‘Three Cups of Tea’ Author Defends Book

The CBS news program "60 Minutes" investigated and questioned events portrayed in Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea:

While the publishing industry waited to see whether it faced the embarrassment of yet another partly fabricated memoir, Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” a book popular with the Pentagon for its inspirational lessons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, forcefully countered a CBS News report on Sunday that questioned the facts of his book and the management of his charitable organization.

An unofficial reponse:

“We continue to believe in the logic of what Greg is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we know the powerful effects that education can have on eroding the root causes of extremism,” said a military official, who asked not to be named under ground rules imposed by the Pentagon.

As Mara Naselli observes:

The debate between truth and fact in personal essay and memoir is an old one, and the test of authenticity has rarely been, “Did it really happen that way?” Many argue that memory is just too slippery to be held to that kind of standard, and that the discernment of fact itself isn’t obvious.

The question, then, is whether the US military should use such slippery accounts as a staple in COIN training.

Read the NYT article here.

Ethics of Human Enhancement

The US National Science Foundation published a report on ethical considerations over using technology to enhance human capabilities beyond normal functioning.  

Corrective eyeglasses, for instance, would be considered therapy rather than en-hancement, since they serve to bring your vision back to normal; but strapping on a pair of night-vision binoculars would count as hu-man enhancement, because they give you sight beyond the range of any unassisted hu-man vision. As another example, using stero-ids to help muscular dystrophy patients regain lost strength is a case of therapy; but steroid use by otherwise-healthy athletes would give them new strength beyond what humans typ-ically have (thereby enabling them to set new performance records in sports). And growing or implanting webbing between one’s fingers and toes to enable better swimming changes the structure and function of those body parts, counting then as a case of human en-hancement and not therapy.

Read the report here.

(Thanks to C3C Dan Pickett for forwarding)

"Immaculate Intervention"

George Friedman offers a perspective of OOD as a casual war fraught with good intentions. The new doctrine of humanitarian intervention - "go in light, go in soft and stay there long" - still leaves open the question of what happens in the aftermath.

I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values. They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.

Read more: "Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism," republished with permission of STRATFOR.

(Thanks to Capt Ashley Anderson for forwarding)

"Flying Solo"

The Colorado Springs Independent carried a story on '93 USAFA grad Grant McKenzie, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, dishonorably discharged, and incarcerated at NAVCONBRIG Miramar. The story highlights gaps in the military mental health service and provides a valuable perspective for future commanders.

"McKenzie wrestled with bipolar disorder, diagnosed by the Air Force within months of that sunny graduation day but never properly treated. As McKenzie cycled down into the abysmal clutches of the illness and its accompanying addictive behaviors — pornography, in particular — he repeatedly told superiors what he was going through. But the Air Force apparently ignored its own policies for how to deal with such disorders."

Read the story here.

Justice for Hedgehogs

Ronald Dworkin believes there are absolute moral values, that when we make a moral or ethical judgment, we are interpreting, and that many of our interpretations have truth values: true or false, and therefore, right or wrong.

"Well, for example, if I say abortion is wrong, I believe what I say is true, not that it's one legitimate opinion among many. I hate it when people say: 'It's OK for gay people to get married but that's only my opinion.' You can't think it's just your opinion or you wouldn't hold it. Imagine a judge who's just sentenced a man to jail for life saying: 'Other judges might have found differently and they're entitled to their opinions.' Who could reasonably say such a thing?"

Read Stuart Jeffries' review of Dworkin's new book in The Guardian here. 

The Moral Case for OOD

Jerome Slater, a research scholar at the University at Buffalo, argues the moral justification for intervening in Libya:

A common fallacy among those who regard themselves as hardheaded “realists” is to dismiss the role of morality in foreign policy decisions and claim it is all about narrow interests, especially economic interests, and most especially, oil interests. Such cynicism, however, is itself a kind of naivete, a reductionism unequal to the complexity of war-and-peace issues.

In the Libyan case, the argument that it’s all about oil is particularly unpersuasive. First, only a very small amount of our imported oil comes from Libya, and in any case for many years Gadhafi has been a reliable supplier, both to us and to our NATO allies. Moreover, in recent years, he has played a valuable intelligence-gathering role in the war against terrorism, especially al-Qaida. So if narrow self-interests really explained the U. S. intervention, we should be fighting to save Gadhafi, not to overthrow him.

In short, there is every reason to believe that genuine moral concerns were an important component — probably the most important component — in explaining the administration’s decision to intervene in Libya.

Read the column in the Buffalo New here.

Europe After the War; JPB on the Ground

Ben Shephard's The Long Road Home documents  jus post bellum issues arising in the efforts to manage mass migrations of displaced persons after WWII:

One heart-rending chapter deals with the efforts to reunite children with their mothers and fathers. On the face of it, this sounds like an incontrovertibly good thing, in particular for those infants who had been stolen from their families by the Nazis on account of their “Aryan” looks and reassigned to German foster parents. Yet was it right to wrench children away from their new families against their will, especially in cases when it was not clear that the true parents could be found or that they wanted their children back? U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration staffers divided on the issue, some feeling that the effort had to be made by way of atonement for the original wrong, and others skeptical that returning children to their birth countries was necessarily in their best interests.

Read the NYT review here.