They then go on:

The more compelling statistic is the one revealed in an independent CBS analysis last November, namely that veterans aged 20-24 (that is, those who've served in current wars) have a suicide rate up to four times higher than civilians the same age.

So we go over to the CBS analysis:

So CBS News did an investigation - asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning.

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.

It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)

One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)

OK, I'm pretty deeply puzzled here.

Back when I did my first post on suicide, here's what I found:

So in 2004, there were a total of 14,328 suicides in the US in the age group 20 - 44 (the group that I think pretty well covers the population in Iraq - some are younger, some are older). the total population in 2004 in that age group was 104,259,000 - so the rate/100,000 population was 15.25.

And since the rate in the military is higher - significantly higher at 17.3/100,000 overall and 19.9 for those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan - I was darn concerned.

And then I asked one more question.

Well, the suicide rates by sex are pretty different, I recalled. I wonder what happens if I sex-norm the suicide rates in the military?

Here's an approximation (because the of women in reserves is slightly higher, and I didn't find the serving in Iraq).

According to the DoD, approximately 17% of US active-duty forces are women.

According to the CDC, the 20 - 44 population had 14,328 suicides in 2004. Of those, 11,460 were men, and 2,868 were women. The census gives an estimate for 2005 population from 20 - 44 as 52,513,000 men and 51,746,000 women.

By my math, this gives a suicide rate of 21.82/100,000 for men, and 5.54/100,000 for women.

If I norm the suicide rates by multiplying the sexes rate by the population in the military, I get (21.82*83%)+(5.54*17%)=19.06/100,000.

So let's go to the CDC data, and see what the numbers for ages 20 - 24 look like.

They show 2,599 suicides in that age range in 2004. There are, per the census, 21.05 million Americans that age; that gives a raw rate of 12.35/100,000.

Note the article states that the rate is 8.9. OK, I'm puzzled - how the heck did he get that?

Now let's take a moment and sex-norm the rate, as I did in the original post.

Per the census, the 20 - 24 age group has 10.86 million males, and 10.20 million females. The suicide number for males in this group was 2,105; the rate was this 20.22/100,000. For females, there were 404 suicides, for a rate of 3.96/100,000.

Assuming the same ratio of males/females in the military (which is for the Army, and hence somewhat high), we have 83% male, 17% female. So sex-norming the rations, we'd get 83% * 20.22 + 17% * 3.96 for a total rate of 17.46/100,000.

The actual rate, per Rathburn, is between 22.9 and 31.9/100,000. Now I'm not sure how he got such a huge variance, but I'll also suggest that the number of veterans between 20 and 24 is pretty small. The VA says there are 287,400 veterans in that age group. This would suggest that there were between 66 and 92 suicides in 2005 in this group.

Let's look at the overall population. There were a total of 24.5 million vets as of 2005, and the CBS study shows 6,256 suicides in 2005, for a rate of 25.51/100,000. Assuming a sex-normed overall population, the rate (using the 83%/17% ratio, which is high, but close enough) would be 15.5/100,000. So - looks like the rate is significantly higher - which means there is some damn serious work to do.

But - I'm seriously puzzled about where the doc got his statistics. I'll look for an email for him and ask him directly. Meanwhile, here are my sources:

US Census

NCIC

VA

I'm open to sources. I know he's a professor of epidemiology, and I'm some guy with Excel and a web browser. But his numbers make no sense to me.

Note: my son is in the military, and I'm darn concerned about his well-being. But I want to have a fact-based discussion; I don't think vaguely-sourced or wrong numbers make for good discussion.

All were entirely wiped away by Japan's surrender in 1945 and its occupation by US forces. Not to be overlooked as well was Gen. Douglas MacArthur's insistence that Emperor Hirohito come to him for their first meeting.

The great rebuilding of Japanese society and industry after the war was accomplished by the same generation that had suffered the crushing blows of the war. Yet I think that this great effort was itself a continuation of bushido - the iron will never to accept defeat.

