zenpundit.com

Have not done one of these in a while. Fortunately, that means there’s lots of good material. 

Top Billing! Steven Pressfield – An Interview with an Afghan Tribal Chief, Part #1 and Interview with a Tribal Chief, Part 2: Warlords

Ah, I am a sucker for posts on warlords.

“Chief Zazai: A tribal leader is elected by the tribes. A warlord is a self-imposed body on the tribes and the people. A tribal leader does not get elected if he has blood on his hands. A warlord cannot survive unless he has killed many innocent people, looted people’s livelihoods and been involved in the opium and drug trade. A tribal leader only gets elected when he, his father and grandfather have been servants of the community. A warlord does not need these recommendations. A warlord gains his position by force of arms and is only interested in personal gain. A warlord has no problem with reelection as this summer’s so-called election has shown. In this case the gun is mightier than the pen.”

Steve has an amazing set of interviews with Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, an elected tribal leader in Paktia province Afghanistan who was educated partly in Canada and fought in the Soviet War.

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett – 10 Reasons Why Sanctions on Iran Won’t Work

Tom weighs in with an Esquire column on all the serious countervailing trends against a hardline policy squeezing Iran sufficiently to make the regime cave on nuclear programs, short of war. Dr. Barnett is right here; if there was an easy or cheap policy solution on Iran, we’d have done it already.

…Used to be that hardcore sanctions focused on weapons of mass destruction. But post-Bush, 21st-century sanctions offer “a pretty rich list to pick from,” as Robert Gates put it – Iran’s energy sector with bans on foreign investment and travel, the elimination of shipping insurance, and possibly the prohibition of oil-and-gas exports. But expect Tehran to activate workarounds wherein it reduces profit margins while muddling through with these wonderfully fungible assets. For example, Iran is vulnerable because it imports one-third of its gasoline, but ravenous Chinese oil companies are already filling the kinds of voids that sanctions could create, meaning that Europe’s temporary market loss will be China’s permanent strategic gain.

The wild card though, is the Mahdist Hojjatiyeh strand within the Pasdaran clique that seized power from the clergy in the wake of the stolen election. Are these IRGC powerbrokers more secular, corrupt, neofascist thugs or are they millenialist true believers?

Frank Hoffman –AFJ – Hybrid vs. compound war

“I would like the Pentagon and the defense community to use the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review to debate the range of threats we face and their potential combination. We need to assess today’s likely irregular threat and potential for high-end asymmetric threats. But this raises a critical issue in our evaluation of the emerging character of conflict: Is the character of conflict diverging into lower and higher forms, or converging, as the hybrid threat suggests? Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to embrace the convergence of threats and assesses this as likely and dangerous”

David Ronfeldt –  TIMN: some implications for thinking about political philosophy and ideology

Rand emeritus David Ronfeldt applies his post-political spectrum TIMN Model to analyze capitalism, democracy and radical ideologies.

Dr. David Kilcullen – NYT – 10 Steps to Victory in Afghanistan ( Hat tip DNI )

Col. Kilcullen is very brief here, focusing on legitimacy and good governance.

Joshua Foust – NYT – “Maladies of Interpreters”

Major kudos to Josh for snagging a high-profile op-ed on an important and generally mishandled problem of the USG giving due diligence to helping those who help us, usually at great risk to themselves. From the Montagnards and Hmong to Afghans and Iraqis, we need to institutionalize our response. If we can lard money on contractors who move toilet papers and MRE’s, a compensatory package for locals should be a no-brainer.

Strategic Studies Institute – Dr. Max G. Manwaring  – A “New” Dynamic in the Western Hemisphere Security Environment: The Mexican Zetas and Other Private Armies

This is good. Why Mexico and the war next door gets less media coverage than Iraq amounts to a case of national denial. Things are getting worse south of the border and we are not prepared.

Dr. Sebastian L. v. Gorka – How to Win in Afghanistan

A back to basics approach on historical COIN examples; an Afghan war strategy the fits well with Steve Pressfield’s posts above.

