conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled The Age Of Terror about United, States, Yale with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government?
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conversations.value: This latest entry into the post-September 11 publishing frenzy (edited by former Time contributor and deputy secretary of state the author and Chanda, his colleague at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization) relies on top-notch academics to probe behind the headlines. While all of the essays taken together provide a primer on some of the most pressing issues that have emerged in the past few months, the strongest pieces provocatively explore new ground. Scientist Maxine Singer underscores the necessity to extend ties and funding between government and researchers, in part to support "off-the-wall" ideas that might help in U.S. domestic defense. Oxford historian Niall Ferguson explores the non-Muslim antecedents of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; individual elements of the attacks were not new, he argues, only their combination was. Yale professor Paul Kennedy compares the situation currently faced by the United States with Britain's in the 19th century, concluding that the United States is in a more difficult predicament mainly because of the openness of today's world. These essays often explore ground already covered by journalists: the difficulties of maintaining good relations with a Muslim world, in which the United States is unpopular; the diffuseness of the enemy; the need to protect civil liberties while simultaneously protecting American security. But even where the scholars go over familiar turf, they do so in a comprehensive and thoughtful way that is sure to feed some readers' newly whetted appetites for information on the post-post-Cold War world.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Age Of Terror
  The first weeks of the crisis have seen a rash of reaction. First, in addition to the antiterrorism bill that rushed through Congress, the president created virtually overnight an Office of Homeland Security. It has been given sweeping but vague powers to coordinate domestic efforts against terrorism, and to "identify priorities and coordinate efforts for collection and analysis of information within the United States regarding... activities of terrorists or terrorist groups within the United States." Second, for the source of the CIA's woes and an implicit cause of the September 11 debacle, several members of Congress have pointed fingers at the Church Committee, the Senate Select Committee, chaired in the late 1970s by the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, to study government operations with respect to intelligence activities. Third, at the urging of the White House, the television networks agreed not to air unedited videotapes of speeches by bin Laden for fear that they might contain coded messages to his cohorts, and several commentators and comedians have been temporarily banished from the airwaves for comments deemed to be politically incorrect and downright unpatriotic.
  Standing alone, none of these reactions seems earthshaking, but taken together, they paint a picture oddly oblivious to recent history. Although the Office of Homeland Security may fill an important bureaucratic gap, its creation also marks an important blurring of a more than fifty-year division of labor between federal domestic law enforcement agencies and international intelligence agencies. In the National Security Act of 1947, Congress expressly denied the CIA police, subpoena, law enforcement and internal security functions to ensure that it would act as a national security agency, not as a domestic law enforcement unit. Yet during the Vietnam War, the CIA blurred that line by conducting illegal secret domestic break-ins, mail intercepts, wiretaps, and domestic surveillance of antiwar activists and domestic protesters. Indeed, we sometimes forget that the infamous Watergate break-in was itself executed by the "plumbers," a White House unit funded with private campaign contributions, partially staffed by former CIA agents, supported by the CIA, and formed for the express purpose of "plugging leaks" by government officials suspected of having exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia. At this writing, how accountable the new OHS will be to Congress or the public remains unclear, given that it is headed by a presidential appointee with cabinet-level status who took office without ever being subjected to congressional confirmation.
  Similarly, those who blame the Church Committee for CIA failings forget how that and similar inquiries came about. Following President Nixon's resignation in 1974, President Ford declared that he would not tolerate illegal activities by the intelligence agencies, and formed the Rockefeller Commission to investigate intelligence abuse, followed by the creation of the Church and other committees to oversee government intelligence operations. In the late 1970s, those committees offered a comprehensive 263-page charter for reform of the intelligence community. But after extensive debate, legislative opponents trimmed that bill down into the two-page Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which ended up making only a few modest revisions in the law.
  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah of Iran, both deemed intelligence failures, further dampened public concern over CIA misconduct. During the Reagan administration, however, a team of White House staff members charged with supporting the covert war in Central America was discovered illegally selling arms to Iran and diverting the proceeds to the contras, the Nicaraguan resistance. After the Iran-Contra Affair, Congress again established House and Senate committees to study intelligence abuses and proposed new amendments to the Intelligence Oversight Act.
  These were ultimately shelved after President Reagan left office, so as not to unduly tie the hands of the new president, George H.W. Bush. Thus, even after the Church Committee's report, successive scandals regarding intelligence misconduct have proceeded from revelation to public outrage to blue-ribbon investigation to legislative reform proposals, which have been largely retracted in deference to executive pledges of good faith that later proved seriously ineffective to forestall future abuse.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: September 11 underscored what should be a new priority for American diplomacy: the effort to slow down the proliferation of dangerous technology.
