Beauty of Gray

2003-11-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

Zell Miller, your life is calling…

Sen. Zell Miller seems to be on a roll. First, he blasted all of the democratic presidential nominees’ foreign policy ideas, despite the fact that his charges bore little resemblance to anything they’ve actually proposed. He’s said he will endorse Bush in 2004. Then, he goes on record calling the Democratic party borderline traitors for wanting to use an investigation into Bush’s pre-war use of intelligence for political gain. And he blasted Gen. Clark’s qualifications.

So what gives? One possibility is obviously that he believes what he’s been saying. But given the tenuous connection of his charges with reality, and their rather harshly partisan nature (against what supposedly is his own party), that seems unlikely. He’s basically regurgitating Republican party talking points. While he’s always been a centrist, his recent comments haven’t been centrist—they’ve been downright right-wing. Has Republican mind control technology advanced that far? Has Miller been kidnapped and replaced by an RNC robot? It just doesn’t seem to make sense.

However, one angle that might be worth watching is whether Miller is trying to position himself for his post-Senate career. He’s said he’s not going to be seeking re-election in 2004, which means he’s ready to enter the private sector and cash in, like many ex-politicians. However, with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, they’ve rather infamously been leaning on lobbying groups to not hire democrats. Which puts Miller in a bit of a bind, if he wants to slide over to one of those very cushy, very lucrative positions. Or, perhaps, he had his eye on some other job in which it would behoove him to curry favor with the governing Republican party.

I don’t know if this is the real explanation, but it will be interesting to see where Miller ends up once he leaves the Senate.

2003-11-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

On second thought…

In an earlier post, I wrote that there had been a real change in the world at some point along the line, to where it was no longer possible to wage true wars of conquest. Subject peoples now have enough self-identity and awareness that they will rise up and rebel against anyone attempting to conquer them.

After reading some more, specifically about the Provinces of the Roman Empire, I’ve decided my earlier post was, at least on this point, simply wrong. I was fooled by the telescope of history which combines decades worth of events down into a few pages, making conquests look neat and easy and smooth. But even in the ancient world, they weren’t, and it took the Romans decades and, in most cases, putting down multiple serious uprisings in their various provinces before the true Pax Romana took hold.

It seems to me now that the real difference is not in the resistance of the local population, but in the determination and the measures which would-be empires were willing to adopt. The Romans werew willing to fight repeated major wars to solidify their control, and were also willing to re-settle subject tribes, and both de-and re-populate regions when it suited their purposes. Modern communications has increased the effectiveness, solidarity, and the international visibility of resistance movements. But really, it isn’t that much different than it’s ever been.

On a similar note, I’m in the middle of an interesting book about Victorian England, and the author pointed out that the price of Empire was near constant warfare. Although it doesn’t get much attention anymore, not a year went by, almost, from 1860-1890, in which there wasn’t some significant military expedition that the British had to undertake to quell a local uprising somewhere in the Empire. I knew about a few of them, like the Zulu War, but the sheer number of these brush-ups astounded me. Continual warfare was the price of empire for the British.

This is one of the problems with trying to draw lessons from history. It’s easy to get misled by the high-level prospect that most histories provide, and very hard to dig down in and really see and understand what everyday life, with all its attendant noise and daily fluctuations, was truly like. And without that understanding, it’s hard to see the congruities with our own experiences to try and pull relevant lessons from the historical record.

2003-11-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

Halliburton, Iraq, the CPI, and Daniel Drezner

Daniel Drezner correctly notes, in a post here and a Slate article here, that the recent report released by the Center for Public Integrity did not, despite some hand waving and attempts to gin up damning statistics, prove anything about the level of corruption in the awarding of post war contract in Iraq. (Or the lack of the same.)

Drezner points out that they use means to hide the fact that many of the winners of big reconstruction projects were not big campaign donors, relatively speaking. However, I think his analysis also doesn’t prove as much as he thinks. He looks at the 70 companies that have won reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and looks for a correlation between the size of the contracts they won and the amount they donated. He finds that this correlation is very weak.

However, this doesn’t prove that campaign donations had no influence on contracts, because all the various companies weren’t competing for all the various contracts. Each was competing for some specific subset of the contracts available. For example, among the big donors list, Dell was presumably not competing for contracts to rebuild the Iraqi power grid or get the oil fields up and running. Yet, by Drezner’s analysis, the fact that Dell didn’t win some of these giant contracts (or some other giant contract) is evidence that campaign contributions didn’t affect the awarding of contracts.

To me, both Drezner and the CPI fail by improperly lumping statistics together. Perhaps the information isn’t available, but if you really wanted to examine this issue, what you would need to do is look at the various bidders for each contract, and then see if the winner of a given contract was more likely to be the biggest (or one of the biggest) donors among the competing firms. It’s possible that some of the big contracts were awarded in fields where none of the major companies are big donors. Or, as mentioned above, that some big donors only competed for relatively small contracts.

It would be relatively easy to design a scenario in which each contract was awarded to the largest donor among the various bidding companies, but which would also pass Drezner’s correlation test. Conversely, almost any scenario which involved a few big donors could be spun as indicating corruption using the IPA approach Drezner rightly critiqued.

So, at the end of the day, neither the original report nor the rebuttal really leaves us any the wiser about the role that campaign donations did or didn’t play in the awarding of contracts in postwar Iraq.

Update: After writing this piece, I noticed that Dan has written several other pieces on his blog about this. Upon a quick perusal, it didn't seem like any of his comments really addressed my point, but I'd urge anyone interested to go over and check out his addition items.

2003-10-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

The Rumsfeld memo

I was reading the recently released memo by Donald Rumsfeld, which has gotten mixed but generally positive reviews. But, while I do agree that the leaders at the DoD are looking at some of these angles, one rather dissonant note jumped out at me, and made me wonder if Rumsfeld has learned anything at all. Is this really a change, or this just another example of the same old MO?

Let’s go to the tape. Early in the memo, Rumsfeld writes:

It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

However, just a few paragraphs down, he writes:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.

So, he’s saying we have no way to measure the actual progress we are making in battling terrorism. However, despite the fact that we can’t quantify our efforts at all, he does know that the DoD must be revamped to face this threat, because it is ineffective at dealing with it.

Now, it is possible for these two viewpoints to both be simply true—to recognize a problem and, without really knowing how to solve it, know that some existing organization is not suitable for it. But given the fact that Rumsfeld’s biggest hobby horse since becoming Secretary of Defense has been to institute a revolution in military affairs, to reshape the armed forces for the future, my cynical side is suspicious. Is this on the up-an-up, or is it one more example where the desired endstate is known in advance, and then a justification for pursuing that course is trumped up.

It’s how Rumsfeld operated in dealing with the invasion of Iraq. On 9-12 he was already set on invading them, and told his intelligence analysis to go find him justifications. Now, conveniently, yet another of his long-time dreams—a faster, more responsive military arm--magically happens to be a vital part of the war on terrorism.

At the very least, it looks like Rumsfeld is looking for some way to work around the existing military hierarchy, in much the same way that he formed his own intelligence office to work around the existing bureaucracy at the CIA, which had an irritating habit of disagreeing with him. In this case, he may be right, but from this perspective it looks less like a new approach and more like the same old "my way or the highway" frustration with existing institutions.

The rest of the memo, though, I found interesting. And I think the second quote above, about metrics, is a big issue, and a very tough problem. One which I may write more about soon, if I can think of anything worth saying.

2003-10-06T17:43:00.000-07:00

Scheduling Note

I will be at conferences for the rest of this week and most of next week as well, so blogging will be light. Even lighter than my usual relaxed pace.

2003-10-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

A centrifugal age

When one reads history, one of the most glaring differences, but one so obvious it’s little remarked upon, is the fact that in the modern world, it is tremendously difficult, if not impossible, to build an empire. A history of the ancient world reads as a succession of conquests and empires—the Assyrians, the Medes, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander, the Romans, the Islamic caliphates, the Turks, Charlemagne, the Mongols, the Mongols again, and so on. But somewhere things started to gum up, and local loyalties and nationalism made it more and more difficult to conquer territory, and more and more difficult to hold it.

It didn’t happen at the same time in every place. The French might have been the earliest in Europe, under Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years War. The Swiss followed, with their mountain cantons and pikemen providing the security for a new spirit of independence. Then the Dutch wars of independence, and on down the line. Where old empires had lives measured in centuries, modern ones lasted mere years, as both Napolean and Hitler discovered. By the 19th century, even a devastating military defeat wouldn’t convince the French to cede their claim to Alsace and Lorraine. And the reverse was true of Germany in the early 20th.

The only modern state I can think of that succeeded in building a true land empire was Russia, with its conquests in western and central Asia continuing on through the 19th century, and its effective conquest of much of eastern Europe in the 20th. This rise, and the central role Russia played in the 19th and 20th century, served to obscure somewhat the underlying tide of history, in which the age of empire had already ebbed. For even Russia only maintained their empire through brutal repression.

And yet, after 80 years of repression, murder, famine, and relocation, when they got the chance, the subject peoples rose up and reclaimed their land. The Latvians, Estonians, Chechyans, Ukrainians, et al had already formed their identity, and it couldn’t be altered even under that horrible regime. The nations of the world are past their adolescence, and no longer can be molded to suit the whims of their conquerors.

It’s a lesson that the Israelis have still not learned, with their persistent attempts to colonize the West Bank. China, with far greater resources, far fewer scruples, and none of the direct media scrutiny, is struggling to absorb Tibet. Tamil, Kashmir, East Timor, the Kurds—around the world one sees that the centrifugal forces have gained the upper hand. And now the US is facing the same issues in Iraq.

Robert Kaplan took this idea to its extreme in his book The Ends of the Earth. He posited the withering away of the nation state, at least across much of the Third World, with local identities and trade connections providing the structures of everyday life. It was, in a way, a return to a medieval existence, with large city states straddling the important trade routes forming the nexuses of society.

I don’t subscribe to Kaplan’s view—I think he is over-extrapolating here—but it is undoubtable that the Neocon’s vision of a new empire, a benevolent hegemony taking over and remaking the Middle East for its own good, is swimming against the tide. And doing that gets you nowhere and leaves you exhausted. Which seems like a pretty good description of our Iraq adventure, at least at this point.

2003-09-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

Crowds, power, totalitarianism, and death

Here I talked about Paul Berman’s excellent intellectual history of terrorism, and here I discussed what I think are some of the details of historical context that are important to understanding our current fight. In this last piece I wasn’t to go back to a dark area of human psychology which Berman, like most writers, skated over. While not critical to planning a strategy in the war on terror, it is nonetheless important, in my opinion, and also gives me the chance to promote one of my favorite authors, who I think is terribly under-read and underappreciated.

