Hezbollah: A Proletarian Party with an Islamic Manifesto – A Sociopolitical Analysis of Islamist Populism in Lebanon and the Middle East

This article examines the rising contention between a global foreign policy promoting liberal democracy in the Middle East and Islamist rejectionism. It provides a sociopolitical analysis of the phenomena of radical Islamist politics while focusing on the experience of Hezbollah in Lebanon. It associates the growth of Hezbollah, a political movement seen in various forms in several countries, with social class dynamics that have been antagonised by social inequality, opportunistic leadership, the importation of Western-ordered democracy and by perceived foreign intervention. By examining the root dynamic of Hezbollah in Lebanon, this article argues that poverty has provided the fertile ground for the growth of Islamic populism as a revolutionary movement and has represented a major reason for the rejection of democratisation and political reform. A global foreign policy that seeks to uproot extremism in favour of state-building and the advancement of democracy in the Middle East needs to be reoriented so as to help undermine class inequality and to strengthen government-sponsored public services programmes for the underclass.     

A Clash of Wills: Hizballah's Psychological Campaign Against Israel in South Lebanon

This article analyzes Hizballah's war against Israel in south Lebanon as a psychological contest where public opinion, perception, and persuasion were the real determinants of victory. Hizballah successfully mobilized popular support for its war by communicating nationalist and religious themes to different sectarian groups in Lebanon. At the same time, it used classic guerrilla warfare as a carefully calibrated psychological tool to erode the morale of Israeli forces, their Lebanese allies, and the Israeli public's support for the war. Hizballah's sophisticated media capability, particularly combat video footage aired on its satellite TV station and the Internet, played a critical role in amplifying the effects of its attrition campaign. By orchestrating information-age media and guerrilla tactics, this strategy has important implications for the future of irregular warfare.     

A network reformulation of an electric utility expansion planning model

We reformulate a multiperiod capacity expansion model of electric utilities as a network model. We show how to reconstruct the dual solution of the original mathematical program from the network model solution. To formulate the network model, we use information about the properties of the optimal solution of the mathematical program to reduce the number of constraints. The remaining constraints are then readily converted into network constraints. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons. Inc.     

INCAPACITATING BIOCHEMICAL WEAPONS

Military interest in incapacitating biochemical weapons has grown in recent years as advances in science and technology have appeared to offer the promise of new “non-lethal” weapons useful for a variety of politically and militarily challenging situations. There is, in fact, a long and unfulfilled history of attempts to develop such weapons. It is clear that advances are opening up a range of possibilities for future biological and chemical weapons more generally. The treaties prohibiting biological and chemical weapons make no distinction between lethal and “non-lethal” weapons—all are equally prohibited. Indeed, a sharp and technically meaningful distinction between lethal and “non-lethal” biological and chemical weapons is beyond the capability of science to make. Thus, interest in incapacitating biochemical weapons, and efforts on the part of various states to develop them, pose a significant challenge to the treaty regimes, to the norms against biological and chemical warfare that they embody, and, ultimately, to the essential protections that they provide. Preventing a new generation of biological and chemical weapons from emerging will take concerted efforts and action at the local, national, and international levels.     

Designing safety space in a supply chain to handle system‐wide disruptions

In some supply chains serious disruptions are system wide. This happens during periods of severe weather, as when storms cause shuttle tankers serving oil platforms in the North Sea to stop movements of crude oil, barges are frozen in the Mississippi, or all airplanes are grounded after a blizzard. Other notable instances of system‐wide disruption happened after the attack on the World Trade Center when all aircraft were grounded and the natural gas and crude‐oil pipelines were tangled by hurricanes in 2005. We model a situation where shutting down supply facilities is very difficult and expensive because of excessive inventory buildup from an inability to move out the production. We present a planning model that balances the cost of spare capacity versus shutting down production when planning for disruptions. The model uses an assignment model embedded in a simulation. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Improved convergence rate results for a class of exponential penalty functions

An improved theoretical rate of convergence is shown for a member of the class of exponential penalty function algorithms. We show that the algorithm has a superlinear convergence rate.     

A mathematical programming approach to the scheduling of sorting operations

In this paper we describe an approach to the scheduling and/or real-time control of sorting operations in the presence of deadlines. The problem arises in the postal service where mail has to be sorted by zip codes, and in the banking system where checks have to be sorted according to the bank on which they are drawn. In both applications losses are incurred if items miss their clearing deadlines. For example, in check-sorting an extremely important objective of the control system is to reduce the “float” i.e., the total dollar value of the checks which miss their deadlines. The proposed real-time control system utilizes a linear program which chooses between alternative sort-patterns and assigns the various processing steps to the time periods between deadlines.