I Am a Published Author!

The Handbook of 5GW has arrived! Read a preview of my chapter The War for Robert Taylor, here.

Planning to Fail in Afghanistan, pt 5: Planning to Fail in Afghanistan the Movie

Here is my presentation from this year's "Capital University Symposium on Undergraduate Research". My presentation was entitled "Moral Warfare in Southwest Asia," and it was based on the paper I wrote this past winter by the same name.

In other news, I was also awarded the Kenneth J. Martin award for scholarship by a senior in political science. The award is a real honor because both the nominations and voting come from the department faculty, so I must have made a few fans in the last 4 years. I guess I can now call myself an award winning political scientist.

The Joseph Korbel School of International Relations Knows Talent when they see it...

They have accepted me into their graduate program in International Relations. I haven't made a full decision yet as I'm still waiting to hear back from a few programs - I know Princeton told me "no soup for you"- but this takes a lot off my mind. I know I have somewhere to go next August and I know I can hit the slopes all winter. 

Moral Warfare in Southwest Asia Pt 3: Obama's War

A Way Forward: Obama’s War

            On December 1^st, 2009 President Barack Obama recommitted the United States to winning the fight over the primary loyalties of the Afghan people. The most publicly debated piece of Obama’s decision involved whether or not send additional troops and how many to send. But the crises that exist and are exploited by the QST today in Afghanistan are as much a problem of strategy as resources. So while the 30,000 additional troops promised by the President at West Point this week could play a critical role securing Afghanistan, it will be the implementation, more than their raw numbers, that will determine success or failure. To that end here is my assessment of what must be done to tackle each of the Afghan crises and in so doing undermine the Taliban’s abilities to exploit weaknesses in Afghan society.

Fixing the security crisis: At the COIN conference hosted by the Marine Corps University nearly every military officer, active duty or retired, pointed to a lack of joint-ness both between civilian and military agencies and between the U.S. and our Afghan counterparts as a serious source of concern. So the first step in any strategy that will improve security must be an increased emphasis on unity of effort between civilian and military operations and Afghan and American operations.

            The first obstacle to this sort of joint effort is to put aside the causality aversion that prevents American officers and NCOs from being embedded in Afghan National Army units. Partnering with local forces – really partnering – putting American and foreign forces in the same barracks with the same weapons eating the same chow and facing the same threats (Marine Corps University , 2009) – was one of the cornerstones of the success of the “surge” in Iraq (West, 2008; Kilcullen, 2009) and will be equally important in Afghanistan. This is the best way to train the officers and NCOs that will someday form the backbone of an independent Afghan army and having Afghan partners nearby is always helpful when conducting operations in populated areas.

            Getting into populated areas must be another part of any successful strategy to improve security. 80% of the Afghan population lives in rural areas, but currently the coalition has their biggest presence in urban areas that are both geographically and culturally separate from the Afghan population (Johnson & Mason, 2009). It’s important to keep in mind that it was in urban areas such as Kabul that young students became convinced that Afghanistan – an agrarian, tribal society with a literacy rate in the low double digits – was ripe for conversion to Marxism. This offers a clue to how far removed from Afghanistan the urban areas can be. In short, we cannot protect the Afghan people nor help them fight back against the QST unless we are out where they are, in the rural areas.

            The model for joint-ness suggested by Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason might offer the best hope for success. They propose the creation of 200 District Reconstruction Teams, which may seem like a large number but probably would have been possible even without the surge of troops. The DRTs would be composed of both civilian and military personal and partnered with Afghan forces and stationed throughout the country in rural areas. These DRTs would allow the Afghan forces to focus on patrolling the populated areas 24 hours a day while freeing up American forces to take offensive action against GT groups in the area and provide backup to the Afghans on patrol. Taking offensive action against the GT, ending the ‘free shots’ that the GT has been enjoying for too long must be a top priority (West, 2009). At the same time, USAID and State Department officials embedded with the DRTs can focus on local economic development and on finding jobs for some of the accidental guerillas that could otherwise find jobs with the QST (Johnson & Mason, 2009). The idea of buying off accidental guerillas is already being experimented with in Jalalabad, and early results appear hopeful (Filkins, Afghans Offer Jobs to Taliban Rank and File if They Defect, 2009 ).

