THE PARTISANSHIP OF A GENTLER ERA PROVIDES A LESSON FOR TODAY

" A military leader is accustomed to giving orders and getting them carried out. He has no political, legislative or business experience. He's an American hero elected in a democratic election and treading on new fields. He'll need help. Remember that we are Americans first and Democrats second.

Remember, any jackass can kick over a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one"

- Sam Rayburn ( D-Tx) 1953, speaking to House Democrats about the
newly inaugurated President, Dwight Eisenhower.


Can you imagine a party leader in Congress today saying such a thing about a president who was from the other political party ? I think Nancy Pelosi might prefer to see her tongue turn to sand.

Incidentally, the voters rewarded Rayburn's constructive engagement strategy in 1956 by returning the Democratic Party to a majority in the House of Representatives and Rayburn to the Speakership, which " Mr. Sam" held until his death in 1961.

Compare that to the electoral records of the House Republicans and Democrats when they employed " scorched earth" political tactics against Clinton and Bush. You take care of your wingnut base by by throwing it red meat at the times when doing so causes the party no harm; you don't let the base start dictating the feeding schedule.

The Republican base is standing on chairs and clanging tin cups on the table. The Democratic base has commandeered the kitchen and is now ransacking the refrigerator.  ¶ 12:15 PM 4 comments

  THE PAPER TRAIL LENGTHENS...

Marc Schulman of American Future has finished the second part to his series deconstructing the evolution of The New York Times on Iraq.

Highly recommended.  ¶ 10:37 PM 0 comments

  CREATIVITY AS THE KEY TO ESCAPING THE TYRANNY OF SELF-REFERENTIAL PARADIGMS

Only a short post for now as work is surging today - and blogging is my way of procrastinating . Actually, this post topic relates directly to my actual job, so strictly speaking, this still counts as " work" :o)

Several things have caught my eye that relate to one another, though not in an obvious way.

First, the esteemed Drs. Eide of The Neurolearning Blog drew my attention with this post to a set of online tests by Texas Tech University that are indicators for creativity. Take a few of them as they are short. I personally like giving people the nonverbal ones best because the results do not get hijacked by idiosyncratic linguistic habits intefering with comprehension

Secondly, Art Hutchinson the strategic thinking guru and founder of Cartegic Group has a post up on his Mapping Strategy blog on 'The Young Arab Leaders Conference' and Scenario Planning ( For more on the conference itself, go here. For the purpose and utility of scenario exercises, go here).

Art's comment on the Conference ( which incidentally is a good idea in my view) was as follows:

"Given the complexity of what's going on in the region right now (Iraq being only a part), it would be a shame if the scenarios they discuss are entirely focused on oil and gas. As a tool, scenarios are deeply embedded into the planning cultures of many oil and gas companies (Shell being the most well known.) Properly applied however, they're at least as powerful for strategic planners in other industries (including government) to holistically think through the interlocking issues (e.g., social, political, military, demographic, religious, constitutional, etc.) that the entire region is facing over the next few years. Oil and gas will be just a part of that picture - albeit a fairly big part."

I agree. Now I will add my two cents:

In getting the participants to engage in scenarios the facilitators are going to be bumping up against a political-cultural reinforcement of the powerful human tendency to become imprisoned in self-referential paradigms. All human cultural and organizational groups are affected by this tendency to varying degrees regardless of whether we are discussing Americans, corporate CEOs, Salafis, Lawyers, String theorists, members of organized crime, Episcopalian clergy - you name it, if a collective body is at all cohesive then over time " groupthink" emerges.

In the Arab world, you have authoritarian governmental systems, secular and religious ideologies like pan-Arabism, Anti-colonialism or Islamism and in some places the legacy of tribal societal rule-sets all converging to stifle the critical dialogue required to actually solve problems. The closest American equivalent to this effect - and it isn't a very good analogy except insofar as it too was reinforced by the possibility of private and state violence - was the issue of race and the color line in the Jim Crow South. Attempts at rational public discussion on a whole range of policy issues were either grotesqely distorted or stymied because they might call the precepts of segregation into question. As a consequence, the South remained the most economically undeveloped region of the United States until the 1970's when de jure segregation was dismantled.

Because the hot button issues in the Arab World are so numerous right now - Women's rights, Israel, free-market liberalization, democracy, Westernization - the scenario facilitators might gain the most productive results from devising depoliticized hypotheticals and concentrating on horizontal thinking solutions to systems-based problems that do not easily " fit" the shopworn but emotionally negative frames that block so much potential progress in the Mideast. If the Conference yields answers that can be expressed in a script that does not alert vested interests to mobilize to defend their broken status quo, then the ideas generated will have some chance, however slim, of being realized on the ground.

More on horizontal thinking:

"Ed DeBono " Lateral Thinking & Parallel Thinking"

" Think Horizontally and Vertically"

" Horizontal Learning"  ¶ 7:32 AM 2 comments

  ROBB ON BOBBITT'S "VIRTUAL-STATE" EPOCHAL WAR

John Robb of Global Guerillas gives an endorsement to, and a sneak peak at, Philip Bobbitt's yet to be released book, War Against Terror ( John has it :" Terror, Can We Win This War" and Amazon also lists it as just plain " Terror" - so, the lack of a single working title indicates that we are getting a look fairly early into the publishing process - cool !). Here's an excerpt from Robb's post (Bobbitt quote is in italics):

" '...Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen. The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy. States make war, not brigands; and the Al Qaeda network is a sort of virtual state, with a consistent source of finance, a recognized hierarchy of officials, foreign alliances, an army, published laws, even a rudimentary welfare system...'

This is a very useful framework by which to view the current conflict. It is also a natural compliment to Global Guerrillas -- the rise of the virtual state, its new methods of warfare, and its impact on the world is a subject of my work here "

To echo the comments I left over at Global Guerillas, I much prefer Dr. Bobbitt's shift of emphasis to " Virtual-State" because:

a)It cuts to the heart of the conflict regarding globalization

b)"Virtual-State" as a term embraces a wide variety of non-state networks with starkly different motivations/aspirations in seeking to exercise state-like power ( Narco-State, Sharia-State, Tribal-State etc.)

c)It is an accurate structural/organizational descriptor of a networked entity.

My criticism from the other day has been pretty much rendered moot as Bobbitt is now articulating both the economic system conflict at the root of the war and the critical impact that scale free networks are having in globalization, warfare and politics.

Color me " impressed".  ¶ 9:53 AM 0 comments

  ON MUSIC AND WAR [ Updated]

This post is more of a cultural question I'd like answered from someone in the know.

If you watch the film Braveheart and you see the Scots assembling at Stirling under William Wallace to fight the dastardly English, there are of course, bagpipes playing. Loud, cacophonous and brash - before the Scots ( after the inspiring speech by Mel Gibson, of course) in age-old Celtic style, adorned with blue paint, scream horrific insults at the English and work themselves into a barbaric frenzy.

Or if you are a fan of The History Channel you can't but help notice in their innumerable WWII documentaries the extent to which the Nazis resorted to music - Deutschland Uber Alles, The Horst Wessel Lied, Wagner, chanting or singing in unison, masses of drums or horns - to mobilize the spirit of Nazi and Wehrmacht formations right down to the rhythmic march of jackboots on pavement.

Traditional, American martial music is either religious - The Battle Hymn of The Republic - or John Philip Sousa - rousing, cheery and optimistic - or sonorous and lonely like Taps played at The Tomb of The Unknown Soldier. However, it must be noted that since at least the invasion of Panama, psychological warfare against the enemy has involved the blasting of nonstop Rock music.

So, is there a deep cultural connection between how a nation makes music and how it makes war? Are the complex symphonies of the 18th century a reflection of the exquisitely disciplined field manuevers of Europe's small and highly-trained professional armies before the coming of the Levee en Masse ? Does music and warfare simply adapt to the spirit of the times ?

Or do they shape their time and each other as well ?

UPDATE:

Some excellent comments - in particular this one by Curtis demands attention:

"...In fact, tones can also be used metrically or rhythmically in opposition or agreement to the meters and have a way of tying content to rhythms. How long a tone is held -- the length of the note in song or of the syllable in spoken languages -- can point at key ideas/themes. What is particularly interesting about this is the differentiation of languages: different languages use these musical structures differently. (Some are more tone-based, some are quantitative -- i.e., hold sounds for particular lengths -- etc.) So, from this perspective, different types of music might be deeply related to different languages and thus to different cultures. "

Any linguists care to comment ?

Also thanks to Younghusband for the link !  ¶ 12:03 AM 10 comments

  WITHDRAW FROM IRAQ? RECOMMENDED READING AND COMMENTARY:

Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye set off a blogospheric dialogue on the prospect of withdrawing from Iraq - all thoughtful and considered arguments from the participants:

"Discussing Withdrawal From Iraq" by Dave Schuler

" Thoughts on Withdrawal" by Dan Darling at Winds Of Change

"Staying the Course and Paying for it" by Jeff Medcalf at Caerdroia

"The Political Reality of Troop Withdrawals" by McQ at QandO

"Biden, Democrats Ask The Wrong Questions" by Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters

Additional Related Links:

"The Controlled Chaos Exit From Iraq" by John Robb at Global Guerillas

"Iraqi Guerillas Make Key Demands of CIA at Cairo Conference" by Juan Cole at Informed Comment

My best forecast is that the United States will make a partial withdrawal from Iraq because the U.S military absolutely requires it at the current level of force structure, regardless of the situation in the Sunni Triangle. We'll probably do a mix of deal-cutting, unleashing of the loyalist paramilitaries and reducing to a heavy-duty " sledgehammer" force to hang in the background and support our Iraqi allies.

The post-Cold War demobilization that occurred during the Clinton and first Bush administration set a force level that was inadequate for the United States to carry out any of its presumed global responsibilities other than short-term MOOTW operations and bombing the hell out of some rogue state by air. Never mind fighting 2.5 or 1.5 wars at once, we're having grevious personnel rotation trouble with just one.

The mismatch of potential missions with the size of American ground forces is not accidental either but a deliberate policy of politicians from both parties who saw a pot of money in 1990 to use for other things but did not care to admit that slashing the Army from 18 to 12 active-duty divisions also meant changing our strategic expectations for using the Army. A policy of unreality cheerfully continued by the Bush administration for reasons both good ( force the Pentagon to transform) and bad ( it costs money without paying political dividends).

We forget that with an economy 25 % smaller in terms of GDP, the United States once easily afforded parking 300,000 troops in West Germany alone, a mere 15 years ago. So our current dilemma is a matter more of political choice than wallet but the problem cannot be fixed except over a period of several years, so we are left pretty much with employing the paramilitaries alongside an American counterinsurgency effort or giving up.

The loyalist paramilitaries are chomping at the bit, arguing that fire can only be fought with a fire that Washington does not have the stomach to do itself. They're probably correct - the insurgency can be defeated militarily ( or significantly degraded) but not without getting your hands dirty by slaughtering (or at least jailing) Sunni clansmen en masse until the insurgent networks collapse. It's a pragmatically ruthless tactic with a record of success in strangling guerilla armies that goes back to the Boer War, but it requires a Lord Kitchener type leader to carry it out and is exceedingly difficult to do and still look like you are the guy wearing a " white hat". (Though, perhaps if Zarqawi , whose Qaida Iraq group Juan Cole reports as being " fabulously wealthy", assists us by ramping up his own level of ghoulish atrocities, it isn't impossible).

President Bush, for good or ill, is no Lord Kitchener and even winning on the battlefield this way becomes meaningless unless America also wins in the "moral" and "political" spheres in Iraq. Indeed, the Boer war was won by Great Britain militarily, British " paramountcy" in the Cape was preserved by bringing the Afrikaaner states into the empire, but the political costs were very high. Arguably, the Boer War weakened Britain's hold over " the white dominions" and left the British Empire less willing or able to face up to looming strategic challenges, economic or military.

An outcome the United States cannot afford.  ¶ 8:38 AM 7 comments

  MARKET-STATE vs. SHARIA-STATE ?

The central hypothesis of Philip Bobbit't's The Shield of Achilles is that there has been an evolution in constitutional states driven by the dynamic interplay of law, strategy and history. Furthermore, accordng to Bobbitt, the era of the sovereign nation-state is passing away due to ( I reify here for brevity's sake):

1. The Moral Claim of Human Rights
2. Nuclear Weapon proliferation
3. Rise of global and transnational threats
4. Globalization of liberal capitalist economic model
5. Rise of the global communications network

Emerging is a new constitutional form that Bobbitt calls " The Market-State", dedicated to " maximizing the opportunities for its people". For a lengthier examination of The Shield of Achilles and the ideas of Bobbitt, check out Josh Manchester's post at The Adventures of Chester.

Using Bobbitt's definition, should the Old and New Core manage to harmonize their rule-sets on security and transactional effciency, the entire Core could be an incipent market-state. These market-states are seemingly purer, more open-dended network structures than nation-states as Bobbitt classifies the broader Islamist, jihadi, insurgency as a market-state:

"This network, of which Al Qaeda is only a part, greatly resembles a multinational corporation but that is simply to say that it is a market-state, made possible by advances in international telecommunications and transit, rapid computation and weapons of mass destruction." (p.820)

I have to disagree. While al Qaida and the greater Islamist-Salafi-Jihadi network of radicals and terrorists exist in this fluid, "market-state" form described by Bobbitt, the state is transient and tactical. It is quite clear from both by example and by public declarations that the Islamists have an entirely different and comprehensive alternative social contract in mind - The Sharia-State - which when they control territory they refer to as an " Emirate" or as a "Caliphate" ( the former exemplified by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the latter entity encompassing the entire future territorial extent of the Ummah).

A sharia-state would begin by rejecting outright the above points 1 and 4 as these secular concepts clash with longstanding interpretations of Islamic Law and the rulers would also be compelled ideologically to severely restrict the operation of point 5. In fact, all of this occurs already in sharia-influenced nation-states like Iran and Saudi Arabia so we need only extrapolate to imagine an al Qaida Arabia or a Jihadi Egypt. The sharia to hard-core salafis is meant not as a guide but a set of divine regulations - and substantially regulations of a political nature - though competing schools of Islamic jurisprudence differ on the meaning and extent of particular interpretations.

In other words, the fundamental preconditions for a market-state would be intolerable to a sharia-state making the latter a deadly 4GW rival of the former and not, as Bobbitt maintained, a variation.  ¶ 12:12 PM 4 comments

  MUSINGS

DNI has brought up Martin van Creveld's Fate of The State several times lately. Reading that [ed. note: Actually I read it several times. It's worth pondering carefully] combined with recent discussions of the " Moral" dimension of warfare by John Robb, Philip Bobbitt and discussions here on resiliency and moral countermeasures have me thinking about the legitimacy of the American state. Why it has weakened. How to strengthen it, and so on. Inchoate thoughts at present, perhaps tomorrow will bring me some insight.

Also, I'm in an interesting discussion with Aaron over at tdaxp.  ¶ 9:07 PM 2 comments

  BLOG CONSOLIDATION ON THE RIGHT

Dr. Demarche and Marc Schulman have joined forces.

Let the Eurosocialists beware their wrath.  ¶ 7:50 PM 0 comments

  SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FOOT WITH BOTH BARRELS: A PLEA FOR SMARTER COUNTERINTELLIGENCE POLICY

The Bush administration is rightly concerned with escalating levels of Chinese espionage against the United States, both military and economic. Particularly troublesome to U.S. officials is the focus of China's foreign intelligence service on recruiting overseas Chinese who hold American or third party national citizenship. The Chinese are quite aggressive and are already matching the efforts of the old Soviet and East bloc agencies at their peak.

That being said, espionage is a fact of life in international affairs and China's effort to "swarm" the United States with HUMINT agents is a partial redress for American superiority in SIGINT and IMINT over China. The best answer to China's efforts is the develppment of a robust, Sinocentric, counterintelligence capability in the American IC. Instead, quite counterproductively, there is a proposal to deal with this problem via a lazy, crude and immeasurably stupid policy of punishing all would-be scientists of Chinese ethnic origin by discouraging their immigration to the United States.

As any competent economist could explain, this proposal, if enacted, will cause 100 times the damage to the U.S. economy and scientific edge that the spies are doing without providing any corresponding national security benefit whatsoever - as China will simply pick up the same information secondhand in Canada, the UK, Australia, Israel, the EU and Japan. Yes, we will cause China's spooks some inconvenience and expense but the cost to America will be patents not filed, hard science PhDs not graduated, inventions not created and a reverse brain drain - the first in U.S. history- as the best scientists, including native born American ones, go abroad to do first-rate research.

Ironically, if this policy had been in place during WWII it would likely have been Germany that built the atomic bomb and not the United States, as so many critical physicists in the Manhattan Project were technically " enemy nationals". Blanket policies are no substitute for cultivating a a cadre of CI officers with the requisite language skills to do the interviews and investigations of suspected spies.

Getting " deep" language skills is a long term investment in personnel that the Pentagon and the IC would rather not spend any money on as they have " higher" bureaucratic priorities. So this proposal seeks to fool the Congress and public into believing the espionage problem is being addressed- we won't increase our competency, we'll just decrease the number of people who might be spies ! That'll work ! As if real spies won't have the patience to jump through the additional bureaucratic hoops to get a visa. Or the Chinese won't simply start recruiting white guys.

If there was ever the CI equivalent of the "Strategic Hamlet Policy" from the Vietnam War, this one is it.

UPDATE:

Dave at The Glittering Eye has thoughts on China's Titan Rain PLA cyberespionage program.

More on Titan Rain - here, here and here.  ¶ 9:05 PM 3 comments

  A DEMONSTRATION IN THE ART OF HORIZONTAL THINKING

Dan of tdaxp has a graphics rich mini-magnum opus entitled " Globalization is Water: The Magic Cloud". In it Dan discusses ( and illustrates) the complex connections between:

The Magic Cloud
Fuzzy Logic
Clausewitzian Friction
Darwinism
Analogical Thinking
Tipping Points
Perception
Fundamentalism as a cognitive frame
Phase Dominance
Boydian strategy
PNM Theory
Dynamic vs. Static Modelling
Cognitive Theory
IR Theory
Horizontal Thinking
Insight

Dan left out the kitchen sink and Bayesian Probability analysis but that was about it :o)  ¶ 3:37 PM 0 comments

  THE PAPER TRAIL OF THE "PAPER OF RECORD"

The New York Times prides itself on being " the paper of record" for our nation. On foreign policy though their editorial record is not one of consistent principle - unless partisanship and historical amnesia constitute principles. Where the Times stands on a given issue depends a great deal on who is standing in the Oval Office. That is as true today for the Iraq War as much as it was yesterday for the war in Vietnam.

Marc Schulman of The American Future is running a three part series that meticulously traces the evolution of the Times in regard to Iraq and it is a devastating portrait:

"A war can be lost because public opinion turns against its continued prosecution. The New York Times – the self-described “newspaper of record” – is among the world’s most influential opinion leaders. As shown by the cited quotations, the newspaper’s stance on Iraq underwent a complete transformation during the decade separating 1993 and 2003. While its editors never lost their fear of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their prescription for countering the threat posed by the weapons was altered beyond recognition. In 1993, by arguing that cease-fire violations nullified U.N. protection, the Times affirmed the right of a victorious party to resume hostilities at its sole discretion if the party it defeated did not abide by the terms of the agreement to which it affixed its signature. Ten years later, the Times reversed its stance, asserting that the United States should not go to war without the approval of the United Nations. In so doing, the Times implicitly argued that going to war with the approval of a multilateral institution took precedence over the use of military force to expeditiously eliminate the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD.

