I intend on writing about several issues as soon as possible.  I just had to chime in and say congratulations to the new President Elect.  Democracy has proved effective once more. 

"More and more military and civilian leaders are voicing pessimism when it comes to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. As the fight continues, ideas for how to break through the ongoing stalemate are few. Some are beginning to think that victory -- for either side -- is impossible."

Worth taking a look at this piece in Der Spiegel. I do not necessarily agree with all the content, but it's always a good idea to read as much as you can overseas to get a feel for allied perspectives. Remember that for any aspiring foreign policy/IR scholars!

Just FYI, because I haven't been posting recently, I'm taking a break until we move to the new blog.

Charlie Rose with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

For obvious reasons, we're all focused on the election and doing our best to work for what we believe in.

One thing that people should think about: if Senator Obama is elected President, for the first time since the early nineties the Congress would have a Democratic Speaker of the House that also has a Democratic White House.

While the President is clearly the top of the crop, the Speaker is (and rightly so) arguably as powerful as the President, if not more so pertaining to domestic matters. That is how the Constitution envisioned the US Congress and the powers of the Speaker are often lost in the shadow of an Imperialist President.

Tomorrow night the country will see what is sure to be the most watched Vice-Presidential debate in history. Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, with over thirty years of experience in Congress, will take on newcomer Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska.

That's more or less how we're seeing the media spin this debate; the whole veteran verse newcomer angle that many of us are quite sick of by this point. What isn’t being talked about enough are the incredibly shrewd and underhanded political tactics being played out by the Republican Party. Let's explore for a minute what's going to happen over the next forty-eight hours.

Senator Biden is faced with an almost a no win situation, minus a serious fumble by Palin in the debate. The best he can hope for is a strong showing of what any knowledgeable American should recognize by this point: he knows the issues and knows how to address them. Any other angle he risks the perception of being overly aggressive, condescending, and *gasp* sexist in debating a serious female candidate for the vice presidency.

Let's say for a moment that we didn't have a debate at all and the public's view was restricted to what we've seen so far and what's to come. That angle favors Senator Biden when it comes to the responsibility and capability of assuming the duties of the Presidency, which is exactly what everyone is talking about given the drastic variation between the two candidates. In order to match this reputation, or at least neutralize it as a deciding factor, Governor Palin needs to prove she can play at this level.

Governor Palin's biggest drawback is her perception as a bubblegum wrapper candidate: looks good and sounds great to the average American but lacks the substance to assume such responsibilities. That is the question being raised, and in a time when Americans are greatly concerned about the economic situation in this country, we can rightly expect them to turn to the party that did not get them into this mess.

Here’s how it’s going to play out. It will shift one way or the other, and this is how each victory would look on Friday.

• Senator Biden makes it clear to Americans he has the experience and knowledge of how to create effective change with an Obama administration. He plays a safe game, not reaching too far to quash Palin, but clearly demonstrates who is more capable on every issue and ready to take charge. It could take as little as one serious knockdown, but expect smaller jabs throughout the debate to undermine credibility. This may not play to his greatest strength as a serious verbal brawler (which we would have seen against a Mitt Romney) but the discrepancies in ability may be enough where he can adopt a shorter, more effective style.

• Governor Palin has a near error free performance, demonstrating an unexpected ability to speak in complete sentences and parry jabs from Senator Biden with everyman wit. Since the campaign has closely guarded her press access and what she has said to the media up to this point, people are expecting very little from her. Expectations have been set so low that a par game will appear to be a resounding victory, and likely quell fears that she is not ready to assume the Presidency. Expect her to play a very safe game with Washington insider hooks as she will be trying to demonstrate to the American people she can level playing field with a breath of fresh air.

While Senator Biden is the superior candidate on virtually every issue, the field of battle at this point favors the Governor of Alaska. If Palin can mange to avoid any knockout punches from the Senator, and prove that she can deliver at least an average performance, it will be a tremendous victory for the Republican Party and very well might pull even with the Obama/Biden ticket.

Pay close attention to the debate and the substance, not the flair. America cannot afford to settle for another sub par four years.

On September 4-7, 2008 around twenty students from ten different states and organizations across the nation converged in Washington D.C. for an anti-trafficking leadership retreat. The meeting was spearheaded by Americans for Informed Democracy, FAIR Fund and Polaris Project. The result was the creation of the National Student Coalition Against Slavery, a group aimed at synchronizing the strategies of the student movement throughout the country that will enhance its capacity to have a legislative and social impact on anti-slavery issues, providing a web of support for activism in different regions, and serving as a well of information and the sharing of resources.

