Intel Authorization Tidbit and the Political Effects of Terrorism

There are two items from today that I need to get to before the day’s out. First, the House passed the intelligence authorization bill, and along with all of the controversial aspects included in the bill, there is one very important aspect that I would like to highlight. As the Washington Post points out:

An additional amendment approved by floor vote yesterday calls for a study on whether former Iraqi and Afghan translators who worked for U.S. forces — and now live in the United States under special visa programs because their lives were threatened at home — could be employed by intelligence agencies.

If this becomes law, it will be an extraordinary step in the right direction for the intelligence community. Based on the experience of my friends and colleagues who have served with this people in Iraq and Afghanistan, adding them to the rolls of the IC would elevate our analytical abilities several orders of magnitude–most importantly in language.
Second, a very interesting paper was released this morning titled “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate” The authors conclude that the Israeli electorate exhibited significant reaction to terror attacks, and that this reaction had strong temporal variation based on the attacks proximity to an election. As the authors state:

These results provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a highly sensitive reaction to terrorism, and substantiate the claim that terror organizations especially target democratic regimes because these regimes are more prone to make territorial concessions.

There are many examples that support this claim, most notably in the U.K, Spain and the United States. What’s most interesting about the finding is that even in Israel, a country where terrorist violence is much more prevalent than almost anywhere else in the world, these acts continue to achieve–in part–their desired affect (e.g., political change). This also, dovetails well with Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism, and its limitation to compelling democracies; however, there is terrorism in many place–ruled by all forms of government–but why? There in lies the next study…

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