MY PRACTITIONER'S DIARY FOR THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

This is a complilation of my thoughts on my Theories of IR class, and how theory meets the real world of practitioners. The diary chronicals my classes in October & November 2005. Earlier classes and their content are talked about earlier in my blog...somewhere close to the absolute start of the blog. Some of my reflections are good, some bad and some ugly...read on to get my drift!

OCTOBER 4TH 2005
Through class we talked about the ‘born again realists’ – An interesting phrase! I’ve heard of the ‘born again Christian’ (forgive the nth crack at Bush Jr.), but I’ve never really heard someone being called ‘born again realist.’ The approach of ‘born again realists,’ better known as Constructivists as I understand, is through linguistics, while Realism and Marxism are rather crude, in their more materialistic focus. To me, the description and discussion of Constructivism showed a diplomatic middle ground for those not brave enough to be labeled realists or idealists! The use of language, I think is what intrigued me about Constructivism. The meaning produced by language and metaphor was fascinating because unconsciously, I walked that middle path professionally. Whether that was the necessity of the job, or was it by choice, is something I really need to think about. I also need to think about whether that is the tact I intend to take as I move through the next few years of my career – as a journalist or in any other role.

Practitioner Hour:
I thought I’d write a brief on Richard Clarke’s ‘Against All Enemies’ which was on our reading list for the day, before getting to what we actually did during the Practitioner Hour. The book was one of the first to point out the critical flaws in the way President Bush conducted himself, as a leader and as a war time President! (Surprise! Surprise!) His accusations were later corroborated in investigations undertaken by the 9/11 Commission. When I read the book, I did feel that Clarke was blowing his own trumpet a bit, but who can deny the President’s actions prior to 9/11 and the tangent he veered onto right after the incident – choosing to focus his energies on Iraq, rather than the Al Qaeda. But Clarke's narrative goes further than just throwing accusations at Bush. He describes terrorism and intelligence gathering of the US from the Soviet Union to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and further highlighting the various attacks on US targets well before 9/11.

He describes the gradual emergence of a man who the CIA called "terrorist financier Osama bin Laden". Clarke’s description of the Clinton administration's approach to terrorism in my opinion was unduly generous, but he repeatedly gave Clinton the benefit of the doubt in the book.

I loved one phrase rather an acronym in the book that described the Bush Camp’s attitude towards everything – “ABC” (Anything But Clinton) which basically meant - Whatever the outgoing lot did, do the opposite.

Ok, enough digression! Against All Enemies had actually set the stage for the assignment of the week. During the hour, we were introduced to our latest assignment which was to design a terrorist organization that we would create. The exercise was for each team to talk about the ideology of their respective group, what we were fighting for, why we believed our existence was critical to our cause and why we had to fight our battles by spilling blood (Gory!)! Then we were expected to outline and describe how the organization was structured, what our recruiting policy was, what was the demographic breakdown of the members. Critically important was to highlight the organization’s security measures and how we would counter any police action against us and most importantly, how would we protect our people and our money trail. Last but not the least, we were expected to outline the group’s modus operandi, logistics and goal achievements.

My team was the ‘Copperhead’ group, which we renamed – Earth F!@*, which basically meant that we were an environmental protection group with a difference! And not a very nice difference! The group consisted of the most blood thirsty environmentalists in the New York State area – namely Shawn Mongin, Amy Koler, Nick Rossman and Steve Hallock! We were angry, we were desperate and we were smart. And so kicked off the planning for Earth F&%*. We only decided the name and cause of the group during class, deciding instead to meet later in the week to form our bloody plan of action! I could see everyone was raring to come up with how we could bomb, pillage and destroy those that had caused us grievous mental trauma! SU Faculty not included!

I left class a little early, to attend to some duties for the South Asia Centre, leaving the group to decide when we could hold our secret meeting and the location of the initiation ceremony for the founders of Earth F%$*. I expect a communiqué from them in the coming days, and hopefully it will be communicated via a human courier so as not to be discovered even before we begin! Who knows, this exercise could just change the direction of my career altogether!


OCTOBER 11TH
I need to mention my Policy Options paper before I try and analyze my class and the practitioner hour today, only because of the kind of eye-opening exercise it was! Writing the policy paper wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it would be. To take into consideration the magnitude of the repercussions for the world as a whole, to understand that the policy adoption by the US towards Iran would set precedence for the US’s policies towards the rest of the world made me wary in terms of the options I wanted to put forth. If this was the real world and I had the opportunity to present those options to my boss and therefore the President, I think I’d be even more cautious than I’ve been in this options paper (given the propensity that the Bush Administration has for playing Cowboy and Indian games!).

