House of War

From The Guardian,

We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.

Alan Greenspan on The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis in OpinionJournal, in which the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve lays out the case for the defense.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, advises that It’s time to abolish the CIA.

Noah Shactman writes solidly on the controversial Human Terrain Teams: Army Social Scientists Calm Afghanistan, Make Enemies at Home.

Paul Romer talks about growth, technology, human capital and the rise of China in a great EconTalk podcast.

Jacob Sullum has a wise article in reason about the dangers and difficulties of trying to interpret the actions of Muslims in light of the Koran.

The Times reports on new research by Professor Harpending of the University of Utah, which suggests that, “races have evolved away from each other over the past 10,000 years”.

Charles Krauthammer makes some good points in the Washington Post about the disturbing levels of ostensible religiosity required of the presidential candidates in the current campaign.

Bill Roggio has an timely and in-depth analysis of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency via the Ramazan Corps, Qods Force’s operational command in Iraq. The Ramazan Corps provides arms, advice and basic training, distributed along a series of “ratlines” that run into the country from Iran’s western border.

Inside Iran, Qods Force manufactures and distributes weapons, provides training for Iraqi recruits, then facilitates the movement of weapons and fighters inside Iraq. Iraqi recruits, largely radicalized Shia from Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, are sent to Iran for what one US military officer described as “basic jihadi training.” The recruits receive several weeks of training with small arms and, depending on the units assigned, mortars and the use of explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs.

American commanders also dispute reports that Iran has reduced its involvement in Iraq, and that it has helped to curb the violence:

“I don’t know what this Iranian pledge is, but the number of munitions has increased,” Lynch said on November 11. “It could be that we are finding them more. But it is still troublesome. I have no idea when these EFP munitions came … before or after the pledge. I don’t know.”

Arnold Kling, drawing on the work of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, says in a January 2007 article for TCS that Iraq “under Saddam Hussein was a limited-access order, or “natural state.” And, furthermore, that “Iraq was never on the “doorstep” of becoming an open-access order.”

His analysis uses a model of macro-socio-economic development that begins with the simplest type of hunter-gatherer societies, referred to as “primitive orders”, progresses through “limited access orders” or “natural states”, the first and most enduring civilisational mode, and finishes with the historically recent advance of “open access orders”. A “limited access order” is North et al’s term for a society that “strictly limits access to positions of power within political, economic, and religious systems.” An “open access order”, on the other hand, is a society “characterized by open political and economic competition, rather than the limited political and economic privileges enjoyed solely by elites in natural states.” Transition between the two is rare (Spain, Ireland and Taiwan are some of the latest), because “the state’s foremost task is securing its own survival”, and so it feels the process of change as a threat to its very existence – and the existence of the elites it serves – which, of course, it is.

For that reason, Kling concludes that the US will never succeed “in its objective of establishing an open-access order in Iraq.” At present, the country is barely any kind of order, limited access or otherwise, and the thought of creating a liberal democracy with a vibrant market economy seems faintly ridiculous, certainly premature. Start with a limited access order, he advises, which can provide security and can establish and consolidate the necessary preliminary stage of economic development. Without the self-interest of an elite who feel that they have “a stake in peace”, Iraq will stall and remain a failed state.

I have previously wondered whether it is wise to be resuscitating, or helping to resuscitate, ethnic, tribal identities to shore up the fall-out from the destruction of the Iraqi state. Perhaps we are simply facilitating, entrenching and developing sectarianism. However, the implications of Kling’s article are that progression to a democratic market economy is impossible without first developing as a natural state, as unpalatable as that may be to westerners. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” and as such we will have to give elites preferential access to political and economic power, or deny them at the cost of state failure and realising Iraq’s potential as an eventual open access order.

Robert Kaplan wrote a recent op-ed for The Atlantic, in which he noted that,

Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.

It seems that a year since Kling wrote “Iraq’s Natural State” in TCS, the US military is acting out his suggestions. Petraeus, and the new COIN-as-anthropology approach he implemented, seeks to work with the grain of existing cultures rather than attempting to impose new rule-sets from the top down. As the natural state develops out of the centralisation of power in the hands of dominant groups, a natural state is precisely what is developing in Iraq with the empowerment of the tribes. Given a stake in the maintenance of order, i.e. they feel they have more to gain by participating, they uphold the state.

