Today is the 4th anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. Four years must seem like an eternity for the families of those who’ve been deployed. But for the Americans sitting at home, flipping the channel away from the latest carnage in Baghdad, four years is little more abstract. Of course, for your beloved Fido, four years is one third of his life. And if you bought a pet rat at the start of the war, chances are it’s going to expire any day now. So Statastic decided to see which species could outlive this war if they were born on March 19, 2003.

Experts and politicians have been a little divided over the past four years about exactly how long this war would last. If Dick Cheney had been right when he notoriously predicted in March 2003 that it would be over in a matter of “weeks rather than months,” then the perishable dragonfly could have outlived this war. Or if Donald Rumsfeld’s most pessimistic estimation of a 6 month war had been correct, a monarch butterfly could have outflown the conflict.

We even had a chance of keeping your pet hamster alive if Ohio had tipped John Kerry’s way. He would have started withdrawing troops at about this time in 2005. Now it’s up to a new crop of Democrats to make promises, underbid one another on withdrawal timelines, and hope that the public notices that’s we’re 2 hamsters into this war when they got to the polls next fall.

Today’s statements from President Bush that “success will take months, not days or weeks,” indicate that this war will likely continue through 2008. Three Republican frontrunners [Giulliani, McCain, Romney] have all supported the president, proposing that we maintain or increase current troop levels. It seems that if Americans elect another Republican president, the War in Iraq may have the same life expectancy of the Tasmanian Devil it has come to resemble.

Unfortunately, the war has proven capable of outlasting our own species. More than 60,000 Iraqi civilians and 3,217 U.S. troops have died since the beginning of the war.

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Today the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released a report estimating that 1 in every 400 Americans is homeless on an average night. This first annual comprehensive effort by HUD is an important first step in understanding homelessness in the U.S.

Of the 754,000 homeless, about 45% are do not find shelter each evening. The report also reveals the demographics behind homelessness: 65% are male, 45% are black, and a very high percentage of the homeless suffer from mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the number of veterans who seem to be falling through the cracks. 18.7% of America’s homeless are veterans of war, and veterans are more than twice as likely to be homeless as those in the general population. With 141,000 homeless veterans in America, there are more troops living on our own streets than serving in Iraq.

In the wake of the uproar over the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed, perhaps we should look to the future homeless the Iraqi War will create. According to salon.com, more than 1 million have already served in our various wars on terror since 9.11.01. That means 6,000 of those who have served will be homeless in the future (see statastics below). Because veterans have a higher rate of homelessness, the war in Iraq will produce 3,000 more homeless than had we not gone to war.

Add the homeless to the casualties of war.

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Sources: Percent of homeless veterans, exhibit 3-5 (page 31) of HUD report; U.S. population of veterans: U.S. Census Bureau.

President Bush’s recently-announced troop surge became all the more perplexing yesterday when Britain announced that they would withdraw almost a quarter of its current troops in Iraq over the coming months. South Korea also announced that it would reduce its troop levels by half by April and would completely withdraw by the end of this year. (For a full list of country troop levels in Iraq click here.)

What a contrast with U.S. policy. The administration must be dizzy from spinning this one. Condoleeza Rice found some good news noting that, “The British have done what is really the plan for the country as a whole, which is to transfer security responsibility to the Iraqis as the situation permits.” Michael O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution and an advisor to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, countered that, “If the Brits really do have the ability to redeploy forces, we obviously need them in Baghdad and environs.” Of course, if you were to believe Vice President Cheney’s recent comments about House Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha’s plans to withdraw troops, then apparently the Brits are just “validat(ing) the al-Qaeda strategy.”

With Bush’s planned surge of 21,500, the U.S. will be adding more than 15% to our current troop levels. Contrast this with allies such as Lithuania and Denmark in the “coalition of the just-a-little-bit willing.” They just announced their complete withdrawal by summer.

While Denmark’s 460 soldiers might not seem to be a major commitment, it is significant compared to their total population of 5.4 million (less populous than Wisconsin). In fact, Denmark ranks fourth per capita troop commitments in Iraq… at least until August. The most remarkable thing about ranking coalition partners by their per-capita troop levels is that the United States, despite its huge population, has committed by far the most soldiers per capita. Nearly one in every 2,000 U.S. citizens is deployed. So if you have an impressive Myspace network, chances are one of your virtual buddies is currently in Iraq.