From the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, Japan's population remained steady, at 30 million-plus citizens. However, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it began expanding in tandem with the drive to build a modern nation-state. In 1926, it reached 60 million, and in 1967, it surpassed the 100 million mark. However, Japan's population growth has slowed in more recent years, with the annual pace of population growth averaging about one percent from the 1960s through the 1970s. Since the 1980s, it has declined sharply. The population figure of 127.77 million released in the 2005 Population Census was below the 2004 population estimate (127.79 million). This marked the first time since World War II that the population has fallen compared to the previous year. The 2006 population estimate was 127.77 million, remaining at the same level of the previous year. While the population of men recorded two years of natural decrease, that of women had a continuous natural increase.

The ministry points out that since World War II, Japan has enjoyed two baby booms (diagram here). One was 1947-1949, not surprising since almost all wars are followed by increased fecundity of the warring populations, victorious or not. Why did it take two years fr the boom to begin? Part of the time is accounted for by the fact that demobilization of Japan's armed forces took quite a long time. But the greater part can probably be accounted for by the fact that Japan's population was starving by the time the war ended. Calorie consumption fell by war's end to only about 800 per day per person. Baby booms require well nourished populations, and the nutrition emergency of the people actually worsened after the surrender because of poor weather, not least of which was a devastating typhoon in late 1945 that wrecked food stocks so badly that there would truly have been mass starvation deaths had not America fed the country. My assessment is that it simply took two years for nutritional levels to rise to the point of supporting a baby boom. But again, the parents were the adults who had been beaten during the war and who still were imbued with some fire of the bushido code.

The second boom was 1971-1974. These parents were the children of the first boom, reaching maturity and enjoying the first fruits of Japan's postwar economic miracle. Their children have not "boomed," however. Why?

The ministry notes that the second boom was not as strong as the first. I would say that the war generation's will to persevere and then prevail was incompletely passed to their children, and passed not at all to their grandchildren. In its place was . . . nothing.

Understand that Japanese militarism, chauvinistic racism and Shintoism/bushidoism were in fact combined to make their national religion. This was what the war destroyed so deeply that it disappeared in only one more generation. What was left? Only the abyss, for there was nothing at hand to re.place it. With no transcendent ideal commanding their souls, however hideous that ideal once had been, there was nothing for their souls to do but wither away.

And as goes the soul, so follows the flesh.

Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven't provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington.

Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.

Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, ``it's quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,'' Insel said.

Well, d'ooh. Welcome to the magic of bad statistics. If the 1.6 million troops who have been to Iraq or Afghanistan during this war have exactly the same rate of suicide as the general population for the rest of their lives - more of them will die than died in the war. The national rate of suicide in 2005 for ages 15+ was 13.14/100000. Assume that the average age of the soldiers is 30, this gives them ~40 years of exposure to the risk of suicide - so 1.6 million * 13.14/100,000 * 40 years = 8,409 suicides. The issue is that the rate of combat deaths is so low that by comparison to other low-probability events - they seem remarkably high.

Men apparently have a 1:34 lifetime chance of dying of prostate cancer (it's dropping now, thankfully); that means some 40,000 of the returning troops will probably die of prostate cancer. If you look at the CDC's 'cause of death by age' table, suicide ranks 11th for all ages - and it's doubtless lower for veterans who have a lower suicide rate than the average population. The article suggests that we should spend more on counseling - and we doubtless should. But shouldn't we balance that consideration against the consequences for our veterans of - say - better prostate cancer screening?

So the article is a twofer - on one hand, it helps drive home the notion that veterans are irremediably damaged by their exposure to war - something that is popular in movies, but just not borne out by the facts, not post-WW II, not post-Vietnam, and I will wager, not post-this war. And on the other, it manages to try and drive public policy by using veterans to suggest that we invest more in public mental health (which might be good to do, balanced against other priorities) - it's the 'poster-child' school of policy making, which ignores facts in favor of dramatic incidents.

Some veterans will be damaged, and we should absolutely do what we can to help them overcome it, and make thoughtful decisions on investment to improve counseling and their access to the help they need.