This post, which covers the eight years of the Clinton administration, is the first of three that employ the Times’ editorials to trace and analyze the evolution of the newspaper’s position on Iraq. The second will cover the pre-invasion Bush administration, while the third will deal with the period from the fall of Baghdad to the present."

Continue reading...

This is an example of blogging at its best, not just citizen-journalism but citizen-history - and I will be linking to each part in Marc's series.  ¶ 8:17 PM 2 comments

  CHET RICHARDS REVIEWS BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION

Dr. Chet Richards, Editor of Defense & The National Interest has posted a review of Blueprint For Action by Thomas P.M. Barnett. This was a very important review, one well worth reading in full; tough but fair and frequently laudatory, written by someone in the small circle of theorists and defense intellectuals who can reasonably be considered a peer of Dr. Barnett's.

It was, unlike most book reviews, informed commentary.

For those not familiar with Dr. Richards, a mathematician by training, he was the long-time associate of the great military strategist Colonel John Boyd, of whose ideas Richards is the
" universally acclaimed keeper of the flame" and authorized briefer since Colonel Boyd's death. Richards is himself the author of several books on strategy including A Swift Elusive Sword and numerous articles. In addition, Richards operates the Belisarius and DNI sites, both of which I recommend highly to anyone interested in strategy or military history.

Several excerpts of Dr. Richards review of BFA ( my comments are in regular text):

"His recommendations for the Department of Defense have finally reached the “radical” level. Essentially, he wants to shrink it down to the special operators (SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers, etc.) plus airpower and put the rest of the Army and Navy and the entire Marine Corps into a new Department of Everything Else. In other words, all of the Marine Corps and about 95% of the Army would become part of Sys Admin. I am truly in awe."

I have watched this evolution in Dr. Barnett's thinking since the publication of The Pentagon's New Map where he introduced the Leviathan-System Administration dichotomy. Initially, the borders were fuzzy between the two and Dr. Barnett leaned toward the conservative side of structural transformation of the armed services, chiding me for including some serious " trigger pullers" in the Sys Admin category. Ultimately in BFA, Dr. Barnett envisioned something far more radical by making the Marine Corps the " Mini-Me Leviathan" of the Sys Admin force. This incidentally returned the Marines to their historic role as the undisputed masters of Small Wars, a mission that is a good cultural fit for the Corps.

"Pattern for success

Like John Boyd, whom he references several times in the book, Barnett considers the range of human conflict from the national aim or vision down to tactics. Putting Barnett’s scheme into Boyd’s pattern would give us something like:

Vision: End “terrorism” and war as we know it; alleviate suffering and poverty world wide.

Grand Strategy: Shrink the Gap – connectivity everywhere.

Strategy: Six point process for “processing politically bankrupt states” (to be critiqued below) featuring internationally-sanctioned preemption when necessary.

Grand Tactics: Build support among a designated group of Core states to sanction attack for removing offending regime and funding reconstruction.

Tactics: Airpower-intensive network-centric warfare (NCW) to take out organized military forces and eliminate or capture indicted members of regime; then, actions to preclude fourth generation warfare including armed counterinsurgency and timely reconstruction of state with connectivity and "New Core" status.

Dr. Richards is laying out the cornerstone for a grand synthesis of strategic thinking that really needs to be considered more deeply. PNM, Boyd's Patterns of Conflict, 4GW, NCW, Global Guerillaism all contain at least some principles that can be extrapolated to every level of the Boydian Taxonomy. Some of these theories are more versatile in this regard than others -i.e. they are more fully developed comprehensive paradigms - and most excel or exhibit greater detail at a particular level.

PNM 's locus is at the level of Vision and Grand strategy and grows sketchier as you move downward toward the practical, concrete, operational application in limited scenarios. Barnett is leaving an " open system" for practitioners of warfare to fill in details by trial and error. The other theories seldom reach the Grand Strategy level, much less articulate a coherently persuasive Vision that becomes the basis of a new moral authority the way PNM/BFA does. That in essence is the " secret" of the power behind the appeal of PNM theory; Dr. Barnett's vision is not a recipe for blowing things up with greater efficiency than the other guy -it is a moral argument for why we should act.

The potential for finding complementary interactions here is large. And discovering the underlying dynamics that give all these theories their varying degrees of validity - which I expect we will find through a better understanding of the behavior of complex networks and in applying such principles as resilience, emergence and phase transitions to analyzing strategy.

"Iraq and the non-case for Sys Admin

Now let’s turn to the one acknowledged failure – Iraq. For Iraq not to blow his case out of the water, Barnett has to declare it a “no-test,” the term used in programs like missile defense when you don’t want an obvious disaster to end support for the project. Barnett’s explanation for Iraq is that we didn’t follow his six-step formula, so it doesn’t represent a failure of it. He is obviously correct that there was no Sys Admin (it was 2 months after the capture of Baghdad before we cut orders for the first military police unit) – but this observation is not conclusive. The fact that we had no Sys Admin and Iraq is a debacle does not imply that having such a force would have led to a more favorable outcome.


...Is there any reason to suspect that with enough troops on the ground, we couldn’t have precluded an insurgency? Against this is the argument that the occupying force itself is a catalyst for insurgency and so one of the ingredients in successful counterinsurgency is keeping as small a footprint as possible. A large Sys Admin force, particularly a multinational one with varying proficiency in handling insurgency – and comprising different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds – adds complexity, increases the potential for misunderstandings and provocative events, and provides a target-rich environment. For these reasons, 250,000 largely non-Muslim Sys Adminers, some with experience fresh from Chechnya, might not have been the panacea Barnett claims. [And I have to admit that this is a significant change from my own critique of Map here on DNI, where I argued for such a force.] "

Well, there are a great deal of variables to play with here in terms of a thought experiment entitled " Iraq with Ideal Sys Admin conditions". Simple advantages in numbers do gain the security effect of proximity when you hit " X" personnel per 100,000 - it simply becomes that much more difficult of a task to pull off insurgent attacks when occupation forces are spread " thick" rather than thin. Higher levels of security means more basic services which in turn reduces grievances but the pivotal aspect will be the political skill with which such a larger force is employed. A considerable portion of America's problems in Iraq are of our own making - an insurgency composed only of foreign jihadis is nothing more than the Baader-Meinhoff gang in a khaffiyeh.

Much food for thought here. A very stimulating review of a superior book.  ¶ 6:19 PM 2 comments

  RECOMMENDED READING [ UPDATED]

Have not done one these, at least a longer one, in some time. Overdue:

The consistently superb Eide Neurolearning Blog explores the intrinsic limitation of psychological self-referentiality in understanding others in "The Tyranny of Our Thinking Styles"

Jeff at Caerdroia - who was kind enough to put me on his coveted quote banner space today - has a highly sensible piece entitled " The Military and Political Implications of Disclosing Strategy". Churchill and FDR understood such things but back then the media did as well.

Dr. Von posts on "Thinking Out Loud About Emergent Behavior...Those Power Laws"

Military analyst and writer Ralph Peters, always worth reading, in a NYPost op-ed " How To Lose A War" ( Hat Tip: Memeorandum)

John Hagel of Edge Perspectives reflected on the contributions to society of the late Peter Drucker who died just shy of his 96th birthday last week.

String theorist Lubos Motl points his readers toward Seed Magazine

Check out the new Threat' s Watch organized by Bill Roggio, Steve Schippert and Marvin Hutchins. Zenpundit wishes them all success with their new venture.

That's it.

UPDATE WITH SOME POLITICAL ANALYSIS:

The Murtha -Troop Withdrawal vote battle in the House of Representatives reignited the fury of the Swift Boat Veterans against former Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry. John O'Neill, a swift boat Vietnam Veteran and was the author of Unfit For Command had an op-ed today blasting Kerry for his comments regarding Murtha's Republican critics given his own rhetorical history. ( Full text courtesy of Bruce Kesler)

To reiterate an analysis I gave over at The Duck of Minerva, the " coward" shot at Congressman Murtha by Rep. Jeane Schmidt was out of line - ridiculous actually. Murtha is no coward but the Democratic anger in the House had less to do with a nasty remark to that effect than with the GOP leadership seizing on Murtha's poorly conceived proposal to:

a) Short-circuit an incipient antiwar " drumbeat" media strategy to build the political momentum to *force* troop withdrawals from Iraq over Bush administration opposition.and

b) Get the Democrats on record for a highly unpalatable vote.

This was a two-fold debacle for antiwar Democrats. Here's why it happened:

Setting aside a debate over the intrinsic merits of troop withdrawal, the Republicans outplayed the Democrats politically because the Democratic leadership is still trying to force-fit the Iraq War into the politics of the Vietnam War paradigm of their boomer youth ( or the boomer youth of their activist base at least) despite this script being a repeated failure with the general public, even one disillusioned with Bush's handling of the war. Why do they keep doing it then ? Because this is the only frame of the Iraq issue that the Moveon.org screamers/ activist base will tolerate.

The Iraq War is many things but it is *not* the Vietnam War. President Bush incidentally, as I read a lot of military-related boards, sites and journals, has no shortage of critics within the uniformed military and civilian defense community on Iraq, but proposals like Murtha's are not a form of opposition to which many of them would sign-on.

If only the Republicans were half as effective in neutralizing the Iraqi insurgency...perhaps Bush will luck out by having Pat Leahy and Nancy Pelosi form an LBJ Martyr Brigade and then the White House can conduct operations against them.  ¶ 7:56 AM 0 comments

  WHY BARNETT AND ROBB SEE DIFFERENT CHINA PATTERNS

Link preface:

"No Longer a One-Sided Fight To Demonize China" and " Perfect NYT Trifecta" by Dr. Barnett

"Fooling Yourself" by John Robb

" The Globalization Bull in the China Shop" and " Will China's New Left be a Force to be Reckoned With?" by Zenpundit

"China's Time Bombs " , " China's Time Bombs: Gray China", " China's Time Bomb: One More Word on The Pension System", " China's Time Bombs: The Banking System" by Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye

"Post Communist China" by Simon of Simon World

President Bush's much publicized trip to China does not have the austere Cold War gravity of the Soviet-American summits or the epochal significance of Richard Nixon's flight to Beijing but the normality itself is an important sign. The leaders of China and the United States are trying to navigate a relationship of significant magnitude and one with enormous room for future positive growth - but they are doing so bereft of mutual understandings on many important subjects in bilateral and international relations ranging from Taiwan to proliferation of WMD technology.

Sino-American relations are really at a critical moment as we stand at the root of a multifaceted decision tree whose branches spread outward into a fog of future scenarios we cannot clearly discern. Part of the problem is the paradoxical position of the Chinese state which is strong and weak, resililient and fragile, resurgent and fading all at once makes gaming China's outcomes difficult at best. Minxin Pei described China's elite in Foreign Policy in these terms:

"But China’s isn’t just any government. It is one that rests on fragile political foundations, little rule of law, and corrupt governance. Worse, it has consistently placed the highest value on economic growth and viewed all demands for curbing its discretion and power as threats to its goal of rapid modernization. The result? Social deficits in education, public health, and environmental protection. But it is hardly surprising, since promoting high growth advances the careers of government officials. Thus, China’s elites devote most of their resources to building glitzy shopping malls, factories, and even Formula One racing tracks, while neglecting social investments with long-term returns. So for those who wonder how, if China’s political system is so rotten, it can deliver robust growth year after year, the answer is that it delivers robust growth year after year, in part, because it is so rotten.

But the Chinese Communist Party knows that the people will tolerate only so much rot. Corruption is a rising concern. The party’s inability to police its own officials, many of whom are now engaged in unrestrained looting of public assets, is one of Beijing’s greatest worries. These regime insiders have effectively privatized the power of the state and use it to advance personal interests. Their loyalty to the party is questionable, if it exists at all. The accelerating effect on the party’s demise resembles that of a bank run; more and more insiders cannot wait to cash in their investment in the party."

On the other hand, much the same could have been said ( and was said in Europe) of the America of Boss Tweed, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Mobilier, Mark Hanna, The Whiskey Ring, Jay Gould, The Homestead Strike and Teapot Dome. With great effort at reform the United States managed to impose the rule of law in matters of both market and politics. It was a bitter struggle though, which took decades and was done in an era when, except for the flow of investment capital, the United States needed little from overseas and derived its economic growth primarily from its own vast internal market.

China's leaders today do not have quite the same luxury of time as did American leaders in the 19th century. While vast, China's potential consumer market lacks purchasing power and as a result China's growth is export-driven; as such, the deep temptation for the Politburo, due both political and profit incentives, is to reinvest endlessly in current growth sectors than in basic services, infrastructure and educational opportunities for the 600-800 million peasants lagging behind. China has an array of future-altering national decisions to make in the next twenty years that most advanced nations, by comparison, made over several centuries - and China's leaders, lacking intrinsic legitimacy, need to get all of them right to avoid a popular explosion.

Thus it is possible to look at China, as does Dr. Barnett and see where all the nonzero sum economic trends are pointing and forecast a hopeful future worth creating for China, the United States and the world. Certainly, the United States can influence some of these outcomes for good or ill and Dr. Barnett is trying to nudge policy makers toward choosing the strategic good.

It is also possible to look at China's numerous political and economic contradictions as does John Robb and Dave Schuler and see a China that is going to walk the narrowest, most self-absorbed, zero-sum path for fearing of falling off the tightrope. As countries are driven by their own internal dynamics this scenario is a very possible one.

And it is also possible - though far more unrealistic - to look at China's defense establishment and diplomacy and assume that China represents a strategic threat to the United States on the revisionist, anti-status quo model of the great totalitarian powers of the 20th century. China, like most states, has a strand of angry ultranationalism and ethnocentrism in it's political culture and there are factions in the PLA and the CCP who periodically play this card during internal power struggles. They play this card because they are not in the driver's seat in China but would like to be. Treating China like it is already our enemy empowers these fringe ultranationalists.

China is a great power in a state of societal flux. All our policies in Asia need to be bent toward guiding China to a peaceful rise that does not conflict with critical American interests.  ¶ 12:03 AM 0 comments

  A PLETHORA OF PARAMILITARIES

This is probably not cutting edge information but it is a good program of Iraq's privately organized armed groups. Can't tell the players without a scorecard.

Hat tip to Dave Dilegge at The Small Wars Journal  ¶ 11:46 AM 0 comments

  RETROSPECTIVE ON THE FRENCH RIOTS

Most of the commentary on the rioting in France seemed to focus on the socioeconomic angle, something very comfortable politically to American liberals as it recalled the racial discrimination that created the 1960's " long hot summer" riots in this country. The second largest segment of opinion dealt with Islamism in France which American conservatives harkened to as it fit the current War on Terror framework. Very few commenters, notably John Robb, discussed the role of criminal gangs controlling TAZ in French suburbs for years, in spreading the riots.

I thought I would put forth some of the more provocative evaluations on the riots from some different ideological and theoretical perspectives that emerged as the rioting ebbed.

" Haaretz Interview with Alain Finkielkraut" via Marc at The American Future

"Why Paris is Burning" by Mark A. LeVine at HNN

" C'est la Guerre " by William Lind at DNI

"Reflections on the Riots in France" by Dr. Michael Scheuer in U.S Cavalry On Point

My own commentary, circa day 10, can be found here.

Interestingly enough, the high rise public housing in some poor French suburbs is a very familiar sight to me or anyone from Chicago, resembling the 1950's and 1960's housing projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes built by the first Daley administration. The solution to gang-rule and drug trade warfare in these buildings ultimately was to begin demolishing them; neither the city of Chicago's very tough police department nor the Feds were ever able to reestablish order there after the 1980's. Even the much publicized " move-in" to Cabrini of Mayor Jane Byrne which flooded the projects with uniformed and plainclothes police, could not break the grip of Chicago's paramilitary street gangs like the Vice Lords, the Black Gangster Disciples and the El Rukns over the projects.

It will be interesting to see if the French state can impose its rule-sets in these suburban zones that the French government itself admits have been beyond their effective grasp or if ultimately they will try a " tear down and disperse" solution along with social and assimilation programs.  ¶ 8:30 AM 3 comments

  COMMENTARY'S 60TH ANNIVERSARY SYMPOSIUM

This is pretty impressive. Commentary asembled the following public figures to debate and evaluate the Bush Doctrine:

Paul Berman, Max Boot, William F. Buckley, Jr., Eliot A. Cohen, Niall Ferguson, Aaron L. Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Reuel Marc Gerecht, Victor Davis Hanson, Owen Harries, Mark Helprin
Daniel Henninger, Stanley Hoffmann, Josef Joffe, Paul Johnson, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Robert J. Lieber, Richard Lowry, Edward N. Luttwak, Joshua Muravchik, John O’Sullivan, Martin Peretz
Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, David Pryce-Jones, Arch Puddington, Natan Sharansky, Amir Taheri, Ruth Wedgwood, George Weigel, James Q. Wilson, R. James Woolsey  ¶ 7:26 PM 0 comments

  BLOGGING AS A NETWORK OF INFLUENCE

Dan of tdaxp had an interesting post reflecting on his victory over Nationmaster after numerous blogs including Zenpundit began piling on in his defense. Quoting from an article on the recent flap over Sony's XCP debacle, Dan posted ( quote in italics; Dan in regular text):

" 'It seems crystal clear that but for the citizen journalists, Sony never would have done anything about this," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyber liberties advocacy group that has been vocal in its condemnation of Sony and may eventually file a a lawsuit against Sony, in addition to three that have already been filed.

"It's plain to me that it was Sony's intent to brush the story under the rug and forget about it."Alan Scott, chief marketing office at business information service Factiva, said, "I think that we're in an entirely new world from a marketing perspective. The rules of the game have changed dramatically. The old way of doing things by ignoring issues, or with giving the canned PR spin response within the blogosphere, it just doesn't work.'

Without blogs, rough-shod corporations and politicians like Activa Holdings and Chris Welch could even get away with harmful lawsuits without any consequences.The Citizen-Media, also known as the blogosphere, is an important leveler, extending connectivity to those other than the Main-Stream Media and the Main-Stream Corporations"

In my view Dan is correct but he has not taken his analysis nearly far enough. In fairness though, the premise that the blogosphere is the power of vox populi incarnate is shared by the bicoastal media elite who look on with as much horror and loathing as Dan does admiration and wonder. The everyman is really irrelevant here and if Dan was only an everyman he'd have received a subpeona from NationMaster's corporate shyster squad by now.

The number of blogs in existence is currently estimated at about 60-70 million plus. Most are admittedly, mind-numbing dreck written by 13 year old girls, spamblogs and mercifully short-lived experiments in public whining by twentysomethings in bad relationships - but that still leaves tens of millions of sober, rational bloggers, trying to get noticed. Out of that unruly horde - a larger than many nation-states - tdaxp is # 999 on the planet ! Think about the Social Darwinian implications of that stement. Any blogger who is, with regularity, interesting enough to be in the top 5000 is above the common herd.

