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RECOMMENDED READING

Younghusband at Coming Anarchy on the ” Warrior Gods” of Zen Buddhism.

Extra Zenpundit brownie points awarded to YH for choice of topic. Huzzah !

Fabius Maximus at DNI on part III of his grand strategy series “America’s Most Dangerous Enemy“

This one is quite a mixed bag. I’ll give Fabius kudos on his larger theme of the dangers of paranoia and hubris and I like his reference to the late historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic concept of ” the paranoid style”. On the other hand, Fabius gets the interplay of anti-Communism and Containment policy in the history of the Cold War wrong in my view, often from gross oversimplification. Likewise, I think his interpretation of Dr. Barnett’s views are often the opposite of what Tom intended, particularly in Blueprint For Action, which may be a result of the influence of Wiliam Lind’s recent review.

Josh at The Adventures of Chester asks ” The Key Strategic Question” – is Islam compatible with a free society ? Josh writes:

“To say yes to our question, one assumes that there are aspects of being Muslim and faithful to Islam, that can coexist peacefully with liberty, tolerance, and equality. The strategy that follows is one of identifying the groups and sects within Islam that adhere to these notions of their religion, and then encouraging them, favoring them, propagating them, and splitting them off from the elements of Islamic practice that are all too incompatible with the portions of modernity that invigorate men’s souls: free inquiry, free association, free commerce, free worship, or even the freedom to be left alone.

To answer no, one states that Islam itself is fundamentally irreconcilable with freedom. This leads to a wholly different set of tactical moves to isolate free societies from Islam”

This post by Josh gets to the heart of the strategic debate between those like Thomas P.M. Barnett who advocate connectivity to shrink a Gap that contains a majority of the Muslim world and William Lind who argues for isolating ourselves from ” centers of disorder” and those migrants who would bear disorder with them into the heart of our civilization.

THE NATURE OF CONNECTIVITY

John Robb at Global Guerillas had an important and thought provoking post on the effects of System Perturbations entitled ” Big Bangs” – a casual term that Thomas P.M. Barnett uses for the invasion of Iraq . After a nice applied physics explanation of systems and feedback, Robb writes:

“If we look at today’s global environment we see a moderately unstable system. It is a relatively high performance system that is increasingly controlled by global markets. This explains why it is spreading so quickly. However, our drive towards a high performance system, powered by rampant global interconnectivity, has outpaced our ability to dampen excess. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The result is a system vulnerable to rogue feedback. Even a small amount of it can cause global reverberations. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. Iraq is a great demonstration of our inability to dampen excess in the face of active opposition (notice how our goals have drifted from building an allied democracy to stopping civil war).

For example, instead of building resilience into the system, we have embarked on a path of introducing more rogue feedback into the system (the invasion of Iraq seen as a “big bang” in the Middle East). This is based on the belief that Fukuyama’s “End of History,” where we all live in capitalist democracies is inexorable. It’s not. There isn’t any guarantee that our current system is the inevitable result of history. As a result, the more likely short term outcome is more chaos (we are seeing the start of that right now). Small attacks, like the one on the Askariya shrine and the facility at Abqaiq will continue to put entire sections of the system on the brink. Over the longer term, the system will continue on its unpredictable path until the weight of numerous fundamental changes to the system’s design and operation are made that dampen this chaos. Where we end up at the end of this process may be a dynamically stable state that is far from the current political and economic status quo. You might not recognize what you see. “

There’s a lot to like in this post as Robb clearly has a grasp on the nature of globalization and some of the potentially negative implications arising from that process interacting with American policy – in this case deliberately intiating a system perturbation in the Middle-East by invading Iraq. However, I’m also reading a significant internal contradiction present in the passage that undermines Robb’s argument that has to do with connectivity.

The global market ( which John seems to define separately and as something less than the environment but an economist probably would not) has always been interconnected, even autarkic, self-isolating, lunatic regimes like the DPRK allow some exchange to take place. What globalization has done is accelerate the transaction speed while dramatically diversifying and increasing the volume of exchanges so when Robb writes about fading borders, fewer governmental controls and the diminishing impact of distance, he’s correct. While we normally consider money and goods when speaking of markets, in reality most of the choices that we make are actually economic decisions, even apparently intangible ones involving information or personal relationships.

These decisions all take place within the infinitely complex global system, so whether we call it a “market” or something else the world is effectively one system. The Gap constitutes a region in the system where the transaction rates are slower, irregular and subject to greater irrationalities or distortions than in the Core. This is because there is either too much centralized control wielded over access to the Gap nation, usually by corrupt, authoritarian, rulers or not enough state control exists to assure physical security and enforce rule-sets as in the case of failed states.

In the former case ” decentralization” needed for ” long term stability” advocated by Robb is little else than the very connectivity that Robb argues that requires a greater dampening capacity on the part of the system ( incidentally, Robb is correct that the interconnectivity yielded by globalization also makes the system more vulnerable to perturbations and rogue feedback. I outlined a similar thesis in my review of system perturbation rule sets). The systemic dampening capacity Robb asserts is needed can only be established by:

1. Better governance in Gap states – something that in extreme cases will involve ” exporting security” through system administration intervention ( abstaining from intervention does not mean an absence of “rogue feedback”, as Afghanistan under Taliban rule proved).

