zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — mapping, silos, Y2K, 9/11, rumors, wars, Boeing 747s, Diebold voting machines, vulnerabilities, dependencies ]

www.fun1001.com | Send this image to your friend

The “bug” of Y2K never quite measured up to the 1919 influenza bug in terms of devastating effect — but as TPM Barnett wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map:

Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age.

1.

My own personal preoccupations during the run-up to Y2K had to do with cults, militias and terrorists — any one of which might have tried for a spectacle.

As it turned out, though, Al Qaida’s plan to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was foiled when Albert Ressam was arrested attempting to enter the US from Canada — so that aspect of what might have happened during the roll-over was essentially postponed until September 11, 2001. And the leaders of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, acting on visionary instructions (allegedly) from the Virgin Mary, announced that the end of the world had been postponed from Dec 31 / Jan 1 till March 17 — at which point they burned 500 of their members to death in their locked church. So that apocalyptic possibility, too, was temporarily averted.

2.

Don Beck of the National Values Center / The Spiral Dynamics Group, commented to me at one point in the run-up:

Y2K is like a lightening bolt: when it strikes and lights up the sky, we will see the contours of our social systems.

— and that quote from Beck, along with Barnett’s observation, pointed strongly to the fact that we don’t have anything remotely resembling a decent global map of interdependencies and vulnerabilities.

What we have instead is a PERT chart for this or that, Markov diagrams, social network maps, railroad maps and timetables… oodles and oodles of smaller pieces of the puzzle of past, present and future… each with its own symbol system and limited scope. Our mapping, in other words, is territorialized, siloed, and disconnected, while the world system which is integral to our being and survival is connected, indeed, seamlessly interwoven.

I’ve suggested before now that our mapping needs to pass across the Cartesian divide from the objective to the subjective, from materiel to morale, from the quantitative to the qualitative, and from rumors to wars. It also needs a uniform language or translation service, so that Jay Forrester system dynamic models can “talk” with PERT and Markov and the rest, Bucky Fuller‘s World Game included.

I suppose some of all this is ongoing, somewhere behind impenetrable curtains, but I wonder how much.

3.

In the meantime, and working from open source materials, the only kind to which I have access – here are two data points we might have noted a litle earlier, if we had decent interdependency and vulnerability mapping:

Fear-mongering — or significant alerts?  I’m not tech savvy enough to know.

4.

Tom Barnett’s point about “the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age” still stands.

Y2K was what first alerted me to the significance of SCADAs.

Something very like what Y2K might have been seems to be unfolding — but slowly, slowly.

Are we thinking yet?

Dr. Robert Bunker testifies before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere on the descent of Mexico into narco-barbarism:

Criminal (Cartel & Gang) Insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: What you need to know, not what you want to hear.

 ….Something very old historically, and at the same time very new, is thus taking place in Mexico. To use a biological metaphor, we are witnessing ‘cancerous organizational tumors’ forming in Mexico both on its encompassing government and its society at large. These tumors have their roots intertwined throughout that nation and, while initially they were symbiotic in nature (like traditional organized crime organizations), they have mutated to the point that they are slowly killing the host and replacing it with something far different. These criminalized tumors draw their nourishment from an increasingly diverse illicit economy that is growing out of proportion to the limited legitimate revenues sustaining the Mexican state. These tumors do not bode well for the health of Mexico or any of its neighboring states

Hat tip to SWJ Blog.

There has been much ado about Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s ennunciation of “Responsibility to Protect” as a justification for the Obama administration’s unusually executed intervention (or assistance to primarily British and French intervention) in Libya in support of rebels seeking to oust their lunatic dictator, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. In “R2P” the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has found it’s own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.

People in the strategic studies, IR and national security communities have a parlor game of wistfully reminiscing about the moral clarity of Containment and the wisdom of George Kennan. They have been issuing tendentiously self-important “Mr. Z” papers for so long that they failed to notice that if anyone has really written the 21st Century’s answer to Kennan’s X article, it was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s battle cry in the pages of The Atlantic.