And maybe, just maybe, one of the things I'll suggest is not treating them - contrary to the facts - like they are going to go psycho any second..

Disengage

An analysis of this sort generates patterns of correlation (factors) in order of their importance in the data. The factors are mathematical constructs, that is, they aren't typically compromised of a single variable, or some neat binary combination. Instead there are weights (loadings) that are assigned to the observed variables and serve as either evidence for or against the existence of the factor in a particular observation (survey answer).

It's common that the first few factors from an experiment have some interpretation comprehensible to humans. Later factors are often complex differences among variables, which become difficult to explain in English. That's the case here.

I'll call the first factor from the CCW study 'Disengage'. Here are some of the loadings for 'Disengage':

A variable that has a 'Yes' at its end represents a positive answer to a particular question, and the same word with 'No' at the end means a negative answer. These are binary variables with either a one or zero, depending. So a "Yes" response to '... have you... boycotted a physical community?' would result in a 1 for TownYes, and a 0 for TownNo, and vice versa. A missing response would set a zero in each. Taking all of the replies in an individual's response to the survey, and adding up the loadings for the variables that are set to one would result in that individual's score on 'Disengage'.

The first thing to observe is that all eleven of the 'Yes' responses are on the positive side of the scales for 'Disengage'. That - fortunately - verifies my hypothesis that having done one of the networking breaking acts predicts that others will also have occurred. The larger the positive number, the more suggestive the particular behavior is of 'Disengage'. The more negative the number for a variable, the more evidence against 'Disengage' it provides for an individual.

Some caution is needed with the variables I've put in italics. These are relatively rare behaviors, reported less than 5% of the time. When they occur, they are highly suggestive, but the number of samples to judge their correlation with other variables is limited. It's likely safe putting all of their 'Yes' variants on the positive side, but the particular magnitude of the loading should be judged with some skepticism.

Thinking further about frequency of occurrence gives insight into the magnitude of the loadings. For instance, 'TownYes' occurs in about 20% of the samples. 'TownNo' is therefore observed about 80% of the time. Finding a 'TownYes' response therefore gives more information about the individual than 'TownNo', and the magnitude of the loading - other things being equal - should be larger for the former, as it is. By the same argument, finding the 'No' case for one of the rarer (italicized) behaviors gives very little information, and it's these variables that I deleted from the middle of the table due to their low loadings and contribution. In the case of behaviors that are close to 50/50 splits, such as canceling subscriptions and boycotting companies, the magnitudes of their positive and negative loadings are similar.

If you took the survey, you'll notice I've held out the responses for party affiliation and attitudes towards 9/11 and the 2000 elections. By my prior chi-squared analysis we know that there are significant correlations, in unsurprising directions, among these extra responses. As this was an experiment regarding network breaking behaviors, I didn't directly introduce these extra (and potentially confounding) responses into the analysis. Instead, after determining the loadings for 'Disengage' we can interpret these extra responses by averaging the scores on 'Disengage' for all individuals who gave a particular response on the extra questions. (If you followed the link on correspondence analysis, this means the behavioral answers are the 'active' variables, and the affiliation and attitude answers are 'supplementary' variables in my experimental design.) Here's what you get:

The big thing to notice here is the low magnitudes. None of these extra answers is more predictive of 'Disengage' than a single 'Yes' answer to a behavioral question. Only a rare troofer "Inside Job" response is a substantial predictor of 'Disengage'. Interestingly, knowing someone is a Democrat is mildly counter-indicative of 'Disengage', while being a Republican yields only a slight positive prediction and an Independent virtually nothing. Responses to the 9/11 and 2000 questions are even less predictive of 'Disengage'.

This single factor - 'Disengage' - explains most of the patterns in the survey responses. If you're following along in CA, it explains 65.8% of the inertia. Yet, we haven't captured everything of interest: The original chi-square results showed significance for party affiliation and attitude towards the 2000 elections in respect of some behavioral answers, and we don't seem to have entirely captured that in this first factor. More may be required to complete the analysis.