I consulted my peers, doctoral students and even my ex-colleagues as to their opinions and realized, those with public administration ambitions in the US didn’t even blink as they propagated the “just bomb them” policy! I didn’t want to take 1 week to write this paper, and just to keep it real, I gave myself 1 day (9am to 5pm) to complete the paper. I kept this time constraint to include the consultation time and the writing time, and while it wasn’t the best that I’ve ever written, I believed it was an option paper that would set a few people back in their chairs. Advocating a drastic policy change, with a bit of hand-shaking combined with tactful diplomacy and a little bit of eating crow, seemed to be the best option in my mind that the US could possibly take to keep the peace! No one in this administration will buy it is my biggest fear, but as they say – Nothing ventured nothing gained. It was better that I put that option on paper, in case someone with some sense was listening! I wish Colin Powell was still in this administration, and then the cowboy would at least have one sensible advisor who wouldn’t be pushing his career agenda before the world’s or the United States (and yes, that was my big Rumsfeld/Rice dig!).

To get back to class today, we continued on the trail of the constructivist ideology, spinning off to ontology, Positivism and the production of post modern constructivism texts. Then we conducted a brief discussion of the 9/11 Commission report, which pointed out how real networks work and how to decipher them, their movements through tracking the money trail as well as their people.

Practitioner Hour:
I must admit I wasn’t paying a lot of attention in class to the theories section today, since I was pre-occupied with what my group was going to present in the practitioner hour! Earth F&*%!

My finest hour was in coming up with that name! What release! To at last be given a free hand to be part of a destructive politicized terrorist group! And it was shocking to say the least, to see that part of us come alive. Earth F&^* was create to protect the earth from poison. Our group was fighting for the environment and believed that States had failed to protect the environment from greedy industries and other greedy governments. The leadership of our group was made up of a cadre of former Greenpeace members, with membership ranging from 18-35 from upper middle class and highly educated backgrounds. Our organization welcomed those from other races, but was essentially white and our monetary support mainly came from eccentric wealthy individuals. We were led by an Executive Council, and worked to spread our message through the media. Our cells worked individually on projects to avoid detection and to gain membership, we would ask potential members to submit proof of a crime (to know the genuine from a plant and also to have evidence against them in case we needed to use them as scapegoats if they turned). Membership was by invitation only to avoid infiltration. We also agreed that we could take human life to further our cause, but our main focus was infrastructure of institutions we held responsible for acts against the environment. We organized to have a front – an NGO that would encourage donations from political parties (to rub salt in the wounds) and maintain a clean money trail. To maintain morale, we would ensure that members worked with the NGO front to feel that they were also having an immediate impact on the environment.

All the groups had worked at their terror organizations with dedication. Call it the release of graduate student frustrations or just the inherent evil residing within us. If I were a part of such a network, I think I’d do well in my career as a terrorist!
The Cobra group wanted to spread capitalism and love by drug trafficking and prostitution. They wanted to run the organization out of Russia and planned to have a top down organization where money laundering would be a key practice. They didn’t intend for all their nodes to have all the information but were more concerned about password protecting their operations. To keep the forces of justice out of their areas of operation, any traitors to the organization would be offered up as sacrificial lambs to the police. Good concept, though I wouldn’t have called them a terrorist organization, actually I didn’t really see the difference between them and the Russian Mafia!

The Mangrove Network wanted to eradicate the blight of the poor – the capitalists! The group aimed at terrorizing capitalists in Latin America, kidnap them, hold them prisoner, beat and starve them and hold them captive with the poor of Latin America. Great concept, poor execution. If you hold someone powerful prisoner, where they can see the captors or accessories to the crime, the retribution is bound to be terrible! They too intended to keep their operatives on a need to know basis of their own roles, without access to the entire operation. Mangrove had planned for 5 regional heads, with counter-terrorism expertise to train its recruits to circumvent all traps. They believed a deep rooted hatred of capitalism would keep the fight alive along with funds from ransoms and extortions. But, with no vetting in the recruiting process, the organization in my opinion was doomed to fail before it began!

