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RECOMMENDED READING: THE TWO-PARTER DUO

Dan of tdaxp in his two-part response to Chirol’s post on the sick man is Europe:

Part I: 4GW Tactic: Love Your Enemy As You Would Have Him Love You

Part II: Caiaphas and Diocletian Did Know Better

First, I enjoyed seeing Dan present the early Christian fathers as the masterminds of concerted, three century long, 4GW attack on the Roman Empire. Dan missed his calling by not majoring in History.

In Part II, Dan has a passage toward which I would like to draw particular attention:

“But Diocletian was not a cruel man. He was an autodidact, a world-system thinker, and a genius. He separated the Roman foreign policy system into what we would call a “Department of Defense” and a “Department of State. He further subdivided DOD into an “Army” and “National Guard.” He defined a system of executive political appointees that would allow for Constitutional succession of Emperors for the first time in history. When his economic reforms caused rapid inflation, he changed them so they wouldn’t. Diocletian was a very intelligent man able to learn from mistakes. Diocletian was smart man. He wanted Christians dead.”

An interesting take on the great Emperor, though one not entirely wrong if you take ” genius” to mean a world-historical visionary comparable to Mao ZeDong or Charles V. Diocletian’s political reforms might have worked for a time had his handpicked colleagues ( Augustii and Casearii ) proved more reliable. Ultimately though, Diocletian needed a more sophisticated and timely channel of communication to the senior Emperor – say a telegraph – than the Roman world possessed in order to prevent the division of government responsibilities from degenerating into simple disunity.

Of Diocletian’s economic reforms, the less said the better.

The Armchair Generalist has completed a two-part review of The Pentagon’s New Map:

Part I. and Part II.

J. has done a nice job here. Instead of doing the usual, comprehensive essay for/against PNM format, instead J. pulled out some key paragraphs and wrote some reflections. The virtue here is that the focus remains on the actual ideas discussed in the book by Dr. Barnett and not some cockeyed straw man version cooked up by some disgruntled assistant professor. I also like the fact that J., like Dan of tdaxp, really understood the virtues of horizontal thinking and that the book had relevance to J.’s own military experience.

That’s it !

NETWORKS, NODES, HUBS, COMPUTER VIRUSES AND AL QAIDA

Dr. Von has an excellent summative essay up today on how network theory applies in different scenarios:

“One can understand from this model how computer viruses are so effective and can spread so quickly around the world. If a single, typical node (perhaps my computer) is ‘infected’ by a virus sent out (normally via email) to the Internet, and if that node were to somehow contain it and not send an email out to anyone else, nothing would happen to the rest of the network. But if I were to send emails to a number of friends and acquaintances, or if the virus were sent to numerous nodes in the network, as each node sent out emails the virus spreads to each of those nodes, and before long it is possible to have a cascading effect. Now, if a hub is infected, and it is linked to many, many other nodes of the Internet network, large numbers of nodes of the Internet may be infected almost simultaneously, perhaps before an ‘antidote’ piece of software can be made available. On the other hand, let’s suppose hubs are ‘cured’ of a virus relatively quickly, but some of the small, peripheral nodes are infected. The virus is not extinguished just because hubs are cured. In fact, computer viruses can persist for long periods of time (6 months to as long as 14 months after antidote software is available) even without infected hubs because they can still move around, albeit slowly, between the poorly connected nodes of the network.