When Berman talked about the transition from various forms of idealistic totalitarianism (be it Nazism, communism, or Islamism) to a murderous cult of death, while he recognized the near commonality of this transition, he didn’t go beyond pointing it out. Rather than ask why this seemed to happen, he simply labeled it as insanity and passed on. And that seems a little too easy and glib, to me. There is clearly some deep connection here between the pursuit of power in totalitarianism and the pursuit of death in its manifestations. No writer has unblinkingly examined this dark corner of the human mind with as much insight and erudition as Elias Canetti, in his monumental work Crowds and Power.

I can’t really even begin to summarize it here, as it is a long book full of telling details and fascinating insights. Canetti pulls in examples from throughout history, anthropology, psychology, and other areas to support his argument. From everywhere, in fact, except from the mid-20th century experience that hangs like a shadow over the book, and in fact is the real question Canetti was trying to understand. And even if you don’t end up agreeing with his opinions, the fascinating examples make the book worth reading.

At the risk of so oversimplifying his argument as to make it seem absurd: Canetti starts with an examination of the nature of the Crowd experience, which he finds satisfies a particular psychological need of humans. Humans gain a release from being immersed in a crowd. It is a felling both of absolute equality and unity, a loss of self, and also of being a part of a powerful organism. So there is an intoxication that comes from being in a crowd. He then spends a large part of the book simply looking at the nature of various crowds, how they come about, how they disperse, what they do. When he started, this was all he wanted to do—explain crowd psychology. Then came the Nazis, and his work led him in a darker direction.

With an understanding of how a demagogue could manipulate crowds, Canetti then looked into the nature of command and of power. He finds the ultimate root of power in the ability to deal out death, both to enemies and even to your own subordinates. Commands have this power lurking in the background, and in hierarchies, each link in the chain is able to pass the command on down, to avoid the sting. It is only at the bottom that the imposition cannot be avoided, which is one root cause of the need for crowds—it provides a release.

Going further, the ability to deal death, when actually invoked, verifies the power and gives and immediate and powerful satisfaction to the leader. He has survived his opponent, and in standing over his corpse gains a brief moment of immortality. But there are always more outsiders, each of whom is a rival and whose life constitutes a challenge. Killing one is not enough, you want to kill many, create crowds of the dead that you have survived. But there always remain others who live, and so are a challenge to your power and your life. Canetti recalls a case of an Indian (I think) tyrant who emptied his capital city, slaughtering many, and then enjoyed staying there in solitude by himself, the last survivor.

Canetti then goes on and identifies the nature of the tyrant, and how he wields power, with the paranoiac, the mental patient. In a detailed case study of Max Schreber (again, I’m working on memory here since my books are in storage), he shows how the symptoms of his mental disease quite closely parallel the habits of mind of the leader.

As I’ve said, I’m afraid in this brief presentation of what seem somewhat fantastic ideas, I may have driven you away from the book rather than attracted you to it. As I said, Canetti amasses a huge corpus of evidence from all areas of human knowledge, and at the end had convinced me, at least, that his arguments had an important element of truth to them. It’s the flip side of the coin to the evolutionary psychology argument. The pursuit of power is both about the pursuit of sex, and through it life and generation, and also about the pursuit of death and destruction. It’s a grim view, but one that’s hard to avoid for anyone who has seen what Hitler did, Stalin, Mao, Hussein, bin Laden.

2003-09-25T16:59:00.000-07:00

The NCAA is a joke

So, a ruling has come down, and the NCAA has accepted the appeal of the University of Michigan to overturn their initial sanctions and allow their basketball team to participate in the postseason this year. This is a travesty, a deepening of an already grave miscarriage of justice.

Michigan was proved to be guilty of paying a series of star basketball players, starting with Chris Webber and the Fab Five and continuing on for 4 or 5 years thereafter, upwards of half a million dollars to play for them. This is the worst pay for play scandal in the history of college sports. Furthermore, the booster who was funneling the cash to them was a convicted gambler, a number runner. And although nothing’s been proven, such a connection certainly raises the sort of questions that college hoops and the NCAA don’t want asked. It does make you go “hmmm” when remembering Chris Webber’s bizarre timeout call in the NCAA finals.

Then, after all this started to come to light, Michigan stonewalled and covered it up, denying knowledge of anything, carrying out self-investigations that somehow didn’t manage to find any evidence of wrongdoing. It was only after the feds came in and indicted Ed Martin (the number runner) and subpoenaed Chris Webber, that the truth came out. Then, forced by circumstance, the NCAA finally decided to investigate. And what was their decision? A measly 1 scholarship lost for 4 years, when many basketball programs don’t even use all their scholarships in the first place. And 2 years of no post season, one of which had already been self-inflcited by UM on a team that they knew was unlikely to make it anyway. And now, the NCAA has eliminated that second year, for no discernable reason. Even with it, the penalty was laughably light. And now they’ve removed even that. If this is all they do for the worst money scandal in the history of the sport, then they might as well just save everyone a lot of time, money, and hassle, and just close the doors on their enforcement arm.

Of course, they won’t, and are still busy handing punitive penalties down onto schools like Utah, for much, much, much, much more minor offenses. But this is nothing new. The NCAA has always had two systems of justice, one for the haves and one for the have nots. And UM is too big, has too much exposure, and generates too much revenue for them to ever give them a serious penalty that might eat into the bottom line. And the joke that is the NCAA continues.

2003-09-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

By their fears you shall know them

Well, at this point it should be fairly obvious which Democratic candidate the Bush team doesn’t want to face. The past few days have seen a remarkable outpouring of critical pieces on him from the right. For the most part, I think these pieces have missed more than they’ve hit, but after this week, if Clark can get weather this storm and the Democratic debate, he’ll certainly have been through a baptism of fire.

As a moderate liberal hawk with DNC type inclinations, I’m certainly intrigued by Clark, especially since he is a candidate who represents my views on foreign policy almost exactly. And the big issue of the day is foreign policy. However, there are a few areas where questions still remain.

The first and most important is also the simplest—how good of a candidate is Clark? Is he charismatic on television, in debate settings, in interviews, and on the campaign trail? Being able to inspire, to connect, to lead the public is a central part of being an effective president, over and above any policy proposals. And it’s in this intangible area that I feel the existing Democratic candidates are lacking.

Second, there’s the issue of why he was removed from his command in Europe early, after the Kosovo war. Was it simply a matter of stepping on too many superiors’ toes, being too outspoken in opposition to them? Jealousy from others in the Army due to his quick rise and that he wasn’t one of the club? Or was there some deeper issue, which Gen. Shelton hinted in his comments? His actual actions during the Kosovo conflict will also be put under the microscope, and rightly so.

Finally, there’s the issue of temperament. Clark was a golden boy in the Army, a brilliant man who was first in his class, Rhodes scholar, and who rose through the ranks with extreme rapidity. He’s a hard charger with strong opinions who has sometimes been a bit high handed with those who disagreed with him, or at least not handled it in the best way, as witness his disagreements with Shelton. In this, he’s a bit lie Rumsfeld—a bright man who is very aware both of how bright he is and, often, others aren’t. Can he lead effectively, make the compromises necessary, interact with those who aren’t quite as quick as he is, deal with subordinates in a way that inspires loyalty as well as respect? Rumsfeld has struggled with this at Defense, and has alienated large segments of the Armed Forces in the process. Will Clark take after him, or will he be able to reign himself in in order to lead others, rather than simply demanding they follow?

Whatever the answers, his presence has immediately made the race more interesting, and given me a candidate that at least has the potential to excite me. The next threat, after the first surge of attacks from the right subsides, will be to see if Clark can capture the media. Front-runner status can lead to laudatory pieces, or it can lead to a reaction by journalists looking to tear you down. Clinton and Bush both charmed the media, which was a large part of their electoral success. Which will it be for Clark?

2003-09-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

Administrative and hurricane notes

During my long hiatus, my blog reading habits changed, and so did some URL's of my regular reads. I have now, hopefully taken account of these dual changes and cleaned up my blogroll to the right.

Isabel has now completely moved through my area north of Baltimore, leaving me immediately unharmed and unaffected, secondarilly tremendously affected, and overall a bit confused. The first part is easy--we have our power, we have running water, and the storm itself was little more than a strong and breezy thunderstorm. Gusts were higher than usual but, absent my knowledge that the strom was a hurrican, would not have seemed to me out of the ordinary. THe mian bulk of the storm passed south and west of Baltimore, and not really directly hitting the city with much in the way of winds or rain.

However, leading to my puzzlement, about half of all homes serviced by the local power monopoly, BGE, seem to be without power throughout the region, which doesn't really make sense to me. Storms that seemed every bit as powerful or more so, at least to me, come through here fairly regularly, without knocking out power to anything like this number of people. I understand the problems in Virginia and NC, which bore the brunt of the storm, but why is the power network in the Baltimore area, which only saw the edge, so devastated?

And as a result of this, my move into our new home is likely delayed. Our settlement was supposed to be on the 30th, but was contingent on BGE moving a transformer box, a move schduled for next monday the 22nd. But with the power outages, who knows when they'll have time to get around to our problem. In the meanwhile, I'll be living in a box (our lease expires on the 30th, and good luck finding anyplace else that will take 2 dogs and 2 cats) and trying to reschedule the 376 different things we had set up based on the anticipated date of the 30th. I suppose I should be thankful a tree didn't fall on the house or something, but given all the other delays we've been waiting through in our dump of a short-term apartment, it's hard to be very graceful about this 11th hour one.

2003-09-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

Struggles to transition to modernity

In an earlier post I alluded to what I see as two weaknesses to Paul Berman’s rather abstract, intellectual treatment of the modern crisis in Arab culture which has led to the rise of terrorist ideologies there. The first, simpler weakness is his concentration on only the intellectual plane, and corresponding lack of historical context. While he does a good job tracing out the ideological roots of extremist Islamism, this still doesn’t explain why it has flourished so well in the Middle East.

I would posit that, while the ideas are necessary, they are not in themselves sufficient to explain their popularity. While many thinkers simply point to the economic and cultural failures of the Middle East and make and argument based on pride and culture, I don’t find that completely convincing either. I think the key missing element is a recognition that the Middle East is going through the same difficult transition from a traditional, agricultural society to a modern urban, industrial one that most of the world has already undergone. And almost nowhere has this transition been carried out without strife, bloodshed, and revolution. While there are certainly various unique aspects associated with each, it is easy to look at the civil wars of the US, Britain, France, China, and Russia as variations on this theme of conflict between an old rural society and an emerging urban, industrial capitalistic one. Japan struggled through the same issues and ended up with the warped modernity that led to their invasion of China and entrance into WWII.

In most of these cases, the new society tears down the old forms and the old ways. The traditional way of life that had been followed for generations is displaced by a new one. The family is broken up by migration to the city, leaving the urban proletariat rootless. Before a middle class can arise there are huge wealth disparities, further alienating the masses. And in each case, there have been reactions against what is seen as an evil and destructive force tearing down society, in the generations before a new world has been created to take its place.

The difference is that the new technology of the 20th century allows the radicalized and discontented Arabs to strike back not just at the local gentry and capitalists seen as their tormenters, but across the globe at the heart of the movement that has thrown their society into turmoil. I believe that this economic nostalgia is an undercurrent in all the appeals of Qutb and other Islamist scholars for a return to the Caliphate. It is not so much the explicit religious appeals to the past that drive their popularity, but their implicit economic ones.

