Uberpower by Josef Joffe

Uberpower contains 7 chapters: 2 that describe the United States' status as the last remaining superpower, 2 about the rise of sentiments for and against the US, and 3 that describe possible solutions. The first two chapters are informative, and then everything goes to hell in the second pair of chapters, leaving the remaining 3 chapters suspect.

I went over the edge in chapter 4, "The Rise of Americanism." Joffe claims that there has recently been a surge in anti-Americanism, driven by a surge in Americanism. He uses Google searches for "anti-Americanism 2004" to measure the "sudden surge" in anti-Americanism. He writes:

When "anti-Americanism" followed by a particular year was entered, there were 180,000 entries for 2004. . . . For the 1970s, the average was 12,000, as it was for the 1960s and in the year 1950. (p. 97)

But if we search Google for just "2004," we get 7,970,000,000 results, but only 284,000,000 for "1950." This means that if we normalize Joffe's results to account for the number of pages Google indexes containing the years 2004 and 1950, the phrase anti-Americanism is less commonly used with 2004 than 1950. Joffe says that his survey is "only suggestive." Even if we could be sure that webpage mentions corresponded to public opinion, which is doubtful, his survey would be "suggestive" of the opposite of what he concludes. After reading this section, the rest of his conclusions were suspect.

Later in the book, Joffe quotes John Winthrop as referring to America in a sermon as a "cittie upon a hill with the eies of all people upon them" (p. 108). Later, he quotes Winthrop again, but this time he writes "the eyes of all people uppon us" (pp. 240-241). Is he making this up? Throwing in funny spellings to liven things up? Is he this careless with the rest of his quotations? Talking about the spread of American clothing styles around the world, Joffe writes, "Among the even younger set, the bulky pants of street surfboarders became de rigeur almost instantly . . ." (p. 99). I believe that I am one of the street surfboarders, a member of the even younger set that Joffe mentions, but I do not consider anything de rigeur. I get the feeling that Joffe experiences youth culture like my parents: "Let's all wear novelty t-shirts to the teen center! Don't wear that ballcap backwards-- it's disrespectful!"

In the concluding chapter of the book, Joffe summarizes his recommendation for US policy (which was the reason I wanted to read the book-- how do we get ourselves out of this mess?). He writes, "Briefly: the United States will have to balance and to bond in order to extend its lease on the top floor of international politics" (p. 210). Ignoring the metaphor blighting the end of the sentence (I know, you Thomas-Friedman-reading Americans don't care), that's an interesting thesis, if you've read chapters 5 and 6 where Joffe summarizes what he means by balancing and bonding. Unfortunately, the rest of his book undermines his reliability. I freely admit that I don't know much about, for example, the military history of Europe; I have read zero works by Carl von Clausewitz, and Joffe's summary of the downfall of Bismarck was the most I've read on the topic. This is why I read books by experts in fields with which I'm unfamiliar-- I'm hoping to learn from their wisdom. My fields of expertise (spelling, Google, high school statistics, street surfboarding) and Joffe's don't overlap very much, but where they do, Joffe looks terrible.

I guess I'll stick with Wikipedia-- the authors might not all have Ph. D.'s, but at least they know how to use Google.

The growing EU "soft balancing" against US preventive war doctrine?

Fellow foreign policy zealot Marian's post about the addition of Turkey to the European Union overlapped with an article by Robert A. Pape in the Summer 2005 issue of International Security that I read this morning. Pape is a proponent of the "soft balancing" theory of international relations. In his words, "States balance when they take action intended to make it hard for strong states to use their military advantage against others. . . . Mechanisms of soft balancing include territorial denial, entangling diplomacy, economic strengthening, and signaling of resolve to participate in a balancing coalition." (International Security 30:1, p. 36).

As an example of soft balancing against the US, Pape cites Turkey's January 2003 refusal to allow the US to stage ground troops in Turkey in preparation for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Perhaps Turkey joining the EU would be a further example of soft balancing-- Europe wants to insulate itself against future economic shocks that could occur as a result of, for example, the US invading Iran, or Syria, or whomever British intelligence next erroneously identifies as hiding WMD (Australia, anyone? Bunch of criminals! How about Canada? Alcan found to be manufacturing 7075 T6 aluminum tubes?)

I mostly agree with Pape's theory, but I think he ascribes too much control to national governments. In January 2003, if I recall correctly, there were riots in Turkey over the possibility of American troops being stationed there. The Turkish government may not have been strategically balancing against the US so much as attempting to ensure political stability for the ruling party.

