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BARNETT-ROBB DIALOGUE

On Open Source Warfare and the Core, helpfully reposted by Critt.

WHY THE MORALLY CONFUSED UN BUREAUCRACY SHOULD NOT BE WRITING RULE-SETS ANY TIME SOON

En route to researching something unrelated I stumbled across this gem today:

“Yes, absolutely, I worry about a democracy having nuclear weapons as much as a dictatorship having nuclear weapons”

– Mohammed ElBareidei, New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2003.

Well now. I think in principle you could easily translate such sentiments to this:

“Yes, absolutely, I worry about a policeman having a handgun as much as a gangbanger having a handgun”.

RECOMMENDED READING

I’ve noticed that the blogosphere, or at least the part I find worth reading, tends to produce high quality postings in bursts ( pulses ? ) with peaks and valleys in terms of both quality and quantity. It’s been pretty good these last few days and I had trouble paring this list down to something readers will find manageable:

Eddie at Live from the FDNF reviews Ralph Peters book New Glory.

Simon at Simon World on “ What Part of East Asia is Important?”

Sean Meade at Interact has a post that includes both Star Wars: Clone Wars and Newt Gingrich running for President

Coming Anarchy, one of my perennial favorites, sees Younghusband on Sherman Kent, one of the fathers of the CIA and Chirol expounding on Isolationism.

Chester liveblogged the Iraqi vote. The man is committed !

Dr. Michael Scheuer in On Point on ” Al Qaida and the Jihad Without Bin Laden“.

Earl at Prometheus6, has good news for all those bloggers suffering the heartbreak of comment spam

Curtis at Phatic Communion mixes biowarfare, Islamist terror and Game Theory .

That’s it !

OPEN-SOURCE WARFARE vs. PNM THEORY [ UPDATED]

It is great fun for me to see two brilliant minds clash. And I saw this one coming. :o)

John Robb of Global Guerillas has an op-ed in the New York Times ( you have ” arrived” as a pundit when you get your NYT op-ed) that forecasts an El Salvadorized exit of American forces from Iraq:

“Given this landscape, let’s look at alternative strategies. First, out-innovating the insurgency will most likely prove unsuccessful. The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative. New technologies and tactics move rapidly from one end of the insurgency to the other, aided by Iraq’s relatively advanced communications and transportation grid – demonstrated by the rapid increases in the sophistication of the insurgents’ homemade bombs. This implies that the insurgency’s innovation cycles are faster than the American military’s slower bureaucratic processes (for example: its inability to deliver sufficient body and vehicle armor to our troops in Iraq).

…What’s left? It’s possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.’s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state’s monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980’s and Colombia in the 1990’s. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq’s paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too. “

I can’t be too hard on Robb here because, frankly, I foresaw the same ” controlled civil war” possibility ten months ago. On the other hand, Robb may be getting more than a little carried away by following up on his op-ed by predicting that Iraq will then yield a Global 1980’s Lebanon. More as to why in a moment.

Dr. Barnett caught Robb’s editorial today and has offered a serious rebuttal on his blog:

“Remember, super-empowered individuals can rule vertical scenarios temporarily, but it takes states, and all their resources, to rule horizonatal ones. In short, don’t confuse disruption capacity with rule-making capacity. To believe the former rules all is to engage in what that battle-tested revolutionary, V.I. Lenin, called the child-like belief that the right bomb in the right place at the right time changes everything. Modeling ourselves on OBL’s and Al Qaeda’s infantilism isn’t the answer. Building the bigger open-source net is. This is my A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states.

So I say, bet on numbers. Bet on bigger networks. Bet on growing the Core and, by doing so, restricting the enemy’s operating domain.”

There are major divergences in perspective between these two theorists beyond a simple classic pessimist vs. an optmist.

Robb is arguing that the operative Rule-set within the battlespace that is Iraq ( actually everywhere) has changed to our disadvantage and that of all nation-states. He is also an “Entropist” – Robb along with other key 4GW thinkers like William Lind are betting their chips that the global system is increasingly suffering effects under the Law of Entropy and is winding down. Agents of centrifugal disintegration and systemic disruption are thus superempowered because their efforts are in sync with the general momentum of the times. The wind is at bin Laden’s back, as it were.

Barnett is arguing that the Rule-set within the battlespace is totally irrelevant; what matters is the power and legitimacy to write the Rule-sets that shape and determine the battlespace. In other words, al Qaida might attack on ground of their own choosing but we can ultimately determine what ground matters and al Qaida cannot. Moreover, Barnett is an
” Evolutionist” – he’s betting on the Darwinian nonzero sum outcomes that undergird the formation and perpetuation of complex systems .

The larger the scale the less valid becomes Robb’s argument because the battlespace ( Iraq, Chechnya, Colombia, wherever) will resemble less and less a closed system that would permit progression to complete breakdown. Human beings are social and economic creatures, they bias their actions toward aggregating added value. In terms of market conclusions, the larger the crowd, the wiser it is.

Globalization trumps guerillas.

UPDATE:

John Robb rebuts Dr. Barnett’s rebuttal. Disputes holding pessimistic views, aligns with Thomas Friedman’s ” Flat world”. An excerpt:

“Our dispute is solely on how we get there. It isn’t a contest of light (light) and dark (pessimistic) views. We are both optimistic about the future…

…This viewpoint translates into our approach to solutions. He’s sees Iraq as a non-attempt at state-sponsored nation-building and I see it as the best attempt that this approach could muster.”

Go read the whole thing at Global Guerillas.

OPERATION AJAX DID NOT CREATE KHOMEINI

Critics of American ME policy often cite the toppling of nationalist Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh by a CIA orchestrated coup on 1953 a the direct cause of Khomeini’s 1979 Islamist revolution. This is an argument that never made much sense to me given the enormous timeline between the two events. Certainly, American meddling in internal affairs rankled Iranian nationalists but the Shah’s downfall was mostly his own doing. Nor did Khomeini have any particular love for Mossadegh style secular nationalism or the Communist Tudeh Party. Khomeini viewed the world on his own terms and would have ultimately opposed any secular Iranian government, regardless of political stripe or its relations with the United States.

Dave at The Glittering Eye had an exemplary post that looks at the Mossadegh era in detail. An excerpt:

“But a greater problem, it seems to me, is that Mossadegh had little natural support. The Tudeh Party (lit. the Masses, the Iranian Communist Party under another name) had abandoned him. Recent revelations from the Kremlin (pointed to by Francis Gavin in his paper, Politics, Power, and U. S. Policy in Iran, 1950-1953) suggest that although Mossadegh was leaning increasingly towards the Kremlin, the Soviet-funded Tudeh was pushing increasingly hard in that direction. The military had many pro-Shah officers despite his best efforts at replacing them with his own men. Religious conservatives had abandoned him, possibly worried about the increasing socialization (and secularization) of the country.”

The post however deserves to be read in full.

I too am of the opinion that Mossadegh could not have continued to ride the tiger of internal Iranian politics indefinitely. He was too mercurial and having alienated Britain and the United States, that left Iran the option of cozying up to the Soviet Union. Mossadegh was not a Communist nor did he trust or love the Tudeh activists who were his semi-allies but partnership with the USSR would have meant conceding the Tudeh a role in Iran. As in Afghanistan, Indonesia, China and other Third World countries from the 1930’s to the 1970’s, Iran would have reached a crisis point between the nationalists and Communists and the outcome, given the proximity of the Soviets, could have easily been in the Tudeh’s favor.