For example, my blogroll contains: enough PhD's to fill several departments at a large university, including one Nobel Prize winner; two nationally known defense intellectuals; several physicists; other scientists; a number of legal experts; an eminent federal judge, numerous historians; combat veterans; several journalists at medium sized city newspapers, including one editorial page editor; diplomats; computer/IT experts, a professional economist; linguists and at least one philosopher. A fair amount of collective brainpower by any measure.

The blogosphere does not empower the average person, it empowers the above average person who previously would - by chance, occupation or geography - have been excluded from having any siginificant input into the larger culture. The centralized old media of the big three networks by and large took their cue from the editorial page New York Times, as did the metropolitan newspapers of a hundred smaller cities. The Eastern Establishment truly shaped public opinion once upon a time. A few voices carried then - Walter Lipmann, Joseph Alsop, Walter Cronkite, Ben Bradlee, "Punch" Sulzberger - there were others but it was a pretty damn short list. The Establishment's superficially diversified heirs still shape the debate to a considerable extent but with two significant changes:

a) They have lost their monopoly on the determination of the bounds of acceptable public discourse

and

b) The very bright or accomplished citizens- formally just isolated local influencers -who might never have met prior to the blogosphere, being scattered throughout the nation( or the world) now connect and form durable networks. Left or Right, this cultural "outlier elite" rejects much of what the MSM elite has to offer.

The blogosphere is an aggregator of intelligence and influence. Primarly, for the moment, blogging is an amusement for these talented individuals but when they are threatened or offended they can respond with surprising speed and intensity. Just ask John Kerry or Dan Rather. Or Trent Lott. They are not the general public which is why the corporate P.R. routine and bigshot bluster backfires so badly with bloggers.

Eventually, some shortsighted fool in the Federal government will make some arrogant gesture that will really outrage these potential leaders and all the latent strength and ability will crystallize as a blogospheric party - an organized faction that will be energized enough to create a political upheaval on par with 1932 or 1980.

Wait and see.  ¶ 7:36 PM 0 comments

  FRIDAY

Spending the day with The Son of Zenpundit in his world of hot wheels, Batman, nerf basketball, The Incredibles, beginning reading books and the various and sundry activities of an active and curious pre-school boy.

Posting will commence later tonight when the tyke and his sibling have gone to bed.  ¶ 8:04 AM 2 comments

  DEMOCRATIC COGNITIVE DISCONNECTION

Our friends on the Democratic side of the divide have launched a new venture to play to the activist base under the guise of boldly reaching out to...well.. the center left voter.

Called "WomenDemocrats.org" this group ( unclear if is a 503(c) or a 527 or something else) is promoting an " Innovation Agenda" that is remarkably free of any attempt to look at subjects beyond domestic policy. Some of it isn't really that bad and reads pro-connectivity and at least pro-small business - but aren't women or Democrats interested in being innovative in foreign and defense policy ? Or even in macroeconomic issues like Globalization ? This online broadsheet reminds me of something from 1995.

Has foreign policy officially become the new third rail in Democratic politics ?  ¶ 9:26 AM 0 comments

  OPEN SOURCE MEDIA LAUNCHED ! ( plus new blogs on the roll)

Via DJB at The First Iraq, I have learned of the launch of Open Source Media, a collective media enterprise - one might even say " empire" - of the blogosphere's elite (including such admired luminaries as Austin Bay and Nathan). OSM's mission:

"OSM’s mission is to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of them, providing bloggers with a forum to meet and share resources, and the chance to join a for-profit network that will give them additional leverage to pursue knowledge wherever they may find it. From academics, professionals and decorated experts, to ordinary citizens sitting around the house opining in their pajamas, our community of bloggers are among the most widely read and influential citizen journalists out there, and our roster will be expanding daily. We also plan to provide a bridge between old media and new, bringing bloggers and mainstream journalists—more and more of whom have started to blog—together in a debate-friendly forum."

This project would seem to be a nonzero sum enterprise that could go far beyond the usual collective blogging efforts or aggregator platform to become a powerful and influential generator of unique media content. Content, it must be said, is going to be increasingly, and for the forseeable future, valuable in a wired world with more conduits of communication than can be qualitatively filled.

And in my own humble corner of the blogosphere, I'd like to welcome the following new bloggers to the Zenpundit roll:


Abu Aardvark

Aqoul

Antimedia

Atlas Shrugs

Dean's World

Edge Perspectives

Grim's Hall

Memeorandum

New Yorker in DC

Overexcitable

QandO

The First Iraq

Check them out !  ¶ 7:59 AM 1 comments

  THE BLOGOSPHERE'S VON CLAUSEWITZ REVIVAL

The literary kriegsherr is enjoying a bit of a revival lately:

"An Interview with Martin van Creveld" by DNI ( compared here with Sun Tzu)

" Clausewitz and War" by Teflon at Moltenthought

"God of War" by Younghusband at Coming Anarchy


A classic does not go out of style it seems.  ¶ 7:48 PM 0 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR REBUTTAL AND COMMENTARY: CURTIS WEEKS

This is not a rebuttal per se of the roundtable but Curtis Gale Weeks of Phatic Communion weaves in a number of economic, political, cultural and philosophical questions related to globalization and American foreign policy that readers may find his post intriguing and challenging.

Link Preface:

The Gaps in "Globalism"

"The Gaps in Globalism

by Curtis Gale Weeks

Globalism continues to be a hot topic, with reason. Most of the flux currently being experienced, throughout American society but also worldwide, is a result of the conflict of paradigms brought about by the growing connectivity that slices across these paradigms.

"Probably the most common use of the word paradigm is in the sense of weltanschauung. For example, in social science, the term is used to describe the set of experiences, beliefs and values that affect the way an individual perceives reality and responds to that perception. Social scientists have adopted the Khunian phrase “paradigm shift” to denote a particular social phenomena rather than what was originally meant by Khun’s study on the practices and development of science. Even occultists, notably chaos magicians, use the term - to describe a shift in personal belief systems concerning magic (magic theory).
Some language purists feel that among “business philosophers” and advocates of any type of change whatsoever, the term paradigm is so widely abused that it bears no meaning whatsoever. Some believe it should be abolished from the English language, and formal studies of this show it as one of the most disliked words in English. "

[Webster’s Online Dictionary: Rosetta Edition]

The looseness of the term paradigm is probably a reflection of something much deeper — as well as the general dislike of the term. Phatic Communion reader Anne suggested in a recent comment on another post a simmering conflict between relativists and moralists, which might account for the flux or at least be a symptom of the flux we are currently experiencing: The looseness of the term is advocated by relativists; the support of strong paradigms (as explanations, motivations) is common among moralists even if they do not use the term.

Controlling, overarching systems either shape society or are shaped by society; or, both. The degree to which we may control the creation of these systems is hotly debated, as is the configuration of whatever systems may be created or modified (if any; extreme relativists and extreme moralists do not seem to believe we can do either.)

For the purpose of this entry, I’ll utilize the term paradigm to signify the various modes by which the world and world events are viewed and explained — although I don’t expect to use the term very much beyond this opening. Suffice to say that

Favorite paradigms represent static worldviews, and

The current flux occurs because differing paradigms are coming into conflict at a high rate, and


Although new paradigms may ultimately form during this process of flux, I will question whether the current flux will or should ultimately resolve into a final paradigm or collection of paradigms. (Although, given my penchant for meandering thought, I might not do so in so many words.)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Flux: a result of the conflict of paradigms brought about by the growing connectivity that slices across these paradigms.
A return to the word, flux.

The term actually comes from the Latin for flow even if it is not always used to denote a flowing environment. The paradox is key. The scientific use of the word often represents a rate of flow of particles or energy; and, the idea that a rate can vary, causing and/or caused by various changes in substance, leads to the common idea of change for the term flux. We may translate this idea for use in understanding world paradigms — or, world views — and the present conflicts brought about through changing rates of connectivity. Various levels of insularity in the past limited the cultural, intellectual, and economic flow between different sets (or, sects) of world views, which in turn led to standardized and accepted modes of interaction, or the flow of these things between the parties. With an increased complexity of interactions, or of networking between parties — or of flow between parties — various paradigmatic elements began to also flow between parties at a greater rate. This has led to a destabilization of static world views. Taking again from the scientific view, we might consider what happens when new data is introduced which conflicts or modifies prior knowledge of a given event or substance: controversies occur at first, then new models are created to account for the new information, and these models persist until another introduction of new and controversial data arrives to upset that model. With greater connectivity between societies (and even, within societies), static world views also undergo such perturbations; and, with the increase in the rate of information being transmitted between societies, the cognition loop of controversy — remodeling — stasis cycles at an increasing rate.

Importantly, when considering whole societies ...."


Continue Reading Gaps in Globalism:  ¶ 10:06 AM 1 comments

  PONDERING THE MEANING OF THE MUJAHIDAAT

Defense and The National Interest has a fairly regular though anonymous contributer
"Fabius Maximus" who reacted to this report on female suicide bombers by the Jamestown Foundation with this commentary(PDF).

FM has a 4GW analysis on female Islamist suicide-bombers which he ties rather nicely to the unsavory but expedient Gap practice of press-ganging child-soldiery into various rebel armies. FM is treating the phenomenon of the " mujahidaat" as a natural evolution in military practice resulting from the disintegration of the rule-sets that govern such things as wars and nation-states.

Fabius Maximus may be correct in his reading. On the other hand, enlisting women into combat has seldom been the tactic of the winning side in a war - instead it usually keeps the conflict going until the damage to the side employing women becomes irrevocable. The Israeli experiment with female combatants in 1948 was so bad as to have never been repeated. Enlisting the entirety of its population did not save Paraguay in the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870; instead Paraguay lost more than half its total population ( and 98 % of its men) and it never really recovered. The ferocity of Germanic and Gaullish tribesmen -including their women - only inspired the Romans to undetake decimatory pacification campaigns.

Much like Robert E. Lee's 11th hour proposal to free and arm the slaves to replenish the ranks of the Confederacy, that the Islamists are now reaching for female suicide bombers to attack wedding receptions bodes poorly for their cause.  ¶ 9:10 PM 0 comments

  U.S.-RUSSIA MOVE TO CORNER IRANIAN HARDLINERS ON NUCLEAR PROGRAM

The United States, Russia, the IAEA and other major powers moved toward establishing an international nuclear fuel bank that would remove any legitimate need for Iran or any other non-nuclear state to reprocess nuclear fuel - a step that can be used for both nuclear reactors as well as to make nuclear warheads.

"Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN nuclear monitor, said on Monday he had won commitments from the US and Russia for an initiative to create an international nuclear fuel bank. He said only such an international approach could resolve the problem of countries being able to develop a nuclear bomb through their own development of the fuel cycle.

"You can’t target one country," he told a Washington conference hosted by the Carnegie think-tank, referring to international pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme.

Mr ElBaradei said he was «very close» to being able to establish an assured supply of nuclear fuel, under IAEA management, within the next year.

The US made a commitment in September to supply 17 tonnes of highly enriched uranium that would be blended down to 290 tonnes of lightly enriched fuel. Russia would also give material from dismantled weapons.

Japan ’s multi-billion-dollar nuclear facility, to be built at Rokkasho, could also become part of a global fuel bank system, he suggested."

While Iran's regime can be expected to balk at this alternative given that their nuclear program is obviously and primarily for the acquisition of nuclear weapons, establishing this kind of bank erodes the "plausible deniability" for the mullahs for even the determinedly gullible in the West.

  ¶ 9:27 AM 0 comments

  RECOMMENDED READING

Just two tonight, despite a backlog of excellent posts to tackle. Sometimes less is more.

Bruce Kesler's " From Every Mountain Top Let Freedom Ring" at The Democracy Project. an excerpt:

"The World Summit on the Information Society meets in Tunis this week to attempt to place the Internet under international controls.

Is freedom divisible? Less and less so, as national and individual actors have the technology and ease to slip near and across borders. Borders are less barriers today than weakening filters.

...Yesterday’s London Times quotes me, with respect to the effort to place control of the Internet under U.N. control:

“ ‘This issue, this outrageous putsch attempt, deserves an uproar heard around the world on the internet,’ wrote blogger Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project. He criticized the EU for its ties to ‘such stalwarts of smothering internet freedom as China, Cuba, Iran.’ ”

The London Times also quotes two leftist bloggers, one calling this “the US conservative spin machine turning this into a battle between the democracy-loving US Government protecting the internet from censorship from the dictators and thugs who run the UN,” and another, the leading leftist blogger Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, saying, the U.S.’ “international belligerence” undermines the world’s faith that the U.S. should regulate a “global medium.” The U.S., unmentioned, has not regulated, but invested in and maintained a completely open forum, anathema to tyrants and those who travel alongside."

Bruce has been beating the drum on this issue and he's completely right - the U.N. is neither capable of governing the internet well in a technical sense or a political one - as the states most anxious for UN control are the ones most alarmed by the internet's freewheeling nature.

I also have note that while there are a lot of smart, thoughtful and persuasive liberals in the blogosphere, Moulitas, on the other hand, is only a hop, skip and a jump from the crackpots over at The Democratic Underground. If the Bush administration were feeding the hungry, the DailyKos would find a kind word for starvation.

From Chirol " A PNM Take on The Riots" at Coming Anarchy. An excerpt ( but click the link for Chirol's beautiful graphic ilustration of the concepts).

"France’s minorities, living in ghettos separated from the rest of society have developed their own culture and implicit rule sets. On top of that, French law, i.e. explicit rules, according to reports, does not extend very far into these areas. Thus, we have weak enforcement of explicit rules in the form of police presence which simultaneously reinforces the growing ghetto rule-set. Thus, this violence is NOT an abberation but rather a norm in sync with the gap’s rule-set. However, it’s now spilling over into the core, instead of staying inside the gap.

Instead of concentrating on the specifics here, think back to the basic Core/Gap theory and the blueprint for action needed to connect these areas and keep them connected. Instead of thinking of poverty or radical Islam as problems, think of them as symptoms for disconnectedness. France needs to take a hard line jailing and deporting who they can, but at the end of the day, their job is to connect these ghettos and like Barnett said, the boys aren’t coming home. Granted we aren’t talking about soldiers here, but his point stands that a sustained effort over a long period of time will be necessary to increase the “flows” and ultimately connect France’s gap."

Chirol has out-Barnetted Barnett !!  ¶ 7:08 PM 4 comments

  VICE-ADMIRAL ARTHUR K. CEBROWSKI, R.I.P.

I was sad to see from Dr. Barnett's blog that one of the nation's preeminent strategic thinkers and creative defense intellectuals, Vice-Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, passed away this weekend after a long illness. Cebrowski was hailed as " The Father of Network-Centric Warfare" and was noted for his vision and depth as a military theorist. The implications of Cebrowski's NCO paradigm for warfare, economics and business management have yet to be fully realized or understood.

Until recently, Cebrowski headed the Office of Force Transformation, a post created in the wake of 9/11, and reported directly to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Zenpundit would like to offer sincere condolences to the family and friends of Art Cebrowski.

I'm not certain exactly how many first-rate strategic minds the United States can boast of having, but we just lost one of the giants.

Addendum:

Arthur K. Cebrowski on Defense Transformation

The 1998 Proceedings Article of Network-Centric Warfare

Department of Defense Report to Congress on Network-Centric Warfare  ¶ 9:33 AM 2 comments

  MORAL COUNTERMEASURES AGAINST ANTI-GLOBALIZATION GUERILLAS

About two weeks ago an anonymous commenter asked of me ( and also Dan of tdaxp)

"What would an example of moral counter-blitz by the US against Al Qaeda? Are counters that have a negative effect on the morale of the external culture counter-productive? If so, what justifications would there be for short-term gains via negative counters-measures?"

Dan referenced Colonel John Boyd's famed Patterns of Conflict brief, slides 105 -111 and then went on to give a more developed Boydian answer in the comments section of my post . The anonymous commenter also brought in to play John Robb's post on Evo Morales. John followed up Sunday on his more formal blog by elaborating on a Morales Bolivia as a " Gray Democracy" with gray denoting " gray market" and not, as in the case of the EU or Japan, a sharply aging demographic.

So we have two types of strategic threats represented here for american policy makers to deal with - a 4GW conflict represented by al Qaida and an indirect " Global Guerilla" geoeconomic and geopolitical attack in the vein of unrestricted warfare being played out on an international chessboard. Let us set al Qaida aside to look at the second threat so that we clarify its nature. John Robb wrote:

"Rogue democracies? Evo Morales (a very popular candidate for President of Bolivia), has given his support for legalizing coca production and voiced an intent to walk away from US anti-drug policies: "We are not interested in protecting US interests." Additionally, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is actively using his countries oil wealth to subvert US policy in the region. "

In my opinion, neither Morales nor Chavez are democrats except in the same nominal sense as Slobodan Milosevic -i.e. participating in a democratic electoral system only to the extent that they can maximize outcomes for themselves. Chavez is a former putschist and Morales toppled two democratically elected governments with street demonstrations; the only democratic scenarios these guys respect are the elections that their side wins. At best, Morales and Chavez are illiberal populists and the only intelligent aspect of a generally hapless U.S. policy toward Venezuela has been not providing Chavez with an anti-yankee pretext to formally seize absolute power.

These men and the explicitly authoritarian political networks they represent are the enemy every bit as much as al Qaida. They are the global radical Left regrouped after the fall of the Soviets in a corporate merger with the world's most atavistic cultural reactionaries.

The challenge of the alternative economic model Chavez and Morales represent America has seen before, though not for some time, in the form of state -directed capitalism of fascist and quasi-fascist states during the 1930's and 1940's, including Peron's Argentina and managed trade type barter agreements pioneered by Hjalmar Schacht. Essentially, it is an anti-free market policy designed to control currency reserves ( back then we would have said gold) for the regime's import priorities and allow the state to exert control over the direction of the economy without the responsibility of total state ownership ( though Chavez may go in that direction in time).

Without getting hung up on labels and arguments over Left-Right terminology, this is a quasi-autarkic policy designed to produce short term economic results for the regime and hold the effects of globalization at bay. It worked for about six years in the case of Nazi Germany and yielded a prodigious rearmament program before the internal contradictions of Schacht's program brought the German economy to the breaking point - at which time Hitler's gamble for a limited war with Poland resulted in WWII. This updated and far less coherent anti-gringo version of Schacht's econmic wizardry runs against an American policy for a freer world of global trade dating back to The Atlantic Charter.

So, from a certain perspective, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Osama bin Laden are all anti-Globalization warriors using different means toward the same end - a world of politically sealed fiefdoms with only slender threads of connectivity to the outside world being allowed by local oligarchies. As a strategic goal, it is a vision with wide appeal to undemocratic elites the world over, including a sizable section of the professoriate in Western countries. While the nationalist, anti-Western and anti-American demogogy will be about sovereignty and evil multinational corporations, the concealed reality has mostly to do with political mafias of iron-hearted men keeping their own people ignorant and shackled.