Jamais Cascio – Fast Company – “The Singularity and Society”

“….And that’s a problem, as the core of the Singularity argument is actually pretty interesting, and worth thinking about. Increasing functional intelligence–whether through smarter machines or smarter people–will almost certainly disrupt how we live in pretty substantial ways, for better and for worse. And there have been periods in our history where the combination of technological change and social change has resulted in quite radical shifts in how we live our lives–so radical that the expectations, norms, and behaviors of pre-transformation societies soon become out of place in the post-transformation world”

Fabius Maximus –  Theories about 4GW are not yet like the Laws of Thermodynamics

….The value of these kinds of insights was well expressed by a post Opposed Systems Design (4 March 2008):

A deeper understanding of these dynamics deserves an organized research program. The first concept – an artificially binary distinction between “foreign COIN” and “native COIN” – has served its purpose by highlighting the need for further work on the subject.

One reason for our difficulty grappling with 4GW is the lack of organized study.  We could learn much from a matrix of all insurgencies over along period (e.g., since 1900), described in a standardized fashion, analyzed for trends.  This has been done by several analysts on the equivalent of “scratch pads” (see IWCKI for details), but not with by a properly funded multi-disciplinary team (esp. to borrow or build computer models).

 We are spending trillions to fight a long war without marshaling or analyzing the available data.  Hundreds of billions for the F-22, but only pennies for historical research.  It is a very expensive way to wage war

Christopher Albon – The Social-Systemic Consequences of War

Diaspora and social network effects.

TDAXP – Review of “Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World” by Margaret MacMillan

Good review by Dan of an important book on the China opening by the author of 1919.

Coming Anarchy (Curzon) – The Hakka People, China’s Leadership Caste

This is a remarkable ethnographic marker of which I had not been aware. Akin to the disproportionate influence of Ashkenazi Jews in science or medicine.

Critt Jarvis – Why evangelize for Honduras? Energy and guts

Critt is back from Honduras and preaching the word.

John Hagel – A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World

A call for “passionate creatives” to organize to reform and innovate the dead hand of hierarchical, taylorist, institutions.

Major Mehar Omar Khan – Small Wars Journal – “Don’t Try to arrest the Sea: An Alternative Approach for Afghanistan” (PDF)

Major Khan is a Pakistani officer on exchange in the U.S. and he argues that COIN strategies that ignore or attempt to “reform” major cultural-historical aspects of Afghan society in top-down fashion are less likely to succeed than strategies that flow with the cultural current and start with small but acheivable “lighthouse” projects.

NewScientist.com – Campaign asks for international treaty to limit war robots

Basically an incipient, NGO-ish, effort to try and preempt and limit avenues of development and field use of armed robots by state militaries. The problem is, that most of these tinkering innovations are going to be well within the realm of modestly funded private groups or well-heeled individual “hobbyist” inventors, not just governments. With some kind of draconian, ill-considered, treaty restrictions, we could end up with insurgencies or terrorist groups that have better and more lethally employed robots and robotic countermeasures, than do conventional militaries. At least for one-shot attacks.

Harper’s Magazine – “American coup d’etat: Military thinkers discuss the unthinkable”

Andrew Bacevich, Charles Dunlap, Richard Kohn and Edward Luttwak discuss the possibility of a military coup in the United States. I owe someone a hat tip for this one but cannot recall who or what site or social network was involved.

That’s it!

This is simply amazing and the ultimate in Orwellian thought police technology ( Hat tip to Bill Petti).

Jessica Margolin, who blogs at Solvation on topics that I would broadly call “political economy” and emergent trends within the moderately liberal, techno-VC–silicon valley – futurist-“social capital”, business culture, writes in to me:

“Hi. As an educated and articulate libertarian person, could you PLEASE point me to conservative points of view that aren’t espoused by retarded ranting weirdos? I know there must be some. Help”

This cri de coeur caused me to ponder. 

Compared to my more leftwing blogfriends at ProgressiveHistorians or NewsHoggers, Margolin does not seem to me to be more than mildly liberal liberal/progressive but, she lives, if I recall, in an area not noted for a high proportion of conservative residents. If all I saw of conservatism were the bombthrowing personalities in 30 second MSM clips, I’d think the Right was composed of wingnuts too.