Before going there, one further note about factors: By the design of the analysis, each factor is independent of every other. Any particular survey answer will likely give insight on more than one of the factors, but the factors themselves are generated to be 'orthogonal' in the mathematical sense. Knowing where an individual scores on 'Disengage' alone gives absolutely no information about where that person would score on succeeding factors in the analysis.

It turns out there's just one more factor of interest in the analysis (all the rest rank below 1% of inertia) and it's quite interesting.

The Little Sort

Here are some of the loadings for the second factor (7.5% of inertia). I'm calling this one 'Sort', with prejudice:

By an accident of the math, the loadings are reversed in sense from my plain English name for 'Sort'. For this factor, a negative loading indicates a proclivity for 'Sort' and a positive the reverse.

Notice that the 'Yes' and 'No' variables are now mixed up on either side of the factor loadings. The 'Disengage' factor did indeed scrub out the general positive correlation among all network breaking behaviors. Leaving - something else. Neglecting two rare (italic) responses, the one action that provides the most evidence for 'Sort' is having moved domicile due to political issues. Supporting this physical world interpretation is the very low weight given to both senses of the "dropped out of a virtual community" question, -.158 and .137, when determining 'Sort'.

It's also interesting which behaviors stack up on the counter-indication side of 'Sort'. Among non-rare responses, having stopped donations to a nonprofit, boycotted a physical community, cancelled a subscription, or boycotted a company count against an individual displaying the 'Sort' factor.

What's going on here? In my earlier post I speculated that the most partisan individuals on the left might already done the lower impact network breaking behaviors, and then took the heavier decision to move during our period of interest. Meanwhile the rest of the citizenry started catching up with their own network breaks. Call this the "already done that" hypothesis.

Another possibility is that one may move in order to avoid the confrontations implied by some of the other acts. In that case, a respondent might answer 'no' to (for instance) boycotting a (local) company. The move was the primary act. The impacts on local companies, nonprofits and newspapers may be viewed as a side-effect, rather than a distinct, politically motivated act. We can call this the "avoid the aggravation" hypothesis, which seems more in line with Bishop's thesis.

More insight can be gained by mapping the supplementary variables against 'Sort', as we did for 'Disengage':

Now we see the 2000 election effect found before. Of these extra variables, it's attitude towards the results of Bush v. Gore that best predicts 'Sort'. If you think it was a deliberate rip-off, you're more likely to have called the moving vans. Interpretation of 9/11 has a minor effect (except for the few troofers) and party identification has even less.

The Inadvertent Experiment

I didn't design the original Cold Civil War survey with this interpretation in mind, since I hadn't heard of Bishop's work before it was mentioned in comments. Albeit with the dangers of a small sample size, this analysis appears to have independently generated a result supporting the Big Sort hypothesis, from a different perspective than the voting and demographic records that appear to form the core of Bishop's analysis. The CCW survey may have inadvertently shed some light on motivations at the individual level, to go with the area-level Big Sort correlations.

Now, why doesn't somebody try a survey designed to match Bishop's ideas, in a larger and less politically charged venue? Maybe one of you lurkers has the resources and motivation to give it a try.

(NB: The original survey is still open and slowly accumulating more responses. If the number gets to twice that in my original sample, I'll rerun the analysis.)

"One intermodal alternative is the development of a robust short sea shipping system that would aid in the reduction of growing freight congestion on our nation’s rail and highway systems.”

Enter SeaBridge, with the Pentamaran ship concept shown above. Their roll-on/ roll-off ship design will have a center hull and 2 sets of catamaran-like outriggers to create speed (up to 40 knots) and stability. With its size and capacity (170 trailers, or 100 trailers and 500 cars, plus 1,800 passengers), it would be designed to load trucks et. al. at one port, then zip them up and down the coast for offloading at other ports. The firm believes this option can transfer up to 800,000 truck trips per year away from the highway system. With its speed, it could actually cut transport time in many cases.

See the firm's web site and June 2007 presentation to the International Hydrofoil Society [PDF] for more.