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President Bush’s 2008 budget hit the Hill yesterday to a frosty reception (so much for global warming). The budget is like having an accountant hold a mirror up to American society, and that society is simultaneously warlike and childish.

Almost half of your income taxes will be spent on national defense, and that doesn’t include the interest on debt from previous defense overspending. The Pentagon will spend 6% of its budget repairing and replacing equipment (mostly for Iraq), but it’s still more than the entire foreign affairs budget for 2008. Diplomacy from the barrel of a recently-repaired gun.

The budget also reveals that we are spending money like spoiled trust fund kids - but without the trust fund. Paying for the $261 billion in interest payments on our past indulgences takes up most (83%) of the revenue collected from corporate taxes. Lest you think that we should cut taxes to spur the economy, may I remind you that tax cuts still don’t pay for themselves no matter how many times Bush insists that they do. In fact, between 2008 and 2012, the Bush tax cuts will cost the Treasury Department more than one year of unemployment and welfare benefits combined.

Gift and inheritance taxes collect enough revenue to pay for nearly all of our national science and technology budget. So if you actually are a trust fund kid and think that so-called death taxes are unjust, consider that they might help keep grandma alive for a few more years. Or was that the point of cutting them?
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Source: Washington Post

If e-books have been a commercial flop thus far, then how do Americans access books? In 2004-2005 we were divided equally between purchasing 2.3 billion books and checking out 2.4 billion books from libraries. Libraries remain a critical steward of our world’s knowledge. But even as the world wide web has made information more global, most libraries remain local in their focus.

For librarians, it must seem that the web has turned information gathering on its head. The Internet is a heady young fellow, self-obsessed, self-referential, and unflinchingly modern in its focus (see right). Libraries house history, centuries of wisdom buried deep in stacks, and even deeper in the un-searchable text of yellowing book pages. So how can libraries remain relevant?

Let’s first examine the mission of public libraries versus the mission of major search engines. The following excerpts are from the mission statements of several major libraries and a certain web giant - see if you can distinguish between them (hover over or click the link for the answers):

A. “Helping people advance knowledge to enrich lives”

B. “…to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

C. “…to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.”

D. “…collecting, cataloging, and conserving books and other materials…. to serve as a great storehouse of knowledge… and to function as an integral part of a fabric of information and learning that stretches across the nation and the world.”

E. “…to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers.”

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Private Sector Libraries

Clearly the missions of Google (and other search engines) are converging with those of the leading libraries. Google recognized this as an opportunity and launched the Google Library Project in late 2004. The project started with five major library partners, but has since extended to 11 libraries in three countries. Google is digitizing the contents of prestigious libraries such as Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, increasing access to tens of millions of unique books that were once accessible only to a small, elite group.

Google spends between $10 and $30 for every book it scans. The entire project, which will span at least a decade, will only cost Google the equivalent of its 4th quarter profits in 2006. Not a bad investment for the web giant.

Google has already made these books available on its Google Book Search, a fascinating portal that for the first time in human history opens up rare and not-so-rare books to anyone in the world. Not only are these books are fully text searchable, Google has recently announced an integration with Google Maps, making librarians, technologists and Google-philes giddy. No more leafing through musty books to find a quote or location.

Google’s Library Project is distinctive from several others such as the Open Content Alliance sponsored by Yahoo and Microsoft because Google is barreling ahead and scanning copyrighted texts. This has not only provoked lawsuits, but more importantly, it has also provided a necessary impetus to publishers and libraries to address the issue of how to manage copyrighted books in the digital era.

Google Book Search allows full text search for copyrighted works by simply telling you that the terms you searched for are in the book. Google then provides a tantalizing “snippet view” of the text as if it was torn right from the page. If you want to read the whole book online, however, you’ll have to wait. Rather than selling the e-book, Google paradoxically directs you to amazon.com which will happily mail you a hardback in 5 to 7 days for $21.95.

This is about to change dramatically. On January 21, 2007, Google announced to the Times of London that it would launch an e-book service. Details are murky, but it seems likely that users will be able to purchase all or part of copyrighted books. I can only reiterate that pricing matters. With e-books, publishers can increase the exposure of previously obscure books and eliminate publishing costs. Ideally, this will increase profit margins and create significant savings for consumers. Because digitized books are easily divided, e-books could lead to a new model of micropayments enabling consumers to purchase only what they need, be it a chapter, a paragraph, or even just a quote.