            When it comes to non-military police forces, the current national police force has many of the same problems as the military in terms of lack of training and discipline and is also considered extremely corrupt, to the point that most Afghans do not even want the police in their village (Marine Corps University , 2009; Moyar, 2009). Perhaps the best solution to this problem is to accept that there is unlikely to be much of a national police force for some time and turn focus to training local tribal militias to fight back against the QST. These militias provide both employment and honor for local residents and could reduce the temptation to become and accidental guerilla. As with the plan to buy off local fighters, the training and support of local militias is already being experimented with in select regions and is seeing positive results (Filkins, Afghan Militias Battle Taliban With Aid of U.S. , 2009).

Solving the crisis of legitimacy: Focusing on the district, versus nation-state or provincial level, aids the coalition in overcoming another crisis; the crisis of legitimacy. It may be time to accept that the Afghan people are going to find a primary identity with their tribe and in the local district for the foreseeable future, so America’s historical focus on the nation-state (read Karzai and his administration) will ultimately be for naught. As Steven Coll has recently observed in Foreign Policy Magazine, Afghanistan has been most successful with a weak central government and diverse regional power centers (Coll, 2009). The focus on the local level allows the U.S. to work with long held tribal traditions in Afghan society and could allow us to make progress without having to completely reboot Afghan identity, a task which neither the Red Army or the QST could accomplish with far harsher tactics than we would be willing to use.

Solving the crisis of trust, at home and abroad: President Obama probably did little to assuage fears of our eminent departure when he promised to begin withdrawing troops in 18 months (Gall, 2009). On the other hand, the president left himself plenty of wiggle room by phrasing July 2011 as the date the U.S. will “begin to transition out,” (Obama, 2009) rather than as a date certain to leave. In choosing his phrasing carefully, the President seems to understand both the crisis of trust in Southwest Asia and the potential political crisis at home. Already, members of the President’s party in the House are starting to turn against the war in Afghanistan (Karl, 2009). Mitigating the domestic political damage will be tricky, but the President must be prepared to define his mission clearly, forcefully and publicly – as he did in his December 1^st speech – when other politicians question his intentions in Afghanistan. It’s worth noting that the President’s December 1^st speech appears to have had the desired effect, because a recent CNN poll that 62% of Americans now favor the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (CNN, 2009).

            When it comes to mitigating the crisis of trust in Pakistan, the U.S. would do well to focus on more than just the relationship between American and Pakistani security interests. Earlier this year Pakistan asked the President for greater economic connectivity between our two nations (Simon Denyer, 2009) and the President would do well to pursue that path. One of the great sources of mistrust between Pakistan and the U.S. results from Pakistan’s recognition that, in a hypothetical war between India and Pakistan, the U.S. would take India’s side because India and the U.S. enjoy hundreds of billions in trade and economic connectivity whereas trade between Pakistan and the U.S. is minuscule. So the President can promise to send x number of troops to Afghanistan and leave them there indefinitely as often as he likes, but until Pakistan becomes more integrated into the global economy they will continue to focus myopically on their unstable relationship with India and continue to hedge their relationship with America and their relationship with militants on their border with Afghanistan.

Conclusion: Known Unknowns and Hope Without Guarantees

            When considering Southwest Asia and America’s future there it’s important to consider what Donald Rumsfeld used to call “known unknowns,” meaning situations which we think could happen but do not know where or when. These situations represent tremendous variables to everything I have written about the war in this paper, and they include a successful attack by QST forces upon Pakistani nuclear bases, a QST or AQ attack on the scale of 9/11 on India or China, an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and, perhaps most important, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S. Any one of these situations could significantly change both the stakes and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and would require a readjustment of American strategy in the region. That being said, there are five main points American policy makers must consider if they wish to leave Afghanistan a stable country within the next half a decade or so:

1.     Security efforts must be joint efforts, meaning they must involve both American and Afghan forces and both civilian and military personnel of both countries.