One interesting aspect of this is to think of a social network such as Al Qaeda. This organization follows scale-free network structures, rather than some other types of social network structures. Other types may be a hub-and-spoke structure like a dictatorship, where a central hub runs the entire network. A tree structure is also possible, with a set chain of command (much like a typical military organization, where more minor decisions can be made locally in parts of the network, and major, global decisions made by someone like the President or a top general, and this decision cascades down to lower parts of the network simultaneously. Al Qaeda is neither of these, but rather a ‘web without a spider.’ An analysis was done after the 9/11 attacks to determine the structure of the cell responsible for the attacks (this is outlined in Barabasi’s book). Mohamed Atta was indeed a hub of the suspected 34-person cell. But, he only had links with 16 other nodes. Marwan Al-Shehhi was linked with only 14 other members of the cell. Most of the other members only may have had one or two known links to other nodes, which is a signature structure for a scale-free network. If we assume the entire Al Qaeda organization is similarly structured, what we are fighting is indeed a network that is very flexible and can tolerate some number of internal failures. If Atta was captured prior to 9/11, that event would not have necessarily crippled the cell, and the attacks may have very well gone as planned. The reason is that the other nodes still had the links to hold together the cell, so even taking out the leader of the cell does not disconnect all the other links. Killing Bin Laden will not in itself cripple Al Qaeda for the same reason. In fact we have seen this because a number of Bin Laden’s very well-connected lieutenants (i.e. other hubs) have been killed or captured, and yet the attacks and killing by the periphery of Al Qaeda continue unabated. This is completely analogous to viruses in the Internet, where if a hub is ‘cured’ (i.e. Bin Laden removed) the virus may still be able to do damage through poorly connected nodes (small cells on the periphery of Al Qaeda’s network, acting almost independently). This is part of the power of a scale-free network structure.”

Jessica Stern, author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill and Superterrorism Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, also draws on network theory, considering al Qaida to be ” a hybrid organization” that now consists of a ” network of networks” that contains ” leaderless resisters, lone-wolf avengers, commanders and cadres, free-lancers and franchises. A flexible organizational-operational pattern that would be quite close to what John Robb calls the ” Open-Source ” warfare model of terrorism.

” State-sponsored Terrorism” is of course, network warfare. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored state actor and subnational proxies in order to wage geopolitical competition with a circuit-breaker of plausible deniability that prevented direct superpower confrontation and escalation to nuclear war. Proxies were kept on relatively short leashes, whenever possible. The Reagan administration, hardly a group that was soft on Communism, agonized and delayed providing the Afghan Mujahedin stinger missiles precisely because those proxies were seen ( correctly ) even within sections of the CIA as unreliable and uncontrollable, compared to, say, the Contras.

The Soviets were less discriminating with their aid but when a proxy wandered away from Moscow’s playbook, as with Gaddafi’s bombing in West Germany that provoked the Reagan administration to attempt to kill the Libyan strongman in a military attack, the Soviets cooly let their proxy take their lumps. This contrasts with their attitude toward more loyal proxies like Hafez Assad, whom the Soviets backed to the extent of replacing much of the Syrian air force shot down over Lebanon by the Israelis.

Networks have the capacity to become self-sustaining enterprises. When Superpower aid dried up across the board in the early 1990’s – terrorists, guerillas and rogue state actors turned to various black market enterprises and Transnational Organized Crime networks to move drugs, diamonds, arms, WMD technology, slave labor and other forms of contraband to create revenue streams. Taking a page from the old 1930’s Comintern, these networks formed legal front organizations, charitiable foundations and even business enterprises in the Core and Seam states to raise additional revenue streams and launder illicit income. By the mid 1990’s, Cold War proxies were morphing into “ Non-state Actors” that were independent players on national, regional or global scales.

This is the strategic environment of the GWOT. Not a world of nation-states but a network of networks in which nation-states are merely one of the major hubs.

TANTALIZING POTENTIAL LEAD IN THE LONDON BOMBING [ UPDATED]

One of the bombs used in the London terror operation may have been made from the same batch of Chinese chemical high explosives used in a bombing in Tel Aviv that was carried out by HAMAS members recruited in Britain.

I caution that this information, which originates with the Mossad, is inadequately sourced and has yet to be confirmed by the British government. HAMAS participating in a bombing in Europe by cooperating with al Qaida would represent a radical escalation for that organization which normally confines their terror operations to Israel and the West Bank.