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Public Library Reactions

Google’s mission is not without its critics. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale wrote a plaintive book called Google And the Myth of Universal Knowledge warning of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism and the risk of market-driven libraries:

“As anyone who uses Google knows, what is intrinsic to all the information it provides is hierarchization. Even if there are many pages of results, the searcher rarely goes beyond the first few. …The profit motive will necessarily promote one product over another.”

As long as there have been publishers with a marketing budget, there have been attempts to woo readers. And while the psychological effect of publishers’ advertising cannot be stopped at the door of library, our French friend would like to see it diminished.

There is some merit to this view, but not much. Libraries and library science will continue to weigh market forces against intellectual ones, but this new digital medium should not be made the culprit. If a library were to license, buy, or rent the contents Google’s digital library, couldn’t they simply reorganize it in a neutral, intellectualized way that would make even Mr. Dewey Decimal proud? Or should the public libraries simply create their own digital library system from scratch?

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Public Library Initiatives

Most libraries do see the upside to digitizing their libraries or they wouldn’t be working with Google. In fact, Google recently gave a $3 million grant to the Library of Congress for its World Digital Library Project in conjunction with UNESCO. The project is focused on improving web access to rare materials that, “…are physically stored in geographically dispersed locations, and which, when brought together with other collections through cross-national and cross-cultural multilingual search and browse capabilities, will yield new knowledge and insights.”

The World Digital Library may sound ambitious, but its scope is much more limited than that of Google Books. It will focus primarily on the long end of the tail: rare cultural treasures that most of us don’t use, rather than popular literature that most of us check out from our local libraries.

So we have the ivory tower approach and the commercial approach. Caught in the middle are the libraries that most Americans use.

Is Google the only answer? To be sure, they have a massive head start (see statastic below). In a decade they may have more books in their digital collection than any library system on earth. But if there is true intellectual concern about the earth’s largest library being in the hands of a profit-driven company, why not launch a public initiative? Can the U.S. government even afford it?

It’s all about priorities. If the U.S. government decided to scan and digitize every one of the 65 million books on earth, it would only cost about $2 billion. That’s less than we are spending for one week in Iraq, and it’s less than kids (I presume it’s kids) are paying for cell phone ring tones each year. We can afford it; so far, we just haven’t chosen to.

Even if the public sector did spend resources digitizing, libraries would face copyright issues. Tomorrow I will look at that as well as e-books initiatives at local libraries. And later this week, a case study that imagines the The DC Public Library in 2017.

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Sources and assumptions: Google has not disclosed the number of books it is digitizing or its timeline for completing the project. Early in the project Google claimed that it would scan 3,000 books per day. This figure was used for the low estimate. The high estimate was based on expanded date searches (1500 to 2007) on Google Books that returned about 4.5 million books. This was extrapolated back to the beginning of the project to find the scan rate, which was then used to project the high estimate. Statastic believes that the high estimate is probably more accurate because the 3,000 books per day figure referred to a contract with only the University of California library system. The fact that Google continues to add libraries to the project indicates that Google is likely to accelerate the scanning rate.

Last night Bush faced the nation, tail between legs, and announced in sober terms a plan to increase the number of troops in Baghdad and Anbar Province by 21,500 troops. This is not a novel approach. In August 2006, Operation Whac-a-Mole pulled troops from Mosul to secure violent areas of Baghdad. The results were dramatic… and temporary. As Senator McCain predicted then, once the troops moved on, the sectarian violence returned to the neighborhoods that U.S. troops had vacated.

Last night’s speech was Bush’s last stand. He seemed to finally realize that not only Iraq’s future is at stake, but also his historical legacy. He faced two basic policy decisions with four possible outcomes.

Using a good old game theory matrix, we see that although there is a chance that a Democrat-led withdrawal might succeed, it would not provide a political victory for Bush. The troop surge is the only attractive solution to a president with an eye on his place in history.

Policy A: Democrats secure a phased withdrawal from Iraq

Outcome 1): Iraq stabilizes or even flourishes as a beacon of democracy and freedom across the Middle East. Bush might get credit for his long term military strategy, but will more likely be blamed for a myopic insistence on prolonged occupation that would have ignited a civil war were it not for the Democrats in Congress.

