In all the discussion over the meaning of General Stanley McChrystal and his aides dissing their civilian bosses, for me was the most shocking comments reported by Mike Hastings had nothing to do with “rival teams”:

Later, McChrystal objected to going to an official NATO dinner in Paris: “I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner.” One of the aides was asked by Rolling Stone who the dinner was with. “Some French minister,” he replied. “It’s fucking gay.”

For Andrew Sullivan, this serves as a reminder that McChrystal was Cheney’s darling.

Marc Ambinder offers a different take:

McChrystal was a hard core operator, aggressive as hell, a JSOC ninja — but he was also a social liberal who tolerated, nay, welcomed gay people into his inner circle, who disdained Fox News, and who grew increasingly frustrated with his reputation as Dick Cheney’s hired assassin….

A lot of the outside discussion of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell assumes that the integration of gays in the military will require the imposition of a new code of political correctness, one that dissolves the rough, often profane, often exaggeratedly anti-gay banter that serves as a gateway into conversation between buddies.

But the two cultures can co-exist. It seems as if they already do, informally. People who are gay, and who are competent, and who have been tabbed, are accepted. And no one is toning down their language; discipline and morale aren’t suffering. It’s the lesson from South Park: there’s “gay,” and then there’s gay. Outside of the military, we are more careful with such language, and that’s probably a good thing — it certainly is for younger kids.

No doubt there will be genuine anxiety among many soldiers about the prospect of serving with gays. No doubt that gays will be genuinely anxious about the prospect of facing real bigotry. But in the special forces community, a model of acceptance seems to already exist.

If you think about it, the special forces is the quintessence of democratic (and maybe Democratic) ideals — rank and position based on merit, guaranteed health care, labor protection for civilians. And acceptance of gays.

The coarse language in the camaraderie between soldiers may be one thing, but surely an aide to the Commander-in-Chief’s top person in Afghanistan should know not to use the language of hate speech when conversing with the media?

I’ve been following with some interest all the various forecasts of seat shares, so I thought I’d collect them here: As of the afternoon of 6/5/2010:

So although there’s a lot of volatility, all of the models, other than uniform national swing under tactical voting show Conservatives being the largest party, but short of a majority.

See this post on what the methodological differences are.

Updated

6^th May 19:50 – Updated Charles Barry

6^th May 17:00 – Updated Hix-Vivyan

6^th May 14:25 – Updated LSE’s UNS

6^th May 01:43 – Updated Rob Ford et al.

6^th May 00:13 – Updated FiveThirtyEight

5^th May 21:45 – New forecast from Charles Barry.

5^th May 18:00 – Added LSE’s Uniform National Swing model. Though, am still waiting for updates based on the final polls to be released shortly.

1. Labour voters are in the majority of Northern and urban areas, and the seats are won by Labour with slim to modest majorities, with vastly lower turnout than Tory seats. So Labour gets to maximize the distribution of votes available to them. In addition, urban constituencies are a smaller size, making them easier to win.
2. The majority of Conservative voters are situated in a smaller number of rural and Southern seats. Seats are won by massive majorities, meaning lots of votes are wasted shoring up the majority.
3. The Parliamentary Boundary Commission, tasked with redistricting, always uses population data from the beginning of the review period, so new boundaries are often 10 years out of date. As former Labour stronghold industrial areas shed their populations, their constituencies get smaller until the following round of redistricting.
   This election is the first using the new post 2005 boundaries, so the tilt towards Labour should be reduced by 15% (which isn’t a big reduction given the size of the bias).
4. The growing popularity of Lib Dems and other parties eats into the anti-incumbent vote that would normally accrue to Conservative ala Nader in 2000.

Turnout’s likely to be higher this election, so perhaps the Labour bias will be reduced, but I wont count on it.

There’s more here (paywall)

Political scientists have been generally sceptical of the impact of presidential debates on electoral results. However, there’s something different about the UK debates. Given the closeness of the debates to the actual polls, the shorter electoral cycle, and perhaps a political culture that’s more oriented towards debate than the US system, the Lib Dem jump is a little hard to ignore (see Henry Farrell’s primer). Having been pretty annoyed with LabourList’s polynomial trend ‘analysis’ (God help any campaigner actually using it), here’s the loess curve for all the major polls:

Data Source: UK Polling Report

Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour started to gain on the Tories since mid-February, and then the Lib Dem’s fortunes turned dramatically with Nick Clegg’s first debate performance. So far, the jump’s held up, though has probably topped out with the 2^nd debate. Brown and Cameron will probably regain some of their vote shares back.