What " moral countermeasures " can be taken then by the United States ?

Looking at Boyd's slide 108 where he discusses a " counter-guerilla" program there are many sensible suggestions that can be adapted or extrapolated for use by civilian policy makers at State, Treasury and in the IC. Dan has already done so in the comments section to which I will add my own observations.

1. This is a global contest of grand strategy and it is asymmetrical in nature.

" Our win" which is a greater good for humanity in terms of prosperity and individual choice is not viewed that way by local elites. This is the " Mubarak problem". From their perspective it is better to rule a poorer country and stay firmly at the top of the pyramid than to share (or lose) power in a rich one. Since a majority of the world's ruling classes stand to lose authority or relative status in a globalized and democratic world, the U.S. needs to prioritize its diplomatic order of battle. America against the world for the sake of consistency is a recipe for America isolated. One or two wars at a time please.

2. At the same time the United States must hold the moral high ground as the nation that empowers the poor of the world.

Not just rhetoric of democracy but offering the kind of economic connectivity that spurs grass-roots economic growth in the Gap states most open to our aid and trade. Microloan programs, educational grants, a revitalized Peace corps, access to cheap communication technology. Imagine the political impact if the United States led the way to providing global wireless broadband internet in nations too poor or with governments too incompetent or corrupt to establish conventional fiber optic infrastructure. All the poor would then have to do is get access to relatively inexpensive connection devices for which a family or village might pool their resources.

3, We can only communicate with our potential allies if we walk the talk and know their language.

By " language" I mean that our public diplomacy has to speak to people of other nations in a referential script they find comprehensible even it is in a presidential speech being translated from English. Every country, culture and civilization has its unique touchstones and some of these are congruent with American values and the practical " win-win" results we would like to achieve. All too often our representatives say things in a way to turn potential victory into a media moment of international awkwardness and embarrassment.

4. Shift from crisis management to pro-active innoculation

"Shrinking the Gap" should start with stealthy Sys Admin work where it is seemingly needed least and not begin with the Gap equivalent of failed state black holes. Dr. Barnett counsels such triage in Blueprint For Action in discussing regional priorities for the U.S. and the Core. We need to lift the Seam states up to the New Core and top tier Gap states into the Seam in an act of geopolitical inkblot tactics.

We would be demonstrating competency, success, empowerment and communication - nonzero sum scenarios - to the audience we need to reach.

And our opponents, by their very nature, cannot.  ¶ 1:00 AM 8 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: REBUTTALS AND COMMENTARY: DAVE SCHULER

Part of an occasional series, the rebuttal and commentary posts will address the roundtable on Globalization and War. This format is open to both the symposium's participants and other interested bloggers or scholars who would like their views published here.

Link Preface:

Globalization and War by Dave Schuler


"Globalization and War

by Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye

I thought I might put in my own two cents (uninvited) on ZenPundit’s roundtable topic, Globalization and War. First, a definition might be in order. Globalization is the idea that, as a result of increasing linkages in modern communications, trade, and social contact that the world is becoming consolidated on a global scale. This may be reflected in the development of a single world market, a single world society, a single world government or all three.

Opponents of globalization tend to portray the final outcome as a mean, homogenous mess in which economic welfare is spread out, as one critic put it, so that the average person would have a lifestyle that would “look good to a Pakistani bricklayer” and world culture would become a simulacrum of popular American commercial culture whose epitome is Ronald McDonald. That’s certainly a possibility but I think others are possible and, indeed, more likely than the “McDonald’s model” in which most people receive a subsistence wage and culture is a uniform commercial nightmare.

Another such model is the “Disney model”. In the Disney model there’s at least the illusion of prosperity but nearly all institutions worldwide are highly uniform. Everyone acts, believes, and thinks the same differing only in menu, language, and national costume. Think of the “It’s A Small World” ride at Disneyland.

A third model of globalization and one that I think is much more likely actually to come about might be characterized as the “linguistic model” in which there are many different styles of institutions and culture in “free variation”. In linguistics two sounds are in free variation when either sound may appear in the same environment without a difference in meaning and without a native speaker considering that either is wrong. For example, the word “economics” may be pronounced with the first sound as “eh” as in “get” or as “ee” as in “geese”, possibly by the same person. The sounds are in free variation.

This won’t mean that anything goes. There will be social pressure for a limitation on the number of acceptable options particularly on the outliers—whereever practice differs most dramatically from world norms.

Some people think that globalization is just another word for American dominance. I think that this is completely the opposite of the truth particularly if the “linguistic model” obtains. In many, many things including ideas of the nature of law, the role of government, and the position of the individual within society, the United States is the outlier and I suspect there will be mounting pressure on people in the United Status to adopt attitudes that are closer to those that are prevalent in the rest of the world.

Does globalization lead to war or discourage war? I think that the answer is “Both”. As countries become more interdependent economically war will become quite difficult and unpalatable. The commodity that Americans usually think of when they think of economic dependence on other countries is oil but I’d like to consider another: computer memories. Computer memories are not just used in computers. They’re used in a huge number of everyday objects including automobiles, electronic goods of all kinds, gas pumps, ATM’s, and stop lights. Computer memories are necessary for our military, government, and daily life to function as we’ve become accustomed.

We used to produce nearly all of our computer memories domestically. We produce nearly none now. Most are produced in South-East Asia: China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, etc. That’s globalization for you.

We’re simultaneously reluctant to go to war with the countries that produce the things we need (like oil or computer memories) and willing to go to war to protect our access to supplies of these things.

Still, as Clausewitz put it, “War is a continuation of politics by other means” and that doesn’t just mean external politics it pertains to internal politics as well. It’s possible to go to war with another country for reasons that have very little to do with country but everything to do with domestic politics. As countries come under the pressure to change due to globalization that pressure is all but certain to manifest from time to time as war. I suspect that this will be particularly true for the outliers especially when their cultural, political, or social variants depend on ignorance or force to maintain."


(Editorial Note: Dave Schuler's views are always welcome here at Zenpundit - an open invite to you Dave )

  ¶ 3:34 PM 2 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: REBUTTALS AND COMMENTARY: SAM CRANE

Part of an occasional series, the rebuttal and commentary posts will address the roundtable on Globalization and War. This format is open to both the symposium's participants and other interested bloggers or scholars who would like their views published here.

Link Preface:

Globalization and Conflict in East Asia by Sam Crane

Globalization, War and Mencius by Sam Crane

Globalization and War by Simon of Simon World


" Globalization, War and Mencius

by Dr. Sam Crane of The Useless Tree

Over at ZenPundit there is roundtable series of posts and discussion on the broad topic of globalization and war (I will have a post there tomorrow). I want to respond here to Simon's (of Simon World) post. He focuses on the upcoming WTO talks in Hong Kong and, drawing on various East Asian data, comes to an optimistic conclusion about globalization and war:

As globalization brings economic growth, it will bring political growth. Countries that are economically successful and growing do not, as a rule, go to war. In a world where there are numerous flashpoints and delicate balances to be maintained, globalization is a key force pushing towards peace. It is that complicated. And that simple.

Many might look at that statement and say it is a clear expression of a classically liberal position: free trade brings economic growth and that engenders peace. It is also in keeping with the political economy of Mencius.

Let me just offer this passage and you can see for yourself the parallels between Mencius and Western liberalism on questions of trade and peace:

Mencius said: "Honor the wise, employ the able, and you'll have great worthies for ministers - then every noble official throughout all beneath Heaven will rejoice and long to stand in you court. Collect rent in the markets but no tax, or enforce laws but collect no rent - then every merchant throughout all beneath Heaven will rejoice and long to trade in your markets. Conduct inspections at the border but collect no tax - then every traveler throughout all beneath Heaven will rejoice and long to travel your roads. Have farmers help with public fields but collect no tax - then every farmer in all beneath Heaven will rejoice and long to work your land. Don't demand tributes in cloth from families and villages - then people throughout all beneath Heaven will rejoice and long to become your subjects.

"If you can do these five things with sincerity, the people in neighboring countries will all revere you as their parent. And not since people first came into being has anyone ever managed to lead children against their own parents. So if you do this, you won't have an enemy anywhere in all beneath Heaven, you'll be Heaven's minister...(54-55)

Save for the "public fields" thing it sounds downright Smithian to me... "
  ¶ 3:18 PM 0 comments

  A DIGITAL DIVIDE?

A good article here on the cultural, educational and organizational implications of information technology "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" (PDF) by Marc Prensky ( Hat tip net-centric dialog. Prensky also has a blog).

Having worked with students on the extreme ends of the spectrum ( both in terms of the Bell Curve and socioeconomic status) during the period where IT phased into schools, universities and the larger society, I have to give an endorsement to Prensky's observations.

American children today are strikingly different learners in the classroom than those from as little as five years ago because IT and internet access has become ubiquitous. The changes are far more modest at the lower socioeconomic quintiles or at small rural school systems but even there they exist.

Students are more receptive to alinear thinking; they naturally multitask; they automatically incorporate IT into their socialization and autonomy from adult supervision; they have higher expectations for ( and impatience with) teacher-delivery of content; they can produce 4th grade presentations that look more visually appealing in terms of design than what a consultant might have produced to illustrate a proposal for, say, a meeting with a CEO circa 1995.

With that cultural assimilation comes some negatives, including a difficulty with sustained attention to task, particularly reading, though that can hardly be laid entirely at the door of IT. However, the cultural shift toward Toffler's " Third Wave" information society would appear to be taking root.  ¶ 9:09 AM 3 comments

  DAY III. GLOBALIZATION AND WAR

Introductory Post by Zenpundit


Today's featured posts:

"Globalization and War" by Paul D. Kretkowski

"The Democratic Peace" by RJ Rummel

Moderator's post:

"The Age of Globalization and War" by Zenpundit

Thursday's posts:

Austin Bay

Sam Crane

Josh Manchester


Wednesday's posts:

Bruce Kesler

Doug Macdonald

Simon World

  ¶ 9:10 AM 2 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: ZENPUNDIT

The age of Globalization and War

by Mark Safranski

I can only begin by first thanking the contributors to the roundtable - Bruce Kesler, Doug Macdonald, Simon, Austin Bay, Sam Crane, Josh Manchester, RJ Rummel and Paul Kretkowski - for their time, their effort and the stimulating ideas that they have brought here to the readers. In particular, Josh and Bruce for their ideas and comments as I was in the process of attempting of putting this event together. Your help was most valuable.

I would also like to thank Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye for his tireless efforts in promoting the Roundtable on Globalization and War and his intelligent and perceptive comments on the guest-posts. And to extend my gratitude for the many blogs that linked including Dean's World, Memeorandum, Winds of Change, The American Future, Coming Anarchy, TDAXP, Grim's Hall,Regions of Mind, The Duck of Minerva, Live From The FDNF, Phatic Communion, The Small Wars Council, Prometheus6, The Dusty Attic, and last though never least, riting on the wall. You have all helped my readers connect to some very important ideas.

Ideas, which return us to the original premise of the roundtable:the age of globalization and war.
American leaders are encountering a geostrategic situation where the United States has preponderant and often overwhelming advantages in bringing hard power to bear relative to all other states but the environment in which that power is being used is changing rapidly because of globalization. There seems to be a sense of pervasive cognitive dissonance among the bipartisan American elite who continue to speak and act as if the rule-set of twenty years ago still held sway.

Globalization is turning international borders from barriers into mere filters that only marginally impede networking flows of capital, resources, people and knowledge so that it is more accurate to look at any act of war as disturbing a coherent system than as a clash between two isolated opponents. When Bruce Kesler points out that "There is no “foreign policy” separate from domestic policy" he is observing that the luxury that statesmen once had in a less democratic, pre-globalized time to cordon off foreign affairs from internal politics and economic policy is long gone. Politics does not stop at the water's edge because a global network has no "edge" at which to stop.

War is an ancient art going to the far distant time when the development of language first permitted our stone age ancestors to try to plan an outcome for violent conflict with neighboring tribes. The rise of the state centralized decision-making and staked the claim for sole legitimacy for initiating acts of war; first by Westphalian monarchies and ultimately refined by the mass-production, mass-man, industrial-age, nation-state superpowers. The early Cold War represented the apogee of centralization in warfare as the world began falling into two great ideological camps led by the totalitarian USSR and the liberal democratic United States, to whom lesser " great powers" ceded their sovereignty as to whether their people's would endure WWIII or not.

That time too is gone.

War is slipping out of the exclusive grasp of the state and into the hands of transnational and subnational actors, "global guerillas" and even superempowered individuals waging a " Fourth Generation War". In 1939, to shatter the established order, Adolf Hitler had to first hijack the state of a great power and then systematically turn a nation into a mighty weapon. Today, the Fuhrer could accomplish widespread ruin with fewer followers than marched with him in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. An interconnected global system, one that did not exist during the 1930's, is vulnerable to system perturbations that allow the effects of catastrophic attacks on critical nodes to cascade across the planet.

Taking down a region's financial system may cause more quantifiable damage than the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg and it might be accomplished from a lap-top in a cheap motel room. Counterattacks by the state may now cause more "blowback" than the state can now tolerate. Like Moses we can see the Promised Land even as we dance on the precipice of the Abyss.

That centrifugal diffusion of war powers calls into question whether globalization and the increasing diffusion of liberal, democratic norms as the only legitimate political system will bring RJ Rummel's " Democratic Peace" or a situation where state actors are at peace with one another but are struggling ineffectively to contain the forces of disruption and terror in revolt against modernity. Will Dr. Barnett's Core powers unite to reset the rules to better squelch violent nihilist "warrior" groups that move through the Gap like Mao's guerillas once did through the Chinese people ? Right now America is not leveraging its advantages in the War on Terror, not even, as Austin Bay pointed out, in the sphere of information and media, a field we pioneered. Our enormous reserves of " softpower" go untapped or are being turned against us.

What American and Core leaders need to do is to begin thinking in terms of the systemic whole because it is the field upon which all their actions play out. The consequences of decentralization of power and information brought by connectivity to previously disconnected communities will, as pointed out by Doug Macdonald's Thai example, incite local elites to resistance to defend their often unjustfiable traditional prerogatives. These are forseeable outcomes and more importantly, they are mostly avoidable ones.

The sooner that our leaders understand that they march upon a spider's web, the better.  ¶ 9:09 AM 2 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR:PAUL KRETKOWSKI

Mr. Paul D. Kretkowski is a consultant and journalist based in San Francisco who writes on a range of topics including soft power, U.S. foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics and information warfare. His writing credits include, among others, Mother Jones, Wired, Business For Diplomatic Action and SFGate.com. Beacon, Mr. Kretkowski's blog, is devoted to exploring the concept and applications of " Soft Power" as articulated by political scientist Joseph Nye.

Globalization and War

by Paul D. Kretkowski

From a soft-power standpoint, the biggest wild card in globalization is that visual communication is becoming universal.

Billions of illiterate or marginally literate people can now receive not just faceless radio broadcasts, but hundreds of commercial and government satellite TV channels from around the world.

People who once relied on rumors or their governments' views of other countries can now access those countries' own images of themselves. Entire worldviews can be imported into sod huts via tin-can satellite dishes, as in Afghanistan. http://www.idsnews.com/story.php?id=7382 Where before people thought they "knew" the U.S. because their cousin's in-laws had a falafel stand in Detroit, they now think they "know" the U.S. because they can see actual Americans at the Oscars or on Baywatch.

The major question today is whether the increasing ability of everyone to see everything will lead to greater understanding—or to revulsion that contributes to increased terrorism and war. What will be the effects as two-thirds of the world realizes that it is shockingly poor?

In China and India the answer seems to be a conversion of those countries' normal industriousness into a consumer and private-enterprise boom. Other countries may follow suit—but what happens if their booms stall but images of wealth continue to be beamed from abroad?

In other regions, particularly in the Muslim world, the result is bafflement that the West's apparently godless, chaotic, mercantile societies can be so far ahead in nearly every measure of human development. Responses to this vary from denial and retreat to new attempts to close the gap.

Part of what Beacon tries to do is monitor this ongoing realization of the world's disparities and suggest how countries, companies and individuals can enhance their soft power in that environment. I welcome others' input as I continue examining ways to accomplish this task.  ¶ 8:56 AM 1 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: RJ RUMMEL

Dr. RJ Rummel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii where he developed his influential Democratic Peace theory, a major contribution to the field of political Science. Professor Rummel is an internationally acknowledged expert on democide and is the author of Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 and Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917. Dr. Rummel has received the Susan Strange Award of the International Studies Association for having intellectually most challenged the field in 1999. And received the Lifetime Achievement Award 2003 from the Conflict Processes Section, American Political Science Association and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Professor Rummel blogs at Democratic Peace and also maintains the Power Kills and the Freedomist Network sites.


The Democratic Peace

By R.J.Rummel

In spite of the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Angola, and elsewhere, there is a cause for much optimism. World violence has been in sharp decline for over five years, and the march of democratization continues with about 117 democracies now existing, and 88 of them liberal democracies. In almost every country where elites have been persuaded of the value of socialism there is now talk of multiparty systems, democracy, and the free market. Even in the classical authoritarian systems, such as those in the Middle East, voices are heard for a free press, legislative power, and political parties.

Obviously, we are riding a democratic wave. The technology of the mass media has brought us all closer together (and who can forget watching the elections in Afghanistan and then Iraq) and in its universal availability and content it has carried implicitly the message of democracy and freedom. And freedom and the rule of law itself has become the most universally accepted political idea and human right, even enshrined in the UN Human Rights Convention

The components of this idea are clear in broad brush although the details, as always, are subject to academic dispute. These are political rights, such as to compete and choose one's candidates for political power, equal and secret ballot, and freedom to organize and protest against office holders; and for liberal democracies, civil rights, such as freedom of religion, organization, and speech. Often we collectively refer to these rights by the term Rule of Law, a basic constitutional order that protects these rights and that lies above the whims of government, groups, and individuals.

But in our enthusiasm for the global movement toward democracy, we should ask ourselves why we support it. A century and more ago the answer would have been almost automatic, as it was for the writers of the American Constitution. It is a natural law, an inalienable right, and a self-evident principle that people should be free. But natural law is no longer intellectually popular and indeed the idea is now so strange that journalists cannot understand the references to it by conservative nominees to the American Supreme Court. They classify it along with such sayings as, "God wills it."

A currently more respectable justification for democracy is that freedom is a fundamental human value and desire. People want to live their own lives, pursue their own interests as free from the meddling of others as possible. If such intrusion is necessary, they want to play a role in determining the who, what, and when of it. And since this is what people universally want it is what they should have. Although the non sequitur in this argument is glaring--one cannot derive a "should" from a "want" or "desire" alone--it at least can be made respectable by reference to the Social Contract Theory of justice. That is, if we argue that a just social system is one whose fundamental principles people would universally choose if they were blind to their selfish interests (if they had no knowledge of where they would end up in that system--rich or poor, tall or fat, black or white), then persuasive is the argument that people would choose as their first principle freedom under the Rule of Law.