2.     Securing the population is essential and that means the coalition must locate the labor near the problem, security forces must be permanently stationed in rural areas and as close to the population as possible.

3.     The coalition must recognize traditional sources of authority in Afghan culture and work within these traditional boundaries as much as possible. Building an Afghanistan that does not respect the traditional tribal district or woleswali level of organization will prove as futile to the coalition as turning Afghanistan into a socialist utopia proved for the Soviets.

4.     The coalition must make every effort to cleave the “accidental guerillas” from the true takfiri believers. To this end, payoffs, amnesties, and standing up local security militias should all be experimented with on a district level.

5.     Security is 90% of the problem until it isn’t, and then it becomes 10% of the problem. So while security is an immediate and urgent problem putting Afghanistan on a sustainable pathway to stability will involve more than just killing bad guys and posting guards. To this end, the U.S. must include China in any plan that hopes to succeed, because the Chinese are already sinking billions in Afghanistan’s mining industry and even taking token steps to help with security force assistance (Page, 2009; MacWilliam, 2007).

      In closing, I believe that Afghanistan remains a salvageable situation, but one which could still turn out very badly for the United States. In Lewis Sorley’s A Better War (1999) the author recounts a number of victories the U.S. experienced in Southeast Asia between 1968 and 1975, including the virtual destruction of Viet Cong and the repeated defeats of attempted North Vietnamese invasions of the South. But at the end, the U.S. simply could not maintain a domestic political consensus strong enough to continue to support the South. Vietnam is a powerful lesson of the need for a leader to remain focused on maintaining public support for operations overseas. And in understanding that sometimes we can do many things right and still wind up with a bad outcome.

Continue to Works Cited Page

5GW Handbook is fast approaching....

Perhaps it will be out in time for the holidays? 

In any case, here is my revised introduction:

The War for Robert Taylor (Brent Grace)

In this chapter I am going to explore what I believe could be a real world example of 5th gradient warfare waged against an urban insurgency. I am going to draw heavily on Columbia University sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh’s three volumes on life in inner city Chicago to described a 5GW counter insurgency operation that was conducted by the Chicago Housing Authority, the city of Chicago and the Federal government against a second generation gang known as the Black Kings who operated out of the Robert Taylor public housing project in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I am going to argue that the CHA et al adopted a 5GW strategy because the BKs had become so embedded within community that it was necessary to change the whole community – or, to put it another way, shape the battle space – in order to defeat the BKs. 

How My Example Fits Within the XGW Framework

                  One of the barriers to writing about the fifth gradient of war is that there is quit a bit of debate over what exactly constitute each gradient of warfare. So I must begin this chapter by stipulating a few assumptions I am making as I lay out my example of 5GW. Those assumptions include:

1.     Warfare is organized violence. 

2.     Each successive grade of warfare represents a tighter focus of violence (aka kinetics) and a more sophisticated division of labor required to create the kinetics.

3.      As a corollary to the point above, as the violence becomes more focused the role of the non-kinetic (aka “everything else) becomes more important in determining the outcome of the conflict.

There are two overall schools of thought when it comes to classifying warfare. The first is the Generations of Modern War that is perhaps best explained (at least to me) in Col. Thomas X. Hammes The Sling and The Stone (2004). GMW theory is a Hegelian view of war; that is, the history of war since 1648 is linear with each subsequent generation of war emerging out of social and technological developments to counter the previous generation of war. In this view 1^st generation war is Napoleonic linear warfare, 2^nd generation war is industrialized war with massed artillery fire (such as The American Civil War and WWI), 3^rd generation war is Blitzkrieg and 4^th generation war is asymmetrical warfare (such as Vietnam and Iraq).