George Kennan did not become the “Father of Containment” because he thought strategically about foreign policy in terms of brutal realism. Nor because he was a stern anti-Communist. Or because he had a deep and reflective understanding of Russian history and Leninism, whose nuances were the sources of Soviet conduct. No, Kennan became the Father of Containment because he encapsulated all of those things precisely at the moment when America’s key decision makers, facing the Soviet threat, were willing to embrace a persuasive explanatory narrative, a grand strategy that could harmonize policy with domestic politics.

Slaughter’s idea is not powerful because it is philosophically or legally airtight – it isn’t – but because R2P resonates deeply both with immediate state interests and emotionally with the generational worldview of what Milovan Djilas might have termed a Western “New Class”.

While it is easy to read R2P simply as a useful political cover for Obama administration policy in Libya, as it functioned as such in the short term, that is a mistaken view, and one that I think badly underestimates Anne-Marie Slaughter. Here is Slaughter’s core assertion, where she turns most of modern diplomatic history and international law as it is understood and practiced bilaterally and multilaterally by sovereign states in the real world (vice academics and IGO/NGO bureaucrats) on it’s head:

If we really do look at the world in terms of governments and societies and the relationship between them, and do recognize that both governments and their citizens have rights as subjects of international law and have agency as actors in international politics, then what exactly is the international community “intervening” in?

…For the first time, international law and the great powers of international politics have recognized both the rights of citizens and a specific relationship between the government and its citizens: a relationship of protection. The nature of sovereignty itself is thus changed: legitimate governments are defined not only by their control of a territory and a population but also by how they exercise that control. If they fail in that obligation, the international community has the responsibility to protect those citizens.

Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process of  state institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community. In terms of policy advocacy, this is a brilliantly adept move to marry state and class interests with stark moral justifications, regardless of how the argument might be nibbled to death in an arcane academic debate.

As with Kennan’s X Article, which faced a sustained critique from Walter Lippmann who realized that Containment implied irrevocable changes in the American system, R2P has attracted criticism. Some examples:

Joshua Foust –Why sovereignty matters

Much as advocates of the “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P, like to say that sovereignty is irrelevant to the relationship of a society to its government (which Slaughter explicitly argues), it is that very sovereignty which also creates the moral and legal justification to intervene. For example, the societies of the United States and NATO did not vote to intervene in Libya – their governments did.

Foreign Affairs – The Folly of Protection

….RtoP, responding to the sense that these domestic harms warranted international response, solidified the Security Council’s claims to wider discretion. Yet it also restricted its ability to sanction intervention to the four situations listed in the RtoP document — genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity — and thus precluded, for example, intervention in cases of civil disorder and coups. Although the resolution authorizing force against Libya will certainly further entrench the principle of RtoP, it will not completely resolve the tension between RtoP — in itself only a General Assembly recommendation — and the UN Charter itself, which, according to the letter of the law, limits action to “international” threats.

Dan Trombly –The upending of sovereignty and Responsibility to Protect Ya Neck

Beauchamp, along with Slaughter, have revealed R2P for what it actually is: a doctrine based on regime change and the destruction of the foundations of international order wherever practically possible. After all, are intervening powers really fulfilling their responsibility if they fail to effect regime change after intervening? This is exactly why I believe R2P is far more insidious than many of its advocates would have us believe or intend in practice. It is essentially mandating a responsibility, wherever possible, to seek the sanction, coercion, or overthrow of regimes which fail to meet a liberal conception of acceptable state behavior. Even if R2P is never applied against a major power, it is hard to see why such behavior would not be met with just as much suspicion as humanitarian intervention and previous Western regime change operations were. Indeed, a full treatment will reveal there is immense pressure for R2P to initiate the more fundamental, and more universal, impulse to revert to the potential ruthlessness inherent in international anarchy.