The Diamondbacks had one of the most powerful groups, and one that was likely to succeed in the real world. It was religiously affiliated by representing the Tibetan freedom movement. By calling themselves the Tibetan Liberation Front, they somewhat justified their existence to other Tibetans and even to those from other nations who believe in the freedom of Tibet. Its organizational chart was extremely strong, though its recruiting and funding plans were a bit flimsy. The concept of “need to know” was once again strong, while their attack plans were relatively well constructed. Their plan to have a charity as a front was good, though easily cracked by any international policing body such as Interpol. Raising money in the west through a charity is no longer the safest way to collect funds for terror networks with all security forces on the alert for such methods. A courier system for carrying messages is interesting but not foolproof nor efficient! But their idea of using Buddhist methods to resist torture was the most far fetched – it reminded me off ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’ and all the visuals that went with it. Interesting as a movie, but against the People’s Liberation Army, I’d give the Tibetan Liberation Front a lead time of 5 minutes and a survival time of 3 seconds!

The next group were all for the betterment of the sea humans – alias – Dolphins! A very adorable thought (loveable creatures, those dolphins) but this group was in no way a terrorist group! Though maybe, the Stepford wives would consider their idea of vandalizing restaurants, eating without cutlery and spitting and urinating in restaurants as a terror act! The group had no organization structure, no leadership, no cause strong enough to keep it sustained, just an externally controlled website for any and everyone to participate, act out any disgusting fantasy and claim it as for the betterment of the sea humans! A very original idea, but frankly not a very good one!
Death before compromise was the motto for the Native Indian rights group! They believed that legal recourse was no longer an option! (A bit late in my opinion, shouldn’t they have woken up to that reality 300 odd years ago?) The age bracket for the recruits was interesting and the strongest point about this group. Catch them young, fill them with hatred and you have the perfect weapon. An old, used, abused and successful tactic! Keeping the training camps in the State Park, a no discussion policy, false names, no association with other members, speaking only the native language, execution of the families of defectors – all these precautions toward security made me believe in terms of survival, this was the group that would succeed! But against Native American philosophy, I don’t believe that the recruits would agree to poison the water supply (would mean killing animals unnecessarily!) And fund raising through the Casino sounded a bit far fetched unless the Casino owner was heading the organization. (But somehow I don’t see the man who cheated his people out of their own land, being part of a terror network to stand up for Native American rights!) Another weak point in the group’s planning was the use of diamonds and gold bars as the medium of transactions. I’d think people would get suspicious of a tribe suddenly doing deals only in diamonds and gold, when usually they wouldn’t have cash to pay for the things they required.

All in all, I think today everyone got an insight into how difficult it is to create a terror network, operate it and keep it from being discovered or infiltrated by security forces. It also gave me an insight into what I’d probably have to encounter, if I ever did decide to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent, and the kinds of firewalls I’d encounter in my attempt to report on international terrorist groups. Another Daniel Pearl I definitely don’t want to be, so after this exercise, I think I really need to research terrorist groups to a greater degree, before I begin focusing on a career as a foreign correspondent. (PS: I still am not sure whether I want to continue being a journalist or to change tracks towards Development Consultancy)

OCTOBER 18TH:
We began class by discussing Cognitive Dynamics - Psychological Stress and Decision-Making. We talked about the various situations in which we had been under tremendous stress and our performance in those situations. I personally believe that I perform the best, when I’m under tremendous pressure, which would fit the description of self-confident vigilance. But some people are hyper vigilant i.e. becoming so stressed out that they just cannot function and then there are others who get so overwhelmed that they just cannot take any decisions.

According to our lecture notes for the day, ‘stress’ can be defined as anxiety or fear resulting from the perception that one’s values are being threatened. And this is an experience that I’ve definitely encountered almost on a daily basis for the last 4 years. This was also one of my main reasons to quit my job and return to School. You can only perform so many times under stress, but as the stress becomes an integral part of your daily life, you just burn out. Getting back to school for me was almost an essential. I needed to open my mind to new subjects, feed it information that it couldn’t see or observe when it was constantly being bombarded with the stress of work. And looking at what I’ve accomplished for myself in terms of learning in the last few months, I’d say I made the right decision.

Practitioner Hour:
Bob Woodward’s book ‘Plan of Attack’ was a great read. ‘Plan of Attack’ claims to be the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush and his war council, along with Prime Minister Tony Blair, launched a pre-emptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq.

