The Limits of Power

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I picked up a copy of David Finkel's The Good Soldiers at Politics and Prose this weekend (because a girl can't read Austen all the time) and I haven't been able to put it down. At the same time, I can't read too much of it in one sitting because there's a lot to absorb, so I've been forcing myself to lay it aside at the end of each chapter.

Finkel follows the soldiers of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion through their 15-month deployment in Baghdad as part of the surge in Iraq, and he captures the mixture of optimism and fear, boredom and danger, confusion and conviction, potential and futility in a way that evokes Michael Herr's Dispatches (my favorite war memoir). As a student of diplomacy and cross-cultural communication, I can't read it without observing how Finkel depicts the limitations of U.S. power -- hard, soft, smart or otherwise -- in counterinsurgency. The Good Soldiers is about good people with good intentions, people who are patriotic, optimistic, determined and skilled, in a bad situation.

Finkel describes the various ways in which the soldiers attempt to win hearts and minds and ensure their own security, from patrols and radio broadcasts to ostentatious displays of power and gifts of soccer balls, and the cultural divisions that impede their progress.The counterinsurgency strategy mixes hard and soft power, and emphasizes the importance of winning public support.

In the second chapter, Finkel exposes the oversimplified expectations and limitations of the battalion's public diplomacy efforts in a few sentences: "For now, Kauzlarich [the battalion leader] thought that giving soccer balls to Iraqi children ... was having an effect. A child would take home a soccer ball; his parents would ask where it came from; he would say, 'the Americans'; the parents would be delighted; their confidence would increase; they would be more willing to make the difficult decisions of reconciliation; Baghdad would become secure; democracy in Iraq would thrive; the war would be won. Eventually, Kauzlarich would give up on soccer balls."

The book covers a period from 2007 to 2008, and since then the situation in Iraq has changed in some ways and in others not. The number of U.S. troops in the country has decreased, and now questions surround the future of U.S. diplomacy in that country--what is its role, how important is it, and can it survive with limited security? These are excellent questions, but as Finkel's book demonstrates, there are no easy answers.

Food for Thought

The challenges of grad school are all made tolerable by quotes like this:

"Our identity is not simply a nice question of where we feel comfortable. Our identity is about who we would kill, who we would kill for, what kind of moral community we identify with, or to touch on the greatest taboo, whom we would eat."

I love everything about this quote, courtesy of Chris Farrands via Rhonda Zaharna--from its inconsistent grammatical accuracy to the silliness of its conclusion. One moment I'm humming to myself as I noodle along through my weekly readings. I'm naive! Innocent! Foolishly presuming that I'm in touch with my cultural identity! The next moment I'm brought up short by the realization that I do not know whom I would eat. Until this moment I have never known myself.

All snark aside, I actually liked the argument Zaharna raises later in the chapter, namely that cultural differences could limit U.S. communication credibility. The U.S. has a fairly individualistic culture, whereas the majority of the world has a more collectivist culture. This results in different attitudes about the role of the individual and the group within society, how identities and relationships are formed, how stability is maintained, how truth is defined and how power is determined.

Culture isn't just an export to influence soft power, but a determinant of its formation. So whether or not we know whom we would eat, having a better understanding of the intrinsic elements of U.S. and other cultures could improve our ability to communicate.

Or, as Zaharna says, "All of the differences in cultural patterns have the potential to cause misunderstanding and misperceptions of U.S. public diplomacy. The more that is known about the underlying cultural assumptions that shape U.S. public diplomacy, the more culturally alert U.S. officials will be to potential unshared communication assumptions that can cause a public diplomacy initiative to fail, or worse, backfire."

More Fun with Ngram

One more astonishing discovering from Google's Ngram:

This one is really uncanny. A comparison of "the best of times" and "the worst of times" shows considerable variability over time, with optimism on the rise for over a century. But the real kicker here is the overlap, exactly once, in what appears to be 1859: the year Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities. (Cue Twilight Zone theme music...)

On the Rise

Google's got a fun new tool called an Ngram viewer, which essentially lets you chart the popularity of a word or phrase over a specific time period. It does this by measuring its occurrence in its reserves of digitized English-language books. (It came to my attention via this article.)

So just for fun, today I plugged in the terms "public diplomacy" and "soft power" and traced them from 1970 to 2008, the last year for which Ngram has results. See the chart below (and yes, I do realize it's difficult to read. You can see the original here).

 

 And check out the results for diplomacy v. propaganda, over a larger time span:

 

And here are some interesting parallels between the rise and fall of democracy and propaganda's popularity:

Of course, it would take additional research to determine what -- if any -- significance the trends show. But I encourage you to try it. And if you come up with any interesting charts, be sure to let me know.

Rage (or Reason) Against the Machine

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NPR had a fabulous story on communication, counter-terrorism and public diplomacy this morning. I'll summarize below, but I highly recommend visiting the source.

The story discusses the dual nature of information and communication technologies, citing examples where they've been used to promote and challenge democracy--and terrorism as well.

It also discusses "credible messengers," or people like Carie Lemack (the daughter of a 9/11 victim) or Abdullah Kemal Sharayed (a former al Qaida operative) whose perceived credibility enables them to reach out to potentially marginalized groups and counter misconceptions and conspiracy theories. This is seen as part of a larger fight against terrorism and the misinformation available online.

The key to their success is their perceived credibility, and it speaks to the realization that public diplomacy cannot be carried out by governments alone--particularly in environments and among people where governments have little credibility.

I've been reading a lot lately on the theory (or lack thereof) of public diplomacy and the importance of credibility is a recurring theme. But another major theme is the difficulty in identifying PD's actors. There are many different perspectives on whether PD involves governments, militaries, citizens, NGOs or private sector reps--and even more perspectives on whether it should.

This story demonstrates that fuzziness surrounding that question beautifully. Here we have private citizens working with counter-terrorism officials and NGOs to promote a shared foreign policy goal (discouraging terrorism) in a multi-national context. It's a mess.

But nobody ever said international affairs was a straightforward business.

Putting the "Dip" in Diplomat

It's been a while since we here at manIC have nominated anybody for a GOB Award. The GOB, named for Will Arnett's character in Arrested Development, recognizes ill-conceived diplomatic actions and is awarded periodically to dips who "have made a huge mistake."

Today's candidate: The unnamed Russian diplomat Ireland booted off the island for identity theft. Read about it in the New York Times. Evidently this diplomat stole six Irish identities and handed them over to Russian spies in the U.S. in what is both a horrendous breach of diplomacy and really incredible set-up for an offensive ethnic joke. (So a Russian spy walks into a New York bar with an Irish passport....)

Kudos, anonymous Russian diplomat. This one's for you: