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CRITT JARVIS NEVER SLEEPS

New blog up. 3:43 am postings. Webmastering for Tom Barnett . Reaching out to others And a big day job at Enterra.

I’m feeling lazy in comparison :o)

5GW REVOLUTIONS

Myke Cole, a consultant with CACI who sometimes appears at DNI as well, has some ominous speculations about 5th Generation Warfare in an excellent article the latest issue of The Small Wars Journal. An excerpt:

“Written in 1988, “V” proves chillingly prescient in light of the strategies 4GW actors are enacting as they maneuver to defeat large states that they cannot hope to defeat on conventional grounds. Historian and 4GW guru William Lind notes “Police departments in some large American cities would be quick to note that they are already facing Fourth Generation opponents on the streets.”In another article, Lind points out that “it is happening in some American cities. Police officers are being killed — assassinated, really — not because they get in the way of some bank robber but because they are symbols of the state. A Fourth Generation fighter, usually a gang member, simply walks up to a police cruiser and shoots a cop.

…Moore’s “V” gives a glimpse of a subnational enemy who has realized that his power rises and falls in direct proportion to the cohesion of state authority. In realizing this, he understands that the destruction of the state altogether creates the kind of power vacuum where his sort can thrive. “V for Vendetta” warns that perhaps it is not a change of tactics, but of the scope of the enemy objective that defines the fifth generation war evolving around us. It suggests a generation of enemies dedicated to the ultimate destruction of the state in totality, not just as means for seizing power in Iraq or driving US forces from Afghanistan, but for inaugurating a new world order where the cohesive, central power of the state fails in the face of an enemy it cannot define, cordon off and defeat on its own terms, until its citizenry loses patience and withdraws its collective allegiance. “

Several comments from me:

First, I have just begun Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles – for those out there who have finished the book, how does Myke’s scenario fit in with the idea of Bobbitt’s Market-state superceding the Nation-state ?

Secondly, I can forsee an exceedingly grim response by States where the ruling elite retains the will to power to contest their destruction.

Confronted with persistently successful 4GW/5GW actors – particularly those on the loose end of the organizational spectrum such as virtual cells or a cell organized around a superempowered individual – a major state power will inevitably go the route of setting up a small off-the books clandestine unit – essentially a death squad without the pyschopoathology – and begin quietly disappearing people based upon probalistic estimates.

You don’t really need very many people to do this either. The yezhovschina purges ( which were not secret and were designed to instill terror rather than suppress it) in 1937
were accompished by about 200 handpicked professional killers who in turn were themselves easily liquidated by Stalin after they had served their purposes, being too few in number to offer effective resistance or mount a coup on their own.

4GW actors are interdependent with the state they are attacking and their effectiveness correlates with the self-restraint of the state actors being concerned with the political calculus. If the State actors are indifferent to political concerns or can achieve mastery over it via secrecy, then the asymmetrical relationship becomes unfavorable to the 4GW actors.

4GW and 5GW threats are dangerous because they threaten to push the State into a great leap backward in moral terms even when the 4GW actors lose the game.

HECTIC

There will be a post later tonight, most likely on American conservatives and France ( inspired by Collounsbury). I’m feeling somewhat pressed for blogging time however as I have a ” facilitation” meeting where I have to lead for semi-unwilling co-workers on Monday that requires planning; and a major project for Zenpundit that I am deep in to putting together and hope to unveil early next month.

And tonight, some kind of Father-Son pumpkin carving event at my son’s pre-school. The Son of Zenpundit wants to make a 10 lb pumpkin look just like Batman ( and not the Adam West version either but the edgy, dark, Frank Miller kind), something that is going to require some artistic license on my part.

To the Batmobile !

DO HISTORIANS UNDERSTAND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT?

Cliopatria has had a symposium on an article “Bush’s Ancestors“by Princeton historian and sometimes liberal partisan Sean Wilentz. In the article, Wilentz draws a comparison and traces the origin of modern American conservatism to The Whig Party that rose up in the antebellum period to challenge the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. The Wilentz article is worth reading even though I think that in numerous instances the author is being rather facile by ignoring some logical historical connections that might be more flattering to George W. Bush and the G.O.P. than the comparison with the Whigs who died an ignoble death equivocating on slavery.

The Cliopatriarchs Ralph Luker, Jonathan Dresner, K.C. Johnson, Caleb McDaniel, Wilson J. Moses and Greg Robinson give an excellent demonstration of how to properly critique a historical argument, probing for weaknesses in reasoning and offering countervailing evidence to the thesis (Moses is the least effective at addressing Wilentz but his argument is nonetheless entertaining in a weirdly provocative way – every symposium needs somebody to be a bombthrower or at a minimum, get outside everyone’s comfort zone).The symposium should be printed and passed around as mandatory reading in seminars for first year graduate students.