Understandably, such critiques of R2P are primarily concerned with sovereignty as it relates to interstate relations and the historical predisposition for great powers to meddle in the affairs of weaker countries, usually with far less forthrightness than the Athenians displayed at Melos. It must be said, that small countries often  are their own worst enemies in terms of frequently providing pretexts for foreign intervention due to epic incompetence in self-governance and a maniacal delight in atavistic bloodshed. Slaughter is not offering up a staw man in relation to democide and genocide being critical problems with which the international community is poorly equipped and politically unwilling to counter.

But R2P is a two edged sword – the sovereignty of all states diminished universally, in legal principle, to the authority of international rule-making about the domestic use of force is likewise diminished in it’s ability to legislate it’s own internal affairs, laws being  nothing but sovereign  promises of state enforcement. Once the camel’s nose is legitimated by being formally accepted as having a place in the tent, the rest of the camel is merely a question of degree.

And time.

As Containment required an NSC-68 to put policy flesh on the bones of doctrine, R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.

Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?

When we arrest a bank robber, we do not feel a need to put law enforcement and the judiciary on a different systemic basis in order to try them. Finding legal pretexts for intervention to stop genocide does not require a substantial revision of international law, merely political will. R2P could become an excellent tool for elites to institute their policy preferences without securing democratic consent and that aspect, to oligarchical elites is a feature, not a bug.

R2P will come back to haunt us sooner than we think.

ADDENDUM:

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway links here in a round-up and commentary about R2P posts popping up in the wake of the Slaughter piece:

The “Responsibility To Protect” Doctrine After Libya

….It’s understandable that the advocates of R2P don’t necessarily want to have Libya held up as an example of their doctrine in action. Leaving aside the obvious contrasts with the situation in Syria and other places in the world, it is by no means clear that post-Gaddafi Libya will be that much better than what preceded it. The rebels themselves are hardly united around anything other than wanting to get rid of Gaddafi and, now that they’ve done that, the possibility of the nation sliding into civil and tribal warfare is readily apparent. Moreover, the links between the rebels and elements of al Qaeda that originated in both Afghanistan and post-Saddam Iraq are well-known. If bringing down Gaddafi means the creation of a safe haven for al Qaeda inspired terrorism on the doorstep of Europe, then we will all surely come to regret the events of the past five months. Finally, with the rebels themselves now engaging in atrocities, one wonders what has happened to the United Nations mission to protect civilians, which didn’t distinguish between attacks by Gaddafi forces or attacks by rebels.

….Finally, there’s the danger that the doctrine poses to American domestic institutions. If Libya is any guide, then R2P interventions, of whatever kind, would likely be decided by international bodies of “experts” rather than the democratically elected representatives of the American people. American sailors and soldiers will be sent off into danger without the American people being consulted. That’s not what the Constitution contemplates, and if we allow it to happen it will be yet another nail in the coffin of liberty.

Read the rest here.

Colonel Robert Killebrew comes to a conclusion I would endorse as both empirical and probable for reasons of economics – interstate warfare and military establishments are very expensive, while irregular conflict is both cheap and accessible to many hands of various motives. Great power wars can still happen, but as ventures of existential risk.

The End of War: Nonstate violence is the new norm

In “The Invention of Peace,” British historian Michael Howard notes that it was the rise of the modern state, with powerful kings, that first brought the idea of “peace” to the Western world. So long as the king or government retained sufficient power, determining “peace” and “war” remained the prerogative of the state, to be managed as required. Hence, the marching armies of August 1914. In the beginning years of the 21st century, though, we are entering into a new historical period. The state no longer has a monopoly on violence, and national borders are not as inviolate as they were in the long-ago 20th century. No other concept for managing fractious relations between states has yet emerged. (Except, perhaps, the concept of “bigness,” as in, “I’m big enough to do this and get away with it.”)

