John Galt post=18.68268.629814 said:
I read the paper and subscribe to a number of magazines so yes, I guess I'm pretty well informed. However, I constantly have to remind myself that I still have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to international issues due to the fact that most of my information comes through the lense of the US media. Trying to get to the actual facts of what happened in Georgia by sifting through CNN and Fox News reports is a task that man was never meant to undertake.
It's much easier if you follow things before they blow up - when war breaks out everyone's brings his own slant, but when it's fairly dry and unexciting information comes through fairly unfiltered. I won't point you to web sites, but you can find all kinds of news on line, including some interesting military analysis. You can start with basics like the BBC, CNN, London Times, Pravda, Pakistan News Service, Jerusalem Post, CIA Factbook, Islamic Republic News Agency, Federation of American Scientists, Global Security, Kommersant, Jane's. Many of these may surprise you, but government- and religious-controlled sites tell you what they
want you to think. When you've been on them long enough to get a feel for the bias, you can then read between the lines. Look at the articles on Yahoo News, Drudge Report, Breitbart - sites like that select stories based on their own interests and biases as much as by news value, but the actual stories are usually AP, Reuters, or some other news agency. A site or reporter that gives you a very slanted view on the war in Georgia may give you a dry, unbiased report on a tunnel being built in Dogestan. When you look at an article from a foreign site, look at other articles on that site as well. In this way you get a feel for that site's issues and biases, thus giving you an idea of how (and how much, if at all) the original story was slanted. Sometimes unlikely sources - the Christian Science Monitor, for instance - have very good and wide spread reporting and analysis.
If you make friends with soldiers and Marines you can get access to some sites that are not classified but require passwords to access which have raw, unfiltered blogs, although to be honest a lot of that stuff dried up a couple years back when the computer-illiterate DOD management discovered exactly how much raw information was going out. Other sources such as global insurance underwriters and business groups are good as well, and often have mailing lists. Often insurance companies and investment groups know of impending events way before it hits the news because they have people studying the region for other reasons. These kinds of sources require contacts, obviously, or a lot of money. The Council On Foreign Relations, for instance, has an incredible amount of information worldwide; access is usually quite limited, but often a news agency like Fox News or CNN will contract with the CFR when they get caught flat-footed. One important point about these sorts of sources - honor them. Don't link to them, don't give them out, don't brag about them, don't post comments - don't abuse them or the trust of the person who gets you on.
Another odd source is Google Earth. Few regions have real-time imaging, but it's simplicity itself to see the distance between, say, Gori and Tskhinvali. With some simple study and a basic knowledge of military operations (battles are more interesting but deployments and campaigns are more useful to understand, and luckily today we have access to excellent quality, inexpensive maps as well as many day-by-day accounts of military operations.)
The object of all this is not so much to develop reliable sources - although that's important - as much as to develop an understanding of how the world is interconnected and how governments and people tend to act. After a few years, you shouldn't be really surprised by most things that appear in geopolitics - not to say you can predict war in Georgia in August '08, but if you're paying attention you'll see small reports of fighting, claims and counterclaims of attacks against civilians... Most of the places where war pops up have been simmering for years, if not decades.
If you're willing to spend a couple of hours each day reading not necessarily the most interesting things, but the most useful things, within a few years you'll have a very good grip on geopolitics.