This is a good example of wise government policy that lays the groundwork for private efforts, and serves as an example of positive cooperation. On Dec. 19, 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which contains provisions establishing a formal marine highway program within the federal government. That program will lay the supporting regulatory and legal infrastructure to smooth the way for companies like SeaBridge.

SeaBridge is focused on the East Coast and Gulf, but there's no reason the same concept couldn't work on the Great Lakes and the West Coast as well. The results would beneficial in a number of areas, from shipbuilding to highway capacity to energy savings to economic competitiveness.

In the last year of her life, Hannah Arendt offered a retrospective on Vietnam; Home to Roost is printed in the Responsibility and Judgment collection published back in 2003. Her prescient insight was that the entire "not very honorable and not very rational enterprise was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth.'" Eventually, the war was maintained solely "to avoid admitting defeat and to keep the image...intact."

Well, yes, that's partly true. But it stops a little too soon, because it doesn't ask why it matters that we had the image as the mightiest power on earth. Because that answer matters more than a bit; and the simple answer is that as Handel talks about Sun Tzu in Masters of Modern Warfare:

Among the force multipliers recommended by Sun Tzu are maneuver; reliance on intelligence; the extensive use of deception and diversionary measures to achieve surprise; the 'indirect approach'; and the use of psychological measures to undermine the enemies will to fight.

We were, in the 1960's and 1970's, in a conflict which was very real. Winning that conflict - as we did - could have involved the direct application of force, which in the case of two nuclear-armed superpowers would have been catastrophic, and so there were a series of indirect, smaller conflicts of which Vietnam was one.

Now I've talked about Vietnam more than once, and will talk about it again soon. But let's accept for a moment that that's what Vietnam was actually about, and put aside the legitimate moral qualms about pushing back the Soviets over the bodies of dead Vietnamese for later discussion.

But let's not - as Meyers does - casually dismiss the issue of 'image' as something that's really about the self-image of a bunch of leaders (although it is, as well), but as one of the tools in any conflict or negotiation.

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era.

That's just so historically inaccurate that I don't know what to say except 'bullshit'. We officially started shaping image in World War I, but Lincoln was active in doing it doing the Civil War, and John Adams did a little bit of it himself.

With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."

Well, that could be seen as a good thing. Here's noted pro-war commentator Armed Liberal in March 2003, just before the invasion:

The reality is that Clinton's team was highly focused on terrorism...but on terrorism as crime, as opposed to as an instrument of war. We focused on identifying the actual perpetrators, and attempting to arrest them or cause their arrest.

This is pretty much the typical liberal response to 9/11. Send in SWAT, pull 'em out in cuffs, and let's sit back and watch the fun on Court TV.

I've been ambivalent about whether this is a good strategy conceptually, and looking at the history...in which we're batting about .600 in arresting and trying Islamist terrorists...I have come to the realization that the fact is that it hasn't worked. The level and intensity of terrorist actions increased, all the way through 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.

And a part of what I have realized is that as long as states - particularly wealthy states - are willing to explicitly house terrorists and their infrastructure, or implicitly turn a blind eye to their recruitment and funding, we can't use the kind of 'police' tactics that worked against Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction. The Soviet Union and it's proxies offered limited support to these terrorist gangs, but they didn't have a national population to recruit from and bases and infrastructure that only a state can provide.

So unless we shock the states supporting terrorism into stopping, the problem will get worse. Note that it will probably get somewhat worse if we do...but that's weather, and I'm worried about climate.

There are a number of engines fueling the Islamist movement, one of which is the belief by its members that they can win, and by their state sponsors that supporting them is a good idea.

Now I'll point out that the latter hasn't worked out so well so far, for a variety of reasons - one of which is, in fact, the fact that we are so deeply divided internally about this war. Now the antiwar left can shrug and suggest that saying this is a variant of the 'Green Lantern' theory (there hasn't been a Green Lantern movie yet, so I'm not 100% sure how this metaphor works) but they need to own up to the notion that it's real (it may be that they were right - I'm not presuming that as a condition of my argument, because if they are right or wrong about the war, it's still true that public opposition to the war isn't without impact).

