Rethinking Security

Combat Camera in France?

Thomas Rid:

"The IDF did it on the Philadelphi Route when clearing tunnel entrances. Hezbollah did it in Southern Lebanon on ambushes. Now the French police are doing it in Seine-Saint-Denis, a rough suburb of Paris: equipping forward-deployed units with mini-cameras. ...'This equipment allows us to establish the context of our interventions,' said Christian Charlot, a police captain in the suburb. 'It allows us to support our procedures but also to deter these people from acting in the first place, because when they know they are filmed, hostile groups are less aggressive.' Apparently police officers were skeptical at first, but now even [they] ask for the gadgets."

What's most interesting here is the apparent crossover between policing and counterinsurgency thinking. The French police see the suburbs of Paris as areas where they must establish legitimacy in order to better control--and know that they are struggling for that legitimacy with other actors. American police have put cameras on their cars for traffic stops, but this is something wholly different.

Anti-Explanations and Symbolism

I have a short hit at RTJ on Charles Kurzman's research and the current Iranian political crisis. Kurzman wrote by far the most interesting book on the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and his insights about the nature of revolutionary change deserve wide dissemination.

On the subject of Iran, I really recommend HG's post on Neda Agha-Soltan's death. I'd also add that Neda's tragedy--and the uprising as a whole--may play an important role in the diplomatic exchange to come with Iran. Afgha-Soltan is very different from the scowling, fanatical Iran that Americans are used to seeing on TV--and has humanized the Iranian people in the eyes of even the most parochial among us. If Flynt Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett are right (a very big IF) about the potential for a "Nixon goes to China" movement in Tehran, then the humanization of the adversary in the eyes of the domestic public opens up more leeway for the policymaker that must make the difficult decision to engage.

However, analogies are often misleading. There are equally compelling reasons why whatever leadership that emerges from the power struggle may refuse such an entreaty. Many Iran experts also see the continuation of Iran's nuclear problem and proxy wars as a given even with a reformist leader. Additionally, Neda could just as easily will become a symbol of the regime's ruthlessness and inhumanity, a face that urges us to embrace further confrontation.

Intelligence in Authoritarian Nations

The essential information problem that the US faces in understanding Iran is its lack of presence on the ground. Although there is HUMINT penetration, it does not necessarily add up to a strategic or even necessarily operational picture of the country's internal dynamics--especially when it comes to Iran's leadership elites. As the linked NYT article notes: "With no diplomatic relations and with foreign journalists largely expelled from the country, an administration that was already struggling to make sense of Iran finds itself picking up tidbits about the crisis in the same ways private citizens do: viewing amateur videos on YouTube and combing posts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook."

Getting information from authoritarian nations has always been extremely difficult. The CIA's long and hard struggle during the Cold War to penetrate Russia is a case in point. Hence the importance of the superstitious tea-reading known as Kremlinology. More recently, the hermit kingdom of North Korea has posed immense difficulties for strategic analysis. Political analysis of North Korea's policies is dependent on the insights of former cooks and other palace personnel who defected from the regime. Exiles and opposition members become some of the only exploitable sources of information. The problem is that they often have agendas of their own--and their interests don't always coincide with yours. In the famous case of the "The Trust," the early Soviet Union used a fictional grouping of exiles to lure other exiles in and Gulag them as well as spread disinformation in the West.

Without presence on the ground, news organizations also become dependent on opposition groups for the entirety of their footage and information during crisis situations. The excellent documentary Burma VJ chronicles how one Burmese opposition group's network of underground video journalists essentially provided the entirety of footage for global media's coverage of the 2007 "Saffron Revolution." While many opposition groups' causes (opposing their brutal regimes) are undeniably just, the unavoidable reliance on their information essentially turns the network news and mainstream media into a giant advocacy network and echo chamber that may not give viewers and readers a good picture of the situation. And it can also serve as a vector for regime elements to spread disinformation virally.

REPORT: THE AESTHETICS OF TYRANNY

The Strategist registers his frustration with a BBC interview of Robert Mugabe, complaining that the writer's stereotypical portrayal of the tyrant panders to preconceived ideas about African despotism.

"The dictator lives in a palace while his subjects starve. He surrounds himself with fawning servants who tell him what he wants to hear. Denying reality, he blames everyone but himself. ...What distinguishes classic studies of tyranny  - Tacticus' The Annals of Imperial Rome, Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler - is that the writers 'get beneath the skin' of the despot, his henchmen and their servants. They elucidate the conditions in which tyranny arises and the structures that sustain it."

For me, the best portrayal of a tyrant is Barbet Schroeder's film Idi Amin Dada. Schroeder follows Idi Amin around with a camera, while Amin's own recorded harmonica music plays in the background. Amin rants about the Queen of England and rambles about various minor oddities while terrified flunkies scramble to attend to this demands. The most hilarious scene is a military drill in which Amin commands a small group of infantrymen and one rotting tank, proclaiming that he is preparing the Ugandan military to retake the Golan Heights. Although Schroeder's film was made in the 70s, it is very reminiscent of modern reality TV.

What's best about Idi Amin Dada is that the director lets Amin speak for himself. There is no narration and little to no interviews with anyone else except Idi Amin. Despite the humor inherent in Amin's self-delusion, the film chillingly shows the extent of his power and foreshadows the dictator's self-destruction after the Israeli raid on Entebbe. The Last King of Scotland was also a good portrayal of Amin, but its focus on the Scottish doctor (James McAvoy) detracts from the emphasis on the dictator that works so well in Idi Amin Dada.