However, translating this into votes and seats is notoriously difficult. I’ve tried to plug in the latest figures on satisfaction with party leaders and the Liberal Democrat vote intention into Nadeau et. al’s regression model to determine final popular vote shares. Ignore the fact that I’m breaking the model, as it’s supposed to be based on retrospective judgement on past economic performance (you can find their original predictions for the elections here). Regression models do take into account the impact of Liberal Democrats on vote shares, but typically only on the anti-incumbent party. A larger shift to the Lib Dems will probably hurt both parties, but Conservatives more than Labour. By divvying up the impact of Lib Dem votes in a 2:1 fashion, we get:

However, just changing the Lib Dem vote and its impact on the two parties radically changes the vote shares.

How does this translate into seats? I’ve tried to use Tufte’s regression model (also in Nadeau et. al), however, the model gets Lib Dem seats pretty wrong, and sticking in current figures shows Lib Dem losing seats from the last General Election. Nevertheless, holding other party seats constant, and taking into consideration a very slight reduction in Labour bias in the system, we can estimate Lib Dem results and get the following share of seats:

So, Labour can lose 7% of the popular vote, and still get a 2% plurality against the Conservatives. Anyway, who gets the most seats is highly variable, but the final outcome isn’t too different. Either Labour remains the largest party but forms a Lab-Lib coalition, or Conservatives become the largest party but with a Lab-Lib coalition being able to form a clear majority.

And people complain about the US Electoral College being unrepresentative…

If I didn’t have exams going on, I might be tempted to start doing some Monte Carlo’s or some such. But not now.

Spreadsheet here

X-posted at Liberal Conspiracy

Last week, Obama authorised the CIA to kill Anwar Al-Awlaki, though it seemed to have evaded the British blogs until this week. Awlaki is not only an extremist, but has been an active recruiter for Al-Qaeda (AQAP), with evidence linking him with both Nidal Hasan and PantsBomber.

However, the Fifth Amendment confers the following rights to Awlaki as a US Citizen:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

However, this is not to say that infringement of rights during wartime has not happened before, and these have even been upheld by the Supreme Court, in the notorious example of the internment of Japanese Americans. This derives from the war powers conferred on the executive by Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution:

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.

This may provide justification for this order, were it not for the fact that the Supreme Court has countered an expansive reading of the power. In recent cases, the court has extended habeas corpus rights to non-citizens captured abroad, notably in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the court decided that the president lacked the authority to establish military commissions.

Obama’s one-time colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, Cass Sunstein, has argued that the justification of the use of war powers against individual liberty requires the following components:

A requirement of clear congressional authorization or executive action intruding on interests with a claim to constitutional protection; An insistence on fair hearings, including access to courts, for those deprived of liberty…

Spencer Ackerman finds that there’s only one possible clear congressional authorisation that may justify the use of lethal force against a US citizen right of due process, and that is the AUMF -Authorisation of Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (2001):

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

This specifically targets terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks, but the evidence is not clear with regards to Awlaki’s role in 9/11. Furthermore the Supreme Court overrid congressional authority in Boumediene v. Bush, where the court decided that Guantanomo detainees have a constitutional right to the writ of Habeaus Corpus that stands over and above procedures outlined in congressional legislation and executive orders.

Access to courts is within rights conferred by the Sixth Amendment requiring trial by jury, and by the Fourteenth Amendment requiring due process of law to deprive a citizen of life. The major questions here involve the applicability of the constitution abroad. The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional rights of citizens abroad, notably in Reid v. Covert, as Julian Ku notes. However, the weight of the precedent then relies on the extent to which constitutional protection of Awlaki would be “impracticable and anomalous.” This pretty much seems the only justificatory manoeuvre at the current moment.

As a further blow to Harry’s Place/Keep America Afraid Safe types, any evidence that was used to authorise the use of lethal force against Awlaki came from the civilian arrest of Abdulmutallab. No torture was necessary. Likewise, area specialist Greg Johnsen argues that the killing of Awlaki is unlikely to bring significant enhancements to national security.

Ackerman is correct in categorising the AUMF as an emergency power to be used only in war time, and should thus be rescinded. Especially as the DOD stopped referring to the Long War in its latest Defense Review.