Outcome 2): Iraq devolves into bloody civil war. Bush is blamed for starting an unnecessary war that could ignite sectarian strife across the Middle East. American military looks weak.

Policy B: Troop surge into Baghdad and Anbar

Outcome 1): Troops secure Baghdad and Iraq before Americans become impatient. Iraq becomes a model of democracy in the Middle East. Bush’s reputation is salvaged, but historians note that his “stay the course” tactics changed only after the 2006 elections.

Outcome 2): Additional American troops cannot break cycle of violence. Iraq devolves to civil war and American military looks even weaker and more irrelevant than if we had withdrawn before the civil war. Bush is blamed for strategic and tactical blunders that endure for generations.

No Free Refills

Three weeks ago President Bush announced plans to increase permanent active-duty military by as many as 70,000 troops. Those troops won’t recruited and trained until 2008, but Bush has already committed one-third (21,500) of them to the troop surge proposed last night. Those 70,000 troops will also be replacing the 25,851 dead and wounded during the war thus far.

The grisly truth is that 68% of the new troops that will be ready in 2008 have already been used.

Last night Bush struck a note of atonement, stating that, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” Let’s hope that the latest surge protectors are not being sent to Iraq to protect Bush’s historical legacy. We cannot afford for Bush to be responsible yet again.

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*Maximum proposed troop increase

Sources: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, Washington Post

One week ago Ethiopian troops moved into the Somali capital of Mogadishu to quell the unrest. According to a U.S. State Department spokesman, the Ethiopian military did so at the request of the secular Somali government which has been battling Islamic fundamentalists in Mogadishu.

The invasion bears some striking similarities to the U.S. invasion of Iraq - perhaps even more so to the Muslim world. Ethiopia is a U.S. ally and a largely Christian nation with a history of enmity toward Muslim Somalia. Ethiopia seemed poised for a rapid military victory, yet completely unprepared for maintaining security in Mogadishu.

As we saw in Iraq, a power vacuum is fertile ground for extremists. Somalia’s secular interior minister ominously said, “We have a symbolic government. Ministries we don’t have, a military we don’t have.” Recent statements by Al Qaida spokesman Ayman al-Zawahri identify that Somalia and Iraq as prime Islamic battlegrounds in their war on the West.

The security picture in Mogadishu bears striking resemblance to that in Baghdad:

Six days after the transitional government took hold, very little security was evident beyond that which Somalis have grown accustomed to providing for themselves: roving pickup trucks filled with armed teenagers, and AK-47-toting militiamen who guard the city block by block, and clan by clan.

Despite similar conditions on the ground, there are important differences. For one, Al Qaeda was active in Somalia before the Ethiopian invasion. And unlike the United States, Ethiopia is appealing to the international community for assistance. With any luck the outcome in Somalia three years hence will also be starkly different from that in Iraq today.

Source: Wikipedia, statastic research

In July of this year, Baghdad was in crisis. Death squads roamed the streets abducting at will and killing more than 50 civilians per day. Starting on August 7, Operation Together Forward concentrated 8,000 additional U.S. troops on 5 of the most deadly neighborhoods in Baghdad - Doura, Ghazaliyah, Rashid, Ahmariya and Mansour (see map).

At the beginning of the operation, Senator John McCain grilled U.S. General John Abizaid about troop movements in Iraq, especially the redeployment of 3,500 troops from Mosul to Baghdad. He was concerned that we were simply putting out bigger and bigger fires, responding to flare ups rather than developing a strategy, saying:

“What I’d worry about is we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole here.”

Yesterday the L.A. Times offered a preliminary assessment of Operation Together Forward:

“An ambitious military sweep appears to be dramatically reducing Baghdad’s homicide rate, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday. …

Similar sweeps in Baghdad and elsewhere since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have reduced violence. But the bloodshed would increase when U.S. forces moved on. …

U.S. and Iraqi officials describe the Baghdad security plan as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and to shore up Maliki’s government, which has struggled to contain sectarian violence and deliver essentials such as electricity and gasoline.”

Twenty-two days after the operation began, it does seem that violence in Baghdad has been significantly reduced. Calculated on a monthly basis, there has been a 77% decrease in the number of civilian deaths.