UPDATE:

Does the sophisticated bomb structure and lack of ” martyrdom operation” attack indicate cooperation with more securlar terrorists or a state-actor intelligence agency ( which could bring explosive material to the U.K. in a diplomatic pouch)? .

RECOMMENDED READING [ UPDATED]

Just one today. Dave at the Glittering Eye has an excellent post entitled “ Orality and Iraq” which points to some very significant aspects of cross-cultural communication between America and the Arab world. I note that while Dave is not an Arabist he does have some background as a linguist in some difficult languages for Westerners to learn and his comments are informed from that perspective:

“In an oral world you know what you can remember.

This has real relevance and real practical application. The Bush Administration has made bringing democracy to Iraq a keystone of its policy in the War on Terror. This would be a formidable task under any circumstances but a major complication is the oral or vestigial oral nature of the culture. When the United States began its own experiment with democracy the literacy in the adult population in New England is estimated at around 90% (somewhat lower in the rest of the new country although statistics are very hard to come by).

I’m not saying, by the way, that orality means that democracy is impossible. I believe, along with Mr. Bush, that all people aspire to freedom. But communicating effectively with the people and making freedom part of the prevailing wisdom in the society requires using modalities of communication that are meaningful to the people.”

Read the whole thing. Later I’ll update with some observations from a historical and epistemological angle.

UPDATE:

The following are some selected observations that I have already shared for the most part with Dave on his Orality post. Dave’s view additionally meshes somewhat with an explanation of the Arab literacy problem once expressed here by Collounsbury quite a long time ago in regard to reconstructing Iraq. My remarks in no particular order:

• Oral traditions have been recently proven, much to the surprise of academic historians who have derided the value of oral histories in favor of documents for the last century, to be relatively accurate and consistent across generations, even centuries. Much that was once central to the ancient western canon – Homer for example – was memorized long before it was ever written down. By giving up that practice, in favor of writing, Western civilization underwent a cognitive reorientation and much mental energy and time was freed up for other things. All that memorization takes up space in the brain, neurons are connecting here and I think, arguably, that left a lot of abilities in the population untapped even without considerations of scarcity and want.
• Not only is Diglossia a factor but Arab elites are Westernized by education in Europe and America create a huge intellectual gulf; some think more frequently or faster in English or French than they do in colloquial Arabic.
  Who are the radical Islamists ? Mostly middle-class guys with traditional Arab educations as preparation before modern scientific, medical, computer science, engineering or mathematical fields where their subsequently learned critical thining skills were acquired primarily on the nonverbal side of the IQ/ “g” rather than the verbal side through study of the humanities. You just don’t see many Art History majors in al Qaida or Islamic Jihad.
• With a lack of abstraction comes a lack of emotional detachment. In a zero-sum game tribal culture this means disputes more easily escalate toward violence and adversaries have fewer psychologically and socially acceptable ways of backing down once they have gotten themselves into a corner

A NIETZSCHEAN LOOK AT THE EUROPEAN DISEASE

Chirol at Coming Anarchy has an analytical post up drawing a historical analogy between the spread of Christianity in the late Roman empire and the effect of Socialism on continental European civilization. You should read the whole thing but here are some excerpts from ” The Sick Man IS Europe”:

“With the Edict of Milan in 313AD, the Roman Empire officially became a Christian empire. While the empire lasted until 476, it was clearly already in decline. According to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the root cause was neither the Germanic hordes nor anything as direct as war or political instability but instead something much more sinister: Christianity…

…While discussing value rivalry which threatens explicit rule sets by promoting implicit rules or values that encourage destructive behavior, Mark Safranski notes that “such a conflict is typical of a dysfunctional rule set that characterizes a system at risk of decline.”(Rule Set Journal Feb 05.) One of the most important and overlooked questions with regard to Christianity is its roots. Christianity, unlike other religions such as Islam, has its roots in the disenfranchised slave classes. Who were the first Christians? The weak, the outcasts, the powerless. This much is indisputable. However, how did a simple belief system, founded by a “traitor” and propagated amongst the lower classes end up conquering the entire empire all the way up to the emperors? Nietzsche thought it was possibly spread intentionally by St. Paul to undermine the Roman system.

