation of Indians governed by Swedes. We, in fact, are in the mainstream. It's the elite who are out of step. So if we focus our energies on working together, we can bring about the great civic and national renewal so many of us seek.
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added. This is not news to the informed public. It has long been known that the 80-20 rule applies–that most agree on 80% and disagree on 20%. Focusing the public “debate” on the 20% is a common means of creating wedge issues that portray a difference between Republicans and Democrats that is cosmetic at best. 2012 is a potential time of Awakening and Emergence.
NIGHTWATCH EXTRACT Tunisia: Update. The Tunisian army fired into the air to disperse protesters from the headquarters of former President Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally (CDR) in Tunis. The CDR has been disbanded but some demonstrators want the building razed. The state of emergency remains in effect.
The interim government met for the first time today. The session concluded with a number of decrees.
The government ordered a general amnesty for all political prisoners, reduction of the curfew everywhere except Tunis, and the reopening of schools and universities next Monday. It also agreed to recognize all previously banned political parties and declared three days of mourning for the 78 people killed during the recent uprising.
In his address, the interim president and former Speaker of the Parliament stressed the temporary character of this government, and determined its tasks to be:
– to make sure that all enterprises get back to normal business;
– to prepare for the forthcoming presidential elections.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The interim president and the prime minister both resigned from the RCD, in which both had been longstanding members. They directed other hold-over cabinet members to resign in today's cabinet session.
The political activities are almost surreal. The holdover political leaders apparently think a “do-over” will be sufficient to correct the authoritarian excesses of the past 23 years. Thus far Tunisians are acquiescing in this bizarre exercise. Meanwhile, the economic grievances that gave rise to street demonstrations remain unaddressed.
Phi Beta Iota: The well-mannered unethical among us will be quick to scorn the above headline, but the comment says it all. Buckminster Fuller was among the first in modern history to point out that the White House was theater, and many others have addressed the huge gap between reality and the images that Wall Street and Washington seek to communicate. Advanced cyber-information operations have been perfected by the financial crime network within which the two political parties are fully complicit co-conspirators. There are 63 other parties in America that have been disenfranchised, and the electoral system is as corrupt as any abroad including that of Tunisia. The current financial and political leadership of the USA really thinks that a “do-over” (the other term is “make-over”) will quiet things down. This isn't just moving deck chairs on the sinking Titanic; this is re-arranging deck chairs floating in the icy waters of the North and pretending the ship of state is still there.
Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is not dead–it just does not exist within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Department of Defense (DoD). “Butts in Seats,” bureaucracy, political flag officers with no sense of responsibility for the commonwealth, this is our lot today.
Rule 1: HUMINT is not an organization. It is a state of mind that can only be found in individual humans.
Rule 2: HUMINT is not secret, not federal, not in English, and not expensive.
Rule 3: Governments and corporations have failed. The era of the hybrid network has begun.
This entire website is about HUMINT–about transparency, truth, & trust. About integrity.
The Clear-Hold-Build (C-H-B) strategy was first enunciated enthusiastically during the Bush Administration as the new counterinsurgency strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Actually, this strategy was merely an unimaginative regurgitation of Marshall Lautey's “tache d'huile” (oil spot) strategy used to quell native uprisings during France colonial wars at the end of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th Century.
The recent escalation in Afghanistan may be taking the unimaginative C-H-B soundbyte to the extremities of its logical absurdity, if the attached report by Spencer Ackerman is correct: Apparently, our forces applied the C-H-B strategy literally to a small Afghan village in Kandahar's Arghandab River Valley of Taliban by using 25 tons of air delivered explosives to CLEAR it off the map (see photo). Ackerman goes to suggest HOLDING will be accomplished because we will spend one million dollars to (re) BUILD it. As part of our cultural sensitivity strategy to HOLD onto the Afghan's hearts and minds during the BUILD leg of the strategy, our troops are holding “construction shuras” with the villagers to compensate them for their loses.
Think of the C-H-B strategy as the Petraeus equivalent of destroying a village to save it — sound familiar?
An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar's Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It's hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America's counterinsurgency strategy – which supposedly prizes the local people's loyalty above all else.
An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar's Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It's hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America's counterinsurgency strategy – which supposedly prizes the local people's loyalty above all else.
But it's the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.
Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks' Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.
In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:
1. Iran . 2. Sri Lanka . 3. Russia . 4. Georgia . 5. Israel . 6. Turkey . 7. Burundi . 8. Chad . 9. Honduras . 10. Czech Republic . 11. China . 12. Italy . 13. Colombia . 14. Ukraine . 15. Indonesia . 16. Malaysia . 17. Jordan . 18. Mexico . 19. Kenya . 20. South Africa . 21. Ireland . 22. Peru . 23. Chile . 24. Armenia . 25. Tunisia . 26. Democratic Republic of the Congo . 27. Belarus . 28. Argentina . 29. Albania . 30. Ecuador . 31. Sudan . 32. Austria . 33. Nigeria . 34. Syria . 35. Kyrgyz Republic . 36. Egypt . 37. Belgium
