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PIRACY AND THE POST-WESTPHALIAN DOCTRINE OF SOVEREIGN IRRESPONSIBILITY

Pirates, the terrorists of the ancient world, are in the news a lot these days it seems. Curzon at Coming Anarchy, among other blogs today, covered this issue in ” Avast” and “More on Piracy“. It is the information in the last post provided by Curzon that I find important ( as well as highly irritating).

“Malaysia ‘will never allow’ foreign military forces to help patrol the Malacca strait, which is vulnerable to pirate attacks, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said. ‘Malaysia firmly believes in the principle of a country’s independence, however small,’ Abdullah said in a speech to the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) general assembly. ‘Based on that principle, Malaysia stands firm in the belief that the responsibility of ensuring the security of the waters of the Malacca strait is ours,’ he told some 2,500 party leaders at the annual talks. ‘We will never allow foreign military to conduct patrols in those waters,’ he said. ‘Their presence, without our approval, would be a breach that we would regard as disrespectful of our country’s independence.’ “

The reaction of the Malaysian Prime Minister, to put it in international law theory terms, amounts to an enunciation of a Doctrine of Sovereign Irresponsibility. As artfully nationalistic developing-world bluster, the statement fits in neatly with the spirit of the post-Westphalian Age but it has all the legal standing of a bin Laden fatwa.

Sovereign powers are respected as sovereigns under International Law precisely because they exercise authority over and accept juridical responsibility for a defined and internationally recognized territory. With the perks of sovereignty come responsibilities – namely maintaining law and order. A sovereign who fails to do so on a continual basis calls their international legitimacy into legal question. By claiming sovereignty but failing to maintain free passage in the Malacca straits ( an international sea lane) the P.M. is trying to have his cake and eat it too.

Secondly, Maylasia’s sovereignty over the straits is, in any event, limited here by their adhering to the Law of the Sea Treaty which recognizes the rights of foreign ships – including armed ones – to pass through. Furthermore, these ships may defend themselves against piracy both under customary international law and under the Law of the Sea Convention’s “ Force Majeure” clause in Article 39. . Legally, the Malaysians do not have a leg to stand on and if we were to dig deeply into the piracy issue – a part of the big business of Transnational Organized Crime – we might be surprised to discover to whom these pirate gangs have financial connections. Internationally as well as locally.

The Malaysian Prime Minister may be doing little more than playing to the injured pride of his countrymen but the time is long overdue to stop excusing developing nations from their duties as sovereigns while granting them all of the diplomatic benefits.

TIP OF THE ZENPUNDIT HAT

I have to say to the bloggers who are my regular reads ( you know who you are), friends and a few here and there who are not as friendly, that if I wished I could post nothing original of my own and simply react to what all of you are writing about. Your blogs are that interesting sometimes.

In fact, this may be one of those days….

RECOMMENDED READING

Several good pieces out there:

Dave at the Glittering Eye had an excellent post up the other day “In for the long haul: what needs to happen in the War on Terror“. Analytical and thorough, Dave’s post nicely complements the ideas presented by…

Jeff at Caerdroia, who has a post entitled ” The Enemy’s Strategic Problem“, gently reminding us that it’s not a bed of roses plotting out of a Wazirstan fuhrerbunker either.

Younghusband at Coming Anarchy was kind enough to give my 5GW discussion with Dan a plug and one of his readers, Curtis Gale Weeks of Phatic Communion brought a fascinating link to my attention. A transliteration of the geopolitical section of” Unrestricted Warfare” by PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. The other sections can be found here – Part I., PartII. and Part III. I can see myself posting an analysis on these in the future. As for the other gentlemen at Coming Anarchy, Chirol is talking SysAdmin and Curzon marvels at transnational progressive legal hubris and asininity.

And I agree with the ubiquitous praktike.

Collounsbury is now stateside.

MY OWN PERSONAL BLOGGING OODA CYCLE IS SLOWING

I see from Dan that a huge blogospheric storm is brewing over Congressman Tancredo’s comments. I’m sort of wondering where these folks were from 1949 -1991 when we had 250+ million Soviet citizens targeted for nuclear annihilation who had a lot less responsibility for what the Politburo did than what wealthy Saudi and Gulf state Arabs by the thousands have for Bin Laden’s actions. This was American policy for so long that the prospect of global holocaust was considered a normal state of affairs for decades. I’m sorry, Hugh Hewett is simply ignorant here.

Tancredo’s hamhanded, off-the-cuff, bluster looks positively milquetoast next to U.S. nuclear doctrine under Jimmy Carter. The purpose of making terrifying, credible, deterrence threats is to NOT have to actually use nuclear weapons. If a nuclear bomb goes off inside the United States tomorrow, I can just about guarantee that we will use nuclear weapons in retaliation against probably more than one terrorist-supporting country. If we are bombed it will because our enemies disbelieved that we would retaliate, not because we are clear that we will.

FIFTH GENERATION WAR IN THE OODA LOOP

Dan of tdaxp has picked up the 5GW ball where I left it yesterday and run downfield to the end zone. Dan took some of my speculations from yesterday and employed a Boydian analysis of putting them into the Observe –Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) decision cycle of the great military theorist John Boyd. Aside from Dan’s usual, sterling graphics he has brought out some exciting points about 5GW possibilities that I had missed. Some excerpts:

“War is going deeper into enemy minds. Every generation of warfare aims for deeper in the enemy’s OODA loop

…The 4th Generation of War redshifts deeper into the OODA loop. It slides into the “Observation” realm. If traditional war centered on an enemy’s physical strength, and 4GW on his moral strength, the 5th Generation of War would focus on his intellectual strength. A 5th Generation War might be fought with one side not knowing who it is fighting. Or even, a brilliantly executed 5GW might involve one side being completely ignorant that there ever was a war. It’s like the old question of what was the perfect robbery: we will never know, because in a perfect robbery the bank would not know that it was robbed. “

Excellent thinking ! My Commentary:

*I had vaguely mentioned a move toward ” shaping the battlespace” by which I meant preemptively seizing control of the power to determine Rule-sets, altering the physical settings and systems and preemptively influencing longitudinal cultural and political trends. Dan has correctly aligned this in the OODA cycle as affecting the enemy’s ability to ” Observe” and illustrated the relationship with other generations of warfare.

* Dan’s post seems to have the advantage of organizing the concepts in harmony with the ideas of Sun-Tzu and John Boyd.

* It occurs to me after reading Dan’s post the that a very powerful shift of longitudinal perspective takes place. 4GW is executed over a very long time frame, sometimes decades. 5GW is conceived in terms of strategic vision over an even longer time frame, sometimes before an opponent realizes that they will be an opponent but the execution time may be very short in comparison to 4GW. The operative question is probably whether the attacker or the defender has initiated 5GW – once you are already attacked you have missed your opportunity to shape the battlespace.

Great work Dan !