         The second system of classifying warfare is the XGW framework, which is similar in many ways to GMW, but does not necessarily assume that warfare progresses chronologically. Instead, XGW is concerned with the “principal behind an expression of force” (Herring 2009), in other words, XGW examines the specific goal that is sought in each generation of warfare. In this context, for example, 3GW has as its goal locating and focusing kinetics on the weak point(s) in the enemies network. Some of my coauthors (Abbott 2009; Herring 2009) have suggested that 5GW is concerned with manipulating what can be or is observed, and in my example I am going to expound upon that idea by showing that a 5GW campaign could be used to attack and eventually alter a battle space, thus making it more difficult for a given actor to orient himself within the battle space and therefore reducing the actors effectiveness as a fighter.

5GW: The Battle of Who Could Care More

In a 4GW caring is important. In a battle of ideas (capitalism/communism, Jihadism/Liberal Democracy) the fighter – especially the insurgent – is generally a passionate advocate for their position. A 5GW is, like a 4GW, typically an insurgency that pits a smaller force against a much stronger opponent, but unlike 4GW there is no ideology involved. 5GW fighters don’t care about ideology – and they hope their opponent dose not care that there is a battle going on (Abbott, 2009):

Every other form of modern-warfare requires people to care. The aggressor needs to be able to morally and physically support his military forces for over a period of time — often a long time. The defender, once he realizes he is being attacked, will care about his own survival and fight back.                 

In many ways getting an enemy to not care is the essence of what happened in the Robert Taylor between the mid 1980s and mid 90s as the BKs rose to prominence. The gangs needed the city of Chicago to not care that they were operating. This was no Maoist insurgency; the BKs were not really looking for converts or comrades; they just needed enough space to operate freely. Much of what the BKs did, from paying off local elites to tamping down violence at the behest of the police was designed to make potential troublemakers not care just enough to decide that taking on the gang was more trouble than going along. On the flip side, anyone inside any level of government that really wanted to fight the gangs was fighting a battle to get someone to care; get the FBI to care about the racketeering; get the City to care about the conditions inside the projects and get the police to care more about a strong rule of law than a hassle free peace. And once this was accomplished, once the government started caring enough to dump resources into solving the problem, the war was won.

Once the authorities cared, they set off a series of developments that substantially weakened the Black Kings. To explain how that happened, I shall steal another concept from Abbott’s (2005/2009) blog posts on 5GW: waterfall development. In a waterfall development model:

·       Requirements must be known a long time before fighting begins

·       Requirements will be rigid and non-adaptable

·       Long Time between proposal and victory

In the 5GW I am describing the insurgents, like all insurgents, draw strength from their environment. Not unlike the way the Viet Cong hid in the jungle and used the natural landscape of Vietnam as a weapon against American soldiers and marines, the Black Kings used their immense store of local knowledge and ability to blend into the environment of Robert Taylor as their primary defense. So the CHA et al defeated them by launching a 5GW against the environment itself. In their grand strategy to destroy the gangs of Chicago, the government turned construction workers, real estate developers and non-profit organizations into unknowing soldiers in a massive counter insurgency campaign. And when they were finished the insurgents found the environment had been so radically altered that they were unable to reorient themselves and many wound up walking away from insurgency all together.

 If you want more? You want to see how this story ends? Want to find out how the 5GW went down?

You'll have to read the book!

Uninformed Voter Bias

This is an excerpt from the literature review of my undergraduate thesis. This section deals with the existence of certain anti-foreign biases among large swaths of the American Electorate.

The paper is still very much a work in progress that now stands at about 30 pages. I'm still engrossed in reading about the history of American Grand Strategy and finding examples of public pressure (presumably related to the findings in the literature that certain biases are widespread within the American electorate) hindering strategy.