Collectively, they offered many cogent criticisms that I myself would make of ” Bush’s Ancestors” including:

• “To begin with, as Eric Foner noted in his review of The Rise of American Democracy, Wilentz is remarkably unsympathetic to Andrew Jackson’s rival, John Quincy Adams. Here, in “Bush’s Ancestors,” Adams gets no credit as a major figure in the Whig Party. The article might actually have been strengthened had Wilentz given Adams some space” – Ralph Luker

• “I’m frankly surprised that Wilentz doesn’t go back at least into the revolutionary period, though perhaps the founders were too deistic and humanistic for their anti-oppressive zeal to fit the conservative mold but their successful revolution clearly set the tone for the movements he tracks forward. ” – Jonathan Dresner

• “There seem to me, however, three significant differences between the two parties. First, as Wilentz notes, the Whigs originated in opposition to what they perceived as the excessive executive authority of Andrew Jackson, and they maintained this vision of a weak presidency for most of their party’s history….And regardless of the merit of his policies, George W. Bush has been a stunningly powerful president—going five years without having to veto one bill, dramatically expanding executive authority after 9/11, and seeming to defy the Supreme Court with his handling of the Guantanamo prisoners issue.” – K.C. Johnson

Where the Cliopatriarchs critiquing Wilentz are weakest – as is Wilentz – is in understanding or explaining the several economic philosophies of conservatism which seem to all get lumped together under the vague label of ” pro-business”. This is a lacuna that seems to affect the historical profession as a whole which collectively believes that modern economics began with John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and ends with Paul Krugman’s column. Any opposing view of economics from the Right is a priori dismissed outright as scribbling on a cocktail napkin – despite von Mises, von Hayek, Milton Friedman, a boatload of Nobel prize winners at the University of Chicago and a supply-sider Nobel laureate who inspired the Euro.

The intellectual resistance among most historians to giving serious consideration to conservative economic arguments borders on being an article of faith; and as a result they miss an important part of the conservative movement. American conservatism is deeply split on economics and the libertarian, free-market wing provided an ideology that helped fuel Ronald Reagan’s march to the White House. Big Business by contrast opposed Reagan in the primaries and lined up behind George H.W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2000. Supply-Side economics are what drove Reagan’s across the board tax cuts, budget cuts, degregulation policy and tax reform, not the complacent rent-seeking of the Business Roundtable.

Big Business does not like across the board tax cuts, tax simplification or pro-entrepreneurial deregulatory policies. Big business likes tax loopholes, credits, subsidies, no-bid contracts, interest-free government loans, waivers and high artificial barriers to market entry – things that George W. Bush has given them in spades. That wing of the G.O.P. is Richard Nixon’s and Bob Dole’s wing, not Jack Kemp’s or Ronald Reagan’s and they are in the driver’s seat these days but constitute few of the rank and file ” movement” conservatives.

A second criticism I have- and it’s a surprising one given the past four years – is that the once, allegedly all-powerful, Neocons are missing in action in both the Wilentz article and in the symposium. Of the group, McDaniel comes closest to addressing that strand of conservatism, albeit indirectly. The Bush administration Neoconservatives fit very poorly into Wilentz’s Whig model, if at all ( I think McDaniel’s allusions and his references to the fire-eating, Southern filibusteros demonstrated how poorly).

Conservatism really isn’t a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma – though in the Ivy League it might as well be.

FUKUYAMA’S REASSESSMENT OF THE BUSH DOCTRINE

The End of History for Preemption ? Francis Fukuyama writes in ” The Bush Doctrine, before and After” the following:

“Under the right circumstances, it is impossible to make a normative case against preventive war: if suicide terrorists with WMD are clearly planning an attack on the US on the territory of another country, it is hard to argue that America does not have the right to take matters into its own hands rather than wait for United Nations Security Council permission to act. Even the UN’s High Level Panel on reform admitted as much. The problem is that, in the real world, such conditions almost never exist. We seldom have good information about our enemies’ capabilities or reliable ways to predict their future behaviour. Failure to find Iraqi WMD exposed the limits of US intelligence capabilities. The Bush administration merged the terrorism/WMD problem with the rogue state/proliferation problem in a way that skewed the risk-reward calculation toward preventive war. The Iraq war showed that traditional prudential strictures against preventive war ( Bismarck once called preventive war “committing suicide for fear of death”) remain valid even in an age of suicide terrorism.

There are several reasons for this. A hegemon has to be perceived not just as benevolent but competent. With the administration’s failure to find Iraqi WMD and its bungling of the Iraq reconstruction process, Washington ‘s credibility plummeted. The Bush doctrine’s preventive war doctrine was, moreover, based on implicit assertion of US exceptionalism. Given that the US would almost certainly criticise a similar anti-terrorist policy proclaimed by Russia , China or India , its assertion of this right rested on the premise that America is somehow more disinterested than other nations. Americans may believe in their own good intentions but international legitimacy emerges only if others do as well. Long before the Iraq war, Americans failed to perceive deep currents of anti-Americanism building up.”

The U.S., it must be said, was first decried as a ” hyperpower” in 1994 when it was being criticized abroad for too little unilateralism, not 2004 when it was widely ( and erroneously) criticized for too much. Fukuyama concludes:

“The best way to assess the durability of the Bush doctrine is to ask how likely it is to be applied again in the future – that is, how ready is the US to again intervene unilaterally to topple a rogue state proliferator and engage in another nation-building exercise? The answer comes from the Bush administration itself, which has already backed away from military confrontations with both North Korea and Iran in favour of multilateral approaches, despite much clearer evidence of nuclear programmes in those countries. This suggests the doctrine has not survived into Mr Bush’s second term, much less become a permanent component of US strategy against global terrorism”

The United States is inevitably going to be involved in future ” nation-building” enterprises simply because the Gap is going to continue produce horrors that will reach a threshold that connected, democratic, vocal populations in the Core will find impossible to ignore once the suffering is of a sufficient magnitude. Or when some ongoing atrocity neatly coincide with state interests. Nor will a future president shrink from a better safe than sorry military intervention approach in a situation where loose nukes and irrational hostile actor are involved.

No, what will happen is like with Munich, Pearl Harbor and Vietnam, 9/11 and Iraq will become analogies that get weighed against one another in a future crisis as statesmen struggle with questions of war and peace.