But this approach to justifying democracy has been unsatisfactory to many. We live in a utilitarian age and it is hardly strange that the major justification for democracy should be in terms of its consequences. Particularly, that where people are free under law that is fair and equally applied to all, they are most happy. Of course, this utilitarian justification itself is subject to question. What is happiness? Although people prefer happiness to sadness, grief, and pain, do they really know what will make them happy?

The democrat argues that we really do not know what makes people happy in general and that this is something that only they can decide for themselves, and if for some issues it must be determined generally, as with regard to pollution or public education, it should be through publicly elected representatives under law. And the democratic individualist has argued further with their democratic socialist friends that the free market is a necessary mechanism through which individuals have the greatest choice as to what will make them happy, both in the relative diversity and cheapness of goods and in the creation and dissemination of wealth.

This utilitarian argument for democracy is what has now won the battle for the minds of men. Democracy, it is widely believed, assures the happiness of the greatest number because it provides freedom and wealth (through economic development). There is much to quibble about this, as can be seen in the arguments between various political parties, and I do not intend to get into these debates. But leaving these details aside, I think that we can accept this as the general argument of the American, Soviet, or Chinese democrat (even those who favor social democracy no longer mean full-scale socialism but now mean a free market qualified by government welfare, safety nets, regulation, and limited government ownership of basic services and production, such as in the public health sector).

But those who make this utilitarian argument for democracy have missed perhaps the strongest possible justification. Democracy preserves human life. In theory and fact, the more democratic two states, the less deadly violence between them; and if they are both democratic, lethal violence is precluded altogether. That is, democratic states do not make war on each other. Moreover, the less democratic two states, the more probable war between them. And also, the less democratic a state, the more likely will occur internal warfare.

This is not all. Perhaps least surprising is that the less democratic a government, the more likely that it will murder its own citizens in cold blood, independent of any foreign or domestic war.

Now, war is not the most deadly form of violence. Indeed, I have found that while about 37,000,000 people have been killed in battle in all foreign and domestic wars in the last century, government democide (genocide and mass murder) have killed about 175 million, most by far by totalitarian governments. There is no case of democratic governments murdering en masse their own citizens.

The point is this. If a utilitarian justification for democracy is to be given, then in addition to the happiness that follows from freedom and the from wealth produced by the free market, democracy preserves and extends human life. It does this through the life extending benefits of the market (as in food production). But most important, it does this through the reduction of deadly violence. Democracy is the successful institutionalization of the forces, culture, and techniques of non-violence.

This is also what we should be shouting from the roof tops. This is also what should be the substance of our utilitarian justification for democracy. Yes, freedom. Yes, development. Yes, happiness. But yes, also life for those saved from murder by their own governments and death from war.

Nothing is certain about the future, but this is true of all predictions based on past events, natural or social. Within this limitation think about this. By fact and theory, we appear to have within the power of democracy the opportunity to end war, genocide, and mass murder, and minimize revolutionary and civil violence. And the epochal movement of our times is toward universal democracy.

It is true that a few political leaders such as President George Bush and practitioners have already pointed out that democracies do not make war on each other. But this has not been a general understanding; virtually no journalists mention this in their analyses of democracy and contemporary trends. I have yet to hear or read about an expert, academic or otherwise, mentioning this in a media interview. Why is this?

First, until recent decades there has been an historic erosion of the tenets of classical liberalism and its faith in democracy and the free market. The pacific nature of democracy is a matter of insight and knowledge gained and lost among liberals. So long ago as 1795, in his virtually now forgotten Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant systematically articulated the positive role of republicanism in eliminating war. He proposed that constitutional republics should be established to assure universal peace. The essential idea was this: the more freedom people have to govern their own lives, the more government power is limited constitutionally, the more leaders are responsible through free elections to their people, then the more restrained the leaders will be in making war.

Through the writings of Kant, de Montesquieu, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, among others, it became an article of classical liberal faith in the 18th and 19th centuries that "Government on the old system," as Paine wrote, "is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new [republican form of government as just established in the United States], a delegation of power for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation."

These liberals believed that there was a natural harmony of interests among nations, and that free trade would facilitate this harmony and promote peace. Most important, they were convinced that monarchical aristocracies had a stake in war. In contemporary terms, it was a game they played with the lives of the common folk. Empower the common people to make such decisions through their representatives, and they would generally oppose war.

In the 18th Century, classical liberals wrote about democracy and peace in the abstract, by hypothesis. Reason, the instrument for uncovering natural law, was their guide. Now we have the longer historical record, empirical research, and social theory to show that indeed, their reason and intuition were not misplaced.

Nonetheless, by the middle of the 20th century, this insight became almost completely ignored or forgotten. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, the classical liberal view itself fell into disrepute among intellectuals and scholars. Essentially, classical liberals believed that the government that governs least governs best. Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was their economic bible. And in current terms, they preached democratic capitalism. But beginning in the 19th century capitalism came under increasing attack by socialists.

First, the socialist agreed with the classical liberal that the people had to be empowered, and that this would bring peace. But what the socialist saw when the liberal creed was enacted into law, especially in Britain, was that the bellicose aristocracies were replaced by bellicose capitalists. Democracies and their attendant free market appeared to foster exploitation, inequality, poverty, and to enable a very few to rule over the many. Most important here, capitalism was seen not just to promote, but to require colonialism and imperialism, and thereby war.

But what was to be done? Here the socialists divided essentially into the democratic socialists, state socialists, and Marxists. The democratic socialists argued that true democracy means that both the political and economic aspects of their lives must be under the people's control, and this is done through a representative government and government ownership, control, and management of the economy. Elected representatives, who would oversee economic planners and managers, and above all be responsive to popular majorities, would thus replace the capitalist. With the aristocratic and capitalist interests in war thus eliminated, with the peace oriented worker and peasant democratically empowered, peace would be assured.

The state socialists, however, would simply replace representative institutions with some form of socialist dictatorship. This would assure the best implementation and progress of socialist egalitarianism, without interference by the bourgeoisie and other self-serving interests. Moreover, the people cannot be trusted to know their own interests, for they are easily blinded by pro-capitalist propaganda and manipulation. Burma today is an example of state socialism in practice.

While agreeing on much of the socialist analysis of capitalism, the Marxists added a deterministic, dialectical theory of history, a class analysis of societies, an economic theory of capitalism, and the necessity of the impoverishment of the worker and the inevitability of a communist revolution. However, the Marxists disagreed with the socialists on the ends. Never far from the anarchists, the Marxists, especially the Marxist-Leninists of our century, looked at the socialist state that would come into being with the overthrow of capitalism as nothing more than an intermediary dictatorship of the proletariat through which the transition to the final stage of communism would be prepared. And stripped of its feudal or capitalist exploiters, and thus its agents of war, communism would mean enlightened cooperation among all people as each works according to his ability and receives according to his need. The state then would wither away, and the masses would live in true, everlasting peace and freedom.

Regardless of the brand of socialism from which the critique of capitalism ensued, the protracted 19th century socialist assault on capitalism had a profound effect on liberalism and especially the theory of war and peace. Falling into disrepute, its program seen as utopian or special pleading for capitalists, pure classical liberalism mutated among western intellectuals into a reform or welfare liberalism that is hardly different today from the programs and views of the early socialists. And this modern liberalism, or "liberalism" as it is now called, has been heavily influenced by the socialist view of war; and became widely influential in scholarly research on international relations, and thus war and peace. It must be recognized that such research was largely the preserve of the social sciences, and an overwhelming number of social scientists were by the mid-20th century modern liberals or socialists in their outlook.

But what happened to the idea that individual freedom promotes nonviolence? With the protracted socialist attack on the classical liberal's fundamental belief in capitalism, coupled with the apparent excesses of capitalism, such as sweat shops, robber barons, monopolies, depressions, and political corruption, classical liberalism eventually lost the heart and minds of Western intellectuals. And with this defeat went its fundamental truth about democracy promoting peace. Interestingly, in the last decade there has been a resurgence of classical liberalism. Former President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher exemplify this, and their often-expressed views on the positive role of free institutions for peace are straight out of classical liberalism. This renewal, however, has yet to have much influence on the media, professionals, or social scientists.

This is not to say that most democrats view capitalist political-economic systems as the cause of war, as asserted by hard-line socialists. Many who think and write about these matters generally view capitalism as one cause among several. They have moved to a middle position: both capitalism and socialism can be a source of peace or war, depending on the circumstances. In either case, neither is a general factor in war.

Now, capitalism and democracy is not the same thing. Democratic socialist systems exist, as in Sweden and Denmark, as do authoritarian capitalist systems like Chile, and Taiwan, or South Korea of a decade ago. Why then has the peace-making effects of democratic freedoms been tossed out with capitalism? As mentioned, these freedoms were part of an ideology emphasizing capitalism--as the ideology retreated, so did its belief in the positive role of freedom in peace. But there are other factors at work here that are at least as important.

One of these factors causing many to reject democracy's peacefulness is a misreading of history. It was believed that democracies not only do go to war, but they can be very aggressive. Americans could easily note their American-Indian Wars, Mexican-American and Spanish American wars, and of course the Civil War And even if one argues that the United States was dragged into both World Wars, there are the invasions of Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Then, of course, there is Great Britain, which between 1850 and 1941 fought twenty wars, more than any other state. France, also a democracy for most of this period, fought the next most at eighteen. The United States fought seven. These three nations alone fought 63 percent of all the wars during these ninety-two years. Of course, Britain did not become a true democracy until 1884 with the extension of the franchise to agricultural workers, but she was afterwards still involved in numerous European and colonial wars. The historical record of democracies thus appeared no better than that of other regimes; and the classical liberal belief in the peacefulness of democracies seemed nothing more than bad theory or misplaced faith.

But all other types of regimes seemed equally bellicose. The supposed peacefulness of socialist systems was belied by the aggressiveness of its two major totalitarian variants, that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; and other types of regimes, whether authoritarian dictatorships like Japan before World War II, or absolute monarchies like czarist Russia before World War I, appeared no less warlike.

The verdict was and largely still is an easy one--all types of political, or politico-economic, systems make war; none is especially pacific. Clearly articulated in Kenneth Waltz's widely read Man, the State and War, this critique is today the consensus view of American academics and intellectuals. Among students of international relations, it is the major alternative belief to that of the inherent bellicosity of capitalist systems.

How could it be missed that democracies do not make war on each other and are generally more peaceful? For one there has been an unfortunate tendency to focus on the many wars of a few democracies while ignoring the many wars of many nondemocracies. Moreover, to the disadvantage of democracies, there is an inclination to treat all wars equally, such that the American invasion of Grenada, the Falklands War, and World War II, are each counted as one war.

Still, how could it be missed that democracies do not make war on each other? The problem is that many who write and speak about these issues do not ordinarily think dyadically. They think of nations as developed or undeveloped, strong or weak, democratic or undemocratic, large or small, belligerent or not. That is, they think monadically.

Like so much in life, this is a matter of perspective. A shift in focus to bilateral relations shows that when two nations are stable democracies, no wars occur between them. Even going back to the classical Greek democracies, the democratic guilds and principalities of the Middle Ages, the democratic Swiss forest states, or the democratic city-states of Italy, there was no full-scale war between those that were democratic in institutions and spirit; nor has research by political scientists uncovered any wars between stable democracies in the 19th or 20th centuries. And this still holds true today, even though the number of democratic states has grown to at least 117, 88 of them liberal democracies, or about 44 percent of the world's population.

Just consider that in a world where contiguous nations often use violence to settle their differences or at least have armed borders between them, the United States and Canada have had for generations a long, completely unarmed border. Even in Europe, the historical cauldron of war, once all Western European nations became democratic they no longer have armed against each other. Indeed, the expectation of war among them became zero. That all this should be missed shows how powerfully misleading an improper historical perspective or model can be.

There is one more factor at work in the rejection of the classical liberal view of democracy and peace. Beginning with the First World War and accelerated by the second, there has been a strong antipathy among intellectuals to any hint of nationalism. Nationalism was seen by many non-socialists as a fundamental cause of war, or at least of the total national mobilization for war and ensuing total violence. Internationalism, rising above one's nation, seeing humanity and its transcending interest as a whole, and furthering world government, became their intellectual ideal. Social scientists have almost universally shared this view. In fact, one of the attractions of socialism for many was its inherent internationalism, its rejection of the nation and patriotism as values.

Internationalists generally have refused to accept that any one nation is really better than another. After all, cultures and values are relative; one nation's virtues are another's evils. Best we treat all nations equally to better resolve conflicts among them. As Professor Hans Morgenthau pointed out in his popular and influential international relations text, Politics Among Nations, both the United States and Soviet Union should be condemned for the Cold War; it is their evangelistic, crusading belief in their own values that made the East-West conflict so difficult to resolve.

This two-partyism can be seen easily in reading the peace oriented literature. There is no victim or aggressor, no right or wrong nation, but only two parties to a conflict (when this two-partyism did break down, it was usually in terms of American, or Western "imperialist, aggression"). Consequently, to accept that the freedoms espoused by the United States and its democratic allies lead to peace, and that the totalitarian socialism that was fostered by the Soviet Union and China lead to violence and war, is to take sides. It is to be nationalistic. And this for many internationalists was ipso facto wrong.

There is another psychological force toward two-partyism that should not be underestimated. The statement that democracy fosters peace seems not only nationalistic, but also inherently ideological. After all, freedom was one of the flags in the "ideological Cold War." No matter that this was an observational and historical statement. To accept it appeared not only to take sides; but what is worse, to be a right wing, cold warrior.

Finally, the peace that the classical liberals had in mind involved not only the absence of war between nations, but also harmonious international relations. They, like our contemporaries, had no conception of the degree to which governments could and would massacre their own people. After all, presumably, mankind had progressed since the bloody Albigensian Crusade in France, Inquisition in Spain, and witch hunts throughout Europe.

Today, we can extend the idea of peace through democracy to cover freedom from government genocide and mass murder. But to do so requires overcoming incredible mass ignorance even about the megamurders for which authoritarian and totalitarian governments have been responsible. Of course, everyone knows about the Nazi genocide. And most consider the near 6,000,000 Jews murdered as a monstrous crime against humanity by Hitler and his Nazi gang of racists. Few know that they also murdered in cold blood an additional near 14,000,000 Poles, Gypsies, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Frenchmen, and others.

Few outside of the Soviet Union know about Stalin's horrors, that he killed people by the tens of millions (I calculate about 43,000,000). Even fewer realize that under the communist regime in China more tens of millions were killed (as shown in Table 1). And virtually no one except Armenians seems to remember the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the Pakistan genocide and mass murder; except Bengalis; and the Japanese atrocities during the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars, except the Chinese and Koreans. And now, virtually no one remembers anymore the mass murder of about 10 million Chinese by their Nationalist regime.

It is understandable, then, that the global magnitude of murder by governments in this century is almost universally unknown, that it might exceed an absolutely incredible 150,944,000 men, women, and children killed, or more than four times all this century's battle deaths in all its domestic and international wars. Of course, it must then be unknown that virtually no democratic citizens are among this utterly fantastic number.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this time of democracy's victory there has been little gleeful shouting about one terribly important value of democracy--the victory of democracy over violent political death, over war, revolution, genocide, and mass murder.  ¶ 8:54 AM 2 comments

  DAY II. GLOBALIZATION AND WAR

Introductory Post by Zenpundit


Today's featured posts:

"Globalizationand War" by Austin Bay

"Globalization and Conflict in East Asia" by Sam Crane

"Globalization and War" by Josh Manchester


Wednesday's posts:

Bruce Kesler

Doug Macdonald

Simon World  ¶ 6:06 AM 0 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: AUSTIN BAY

Dr. Austin Bay is an accomplished author, syndicated columnist and consultant to the Department of Defense on wargaming. He is the author of The Wrong Side of Brightness, a novel, and A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: Third Edition. co-authored with James Dunnigan. Bay also maintains a popular and influential blog and in addition to his literary pursuits, Dr. Bay is Colonel in the Army Reserve (ret.) and served in Iraq in 2004, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Globalization and War

by Austin Bay


In early 1993 I made a wisecrack during an Office of Net Assessments-sponsored seminar at Ft. Monroe, Virginia. The subject was “future requirements on the global battlefield.” I said that to dominate the global battlespace (hey, why not use the buzzwords) American soldiers must have full spectrum capabilities. The wisecrack: “Troops need to be good with everything from bayonets to smart bombs.” In retrospect I should have added computers and syringes, but lots of conjunctions spoil a wisecrack. Substituting “beam weapons” for “smart bombs” may have sounded Star-Trekky, but as the decades march forward it may prove to be more apt. If I had really been savvy I would have said from bayonets to…no, I’ll hold off on that. For the moment the bayonet goes back into the scabbard.

The truth is, what constitutes “full spectrum capabilities” is never fully known. Don Rumsfeld ruminated on the “unknown unknowns” as plaguing intelligence analysts, planners, and leaders. When he said this I chuckled but thought “The old boy’s absolutely right.” A global battlefield has many niches, each one capable of springing a surprise for which “a global power” is not quite prepared.

Note I didn’t write “unprepared.” The big shots in military strategy, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, emphasize the need for anticipation, flexibility and adaptation. Alexander the Great was one great political and military anticipator and adapter. The Macedonian “combined arms system” was, for its era, the pinnacle of tactical adaptability. My point: Flexibility and adaptation are not new requirements for doing anything effectively—be it running a business, teaching a high school class, or waging war. However, when the problem inputs are planet-wide and the media outputs are planet-wired, tactical anticipation, flexibility, and adaptation can have strategic effects. Even tactical (troop level) un-anticipation, in-flexibility, and mal-adaptation can produce profoundly bad strategic effects when the planet-wired media focuses on the foul-ups.

Which brings us back to the “should have been” wisecrack. American troops must be good with everything from bayonets to smart bombs and media bombast. The camera, the microphone, and the computer screen shape the new battlespace –warp it in ways a clever cavalry flanking maneuver or well-screened ambush once surprised the superior force.

Success in the information battlespace doesn’t translate into victory, but it can create a hellacious global challenge. Al Qaeda is an extremely limited organization. It’s military limitations are obvious. As US Central Command’s General John Abizaid recently noted, Al Qaeda has yet to win a military engagement with US forces at or above the platoon level. (A platoon has approximately 30 troops.) This also holds true for Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan and what military analysts call the “former regime elements” (FRE—ie, pro-Saddam forces) in Iraq.

Al Qaeda doesn’t have much in the way of education policies, beyond bankrolling Islamist schools. Al Qaeda says it will re-distribute the wealth of corrupt Middle Eastern petro-sheiks. Though that is an economic promise, it isn’t a long-term economic plan.

Al Qaeda, however, understands the power of perceived grievance and the appeal of Utopia. In the late 1990s Osama Bin Laden said Al Qaeda’s strategic goal was restoring the Islamic caliphate. Bin Laden expressed a special hatred for Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who ended the caliphate in 1924. History, going wrong for Islamist supremacists at least since the 16th century, really failed when the caliphate dissolved. Though Al Qaeda’s time-line to Utopia remains hazy, once the caliphate returns the decadent modern world will fade as Western power collapses—and presumably Eastern power as well. (Islamists are active in China’s Sinkiang province.) At some point Bin Laden-interpreted Islamic law will bring strict bliss to the entire world. If this sounds vaguely like a Marxist “Workers Paradise” that’s no accident—the Communists also justified the murder of millions pursuing their atheist Utopia.