Senator McCain has repeatedly called for more troops in Iraq to snuff out the sectarian violence once and for all. Is he right? By increasing the total number of U.S. soldiers in the Baghdad area from by 24,000 to 32,000, the troops are also becoming more efficient at preventing civilian deaths. In July, there were 76 civilian deaths for every 1,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad. During Operation Together Forward, that has dropped to 10 civilian deaths for every 1,000 troops in Baghdad.

But McCain’s comparison to Whac-A-Mole indicates that he believes troops movements within Iraq are a zero-sum game. As we move troops from hot spot to hot spot we are always chasing new problems. Perhaps. After the 3,500 troops in Mosul were moved to Baghdad, violence in Mosul did not increase significantly. Those 3,500 troops from the Stryker Brigade may have helped save as many as 622 Iraqi lives.

What’s more, U.S. troops in Baghdad appear to have a lower casualty rate in August than in July. Perhaps this is all due to the fact that militias such as those loyal to al-Sadr simply abandon neighborhoods where the U.S. coalition announces that it will be conducting raids. During Operation Together Freedom violence has surged in Diwaniya, for example.
But we have been down this road before. Here’s a description from the June, 2006 Christian Science Monitor of how the wealthy Amariya neighborhood first turned deadly:

“…insurgents began arriving in Amariyah after the deadly US assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first jihadis sought haven with relatives, many of them former senior officers in Saddam Hussein’s Army. …

Not content with having found a haven, the militants set about transforming the demographics and social mores of the area. ‘At first it was just the outsiders, but some of the young men - surrounded by these people telling stories about what the Americans did in Fallujah and these preachers telling them it was their duty to fight - joined up,’ says Aqeel, a former resident of Amariyah who fled in February.

Soon, graffiti praising Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and promising death to traitors proliferated; new prayer leaders took over mosques, issuing strident demands for jihad over their loudspeakers every Friday; leaflets were distributed warning women not to work and to cover their hair, men not to trim their beards or wear shorts; then bodies started to appear on street corners.

Amariyah, a wealthy Baghdad … neighborhood of shaded gardens … has become synonymous with gruesome, anonymous death, as have other Sunni neighborhoods like Dora and Adhamiya. They are all examples of the ongoing battle occurring throughout Iraq to loosen the grip of the insurgency - and the tough fight facing the Iraqi Army and US forces to dislodge them.“

In June, Colonel Burleson said that he believed the violence in Amariya was “past its crest.” In June, Iraqi soldiers were more measured in their assessment of Amariya, saying that, “We’ve shut off most of the branch streets and are funneling the traffic through our checkpoints, so we’ve got a lot more control, but if we don’t maintain this type of control, what happens then?” The answer came in July.

Perhaps the administration should listen to those on the ground. A few days ago, a minibus driver who lives in one of the neighborhoods being targeted by Operation Forward Together said:

“As long as the Americans are here it is fine,” he said. “If they leave it to the Iraqi police the killing will just return.”

So Operation Whac-A-Mole is in place, and the results are dramatic… for now.

It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, and it really sounds like a duck.

Yesterday’s Washington Post editorial, “What Next?” gave a grim assessment of how a civil war in Iraq could explode into a regional conflict in the Middle East. Iraq has all of the necessary ingredients of a civil war: a growing tendency to identify with religious and ethnic groups rather than the Iraqi nation-state, valuable resources spread unevenly throughout the country, a growing perception that democracy does not reflect regional interests, and daily news of increasing civilian casualties.

A broader civil war would likely produce Iraqi refugees who could export the Iraqi conflict to neighboring countries. As we have seen in the recent Lebanon-Israel conflict, these neighboring states are willing to fund proxies such as Hezbollah, if not to intervene directly. The authors note that the foundation for a regional war could already be in place:

U.S. military and Iraqi sources think there are several thousand Iranian agents of all kinds already in Iraq…. Iran has set up an extensive network of safe houses, arms caches, communications channels and proxy fighters, and will be well-positioned to pursue its interests in a full-blown civil war.

Although Bush administration officials acknowledge privately that things are not going according to plan, Bush said publicly today that Americans “have to understand the consequences of leaving Iraq before the job is done.”