Scott Althaus’s Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People picks up where Keeter and Caprini left off. While Keeter and Caprini sought to establish that there were a large number of Americans that lacked the information necessary to make an informed decision about policy, Althuas was generally concerned with examining ways in which the views of the informed and the uninformed diverged. Althaus looked deeper into Keeter and Caprini’s assertion that there was little consistency in the views of uninformed voters. Althaus’s conclusion was that, on certain issues, there was actually a great deal of consistency among the uninformed voters. Althaus concludes, “the opinions of ill informed respondents are often amplified in collective preferences because they tend to more like minded in their answers than knowledgeable respondents”(Althaus 23), to be precise, Althaus finds that at least 30 percent of the answers on the National Election Survey have a bimodal distribution with a large grouping at both the lowest and highest knowledge quartile; foreign policy is close to the average with 26 percent of the answers having a bimodal preference between the highest and lowest quartiles (Althaus 81).

When it comes to issues of foreign policy and globalization Althaus found that uninformed voters were less inclined towards intervention, less supportive of immigration and more hawkish on military matters(Althaus 129). For example, 29 percents of respondents agreed that the U.S. should stay out of problems in other parts of the world, but that number dropped to just 18 percent among the fully informed while at the same time 64 percent of all respondents favored deployment of U.S. troops in the Middle East (in 1988) while the informed opinion dropped to 57 percent(Althaus 130). A corollary to Althaus’s research may be a recent study from the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs, which looked at global opinions largely of trade and economic globalization. While the CCFA study did not test political knowledge, they did find that support for globalization in the U.S. increased from 40 percent among those who did not follow international news to 60 percent for those that did follow international news (Chicago Council of Foriegn Relations ). While not as scientific as Althaus’s findings, it seems consistent with the idea that people will be supportive of internationalism if they are better informed.

A logical question to these findings is: Could it be that people that are better informed also share other demographic factors that make them more likely to support globalization? For example, Keeter and Carpinni observe that “Much of this nations enduring political history has been defined by four critical struggles; between economically advantaged and the economically disadvantaged; between whites and blacks; between men and women; and (in a somewhat different way) between the generation in power and the generation that preceded and follows it”(Keeter and Deli Carprini 156). It is possible that wealthy people somehow benefit from globalization or certain foreign policies more than poorer people. Of course, differentiating between a person’s ‘interests’ and the effect of information can be difficult. For example, below is a chart that illustrates the difference in political knowledge between different demographics (Keeter and Deli Carprini 162).



So while on one hand it is not unreasonable to think that the poorest and wealthiest people in society may view globalization differently, it also stands to reason that, if an information effect exists independent of other factors, views may change if respondents were better informed. Indeed, Scott Althaus suggests, that by using his method of simulating informed opinion while controlling for the effects of demographics, it can be demonstrated that the information effect is indeed very real, fairly large, and would move policy preferences in any demographic group (Althaus 193).

Further evidence of this can be seen in the work of Bryan Caplan, as the chart below demonstrates(Caplan 26). The ‘average response’ is the respondent’s answers to questions about welfare reform, with lower numbers indicating a desire to cut benefits and higher numbers illustrating a desire to raise them. As the chart shows, the response of those with high income and high knowledge is closer to the response of those with low income and high knowledge than it is to those with high income and low knowledge.

Income ------Knowledge----- % Of Population------ Response
High -----------High -----------------25-------------------------- 3
High -----------Low ------------------25-------------------------- 5
Low ------------High -----------------25 --------------------------4
Low---------- --Low ------------------25-------------------------- 6


Unlike Althaus and Keeter and Caprini, who put a good deal of their focus on strictly domestic issues while occasionally looking at foreign policy questions, Caplan focuses much of his attention on issues related international trade, immigration and globalization. In his book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. , Caplan explores differences between the views of economists and laymen. He begins his research by looking at the findings of a Kaiser Foundation study that surveyed economists and lay people about their opinions on economic questions. Caplan looked at several of the questions and compared the views of economists with those of both the general public and a simulated fully informed public. The answer scale ran from 0 to 2, with zero representing ‘not a reason’ for something and 2 representing a ‘major reason’. For example, when asked if a given reason responsible for slowing growth of the U.S. economy the general public supported the answer “Foreign aid spending is too high” with a ranking of of 1.5, meaning between minor reason and major reason (Caplan 58) versus economist and the enlightened public who both answered less than ‘minor reason’. Other reasons cited heavily by the general public but very little by either economists of the informed public include “There are too many immigrants”(Caplan 59), and “Companies are sending jobs overseas” (Caplan 66). Caplan puts all of these misassumptions under a meta-category he calls the anti-foreign bias(Caplan 36), which means that many people are naturally opposed to interacting with those they perceive as ‘outsiders’.