2. A new rule-set consensus being implemented among the Core states whose economic dynamism drives the global market’s destabilizing high performance characteristics. Primarily this is the realm of international economic diplomacy, rationalizing market effciency while setting up breakers to interrupt potential domino effect transnational market collapse in cases of panic, natural or man-made disasters.

Can the system be stressed by a series of smaller shocks to a ” tipping point”, at least regionally, as Robb argues? Yes, I think that is certainly possible but we need to remember that in a dynamic system it isn’t simply the centrifugal, disintegrating, entropic or negative events that count against a status quo but those events in relation to the centripetal, integrating, nonzero sum or positive events happening simultaneously. This is why complex systems are notoriously difficult to game out without relying on greatly simplified models – the mathematical predictability of the model comes at the cost of varying from reality. Even supercomputer modelling of, say,weather patterns or the stock market cannot produce reliable outcomes, being thwarted by the sheer complexity and the dynamic state of the global market.

The disruptive effects – political, economic and moral – that Robb worries about and encapsulates as his strategy of Global Guerillaism are quite real and are not to be dismissed lightly. In any system, the devolution toward entropy will be present but these forces are not the only ones driving mankind and the evolutionary and creative phenomena that add value to our civilization have a powerful logic of their own.

UPDATE:

Chirol at Coming Anarchy has his own take on Robb’s post, leaning toward…ahem..a coming anarchy.

PERILS OF PUSH POLLING FOREIGN POLICY

John Zogby, the well known political pollster is in the news today due to a poll he ran for a left-wing peace group that was published in the Christian Science Monitor that purports to show a remarkable shift in sentiment by American troops in Iraq to favor immediate withdrawal and a deep division between regular troops and reservists. Serious questions are being raised on both the Left and Right about the methodology used by Zogby as well as the phrasing of the questions themselves.

For starters, a proper representative sampling appears not to have been used by Zogby in this poll; Bruce Kesler at the Democracy Project writes:

“Today, Mystery Pollster — who is liberal, a reputable and experienced evaluator of polls, and who had access to some of the “secret” methodology – reveals his judgments [ ed. Note ” Mystery Pollster”communicated with John Zogby directly]. They parallel mine.

First, to be clear, the Center for Peace and Global Studies is in effect a “partisan” sponsor in that, according to Zogby, they oppose the war in Iraq.

Second, while Zogby says his interviewers selected respondents randomly at various locations, he makes no claim of random selection with respect to the locations involved. I apologize for being so vague, but the most I can say is that the method Zogby used to gain access to those locations constrained his ability to make random selections.

Third, even if consumers of this data knew all that I know about how Zogby’s interviewers “walked up to troops” (as commenter Karen puts it), they would still have questions about the impact of such an interaction might have on the kinds of troops most likely to agree to participate in the survey. Consider the exit poll example again. Even though exit pollsters have disclosed the procedures they use to train interviewers and select respondents, we still debate the effect of those procedures on the kinds of voters that choose to participate. Disclosure in that case cannot resolve all questions, but it at least enables an informed debate. Unfortunately, such discussion and debate is impossible in this case. “

Aside from the problem of of the Zogby poll not being properly representative in general there may be a particular selection bias at work here. As a military affairs writer for The Chicago Tribune, Colonel E. W. Chamberlain III has noted, the troops that civilian journalists have the easiest access to in a war zone are also those most likely to have the lowest morale and loudest gripes. Garrison or routine duty is inherently demotivating compared to more exciting missions in the field that far fewer journalists ever see outside of the Robert Kaplan types.

A definitive answer on the accuracy of the Zogby poll is not possible unless John Zogby chooses to make such information regarding his exact methodology available. If it is accurate, that poll would be a critical data point for field commanders, policy makers and the Congress to know. It would indicate very serious problems in terms of the troops morale and mission objectives and a need for the administration to take action.

If it is not accurate then it is either bad data honestly arrived at or an attempt to drive public debate and thus foreign policy under false pretenses to a position favored by the Zogby client and perhaps Mr. Zogby himself, given his personal interest in America adopting a more evenhanded or pro-Arab policy for the Middle-East. Either way the poll would not be adding illumination to the events in Iraq but throwing up dust and distorting the OODA loop.

John Zogby is an influential and important pollster but credibility once lost, is lost. He owes it to both himself and the American troops in Iraq to offer the public some clarification.

DISCREDITED SHILLS FOR THE DNC POSING AS “JOURNALISTS”

If you ever wonder why Republicans and conservatives have an almost pathological, knee-jerk loathing of the MSM and continue to complain of liberal bias long after the rise of talk radio, FOXnews and the blogosphere, this is it.

It is however, fun to catch them at it just as the news cycle gets going.

BIBLIOMANIA

My book buying, which is now beyond all sensible bounds, has led me to pick up Admiral Stansfield Turner’s new Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors And Secret Intelligence and I find I like Admiral Turner far more as a popular historian and commentator on Intelligence than I liked him as DCI. While I am familiar with most of the stories Turner is relating, in every case he throws in some nuggets that I have never heard before; I guess being a former DCI opens a lot of doors when you are researching a book. Moreover his personal observations on the historical figures that Turner knew or worked alongside are illuminating in themselves.

On a related note, I direct your attention toward ” Improving CIA Analytic Performance: Analysts and the Policymaking Process” from the Sherman Kent Center For Intelligence Analysis. Short but worthwhile read.