We’ve done a heck of a job so far. Insecurity has left the Iraqi economy in shambles making it easier for insurgents to find new recruits. One-fifth of the population is in poverty. Oil production is still 11% below pre-war production levels. Unemployment is as high as 40% in some regions, and inflation is rampant.

Iraq also has a serious brain drain that leaves little human capital with which to rebuild. According to a report by the Brookings Institution, 2,000 doctors have been murdered, and another 12,000 have fled the country. Internal displacement is also a growing problem: 200,000 Sunni Arabs have been displaced from western Iraq and up to 100,000 Shiites have fled cities to take refuge in the south.

Civilian deaths increased by nine percent from June to July, and have almost doubled since January, 2006. One of the more disturbing trends is that as violence has increased in Iraq, it has also become increasingly brutal.

When do we recognize this as a civil war? In the editorial “What Next?” Laura Stanton of the Washington Post produced a graphic that applied the percentage of deaths and displaced persons from recent civil wars to the current population of Iraq. Statastic used this data to gain further insight into the average number of deaths per month during these civil wars.

So how severe are the 3,438 civilian deaths reported in July, 2006? On a per capita basis, this is nearly 50% more deaths per month than averaged during the Croatian civil war. If violence in Iraq were to increase at the same rate that it increased between January and July of 2006, there would be more than 450 deaths per day in Iraq by July, 2007. This is about the same rate as the Kosovo war, but with one critical difference: Iraq’s population is 14 times larger. We would need as much as four times the current financial and military resources to quell a civil war, requiring as many as 450,000 soldiers. And that says nothing of how we would stop a regional conflict.

If a civil war does erupt into a regional war, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack note that history is not on our side:

No country in recent history has successfully managed the spillovers from a full-blown civil war; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably.

Much as Americans may want to believe that the United States can just walk away from Iraq should it slide into all-out civil war, the threat of spillover from such a conflict throughout the Middle East means it can’t.

It’s time to acknowledge the Iraqi insurgency for what it is: a civil war. Quack.

Sources: Washington Post (primary sources cited include Amnesty International, Center for Study of Civil War, CIA World Factbook, Richard Holbrooke’s “To End a War”, World Bank); PBS Frontline map.

Notes: *The estimate for July, 2007 applies the rate of doubling in civilian deaths that occurred during the 6 months between January and July, 2006.

The average monthly deaths were calculated by applying the death rate per capita in each country’s civil war to the population of Iraq. This was then divided by the length of the each civil war. The monthly average was calculated using whole years for these conflicts. In other words if a civil was started in December of 2000 and ended in January 2001, its duration would counted as two years, not two months.

Why the lack of precision? Because using the monthly average of deaths during a civil war is an imperfect measure to begin with. Civil conflicts often hinge on a single event that may not have many civilian deaths (such as the February 22, 2006 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra), or a monthly average may understate the brutality of a shorter campaign (such as the 800,000 who were murdered in Rwanda over the course of 100 days).

This measure is only meant to lend an international comparison to the debate about what constitutes a civil war.

It should come as no surprise that war made quick inroads into gaming. It translates well: war is a vastly simplified solution to complex problems. War is good versus evil, it has an enormous historical body of work to draw upon, and it appeals to men who make up 62% of gamers. But in 2005, “shooter” and “fighting” games only made up only 13% of total games sales. In fact, when you look at the $1 billion computer game market, strategy games outsell shooter games by 2 to 1.

As games have become more sophisticated, they have also become less black and white in interpretation of the world. The gray areas are starting to be addressed by a genre of gaming dubbed “serious gaming.” Serious games include any training and simulation games - including the games developed for the military mentioned in pt. 2 of this series - and they are an emerging resource for policymakers as well as war mongers.

The DC-based think tank Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars founded the Serious Games Initiative to “help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills.” A growing subset of serious gaming is known as activist games. Activist games are designed to raise social awareness of issues near and dear to many non-profits - issues such as poverty, war, environmental protection, even genocide. Nonetheless, the oxymoronic genre of “serious games” has met some resistance in the world of social activism, despite good intentions:

“It’s like what Adorno said, the idea that it’s barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. But you saw this around film too, when it first started: ‘The medium isn’t serious enough to allow for serious discourse.’ I find it somewhat contradictory because people criticize games for saying there’s nothing good in them, nothing serious. But when games try to talk about a serious issue, they say, ‘You can’t talk about that in a game.’ ”

-Professor Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the George Institute of Technology, whose book on serious games will be published next spring by M.I.T. Press - New York Times, July 23, 2006

So what do activist games look like? While some of the games have share war games’ complex interactivity in massively multi-player online games (MMOG), most are much simpler. These stripped-down games often reflect the limited non-profit budgets which support the development costs of activist games. And with few exceptions, activist games are significantly lower quality than commercial games, which may further limit their reach.