2003-09-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

Who cares about Vice-Presidents?

Not the voters. In line with the expansion of the presidential campaign earlier and earlier, we’ve already seen the beginning of the political pndut’s favorite game, analyzing the vice presidential choices. But, while there will be much more of this in the months to come, especially in the weeks leading up to the Democratic convention, let me be the first to say that it doesn’t really matter. Or at least, it doesn’t matter the way the pundits want it to.

While a Vice President can play an important role in the policy of an administration (as both Cheney and Gore have), their political contribution is so close to nil as to be almost indistinguishable. VP choices don’t balance the ticket, either geographically or ideologically. People vote the top of the ticket, not for some weighted average of the two. If, to take an example, people think Dean is soft on foreign policy, no running mate will make that up. And he will lose because of it. The same goes for other candidates.

Pundits love the VP nomination because it brings in a second moving part and allows them to analyze all the option, weighing and balancing factors, looking at it like a chess game. But don’t let them fool you, come election day, none of that really matters. The VP won’t even carry his own state, much less any others.

2003-09-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Terror and Liberalism

Rounding out my readings (for now) on the Middle East and Central Asia the book of that name (Terror and Liberalism) by Paul Berman, a first rate book which I strongly recommend to anyone who wished to understand and make sense of how we got to where we are in the war on terror and what the nature of the opponent is.

The book is broadly divided into three main parts. The first convincingly argues that, for all their superficial differences, the Islamicist ideology that the terrorists (or at least al Qaeda) subscribe to is simply another flowering of the same totalitarian tree that brought us fascism and communism in the 20th century. Berman specifically identifies it with fascism, which is distinct from communism in its elevation of local, nationalistic factors to a central, psuedo-religious place. While communism is the same ideology everywhere, fascism hides the totalitarian idea under local costume, assuming the mantle of each specific time and place where it takes root. This gives each version of fascism superficial differences, but the underlying idea is the same, and Berman argues that Islamism shows many recognizable family traits. And, as with Nazism, utopian ideology gained influence and then, somewhere along the line, took a turn towards a murderous cult of death.

In the second part, Bremer examines the ideas underlying the Islamist view of life, specifically discussing the influential work of Qutb, the thinker who is seen by many as the father of the current Islamist movement. He was certainly influential to Osama bin Laden. Bremer’s treatment of Qutb is excellent, and is a very good short primer on the mindset and aspirations of the terrorists. Bremer argues that, while there may be specific proximate causes to their violence (such as the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia), ultimately the Islamist movement is at war with modernity, and with the US as its most prominent representative. But he takes Europe to task for thinking that, by avoiding confrontation, they can remain safe on the sidelines. (Throughout the book, European foreign policy comes in for some pretty harsh critiques.)

The final, shortest section covers the war on terror from 9-11 up to the invasion of Iraq (which was imminent at the time of writing.) This section is a must-read for any liberal, and I hope all of the Democratic presidential hopefuls will read it. Berman is a liberal hawk, who understands the importance of a vigorous foreign policy in the fight against terrorism, but he nevertheless makes numerous damning criticisms of the way the Bush administration has handled things. It won’t be anything really unfamiliar to readers of the blogosphere (or at least the left wing blogosphere), but it’s still important as it states the issues well and lays out a strong case for a firm, forward looking, liberal foreign policy.

There are only two real weaknesses to the book, in my opinion, which I will be covering over the next week or so. The first is the relative lack of an historical context. Berman self-consciously modeled the book on the Rebel by Camus, as a history of ideas, an intellectual answer to the question “What went wrong?” As such, the background conditions in the Middle East, which I think are a very important contributing element, go largely unremarked. Second, Berman like Camus never directly confronts the kernel of evil at the heart of the totalitarian ideology—that lurch from utopianism to murder. Berman simply dismisses this as insanity, but I think his glossing over misses a second important element. It’s understandable, since as far as I know only one thinker has really investigated this phenomenon in detail, and few people ever read Elias Canetti, and fewer still today.

2003-09-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

Coping with the transition to modernity

Two more book reviews. The first is for Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? I found the book to be very disappointing. Given Lewis’s great stature, and the title of the book, I expected much more insight than Lewis provides. The book would be better titled “How the Ottoman Empire reacted to Western Influences.” Almost all of the book concerns the 18th and 19th centuries, and it’s mostly history—the assembling and telling of facts and events. And many of these events are, to my mind at least, relatively trivial, and Lewis didn’t do a good job tying these small details into any larger picture or pattern.

The concluding 10 pages is about the only analysis in the book, and even that is merely a regurgitation of various conventional explanations and answers to the title question, without much input or insight from Lewis himself. Compounding the problems with the content, I didn’t find Lewis to be a very good writer. There are many anecdotal pieces that, in the hands of better writers, would spice up the narration and give it interest. But that didn’t happen here. Instead, the text was dry and dull, and I actually found it a struggle to get all the way through the book, which was a very short 150 pages.

The second book is a much better treatment of a similar subject—the history of Japan from its opening to the West up until the end of the postwar occupation. This book is the slim volume Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma, and detailed the various ways in which Japan dealt with its own transition from a feudalistic society to a modern one following Admiral Perry’s arrival. It is told as a narrative history, and despite its short length does a good job introducing the main trends in Japanese political thought and action during this tumultuous period. He shows how the interactions of the various factions ended up producing the maladjusted society and government that led Japan to invade China and attack the US, committing numerous atrocities along the way. Ultimately, this book might tell you more about the problems we face in the modern Middle East than Bernard Lewis’s work.

2003-09-10T14:40:00.001-07:00

My promise to you

Since it’s now the political season, I will make one promise to all my loyal readers, and that is that this will be a California recall election-free zone. I will not discuss anything about it, since I fail to see why it matters to anyone who doesn’t live in California. Governors are irrelevant nationally, and frankly in most cases there’s pretty limited differences between what a Republican can do at the state level and what a Democrat can do. When you can’t run a deficit and actually have to deal with issues on the ground, pragmatism seems to win out over ideology, more often than not.

2003-09-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Sanctions

One thing which seems to have been overshadowed in the accusations about Bush’s misleading the country into war, faulty intelligence, culpability, and the like, is the rather important fact that the sanctions on Iraq do seem to have worked in preventing him from building a WMD arsenal after the Gulf War. Now, obviously it might turn out that he had active programs and was simply able to hide them or dispose of them before the invasion, but I think that is increasingly unlikely.

So, in future negotiations with countries like North Korea, setting up some sort of sanctions and verification scheme might, if it’s implemented properly, actually be effective. Of course, it didn’t work in North Korea, since the inspectors were too limited, and they simply “built it where they ain’t.” But, it’s something to keep in mind in future situations, which will certainly come up at an increasing rate.

2003-09-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

Strained historical analogy to Iraq

While the most popular analogies are to Japan and Germany, post WWII, recently reading a history of Iraq reminded me not of these two countries, but of a third. Specifically, Yugoslavia. Both Iraq and Yugoslavia have been crossroads nations, lying on remarkably consistent civilizational and ethnic frontiers, although the empires bordering them changed over time. Yugoslavia was the fault line between the eastern and western Roman empires, the break between the Ottoman empire and the West, the break between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Iraq is on the break between the Arabs and the Persians and the Kurds, is split between Sunni and Shiite, was battled over by Romans and Parthians, Was the boundary of the Ottoman empire, and so on.

In each case, being a boundary, crossroads state created great divides in the society, and then the ebb and flow of empires around them exacerbated these problems. One group in Yugoslavia would collaborate with the Ottomans, another with the Austrians, one helped the Nazis while another was adopted by the communists. The broader power games were all played out inside the country, refracted through the lens of the local ethnic and religious conflicts. Similar, though less familiar events occurred in Iraq, although it seems that in modern times at least, the Sunnis have managed to keep themselves perched atop the pile.

In each case the simmering hatreds between the factions were either kept subdued or else exploited by strongman leaders. Well, we’ve toppled Tito and are on the ground in Sarajevo. What now?

2003-09-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

Nation-building in a multi-ethnic society

This post over at Uncertain Principles expresses a pessimistic view on the possibility of a non-oppressive government in Iraq:

I've long had a nagging worry that Saddam ran Iraq the way he did because it was the only way anyone could run Iraq, if you accepted the existence of "Iraq" in the first place - if your priority was holding that absurdly geometrical container of fissiparous faiths and fealties together in that neighborhood, with those rivals.

While that’s an extreme view, and one that I hope is wrong, there may be some truth to it. Robert D. Kaplan, while not writing specifically about Iraq, has danced around the issue in a number of other countries, areas where democracy has produced regional discord and ethnic separatism, culminating in civil war. While authoritarian governments have at least produced stability. While they oppress their people, the stability the provide is necessary to make any progress, and perhaps eventually lead, via reforms, to a more liberal and open society.

I’d like to think this view is overly pessimistic, but it is clear that simply trying to graft a version of the modern US Constitution and government onto another society is not likely to work. The US Constitution arose out of a series of political negotiations and compromises relating to the specific conditions in the United States. If you want to form a successful government somewhere else, you need to have a similar engagement with their local issues.

However, taking this a step further, while a broad-based democracy might be the ultimate goal, I don’t think the immediate imposition of such a system is the best approach. How many times have democracies failed in tribal societies, where interest group ethnic parties come to prominence, and ending either with a coup or a civil war? Most of Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia all show the perils of trying to jump from zero to full democracy. India is the only success story I can think of, in the imposition of democracy on ethnically divided former colonies.

However, I’m not as pessimistic as Jim Henley (or, perhaps, Kaplan.) There is a middle ground here between authoritarianism and full democracy with a broad franchise. And that’s by limiting the franchise, essentially putting an additional representative layer between the people and the elected government. It’s worth remembering that this is, in fact, how democracy developed in both the US and in England. Only gradually have voting requirements been eliminated, the Senate become directly elected, the franchise extended. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a solution to the problem, but I think it’s worth trying, especially as the US could establish such an approach as an interim government—local leaders and elites from each group would be franchised to then elect the national figures.

Since the elites might be less susceptible to manipulation and simple ethnic rabble rousing, and would have more vested in the status quo, it would seem that this could produce a more stable government. Then, as democratic habits took root and the government acquired legitimacy, you could move towards a full democracy by expanding the franchise. I don't know if it would work, but it would seem more promising and history would suggest it's more likely to succeed than immediate mass democracy.

2003-09-04T14:34:00.002-07:00

Integrating with the second and third world

As long as I’m dealing in analogies, here’s another one. The increasing interconnectedness of the world economy is, essentially, putting the entire world through German reunification writ large. In each case a large, prosperous block is connected to another area stuck in the second world, and forced to try and unify with them. Just as the hiccups with the reunification held down the advance of the West German economy for a decade and counting, the forging of ever closer connections between the first, second, and third world is likely to involve a similar drag on first world economies.