  After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, the great hope was that the world would develop in benign ways, focusing on economic development and political liberalization. There was significant progress in that direction. But there have also been some disturbing trends, particularly the growth of the nuclear weapons club to include India and Pakistan, with a number of other countries knocking on the door. Along a wide belt stretching halfway around the globe, from Israel to North Korea, a number of nations either have acquired or are bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction and the capability of launching them with ballistic missiles.
  Of all the permutations and combinations, the India- Pakistan matchup is the most worrisome, since those two countries have declared and demonstrated their nuclear capability and have already fought four wars, including a severe and prolonged skirmish in 1999. Mutual deterrence, escalation control, crisis management and other concepts developed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war simply aren't part of the vocabulary, mindset or behavior patterns in the Middle East and South Asia. It is all too easy to imagine a crisis that might begin with an incident of terrorism—say, another massacre in Kashmir of the kind that has been common in recent years, followed by an Indian retaliation of some kind—that spins out of control.
  Against that backdrop, India and Pakistan should have an incentive to get serious about regulating their arms race. The U.S. is uniquely positioned to help them do so.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Too often, strategic plans for government programs fail to address one question critical to their success: are there highly trained, skilled, and competent people available to carry out and sustain the program? It is assumed, and hiring rules often support such assumptions, that it is good enough to hire the most highly qualified person available and rely on "training" courses to bring marginally qualified people up to snuff. Now, the U.S. defense and intelligence agencies must recruit the very best people regardless of political views. Those in power need to accept that they can never emulate the imaginations, facile talents and up-to-date knowledge of even unconventional young people. Vannevar Bush constantly sought draft deferments for people he thought essential—and almost all of them were less than 26 years old. Outstanding scientists, engineers, and scholars are often independent and nonconformist while military and bureaucratic minds are more tuned to rules and regimentation. The histories of the OSRD, the early years of DARPA, NASA, and the NIH tell us that there are productive ways to promote interaction between these very different worlds both within the government and by outreach of government to universities and industry. The OSRD's policy of letting people work wherever they were rather than gathering them into government labs and offices is likely to still be most efficient.
  International terrorism and the need for smart, responsive strategies are likely to be with us for a long time. Our future security will require a constant supply of people trained in math, science, engineering, and serious computer science. Yet at present, diminishing numbers of young Americans enter these fields. Endless numbers of reports and a lot of money for K-12 education have tried and failed to address this situation. In recent years, of doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. institutions, about a third in science and half in engineering went to foreigners. Many of those students will remain in the U.S. and contribute to our needs. We welcome them, but also realize that the expertise of those from poor countries could, if they returned home, help ameliorate the conditions that support terrorism.
  Building the scientific research infrastructure in developing countries can lead directly to improved economies, health care, and general living conditions. The U.S. scientific community has important roles to play in this endeavor. One path is through its typical and extensive informal networks. Another is through formal mechanisms such as the international network of National Academies of Science initiated by the president of the U.S. Academy. A third, the establishment of world-class laboratories in developing countries, has been discouraging in the past because the laboratories are frequently unsustainable when the international sponsoring organization leaves. It is difficult to convince the host countries that investment in a scientific and engineering infrastructure, including trained scientists and engineers, should have priority because of its long-term effect on improving daily life. New approaches are needed.
  It will be especially challenging to enhance scientific interactions within Muslim countries, especially those in which government and religion are either unified or intertwined and whose hostility to the U.S. is, at least partly, the consequence of distrust of our technological advances. Professor Seyyid Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, believes "that the cultural crisis created by the successful introduction of Western science and technology, successful enough to bring about rapid cultural patterns of change, is going to continue to pose major problems for the Islamic world." Perhaps experience with similar conflicts at home between scientists and people of fundamentalist faiths can help direct us toward constructive conversations with scientists in Islamic nations.
  Millions of people in poor nations watch their children die of diseases we have not seen in generations. They themselves are likely to suffer without hope of medical care from malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera, and other diseases. (Estimates of annual deaths from malaria worldwide were recently raised from 1 million to 2.7 million.) To such people, the introduction of dangerous biological and chemical agents into our relatively clean environments may not seem as horrible as it does to us. Also, the willingness of terrorists to die for a cause we find unfathomable may be influenced by the fact that life spans in their societies are in any case short. We need to see the world as our enemies do if we are to defend ourselves successfully. We have known for a long time of the tremendous disparity between the health of our populations and of those in developing countries. We have avoided doing much about this because our policies have been driven by free-market concepts and a miserly concept of our national wealth. Now we are forced to spend tens of billions of dollars of that wealth recuperating from and preparing for terrorist acts. Threatened people might now be less aggrieved if we had used those same tens of billions to share with them the things that give us such healthy lives, just as we shared with a devastated Europe at the end of World War II through the Marshall Plan. Sound arguments can certainly be made that this is not really our responsibility, but it may be more constructive to recognize that finding ways to share our medical technology is an integral part of national defense in this new era.