Activist gaming still faces an uphill battle with more mature media: video games are hard to create on the cheap. Activist leaflets are cheap, web sites and blogs for social change are almost free. But even comparing the motion picture media reveals that blockbuster independent documentaries such as Supersize Me, which was produced for a budget of $65,000, can be made for less than blockbuster games.

The game A Force More Powerful is a role-playing game that puts you in the position of planner for a nonviolent movement seeking social change, pitting you against a regimepowered by artificial intelligence. The game required $3 million in funding and sells for about $20. Whether it will break even is doubtful.

But do games that inspire social change need to be as complex and expensive as Sim City? The online game Darfur is Dying was produced with a $50,000 grant and has attracted almost a million users. And one of the most simple and effective meassages highlighted below is conveyed in the editorial game September 12. The harder you try to exterminate the terrorists with violence, the more you terrorists you create. Perhaps President Bush should have played this before he invaded Iraq.

If our president is unconvinced that his current tactics create more terrorists than they destroy, at least he can take solace in the fact that there is a virtual suicide bus simulation in development for the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Games have come full circle to reflect the complexity of the world around us. They train U.S. war fighters, inspire terrorists, rally the local activists, teach diplomacy to the next generation, and treat the victims of our wars that exist not only in virtual reality.

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A Survey and Screenshots of Activist Games

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International Aid & Development Games

Food Force

About: World Food Programme’s “Food Force” simulates a country threatened by a hunger crisis. Acting as a humanitarian aid worker, the player completes a series of missions to plan and complete a successful emergency response. Players have to complete a series of missions ranging from dropping food parcels from the air to using food aid to rebuild a country’s economy.

Developer: United Nations World Food Program

Reach: Downloaded 4 million times in its first year online, audience target is children ages 8-13

Price: Free

Download at: www.food-force.com

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3rd World Farmer

About: Players manage an African farm, and are confronted with the difficult choices caused by poverty - drought, war, and starvation.

Developers: The first prototype of the game was developed as a students’ project at the IT-University in Copenhagen, Spring 2005.
Price: Free

Play online here: http://www.heavygames.com/3rdworldfarmer/showgame.asp

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Water Alert!

About: UNICEF’s unfortunately pedantic and un-engaging game, Water Alert takes you through the minutae of collecting water sample. This is more educational than most of the games mentioned here.

Price: Free

Play online here: http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/wes/explore_1818.html

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Activist Games

Darfur is Dying

About: Users play the role of a Darfur refugee. In the simualation, your character runs to fetch water risking rape or abduction by Janjaweed militae before returning to the refugee camp.

Developed by: University of Southern California, Reebok Human Rights Foundation and The International Crisis Group

Funding: Reebok Human Rights Foundation

Reach: 700,000 in the first seven weeks of its release

Developer: Susana Ruiz, Ashley York, Mike Stein, Noah Keating, and Kellee Santiago - all graduate student at the University of Southern California

Cost: $50,000 grant from Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group in partnership with by MTVu, MTV’s online network geared toward fostering actvism amongst university students

Price: Free

Play online: www.darfurisdying.com

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A Force More Powerful (AFMP)

About: AFFMP is a strategy game that is intended to teach budding activists how to use non-violent methods to influence government policies. Non-violent resistance tactics include training, fund-raising and organizing, protests, strikes, mass action, civil disobedience, noncooperation, and even such mundane actions as leafletting.

The game was developed by Ivan Marovic, co-founder of Otpor (Resistance) the Serbian youth movement, the non-violent movement that helped topple Milosovic in Serbia. Another apparent collaborator is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which claims to have helped oust tyrants in Serbia, Georgia and most recently Ukraine.

Developer: International Center on Nonviolent Conflict allied with commercial game developer Breakaway LTD.