The appeal to perceived grievance and promise of an Islamist utopia, however, made Al Qaeda a regional information power in a Middle East where political options were denied by tyrants. The 9/11 attacks made Al Qaeda a global information power—they were an international advertising campaign. Four years later Al Qaeda remains a strategic information power, but little else.

American is also information power but it is not a focused information power. Hence Al Qaeda’s success in this one area gives it a degree of global leverage. Focused information –a media campaign-- has characteristics we associate with “special weapons.” A weapon of mass destruction, be it chemical, nuclear, or biological, gives even its “smallest owner” big bang capacity. So does a globalized media event.

One final thought: American bayonets, smart bombs, and media bombast are formidable, but I suspect the growing awareness of an Iraqi democratic victory in Iraq will prove to be the “strategic information campaign” that trumps Al Qaeda.

copyright Austin Bay November 4, 2005

All Rights Reserved  ¶ 5:45 AM 5 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: SAM CRANE

Dr. George T. " Sam" Crane is Professor of Political Science at Williams College, where he is the Chair of the Asian Studies Department and- quite appropriately - is teaching a course on war and globalization. The author of Aidan's Way: The Story of a Boy's Life and a Father's Journey and numerous articles on international relations, Professor Crane is also the respected and discerning blogger at The Useless Tree, a blog devoted to world affairs examined through the prism of classical Chinese philosophy .


Globalization and Conflict in East Asia

by Sam Crane

I go back and forth on this question: has globalization had more of a positive effect or more of a negative effect on war over the past thirty years or so? Globalization has obviously contributed to the reduction in interstate war among advanced industrial countries, especially in Europe; but it has also spawned nationalist backlashes in various places and has engendered new forms of networked threats. The news seems generally good when one looks at the numbers of combat deaths reported in the new Human Security Report (which might need to have a post of its own), but then there is China.

China has obviously benefited from globalization and the extraordinary economic growth there has certainly allowed it to modernize its military. The potential threat of that improving military is offset to some degree by its intensifying interconnections with global institutions and its interdependence on foreign trade and investment. It is, in many ways, a status quo power. But globalization has also contributed to the strengthening of a new popular nationalism that resents slights by the US and other powers, and takes an especially hard line against Japan. The overall effect has been to raise the possibility of conflict in East Asia.

The problem is both general and particular. In general, China’s rise has contributed to Japanese fears (North Korea has also worried the Japanese), pushing Tokyo further down the road to constitutional revision that will allow it to have a “real” military and pressing it into a closer military relationship with the US, especially on the Taiwan issue . China, of course, notices these changes and does not like what it sees .

By themselves, these general trends might not be too dangerous; they could be offset by a strategic calculation in both Beijing and Tokyo that going to war is just too costly. But there is a more specific issue that could spark direct conflict: oil.

China’s globalization-driven economic growth has increased the demand for oil world-wide, and made petroleum diplomacy a priority for Beijing. Tokyo also worries about supplies. Add to this the specific territorial disputes between China and Japan in the East China Sea, an area said to have petroleum reserves, and we have the makings of a tense standoff .

So, globalization, in this case, may be increasing the possibility of interstate war. Thirty years ago the likelihood of a conflict between China and Japan was infinitesimal. Mao had buried the hatchet with Tokyo in 1972, when he dropped a demand for war indemnities in return for Japanese recognition of the PRC. No Chinese dared to get out on the streets and protest against past war crimes. And in Japan then there was something of a “China fever” as business interests eyed the seemingly endless opportunities. Fast forward to today and the ruling party in Japan has identified China as its most significant strategic threat and China is sending warships into the East China Sea to ward Japan off its oil exploration . And this change has happened as globalization has deepened in both places.

General theories that suggest globalization reduces the likelihood of interstate war are fairly persuasive. The problem comes when we dig more deeply into specific relationships. The China-Japan relationship is worsening. The reason why no shooting has broken out yet may have more to do with old-fashioned balance of power dynamics (which are not set in stone and could tip out of balance under the right circumstances) and less with globalization.  ¶ 5:40 AM 6 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: JOSH MANCHESTER

From 2000 to 2004, Mr. Josh Manchester was on active duty in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Egypt, Kuwait, and Iraq. A combat engineer officer, he participated in battalion, group, and occasionally Marine Expeditionary Force-level planning for the invasion of Iraq. He also served for a short period as an intelligence officer, finding, sorting, and analyzing various intelligence products. Manchester has a wide familiarity with Marine Corps history and doctrine: division, regimental, and battalion-level operations, combat engineering, command and control, and logistics. He is a graduate of The Basic School and Marine Corps Engineer School, and received a BA with honors from Duke University. Manchester's blog, the lively and stimulating The Adventures of Chester covers a wide range of foreign policy and military-related issues.

Globalization and War

by Josh Manchester

In the 1990s, the world awakened to a post-Communist order, one in which global capital was largely unfettered to come and go as it pleased. Soon it became apparent that not just capital, but people, ideas, goods, services, and every manner of human transaction, physical or otherwise, was enabled by technology and the fall of the USSR to spread as never before. This entire phenomenon came to be known through the shorthand term of "globalization."

Western academia had several assumptions in its analysis of the globalization phenomenon. Taken together these closely-held tenets, nearly sacred in ivory towers, might be called the "normal" theory of globalization. Many of these assumptions are now very clearly wrong and they are worth exploring:

1. Globalization will inevitably lead to Westernization. It's rather ironic that so many leftist academics espoused this theory, since it manages to embrace a sort of assumed Western superiority while at the same time turning the rest of the world's cultures into victims. Or maybe, Westernization would result because we in the West are so aggressive? No matter. The assumption is false. If there is any lesson to be learned these days from globalization's effects on people and cultures, it is that it transmits all of them, and transforms all of them. There is an process of give-and-take at play in nearly every place -- whether physically or in cyberspace, or other media -- where two or more cultures and peoples collide. In this way, we find radicalized Muslims as easily in Munich as we do in Mecca, and democrats as easily in Kabul as in Kansas. Moreover, the very cultures that were thought soon to be washed away by the onrush of global capitalism find themselves just as easily transmitted by it as those of the West. Witness the border region of the US and Mexico, which is a teeming hybrid of both Western and Latin cultures, or examine the growing influence of Chinese and Japanese pop culture upon the rest of Asia and even the United States. Western -- and American -- culture have influenced each of these others in turn, but by no means can be described as ascendant, and even less and less so, as dominant.

2. Globalization leads to homogenization. A famous and well-regarded 1996 work was entitled Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. Each of the visions it describes as competing for dominance in the world can only be considered homogenous: jihad and tribalism on the one hand, and global capitalism on the other. But the nearly 10 years since have revealed the actual fragmentation of both of these tendencies. All sorts of large-scale institutions, which Barber lumps into "global capitalism" are disintegrating, or decentralizing. And tribalism serves many people in many different ways. Polities are now to be found in diasporas all over the world, and are much less likely to fall upon traditional fault lines as they are to splinter into dozens of interest groups. From the consumer marketplace to geographic identity, political parties, racial identification, and even ideologies, heterogeneity is the order of the day.

3. Globalization will lead to a decline in state power. This is one of the most frequent assumptions in all of the lexicon of the political scientists who study globalization, and is taken for granted so regularly as to be a maxim of the field. But while there is certainly no dearth of failed states, successful states are just as plentiful. Moreover, state power, while sometimes bested by new challenges, does not seem to be withering away. Consider the many faces of state power that are not about to crumble: intelligence collection; military expenditure and operations; the setting of monetary policy and interest rates; the collection and disbursement of revenue; the creation and enforcement of regulations. States are surely challenged by globalization, and many may succumb to it, but its effects cannot be described as a frontal assault, and the demise of states is far from a foregone conclusion.

If the old touchstones of globalization analysis are looking pretty worn for the wearing, where does that leave us? I propose two new tenets of globalization that recent history seems to uphold:

1. Globalization subverts hierarchies. Indeed, it is not state power that is waning, it is state power expressed in the form of bureaucracy. Globalization speeds the pace of life, of events, of the spread of ideas, of the necessity for decisionmaking. Sclerotic state bureaucracies -- and any other bureaucracies for that matter, corporate or otherwise -- can only keep up for so long. Here is where the purported loss of state power may be visible; for while organizations that are flexible and adaptable have no problem adjusting to the speed of current decision cycles, those that require reams of forms filled out in triplicate, several layers of command between action and decision, and administration by committee are the ones most likely to be found mired in scandal, backlogs, and ultimately, irrelevancy.

The very medium through which I deliver this message is one of the more prominent examples. A pulsing, living, breathing conscious thing called the internet, but which is actually the online mind of a large proportion of humanity, is constantly seeking new information, devouring it, processing it, transmitting it, analyzing it, storing it, and so on in iterations ad infinitum. Compared to traditional means of performing those same functions, it is blisteringly fast. Moreover, it has little imposed order within its organization. What hierarchy may exist is highly decentralized and spontaneously generated ex machina. There is no top-down organization and drawing a wire-diagram of even the smallest portion of it would soon prove frustrating. The relationship to subversion of hierarchies is not hard to comprehend. One of the earliest texts on the implications of the internet, the cluetrain manifesto declared that "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy." In the intervening years, this has proved true. And so on to the next point:

2. Globalization leads to a decentralization of all aspects of human existence. Whereas cranks like the Unabomber once worried that the forces of history were turning human beings into "mere cogs in the social machine," now we know better. The "machine" is decentralizing, and is no longer singular, having made itself into a networked entity, not a singly hierarchy. And the results for human choice have been, and will continue to be, nearly unimaginable. Humans are not cogs in a machine -- they are more and more free radicals in a large interconnected organism. Certainly we are connected to others in many more ways, and in some cases new ways, than we once were, but at the same time our freedom of activity has not been circumscribed -- in most cases it has been enhanced dramatically. In the United States for example, a country that was recently declared to be a Free Agent Nation, is now developing a do-it-yourself economy, such that, for example, anyone with the time and inclination to do so can use services such as eMachineShop, and draw on a worldwide manufacturing and supply network. Such trends are expected to increase dramatically.

What does all this mean for the future of warfare? Several things: while violent conflict may be localized, if there are fundamental ideas underlying that conflict (as opposed to, say, local resource scarcity), the ideas will not be localized in the slightest. Walling off any one part of the world in the hopes that it will not impede upon the rest will prove useless.

Moreover, if decentralization is the order of the day, then the states that allow their functions to be decentralized will probably retain more power than those that continue to try to control their tasks via rigid hierarchies.

Finally, networked global actors, whether states, non-state groups, religious organizations, criminal enterprises, or basically any other formal or informal group of people, will continue to be dramatically more nimble than their hierarchical counterparts and competitors.

In many areas of warfare, theorists are attempting to understand and work within the ethic of decentralization. Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles, creates the concept of the market-state. Though he does not express it in the terms of hierarchy and decentralization used here, the goal of the market-state is to perform the functions of the state through decentralized and networked means -- markets, whether via privatization or other sorts of proto-markets. Some examples he offers are security warranties through which one state might offer a sort of guarantee to aid another that is more akin to an insurance policy than an alliance. Bobbitt also mentions programs such as "lease-hire security insurance, licensing some forms of defense technology and emphasizing the U.S. role in providing information, missile defense, and even intervention for hire."

Whereas Bobbitt is a strategist by training, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla study networks and networked forms of warfare at the tactical and operational levels. In works like Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy and Swarming and the Future of Conflict they discuss the advantages and disadvantages of networked forms of organizations and their preferred tactic, swarming. One development that seems to be influenced by the RAND researchers is the Marine Corps' experiments with a form of networked ground warfare called USMC Distributed Operations, which is about

enabling the ground elements to conduct successful NCW [network-centric warfare] against an adaptive, asymmetric enemy.

It is important to remember that no new programs develop from scratch. The US military's officer and NCO corps will have to undergo a variety of changes if distributed operations or other networked forms of battle organization and doctrine are to be adopted. Those systems, that of officers in particular, rest upon ancient ideas of aristocracy and noblesse oblige. Can the US military perform what might seem to be a subversion of this storied hierarchy?

It should be noted that whether it can or not, many private organizations may be able to do so with ease. The growing private military industry is as capable as any state of creating and provisioning the types of security markets that Bobbitt envisions and the types of decentralized tactical units that are foreseen by Arquilla and Ronfeldt. If the US military, or other state militaries prove too hierarchical to adapt to the decentralized, globalized world in which we live, other actors now waiting in the wings, many of them private, will rise to fill the void.

Such a vision of the future of warfare seems dark and mysterious, one in which the Leviathan of the state could easily break down. Perhaps. But a future in which anyone can publish anything might have once seemed frightening, just as a future in which anyone could worship as they pleased still does to many. There is just enough reason to believe that the future decentralized security market, both private and public, will serve its ultimate citizens – or consumers – just as efficiently as other new markets serve us today.  ¶ 5:25 AM 3 comments

  DAY I: GLOBALIZATION AND WAR

Introductory Post by Zenpundit

Our featured posts today:

"A Foreign Policy Needs a Domestic Policy " by Bruce Kesler

" Globalization and War" by Doug Macdonald

"Globalization and War" by Simon  ¶ 7:30 AM 0 comments

 

GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: BRUCE KESLER

Mr. Bruce Kesler has been active in American politics for forty years. An early member of Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, Mr. Kesler has also worked for The Foreign Policy Research Institute and today he writes occasionally for The Augusta Free Press, The Democracy Project and The American Enterprise Online .

A Foreign Policy Needs a Domestic Policy

By Bruce Kesler


There is no “foreign policy” separate from domestic policy. There is no “doctrine” separate from its actual implementation. A doctrine is a statement of important guiding principle. But in the absence of integration in a comprehensive winning strategy, it is little more than an inadequate public relations campaign.

In 1971, when working at an eminent foreign policy think tank, I was tasked to analyze the Nixon Doctrine[1]. After assessing reams of commentary that Delphically delved into the administration’s arguments, I concluded that there was no Nixon Doctrine. “Strength through partnership,” I argued, was a public relations coping mechanism designed to change the vocabulary of discourse in order to preserve continuity and flexibility of American foreign policy. I pointed out that it also contained a dangerous component of existential defeatism, meant to rally forces to slow the eventual perceived defeat of the West, rather than a prescriptive guidance to achieve larger goals abroad.

Learned, experienced, and respected elders privately agreed. But they then accepted the Nixon Doctrine as a practical alternative to the strong assault of the McGovernite opposition. To declare that the emperor had no clothes wasn’t realistic or politically sound.

In the context of the domestic political situation faced by Nixon and Kissinger, I didn’t question the need for such a public relations “doctrine,” at least in the short-term. But I did question whether it sowed longer-term seeds that would leave the U.S. self-absorbedly reactive and overly self-restrained.

Being raised in a Dean Acheson world, his message from a December 9, 1964 speech at Amherst College is worth revisiting: “The end sought by our foreign policy, the purpose for which we carry on relations with foreign states, is as I have said, to preserve and foster an environment in which free societies may exist and flourish. Our policies and actions must be tested by whether they contribute to or detract from achievement of this end. They need no other justification or moral or ethical embellishment.”

This was nicely followed at the time by the comments of Paul Warnke and Leslie Gelb, on the consequences of failing to deal with foreign threats: “Our own society could become a cloistered citadel of fear and repression. These events would, in turn, deeply challenge our lives and our security.” The domestic consequence of a non-engaged, reactively-protective foreign policy would eventually lead to domestic policies averse to Americans’ cherished liberties and comforts and weaken our determination to make their defense our primary goal.

With the partial exception of President Reagan’s revival of an assertive foreign policy, America spent much of the last 30 years coasting with veiled eyes as the threat to U.S. and global security brewed in the Middle East. For most of us, September 11 tore that veil away.

For 60 years, Commentary magazine educated the vital center in America about present and potential dangers from an inertial, outdated 1930s liberalism and from consequent excesses. Its current issue continues that invaluable service, publishing a symposium on the Bush Doctrine by three dozen of the most penetrating minds in foreign policy.

The contributors agree that the Bush Doctrine is about preempting potentially disastrous threats through force and preventing future ones by building more benign democratic states. They also agree that there are such threats.

Disagreements are expressed over the concept of preemption, the practicality of democratization, Iraq as a proper location for application of the doctrine, and the Bush administration’s policies toward Iran and North Korea. As to Iraq—thanks to 20/20 hindsight—most agree that there have been some serious failings in the planning and execution of the war. However, they agree on little else, one adding some more salt, another a bit more pepper, another a dollop of honey to the mix. All agree that the outcome in Iraq, more promising to some than others, will determine the ultimate judgment of the Bush Doctrine.

Richard Perle, a key player in all things Iraq, minces few words:

"Notwithstanding the caricature of the Bush Doctrine, portrayed by its critics as a menacing unilateralism serving a crusade to impose democracy by force, Bush has correctly understood that the dictatorships and autocracies of the Middle East are the soil in which lethal extremism and the passion for holy war have taken root and spread. He is under no illusion that democratic reform will come quickly or easily, or that it can be imposed from outside by military means. In pressing for reform, he has stood up against the counsel of inaction, self-designated as sophistication, from foreign offices around the world—including those of our European and ‘moderate’ Arab allies—and rather too often even from our own diplomatic establishment. Such counsel would leave the dictators in place for as long as they can cling to power or, worse still, have us collaborate with them and their secret services, or negotiate for their voluntary restraint, in the vain and by now discredited hope that we can thereby purchase safety for our citizens."

Another longtime observer, Richard Pipes, comments, “I do not recall a period in modern history when United States foreign policy has been under such relentless attack from abroad and at home as in the administration of George W. Bush.”

Pipes’s next sentence, at first, struck me as too partisan: “At home, the criticism is mainly inspired by Democratic frustration over Republican electoral triumphs and the feeling that the Republicans’ aggressive foreign policy is what makes them vulnerable.”

But then, Senate Democrat Minority Leader Harry Reid pulled the U.S. Senate into secret session to demand, “a searching and comprehensive investigation about how the Bush Administration brought this country to war.”

In doing so, Reid ensured that November 1, 2005, would forever be remembered as the day that the Democrat Party officially declared war on the war in Iraq. They’re now repeating their 1972 game plan of openly coalescing around eviscerating the war policy for which they’ve lost guts.

As Henry Kissinger reflected back in August, “America’s emotional exhaustion with the [Vietnam] war and the domestic travail of Watergate had reduced economic and military aid to Vietnam by two-thirds, and Congress prohibited military support, even via airpower, to the besieged ally.”

Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz reflects, “If we are eventually beaten back, it will not be by the terrorist insurgency over there but by the political insurgency here at home.” Daniel Henninger, of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, chimes in, “The U.S. and Western European media are together the most potent driver of doctrinaire pacifism since the idea emerged with force in the twentieth century.”

Paul Johnson, as befits such a sweeping scholar of the entire history of religions and countries, concludes, “We must ask ourselves this question: how much more fearful and violent would our world be if America did not exist?”