Other interesting information from Pape's article:

1. What Bush II calls a war in which the US would "act preemptively" in The National Security Strategy of the United States has traditionally been called in international relations "preventive war." A "preemptive" attack typically refers to an attack which occurs in immediate response to observed battle preparations (troop deployments, for example).
2. In a footnote, Pape says that "In the standard list of preventive wars over the past two centuries, all were started by authoritarian states: Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), Austro-Prussian War (1866), Franco-Prussian War (1870), Russo-Japanese War (1904), World War I (1914), Germany-Soviet Union (1941), and Japan-United States (1941)." Pape cites as a source Randall L. Schweller, World Politics 44:2, pp. 235-269.

Jarhead by Anthony Swofford and State of War by James Risen

I read two books this week: Jarhead and State of War.

Jarhead is a memoir covering the author's work as a Marine fighting in the 1991 Gulf War. It contains a lot of profanity and crude expressions, but I suspect this is an honest recollection of the war. Jarhead evoked a sympathetic mood in describing the Marine's experiences and yet still describes the emotional chaos and devastation convincingly.

Risen's book, State of War, was largely a recounting of the failures of the CIA between the late 90's and late 2005. Most of the information was already reported in the New York Times. Two chapters contained stories that I had not heard before: "The Hunt for WMD" and "A Rogue Operation."

The first described a CIA mission in which Sawsan Alhaddad, an anesthesiologist living in Ohio who had left Iraq in 1979, was sent to Iraq in 2002 to convince her brother to try to escape Baghdad to defect to the US or at least tell her what he knew about Iraqi WMD. Her brother, Saad Tawfiq, was "a key figure in Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear weapons program" (p. 88). Tawfiq told his sister that Iraq had had no WMD program since June of 1991, when the uranium refinement system they had been working on was dismantled, loaded onto 150 trucks, and driven into the desert to be hidden. The hidden equipment was revealed to UN inspectors 3 months later, according to Risen.

The final chapter in the book is called "A Rogue Operation," but the operation described does not seem to be rogue. It describes the CIA's attempt to leak flawed plans for a nuclear detonation system to Iran through an unidentified Russian scientist who had defected to the US at the end of the Cold War. The scientist likely succeeded in leaking the plans to Iran; he also suggested subtly to the Iranians that the plans were flawed. ("If you try to create a similar device you will need to ask some practical questions." (p. 205)). Perhaps that sentence could be described as "rogue," but the rest of the operation was carried out as intended.

My only complaint about Risen's book, other than the lack of source attribution, which is perhaps necessary, is his weak description of a file transfer that betrayed all of the CIA's agents in Iran in 2004. A CIA agent "sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents . . ." (p. 193). She "didn't think twice when she began her latest download." But if she was sending information out to agents, this would be an upload, not a download. Was it that she was receiving a secret data flow, but revealing it to all of the agents? The crux of the agents' betrayal is described as, "She had sent information to one Iranian agent meant for the entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran." This doesn't make sense-- how could identities be betrayed if the information was sent to fewer people than it should have been? My best guess is that Risen means that she uploaded a set of unique messages to one spy, when the intent was for each spy to receive one unique message. But what CIA agent would send a spy a message that contains his or her identity?

"Dear Saad Tawfiq, spy for the United States,

Please send us information about WMD. Also, have you seen OBL? We really need to find that guy. Please advise.

The CIA."

Book review: Who Controls the Internet? by Goldsmith and Wu

Longtime readers of this site will be loath to discover another tedious book review of a soft technical book, but perhaps there are a few new readers who have some life left yet. Read on, unknowing vanguard of the newly alienated!

Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, both law professors, wrote Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford University Press, 226 pp., $28.00) to present their answer to the question of "whether the technological changes of the last decade . . . have had a lasting effect on how nations, and their peoples, govern themselves" (p. 180). They make a compelling case that the optimistic hope that the internet would erase national boundaries has been replaced by a reality of local control leveraged through governmental pressure on intermediaries, at least in the case of large multinational companies.

Goldsmith and Wu cite the changing attitude of Yahoo's Jerry Yang between mid-2000 and the fall of 2005. In 2000, Yang was defiant toward French regulations that prohibit the sale of Nazi goods: "Asking us to filter access to our sites according to the nationality of web surfers is very naive" (p. 6). Five years later, Yahoo, in compliance with Chinese law, collaborated with the Chinese government to identify a dissident journalist, Shi Tao, through his Yahoo email account. Said Yang, "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law" (p. 10). The information that prompted Chinese authorities to jail Tao, like the Nazi paraphrenalia offered for auction in 2000, was found on one of Yahoo's servers in the United States. The situations are not exactly analogous, but Yang's change in attitude is what's important.