Without getting into too much historical depth on this, Nietzsche essentially theorized that Rome was the target of an ideological insurgency bent on undermining Rome. Perhaps one of the first and most famous fourth generation wars? (Dan?) While many more direct factors led to the actual fall of Rome, it was this disease from within which continued to weaken it and make it more and more susceptible to outside attacks just as AIDS destroys your immune system from within leaving some minor external disease to ultimately kill the victim. What does this have to do with me you ask? The parallels between Christianity, the geneology of its morals and present day Leftism/Socialism is quite interesting.

…Thus, as people climb the ladder of wealth and development, they slowly discard weaker values and adopt new ones. Keep in mind a person may still call himself Christian, but it’s the practice we’re worried about, not the label. What are the ramifications of this for the US and Europe? The disease of Communism, also an ideology of the weak, rose quickly in Russia in the early 1900s and spread like a plague across the globe ultimately destroying its host states. Socialism is merely a weaker varient thereof yet Europe has long since succumbed to it and its values that favor the weak. Is the United States going to face such a battle in the future? Could it undermine our American values as it has done to other countries past and present? Maybe.”

Dan of tdaxp has already posted on Christianity as the 4GW movement of the Roman world, complete with his usual excellent, open-source graphics. I will take that as a sign that my part of the division of labor will be the other half of Chirol’s analogy, the question of European modernity and its value-rivalry with the United States.

Some years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks published It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States which neatly summed up the ideological differences in the history of the American and European Labor movements and why the Socialist idea caught fire in Europe but died in America. Essentially, they found the same answer as did Alexis de Tocqueville, American social mobility and the lack of any class/caste legacy of feudalism left American workers and labor activists unreceptive to calls for revolution. Trade unions like the AFL-CIO became, as Lenin predicted, bastions of anti-Communism and sought material improvements for their members and not Bolshevism. Or even Social-Democracy, as a German or a Scandinavian would understand that term.

Where did American Socialism flourish if it failed among the mass of citizenry ? Primarily among materially secure but psychologically alienated intellectuals.

As a rival Rule-set to liberal, market democracy, the Socialist idea offers little that is attractive in the objective measurements of GDP, economy of resources, living standards or even the ability to plan social outcomes, the supposed strength of that value-system. What Socialism retains however, is its utility as a rationale to invest great swaths of arbitrary authority in a mandarin class of intellectuals who can fill the ranks of a regulatory state machine – lawyers, social workers, economists, statisticians and various kinds of apparatchiks. Socialism is attractive to them for the same reason American society is not – self-aggrandizing will to power as a class.

The heyday of these people had its origin in WWI where administrators like Herbert Hoover and William McAdoo were the heroic celebrities of that war moreso than generals. When the calamity of the great Depression and the Second World War struck America, the public was ready in the spirit of emergency to go along with the vast expansion of the state and the methods of the would-be planners. This phenomena was in sync with a global shift toward the state and was examined in detail by Friedrich von Hayek in his classic Road to Serfdom.

What did not happen however, was a fundamental shift in American values away from liberty and equality toward statism and paternalism on the European model. The socialist intellectuals had the keys to the kingdom on an empirical-results trial basis only and when their demand-side Keynesian prescriptions broke down in the 1970’s with stagflation the voters threw the Left and their premises out on their ear in 1980. This would not have happened on the European continent where parties come and go but the welfare state remains inviolate and the regulatory Brussells leviathan is actually be regarded by some as being ” ultraliberal”.

As a value-rival Rule-set, Socialism failed here as it dies in any cultural soil rich in optimism and well grounded in the concepts of cause and effect. It needs envy and fatalism to grow.