NATHAN, LORD OF FISKING
Curzon, at Coming Anarchy, rightly directs reader attention to Nathan at Registan( Argus) fisking the living hell out of a really dumb piece of blather about U.S. military bases, gas and oil in Central asia and China.
RECOMMENDED READING
Posts and articles that have intrigued or amused me lately:
From Coming Anarchy we have two winners. Younghusband has brought additional points to light on PMCs and Curzon has highlighted some genuinely sophmoric foolishness masquerading as enlightenment at Harvard.
Phil Carter of Slate and Intel Dump comments on the idea of a Foreign Legion for America, something I have proposed in the past on HNN. Carter draws on Max Boot initially but offers an extended analysis. Nicely complements Younghusband’s and John Robb’s posts.
From Done with Mirrors, Callimachus reveals his bibliomania for all to see.
Miss Pundita discourses on the dangers of Westerners ” Going native” when faced with drastically different cultural norms
Dave at The Glittering Eye has dug up some tactical advice for would-be Jihadis headed to Iraq.
Juan Cole has decided that the Bush administration and Iran’s new hardline Islamist President are political twins. The Ayatollah Rove, Juan ? Supreme Jurisprudent Bush ? Tom Barnett has a far less hyperbolic assessment of Iran’s election.
Orac at Respectful Insolence draws attention to the deep influence the Hitler Zombie manages to have on contemporary American political debate.
Marc Schulman at The American Future posts on the 9/11 Mentality.
Jodi at The Asia Pages discusses the cultural exportability of Anime.
That’s it.
SOLDIERS OF THE CORE VS. THE 4GWARRIORS OF THE GAP 
John Robb at Global Guerillas had an excellent post up last week on ” The New Warrior Class” a 1994 article in the military journal Parameters by Ralph Peters that dealt with the differences in worldview between modern professional soldiers and the various irregular, unconventional and sometimes pre-modern warriors. Below is the Peters graphic that summarizes the battlefield dichotomy.
Peters and Robb are both concerned about the intersection of modernity in the form of advanced, martial skill-sets with barbaric pre-modern ( and post-modern) mentalities. Peters writes:
“Dispossessed, cashiered, or otherwise failed military men form the fourth and most dangerous pool of warriors. Officers, NCOs, or just charismatic privates who could not function in a traditional military environment, these men bring other warriors the rudiments of the military art–just enough to inspire faith and encourage folly in many cases, although the fittest of these men become the warrior chieftains or warlords with whom we must finally cope. The greatest, although not the only, contemporary source of military men who have degenerated into warriors is the former Soviet Union. Whether veterans of Afghanistan or simply officers who lost their positions in post-collapse cutbacks, Russian and other former-Soviet military men currently serve as mercenaries or volunteers (often one and the same thing) in the moral wasteland of Yugoslavia and on multiple sides in conflicts throughout the former Soviet Union. These warriors are especially dangerous not only because their skills heighten the level of bloodshed, but also because they provide a nucleus of internationally available mercenaries for future conflicts. Given that most civil wars begin with the actions of a small fraction of the population (as little as one percent might actively participate in or support the initial violence),[5] any rabid assembly of militants with cash will be able to recruit mercenary forces with ease and spark “tribal” strife that will make the brutality of Africa in the 1960s seem like some sort of Quaker peaceable kingdom. “
This is essentially what Islamist radicals have managed with the Arab Afghans and second generation Jihadis schooled at the knees of their Arab Afghan seniors. Interestingly enough, the Pentagon has also ” recruited mercenary forces with ease” through the contracting of highly adept ” Corporate warriors” – many of whom are experienced special forces vets – for work in Iraq and Afghanistan. These corporate warriors are unshackled from many of the legal and command and control restrictions of U.S. military personnel and can act accordingly.
John Robb, expounds further in his post on why this may be the most dangerous pool of potential warriors:
“Peters’ formulation works well as a starting point in our analysis. Warriors, as he describes them, are difficult to defeat because of the asymmetrical methods by which they fight war. It’s classic fourth generation warfare — dirty, nasty, and ultimately won or lost in the moral sphere.
However, as tough as the the 4GW warrior is, it fails to account for the extreme resilience and innovation we see today in global terrorism and guerrilla warfare. We are also fighting on many more levels that merely the moral one. This implies that something has been left out of this analysis. My conclusion is that it fails to appreciate how globalization has layered new skill sets on ancient mindsets. Warriors, in our current context, are not merely lazy and monosyllabic primitives as Peters implies. They are wired, educated, and globally mobile. They build complex supply chains, benefit from global money flows, and they invest shrewdly. In a nutshell, they are modern.”
Much of Iraq’s insurgency is a part-time, unskilled, bunch of rabble paid a modest sum to lob grenades or shoot wildly with their AK-47’s but there are two far more dangerous clusters of insurgents. Iraqi veterans of the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, Special Security Organization, the Mukhabarat and its Army parallel who possess varying degrees of Soviet Spetsnaz training. A highly disciplined and skilled group that is also backed into a corner – they have nowhere to go and some are too notorious to hide by blending in with the local population. The other dangerous element are the al Qaida affiliated foreign jihadis. They are highly motivated and often suicidal in their willingness to take losses. Some are experienced in combat from Bosnia to Afghanistan.