Perhaps this might even aid the state moving up the order-type value chain. Pluralism or plurality of access to economic and political power is, after all, part of what makes open access orders what they are. Such a situation is doubtless more fragile – Saddam found it easier to be a tyrant than the US is finding it to be a liberator – but also more worthwhile: for greater risk (and associated cost), there is greater return.

The still unanswered question is whether the various tribal powers, religious factions and ethnic groups can all be reconciled to the natural state of Iraq. Can be power be centralised and dispersed at the same time? Federalism is probably the most realistic and sustainable solution.

From a wonderful paper that mixes equal parts Smith, Schumpeter, Hayek and Darwin:

…And knowledge is what the economic system is made of. In an evolutionary economic process, it is knowledge that evolves. Capital is knowledge in an operational form. Labour is knowledge in an active form. Money, as a store of value, is unspecified knowledge potential. Knowledge is subject to selection, variation, and replication. These evolutionary mechanisms operate over systems and populations of rules (that is, institutions) to produce the growth of knowledge process known as economic evolution. It is the growth of knowledge that ultimately underpins the wealth of nations.

J. Potts, Evolutionary Economics: An Introduction to the Foundation of Liberal Economic Philosophy (University of Queensland, Discussion Papers Series, 2003).

Reading the recent exchange between Noah Shactman and Tom Barnett, it seems to me that both are right in some sense, or at least, both have useful contributions to make.

Shactman’s thesis (published in WIRED) is only partially explained by its title: How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic. In the article he describes how the focus of the American military, as an institution, on fighting large, WWII-scale battles against peer (or almost peer) opposition armed forces, occluded them and left them unable to recognise or divine the looming mess of post-conflict Iraq urban insurrection.

Except, that’s not quite what he says. It’s probably what he should have said, but as Tom Barnett points out, Shactman’s article, in effect, excuses the US Administration for any mistakes made or lack of foresight, and instead blames it all on… Arthur Cebrowski, John Garstka and the theory of Network Centric Warfare as they developed it.

However, although he initially proposes a strangely simplified dichotomy (further reduced by me to 4GW vs. NCW), as the piece progresses the two supposedly opposing sides don’t seem quite so exclusive. For instance, though Shactman is unimpressed by the Fourth Division’s ultra-modern telecommunications and networked tracking systems, the actual users appear to feel differently. “No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily. “It increases the unit’s combat power, no question,” Prior says.” The potential of the NCW doctrine is ignored, even as its successes are recounted: “When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed.” Garstka even tells him directly that “you have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.” But Shactman either can’t see the obvious positive uses for the networked, advanced-tech, quantitative analysis approach which emerge from his writing or, perhaps more probably, doesn’t want to because it contradicts his idea.

It’s almost funny when Shactman interviews Petraeus towards the article’s end. “I’m expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare,” he writes. “Instead, he sings me a love song.”

Zenpundit sums it up well:

The crux of the problem with Shachtman’s article is that his opener gives the impression that the botching of the occupation in Iraq should be laid at the door of two men who articulated strategic ideas with impressive intellectual celerity and subtlety, one of whom is no longer able to defend himself.

Indeed, Shactman would do better to look at institutions rather than an idea because,

whenever a theory is accepted by a large and powerful bureaucratic organization- like, say, the Pentagon - it collides with reality.

The rejection by a majority of Venezuelan voters of Hugo Chavez’s proposal to turn their country into a socialist state is a signal to all of Latin America that the leftist leader does not in fact embody the aspirations of his people. Ordinary citizens from a broad ideological spectrum and from all classes voted against Chavez’s attempted concentration of power, making it harder for him to credibly make populist claims either in Venezuela or the region. Though Chavez has recognized the referendum’s results, he has already made clear that the outcome has not diminished his ambition to carry through his socialist project. With so much power already concentrated in Chavez’s hands—only Fidel Castro has centralized more power in the region—the institutions of a free society, such as the media or private property, are still under assault. The victory of the No vote was critical in limiting Chavez’s power for the moment, but by no means guarantees that democracy will prevail in Venezuela.

Ian Vásquez, Cato Institute