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How Social Networking Helped Bag Saddam Hussein

by Terrence O'Brien on February 24, 2010 at 06:30 AM

How Social Networking Bagged SaddamWe'll bypass both the criticisms and the flag waving for now, and establish one simple fact about the Iraq war: we found and captured Saddam Hussein. It's a success that is often lost in the sea of critiques (deserved and otherwise) and overshadowed by our failure to do the same with Osama Bin Laden. What makes this success particularly interesting, however, is how the military utilized what were, at the time, relatively new ideas regarding the ways in which people form interpersonal networks -- now the linchpin of modern social networking sites.

Traditional, Western models of military and government power are understood to be strictly hierarchical, top-to-down commands. But Iraqi society does not have the same fundamental structure; on the contrary, it relies heavily on tribal ties.

Colonel James Hickey, described by Slate as an "archetypal warrior-scholar," realized that the military's success rested on the ability to understand the connections between its targets and Saddam. He had his intelligence officers chart all of the personal relationships between "the bad guys," and create a vast map of Saddam's social network.

The results revealed a web of primarily familial ties that had more in common with the mob than the Third Reich. The sociological concepts of nodes and edges that make up social networks were crucial in understanding the structure of Iraqi society and, ultimately, in locating Saddam.

Slate has run the first article in a five part series examining how the concepts of social networking led to the capture of the Iraqi dictator. We can only touch on the background info here, but we highly recommend you head over to Slate, and keep checking in over the next few days, to get the whole story. [From: Slate]

Tags: iraq, Iraq war, IraqWar, military, Saddam Hussein, SaddamHussein, socialnetworking, spy, top, war, web

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