While in the German case, the bonds were much tighter, West Germany also was much larger in size and population than East Germany. While the first world is much smaller in terms of size and population than the third world. So while it isn’t integrating as closely, the inertial forces are much larger, trying to bring not just East Europe, but all the Asian Rim, India, China, Indonesia, Latin America, etc. up to economic speed. I’d be curious to hear from any professional economists about why this is a stupid comparison, or alternatively why it’s not.

2003-09-04T14:34:00.001-07:00

Finding something to fight about

Each successive age of the world has found something new to spark their wars. The one constant is the warfare. First is was territorial expansion, then religion, then nationalism, then ideology (mixed with nationalism and tribalism), and now we’ve moved on to tribalism as the dominant source if discord across much of the globe. The fact that the advance past one justification for war either seems to require or produce a new one can cause pessimism, although it’s possible the recent stability in Western Europe might really be pointing towards an ultimate way out, rather than being an exceptional calm between storms.

Regardless, when looking at these broad ages of warfare, it strikes me that, that the war in the Congo is analogous to the 30 Years War. Instead of the underlying protestant/catholic split, you have the tapestry of ethnicities in central Africa. The battleground remains a single country, but rather than a real Civil War, it has instead become a proxy war involving multiple neighboring countries who have taken advantage of the chaos to try and seize some ground and advance their own interests. And with each additional player and competing interest involved, the possibility of making a lasting peace decrease exponentially. Nobody wins, while the people of Congo (like the German peasant) pay a terrible price.

2003-09-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

Back with some book reviews

After a long lay-off, I’m back, and will hopefully be writing with a little more frequency. My plan is to dial down my entries, writing shorter posts rather than long essays. I hope this will prevent me from avoiding posting just because I’m daunted at the prospect of sitting down and writing out what I was thinking of. More posts laying out simple ideas or connections that have occurred to me, and fewer big long books trying to fully justify everything starting with Adam to the present day.

Let me start of with a few quick book reviews of my recent reading, which will be stimulating some of my upcoming posts:

1421: the Year the Chinese Discovered America. Very interesting speculative account of the last voyage of the great Ming Chinese treasure fleets. While suggestive, Menzies’s thesis rests on a lot of circumstantial evidence and is hence not that convincing. I’d be curious to see what some professional historians have to say about the book. Probably the most interesting bits he presents are direct writing from Columbus and other explorers which mention that they had pre-existing maps which showed the areas they purportedly discovered. I’m amazed these pieces from their journals are not better known, as they substantially alter the entire understanding of their exploratory voyages. Regardless who got their first, if these excerpts are correct somebody did, and they left maps which helped guide later explorers. As for the Chinese, they may or may not have gotten there first, but ultimately it doesn’t seem to have mattered, as they retreated from the world and destroyed all their records. (The book has its own website, which I haven’t perused.)

The Saudis. I found the book to be a very interesting portrait of Saudi society, but there are a number of Amazon reviews from other people who lived in Saudi Arabia for a more extended period of time panning the work. Unfortunately, they don’t give too many details, so I don’t know what specifically they objected to. I found Mackey’s over-al political and social explication provided a good framework which explained Saudi actions. That is, it fits the external facts and seems to have predictive value, even if it is wrong.

The Reckoning: A basic overview of Iraqi history from the ancients to today. Nothing special, but it hits the main points, and provides the grounding necessary for any understanding of the situation in the country today.

Eastward to Tartary: Not quite finished with this book by the pessimistic travel writer Kaplan, but it fits the mold of most of his previous work. Travels to unpleasant 3rd world locales, full of interesting characters and insightful comments, leading to the conclusion that ethnic tensions will spiral out of control and send everything to hell. He was right about that in Balkan Ghosts, and has become a bit of a one trick pony on that thesis ever since. The depressing bit is that he might be right.

2003-05-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

Why healthcare is not a winning political issue

Admit it, your eyes glazed over a bit at that headline, didn’t they? And even more than they usually do at my headlines, I bet. And that’s the problem, in a nutshell.

I was just over at Asymmetrical Information, and Jane Galt had posted an item: a quick link to a “really good piece on health care.” And I kept scrolling, and then stopped and forced myself, literally out of a sense of duty, to go read the article she had linked. Now, I’m something of a policy wonk, and find economic arguments fairly interesting, and follow politics and policy even when there isn’t a campaign going on. So as an audience, I’m as good as it gets when it comes to arguments about health care. And my eyes glaze over when someone mentions the issue and I either ignore it or force myself to slog through the details.

So if that’s my reaction, imagine what the reaction is of the average voter who doesn’t really enjoy digging their claws into a nice meaty policy wonk argument. Health care is an immensely complicated issue with no really good, clear, unambiguous solutions. But there are some really easy, clear, simple to grasp criticisms of any big, ambitious plan. So Joe Voter is going to hear “health care costs inflation blah blah single payer blah blah tax incentives….” From one side before they flip the channel. From the other side he’s going to hear “My opponent wants to spend 250 billion dollars to get the Federal bureaucracy involved in running your healthcare.” Figuring out who is going to win that argument is a no brainer.

People don’t trust the government, they aren’t that happy with most big government programs, they don’t want to raise their taxes to pay for big new ones, and, the real kicker, they have health care and, while it’s not the greatest, it works just fine for them. And if someone doesn’t like all the paperwork and hoops they have to jump through for their HMO, can anyone seriously believe that bringing the Federal Government into the situation is a solution to these concerns?

If the Democrats want to lose the election, there’s no more certain way to do so than to make health care reforms the central aspect and signature issue of their campaign.

2003-05-15T06:23:00.000-07:00

A shocking development

And the award for the least surprising sentence written anywhere this week goes to....Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, for his observation that "Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan has plenty to say on what's going on at the Times, as does Mickey Kaus." Good to see that the obsessions of Kaus and Sullivan haven't changed in the many months since their endless and tedious carping about the Times drove me away from their sites.

2003-05-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the hiatus

I've been busy getting a new job, quitting the old one, selling a house, and buying a new house. So blogging, which was sporadic to begin with, decreased to non-existence. I've still got to deal with moving and various other details, so I can't make any promises, but hopefully I'll at least move back into the sporadic posting category.

2003-04-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

Far overdue links to some responses

Two good responses were snet in much too long ago, and I haven't gotten around to posting them. Rather than stick them back at the bottom of the old items where no-one will ever see them, I thought I'd put them up here.

First, on the issue of the Palestinian peace process and the final Israeli offer to Arafat, Russel Wvong wrote in to point out that there was one final offer made after Camp David, which was more favorable to the Palestinians and didn't chop up the West Bank as much as the plan I previously linked to.( Original post here.) Check out here for a map of that offer. It is better in some ways, but there are still some real problems in terms of chunk of land taken, just from a geographic standpoint. And this map doesn't include the various Israeli roads across the territory, which act to subdivide it. Water and overflight rights were also sticking points, beyond the old standbys of Jerusalem and the right of return.

And, concerning the justification for manned space flight, and how it is or isn't similar to that given for environmentalism, (original post here), the baseball crank wrote a long, thoughtful reply to why manned space flight makes sense, economically, while environmentalism in many (most?) cases doesn't. I don't want to mis-state his arguments in an attempt to sum them up, so go there and read it all.

2003-04-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Weep for the future

2003-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

Another dog that didn’t bark

There has been a fair amount of attention to several “dogs that didn’t bark” in this war, from Saddam’s WMD’s to the bloody urban warfare to foreign troops deploying in Iraq. But there was one that I haven’t heard mentioned, and that’s the lack of surface to air missiles, especially the man portable ones (MANPADs, for short.) In Afghanistan, there was a lot of anxiety about leftover Stingers that might pose a threat to US aircraft. But these were only present in small numbers.

Iraq, on the other hand, with a large standing army, presumably has quite a few of these missiles stashed away. Indeed, at least one report (which I can’t locate) about an uncovered arms cache, mentioned finding a large number of SA-7’s, the most common variant of these types of missiles, the most primitive Soviet variant.

Most of these missiles are not a major threat to aircraft, since their operational range largely precludes their use against high flying jets. However, MANPADs are helo pilots’ worst nightmare, since they are stuck flying low and slow, and helos are also fairly delicate aircraft that are vulnerable to even small warheads (as the effectiveness of RPG’s in Somalia proved.) Indeed, the use of Stingers against Soviet helos in Afghanistan is credited with turning the tide in the war there, largely eliminating their use as lethal close air support platforms for Soviet ground forces.

So in Iraq, we’ve had an environment with lots of MANPADs around, lots of allied helos and A-10 aircraft flying low, making for very appealing targets, yet, at least in press reports, there has been nothing about missile attacks. And if there have been, as far as I know we haven’t lost any aircraft to such attacks. While at the same time, our helos have been operating in hot enough areas to have lost several to small arms fire from the ground, and to have had many more damaged. So where have the missiles been?

Presumably, Army and Marine Corps analysts will be taking a look at this issue, since the effectiveness of helos against ground troops armed with MANPADs has long been a matter of some debate. Why the difference between the US experience in Iraq, where we had no trouble with MANPADs, and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, where MANPADs were a very serious threat and over a hundred helos were lost to them?

I can think of a few explanations, although I may be missing others.

Threat level: maybe there aren’t that many MANPADs around in Iraq. Possible, but seems implausible, given their cheapness and the attention given to other air defense systems in the country.

Training: The missiles are there but the Iraqi just don’t know how to use them. Again, seems improbable since these weapons aren’t that tough. There’s a little more to it, but they’re more or less point and shoot. If a few CIA operatives can teach the Afghans how to use Stingers (which many worried were to complex for easy use in combat), a standing army ought to be able to use the simpler Soviet models.

Maintenance: Iraq has been under an embargo, and one thing that gets limited ins the spare parts. That combined with general low levels of maintenance in 2nd world armies, could have led to the majority of Iraqi missiles being inoperative. If the MANPADs had been sitting in a box for 10 years, there’s a good chance when you take them out, they’re not going to work as designed.

Primitive technology: SA-7’s are old, primitive missiles, that are fairly easily fooled by countermeasures. If the Iraqis only had these missiles, then maybe simple countermeasures (like flares) were enough to defeat the threat. If this is the answer, then it doesn’t say much about future wars, since there have been 3 or 4 generations of improved models beyond the SA-7.

Tactics: Perhaps allied tactics that are being used have been enough to defeat the threat. I know it’s standard practice for planes making close strike runs to release flares in case of an enemy MANPAD launch. And TV images of some A-10 strikes on Baghdad confirmed that they were doing this—they were launching out numerous flares during or after their attacks. Other possible tactical solutions include rapid attacks and suppressive fire.

As I said, I don’t know the answer, but it’s an important question for future military planners. Hopefully as part of the follow on to the invasion, there will be some investigation into this issue, including debriefing of Iraqi soldiers, to figure out just what the conditions were that led to the ineffectiveness of the MANPADs. Is it something we did, that we could repeat in other countries? Or is it something unique to the Iraqi situation, that we can’t count on in future conflicts?