It isn’t, of course, any more than the Left is exclusively populated by Hugo Chavez worshipping, Cindy Sheehan clones. I think the problem in the mutual perception of respective Left-Right wingnuttery comes down to three factors:

1. Partisanship

2. Ideology

3. The Infotainment Media Business Model

Number three is the most significant factor. Bombastic clowns draw an audience. Reasoned discourse puts viewers to sleep. The media is a business, not a charity organization or even a totally one-sided political machine. Basically liberal broadcast networks will air a few conservatives who bring in ad revenue. Period. This model is a driver to propagating corrosive, demonizing, political rhetoric in the public discourse and it garners attention far beyond the actual numbers of people who genuinely support such positions

The most aggravating figures in political life are really more partisan than ideological. Something about the intrinsic one-sidedness of partisan rhetoric, I suspect.  Richard Nixon and George W. Bush were not very conservative in their policies but they were aggressive partisans. Bill and Hillary Clinton are partisan Democrats as was Jimmy Carter (the much maligned Carter enraged stalwart liberals among the House Democrats). By contrast, LBJ, Obama and Reagan are/were more ideological than partisan presidents. Eisenhower, JFK and Ford were neither sharply partisan nor ideological but epitomized pragmatic consensus politics.

Ideology is the bedrock of political conviction. Certain people though prefer purism to policy “wins” and are willing to go down with flags flying rather than compromise their principles. We can even find this praiseworthy, in retrospect; men like Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey appear far more admirable in the eyes of history than the opponents who beat them for the presidency. By contrast, others appear to be a little cracked, impractical and unreasonable tilters at windmills and political ass-clowns who only injure their own party with buffoonish antics.

Returning to Jessica’s question, conservatism is a coalition and not a movement, like liberalism. There are real and important philosophical differences between factions on the Right – neocons, paleocons, libertarians, moderates and the religious right – that do not have counterparts on the Left. The Right tends to stick together based more upon what they are against than what they are for.

Here are some voices in the different conservative factions that I find to be “reasonable”, most of the time. It is an imperfect and admittedly arbitrary list composed of pundits, media personalities, philosophers, bloggers and historical figures. I do not claim to have read every word each person has ever written or that I endorse all of their views. I am using these labels very broadly ( Ayn Rand rejected the term “libertarian”, John Adams was also a radical because he was a republican revolutionary, etc.) and my familiarity with religious right figures is very weak. I did not include a category for “moderate conservatives” – something that probably describes most GOP general election voters who often do not bother to vote in the primaries.

All I am saying is that these individuals are among the better representatives of different kinds of conservatism in the Anglo-American sense of the term, the a couple of figures are probably borderline, depending where you stand.

Paleoconservatives:

Arnaud de Borchgrave, W. Pat Lang, Bernard Finel, George Will, Fabius Maximus, Milt Rosenberg, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, George Kennan, Robert Taft, Whittaker Chambers, Edmund Burke, John Adams

Libertarians:

Amity Shlaes, Virginia Postrel, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Stephen Chapman,  Ayn Rand,  Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek,  Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Barry Goldwater,  Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine

Neoconservatives:

Max Boot, Fred Kagan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Richard Pipes, Donald Kagan, David Horowitz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Constantine Menges, William J. Bennett, William Kristol

The Religious Right:

Cal Thomas,  Richard John Neuhaus, Dinesh D’Souza, Reinhold Niebuhr

Comments, criticism, complaints, suggestions. Open fire in the comments…..

ADDENDUM:

By acclamation from the learned gents in the comments section, 20th century American political theorist James Burnham and 19th century French philosopher Frederic Bastiat, are officially added to the list.

I have not read either, though I’ve seen Bastiat frequently quoted by libertarian writers. Joseph Fouche of The Committe of Public Safety blog did an excellent series on Burnham which you can access here.