My fear is not so much the targeting of a Muslim, in this instance at least, but the continual erosion of due process requirements that authorise a state to deprive an individual citizen of life, liberty or propert.

PS: It’s not just the US Government that wants Awlaki dead. So do other terrorists…

PPS: Awlaki is not even Al-Qaeda’s top-spokesperson-who-is-also-a-us-citizen. That honour goes to Adam Gudahn.

Over at Pickled Politics, Sunny Hundal cites Robert Pape’s Dying to Win (or at least Slate’s Fred Kaplan’s reading of it) to make the case that the Moscow subway bombings were motivated simply by their nationalist struggle:

I’ll come back to the idea of nationalist resistance very soon. But the point here is that research shows that foreign policy and regional / local instability has a huge impact on the likelihood of terrorism. The Moscow terrorist bombers were Chechen, and furthermore one of the women had her husband killed by Russian forces earlier.

The question then is: what kind of nationalist resistance is acceptable and what isn’t. Anyone who says any kind of resistance is unacceptable when your country is being occupied is either a fool or highly naive.

Well, yes, that’s true, but it’s only part of the story.

Jason Lyall, writing to The Monkey Cage, offers a different perspective, based on his APSR article “Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Second Chechen War”:

In war, as in political life, today’s solution is often tomorrow’s problem. The twin Moscow Metro bombings offer a graphic example of this principle at work. While commentators have been quick to cite these attacks as evidence of the bankruptcy of the Kremlin’s counterinsurgency campaign in Chechnya, the reality is perhaps the exact opposite.

Perversely, it is the very success of Kremlin-backed efforts by local actors — most notably, Ramzan Kadyrov, the 33-year-old now ruling Chechnya — in weakening the power, appeal, and geographic scope of the insurgency, that has prompted a radical about-face in tactics by its embattled leader, Doku Umarov.

This downturn in rebel fortunes is directly attributable to twin efforts by the Kremlin and Kadyrov to induce Chechen rebels to switch sides and join militia formations (collectively known as the Kadyrovtsi) designed to hunt their former colleagues and their supporters.

Driven by a mixture of disillusionment, greed, and intimidation, some 20,000 men have defected to the Russian side, leaving the insurgency a hollow shell of its former self.

Indeed, given the advantages of coethnicity, these militia groups have proven extremely, and lethally, effective at identifying and killing insurgents, while also cutting a wide swatch of fear and intimidation among the general public through forced disappearances, targeted home burnings, and extrajudicial killings. Yet the stability purchased by these militia in Chechnya is fragile, for three reasons.

First, suicide terrorism has reemerged as a effective, and perhaps the only, means for the insurgency’s nominal leader, Umarov, to influence Russian audiences and within the internecine struggle for control among the fragmented leadership.

Second, while the brutality of these militia has sharply degraded the insurgency’s effectiveness, it has also created widespread grievances among victimized populations within Chechnya, ensuring a trickle of new recruits that disappear into the forests each summer.

Finally, remaining insurgents have been forced to seek freedom of action in the neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, mixing in with homegrown groups to diffuse the conflict throughout the Northern Caucasus.

Russians were able to successfully co-opt Chechen ethnic members for use against a violent nationalist movement. One of Medvedev’s first acts after coming to power was to end the counter-terror operations in Chechnya, which does enjoy at least some autonomy from Moscow, albeit under the pro-Kremlin Ramzan Kadyrov.

However, the violence of these co-ethnic militias, although able to crush the movement, was so severe that it led to further trickle of radicalisation. The leadership of the movement tries to maintain itself by spreading conflict throughout the region, framing the struggle in more universalist (i.e. Islamic) terms than local-national.

So, to what extent can Doku Umarov’s movement actually represent a genuine nationalist movement? It is possible to justify terrorism which, although based on legitimate grievances, is not in the interest of their wider co-ethnics? I think it would be difficult to make this point. And there’s a close analogy here with the Taliban, whom Sunny does wish Afghanistan and Pakistan were rid of.

Furthermore commenters seem confused by Pape’s analysis of suicide bombing, which doesn’t extend to all of its forms, and in particular, those acts of global Jihadism against the West. As Thomas Hegghammer writes in the recent discussion over the threat to national security posed by Lady Gaga:

To the extent that Westernization causes militancy, the violence it inspires is nearly always directed at other Muslims, typically against regimes in Arab countries, because these legislate over matters of public morality. Jihadists are idealists, but they are not so utopian as to think they can stop Westernization by attacking America. However, they do think that by installing Islamist local governments, those governments can take measures to limit social liberalization.