The enforcement pattern illustrated by Goldsmith and Wu is one in which local authorities pressure local intermediaries, generally ISPs, to control the content flowing over their wires. Search engines are also targeted, with Google.fr and Google.de cited as examples. Additionally, large multinational companies doing business over the internet need local law enforcement on their side. The capture of criminals is enacted as some local police officer pointing a gun at a would-be h4X0r and asking him or her to come quietly (as normal people are asleep at this hour). This is the major point that Goldsmith and Wu get right. I'm not convinced by their thesis relating to free speech laws racing to match the lowest common denominator-- I think that this is exactly what is occurring, but they disagree. In describing a case involving Australian libel laws and a wealthy Australian named Joseph Gutnick, Goldsmith and Wu suggest that wsj.com can choose not do business in Australia if they don't want to be subject to Australian laws. "Compliance with Australian libel laws . . . is a cost of doing business in Australia" (p. 157).

Goldsmith and Wu assume that publishing on the internet works like publishing newspapers. In traditional publishing, newspapers read in Australia are printed and distributed in Australia; the printers and distributors are work in Australia. In internet publishing, documents are stored on a central server, and copies are transmitted to whichever computers request them. The server is maintained, at least in part, by people who work in the country where the server is hosted. Where a website does business is determined only by the consumers whose interests lead them to request the site using their web browser.

I could imagine a restricted case of the argument, in which we limit ourselves to the consideration of only subscription sites where local caches are used. If wsj.com maintained a server in Australia and charged subscribers to access it, that would be a compelling argument, but this does not describe the vast majority of the traffic on the internet. Most sites do not require subscription, and while many high-bandwidth publishers do maintain caches around the globe, most domains reside on only one server in one country.

Is it really nothing new that multi-national corporations need to either limit their speech to everyone or pay for communications filtering (in the form of IP geolocation)? In the case where people pay for permission to see content, as with the bulk of wsj.com, there is a business relationship formed. But consider a Z-list blogger such as myself who might decide to stain his soul by displaying Google ads for high-value keywords (exchange-traded funds, for example). When Goldsmith's Australian cousin who likes reading the Z-list finds this review on Google and feels that I have besmirched his family name by disagreeing with his lawyer cousin, do I need to invest in geolocation filtering? Or will Google.com.au just do it for me? Preemptively, perhaps?

As one might expect from Oxford University Press, the mechanics of the book (rectangular pages, clear type) are well executed, save one typo in the last paragraph on page 160: missing period (or spurious capitalization) between "costly" and "But." The cover, with its ghostly green pixel trails and monospaced subtitle, uses the imagery of the The Matrix, or was it the cover to Stephen Levy's Crypto, published in 2000? Goldsmith and Wu's book is printed on acid-free paper, but not on recycled paper. Crashing the Gate, by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, which was published just a few days earlier, is of similar cost ($0.128/page vs. $0.124/page for Goldsmith and Wu), and target market, but it's printed on "100 percent post-consumer-waste recycled" paper. Perhaps Oxford was concentrating its efforts on the editing, rather than the physical production of the book.

Unfortunately, the editing of the book could be better. We can be certain of this because an "adapted" subset of the book appeared in the January/February 2006 issue of Legal Affairs, and it was better. The improvement I noticed first was that the book's strange assertion that "Apple came in Icelandic" (p. 50), which mistakes the company for its product, appeared as "Apple software came in Icelandic" in Legal Affairs (p. 42).

In general, the prose in Legal Affairs flows more smoothly and tells a more precise story. Consider these two sentences from the book: "Net geo-identification services are still relatively new but are starting to have their effects on e-commerce. Online fraud, and in particular online identity theft, has been a big challenge for e-commerce, causing firms and consumers to lose billions of dollars each year" (p. 61).

The corresponding sentences in Legal Affairs read: "Internet geo-identification services are still nascent, but they are starting to have effects on e-commerce. Online identity theft in the U.S. causes firms and consumers to lose billions of dollars each year."

That's a decrease of more than 20% in number of words for the same content and a 50% reduction in usage of the word "e-commerce." Note also the substitution of "nascent" for "relatively new" and the omission of "their" as a descriptor of "effects" in the first sentence. It's unfortunate that the more permanent version (the book) couldn't be the better version.

Who Controls the Internet nails the most important points of support for its thesis. I would have liked to see more information about the rise of ICANN and the history of the organizations that preceded it. The central argument of the book convinced me that the idea that the decentralized architecture of the internet would ensure decentralized control of the internet was wrong; as Goldsmith and Wu claim, we are at "the beginning of a technological version of the cold war" (p. 184).