2003-04-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

Why is there a debate going on now?

OK, so the emerging CW is that we’ve gotten the easy part out of the way in Iraq, and now it’s on to the tough bit—rebuilding society. And this brings along a host of questions—who should run the country? How should they run it/ What to do with the oil? Which Iraqi exile groups should get power? What is the role of the UN? Of the US military? Does the Pentagon get the lead? Does State? And so on.

These are the issues of the day, being hashed out in the back rooms of the administration, and debated in magazine columns, op-eds, and blogs. But is no-one else as utterly appalled as I am by this process? Why on earth is this being debated now, when something needs to be done in a matter of days or weeks? There’s emerging chaos on the ground, with everyone under the sun jockeying for position in Kuwait, and a power vacuum in Iraq. Is it not a planning failure of colossal proportions to, only now at the 11th hour, to be trying to figure out what to do in Iraq?

We’ve been pretty sure we were going to invade for the past year, at least, if not since September 12th. We’ve spent months building up troops in the region and wrangling in the UN. All throughout, the one thing that everyone agreed on was that, if we did invade, we’d be able to oust Hussein and defeat his army with relative ease. In fact, the relative ease with which we have done so was, if anything, tougher than most were predicting. So the existence of the current situation was a fait accompli for at least a year.

And you’re telling me that nobody sat down and came up with a plan for postwar reconstruction anytime over the past year? It seems to me that anyone with a shred of competence would make having a follow-on governance plan a precondition of military action. And yet, astoundingly, the decision makers seem to not have had a clue that the situation that everyone knew was coming would, in fact come, and maybe they should spend a few minutes thinking about it before starting the whole thing in motion.

It’s absurd, and if things fall apart because of it, the failure will be directly attributable to the Bush Administration and their failure to prepare for this entirely predictable situation. They spent months and months arguing about how to do the easy part, and apparently decided to leave the hard part for later, when they’d have days instead of months to figure it out. So now we’re left with no-one knowing where they stand, and multiple competing plans with no guidance from the top.

2003-04-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

Internalized spin

I have been content lately to sit by the sidelines, not writing anything, since most of what I’d want to say about the issues of the day had already been said multiple times and was continuing to be said in other, more popular venues. (It seems to me that the skill required to be an op-ed writer is not so much ability to write, or the ability to think and come up with new ideas, but the ability to be comfortable parroting old, worn-out ideas as if they were new, and your own. And to do this every week, for the rest of your life.)

Anyway, one thing that struck me while sitting out the fray was how much of what is usually called spin—the adjusting of facts to support political arguments you want to make—is not so much a conscious process of dissimulation as an unconscious filtering. In this case, what I’m specifically thinking of was the differing assessments of the conduct of the war about a week ago, in its brief “quagmire” phase. Almost without fail, those who had been opposed to the war before it started were those that were, given the exact same data inputs from news reports, the most pessimistic about its prosecution. If you had only read Talking Points Memo, a week or so ago you might have thought the US forces were in terrible condition, balancing on a knife edge of imminent defeat. Similar negativity exuded from Maxspeak, although not to the same extent.

Meanwhile, from the same reports, Instapundit and other hawks were trumpeting the great success that the war was, and how much progress had been made.

It was interesting to me because, on the face of it, these two points would seem to be completely independent. Judging the progress of the war from news reports has nothing to do with how one felt about the morality of wisdom of waging the war in the first place. And yet, once they had signed on to oppose the war, many people became so wedded to the position that the war was a bad idea that they ended up searching for support for this position and finding it. While others (who turn out to have been correct int his case) who thought the war was a smashing idea and would be a cakewalk, looked at the same data and decided that, what do you know? They were right all along.

Not exactly a new point to make, but it does point out that charges of dishonesty in political debate are probably misplaced. Even when someone is wrong, it’s not so much that they are deliberately attempting to deceive, as that their pre-existing ideas corrupt the data they receive so that they come to false conclusions.

2003-03-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

Inside al Qaeda: The money trail

Gunaratna’s book also gave interesting insight into the way al Qaeda funds itself, which further illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia. In the months since 9-11, the US, in cooperation with many other countries, has worked hard to cut off funding to al Qaeda, and has designated numerous Islamic charities as terrorist funders and either closed them down or had their assets frozen.

I, and perhaps most Americans, when we heard or terrorism being funded through Islamic charities, imagined these charities as simple front organizations, whose purpose wasn’t actually charity, but to serve as camouflage for donations to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The assumption I had was that there was a lot of the old wink-wink, nudge-nudge, sure it’s going to charity type thing going on, while everyone involved knew that the money was really going to help support al Qaeda. In this reading, the money trail leading back to the Saudis was very damning, and support from Saudi based charities meant support from the Saudis and even their government.

But this is too simplistic an interpretation. The first thing to recognize is that almsgiving is one of the five pillars of Islam, a fundamental duty imposed on all Muslims. (The pillars are accepting Allah and his prophet Mohammed, daily prayer, making the Hajj, fasting during Ramadan, and almsgiving or charity.) As charitable giving is a central duty for Muslims, this has naturally resulted in the formation of numerous Islamic charities. And given the wealth in the Middle East and the sheer number of Muslims around the world, this means that there’s a lot of money sloshing around in Islamic charities as a matter of course.

Al Qaeda has systematically pursued a strategy of infiltrating charities, both local branches and central offices. Al Qaeda operatives or sympathizers join the organization and then use their positions to help skim money off to support al Qaeda. While some charitiable groups were formed simply as fronts for al Qaeda, in many more instances the charity was legitimate but was corrupted by al Qaeda, often without the knowledge of either those in charge of the charity or those giving money to it.

And since Saudi Arabia is among the wealthiest of Muslim countries as well as being a very devout country, it’s only natural that there’s a lot of money going from Saudi Arabia into Islamic charities, and from there much of it found it’s way to al Qaeda. But this money trail does not thereby imply that the Saudis are knowingly supporting al Qaeda, although in some cases that may be the case.

It strikes me that this corruption of Islamic charities by al Qaeda would, in the right hands, be a powerful propaganda tool to use against them. With many Muslims around the world poor and needy, and many others giving money to assist them in good faith, al Qaeda has come in and stolen bread from the mouths of hungry Muslims for themselves, to support their troops and fund terrorist assaults. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the US is interested in achieving any propoganda victories, so al Qaeda gets away with this anti-Islamic outrage scot-free, in fact having their cake and eating it too by both skimming off charitable donations and also distributing the remaining charitable funds and appearing as the benefactor of local Muslims when in fact they are stealing from them.

Beyond the charities, al Qaeda has gotten involved in a dizzying number of legitimate and criminal businesses all around the world, with proceeds from them being used to support terrorist cells and attacks. Construction firms in the Sudan, diamond smuggling from sub-Saharan Africa, credit card fraud and counterfeit money in Western Europe, banking, you name it and al Qaeda has probably tried it.

And while major attacks are both planned and funded by the central organization, the average al Qaeda member gets little in the way of pay, with regional cells expected to be self-supporting by whatever means they can. (Which often involves fraud or other criminal activity, but doesn’t necessarily.) So while cutting off funds can hurt al Qaeda’s ability to co-opt existing organizations and plan and carry out large attacks, it does not in and of itself degrade its local capabilities around the world.

Edit on 3/25/03: Mistake above in counting the pillars of Islam corrected from 4 to 5. Caught by alert reader Paul Dunne.

2003-03-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

Inside al-Qaeda: The spread of al Qaeda

One virtue of Gunaratna’s book is the broad coverage which he gives of al Qaeda’s actions all over the world—he doesn’t just focus on the local threat to the US and Western Europe, but spends a lot of time detailing their actions in Africa and Asia as well. And a pattern for the spread of al Qaeda was repeated over and over again. In almost every instance (with the exception of the early merger between al Qaeda and some Egyptian terrorist groups which was on a relatively equal footing), al Qaeda came in as an outsider, but like Walmart competing with local neighborhood stores was able to use their money and international assets (especially their training camps) to co-opt member of local terrorist organizations and eventually seize control of them, to a greater or lesser extent.

Gunaratna compares al Qaeda to an international holding company, with dozens of small, local terrorist organizations under its umbrellas. The actual size and memebership of al Qaeda itself is not that large, but the total number of assets it influences or controls is much greater, and it is able to utilize the assets of local terrorist organizations (such as safe houses in the Phillipines, for example) to help in the planning and execution of its plots.

In reading this history, it struck me how vitally important it was to destroy the training camps in Afhganistan. I knew they were important, but before reading the book, I didn’t know just how big of an asset they were for al Qaeda. They were the central training point for terrorists from all over the world, who would come there to train. It was the Harvard or MIT of terrorism. And when they came there, the terrorists would be taught not just methods, but also ideology, which helped to spread al Qaeda’s message and radicalize local organizations.

Further, since all these terrorists were coming through al Qaeda camps, al Qaeda was able to have their pick of them for recruiting, choosing only the best of them to become actual members. But they and their compatriots would return to their host countries having imbibed the extremist message of al Qaeda (and terrorists, already pretty extreme, have no little intellectual defense against further radicalization.) This alone would make the group more sympathetic to al Qaeda, who would further buy sympathy and influence with money, as they have access to millions while local operations are usually pretty shoestring.

This approach in most cases relatively rapidly co-opted local terrorist groups such as MILF from local operations with narrow, parochial aims, to effective arms of al Qaeda with its globalist aspirations.

Now, however, this source of metastasizing has largely been eliminated. At least in the short term, al Qaeda’s finances have been disrupted and some of htem have been seized, while the large training camps in Afghanistan have been shut down. Together, these two facts mean that local terrorist cells and organizations have to a large degree been thrown back onto their own resources. It doesn’t eliminate the threat, but interrupting the easy international flow of men and money is a significant blow to the current and more importantly the future effectiveness of al Qaeda. It doesn’t eliminate its spread, but it greatly slows it down, as well as making it possible for alternative terrorist organization to compete with al Qaeda at the local level, which is a good thing (for the US, anyway.)

2003-03-04T14:11:00.000-08:00

Inside al Qaeda: an important detail about the Mohammed arrest

One additional note that I hadn’t seen emphasized in the coverage of Mohammed’s arrest. That is that Mohammed had narrowly avoided capture several times in the 3 or 4 weeks before he was actually apprehended. What strikes me about this is that, even though he thus knew that the authorities were right on his trail and that he was in grave danger, he didn’t really go very far. He stayed in Pakistan, even when the heat was on.

This could mean a number of things. First, that he was in the middle of some important plans and couldn’t spare the weeks of disruption fleeing the country and re-establishing himself somewhere else would cause. That’s the scary option.

The more optimistic one is that he didn’t have anywhere else to go. One of the problems in fighting al Qaeda in the past has been it’s ability to change it’;s base of operations. It started in Afghanistan, moved to Pakistan, then when it got too dangerous there they went to the Sudan. When they overstayed their welcome there and it became dangerous to stay there, they returned to Afghanistan. Then after the US attack, what? From reports, they retreated to Northern Pakistan and reorganized there.