Yet, what’s missing from the Commentary symposium is an in-depth examination of whether the Bush Doctrine is a blueprint for action, or a formulation for reactive coping in the post-9/11 world.

While far more assertive than Clinton’s national security strategy, I contend that the Bush Doctrine is still excessively reactive and doesn’t present a sufficiently aggressive blueprint for ultimately winning the war against terror, its state sponsors, and the threat of WMD’s. Moreover, even the Nixon Doctrine may have been more forward-looking.

So what’s needed? On the domestic front, far more is required to strengthen our foreign policy, for no such strategy can succeed absent a strong domestic policy. In turn, the self-strengthening domestic policies must be directly linked to our specific foreign policy goals:

To relieve the downward pressure of oil dependence on the American economy, and to free ourselves to more forthrightly confront the Saudi and other Arab League sycophants of Islamic extremism, we must go full tilt into conservation and alternate fuel technologies.

To sustain our ability to deter and meet armed challenges, we must build a larger and more robust military and simultaneously demand that university recipients of federal dollars not impede research or recruitment.

To pay for these measures, we must phase in dissuasive-level fossil fuel taxes. Strict budget rules must be honored for a multi-year moratorium on increases in existing discretionary and new spending programs. Responsible Congresses and administrations imposed such measures during World War II and Korea. We can demand no less now. Irresponsible “guns-and-butter” Johnson administration policies during Vietnam excused Americans from the national commitment and fed enervating inflation in the 1970s.

In Iran and North Korea, in order to curb their nuclear ambitions, an unequivocal promise to use American destructive air force must be added to multilateral pressures.

Domestic opponents of such measures, whether Democrat or Republican, must be energetically and publicly confronted by the administration. Quislings or profiteers cannot be tolerated.

Private foundations must steer major new funds and efforts into their media operations and into training a new generation of reporters with foreign policy and military knowledge and experience. The Defense Department must not merely welcome, but financially underwrite, private media correspondents embedding within garrison and frontline units.

The defense universities must reexamine their reliance on some faculty inexperienced in war, and indeed as ignorant and opposed to U.S. force as some in the Leftist media. The CIA is already cleaning house. The State Department needs to as well.

As seen from the generally unfocused thinking among the Commentary contributors, those friendly toward President Bush’s objectives need a more focused and effective policy to support. That can be found not in caving to his Democratic critics, but in pursuing an even more assertive doctrine, integrated within a more comprehensive strategy and execution.

President Bush is not running for reelection. And even though his poll ratings may suffer from a more assertive foreign policy, his legacy—of defending and advancing freedom—will not. And most importantly, rather than simply lurching from coping slogan to coping slogan, America will lastingly benefit.

Footnotes:

1.The 1969 Wake Island statement of the Nixon Doctrine might be summarized as "strength through partnership," as the editor of my American Enterprise Online piece changed my draft. By 1971, under the pressure of domestic and international politics, it had migrated to "negotiation through strength and partnership," the "weaker" formulation I was addressing in 1971 and in my piece. It's not directly relevant to the thrust of the piece, so the editor's change in my text can stand. However, this change in formulation is important as an indicator of the difference within a "doctrine' over time in response to changing conditions, and to understanding that a "doctrine" is known through and only as good as its implementing strategy. Both the presentation and the comprehensiveness of Nixon's "doctrine' were superior to that of Bush, but both may fall on the pyre of Democrat scorched earth politics and war weariness

Editorial Note: Mr. Kesler's article is being cross-posted at The American Enterprise Online. .

  ¶ 7:25 AM 6 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR:DOUG MACDONALD

Dr. Doug Macdonald is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University and author of Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World and is an expert on American Defense and Terrorism policies, particularly as they relate to Asia. Professor Macdonald has held a number of distinguished positions including Director of the International Relations Program at Colgate University and Senior Research Fellow at The Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway.

Globalization and War

by Doug Macdonald

I am going to concentrate my remarks on the question of Globalization and terrorism, as that is the main means of conflict that seems to have emerged since the end of the Cold War, and the acceleration of trends that had been developing for decades that we now call Globalization.

Let me begin with a working definition. Globalization has been defined in various ways, but to me it is the spread of neoliberal economic and political reforms, the diffusion of new technologies of information, especially the internet, the lowering of barriers to trade through the WTO and other international institutions, and the internationalization of capital. Taken together, this sweeping tide of change is both exhilarating and, to the vulnerable, frightening.

The reason that these changes are unsettling in Third World countries is that they disrupt old patterns of behavior and it is almost impossible, as in remote areas in the past, to avoid their effects. It is not a coincidence that many Islamist terrorists, not all, are from rural areas, or are newly arrived to urban life. These urban cultural challenges to established value systems can lead to violence, and lead minority groups in some countries to rebel. Globalization in this regard is not seen as an increase in opportunities or the hope of a better future, but as a destructive force that is destroying traditional ways of life. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” inherent in industrialization is not appreciated everywhere, as a concept or as a process.

Some of these movements are ironically partly the result of democratization, the expressed desire for which has been spreading around the world. Neoliberal political reforms decentralize power in the political realm and weaken the authority of already weak states. In the area of the world I am most interested in, Southeast Asia, in the newly democratic countries of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, there is a tremendous distrust of the military and other security forces because of the recent dictatorships that has hampered the war on terror in those countries. It is also worth noting that these three countries have the most troublesome terrorist problems in the region. Countries that have sufficient economic “safety nets” and relatively strong states, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have relatively slight terror problems.

Let me illustrate with an example of how Globalization-driven reforms can have the unintended consequence of creating violent conflict. In Thailand several years ago, the government decided to push through educational reforms, specifically increasing the number of years of schooling mandated by the state from six to nine years. This was done for two primary reasons. First, the change was meant to help reduce the educational and economic disparities between rural and urban areas, the former being far behind in development. Second, it was decided that if Thailand was to become more competitive in the global marketplace, it would need better educated citizens. Their models for reform appear to have been earlier programs along these lines by Singapore and Malaysia.

A good, progressive, modernizing neoliberal reform, right? The problem was that in the heavily Muslim areas along the Malaysian border, the population – that speaks a different language, and is ethnically Malay and overwhelmingly Muslim - resented the Thai-Buddhist nationalist-secularist curriculum. When the government began closing religious schools in those areas that preached separatism, in January, 2004 tensions spilled over into violence. Since January, 2004 over 1,000 people have been killed. Twenty-seven percent of the attacks have been on educational institutions. The insurgency, perhaps the worst in the region, has no chance of overthrowing the government – Muslims are only 4% of the population. But it is causing numbers of deaths, widespread Buddhist flight from the affected areas, and consuming an inordinate amount of government time and resources. All because of a reform that by neoliberal, secularist standards was both helpful and just.

This is not an invitation to throw away Globalization, even if we could. But it may never lead to the better world it promises if those of us that support it have to shoot our way into dominance. We should not make Marx’s mistake when he saw the disruptive effects of early industrialization in Europe as capitalism’s death throes rather than its birth pangs. But we need to design these changes in more sensible and intelligent ways, and realize that we have a selling job to do, even at the lowest levels of the socio-economic totem pole. Perhaps most there. If we charge ahead with a “bottom line,”macro-economic standard only, we can expect more conflict and terroristic wars. We may have to face the fact that neoliberal decentralization in the form of democracy may be the best long term strategy, but can have disruptive and even catastrophic effects in the short run. I see no easy solution to the problem, but it deserves more attention than it is getting, especially from economists.  ¶ 7:21 AM 2 comments

  GLOBALIZATION AND WAR: SIMON WORLD

Simon is the Hong Kong based, anonymous proprietor of the highly regarded and enormously popular Simon World blog. Simon's timely postings, steady output and incisive, crisp, commentary on Asian and world affairs have won him many devoted readers in an ever more competitive blogosphere.


Globalization and war

by Simon

The upcoming WTO conference in Hong Kong has everyone on edge. Hong Kong’s security forces are preparing for the inevitable anti-trade protests. The governments’ participating are inching towards an agreement, but it is by no means certain. Hong Kong’s government frets it will play host to a giant farce, with nothing agreed and everyone’s time wasted. Yet the WTO represents one of the greatest economic achievements of the modern era: trade liberalization. And Hong Kong embodies the free trade spirit better than almost any place on Earth.

Can an economically integrated and trading world go to war? It certainly managed to in 1914. China’s ongoing stirring of nationalism, especially against the Japanese and Taiwan, serves a political purpose that is at odds with the economic benefits trade and investment between these places. On the other hand, China has become in the naughties what Japan was in the eighties to America – the trade and economic bogey-man. There are plenty on both sides of that fence that can envisage war between two of the world’s biggest trading partners. It might not be good for Wal-Mart but a confrontation over Taiwan is a possibility.

And yet globalization could well act as a mitigating circumstance. Will China’s rulers, for all their bluster, squander the value of their massive holdings of US government debt, the massive benefits that export-led growth has brought to China’s economy? Certainly one consequence of globalization is it has made war more costly. Not just first order costs, but broader economic costs as well. Upping the costs and reducing the benfits of going to war makes globalization a force for moderation and peace.

But wait, there’s more. The flipside of this is the globalization of war and especially the global market for military weapons and technology. Pakistan made a business of exporting nuclear technology. It is widely thought China has exported military technology to unsavory regimes, and North Korea is famous for its missile exports. So in that regard globalization has become a force for war.

There’s more again. China’s opening up to the world through globalization has seen it create a vigorous appetite for commodities and energy. With its leadership primarily focused on economic growth at almost any cost, combined with a “flexible” ideology and foreign policy, has meant China has formed alliances and invested in far flung corners of the world that are inherently unstable or alien to liberal democracies. There are examples from the Middle East, Central Europe and Africa that all fit into this category. Whereas it could be argued that America’s foreign policy is not solely or even primarily driven by economic concerns, China’s is and that leads to allies you wouldn’t want to take home to your Mum. Chalk it up as another minus for globalization.

But I’m not here to finish on a pessimistic note. I am a firm believer in free trade and globalization for both its economic benefits, especially to the poor, and as a driver of a more peaceful and safer world. The globalization of culture is often characterized as the “Disneyfication” (or McDonaldisation, or Hollywodisation, whichever American cultural icon you choose) of the world and is derided as a “bad thing”. But these companies and groups provide products that are popular with consumers the world over. No-one is forced to visit Disneyland, or eat a Big Mac, or watch a movie. But people want to. Moreover America remains the favoured destination for immigrants and would-be immigrants the world over, including in China. The American dream is a global one. This success sometimes drives envy, but America’s prosperity is widely admired. The foundations of that success? Liberal capitalist democracy. If globalization can bring images and ideas of liberal capitalist democracy to those who live without it, it can only serve to drive people to aspire to such a society. America’s model is not the only one. But it is the biggest and most successful (and note that I’m an Australian). As people grow richer in countries like China, they will start demanding more secure property rights, rule of law, less tolerance of corruption, more say in how they are governed. Globalization makes countries richer while at the same time constantly exposing populations to the most successful economic and political model the world has devised.

As globalization brings economic growth, it will bring political growth. Countries that are economically successful and growing do not, as a rule, go to war. In a world where there are numerous flashpoints and delicate balances to be maintained, globalization is a key force pushing towards peace. It is that complicated. And that simple.  ¶ 7:19 AM 16 comments

  THE ZENPUNDIT ROUNDTABLE:
ON GLOBALIZATION AND WAR

It is my great pleasure to announce the start of a symposium designed to examine our time as an age of globalization and war.

On Wednesday November 9th I am turning Zenpundit over to a special group of invited academic experts, military veterans, experienced journalists and highly regarded bloggers who will be debating the state of the world and the war we find ourselves in today and perhaps tomorrow. The issues are deep but the range and of the participants is wide and their prose is sharp. I am certain you will find their arguments as challenging and interesting to read as I have these last few days.

The Zenpundit Roundtable:


Austin Bay

Bruce Kesler of The Democracy Project

Professor Doug Macdonald of Colgate University

Simon of Simon World

Professor Sam Crane of Williams College and The Useless Tree

Chester of The Adventures of Chester

Professor RJ Rummel of the University of Hawaii and Democratic Peace

Paul D. Kretkowski of Beacon


Posts will appear in groups of three over the next three days each with a concluding post from me as the host and moderator of the symposium. Comments from the readers, as always, are welcome and encouraged. Many of the authors will be cross-posting and linking for further discussion on their own blogs as well.

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

John Milton


"To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight."

Homer, The Iliad

  ¶ 6:24 PM 3 comments

  TDAXP AND HIS BATTLE WITH THE NATIONMASTER: A LESSON IN NETWORKS

Dan of tdaxp, long a blogfriend of Zenpundit is locked in a consumer complaint battle with an internet information company known as NationMaster. In the day of the dead tree media, there was a saying about the power of big city newspapers " Don't get in a pissing contest with somebody who buys ink by the barrel". Today, an updated version might go like this " Don't get in a pissing contest with somebody who is part of a scale free network"

In addition to Dan's most recent post he has previously posted here ( where you can read Nationmaster's bullying, psuedo-legal email correspondence) and here ( the original post that ticked off Nationmaster's executives, including one " John Steinmetz").

By choosing to needlessly go the adversarial path with with Dan, a grad student who just wanted his money back, NationMaster ended up getting panned by:

Curzon at Coming Anarchy

Adam at The Metropolis Times

Bill at Dawn's Early Light

Ryne from Ryne McClaren

Brendan at I hate Linux

Simon at Simon World

NationMaster Watch - a blog established by Dan to do nothing but follow the permutations of Nationmaster's highly unusual customer relations policy.

Technorati leads with this dispute if you type in " NationMaster" for your search.

And now I am posting on this story. This is how a network functions. While Curzon and Simon are also blogfriends of mine as well as Dan's I was not familiar with the other blogs except I hate Linux which I had more heard of than visited. Dan is a " hub" that connects otherwise unrelated bloggers. For that matter, I'd barely heard of NationMaster either.

Given the number of readers these blogs have I have to wonder about the strategic thinking that went into NationMaster's response to Dan. Bloggers, I would think, would be a key customer demographic for this corporation and making gestures that engendered good will rather than bad in the blogging community would be the way I would have advised to go.

It is theoretically possible that Dan is a clever but psychotic con man posing as a grad student simply to bilk helpless corporations out of fairly earned dollars - but I kind of doubt it. It seems more likely that some arrogant a-hole in a corner office at NationMaster reacted dismissively when Dan asked for his money back and then decided that Dan " could be rolled" by pressuring him with a frivolous lawsuit.

Looks like a mistaken premise on NationMaster's part.

Moreover, in a network situation like this it isn't just how many people are reading but also whom. I really don't know who reads these other blogs (though some smart attorneys seem to read tdaxp) but I know who reads mine. Lots of academics, nationally known experts, think tank types, journalists and employees of numerous U.S. Government agencies. Some of these people are exceptionally bright and well-connected - I know this because they send me email - and now they are reading this post, clicking links and reading a heck of a lot about NationMaster.

Not much that's good, unfortunately.

Just think of how a gracious initial- or even belated - response by NationMaster to Dan's complaint would have gone over instead. It might still go over well at this late date. No skin off my nose to post that a company decided to do the right thing.

Because Zenpundit is eminently fair and I have goodwill toward one and all, I'm going to do my part to stop a corporation that should know better from continuing to dig a needless hole for itself. Here's a book recommendation for John Steinmetz of NationMaster - it's a quick read but it might help prevent customer relations problems like this in the future.

And here's another.  ¶ 6:06 PM 2 comments

  HETEROGENEITY OF LOYALIST PARAMILITARIES

I attended a Genocide Studies conference today. Multidisciplinary in nature, in some instances crit theory was raising its ugly ( and counterproductive) head. While not a specialist in the Holocaust per se, I do have enough expertise in the subject to have once been a finalist for a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. For the life of me though, I could not have explained what an English prof was going on about in terms of " turning earlier literary models against themselves...overturning the reigning conceptions of man ". Say, what ?

More interesting to me than the droning cant was the experience of one speaker, an anthropologist who specializes in the eastern islands of the Indonesian archipelago, who served as an election monitor for the East Timor independence vote for the Carter Center. She had at that time numerous, harrowing, personal encounters with the wild, anti-independence, militias sponsored by the brutal Indonesian Army and had only narrowly managed to get safely out of East Timor.

I asked her to speak to the demographics of the loyalist paramilitaries that destroyed 70 % of East Timor and raped and murdered thousands of East Timorese. The militias - notably Mahadi, Jati Merah Putih (Real Red and White), Aitarak ( Thorn), Mahadomi, Sakunar, Rajawali, Sera, Mahidi (Dead or Alive), Halilintar(Lightning), Laksaur (Eagle), ABLAI ( Struggle For integration), Darah Merah ( Red Blood), Besi Merah Putih ( Red and White Iron) and the Keaman Rakyat - had little in common with one another aside from violent tactics and Indonesian Army sponsorship.

• The militia members ran the ideological gamut from nationalist, to Islamist to ethnic network and criminal syndicate thugs to Timorese shanghaied into participating to Indonesian and foreign mercenaries. Some militia members were bought for as little as a sack of rice, some drugs and the freedom to rape and pillage.
• Most militia members were drunk and/or high on narcotics while committing atrocities.
• Indonesian troops and police casually supervised militia mayhem - much like German police during Kristallnacht - and shed their uniforms at times to join in.
• The dangerous factionalization of the Indonesian Army plus rivalries between the Army and Navy and Army and police meant that having secured relative safety from the depradations of one militia due to good connections might do little to help you with a militia aligned with another group. Or one exceeding their instructions

It would be interesting to look at the composition of Serb paramilitaries to see if Milosevic's regime drew upon a similar though Balkan " scum of the Earth" diversity in carrying out ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosnian and Kosovar Albanian Muslims, Croats and Slovenes. The Nazis cast a wide pan-European net to fill the ranks of their Waffen- SS and foreign auxillary formations like the Arajs Kommando. Stalin too went through " ethnic" phases where his secret police apparatus had disproportionate numbers of Jews, Letts, Georgians and other minorities.

Until his paranoia returned of course. Then they were purged and liquidated and replaced by ethnic Great Russians until the next major terror wave. The life of a loyalist paramilitary is a precarious one.

  ¶ 4:05 PM 5 comments

  MISCELLANEOUS FOREIGN POLICY BLOGGER RESOURCES

Personally, I tend to read more think tank and related specialty site output than daily blog aggregator collections, mostly because I want to read things that are not yet on the radar screen. I thought I would share a few that I have come across recently ( last 3 months +).