The introduction of the Bush team, starting with a private meeting between Bush and Donald Rumsfeld where Bush asks for a war plan on Iraq was a potent start. But the rest of the book was a bit of a struggle. Too many inconsequential details were peppered into important facets of the errors of judgment of the Bush team. But I did rather enjoy the description of Douglas Feith, an under secretary of defense, who was called the ‘stupidest guy on the face of the earth’ by General Franks. But even more funny was Woodward’s description of Cheney who is described in the book as almost deranged (‘beyond hell-bent’) in his desire to go to war and is shown to exert a heavy influence on the president's thinking. (Do I sense intense dislike there Mr. Woodward?)
Woodward’s narration concludes that Vice-President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld were part of a group leading the charge to war while Secretary of State, Colin Powell, General Tommy Franks, and others actively questioned the plan to invade a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. But the book's most interesting character is Powell. He finds himself increasingly at odds with the agenda of the administration and rejects the evidence on Iraqi WMD that he sees as spurious. However Powell ultimately endorses the invasion effort, apparently out of a sense of duty. I cannot imagine the pressure on Woodward to write an account of the process of going to war, without being unduly critical of President Bush. But after reading ‘Against all Enemies’ and other books outside the course syllabi, I was disappointed at the calm passivity with which Woodward had written his story. As an investigative journalist, I had expected neutrality in his reporting, but I had also expected Woodward to call out Bush on a number of issues he mentions in the book. But Woodward never does.

If I’d been in Woodward’s place, I don’t believe (or atleast hope) I would have allowed my political affiliations to color my reportage, neither would I allow myself to be controlled by others in what I chose to write and how. Few journalists reach the stature that Woodward enjoys, and to not use that position to tell the honest truth, question those that believe they are above questioning and ensure that the Fourth Estate is never viewed as biased, in my mind is a crime. I hope to be in a position similar to Woodward someday, and I hope that I am able to carry the lessons we learnt from him from Watergate through my career, without being accused of being an ‘insider’ as Woodward has been called.

But getting back to the Practitioner Hour for the week, the class re-arranged itself into their respective groups for our ‘Big’ presentation. The idea was to give Prof Bonham a heads up on what we believed were necessary terms of reference. Han, Lucille and I had written out precisely what we wanted to cover, but since the team had lost it’s third member and was now down to only two (Han and I), both of us were worried about the magnitude of work and how a two member team could accomplish what we had set out to do. I was still upset with Lucille about the way she had informed us about dropping the class. The previous day we’d met and thrashed out a number of issues on the project and she’d never hinted at potentially dropping the class. The day of the class, she’d sent us an email and the story abruptly ended there. I thought her behavior was unprofessional and irresponsible. Han was disturbed as well, but the two of us had concluded that we could manage the project though it wouldn’t be as detailed as we’d planned. We outlined our project i.e. The WTO Trade Team’s Terms of Reference for Prof Bonham and discussed our worries with him. He was quite supportive and understanding and did give us an option to make the presentation slightly more skeletal.

We basically have decided to focus on the following points, highlighting the actual case studies and playing up the WTO decisions as the foundation of our arguments against Agricultural Subsidies.

With the issues surrounding trade, exceedingly vast, the WTO-Trade group (i.e. we) have chosen to focus on the issue of Agricultural Subsidies and will present our key recommendations on the same.

Research:
Sources of Information: WTO, Panel and Appellate body reports, media reports and other analytical research of colleagues in the consulting professions

Method: We intend to analyze the key data and arguments presented in the past. This is a topic that has had a number of forums to address issues and well researched arguments to state differences between fact and fiction. We intend to highlight what we believe are the key issues from the same as also, our perspective on analyzing the cases brought in front of the WTO that present the issue in its correct light.

Structure of Study:

We will first define and highlight "Agricultural Subsidies" to ensure clarity and consensus on the issue itself.

In the next part of our presentation we intend to show the key issue areas of agri subsidies in the EU and the US and the figures to substantiate the complaints of other WTO members.
1) Within this segment we will also highlight the key points of the Brazil-Cotton case to substantiate the WTO's stance
2) We will also present a short case study (key points only) of the Mozambique - Sugar case to further back the arguments against Agri Subsidies.

With references to the arguments of nations at the last Doha WTO meet, we will then recommend actions, suitably agreeable to both developing and developed countries - so as to ensure their implementation. We would like to highlight that as a consultant group, we do not wish to waste the time of our client, with recommendations that will be completely unacceptable to either/or parties. While we don't anticipate all of our actions being implemented, we do expect a majority of them being practical.

Lastly, we will tackle the implementation of the said recommendations. We will suggest ways and means for said recommendations to be implemented, though it will finally be the onus of member nations to decide on the methodology of implementation of the said recommendations.

I am not sure if we can still manage all of this, but see no option but to follow through to the best of Han and my abilities.