But with Musharraf on the side of the US, and US military and intelligence forces in the area in addition to Pakistan ones, this area is no longer safe for al Qaeda, as the arrest shows. But Mohammed didn’t flee to Somalia or Yemen, or some other trouble spot. Which could mean that safe harbors no longer exist for al Qaeda, and the law enforcement noose may be tightening around them, smoking them out of their hiding places.

2003-03-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

Inside al Qaeda: The arrest and its likely effects

I just finished reading the book Inside al Qaeda by Rohan Gunaratna, which is a fairly detailed book about the history of al Qaeda and its various efforts around the world. Although the book was very short on analysis, reading it stimulated quite a few ideas about al Qaeda and the war on terror, which I’ll be developing here over the next week or so. It doesn’t really break down into neat and clean topics, so I'll be rambling a bit, but hopefully it will be of some interest.

One of the main organization features of al Qaeda, which everyone knows, is its organization into cells. Each cell is isolated, so breaking up one plot and making arrests does not compromise other cells. However, while this is true at the lower levels, it's not true at higher levels. Al Qaeda is a fairly horizontal organization, so while each cell is isolated, the “oversee-ers,” the handlers of the cells are relatively few in number. It’s this class of managers which connects the far-flung cells of al Qaeda into a real organization.

And reading the history of the various plots, it's remarkable how the same names kept showing up again and again. Almost every major attack of the past 5 years had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's fingerprints on it, while Mohammed Atef was also involved in many plans.

What this means is that, if you can get up the ladder in al Qaeda and start killing or, even better, arresting top operatives, then the dispersed, horizontal nature of the organization which was a strength when attacking it from the bottom up, becomes a weakness when attacking it from the top down. The top operatives probably have detailed information about many (most?) of the ongoing plots of the group, certainly any major ones, as well as contact information for large numbers of cells. It's still an open question how much useful information they will get from Mohammed and the various assets which were seized, but the potential for damaging al Qaeda is enormous.

There are two secondary questions about the impact of the arrest. The first is what it will do in the short term to any attacks which are in the planning stage. On the Jim Lehrer News Hour last night, the experts they interviews were unwilling to take a stand on whether it would trigger attacks, which agenst will try to get off before they are compromised, or whether terrorists that believed they might be compromised would go into hiding.

Since I’m not an expert and am therefore more free to take a clear stand without a blow to my credibility, my reading of the groups history makes me think that almost all planned attacks will be aborted. Over the past 7 or 8 years, Gunaratna reports on several dozen planned attacks, of which only a few came off. And in almost every case where an agent involved in or privy to information about the plots was arrested, the subsequent attacks were called off. Both when the arrests occurred months before the planned attacks, and when they occurred only a few weeks before. If that pattern holds, unless there were any terrorist strikes planned in the next week or two, other plots will likely be aborted and the terrorist plotters will go into hiding and wait another day.

The second secondary question is whether al Qaeda will be able to replace Mohammed. The key here is how deep the “bench” of al Qaeda is. Before the attack on Afghanistan, it was very deep, with several layers of trusted lieutenants surrounding bin Laden (Mohammed was a layer or two down, despite his expertise and role in many of their major attacks.) Furthermore, al Qaeda had contingency plans, with secondary figures trained to step in and assume the role of any leaders who were killed or captures. Together, these made al Qaeda very resiliant and have allowed it to keep operating even with many leaders killed or on the run. But, given the pressure the organization has been under, it's hard to know whether they have been able to maintain the same level of strategic reserves in personnel, or whether continued attrition at the top might start taking a toll on the overall organizations operation effectiveness.

2003-02-18T13:37:00.000-08:00

Wow!

What is unquestionably the best writing on a potential war with Iraq that I've seen can be found over at Thomas Nephew's Newsrack blog, which I will be adding to the bloglist at right post-haste. He's a reluctant hawk, having been swayed by many lines of evidence to favor an invasion or Iraq. But go and read it for yourself.

As a kicker, if you don't trust the US, he also provides links to stories in which the German Intelligence agency confirms the exitence of mobile bioweapons labs. If that makes you uncomfortable, they also estimate that Saddam is only a couple of years away from acquiring nuclear weapons.

2003-02-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

Coalitions and alliances

One argument I’ve seen criticizing US diplomatic efforts is that, if NATO breaks up now and we alienate France and Germany (and maybe England, too according to the linked piece on Through the Looking Glass), then even if it doesn’t affect the war on Iraq, there will be times down the line when we’ll want their support and it won’t be there.

But it seems to me that this argument doesn’t hold up. What it's saying is that if we had an alliance, then NATO would support us when we want them too, even if it wasn’t in their direct self-interest. But the very crisis in NATO right now proves that this underlying assumption is false. The fact is, the existence of NATO is not enough to influence France and Germany to support us, or even to remain neutral on Iraq. They see an invasion as working against their self interest, and so are actively opposing it in any and every way they can.

So why would this be any different in the future? The fact of the matter is, in the future, just as in the present, nations will act in their self interest and any coalition the US is a part of to, say, oppose China, will be dictated by where countries feel their self interest lies. The presence of NATO will not incline them to help where they otherwise wouldn’t, and the absence of NATO will not discourage them from helping if they wish to do so.

I think the static nature of the Cold War and the long life of NATO has confused some people about the nature of coalitions and alliances and diplomacy. Countries always have, and always will, act in their perceived self-interest. The Cold War was an unusual interlude in that the overwhelming threat of the Soviet Union brought the interests of the US and all of Western Europe into line. And, as countries have always done in such instances, they formed an alliance to face this threat. And NATO was born and lasted for 50 years, while the threat did. But that was a function of the outside circumstances remaining the same, not any inherent stability and commonality of interest and action brought about by the existence of NATO itself.

So rather than looking back at the cold war and it’s simple international blocs, I think a better comparison for the future would be the great game played by nations during the 19th century. If you’re interested, AJP Taylor wrote a wonderful history of the era from 1848-1918. And even a cursory examination of the period shows that treaties and alliances were ephemeral things. One decade, France and England would align themselves against Russia in the Crimea. Later France and England were adversaries in Egypt, while France allied herself to Russia to oppose Germany. The examples of such reversals are numerous.

All of these diplomatic attachments came and went depending on the specific circumstances of the crisis of the day. The past alignments were no predictor of future ones, except insofar as permanent geographic interests (like the Straits of Constantinople) brought states into continuing harmony or discord. Each issue was decided on its own merits in each capitol, and the maneuvering followed these calculations. That was true then and will be true in the future. NATO has a military use in that it provides a framework for coalition command and control. But diplomatically, I think its effect is minimal at best, as the current crisis over Iraq has revealed.

2003-02-18T13:10:00.000-08:00

Immoral and Stupid

Talking Points Memo reports on a quote from German sources indicating that they covered up evidence of Iraqi smallpox reserves to maintain the strength of their own anti-war line during the past election cycle. Their justification? Apparently, it's because they didn't think the threat against Germany was that high, since the terrorists really hate America.

Now, leaving aside for a moment the morality of this position, putting their own short term electoral interests ahead of the lives of thousands or millions of Americans. But can they really have been that stupid? The whole reason that smallpox is considered such a dangerous threat is that it's highly contagious. And there are lots and lots of people flying back and forth between Europe and America every day. If smallpox breaks out here, unless the government does an incredible job in their response and quarantine, it's likely to spread acorss the entire world. Which would include Germany.

2003-02-18T07:24:00.000-08:00

Looking at both sides of the situation

A common mistake in many contests is to focus too much on your own situation and not enough on your opponent’s. I’m seeing some of this in comments about the current diplomatic wrangling the US is engaged in over Iraq and North Korea. The anti-Bush line (ably espoused by Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo) looks and sees that the US has gotten bogged down in inspections, has failed to convince France of our position and so is paralyzed in the UN, is having trouble with Turkey, facing mounting peace movements all across the US and Europe, and just generally has made a mess of things. They’re in danger of breaking up NATO, our old and dependable military alliance on the continent, and have pushed France and Germany, the heart of the EU, into open opposition to us.

And that’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ve taken a wary but stable situation on the Korean Penninsula and turned it into a powder keg, goading North Korea into re-starting their reactors and ratcheting up their hostile rhetoric. Their empty sword rattling has worsened the situation immeasurably, and they are now forced to crawl back to the negotiating table, having lost face and essentially allowed the North to develop nukes quickly and in the open.

So far, so bad. But before you completely buy into this line, it’s worth looking at things from the other side of the board for a minute. Sure, it’s easy to see all the areas where things have fallen short the ideal for the US, but just because we’re not winning smashing victories, it doesn’t mean the other side is doing any better.

A year ago, France and Germany were the heart of the EU, controlling it and getting ready to try and push through proposals which would give them even more power over it. They envisioned the EU as forming a unified front to counter-balance US hegemony, and they were at the head of that counterbalance. Not only was the EU coming together, it was preparing to expand and draw the new democracies of Eastern Europe into the fold, doubling it’s area and further increasing it’s economic and political clout.

Now, a short time later, Chirac and Schroeder have managed to turn the most powerful nation in the world from an ally into a sullen and semi-hostile state which is looking for ways (like pulling the military out of Germany) to stick it to them as much as possible. They’ve driven Britain, already skeptical about the EU and wavering between it and the US, fully into the US’s arms. And they’ve alienated most of Eastern Europe with their pressure and Chirac’s scolding condescension. At the least, this is likely to make them more hostile to Franco-German domination of the EU. Further, their foot dragging has made the US, the primary military force in NATO, skeptical of the entire endeavor, largely eliminating NATO’s ability to intervene anywhere outside of Western Europe, where no intervention is needed.

Over in Asia, the North Koreans, already suffering from a terrible and long lasting famine, and the most desperately poor country in the entire world, has cut off a massive pipeline of food, oil, and other aid from the US, with no prospects of restoring it. They’ve ratcheted up tensions on the peninsula with talk of war, interfering with their second lifeline—financial aid from the South. And their aggressive nuclear and missile development programs are frightening Japan, a third source (through payments from expatriates) of economic aid. They are saber-rattling, but just as the US knows any war would have terrible consequences for the south, both sides equally know that any war would just as surely completely destroy the north and topple its government. So their military option is even less credible than that of the US. At the beginning of the process, nobody liked them but they were being bought off. Now, nobody likes them and they’re not being bought off.

Now, at this point, I don’t know who is going to come out looking better in these two crises, real and diplomatic. But it’s far too simplistic to simply look at the US side and say everything’s a disaster, when the other side has made at least as many costly mistakes. And you also always have to keep in mind that the situations have arisen by an interaction of US and foreign actions. The US is not the only actor in the world, with everything good or bad a direct result of US behavior. The rift between the US and France/Germany, for example, is two way; the French and Germans did as much to cause it as the US.