Funding: $3 million from International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Price: $19.95 Order here

Web site: http://www.afmpgame.com/index.shtml

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September 12

About: Newgaming.com has created a new sub-genre of editorialized serious games that they call newsgames. September 12 is a simple, browser-based game where your apparent goal is to bomb terrorists who are wandering amongst civilians through an Arab market. When you bomb them, collateral damage kills innocent bystanders. Grief-stricken relatives are drawn to terrorism themselves and you see that bombing only produces more terrorists.

Developer: Newsgaming.com and Gonzalo Frasca, a game designer and professor at the University of Copenhagen

Price: Free

Play online: http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm

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Peace & Peacekeeping Games

Madrid

About: Produced by the creators of September 12, Madrid was designed within two days of the Madrid train bombings as a memorial to the 192 victims.

Developer: NewsGaming.com – “This new site showcases video games that editorialize on current international news. Its team gathers a group of professional game developers and artists who believe that videogames can not only entertain but also encourage critical thinking. Periodically, Newsgaming.com will launch online video games related to major international news events.”

Play online: http://www.newsgaming.com/newsgames.htm

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Foreign Ground

About: A first-person perspective training game used by the Swedish military to that simulates peacekeeping operations. Instead of focusing on combat it deals mostly with solving problems using non-violent means without relying on duels and combat. The user play the role of a UN Peacekeeper and solves various tasks while on foot or vehicle patrol.

Developer: Swedish National Defence College

Web site: http://www.defencegaming.org/foreign_ground.htm

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Diplomacy Games

Peacemaker

About: Simulates the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Players choose between the role of an Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian Authority president, making policy decisions and communicating with the international community while dealing with unexpected violent events. The games teaches high school and college students about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by focusing on the goal of cohabitation rather than on occupation and destruction.

“It’s meant to teach people about the different perspectives. It’s just a turn-based strategy game, but we’ve inverted the war model so it’s about conflict resolution. The end goal is to create a peaceful resolution to the conflicts.” -Eric Brown of Impact Games

Developer: Impact Games

Reach: Developers are currently testing the game in limited pilots and have not yet announced a release date.

Web site: http://www.peacemakergame.com

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Global Kids Island

About: “Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which the residents are provided with the tools required to lliterally shape the world around them. Teen Second Life is a space restricted to 13-17 year olds. Beginning in February, 2006, Global Kids has been exploring how to bring a youth development model around global issues into an island within this teen grid.”

Price: First Basic Account is free. Premium: ranges from $6.00 to $9.95 per month

Second Life blog: http://www.holymeatballs.org/second_life/

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Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Virtual Reality

Suicide Bus Bomber Virtual Reality PTSD Prototype

About: Researchers Tamar Weiss (Haifa, Israel), Azu Garcia-Palacios (Spain) and Hunter Hoffman (U.W. Seattle) are developing an immersive virtual reality simulation to help survivors or witnesses of terrorism who have developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The simulation of a terrorist bus bombing is designed to give the therapist control over the progression and intensity of the experience, including the addition of realistic visual and audio affects.

Developer: Imprint Interactive

Developer web site: http://www.imprintit.com/index.html

More info: http://seriousgamessource.com/features/feature_053006_ptsd.php

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9/11 Virtual Reality PTSD Prototype

About: A Weill Cornell Medical College therapist and a virtual reality researcher from the University of Washington HITLab are using virtual reality to treat victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, and their regimen appears to be effective in helping patients cope with the severe psychological trauma of the event.

Web site: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/ptsd/

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Serious and Activist Gaming News

New York Times: Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time - reprinted in full here

Business Week: Getting Activist Video Games to Market

Overview of Games for Change Conference

Newsweek: Gaming the Poor

PBS Newshour: Can “Serious Games” Improve Your Mind?

NPR: Video-Game Designers Target World Peace

Interview with Professor James Paul Gee, professor of educational psychology, UW-Madison who recently received $1.5 million from the MacArthur Foundation to support his research on learning and video games

Use of virtual reality for treating post-traumatic stress disorder

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Blogs about Serious Gaming
Blog from Games for Change Conference

Blog from Susana Ruiz, a graduate student in the School of Cinema-Television’s Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California, part of the team behind Darfur is Dying

Good essay about the Syrian company Afkar Media that produced Under Siege

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Serious Games Web Sites
Games for Change

Serious Games Source

Social Impact Games