So let's not discount public-relations campaigns; and let's accept the fact that shaping the views of our opponents may be more important and effective than killing them.

Here is an excerpt from the preface (written in 1976):

Twenty years ago, when this study was made, memories of World War II and of its horrors were still vivid, and the political emotions of Europe were direct continuations of those that prevailed in wartime. These bitter feelings have faded in intensity. A generation of Eastern Europeans, reared under Socialism, has come to accept many of its institutions as permanent and desirable. In the Soviet Union, the opposition, restrained rather than crushed, has found new voices, and foreign broadcasts are no longer obliterated by jamming.

The development of the great schism in the Communist camp has been followed by an unprecedented Soviet tolerance of minor deviationism in the policies of individual national parties. The economic recovery of Western Europe and Japan has created strong independent forces within the American system of alliances. A capacity for autonomous political action has been manifested in the succession of wars in the Middle East, the display of economic power by the oil-producing nations, the emergence of independent African states, the growth of guerilla movements in Southeast Asia, and the long agony of Indochina. All these familiar strands of recent history have made the tasks of propaganda, like those of diplomacy, incredibly more complex than they were at the height of the Cold War, when the world was politically polarized.

The political rhetoric of that period was still, at least to a substantial degree, an outgrowth of the ideological self-righteousness of World War II, when terms like "freedom," "democracy," and "the Free World" could be used without a trace of cynicism or self-consciousness and with the expectation that they would strike a responsive chord. Sophisticated political observers could speak unblushingly of the war to win men's minds and souls. There was strong belief in the power of words and ideas to influence events.

As President Eisenhower said in an address to the staff of the Agency in November, 1953, "We are now conducting a cold war. That cold war must have some objective, otherwise it would be senseless. It is conducted in the belief that if there is no war, if two systems of government are allowed to live side by side, that ours, because of its greater appeal to men everywhere, to mankind, in the long run will win out. That it will defeat all forms of dictatorial government because of its greater appeal to the human soul, the human heart, the human mind."

"In the contest for men's minds," wrote former Assistant Secretary of State Edward W. Barrett, "truth can be peculiarly the American weapon." Senator Homer Capehart put it more bluntly a few years later when he said the job of the Agency "is to sell the United States to the world, just as a sales manager's job is to sell a Buick or a Cadillac or a radio or television set."

It was generally assumed that throughout the world, public opinion could be influenced, could be shaped, and that ultimately it would have to be heeded by those who ruled, no matter how evil and ruthless they might be. Who today still maintains this faith? Instead, there has come about, on the part of America's government, its intellectuals, and its general public, a reawakened appreciation of the uses and importance of power, divorced from ideals or ideology. In part, this change in outlook reflects the realities of the nuclear standoff and uneasy awareness of the possibilities of disaster. In part, it reflects the processes of fractionation in international politics to which I have just referred. This very fractionation has reduced the level of dependable and unquestioning support enjoyed by the United States among a variety of former client countries around the world. The illusion of being on the side of the angels becomes more difficult to sustain when few others share it. A succession of regional wars and civil wars in Asia and Africa has further weakened the proposition that international conflicts are essentially expressions of the great division of the world into its Communist and "anti-Communist" components. The "Good Guys" often have turned out to be suspicious or hostile toward the United States, and, in any case, the "Good Guys" don't always win.

In a world in which the triumph of justice and truth is as often as not impeded by naked force, the power of public opinion fades, and the very concept of public opinion may be disregarded as a force in international politics.

Not so much any more.

The book directly addresses many of the challenges that are being discussed today as we discuss our ideological conflict with the Islamist movement. How can a democratcy - founded in the open flow of discussion and information, deliberately shape information so as to combat an opponent who is not so restrained? How do we have political accountability without political meddling (McCarthy was tearing apart the USIA as the study was being written)? How do we balance the desire to simply show the reality of who we are with the desire to sell our beliefs?

What do we do about promoting freedom as our core value to the peoples of unfree allies?

It's a truly interesting book, and a reminder that there is litte that we have to deal with that we can't learn something about from the past.

A definite find.