My thesis topic has been approved!

Do informed voters hold different views on foreign policy than less well informed voters?


Research Questions:

In the population of all Americans, is there a difference between the foreign policy
views of informed voters and less well informed voters? What is the relationship between political IQ and foreign policy preference?


Research design:
I will survey a minimum of 25 subjects asking them questions from a political IQ test consisting of objective questions related to civic and political knowledge (i.e. How many justice sit on the supreme court? ect). I will then examine the results to see if there is a relationship between the subject’s political IQ and the subject’s answers to foreign policy questions.


Hypothesis:
H1: There will be no correlation, indicating that America policy preference towards foreign policy is independent of their political IQ.

H2: There will be a correlation between a person’s political IQ and their answers to the foreign policy preference questions.


Section 1:
I will begin by reviewing the literature about and establishing the parameters for the Enlightened Policy Preference model. I will then construct a political IQ test using questions from both political IQ test examples from the literature and questions from the American Civic Literacy Quiz. I will then construct a foreign policy opinion test with one section made up of broad questions on globalization and one section made up of more questions about policy preference regarding specific questions of U.S. foreign policy. The globalization questions will focus on attitudes towards the “4 flows” of globalization: Money, Energy, Security and People. The more specific questions on U.S. foreign policy preference will be based on current controversies from major media sources which could include major newspapers and national polling organizations.


Section 2: I will analyze the results of the survey.

Section 3: I will attempt to place the results of the survey and the answers to the research questions in the context of American grand strategy for the 21st century. What do the results portend for building a sustainable foreign policy for the 21st century? Should we make civic and geo-political education part of any public diplomacy campaign?

Just a small town girl, living in a lonley world...

I read a story today of the BBC website about the end of the Sopranos that sort of struck me. This comment reminds me of a paper I wrote for a sociology class I had two years ago:

Mr Jaafar also explains that after 11 September 2001, the US was more willing to accept "darker fare and more serious material" on TV.

"You can see a changing landscape on American TV after 9/11 - The Sopranos was one of the first, followed by 24 and The Shield - gritty, well-written, expensive shows," he says.

Such fare stood out against a "barrage of reality and non-scripted TV programmes", he adds.

In my paper, entitled "The Dawning of a Doom Struck Era: How 9/11 Changed the content of Prime Time T.V., I used the plot lines for The West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Shield to demonstrate how television changed in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

Let's be clear: This paper was written for a 100 level sociology course taught by an instructor with low standard, we were only required 2 sources.

And the Paper:

September 11th changed nearly every aspect of American life, and prime time T.V. was no exception. Shows such as Fox’s 24 and ABC’s Alias depicted brave, dedicated patriots who spent each episode locked in mortal combat with super-empowered non-state actors. The story lines for major network shows in 2001-2002 also brought moral dilemmas that pre -9/11 prime time protagonist rarely faced. Shows such as The West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Shield depicted characters forced to commit morally ambiguous acts of violence in the name of preventing the death or injury of innocent bystanders. The best illustration of post 9/11 sensibilities occurred on NBC’s “The West Wing,” in the episode entitled “Posse Comitatus,” when President Josiah Bartlet was forced to order the pre-emptive assassination of the defense minister of the fictional country of Qumar, who was planning a major terrorist attack on the U.S.