OCTOBER 25TH: No Class (Prof Bonham’s Student Recruiting Trip)


NOVEMBER 1ST:
Theories was interesting today, but I want to get straight into the Practitioner Hour because I haven’t seen anything that has caught my attention quite this way before. We started with the video of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiment video. Stanley research was based on the concept of obedience to authority and was based on candid footage shot at Yale University. The experiment was conducted using subjects who were unaware of what exactly the experiment entailed. They were told that it was an experiment in learning and that one of the two who had come to the lab would be the teacher and the other the student. (They of course didn’t know that the draw for positions was rigged and that the student was always the person part of the study. They also didn’t know that the other person who had so-called arrived for the experiment was a plant and part of the experiment.) The subject would watch the “student” being strapped into a chair in a room that was closed off from view and watch as he received instructions on how to respond to the “teacher’s” questions. At no time did the experimenters inform the student what to expect and of what magnitude if they didn’t perform in front of the teacher. The teacher was then made to sit in front of a huge box shaped instrument with a mike and speakers and was instructed to read out words relations to the student (who is now not in sight) and make the student repeat after him. For every wrong answer the teacher was instructed to give the student electric shocks, and each shock would have to be progressively stronger. Most of the teachers asked if this would hurt, to which the experimenters then put conducive gel on their hand and gave them the most minor of jolts, to give them a taste of what the student could expect. Most would give the shocks to a medium range voltage without blinking an eyelid. When they’d reach a medium range, they’d get worried as the “student” would then start to cry out or complain. Most would turn to the person conducting the experiment (who was in their line of sight) and ask whether to stop. When the instructor would tell them to continue, most did it after shrugging and accepting the instruction. Almost all the teachers would giggle when the voltage started to climb to dangerous levels and as the students complaints got louder. (The giggling wasn’t because they thought the situation funny – though you could’ve fooled me! It was more of a reaction to the pain they were inflicting on someone else – a nervous reaction so to say!) I can’t say I’d have wanted to willingly participate in such an experiment, but the subjects had volunteered, so I guess they were braver than I!

As the voltage would get near the 275V-300V mark, many of the subjects refused to cooperate and continue the experiment if the experimenter didn’t check on the student. If the experimenter insisted on continuing, many would get agitated and tell them to keep the payment for the experiment and refuse to cause harm to any human being for pay. But many also blindly followed the experimenter’s instructions, after being reassured that all responsibility for any fall-out of the experiment going wrong was the experimenters’ and not the teacher’s. Reassured, these people went all the way to the highest level of shock on the machine. It was inconceivable, that otherwise ‘normal’ people could allow themselves to cause grievous harm to others because they had been instructed to follow the procedures of the experiment.
What the experiment did clarify was that people who did go all the way were not sadistic; they had just been carried away by the momentum of the experiment and with the onus on the experimenters believed it was the correct thing to do to follow the experiment to the end. Each candidate was interviewed at the end of the experiment to find out why they had taken the action they had, and it was observed that when the ‘student’ was audible/visible, the chances of the ‘teacher’ following through after the objections of the ‘student’ were very low. A follow through was also low if the experimenter was removed from the vicinity. Therefore a power source’s presence was critical to any ‘teacher’ following through on the experiment after a ‘student’ had already objected.

The relation to the video and Abu Ghraib became clearer. Here was an experiment that documented what would happen in a scenario like Abu Ghraib decades before the incident took place. Didn’t anyone circulate the results? Wasn’t the Pentagon aware of this experiment?

A 1970’s adaptation of a new millennium incident? Slightly hard to conceive, but if the Obedience experiment pointed us in the direction of the why’s and what’s of Abu Gharaib, then Philip J. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t point in the direction, it nailed all the answers. The experiment highlighted how ‘normal’ people react when entrusted with power, or a role that affords them power over others. It also studied human behavior when those roles were reversed and people were stripped of any power over themselves or their actions.

The experiment was supposed to be for a period of two weeks but had to be ended within 6 days because of the rapidly deteriorating situation within a prison, fabricated for the experiment. The behavior of the college students who participated shocked me, because when one imagines an abuser or an abused, you assume that they are uneducated, crude and have no moral concept of right or wrong. Well, I was wrong! No matter how much you educate people, it is human nature to hunger for power and it is also human nature to define what’s right and what’s wrong when you hold all that power.

25 male college students who volunteered to participate in the experiment didn’t know the requirements of the same. They were randomly divided into 2 groups, one being the guards and the other group, the prisoners. The guards weren’t given any instructions on how to be guards, but the prisoners went through all the rigmarole that a prisoner would usually go through. The guards worked 3 hour shifts.