Among other things, the students were trained on how to handle the media and approaching someone about human trafficking in less than a minute (the “elevator pitch”) as presented by Paula-Raye O’Sullivan from Campus Progress. Michele Clark, Professor for the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University spoke about the challenges of teaching about and fighting human trafficking. Karen Stauss (Managing Attorney and Policy Council) and Elizabeth Rhodes (National Grassroots Coordinator) from the Polaris Project explained how to go about lobbying for the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), and the differences between the House and Senate bills, among other things. Amelia Korangy, Development Officer for FAIR Fund, addressed activism, and advised and guided discussions in the break-out groups. Aashika Damodar, Zimmerman Fellow at Free the Slaves, related to students her experiences organizing students in California and her work at Free the Slaves; she also actively participated in break-out groups.

After the lobbying training students along with AID staff members including Arya Zarrinkelk, Sarah Frazier, Kate Willard, and FAIR Fund representative Amelia Korangy visited Capitol Hill. They split into groups of two to three students guided by a staff member and met with representatives of several senators from their respective states in order to advocate for the TVPRA.

The group “Yellow Rage” was unable to attend the retreat and perform live for students due to bad weather conditions. However, they were present via video conferencing. Their recorded performances about human trafficking and other poems were played and explained by the group members for the attendees, illustrating one of many creative mediums by which different oopulations can be educated about modern day slavery.

Nope; they are not letting me go and is good because it serves as a reminder and reason to remain active in anti-slavery efforts.

The Monday after my return to the States, the girls at the Center drove Becky so crazy that she ended up calling me and letting them say hello on the phone while she translated. 

As I was getting ready for my trip to D.C. this past Thursday to go advocate for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act Reauthorization at Capitol Hill and for the anti-trafficking retreat organized by AID along with Polaris Project and FAIR Fund, Becky (The Emancipation Network) returned a previous call of mine with all the girls on the phone at 12:30am.  I promised to send them pictures from the trip and did.  After they saw them in Becky's computer, they sent the following messages (note the names have been eliminated for security purposes) via Becky.  It is so heart warming for me that I am sharing them you.  I miss the girls!

Bernard-Henri Levy raises an interesting perspective in The New Republic:

"We keep hearing, for example, that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili is an unpredictable, even irresponsible and dangerous character. Who's being made fun of here? How can anyone say these things when looking at the man Saakashvili is up against, Vladimir Putin, who has, among other exploits, razed Grozny, wiped out a fifth of the population of Chechnya, allied himself with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rearmed Syria, and also decided _ just like that, one fine day _ to resume flights of strategic bombers armed with nuclear payloads?"

One has only to step back and look at what Putin's Russia has been doing against the fledgling democracy of Georgia to understand any propaganda or disinformation emerging from Russia has been designed to undermine Western support. The longer Europe hedges on this critical issue, the more time, resources, and planning for a Russian response and/or further unwarranted aggression in the region.

With an overstretched American security force and hesitant European security community, at this moment Putin has all the time in the world to get away with it.

Every individual death is a tragedy for those who knew and loved the person killed. A single violent death sends waves of grief and shock radiating outward through the circles of friends and family of the deceased. War brings death in large doses, and those waves of grief become tsunamis.

But fatality numbers in armed conflict are themselves dangerous things, as they can be used to justify more and deadlier violence.

It is vitally important, for the sake of peace, that we know how many people have died in the war between Russia and Georgia. The breakdown, too, is important; how many Georgian civilians? How many Ossetian civilians? How many soldiers on each side? How many paramilitaries and mercenaries?

Accounts like this are viscerally disturbing, as are ones like this --but numbers of dead are just being thrown out there by refugees and politicians --dozens in this town, a hundred here, several hundred here, more on this side, more on the other side-- and then being reported as facts. These numbers aren't facts, at least not yet. What we need are hard numbers provided by the parties that are normally tasked with doing the body-count work in the thick fog of war: the United Nations and the Red Cross.

In most nationalist conflicts, inflated civilian dead numbers can and do arouse tremendous anger, collective anger that is all too easily channeled by those in power to justify the continuation or escalation of military action and the incitement of paramilitary-driven revenge attacks against civilians. This then makes refugee returns near impossible when the fighting finally stops. Unfortunately, in the long term, it's the inflated numbers that usually stick in collective memory, rendering reconciliation (citizen to citizen as well as between political factions) and the acceptance of a common historical narrative extremely difficult.

I'm not saying there hasn't been massive civilian suffering in Georgia. Without a doubt there has been. Numbers won't alter the basic truth that parents, lovers, friends, children, and schoolmates have been taken away from those they shared their lives with. And it may turn out that even more people have died in this war than even the highest unjustified estimates, but we just don't know yet. That's a serious problem, and one that needs to be addressed now.

This blog will be no more in a few weeks, as we are moving to Wordpress, with all its wonderful features. So, FYI on that. And thanks to Richard at the AIDemocracy office for setting it up.