The third season of The West Wing premiered in late September of 2001 and from the start the producers were trying to find a way to deal with the terrorist attack on New York and Washington. The first episode of the season was not part of the regular story line, rather, it was a one-act teleplay written by Aaron Sorkin that attempted to put the events of 9/11 in perspective and assuage a grieving nation. The episode was entitled “Isaac and Ishmael.” Although well meaning, it did little to shed new light on the challenges brought on by terrorism and focused mainly on the Arab-Israeli conflict (a cause rarely mentioned by Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11) and American prejudices against Arabs. The episode also related misinformation, for example, the characters mention that most of “the terrorists” come from refugee camps and extreme poverty. In reality, most of the 9/11 hijackers were the sons of wealthy men who had been educated at some of the finest universities in the world.

Aaron Sorkin, head writer and producer of The West Wing, finally began to explore a more complex post 9/11 world at the end of the third season in a four episode arc that began with an episode entitled “Enemies Foreign and Domestic.” Post September 11th fears were explored throughout the story arc. For example, in “Enemies Foreign and Domestic,” Leo McGary tells Bartlett that he should “Get himself into a mental place where he can order an unidentified plane shot down.” This was obviously a reference to the situation on the morning of 9/11 when Vice President Cheney reluctantly gave an order allowing the Air Force to shoot down any plane that refused to land.

Another post September 11th fear that was explored in the story line was the target list of the terrorists. The president’s advisers warn him that buildings in Washington, including the White House, were considered possible targets. Again, this is a reflection of 9/11, when the Pentagon was hit directly and either the White House or the Capital may have been a target of flight 93.

Bartlett’s actions in the face of these terrorists’ threats are a reflection of the post September 11th notion of preemption as a doctrine of national security. His first instinct was to order his Attorney General to prepare an indictment of Sharif, but the A.G. informed Bartlet that Sharif, as an emissary of the Sultan of Qumar, enjoys diplomatic immunity. Bartlett is then pressured by Leo McGary to order Shariff’s assassination during Shariff’s upcoming visit.

It is important to look at earlier seasons of the West Wing to understand why the post September 11th season was different. During the first season, in an episode entitled “A Proportional Response,” Leo argues that Bartlet cannot use the U.S. military arbitrarily or for personal vengeance. In the second season, in an episode entitled “The War at Home,” Leo actually argues against the assassination of a Colombian drug lord named Juan Aquilar. This trend indicates that the writers made a decision to take the story in a new direction in the wake of 9/11.

The West Wing was not the only show to change its characters and story lines to reflect the post 9/11 realities. The WB’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which had previously always used a super natural villain as the season long antagonist (generally known as “the big bad” or “the evil”) featured humans as “the evil” during the 2001-2002 season. The end of the season brought the death of Willow’s girlfriend, Tara, at the hands of evildoer Warren. Unlike previous seasons, in which characters fought and died at the hands of medieval weapons such as cross bows and swords, Warren uses a pistol to shoot Tara in the chest. The 2001-2002 season marked the first time a firearm was used to kill any character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The post 9/11 season also marked the first time that a member of the “Scooby Gang,” (the shows protagonist who fought against super natural villains in Sunnydale, California) killed a mortal. Willow killed Warren in revenge for murdering Tara. In the episode entitled, “Two to Go,” Buffy, Dawn, Anaya and Xander debate weather or not it was right to kill Warren, and Xander argues that Warren “Got what he deserved,” and that it is okay to kill a human who commits an act of evil. This is a view that was never expressed in previous seasons (members of the “gang” had always been forbidden from hurting mortals) and, like The West Wing, these new plot twists indicated a much darker, more morally ambivalent tone for the show.

The reason T.V. writers choose to deal with both terrorism and the type of warfare that must be conducted to combat it is because American’s were frightened by the events of 9/11 and studies show that many Americans were deeply concerned that they or someone they knew would be a victim of terrorism. In the article, The Consequences of Terrorism: Disentangling the Effects of Personal and National Threat, (Huddy, Feldman, Capelos and Provost 2002) the authors describe a survey taken between October and November of 2001 in the New York metropolitan area. They reported that 82% of respondents were at least somewhat concerned about a major terrorist attack on the U.S. in the near future and 70% were afraid that they or someone they knew would be injured or killed in a terrorist attack. These results seem to indicate that many Americans were personally frightened by the 9/11 attacks, although, as the authors point out, only a very small minority was actually affected by the attacks directly.