We couldn’t watch the entire video, since we ran out of time, but as Prof Bonham quickly summarized and according to the link to the experiment, some guards tried to help the prisoners, but the third shift of guards became exceedingly abusive and almost indulging in an Abu Gharaib like situation. The guards started with small punishments and those punishments got excessively worse, even as the prisoners became more docile and cooperative.

The experiment was ended prematurely with the abuse reaching an extreme that the experimenters had not bargained for. In only a few days, the guards became sadistic and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

To me the Stanford Prison Experiment categorically showed that good, moral people can be readily converted to abusive monsters when the power to be so lies in their hands. I don’t know how I would behave in a similar situation. I am unsure now of whether I would ever abuse another human being or not if the opportunity was before me. Before seeing these experiments my answer would have been an immediate NO. But after watching both these experiments, I don’t know whether I’m a better human being than everyone else. If I were to be in such a situation, I just pray that my morals, my values, my beliefs are stronger than the urge and result of power. I pray that I never give in to the temptation! I also pray that if I’m ever at the receiving end, I don’t give up and I fight for the dignity I believe every human being should have.


NOVEMBER 8TH: NO CLASS (Prof Bonham’s Student Recruiting Trip)



NOVEMBER 15TH:
We began class with a discussion on what really is a group and how when in a group you are surrounded with an aura of invincibility. We further discussed leadership in its various facets, i.e. the rational and the dominating. And within that, how leaders bring about cohesion of thought and highlighted the dangers of conformity. Well we know who paid the price of not conforming and being disagreeable with the cohesion of thought within the Bush Administration. Colin Powell didn’t really fit the bill in terms of group think for Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice and therefore he paid the price! Cohesion of thought or just follow the leader, I’m unable to point out exactly what is the strategy that this threesome follows. And who exactly is leading who is another question I’d like to throw out there!

Would I play follow the leader? Unfortunately as my track record would show, I tend to be Colin Powell in a Bush Administration! Am I ever cornered into playing devil’s advocate? The honest answer would be sometimes! Am I ever made to feel ousted by my superiors? I’d say not! I believe that if you disagree with the person on top, in a democratic situation, create a strong lobby or interest group that supports you (a lobby that will also warrant the head honcho’s attention) play the game and win! Now, the situation would be different if I belonged to a dictatorship, where my head would probably be swinging on a pike somewhere!

Practitioner Hour:
As we sat to watch the The Fog of War--Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, I wasn’t sure as to what I expected to hear and how I was to react to his words! McNamara has been painted black, grey, blue, and any and every other color imaginable. But since I’ve no prior views of the man, until I began this program, I think I’m also in the enviable position to view him without prejudice! His policies never impacted me in a direct way, nor were they during my time. (As one can see, this is not exactly identical to my sentiments towards the current White House threesome!)
Listening to McNamara, the one sentence that stuck to my mind was – “we now have the advantage of hindsight!” Those words are so true! We are quick to judge and quick to convict events of the past, never realizing that we have the advantage of hindsight, the advantage of information, the advantage of distance from the event! As he spoke about the Vietnam War, the escalation, the first torpedo attacks, the miscommunication, the lack of expertise, the lack of experience topped off with President Johnson’s secretive attitude – it struck me how the situation would have appeared to those making the decisions all those years ago! A simple thing as a sonar reading error brought the United States to war! The advantage of hindsight! The next report was of an attack that was genuine. But the end lesson was that “we see what we want to believe” and even today – that holds true. While the war in Vietnam was for different reasons altogether, the pre-emptive strike on Iraq holds true to the statement – “we see what we want to believe.”
But belief and seeing can both be wrong – that was a point proven in Vietnam, and also in Iraq. Mankind is fallible, and so are his senses!

As McNamara continued to explain the actions of the Johnson Administration, he clarified that Johnson never wanted to put ground forces in Vietnam by choice, but was forced to by his fear of losing planes. As the war escalated, so did the number of battalions and therefore soldiers on ground. The worst was yet to come! The commander in chief never believed that the United States would win a war in Vietnam, but wanted to hold on to what they had secured for whatever the cost might be! The rhetoric was clear to Johnson and that how he viewed the world – through the fog of war – It was a war on tyranny and aggression. In Johnson’s words, ask yourself what’s going to happen to all the other little nations!

But when McNamara had an opportunity to ask the Vietnamese leadership what they had accomplished in the war, with almost 3-4 million Vietnamese dead, he was set aback by their answer. They’d been fighting for independence for 1000 years, before the Americans had intervened, and they were not going to stop just because the Americans had arrived!