Militants who attack the West, such as al Qaeda members, represent a different phenomenon. They argue that the fight against secular Muslim regimes (and by extension Westernization) is less urgent than attacking non-Muslims who kill Muslims and occupy Muslim territory.

How do we know that Palestine is more important than Westernization for the anti-American jihadists? First, al Qaeda’s leaders have spoken more often about Palestine and other political issues than about moral corruption. Second, when al Qaeda recruits cite their reasons for joining, they more often mention Palestine, Chechnya, and other political issues than they do examples of Westernization. Third, incidents of anti-American violence and vandalism in the Middle East have tended to increase during or shortly after dramatic events in Palestine. Fourth, recruitment to al Qaeda has tended to expand during or shortly after escalation of hostilities in Palestine. Fifth, al Qaeda militants are happy to embrace aspects of Western culture when it suits them — witness the use of videos and music in jihadi propaganda — and they are arguably more pragmatic about matters moral and ritual than many other Islamists.

Considering that the number of suicide bombers involved in the acts of terrorism against the West are extremely small relative to the overall total, Pape’s findings still stand.

It strikes me that British Pakistanis don’t talk often about the politics of their country of origin. In contrast, I’ve found amongst Turkish colleagues, the mere mention of the name of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) can spark heated debates on the merits of Kemalism. Why is this? Disillusionment? If so, recent news should dampen the feeling somewhat.

Via Al Jazeera and Juan Cole, comes news of a constitutional reform package being submitted to Pakistan’s parliament that would change the presidency into a titular role and shift the regime structure from an executive-heavy semi-presidential system to a strong parliamentary democracy. Furthermore, Pashtuns will be formally recognised with their own province instead of the colonial-era “North-Western Frontier Province”.

To be sure, Pakistan’s got issues: Underdevelopment, the inability to enact needed land reform for decades, and an on-going low-intensity war with India over Kashmir whose strategic concerns fuel security service ISI-backed Talibanisation. However, as Cole notes, Pakistanis have consistently pushed for the rule of law, respect for the judiciary, and railed against corruption and military largesse. Oh, and Pakistan recognises third genders, and is the world’s largest contributor of UN peackeepers, so they’re ahead of the United States on at least two counts. And, this has all happened without shock and awe.

Cole compares to Iraq:

In contrast, the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq have been widely lauded by the US right as vindication of George W. Bush’s illegal invasion and occupation of that country. Iraq is a basket case, full of smoldering rubble and an army of displaced people, as well as masses of widows and orphans created by the violence that broke out when Bush created a power vacuum. The party most likely to play kingmaker is the Sadrists, followers of fundamentalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Iraqi politics are far less secular than Pakistan’s. For all the recent violence in Pakistan, it is a much more secure country than Iraq, possessing a large and professional army. Iraq is being lauded as a role model not because it is a success but because it is an American project, in which the little brown irrational people have allegedly once again have had the precious tutelage of white Europeans (and Euro-Americans) generously bestowed upon them.

If you think that’s overly harsh on the Americans, don’t underestimate the contempt that Western political and economic elites have for Pakistani self-government, as the following anecdote from Institutional Investor magazine demonstrates:

SEVERAL MONTHS before he was killed in a plane crash in August 1988, Pakistani military strongman General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who ruled the country with an iron hand for 11 years, reportedly complained to a small gathering of investors that he didn’t understand their mind-set. "If only you guys had invested ten years ago, you all would have had spectacular returns," Zia chided. "Sir," one of the investors is said to have responded, "if we had known you would be around for ten years, we would have indeed invested. We believed you when you said you were just an interim president."

The battle against Islamist control of Tower Hamlets council [1]. Netanyahu’s application of the Rick James school of international relations. The polarisation of the United States and the anti-abortion amendment to health care reform.

What do these all have in common? A possible decline in secularism in industrialised nations?

For sociologist, and one of my lecturers, Eric Kaufmann, the answer is yes. What explains this is an extreme drop in secular birth-rates whilst those of the most religiously extreme have stayed constant. Furthermore, they’re actively promoting pronatalism within endogamous marriage. That’s the argument of his new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth.

It’s an interesting addition to the general social movements approach that I’ve been tending to for quite some time, but not actually blogging about. [2]

There’ll be a book launch at Birkbeck College, Room 403, Main Building, Malet Street, London with (secular and integrated) drinkies tomorrow, Thursday 25th March at 6pm.

