Attention Economy


Saturday, February 25, 2023

Lessons from Past Wars

A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Inside Iraq’s Two Decades of War
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/25/a-stranger-in-your-own-city-by-ghaith-abdul-ahad-review-inside-iraqs-two-decades-of-war
Next month marks the 20th anniversary of George W Bush and Tony Blair’s criminally reckless invasion. As Abdul-Ahad notes, it was misconceived from the outset: “No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.” Though Saddam’s regime had “fossilised social, artistic and economic development” in Iraq, the bloodbath that followed its toppling has “permanently crippled democracy in the Middle East”. Moreover, Abdul-Ahad believes the very idea of Iraqi nationhood – embodied in the Arabic word watan – has been eroded.

Nation Building through Foreign Intervention by MELISSA DELL AND PABLO QUERUBIN
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dell/files/nationbuilding.pdf
Abstract
This study uses discontinuities in U.S. strategies employed during the Vietnam War to estimate their causal impacts. It identifies the effects of bombing by exploiting rounding thresholds in an algorithm used to target air strikes. Bombing increased the military and political activities of the communist insurgency, weakened local governance, and reduced noncommunist civic engagement. The study also exploits a spatial discontinuity across neighboring military regions that pursued different counterinsurgency strategies. A strategy emphasizing overwhelming firepower plausibly increased insurgent attacks and worsened attitudes toward the U.S. and South Vietnamese government, relative to a more hearts-and-minds oriented approach.