Author: old_wp_importer

Blind governors

One of the breathtaking nuggets in the Iraq Study Group report is the following:

“All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans’ lack of language and cultural understanding. Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency.”

How did that happen? One explanation is bureaucratic closed-mindedness:

The pathetic language skills at the embassy are as I understand it largely a side-effect of the security clearance process. Anyone who has spent time in an Arabic speaking country outside the framework of military or diplomatic service is generically excluded, leaving only those trained stateside at DLI and similar institutions, whose pedagogical techniques are basically back in the 60s.

This isn’t unique to the Baghdad embassy; the FBI, coincidentally, also has only 33 Arabists of its own – and again, one reason cited is that “it is easier to get a security clearance if you don’t have any interaction with foreigners”.

I can only hope that competent linguists are hired to work on a contract basis – because the idea of America’s Iraq policy being run almost entirely by people who can’t communicate with Iraqis is frightening.

[another IAG crosspost]

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Iraq

UN agencies might not be known for their elegant prose, but when things are this bad the plain facts are more compelling than journalists’ waffle:


Iraq is haemorrhaging. The humanitarian crisis which the international community had feared in 2003 is now unfolding. The massive displacement has emerged quietly and without fanfare but the numbers affected are in excess of what many agencies had predicted in 2003.

Since the February 2006 Samarra bombings UNHCR, as Cluster Coordinator for displaced groups inside Iraq, estimates some 425,000 Iraqis to have been recently displaced. In addition, some two to three thousand Iraqis are leaving per day via neighbouring countries as the extent of the tragedy becomes obvious. UNHCR estimates that there are at least 1.6 million Iraqis internally displaced with at least another 1.6 – 1.8 million(4) in neighbouring states.

[[UNHCR](http://reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-6W2F7S?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635P5D), via Reliefweb]

Westminster’s map

[

Update

: I finally got round to adding legends to the maps]

Which countries get talked about in parliament? With data from [They Work For You](http://www.theyworkforyou.com), I’ve put together these maps of where MPs like to talk about. Here’s the number of mentions a country has had in parliament recently, adjusted for population:





< – Few mentions _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Many mentions->

Looking at this, I’m actually surprised at how globally-minded Parliament is. Sudan (pop. 34.2 million) gets 2,302 mentions; Germany (pop. 82.5 million) has only 3,695 mentions in parliament.

Far from being ignored, Africa actually gets mentioned well beyond its economic importance to the UK. South America, on the other hand, is basically ignored.

Then there’s the size bias: small countries get more mentions than big ones, once you adjust for population. Look at Mongolia: Westminster, it seems, finds Mongolians immensely more important than Chinese. The bias can partly be discounted as a problem with measurement: parliament is prone to lists of foreign relations and trade issues, for instance, which mention every country regardless of how small it is. Also, it’s possible MPs talk about areas within China or India, which I wouldn’t have picked up on.

But there’s more to it: larger countries really do get short-changed in the attention we give them. China has a population perhaps 150 times larger than than of Bolivia – but we don’t hear anything like 150 times as much news from China. We’re all biased by imagining a world made up of nations, and giving the same weight to nations of all sizes. Small islands got discussed an incredible amount – particularly places in the news, like Tuvalu and the Pitcairns, but others as well.


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Maps

Feeling quite proud of my latest little project – making maps of which parts of the world get talked about in Parliament. The results are

here

– bizarrely enough, it seems that MPs spend a lot of time talking about Africa, compared to say, Asia or South America. They also have a bit of a Mongolia obsession, although on closer inspection that turns out to made up of lists of parking tickets, and things like Tony Benn saying that “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”

OK, so the results might be a bit dubious if you look too closely – but still, I made pretty pictures
:)

Have fun at Alt-Xmas, people: would love to be there.

Countries mentioned in parliament

Since [My Society](http://www.mysociety.org/) have made data on what’s happening in parliament so easily available, I figured somebody should poke at it. [Here](http://ohuiginn.net/docs/parliamentmentions.csv) is a first shot: a table of how often each of the world’s developing countries has been mentioned in Commons and Lords debates. The plan now is to look at what gets a country mentioned in parliament – i.e. (very roughly) what foreign policy issues MPs and Lords care about. So far I’ve only looked at the GDP of the countries, which doesn’t make a great deal of difference (R²=0.45), but I’m currently trying to find data for trade with the UK, human rights, and so on. The one surprise so far is how closely the number of mentions in the Lords and in the Commons match each other (R²=0.97) – I’d expected them to get excited about different topics. The lords cared more about Burma, and less about Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but not greatly.

Anyway, I’ll keep on tinkering with this for a while, and see what else I can find.

Hersh for the lazy

[Seymour Hersh’s latest piece on Iran](http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061127fa_fact) isn’t one of his greatest hits, but there are still some fascinating nuggets…

>In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the [Party for Free Life in Kurdistan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_a_Free_Life_in_Kurdistan). The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran

Having this run as a military rather than a CIA operation apparently reduces the need for the US administration to report on it. But most of the article isn’t about covert ops so much as it’s about showing how crazy the people in power are:

>many in the White House and the Pentagon insist that getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq…..They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq–like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt to revive the concept of spreading democracy in the Middle East by creating one new model state.

um. Iran is at least somewhat democratic – imperfect, but certainly more appealing than a US puppet imposed by force. So here’s another idea for saving Iraq:

>The White House believes that if American troops stay in Iraq long enough-with enough troops-the bad guys will end up killing each other, and Iraqi citizens, fed up with internal strife, will come up with a solution.

In their defence, although the optimism is misplaced, getting the army out of Iraq’s cities isn’t a bad start. Back to Iran, and another example of the American tendency to exaggerate Sunni-Shia differences:

>A nuclear-armed Iran would not only threaten Israel. It could trigger a strategic-arms race throughout the Middle East, as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt-all led by Sunni governments-would be compelled to take steps to defend themselves.

And finally, yet another reason why bombing Iran is a very stupid idea:

>the C.I.A.’s assessment suggested that Iran might even see some benefits in a limited military strike-especially one that did not succeed in fully destroying its nuclear program in that an attack might enhance its position in the Islamic world.