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CIAO DATE: 02/04
Fall 2003 (Volume 28 Issue 2)
Editor's Note
Amid continuing despair over the stalled implementation of President George W. Bush's "roadmap" for peace in the Middle East, Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut offers a glimmer of hope. Pressman begins with an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian-U.S. summit at Camp David in 2000 and the talks in Taba, Egypt, in 2001. He explicates the Palestinian, Israeli, and U.S. claims about what happened at the talks and compares each version to the evidentiary record. He concludes that although the negotiations did not produce a final peace settlement, they were not the dismal failures that Israeli and U.S. officials, in particular, have portrayed them to be. Pressman asserts that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators made significant progress on a number of crucial issues, creating "building blocks" that can serve as the foundation for an eventual peace agreement.
Zeev Maoz, a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, challenges the widespread belief that Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity has deterred an all-out Arab attack for more than thirty years. He credits instead Israel's strategy of conventional deterrence and the increasing willingness of Israeli leaders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War to engage in diplomacy. In addition, Maoz claims that Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity has had two negative side effects: First, it has accelerated the conventional arms race in the Middle East and sparked a regional nonconventional arms race. Second, the "regime of secrecy" that surrounds Israel's nuclear policy has prevented open debate regarding its effectiveness. Maoz proposes that Israel disband its nuclear weapons program and join with other countries in the region to establish a nuclear-weapons-free zone.
Is globalization moving us toward a border-free world? Are borders, as some international relations scholars maintain, becoming irrelevant? According to Peter Andreas of Brown University, "The importance of territoriality is persisting—but with a shift in emphasis." Andreas argues that "clandestine transnational actors" (CTAs) such as terrorists, drug traffickers, unauthorized migrants, and migrant smugglers are posing increasing challenges to traditional border policing and law enforcement. In exploring recent policy initiatives in the United States and the European Union to restrict territorial access to CTAs while assuring continued access to more "desirable" entries, Andreas finds that "growing anxiety over CTAs not only has transformed state border regulatory practices and cross-border relations, but has blurred traditional distinctions between external and internal security."
Thomas Mahnken of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and James FitzSimonds of the U.S. Naval War College offer an explanation for why the Department of Defense is not having greater success in its strategy to fundamentally transform the U.S. armed forces. According to the authors, "Broad support of the officer corps is a key element in force transformation." Thus far, however, the officer corps, though open to the idea of change in the abstract, does not appear to support changes that would create new services or devalue currently dominant weapons systems.
Risa Brooks of Northwestern University reviews two books on regime type and military effectiveness: Arabs at War, by Kenneth Pollack, and Democracies at War, by Dan Reiter and Allan Stam. Brooks commends the authors for their ambitious efforts to explain why states win and lose wars. She argues, however, that major conceptual and methodological weaknesses undermine the main findings of both books.
In our correspondence section, Charles Knight and Melissa Murphy raise several objections to Michael Mousseau's hypothesis on the "social origins of terror." Mousseau answers his critics.
With this issue, we bid a farewell to Michelle Von Euw, who left her position as editorial assistant to take up graduate studies at the University of Maryland. We welcome Sarah Buckley, recent graduate of Simmons College, as the journal’s new editorial assistant.
Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba? by Jeremy Pressman
The Mixed Blessing of Israel's Nuclear Policy by Zeev Maoz
Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-first Century by Peter Andreas
Border control—the effort to restrict territorial access—has long been a core state activity. As territorially demarcated institutions, states have always imposed entry barriers, whether to deter armies, tax trade and protect domestic producers, or keep out perceived "undesirables." All states monopolize the right to determine who and what is granted legitimate territorial access. But there is significant historical variation in border control priorities. Although military defense and economic regulation have traditionally been central border concerns, in many places states are retooling and reconfiguring their border regulatory apparatus to prioritize policing. Thus, rather than simply eroding, as is often assumed, the importance of territoriality is persisting—but with a shift in emphasis. In many cases, more intensive border law enforcement is accompanying the demilitarization and economic liberalization of borders . . .
Revolutionary Ambivalence: Understanding Officer Attitudes toward Transformation by Thomas G. Mahnken and James R. FitzSimonds
Over the past decade a growing number of defense analysts, government officials, and military officers have argued that the growth and diffusion of stealth, precision, and information technology will drastically alter the character and conduct of future wars, yielding a revolution in military affairs (RMA). George W. Bush and his administration came to office promising to transform the U.S. armed forces by skipping a generation of technology. In a speech at the Norfolk Navy Base on February 13, 2001, President Bush pledged to "move beyond marginal improvements to harness new technologies that will support a new strategy." He called for the development of ground forces that are lighter, more mobile, and more lethal, as well as manned and unmanned air forces capable of striking across the globe with precision . . .
Making Military Might: Why Do States Fail and Succeed? A Review Essay by Risa A. Brooks
Throughout history, states have exhibited a puzzling degree of variation in their capacities to create military power. Some consistently excel at warfare. Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, has long been singled out for its military's exceptional tactical proficiency, especially in the battles of both world wars. Others—such as Italy in those same conflicts—often perform poorly, demonstrating endemic weaknesses in their abilities to generate military force. Yet a third category of states exhibits curious variation in military effectiveness over time. Most analysts, for example, count Egypt's performance in the 1967 Six Day War against Israel among the most dismal of contemporary military history. They also tend to agree, however, that in the 1973 October War Egypt was able to dramatically improve its effectiveness, manifest most vividly in the military's textbook crossing of the Suez Canal . . .
The Sources of Terrorism by Charles Knight, Melissa Murphy and Michael Mousseau
In his article "Market Civilization and Its Clash with Terror," Michael Mousseau frames a hypothesis about the contemporary "social origins of terror." According to Mousseau, "As a result of globalization, [the values and beliefs of liberal democracies and those of collectivistautocratic clientalist states] are increasingly clashing in the mixed market-clientalist economies of the developing world, triggering intense antimarket resentment directed primarily against the epitome of market civilization: the United States."
This is a proposition with sufficient plausibility to make it a worthwhile subject of scholarly exploration. Mousseau's ambition, however, appears to be much greater than opening up a productive vein of study. Instead he asserts that his work, which "builds on several generations of research in anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology ... explains much of the historical record of sectarian terror around the globe" (p. 6). This is a overstatement of the explanatory power of his hypothesis and of the evidence he presents in support of it.
The most immediate problem with Mousseau's claim is that he fails to provide as contextual evidence a summary review of terror incidents in recent decades. Mousseau's argument links the phenomenon of suicidal mass murder with anti-Americanism and antimarket rage. The majority of suicidal terror incidents, however, are related to two long-lasting and intense ethnopolitical struggles, one in Sri Lanka and the other in Israel-Palestine. In each case, particular historical and political aspects of the conflict have much more direct and parsimonious explanatory power than a theory that the terror is motivated by resentments against American market values. Regarding suicidal attacks on U.S. targets, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, are unique as mass terror incidents by foreign agents on U.S. territory. The September 11 attacks also account for more than 85 percent of all American civilians killed in the last twenty years in terrorist incidents of all sorts . . .