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, constant conflict has been the norm not only for the U.S. but also for much of the world, whether because of ideological struggle (the Balkans and Southwest Asia), political conflict (the Middle East and Eurasia), tribal wars (the Balkans and Africa), criminal insurgencies (Mexico, Central and South America) or terrorism (global). The pat-down at your local airport is a sign that the world has changed. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Americans and Europeans used to vacation in spots where they would be beheaded today. In Central America – now the most violent region in the world – citizens report the social fabric that held their civic life together is disintegrating in the face of gang violence and government impotence.

Five global conditions that have grown exponentially since the end of the Cold War are challenging governments everywhere: first, the enormous growth in criminal wealth over the past two decades, fueled by drug money, human trafficking, illegal arms sales and other crimes; second, mass migrations of peoples from south to north, pressing in on developed countries; third, the Internet and other technology that has brought violent organizations into the same technical sphere as governments; fourth, the free flow of arms that supplies firepower equal (or superior) to government security forces; and, finally, the empowerment of violent extremists who use the first four conditions to attack states and their legal institutions, whether to overthrow them, neutralize them for criminal or other purposes, or out of simple nihilism.

….It is increasingly clear that the greatest armed threat the U.S. faces is the attack on international civil order that violent extremists represent. The most likely use for U.S. armed forces in the coming century will be to help extend the rule of law to states struggling against extremists that also threaten the U.S. This does not mean the end of armored warfare, for example; future battlefields are impossible to predict. But the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts have already begun to align U.S. military thought toward the more complex world of the 21st century. Conflict changes both winners and losers, and the armed services’ world after Iraq and Afghanistan will not be a return to the good old days of predictable deployments and annual training cycles, any more than the Army in 1946 was able to go back to the garrisons of 1935. While the development of aggressive, highly skilled units and combined-arms capabilities is still very necessary, the uses to which they are put will change….

ADDENDUM:

Posting from me will be light until next Monday.

London burns for four days as UK authorities dealt timidly and uncertainly with semi-organized swarms of brazen thugs, causing rioting to spread to other cities. What have we seen so far?

* The British government and police acted with moral uncertainty in the face of violent challenge from swarming tactics by “underclass youth” rioters.  The BBC was filled with interviews of victimized citizens complaining about how police were unwilling to intervene to stop acts of looting, assault and arson. Police behavior fed the cycle of rioting and encouraged fence-sitters to join in and swell the ranks of the mob, as did early talking head comments in the British media that argued that the rioters were “justified”

* The British government was politically paralyzed by the crisis and needed three days and a Cabinet meeting to begin to organize an effective anti-riot strategy, distribute proper equipment, summon additional manpower, change police ROE and marshal a rhetorical narrative against the rioters.  All the halmarks of excessive top-down control by out of touch technocrats and politicians.

 John Robb summed up this kind of anti-leadership beautifully in his review of Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell  :

…In contrast to the people on the ground, she shows that the only people that actually do panic during disasters are the elites — from those with wealth to those running the government’s response (I’m not talking about the first responders actually on the ground doing good work).  They panic over the loss of control a disaster brings.  This often results in extreme actions that only serve to make things worse: from martial law authorized to use deadly force against looters (often just people trying to survive the situation) to arbitrarily hearding people into locations that aren’t able to support large groups of people.  

What This Means

The lesson here is that during an extreme disaster, the people you may most need to fear are those in charge, particularly if their motives are focused on protecting elite interests put at risk by the disaster

* The Cameron government’s legitimacy is at risk, being currently blamed for everything connected to the riot from the underlying “root causes”, to their initial total lack of interest in defending ordinary Britons to the bad impression made of having senior ministers being on vacation while the capitol of the UK was ablaze. Earnest and repeated assertions by government officials that no political or racial motives were behind the rioting conflicted with the reality being broadcast live by the government’s own news service in the first hours and days of the riot.

Handling a riot properly is state power 101. The Prime Minister has about two days to turn this situation and the political perceptions created around or he will begin an irreversible downward spiral to an early retirement.