Another study, entitled Effects of Right Wing Authoritarianism and Threat from Terrorism on Restriction of Civil Liberties (Corrs, Kielmann, Maes, Moschner 2005) looked at the way fear affected peoples views on suppression of civil liberties. The study was conducted over the course of several months following the September 11th attacks and indicated that many people become more willing to accept the suppression of civil liberties in exchange for security in the face of threats from terrorism.
This study brings us around to another show that enjoyed tremendous success in the 2001-2002-television season, FX Network’s “The Shield.” From the first episode the show made a hero of Vic Mackey, an LAPD detective who never let a suspect’s civil rights slow him down. Although there was never a terrorism plot line in The Shield, post 9/11 fears and sensibilities were palpable throughout the season. For example, in the first episode, entitled “Pilot”, Vic beats a suspect who had asked to speak to his attorney until the man reveals the location of a kid-napped little girl. The man was not a terrorist, but it is easy to see how harsh interrogation techniques might appeal to an audience worried, as the Huddy survey indicated, that another terror attack was eminent. When Vic went into that interrogation room the audience might have imagined Zacharious Moussouri or Richard Reid (the “shoe bomber”) sitting across the table. Assuming the findings of the study on authoritarianism and threat were valid, the fact that Vic Mackey became so popular in the wake of 9/11 is no surprise. Every time he beat a criminal or intimidated a witness Americans saw a man of action who would protect them by any mean necessary.

This brings us back to The West Wing and “Posse Comitatus.” President Bartlett was not cut out for a world where Vic Mackey was a folk hero. Bartlett belonged to last century, to the roaring 90’s and the days when POTUS was little more than a CEO and chief. The whole show reflected a simpler, more innocent time. When The West Wing premiered 1999 it offered the optimistic view that government was a place for people to come together. For two years the audience went to work each week with a group of smart, dedicated public servants who strove to raise the level of debate in America and maybe help a few people in the process. The president’s chief of staff, Leo McGary, had the simple goal of proving that it was possible for a good man to get elected. And Bartlett was a good man, a former economics professor and Noble laureate who was always ready to reassure with a smile and a quote from scripture (sometimes in Latin). The West Wing was a vision of the 90’s as we wished they had been. On 9/11 that vision came crashing down. “Posse Comitatus” represented this incredibly optimistic show finally facing the realities of its time. Ultimately, this episode depicted the veil of carefree innocence that had embodied the 1990’s being torn away. At the end of the episode Bartlett says to Leo “It’s just wrong, it’s absolutely wrong,” Leo responds with a nod and says, “I know, but you have to do it anyway.” Bartlett then turns away and delivers the order, “Take him.” The next scene depicts a team of Army Rangers opening fire on Shariff as he steps off his plane.

This year will mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11. This year will also mark the seventeenth anniversary of 11/9, the day the Berlin wall came down. The dozen years that separate those two events were marked by a towering sense of optimism. And when that optimism was laid low by a bolt from a clear September sky, popular culture, especially prime time T.V., reflected feelings of foreboding and the sense that we were living in what Hunter S. Thompson called a “doom struck era.” Nowhere was the loss of innocence more pronounced, or the sense of foreboding more profound, then in the alternative reality of Jeb Bartlett’s White House, which had once represented the best of all possible worlds.



REFRENCES:
Cohrs, Christopher. Kielmann, Sven. Maes, Jurgen. And Mochner, Barbara. “Effects of Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Threat from Terrorism on Restriction of Civil Liberties.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2005, pp. 263-276

Capelos, Theresa. Feldman, Stanley. Huddy, Leonie. And Provost, Colin. “The Consequences of Terrorism: Disentangling the Effects of Personal and National Threat.” Political Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2002 pp. 1-25