Xenophon’s Vanished Cities by Mitch Townsend

I have been trying to map the physical progress of Xenophon through the Middle East and back to the Greek cities in Anatolia. His starting point is relatively easy to find: the city of Sardis, now called Sart, still exists, although now it is just a village near the ruins. The city was destroyed several times by earthquakes. The next city mentioned, Colossae, was located near what is now Denzli (Turkey). They went on to Celaenae, near the present-day town of Dinar, where they remained for 30 days. While looking at the area in Google Earth, I noticed some landscape features that look like they might be the outlines of ancient buildings under the plowed fields. Have a look for yourself.

Xenophon Roundtable: The Army Reaches Level Ground by Lexington Green

This theme becomes more muted after the army reaches the summit of Mt. Eches, at the end of book 4. From that point, the army descends to level ground, and begins to decay as an army and as a quasi-political community. We see in the beginning of Book V, ch. 1, that the discipline and hardihood that carried the army to the sea begins to break down. The first thing they do is gather together to “deliberate about the rest of their journey”. As always with this army, the soldiers themselves must be consulted and agree to any major course of action. The soldiers resist the necessity of marching and carrying heavy loads. The first person to speak, says “I for my part, men, am by now tired of this packing up, walking, running, bearing heavy arms, marching in order, standing guard, and fighting. I now desire to cease from these labors, since we have the sea, to sail the rest of the way stretched out like Odysseus, and to arrive in Greece.” In other words, everything that makes this group of armed men an army, and makes them individually soldiers, is too onerous to keep on doing. In effect, this is a motion to the meeting to dissolve the army and turn it into a group of tourists. The army, like any democratic community presented with a seemingly easy, costless and pleasant course acclaims this proposal

Xenophon Roundtable: A Few Martial Rhymes by Historyguy99

Mark Twain wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The Anabasis of Cyrus is filled with events that have reappeared throughout history to form a rhythm that if not repeated, lends example and advice to other commanders faced with similar challenges.

Not much discussed in the forgoing posts, has been Xenophon’s speech to the assembled soldiers before setting out on their march to the sea. Reading the speech, one will note several themes that have a familiar ring to any student of American military history. This account of how Xenophon dressed for the occasion has a twin in the way one American General outfitted himself for battle

Xenophon Roundtable: The Building of a Political Community by Seydlitz89

….We start with the Greek army marching through Asia Minor east, but with no actual idea of their real goal.  It is only after they have advanced a considerable distance that their benefactor, Cyrus of Persia, tells all the Greek generals the true goal of their expedition – the defeat of his brother the King of Persia and his own establishment as new king.  The Greeks do not react positively to this and demand more money to continue.  Xenophon remarks that the mass of the Greeks continue on out of a sense of shame, that is more a sense of inertia and vague material interest drives the army on (III, 1, 10).  Their military professionalism and sense of belonging to “Greece” can be seen as elements of material cohesion, whereas their sense of belonging to specific city states or tribes and their individual loyalties to their specific generals can be seen as moral cohesion.  Both types of cohesion are weakened at specific instances during the advance by the actions of for instance Menon when he convinces his army to advance first across the Euphrates River and thus gain the favour of Cyrus at the expense of the other Greeks (I, 4 15).

The moral and material cohesion of the Greek Army is sufficient to get them to the battle of  Cunaxa and allow them to make a good accounting of themselves, but the battle ends in disaster for the Greeks since Cyrus is killed and his body mutilated by his brother the Great King.  Cyrus’s death removes the political support and purpose that holds the Greek army together and unites it with its Persian allies.  Without Cyrus there is also no source of monetary funds to pay the soldiers who are now without a patron.  Xenophon is also well aware of the new political situation and how the Greek Army poses a threat to the Great King by its very continued existence (II, 4, 3-4).

Read the rest at Chicago Boyz.

Samael’s Oak-Aged Ale

Very rich taste but not too heavy. This batch is allegedly 14.5 % ABV but the helpful employee-beer aficianados at Binny’s claim it is in practice, much higher than that. I’m inclined to agree that a bottle of Samael’s packs more of a punch than the average glass of wine or mixed drink.