No particular endorsement other than check these out and see if they suit your needs. I visit some them sporadically and a few regularly. A few of them are superb for scholarly purposes as well:

The Combined Arms Research Library ( U.S. Army Command & General Staff College)

The SITE Institute ( International Terrorism, heavy Islamist focus)

AccessToLaw ( International Law, Treaties and Covenants)

Power & Interest News Report ( Analysis - high quality summative type)

WorldSecurityNetwork (Global opinion leaders)

Europe's World ( new Eurocentric policy journal - hat tip to Marc Schulman)

Terrorism Central ( self-explanatory)

OpenCRS ( Congressional Research Service)

Foreign Service Journal ( self-explanatory)

Strategic Intelligence ( Loyola University)

Law, Terrorism and Homeland Security ( News Aggregator)

MIPT Terrorism Data Base ( Statistical & Reference Database)  ¶ 8:27 PM 1 comments

  FRANCE'S URBAN INSURGENCY: CAN WE STOP CALLING THEM "YOUTHS" NOW?[ UPDATED]

The French government is having an inordinately difficult time suppressing riots and arson which are spreading like inkblots of disorder throughout French urban areas. Organization, coordination and pre-planning have been suspected in the rioting that began in predominantly Arab-Muslim and North African suburban ghettos but not concretely proven until the discovery today of a gasoline bomb making safe house in Paris. At this point, it is now time to set aside the comforting conceit of out of control "youths". Amidst the far more numerous opportunistic rioters, France has its own urban, Islamist, insurgency. One that is well-disciplined, experienced, ideologically committed and highly mobile.

France has a tradition of providing asylum to foreign political dissidents that reaches back two centuries. Today that open door includes Islamist extremists the way the doors of the Republic once opened for Eastern European anarchists, antifascist refugees fleeing Hitler and Franco and 1960's Third World revolutionaries who lionized Franz Fanon. Ayatollah Khomeini directed his 1979 revolution from Paris and his regime's agents assassinated Shahpour Bakhtiar there in 1991 the way Stalin's OGPU once iced White Russian emigres in cafes and coffee houses. In the French Muslim community, there exist those with ties to the GIA, Call to Combat, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hezbollah, various Palestinian factions and other groups more obscure (Chirac has been particularly ingratiating in terms of policy toward Arab-Muslim extremists in Lebanon and among the Palestinians). If these organizations are there, then so is al Qaida.

I think it would be a serious error to conclude that such a movement is very large in terms of numbers. One byproduct of sheltering the planet's political misfits is that French counterintelligence, both police and state security, is very, very, good . Moreover, with 10 % of the French population coming from Muslim ethnic groups in former French colonies, the language skills and cultural intelligence capabilities are there for French security services in a way the United States can only envy. If these insurgents were numerous they would have been penetrated already. So their elusiveness speaks to the insurgents being a small, tightly-compartmentalized but decentralized network of cells, quite possibly less than 100 people.

The reason the hard core of insurgents directing the rioting in French cities do not need to be numerous is that mob psychology is such that they can rely on being just a spark, rather than a flame:

"Conversely, a crowd is not an incipient riot merely because it assembles a great many people with the predisposing demographic characteristics. For example, every Fourth of July in Chicago's Grant Park there is a fireworks display that usually attracts about a million spectators. In certain parts of the grounds, people are packed together like sardines, so that individuals substantially lose their ability to decide where to go. One goes where the crowd goes. Going against it is impossible, and even leaving it (unless one is near the edge) may be difficult. Some people dislike the experience, but whatever its discomforts, the Fourth of July crowd at Grant Park is not a riot in the making. The crowd is big, it is loud, it is unmanageable, it is filled with people who have suffered from racial discrimination and economic deprivation, it has, in aggregate, drunk a lot of beer (which is legally for sale at dozens of kiosks at the event); but it is only a crowd, not an incipient riot.

...For a riot to begin, it is necessary but not sufficient that there be many people who want to riot and who believe that others want to riot too. One more hurdle has to be overcome. Even in an unstable gathering, the first perpetrator of a misdemeanor is at risk if the police are willing and able to zero in on him. Thus, someone has to serve as a catalyst--a sort of entrepreneur to get things going--in Buford's account usually by breaking a window (a signal that can be heard by many who do not see it).

...The entrepreneur will throw the first stone when he calculates that the risk that he will be apprehended for doing so has diminished to an acceptable level. The risk of arrest declines as a function of two variables--the size of the crowd relative to the police force available to control it, and the probability that others will follow if somebody leads. This latter point could potentially be tricky, because as we have noted, crowds will generally be inhospitable to the commission of violent acts. But it is possible for a crowd to telegraph its willingness to riot. Buford's account (1991: 81n-dash85) of a soccer hooligan rampage in Turin furnishes an example. Members of the crowd marched themselves around in a spontaneous formation with a stilted, unnatural gait, chanting the name of their team. This unmistakable token of cohesion stopped well short of anything that the Italian police could plausibly charge as solicitation or incitement, but served to assure the members of the crowd that a critical mass had formed.

Sometimes a crowd will not clearly commit itself to riot, and in such instances an entrepreneur will take more of a risk getting things started. But if he has done his implicit calculations properly, once the first plate-glass window is broken, the looting will begin and will spread and continue until the civil authorities muster enough force to make the rioters believe that they once again face a realistic prospect of arrest."

Why is this happening in France today ? Counterpressure. The French government has asserted itself against Islamist ideological encroachment by banning headscarves, attempting to root Salafi radical imams from the mosques, it has squeezed Syria over Lebanon ( and thus Hezbollah) and is " siding" with the U.S. over the Iranian nuclear program. Both Sunni and Shiite radicals have reasons to see a humiliating French retreat on issues of French internal security as a strategic victory for radical Islamism - another " 3-11", as it were.

These Islamist insurgents probably do not have the goal, as did the '68 leftist radicals, of topping the government itself; with only 10 % of the French population being Muslim, and few of these being Islamist, the backlash from causing a serious systemic disruption would be severe. Too many Frenchmen are veterans of Algeria, are descended from Pied Noirs or subscribe to a culturally conservative Gallic nationalism that looks with loathing at Islam. As John Robb wrote yesterday regarding 4GW forces that overreach:

"Complete collapse would create total war (via a bloody civil war). A complete urban/country takedown would prompt the state to launch a total war. This is a type of warfare that global guerrillas are not prepared or able to fight (in contrast, states are well suited to this). By keeping the level of damage below what would be considered fatal to the state, total war is avoided. "

( Note: Robb has his own analysis of the insurgency in France up this morning and a further explanation why insurgents have, so far, minimized loss of life)

What the insurgents are trying to accomplish, in my view, is to demonstrate their potential strength to the key decision-making officials in Chirac's administration and " punish" them for policies they view as anti-Islam. In the short and medium term, the insurgents would like to secure a modus vivendi that allows the radicals a free hand in the ghettos to oppress their own and a further distancing between France and the United States on Mideast questions. After the LePen phenomenon, it is questionable how much political room Chirac, Sarkozy and Villepin have for such concessions, even if they wanted to make them - which would also run into fierce resistance from top level civil servants in the police and security services.

ADDENDUM:

More analysis on rioting in France is being offered by Dave at The Glittering Eye ( also here and here), the now semi-ubiquitous praktike at Liberals Against Terrorism and
Armed Liberal at Winds of Change.

COUNTERPOINT UPDATE:

Collounsbury thinks I'm a blithering idiot. Dr. Barnett sees the solution in a French Islamist Party.  ¶ 8:46 PM 2 comments

  COUNTERVAILING ARGUMENTS

Myke Cole in the new feature article " Meet The New War, Same as The Old War" in U.S. Cavalry On Point counsels caution that revolutionary new forms of warfare may end up being more familiar than we expect. An excerpt:

"When Microsoft exploded onto the scene in the early 90’s, it sparked a new epoch of computing in which processing power was moved to desktop “personal computers” (PCs) and off of the large back-end servers to which most users connected via terminals. Technology analysts and pundits alike heralded this as a new and unchangeable computing paradigm. The past was dead, PCs were the future.

New advents in web technology began to change all that before the ink was dry on those predictions. Sophisticated Cold-Fusion and Java development made a lot of applications easier and cheaper to run on large web servers, making it far easier for users to simply connect to the web through a less powerful computer and have their work done on the back end. Companies like Austin based ClearCube have in some cases already eliminated the PC altogether in several universities, county court systems and two Air Force bases.[9] Seattle based PopCap Games has long replaced Minesweeper and Solitaire as the ultimate waster of productive worker hours through a product line of sophisticated games playable entirely via the web.[10] All any user needs to do most functions, from email to video games to data mining, is have a dumb terminal with internet access.

In less than ten years, the IT of the future looks largely like the IT of the past.

Open source reporting indicates our present major conventional threats; China, Iran and North Korea showing signs of military buildup. Worse, such reporting is proving more accurate than the assessments delivered by our own intelligence services.

...The Times article cited above points out where China’s expenditures have gone, and the list is hardly an indicator of a 4GW strategy: New long-range cruise missiles, hi-tech warships, attack submarines, precision guided munitions and surface-to-surface missile technology.[14]

North Korea’s recent media blitz is due not to 4GW methods of message warfare (Kim Jong-Il appears like a madman uniformly in the press), but rather to the possibility of good old-fashioned nuclear détente."

Go read the whole thing.  ¶ 10:08 AM 0 comments

  RESILIENCY GAINS SOME TRACTION - SPURS FURTHER CONTEMPLATION

The State Resiliency post was linked to yesterday by both Dr. Barnett and John Robb - a very good blogospheric sign for the validity of the concept - and they each made some complimentary remarks which I appreciate and encouraged me to develop this idea further. Myke Cole's suggestions and criticism via email have also been very helpful as were the remarks of Dan, Curtis and Nadezhda (the last of which still requires a reply from me).

Related links: Take a look at John Robb's post on Evo Morales ( I don't claim to be an expert on Bolivia but the historical governmental instability of that state is matched only by its unchanging social stratification). A new commenter, Valdis hails from a commercial site - Orgnet.com / InFlow - that nevertheless has a large file of network theory related papers. Finally, Dr. Chet Richards recent " Beyond Patterns of Conflict" at DNI particularly his reference to John Boyd's slide " Theme for Vitality and Growth "(PDF). For the latter note:

• Boyd's concept of grand strategy as "constructive" rather than "destructive" like the OODA loop. Recall in Boyd's Destruction and Creation that destruction-creation is a dialectical engine of change. I see Barnett's PNM Theory fulfilling the " constructive" role in the process at the grand strategy level ( but Sys Admin also at tactical) even as 4GW/5GW and Global Guerillaism represent the "destructive" aspect of the dynamic at the tactical -operational and possibly theater/regional strategic level. Very yin-yang, very Schumpeter.

• Moral strength is composed of what exactly ? Collective vs. individual. Moral (ethical value system) vs. Morale (confidence and cognitive integration of values). Conceptual/Memetic Attraction - winning over neutrals, countering the moral strength of adversaries. State Resiliency would indicate the existence of moral harmony between leaders and the society.

• Clashes between two equally Resilient forces in the moral sphere would be likely to be the most destructive kind of warfare, even if the combatants were otherwise asymmetrical oponents. Examples of this would be " epochal wars" like the religiously energized Thirty Years War, the Jews facing Titus at Masada or the modern secular ideological crusade against Nazism or many civil wars, notably the American or China's Taiping rebellion.

Comments, criticism, thoughts are welcome. I'm still thinking through these concepts myself ( and incidentally doing an excellent job of procrastinating on my actual work!).

  ¶ 6:40 AM 0 comments

  THE U.S. CONGRESS LETS DOWN THE FIRST AMENDMENT - AGAIN

Bruce Kesler has the details. I am in complete agreement and share a sense of disgust and outrage.

What this country needs is a political party that supports the idea of limited government and individual liberty.  ¶ 12:09 PM 2 comments

  MAPPING A TERROR NETWORK'S IMPLICIT VILLAINS

Chester at The Adventures of Chester had an important post yesterday "All Al-Tikriti's Men" that I urge you to read. An excerpt:

"...The other shareholder in Torno S.A.H., who gave his proxy to Fischer to approve the sale, was a man named Engelbert Schreiber, Jr. (search) He has been linked, either directly or through father-son family business, to a number of Liechtenstein enterprises affiliated at various times from the 1970s through at least the year 2000 with Ahmed Idris Nasreddin (search), a man designated as a terrorist financier by the U.S. and U.N. shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.

A naturalized Italian citizen, Nasreddin operated for decades out of Milan and Lugano, Switzerland, both as a businessman and a member of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, some elements of which morphed into Al Qaeda. In 2002, Nasreddin, along with a number of his enterprises, landed on the U.N.’s list of individuals or entities “belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda.” He is now believed to be in Morocco.

It is rare for an entire network to be exposed at once, for its power relationships to become visible to the naked eye in such detail as to find its members scurrying for cover from enemy networks, the lidless eye of the press, or in the case of dictatorships, the furor of the formerly subjugated. Yet this is what is afoot in the circumstances surrounding the overthrow and trial of Saddam Hussein

...One wonders what manner of connections may ultimately be found among Saddam’s trading partners in the Oil-for-Food mess, his legal defense team, and the slew of international agencies and organizations that decry his trial as unfair. An overclass of globalati, they will cough quite loudly as the pungent odor of corruption exposed ruins their rarefied air. If they aren’t careful, their ideas, programs, and issues might all be discredited. Following the money is proving thus far to be quite a show: named as facilitors in the Oil-for-Food kickback scheme are a British MP; a French Interior Minister; a French Ambassador to the UN,; a former assistant to the Secretary of State for the Vatican,; Marc Rich, beneficiary of President Clinton’s merciful last-minute pardons; DaimlerChrysler, Siemens, and 2400 other firms and individuals. "

Transnational networks be they organized crime or terrorist in nature rely on either sponsorship by a state or a significant number of supporting " nodes" that exist in the gray zone of questionable legality and even some, particularly in the financial sector, who are respectable members of the above ground economy. Without such ties the transnational network will be extremely limited in its operational capacity.  ¶ 8:39 PM 1 comments

  COUNTERING 4GW: STATE RESILIENCE, NOT STATE BUILDING, IS KEY

Link Preface:

"The Failure of Global Guerrillaism: Democracies Withstand Economic Pain" by Dan of tdaxp

"Cascading System Failure" and " State Failure 101" by John Robb

"Network Theory with an Emphasis on al Qaeda" and " Emergence" by Dr. Von

"The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation" by William Lind, Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt , Joseph W. Sutton ,Gary I. Wilson

"Thomas P.M. Barnett: Deleted Scenes" and " The Virtuous Circle on Security: The Slippery Slope to Resiliency" by Dr. Barnett

"Reviewing the Deleted Scene on System Perturbation Part II." and "Rules, Rule-Sets And Social Systems" by Zenpundit

The Sling and The Stone: On War in The 21st Century by Thomas X. Hammes

State-Building:Governance and world order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

The hydra-like insurgency in Iraq has drawn attention to the political conundrum faced by state authorities when facing unconventional opponents. Whether they come in the form of traditional guerillas, transnational terrorist networks and even looser " leaderless resistance" movements that attract superempowered individuals, State actors often face the damned if you do, damned if you don't cycle of reaction and retaliation. Drifting into a seemingly permanent loss of initiative, the state allows the non-state actors to " write the script" in the political and moral dimensions of the conflict, creating strategic losses even out of tactical and operational victories.

This has led some military theorists of the 4GW school to make particularly gloomy forecasts in regard to not only Iraq, but toward all "state-building" interventions and even the long-term stability of the states of the Core. 4GW and "Open-Source " warfare of Global Guerillaism are inarguably very effective and these methods of warfare, when a State reacts conventionally and with political ineptitude, place the very legitimacy of the state itself is in jeopardy.

It would be a grave mistake however to conclude that these forms of warfare represent a magic anti-state bullet. They do not. 4GW forces can lose wars and have. Much of the current track record of 4GW success rests primarily upon the recurring failure of their state opponents to deliberately maximize their existing advantages and secondarily to develop and employ countervailing tactics. In other words, these represent failures of strategic vision on the part of statesmen and commanders who get caught up in the small-picture dynamics of the scenario rather than directing their attention to shaping the scenario itself. Some quotations to keep in mind here:

" Super-empowered individuals may rule vertical scenarios, but nation-states still rule horizontal scenarios. "

Thomas P.M. Barnett

" ...we must learn to function as a practical network"

" History has shown our fourth-generation opponents know how to fight us. Fortunately, it has also shown us how a democracy can defeat such an enemy. The British experience in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Borneo all show that an integrated, coordinated, interagency approach can win the war of ideas rather than just winning in the field"

Thomas X. Hammes

Too often statesmen fail to mobilize the overarching panoply of resources at the state's disposal in diplomacy, intelligence, law, economics and politics to work in sync with military operations to close off all possible options for 4GW opponents. Or they crumble in the face of relatively minor damage, effectively abdicating their position. The reason for either scenario amounts to insufficient State Resiliency, a crucial element for surviving and prevailing during the stress imposed by wartime. Resilience may not guarantee victory in the war but it certainly improves the chances and imposes far higher costs on the opponent.

State Resilience, as the term implies is a state having the quality of adapting and continuing to function despite severe trauma or losses. When under attack, Non-resilient States lash out stupidly, retreat or collapse. Resilient States adjust and hit back from an unexpected direction. The term indicates a fusion of political will with executive competence and material means.

Nation-states are at root simply very large, very complex, networks with the capacity to determine the rule-sets that govern the behavior of all the smaller, internal, subnetworks they contain or the external networks with which they come in to contact. The greater the legitimacy of the state, the less frequently it need employ physical force to assure compliance. with legitimacy, the state's rule-sets exude enough moral authority and secure the nonzero sum outcomes that win voluntary obedience. Legitimacy in turn is secured when the governed implicitly recognize in their leadership a reflection of the deepest of their societal values.

A state whose leaders exemplify a nation's creed and demonstrate courage or intelligence can find men who will march for them to the Gates of Hell. A great empire, governed by hypocrites and thieves, will dissolve into mist as we discovered in 1991. No legitimacy, no resilience. No resilience, no state.

Legitimacy is often conferred by democratic elections, though not always. The Weimar Republic had one of Europe's most liberal and democratic constitutions in the interwar period but a majority of Germans decisively rejected liberal and democratic values. Thus, Weimar crumbled in the face of organized mob violence, implied threats and elite betrayal. Imperial Japan was oligarchic and authoritarian and grew moreso during the course of WWII but had Americans landed on Honshu as they did at Normandy then oppressed Japanese civilians would have marched off to their collective doom, shouting " Banzai!". Japan was as resilient in defeat as most nations only are in moments of victory because the Japanese imagined their Emperor as the living embodiment of Japan.

Against secure State Resiliency, a 4GW movement can make no headway, unless perhaps it would be to represent themselves as more truly " authentic" agents of society than the state itself. This is in fact the card that Osama bin Laden and radical Salafis and Deobandis seek to play in the Arab-Muslim world. It is a claim that has traction because so many regimes in that region of the world are unrepresentative, incompetent and deeply corrupt -in fact the degraded nature of these governments fostered the emergence of the terror networks dedicated to their destruction. Where the rulers are both self-confidently ruthless and are reflecting some degree of popular values of their own, usually nationalism, then the appeal of Islamism is muted.

Broadband connectivity style State-building is a positive endeavor, a useful prophylactic in weak States before trouble begins and a vital support where resilient states are effectively combatting 4GW attackers. Resiliency however is critical to state survival - it is the foundation that will support the range of State-building programs and will be reinforced by them. Nurturing resiliency should be the pivotal aspect of any System Administration intervention.

Without resiliency, State-building is nothing more than the creation of an empty suit.

  ¶ 6:00 PM 15 comments