McNamara also talked about the use of chemicals that could strip off leaves and bark from trees, let alone humans, in the Vietnam War. His thoughts were summarized by just one line – In order to do good, you have to engage in evil! That motto seems to be unanimous amongst most leadership around the world – justifying the use of chemicals by the ‘good’ countries even today while ‘evil’ countries are hung to dry if suspected of even possessing them.

The President – but Kennedy would have been different, is all that McNamara said when asked whose responsibility it was when a country goes to war, uses questionable tactics and loses its personnel in droves in a battle that is not being fought to be won, but to hold on! McNamara’s justification of his role emerged just once in the Fog of War. He mentioned a memo he sent to President Johnson, where he told the President that the course that the United States was on was wrong. Johnson never responded to that memo. War according to McNamara is complex and beyond the comprehension of the human mind. War cannot be eliminated, just as human nature cannot be changed. Humans are rational, but reason has its limits!

McNamara in hindsight proves that one can be against a certain action, but be unable to stop its momentum. When asked, why he hadn’t spoken out against the Vietnam war while in the Administration or whether he felt a sense of responsibility of what transpired in Vietnam, he simply said, “Vietnam is complex – Damned if I do, Damned if I don’t.”
Hindsight is a funny thing. It lets you cut through the fog and see the actions and the actors for what they really are. Today as an outsider, uninvolved, with nothing to gain or lose, I might be able to pass judgment on a number of policy decisions taken by governments across the world. If I choose my favorite whipping horse, George Bush, I would say that while I don’t have a fog to battle in my vision of the world, Bush’s visibility is definitely down to zero. Hindsight may teach him and his team that their actions may not have been for the betterment or safety of this world – But at this juncture, the Fog of War has definitely blinded them to the obvious, to the reality of this world.
In the real world, would I ever allow myself to be blinded by the Fog? The answer is simple, no one can prevent it, but one can think rationally and justify each action that is taken. Would I compromise my morals by entering a war without good reason? Would I allow an administration’s bull headedness define my actions? Would I compromise my values, by authorizing the use of chemical or biological weapons? The answer my friend is not blowing in the wind, the answer is definitely in the negative. Maybe I am another Colin Powell, maybe I would not be a correct fit for a government position where an Administration allows itself to compromise human values, maybe I just need to wait for the right kind of leadership, and maybe I am that leadership!



NOVEMBER 16TH
This has been a supremely hectic week, with assignments due in today at 5 for some other subjects, midterms that just got over yesterday, no sleep in the last three days and the thought of staying awake all night again to complete another paper due in tomorrow, absolutely petrified me. We were expected for dinner at Professor Bonham's House to view ‘The Quiet American’ at 6pm and I was struggling to make it in time. But once I did, I was glad I hadn’t rented the movie and watched it on my own a few days later.

Dinner that night was an absolute delight! There was a beautiful spread of food that was accompanied by some excellent wine (beer for all the beer lovers!) and rounded off with dessert and tea. Prof Bonham and his wife actually managed to fit everyone into their living room and didn’t look remotely harried at the thought of cleaning up after a dozen hungry grad students. The finesse, with which they got us sitting for the movie, showed they’ve done this before and they do it well!

Based on a novel by Graham Greene written in 1955, The Quiet American is an almost eerie look at what would be America’s doom in Vietnam long before it actually happened. Greene could almost be Nostradamus in his accuracy!