2003-02-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

A quick note about the Palestinian peace process

It’s been off the front pages for a while, at least here in the US, but I wanted to reiterate a point I made a while ago. A common argument against any peace process is that the Palestinians were offered almost everything they wanted—98% of their land, for goodness sakes!—and refused it. Ergo, no peace proposal short of the extinction of Israel would satisfy them.

But I wish everyone that uses the 98% figure would take the time to go and actually look at what that 98% entailed. Although it might not be a lie, the contextless quoting of that figure is certainly using statistics to mislead. When you see it, the natural assumption is that the Palestinians were offered essentially the entire West Bank, with a few chunks taken out along the border to cover areas with large numbers of settlements, and maybe some adjustments around Jerusalem as well. Maybe not everything they wanted, but so close as to be all they could reasonably hope for, right?

Wrong. Go ahead and look at what was actually proposed. (Look here for a non-pdf form of a similar map.) The Israeli proposal was to chop up the land offered into three largely unconnected chunks, separated by strips of land to remain permanently under Israeli control. These Palestinian controlled areas were to be further subdivided by an extensive network of Israeli military roads and highways, remaining open to Israeli traffic. And finally, Israel was to retain control temporarily (10+ years) over a large swatch of territory on the eastern edge of the West Bank, rending it completely non-contiguous in the short to medium term. So the Palestinian state was actually to be an archipelago in an Israeli sea.

Looking at the map, the Palestinian refusal suddenly become a lot more explicable. Now, Arafat is a murderous thug, but Gandhi would have laughed in the face of the Israeli negotiators proposing this as a permanent solution. It’s simply not a credible end state for the Palestinians. It would permanently fix Israeli military control over the west bank, eliminating Palestinian ability to travel freely, and would allow Israel to project force anywhere in the Palestinian territory with impunity. Oh, and Israel also retained rights over water sources in the West Bank, not a trivial matter in the region. Forget the right of return, how about actually offering territorial integrity?

2003-02-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

Who are your representatives listening to?

I was somewhat disturbed to read this recent post from Jane Galt, in which she decried the flood of angry and abusive hatemail she’s been getting regarding her posts on the anti-war rallies in NYC. For one thing, I’m amazed that people cared enough to generate vitriol over the entire protest march/rally permit micro-outrage, something which struck me as a prime example of a non-issue that the over-abundance of political commentators seized on and blew up to mountainous proportions. Even if there’s no news, the commentariat must still produce, so whatever story comes to hand become the crisis of the hour. And the media is what it is. There is no volume control on coverage, so in the lack of something major, small issues get big issue coverage levels.

But I was also struck by the way in which those who were angry enough to actually write a response to Jane were also some of the least rational and least worth hearing. But this is exactly the sub-group of the electorate that Congressmen are hearing from, and using to form ideas about what the voters think. One of the factors (of many, to be sure) that they use to determine the public mood is the letters they receive on an issue. While the internet brings out the worst in people (I doubt there are many profanity laced tirades addresses to Senators), nonetheless the same principle probably applies, and it’s this angry fringe that is influencing our representatives in Congress.

2003-02-15T16:45:00.000-08:00

Let’s get some new arguments

A common sentiment on the pro-war side has been to lament the lack of new ideas in the anti-war camp, criticizing them for simply recycling generations old slogans and ideas. (See here for a recent example, if you haven’t already seen many.) With that in mind, I was amused to run across the following line of argument in The Idiot by Dostoevsky:

“To begin with, what is liberalism, really, speaking in general, if not an assault (reasonable or erroneous is not the point) on the existing order of things? That’s so, isn’t it? Well then, my fact is that Russian liberalism is not an assault on the existing order of things, it is an attack on the very essence of the things we have, the things themselves, not just on their ordering, not on the Russian system but on Russia herself. My liberal has reached the stage of denying Russia itself—that is, he hates and beats his own mother. Every evidence of the wretchedness and failure of Russia prompts him to laughter, delight even…If there’s an excuse for him, it’s only that he doesn’t realize what he’s doing and takes his hatred of Russia for the most fruitful kind of liberalism…Not too long ago some of our liberals used to regard this hatred of Russia as being almost equivalent to a genuine love of country…nowadays they’ve become more outspoken and even the words “love of country” make them fel ashamed; they’ve even banished and dismissed the very concept as something pernicious and of little account.”

While the anti-war protesters may be recycling their ideas from the 60’s, too many conservatives seem to be recycling their ideas about liberals from the 60’s too. The 1860’s, that is. The equation of liberalism with hatred of country goes back at least that far, although one doubts Coulter and others making the charge know or care of the long pedigree of the ideas they present as if they were their own. Neither side here has any monopoly on the tired retreading of worn-out arguments.

2003-02-15T16:42:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different…

Flipping around the radio yesterday, since it was Valentine’s Day I happened to hear a DJ referring to Romeo and Juliet as the “Mount Everest” of love stories. This is a pet peeve of mine, since I think that sentiment is so common and so utterly misguided. I don’t know if it’s the general critical consensus, but certainly among the general population Romeo and Juliet has become elevated into a beautiful story of great love, archetypal and moving, the highest expression of love and romance. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Strip away the beautiful language that Shakespeare gives to his characters, and what is left? Well, let me put it this way. If your 16 year old daughter came home from school one day and told you that she’d just met this guy, and he’s soooooo dreamy, and she’s totally in love with him and can’t live without him, what would you think? Would you think she is truly in the grip of a grand love for the ages, or would you think she was infatuated, feeling her hormones and struck with puppy love, the sort of thing all adolescents experience and think is the real thing?

And that’s what Romeo and Juliet is—it’s a play about an adolescent infatuation that the teenagers are utterly convinced is true love. And since, like most teenagers, they think everything they experience is totally unprecedented and the grandest emotion ever, they take their puppy love so seriously that, in dual fits of angst and melodrama, they commit suicide (another not so mature response to a situation.) It might be a tragic story, but it’s not because a great, pure, true love lies at the center of it.

2003-02-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

A new endeavor--basketball analysis

Apologies for the rare posting lately, to the few of you still bothering to check here. Equal parts laziness and lack of inspiration have been the cause. However, I would like to direct all of you that are interested over to my new blog, dedicated to analyzing the game of basketball. Specifically, I want to bring the same sort of rigorous analysis to basketball that Bill James brought to baseball. If you're interested, head on over to Court Analysis and check it out.

I'll still be posting here, with the same intermittent schedule I've had recently. You can also find me lurkin in the comments sections of several of the blogs linked over there on the right (a big reason I haven't been writing much here. Why respond for a small audience at my own site, when I can respond directly, to a likely much larger audience?)

2003-02-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

Romanticism and public policy

Can anyone come up with an argument for manned space flight that couldn't, with a few changed words, also be used to support a ban on ANWR drilling, or almost any pro-environmental position, for that matter? Both seem to rest on a fundamental romanticism--in the one case of space, in the other of wilderness and wildlife here on earth. Both involve large economic costs to pursue this romantic goal, with either no economic payoff, or a highly questionable economic payoff in the distant future.

So why are so many of the same people who sneer at environmentalists' arguments about preserving wilderness, who happily whip out their cost benefit analysis thinking caps when such arguments come up, perfectly willing to jettison any semblance of rational thought or cost-benefit considerations when it comes to space exploration?

There are footprints on the moon. Big whoop. How does that help me in my life? It doesn’t. And I really like Tang, too.

Pro-Space: We need to go to space to preserve the future of the species.
Pro-Environment: We need to protect the environment to preserve the future of the species.

Pro-Space: We get neat spin-off technologies, like astronaut ice cream.
Pro-Environment: We get neat spin-off technologies, like hydrogen cars.

Anti-Space: We need to wait on manned flight until we know more, and there are better, cheaper technological solutions to the problems it presents
Anti-Environment: We need to wait on cutting greenhouse emissions until we know more, and there are better, cheaper technological solutions to the problems it presents

Pro-Space: Space exploration satisfies a longing in the human soul.
Pro-Environment: Untamed wilderness satisfies a longing in the human soul.

Pro-Space: Anti space people are just luddite, anti-progress, gravity bound trogs.
Pro-environment: Anti-environment people are just greedy, insensitive developers, who don’t care about the world and would pollute their grandmothers' drinking water if they could make a buck on it.

Pro-Space: It would look better if we could get rid of the government top down approach and let private industry attack the problem.
Pro-environment: It would look better if we could get rid of the government top down approach and use market incentives to let private industry attack the problem.

Personally, I’m ambivalent about both the claims of space activists and those of most environmentalists. I’m more sympathetic to the environmental arguments, since the costs there (such as species extinction and habitat loss) are much clearer and more obvious than the supposed benefits of space flight, which seem to mainly focus on intangibles like the human spirit of conquest and exploration.

Regardless of how you feel about things, it seems incontrovertible to me that the US’s current manned space program is a giant boondoggle, a colossal waste of money. They spend 5.5 billion dollars a year on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station combined. And for what? The Space Station has been done before, twice, and adds nothing new to our knowledge at a cost of scores of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the Space Shuttle is used to launch satellites at 3-4 times the cost of unmanned rockets, putting lives at risk in the process.

The supposed spin-off benefits are a joke. Neither of these two giant programs is pushing the envelope in a major way. And even if they were, the benefit of the spin-offs would be negligible compared to the cost. For comparison, the entire yearly budget of the National Science Foundation, the primary organization that provides funding for research in the physical sciences in the US, is less than is spent on manned space flight. So if you want new technologies, the Space Shuttle is about the stupidest way imaginable to pursue that goal. You could almost double the amount of basic research going on in the US, together with the fruits it produces, by killing manned space flig

2003-02-04T08:42:00.000-08:00

On the bright side...

At least the shuttle disaster has turned the blogosphere's attention to more interesting pursuits than the silly ANSWER controversy, the right wing version of the chickenhawk charge.

2003-01-14T14:52:00.000-08:00

You get what you pay for

Since I've criticized him in the past for empty and pointless name calling, along with a borderline obsession with the NYT, it's worth mentioning that in the last couple of weeks, Andrew Sullivan has been putting a lot of good stuff on his site. Which is probably not unrelated to his getting a big check from readers. Anyone who wishes to improve the quality of this site is encouraged to e-mail me and we can figure out the details.

Anyway, today he links to this very interesting article. Using more polite words, it points out that the previous method of determining how segregated a city is was idiotic, and talks about a new and improved methodology developed by some University of Wisconsin researchers. Check it out.

2003-01-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

The evolution of advertising

I ran across this interesting report of a proposed new TV show on the WB network which will have no commercial breaks at all, but will generate ad revenue solely from product placement and other methods of integrating advertising into the fabric of the show. The article in question identifies this as a pre-emptive strike against Tivo and similar services which offer commercial skipping ability. Which it might be, although VCR’s offer the same possibility, just with a little less convenience. But I think it’s simply one signal of a much larger shift in the nature of advertising.

I don’t have any problem with product placement. If it’s done right, it’s seamless and everyone’s happy. The advertisers get their value, and the rest of us aren’t forced to watch babies riding around in tires or whatever else they’ve dreamt up this week. Furthermore, while it’s often presented as pernicious and subliminal, it seems to me that it only works if it gives value, if it actually delivers on what it's selling.