Synopsis:

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don’t read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. In the race for souls, demography counts for more than eloquence.

And demographic reality is very much slanted against secularism: what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population because secular birthrates have plunged below replacement. Based on a wealth of demographic studies, Kaufmann shows that the more religious people are, regardless of income, faith tradition or education, the more children they have. Religious countries have faster population growth than secular ones which is why immigrants are typically much more religious than their secular host societies. The cumulative effect of immigration and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West.

Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families. Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Neo-fundamentalist and neo-traditional Christians look like they will eventually follow suit in the United States and Europe. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Drawing on extensive demographic research, and considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises – and what this means for the future of western modernity.

[1] Sorry to certain NUS activists, but the Dispatches was not islamophobic. Whilst one might balk at what Gilligan suggests as the solution, the reassertion of the old community leader bullcrap, it’s not racist to point out that people who hold non-secular, illiberal views should not be allowed near councils, let alone mainstream parties.

[2] I’ll prod myself back into blogging after exams are done.

This is mainly a summary of yesterday’s round table at the LSE featuring Lord Wallace, Justin Webb, Rob Singh, Mick Cox and Robin Niblett.

There was a palpable sense of disappointment amongst the speakers with regards to foreign policy. All agreed that although Obama is many places outside of the USA, he’s failed to connect with Americans themselves, and the Middle East continues to be disappointed at his failure to transform the Cairo speech into positive action. Oh, and he should never have accepted the Nobel Prize.

There was agreement that Obama’s Pakistan programme has been disastrous. For Niblett, there’s been a failure to separate nationalist terrorism (Taliban) that doesn’t form an immediate threat to the US from international terrorism (Al-Qaeda). Rob Singh pointed out how the US has failed to form policy that can properly engage Pakistan to deal with the ISI’s excesses-in particular the ISI is quite willing to keep the Afghan Taliban going as it hampers Indian influence in the region. Webb added that the Pakistani fear of India isn’t really taken seriously by policymakers. But this really highlights the main problem with Obama’s foreign policy.

As Mick Cox suggested, riffing off a recent piece by Barry Buzan, the main challenges that Obama faces are structural. International society is far less willing to tolerate a unipolar power, regardless of its inherent values, and American influence is declining with the rise of strong regional powers, none of whom constitute a superpower. Admittedly, most of the speakers are fearful of the drift into multipolarity, none so much as Rob Singh, who suggested that the paring back of the military is perhaps a deliberate strategy by Obama to reduce US military power. If true, then he’s taking a leaf out of Stephen Walt’s playbook. The only problem is that no one’s particularly willing to step up to take a joint leadership role.

The key problem ongoing for the United States is to transition smoothly to a multipolar world, making sure those regional powers learn the values and institutional norms of the liberal international order (China) and incentivising current free riders to rely on their own steam and play a more active role in international relations (European Union).

Climate change negotiation should never have been up to the unwieldy unanimous judgement process of COP15. EU+Japan should pursue strong reductions, with the US and China doing their own bilateral deals and joining us later on in the game. Many in the environmental movement will be upset at the lack of international agreement, and neoliberals may get worried about the possibilities of tariffs being imposed. But this sort of compromise will lead to stronger emission reductions than Kyoto that may actually lead the world off the path of calamity.

Image by The Edge of the American West

Today, Blair, Dennis Blair that is, director of national intelligence became the first individual in the Obama administration to question Obama’s decision to try Omar Abdulmutallab in the civilian court system. As Justin Webb said earlier tonight at the LSE, we have a strange situation where Abdulmutallab could have been killed in a drone strike in Yemen without so much a squeak, but he gets as far as Detroit and is given a defence lawyer.

This may seem paradoxical, but for people who argue for the necessity of extended war powers (Yoo et al.), its actually the wrong debate. Instead, they should be asking which methods of dealing with attempted terrorism are more likely to contribute to national security, rather than constituting simple revenge. As FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

we’ve had a number of cases in which through the process — the criminal justice process of the United States, individuals have decided to cooperate and provided tremendous intelligence. That is not to say that there may not be other ways of obtaining that intelligence. But, yes, in answer to your question, the criminal justice system has been a — a fount of intelligence in the years since September 11th.

–

Thanks to Spencer Ackerman’s ongoing coverage.