What are seeing In Iraq and earlier in Somalia is the paradigm for conflicts where the Core attempts to ” export security” and connectivity to the Gap in failed states and defeated rogue regimes. The warriors will run away from the scary, American ” Leviathan” force that will steamroll over them but they will come out of the woodwork, 4GW style, to degrade, demoralize and disrupt attempts at System Administration by the more constabulary-type, nation-builders envisioned by Dr. Barnett. They are Ghazis with laptops.
System Administration forces may have to either be constructed with more ” small wars” expert trigger-pullers to go in and disrupt potential 4GW warrior groupings before they can get started or System Administration and Leviathan will have to work in tandem as a synergistic network.
THE MEDIOCRITIES IN BLACK ROBES
” Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,” O’Connor wrote. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”
– Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, in dissent
If after thirty years of trying to tilt the Supreme Court of the United States to the right and toward a philosophy of judicial restraint the best outcome we get is this morally obtuse and defiantly Orwellian decision by the textual-phobic moderate Justices, it is time for the GOP to throw in the towel. We need a a different strategy. Some other views on Kelo:
“On thinking more about this, there are two things I find even worse than the thought that our Constitution as written is meaningless: the Court just handed city officials everywhere the ultimate fundraising tool, because the opportunity for corruption inherent in city officials selling your property for campaign cash is unlimited; and we’ve tried in the West a system where the wealthy can simply expropriate land at need, reducing the non-wealthy to indentured tenants in fact if not in word – it’s called feudalism, and it didn’t work out too well, all things considered.”
Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy:
“New York Times Hypothesis:
Awhile back, around the time of Lawrence and Grutter in particular, the hypothesis was floated–mainly in jest, I assume–that the best predictor of Surpreme Court outcomes in many socially and politically controversial cases was the conventional wisdom of America’s political and legal elite. And that this consensus could be captured in an operative variable as being the expressed position of the New York Times Editorial Board (perhaps the Washington Post Editorial Board as well).
The Court’s ruling in Kelo got me thinking about this hypothesis again, and so I went back and looked at the New York Times Editorials in three recent cases that came to mind as perhaps the most obvious tests of the hypothesis–Kelo, Raich, and Granholm. Sure enough, traditional legal variables seem to do fairly poorly in predicting the results in those cases, as many have noted. The composition of the majorities and minorities are all over the place with little consistency.”
But one variable does hit the mark three out of three times–in each case, the Supreme Court ruling met with the approval of the New York Times Editorial Page. Moreover, Kennedy–who has typically been characterized by critics as being the most susceptible to being swayed by elite opinion–voted with the Times, I mean the majority, in each of the three cases (by my calculation, he was the only one who did so). (Update: As the Comments point out, the liberals Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer consistently were in the majority in these cases, it was the others that switched around.) “
Stephen Bainbridge at TCS:
“Unfortunately, the requirement to pay fair market value is a grossly inadequate safeguard on government power for two reasons. First, it fails to take into account the subjective valuations placed on the New London property by people whose families have lived on the land, in at least one case, for a 100 years. In other words, the government now will be able to seize land at a price considerably below the reservation price of the owners. Indeed, as Will Collier explained:
“… the price even a willing seller would be able to get from his property just took a huge hit. All a developer has to do now is make a lowball offer and threaten to involve a bought-and-paid-for politician to take the property away if the owner doesn’t acquiesce.”
Second, unlike the prototypical eminent domain case, in which the land is seized to build, say, a school or road, in this case the city is using eminent domain to seize property that will then be turned over to a private developer. If this new development increases the value of the property, all of that value will be captured by the new owner, rather than the forced sellers. As a result, the city will have made itself richer (through higher taxes), and the developer richer, while leaving the forced sellers poorer in both subjective and objective senses.”
I think Todd made exactly the right point about elitism being the operative problem here. Kelo represents a growing tendency of the political, business and legal elite feeling entitled to impose a creeping oligarchy by inverting clear meanings of Constitutional clauses so that some – namely what Ayn Rand once called ” the aristocracy of Pull” – shall be more equal than others.
Some of us can advertise our political opinions less than sixty days before an election and some of us cannot. Some of us can bribe and intimidate a village or town council composed of small-timers with bad toupees and unjustifiably large egos into looting the homes and businesses of their unconnected neighbors and some of us will lose our homes.
Oligarchy is a sign of civilizational decay.
FIREWORKS OVER THE NAZIS MIGRATES TO OTHER BLOGS
For those who may be interested and possibly amused, my post on the Bush administration and Democracy somehow evolved in the comments section into a firey debate over Nazism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt between Beltway- insider connected Pundita and expat MENA expert Collounsbury.
Parting shots have been exchanged, with Pundita vociferously condemning British indulgence of barbarism and Collounsbury – well – demonstrating his usual tolerance for right-wing non-specialists.
And as I write this, I see that Col has posted a mild rebuttal to Pundita’s post.
ADDENDUM:
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