The mood of wry disillusionment seeps The Quiet American. Michael Caine’s character (Thomas Fowler) states in his opening lines, musing dreamily on the mystique of Saigon in the early 1950's that its a place, where colors and tastes seem sharper than they do elsewhere and where even the rain has a special intensity. Fowler is a cynical British journalist who has fled an arid marriage in England to live in Southeast Asia, where he reports on the Vietnamese fight for independence from French colonial rule. Despite the conflict, Fowler enjoys a peaceful existence with his beautiful young Vietnamese mistress Phuong. But his complacency is disturbed by the arrival of idealistic American aid worker Brendan Fraser who plays Alden Pyle. At first, the cynical Fowler observes the newcomer's zeal with detachment. The seemingly naive Pyle is seeking to promote a third force in the region, one that is neither colonial nor communist. Fowler, however, doesn't take sides: "I don't get involved," he says. "I just report what I see." But when Pyle attempts to take Phuong away from Fowler, at the same time as violence explodes on the streets of Saigon, Fowler's neutrality is shaken. And as he sees Pyle’s innocent veneer dissipate as he brushes of blood stains from his trousers after an attack on Saigon’s civilians, screaming at a policeman in Vietnamese (After claiming not to understand the language) Fowler must decide just where he stands. And decide he does. The film is almost symbolic of the countries that the characters portray. A Vietnam that needs protection but is willing to fight for survival, the British who just want to be quiet observers, the French who are hapless, helpless and quickly losing control and the Americans who want to quietly yet forcefully take control under the guise of aiding the French, the Vietnamese and whoever else they can fool into believing them. And finally a white coated American corpse, stabbed in the stomach floating face down in the river.
According to Prof Bonham, Greene's novel has been filmed before. But Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1958 version downplayed the book's attack on US meddling in the region. When I returned from Prof Bonham’s house, a little bit of ‘Googling’ brought out the fact that the 1958 version had made Greene's furious. And I don’t blame him, considering the way the story ended, Greene had not really written a book, more a prophesy.
Pyle’s role in Vietnam, to indoctrinate a third force and his methodology was clean and unemotional. Using people, whether it be a power hungry self proclaimed general or a money grubbing merchant, a impoverished woman or a disillusioned old man – none of the ideals that Pyle lived by appeal to my sense of what is right in this world. I don’t think I’d ever survive the role that Pyle set out for himself, though I could see myself in Fowler’s shoes. I too believe strongly in not taking sides and just reporting what I see, but at the end of the movie when I put the very same question Fowler had faced, to myself, I’m left without answers as to what I would do. In the real world, whose side would I really take?



NOVEMBER 22ND:
It was a bit of an upside down class with the Practitioner Hour in the first half and theories in the second. The class began with a talk by Derrick L Cogburn, from the IST department in the University. Derrick spoke about Policy issues regarding internet governance. I did like the way he introduced his family that was visiting and in his own words, he must love Matt if he was there with his extended family and before going to pick up his mother all the way to Rochester.

Derrick spoke about the fact that NGOs are getting more involved along with other civil society in internet governance and that the process is a global multi stakeholder process.
When he put around 10 acronyms of various organizations working on the issue and asked if someone would attempt to give all their full forms, only Amir was brave enough to attempt that and the Iranian got 80% of the acronyms which was super! I guess it was helpful that he’d worked in the UN system and actually with some of the organizations on that list!

Then Derrick went on to a tangent that I didn’t understand nor get it’s relevance to Theories of International Relations. He began by talking about getting non-state actor participation in the process and went on to discuss his project’s technical offerings. He spoke about creating an environment that would allow team members to connect around the world, his collabotory, its requirement of low bandwidth etc. He mentioned going global locally- building human capacity from a distance and the need to effectively start involving participation from across the board.

I’ve heard Derrick speak before and I appreciate the work he does, but the technology he was talking about has been in existence in various forms and has been used by companies worldwide for sometime now. I did not glean any information that was shockingly new to me in his talk. I also did not understand why he was talking about the technical offerings of his project. While I would have understood a discussion on internet governance and international relations, I really missed the boat on what the point of the discussion was.
This was the only Practitioner Hour this whole semester where I didn’t understand the context of the topic and also completely lost interest in the first ten minutes of the class.

Thankfully, a discussion on Feminist IR perked me up post the Practitioner Hour. We talked about what was Feminist IR and feminism from first a female and then a male perspective. Prof Bonham even managed to get in a rib at Francine Dimico’s editing skills with a woman on top and then a man on top joke! Stereotyping was the main focus of our discussion though we somehow never got around to actually discussing what feminist IR exactly was.

But I must stand by my point (which got a lot of people disagreeing with me!) – Feminists in today’s day and age are a liability to women’s issues. Their attitude and aggressiveness make a mockery out of issues that hold women back. In the 1920s we needed the kind of feminism that gave the movement its name. It’s the kind of feminism that exists in successful women achievers of today – whether they are career women or homemakers. Feminism as it began and evolved was women standing up for their rights to be treated as equals. And that is what women are fighting for today! Today’s feminists have gone far beyond the call of duty. They no longer want equality, they want superiority! I think I would have been classified as a feminist in the 1920s, heck maybe even the 1980s, but by today’s definition, I’d say I’m an aggressive propagator of equal rights and women’s rights, but am definitely not a feminist.

I’m now looking forward to next week’s class where we’re going to figure out the global collabotory and get some pointers on our presentation skills for the big group presentation.


© All Rights Reserved Maithreyi Seetharaman 2005