Long views of insurgency
Thursday, June 22, 2006
I was interviewed a while ago by CNN about Iraq and Ireland. I had some qualms about pushing too far the occasional parallels, or at least some disturbing echoes, between the current US-led occupation and the British army's entanglement in Northern Ireland through the past three decades. But as time has gone on, more similarities are making themselves evident - none of them encouraging.
The CNN piece to which I contributed recalled (and it surely shouldn't be forgotten, despite widespread scorn for America now) that incoming troops to each theater of operation were at least briefly welcomed by previously oppressed sectors of the populace - meaning in Iraq the Shiites especially, and in Northern Ireland the Roman Catholics. The media gleefully celebrated instances of flower-tossing in one case, cups of Irish tea in the other.
But before long, in both arenas, soldiers had foregone their popularity and respect, as it seems all occupying military forces must. CBS News and The New Yorker disgusted the world with revelations about Abu Ghraib, just as back in the early 1970s London's Sunday Times exposed the inhuman and degrading techniques used at the infamous Castlereagh Interrogation Centre, which led to Britain being condemned at the European Court of Human Rights.
Now, horrifyingly, there has come the alleged massacre of twenty-four civilians last November in Haditha, by reputedly well-disciplined US Marines - echoing the killing of 14 civilians on Bloody Sunday in Derry, by crack troops of the British Parachute Regiment. (And add to that this April's alleged killing. and framing as a bomber, of a single civilian in Hamdania by seven Marines and a Navy corpsman).
A voluble "Troops Out" movement developed in mainland Britain, but it wasn't to win the day. Eventually - but it was a long eventually - the British governmnent negotiated a deal (the "Good Friday Agreement" of 1998) with its "insurgents" - in fact with the political wing of the IRA gunmen whom they used to battle in the streets. British troops are still there, after 37 years, but they now keep a low profile, as local politicians of opposing camps wrangle over civilian power. The levers of overall executive control remain in the hands of the British, in the shape of a governor-like Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
Here of course similarities with the Iraqi situation end. A majority of Americans may now believe it was a mistake to send troops into Iraq, but the US Congress is not going to call for a troop withdrawal (indeed only today the Senate expressly declined to pass such a measure - either John Kerry's or Jack Reed's).
Meanwhile, geopolitical experts in such influential forums as the Council on Foreign Relations look repeatedly for precedents in Britain's experience with insurgencies - as well as Northern Ireland there was Britain's Malaya campaign, all-too-often cited as a rare example of a "successful" anti-insurgency operation. But they generally conclude, as stragegist Andrew Krepinevich has suggested in Foreign Affairs, the Council's own publication, that such efforts at disentanglement need to be measured by the decade rather than in years.
Does America have the stomach for such a protracted, and of course costly, exercise? I've yet to see any broadbased media outlet in the US ask that straight and open question.
PERHAPS HUMANITY'S MOST BASIC form of communicating essential information is the map. As the design back-drop to this website of mine suggests, I am something of a map enthusiast - I'm a cartophiliac no less. So I've watched with fascination the development of universally available, satellite-aided maps through the internet.
It came as no surprise to this observer, like may others, to see web-users soon exploiting the commercial possibilities of computer-generated mapping. If you can merge into an online map other forms of information - like, say, real estate details and prices, a slide-show of scenic pictures, or a guide to geographically-indexed businesses - you can of course sell this value-added compilation. And that's exactly what many web-savvy people are now doing.
So many in fact that O'Reilly Media, the 28-year old Sebastapol, California-based company formed by alpha geeks who claim virtually to have invented Open Source networking, were able to hold an e-mapping conference in San Jose this month (June 13-14), wittily titled "Where 2.0". Everyone there was deeply into "mash-ups", the mixing of maps from Google (and elsewhere) with other stuff mixed in, that's been growing so rapidly since it began about a year ago.
It was only in June 2005 that Google began allowing developers to pretty much do whatever they liked with its map data. Microsoft's Virtual Earth started similar open access in September, and Yahoo! fully opened up its mapping program in recent weeks.
A few operators have proved able to turn such access into profitable businesses, like the real estate startup Zillow.com, which uses Microsoft's maps. But a lot of others - and they were very evident in the hallways at the conference site at San Jose's Fairmont Hotel - seem content to invent something clever, and then hope a big outfit (like maybe even the service providing the maps in the first place) buys them up.
The dot-com world has long been peopled by such hopefuls - and there are always successful examples to look to. This mapping mash-up field can offer the case of 3-D graphic artist Paul Rademacher, who has yoked together material from Craigslist and Google Maps to create HousingMaps.com, which enables renters and buyers look for homes by mapped location. Rademacher has been bought up by - guess who? - Google.