The main goal of most product placements is to associate their product with a positive image. Like James Bond driving a Jaguar, for example. What the product placement is trying to sell is the image of Jaguar as a cool car, the kind of thing James Bond would drive. Now, if the advertising works, it’s precisely because this identification sticks—people really do associate the car with James Bond, or at least some of his mojo rubs off. So people who buy the car for that reason (the people influenced by the ad) are getting the benefit of that image. If the image doesn’t stick, then the ad doesn’t work, and few people buy the car in search of the image which isn’t there. To the extent that it works, the ad is delivering on the promise it makes.

However, in the past decade, advertising has become much more ubiquitous and intrusive, far beyond simple product placements. Whether because of VCR’s and Tivos, or simply because they’ve learned they can, advertisers now intrude much more upon realms that were previously considered private. It is, in a way, a market breakdown, wherein the advertisers are free to inflict minor annoyance on millions and are not penalized for it, but are free to reap the benefits from the minute percentage of people who respond.

The two obvious examples of this effect are spam-mail and telemarketers. With small marginal costs, they can fund themselves to call me 3 or 4 times a night, and send me 30-40 junk e-mails a day. They probably cost me 15 minutes of my time per day, I’d guess. But it’s not just there. Any movie release now will have not just trailers for a few upcoming films, but 3 or 4 long commercials as well. The Two Towers had over 20 minutes of filler before the film actually started. Not to mention the slide-show advertising that is now on before the projector starts. My dentist’s office has a TV screens in every room which broadcast ads for dental procedures I could get done.

Advertisers are more and more trying to find any captured audience they can and are inserting their ads there. It’s only a matter of time before schools get billboards—I remember there was a stink a few years ago when ads were being inserted into educational videos bought by companies for public schools. Perhaps in the future you’ll be able to save $20,000 on your next house by agreeing to put flat screens in every room, which will broadcast commercials at you 24 hours a day.

I don’t know how I feel about this. Telemarketing, in particular, strikes me as unreasonably intrusive, and I’m interested to see if the current push to develop a national no-call list takes hold. The other ads are, I’m sure, an example of some sort of economic effect, in which the advertisers are able to inflict millions of small pricks to consumers, (actually, I think I’ve got some spam that could help with that…) causing minor annoyance for the majority but in such a way that the advertisers aren’t penalized for. There's probably a name for this, involving the german word for decision tipping point, but I don't know it.

No real conclusion here, but it seems we’re in the middle of a real revolution in advertising which has largely (at least in my reading) gone uncommented upon. So if I’m right, I can point to this article, proclaim my genius for prophecy, and make millions writing instantly out of date futurist books, like Megatrends. Sign up for your personal seminar now—dates are going fast.

2003-01-13T14:18:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on Medical Malpractice, pt. III

Part I is here, part II is here.

In those, I came to the tentative conclusion, based on such incomplete statistics as I could find in a couple of hours of searching on the web, that the problems of high medical malpractice premiums were likely real, but that they were not due to a flawed operation of the legal system. Costs don’t seem to be driven by a huge number of frivolous lawsuits, or by excessive awards of punitive damages. So some quick tort reform proposal won’t really solve the problem, and will distort the system against plaintiffs in the process.

Instead, from my reading, it seems as though the recent spike in insurance rates is a consequence of the nature of the insurance business. Because it’s easy to move into and out of the market, insurance has a natural boom-bust tendency. When profits are high, then many companies will jump in, with newcomers pushing prices down to try and grab market share. Furthermore, since insurance companies invest some of their premium income in the markets, high returns on these investments help to keep premiums low. Then, when the market tanked and profits dried up, many companies fled the field, removing some of the competitive drive to keep prices down. The result is a price spike.

That, anyway, was the narrative given by a consumer advocacy group that wanted to pin all the blame on insurance companies. They could be right, but if the insurers are currently taking a bath, it’s hard to see how their raising of rates is somehow illegitimate. And saying it’s their fault doesn’t really get us closer to a solution.

So what are the possibilities? The first one is simple. Don’t do anything. The current spike in rates might be a crisis, but it, too, will pass. Insurance rates remained steady or even went down through much of the 90’s, so rates right now aren’t much higher, if at all, than they were 15 years ago. Basically, this approach tells doctors to suck it up. If you don’t like paying lots of money in insurance, get a new job. The downside of this, of course, is that the quality of doctors might go down, and you might get fewer (or no) doctors willing to work in high risk, but high reward areas. Surgeons can save lives, but they won’t if doing so doesn’t make financial sense.

It’s worth noting here that this could be the case. No human is perfect, so any doctor will make some mistakes. If the cost of those mistakes is high enough (measured in malpractice rates), the net pay for the doctor might still be reasonable (say, $40,000), but would not be enough to entice people into the field, or to pay for a reasonable life along with medical school expenses.

This then seems to be a recipe for government intervention of some sort—the operation of the free market might be creating a situation that harms everyone. There are several options. First, one which has some philosophical appeal but would be very difficult in practice, would be to shift much of the risk onto the consumer. If no-one is perfect, then some procedures are bound to go wrong. Why is it that doctor’s are forced to bear the entire cost of their failure to achieve and impossible perfection? The problem, of course, is how to do this and still retain some accountability for real misconduct or failures.

A second possibility would be for the government to come in and provide some direct relief for doctors. Either in the form of reduced premiums for some or all doctors(much like they do with flood insurance for homeowners), or through funding of medical school. If doctors didn’t start out $150,000 in the hole, a lower net salary could still be attractive to many. (Revamping the entire process of hazing involved in entering the field of medicine would be another option to attract better candidates, but would require a bigger adjustment.)

A final option would be to shift some or all of the cost onto hospitals, HMO’s, or other parts of the health care industry. In the statistics I’ve seen, malpractice costs only represent 1% of the total budget of the health care industry (although I don’t know how this was defined.) This sort of overhead doesn’t seem unreasonable, and this would also encourage accountability on the part of the hospital to make sure their doctors are practicing at the highest possible levels. These organizations are also much better equipped to pass the cost on to the consumers than individual doctors are.

I don’t know what the best solution is, and probably still wouldn’t know even if I had been able to find the detailed statistics really necessary to do an analysis. (Not that it stopped me, as you can see.) Like most complicated issues, there aren’t simple solutions, even if there are many folks with agendas trying to convince you that there are.

2003-01-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

A quick note on Lomberg and the Sketpical environmentalist

Instapundit has drawn a stark contrast between Lomberg and Bellisiles, while Andrew Sullivan makes basically the same point:

No factual errors have been found in Lomborg's book; no unethical scholarship; only provocative arguments designed to get people to think again about their assumptions about how best to protect and preserve our natural inheritance.

Actually, this is simply wrong. In the area that I'm most interested in and most knowledgeable about, extinction rates and biodiversity, there were factual errors, misquotes of sources, and the sorts of misleading misuse of statistics that could be comfortably chalked up to innumeracy, except for the inconvenient fact that Lomberg was a professor of statistics.

Unfortunately, the union of Conerned Scientists has taken down its page that had a series of very well written and balanced critiques of several chapters in the book. There was a great rebuttal by E.O. Wilson to his chapter on biodiversity there, as well as the best and most balanced discussion of his chapter on global warming that I've seen anywhere. But absent the ability to simply link that, I'll have to go from memory here and could have specifics wrong.

The statistics that Lomberg cited for bird extinctions in one region (I believe the Eastern United States) were simply wrong, with his claiming only one extinction compared to the actual number of 5 or 6 listed in the paper he cited. He also discussed the situation in Puerto Rico, citing the loss of habitat without the subsequent loss of species predicted by the species area theory (a theory well established from both a wide range of experimental results and from theoretical considerations.)

He didn't note that of species unique to Puerto Rico, the extinction rate matched closely with experimental predictions, while other birds didn't go extinct on the island because populations existed on neighboring islands to allow for re-introduction. He also exagerated the extent of habitat loss by quoting primary forest loss numbers, ignoring regrowth of secondary forest (the same bait-and-switch he later accused environmentalists of in his forestry chapter, so he's obviously aware of the issue. Deliberate dishonesty in this case seems to be the conclusion left by Occam's razor.)

His forestry chapter drew graphs based on surveys that had changing definitions during the time period graphed, making any such time series plot meaningless, as well as odd definitions, like considering a clear cut area a forest if it was scheduled to be replanted. In this section, when convenient, he ignored the distinction between different types of forest (old growth, new growqth, and single species tree farm), and lumped together world statistics to disguise the problems of deforestation in rain forests with the planting of tree farms and new growth forests in the US and elsewhere.

I don't know that everything he said was wrong, and I think the underlying viewpoint--that environmentalism needs to be considered through a cost-benefit prism--is valid. Too often, environmentlists assume an infinite value for all things green, and fail to consider the costs of protecting them. And much of the criticism of the book was sad, sloppy, and ad hominem. But that his critics were often off the mark does not thereby mean that he was always on it. And given the numerous errors in the sections that I have some knowledge of, I'm skeptical of the rest of his book, myself.

2003-01-10T14:24:00.000-08:00

A couple of questions

Why is it that, when talking about the Israeli-Palestine war, the “yes, but…” formulation of condemning terrorist attacks is considered sign of terrible moral blindness. But when talking about US foreign policy adventures--support for dictators, oppressive regimes, overthrowing governments we didn’t like, etc.--the “yes, but…” formulation is considered eminently reasonable?

Why is it that Sen. Frist, a doctor whose family is involved in the health care business, a business he owns millions in stock in, is looked to as an authority, the last word on health care issues, rather than being considered hopelessly biased by this conflict of interest? I don’t see the same approach being used towards trial lawyers and tort reform, or teachers and school reform. Why then is a doctor and health care scion considered more reliable when it comes to health care reform?

2003-01-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on medical malpractice, Part II

So, it seems to be the case that malpractice rates really are becoming prohibitively high for doctors. Again, there are three possible explanations for this state of affairs. First, the awards on suits could be too high—plaintiff’s are getting too much money, driving up costs. Second, there could be too many frivolous cases being filed—the lawyer’s are getting too much money, driving up costs. Or third, the system could be working just fine—there aren’t too many frivolous cases and the awards aren’t too high. But the cost-benefit calculation of the health care industry is starting to push over into the costs, with the current set-up.

Are there too many lawsuits? The evidence here is mixed. According to this report, studies from the Harvard School of Public Health and an independent study from the New England Journal of Medicine (it doesn’t list the study authors) estimate that only a small percentage of patients who are harmed by malpractice actually file suit—from 12% down to as low as 2% (without about half of these cases resulting in payouts.) So if anything, it seems like there ought to be many more lawsuits than there already are. On the other hand, according to statistics cited in this report:

According to closed claims data, 1985-1999, reported by 20 companies that belong to the Physicians Insurer's Association of America, of the 155,671 claims examined, 29.4 percent were settled in favor of the plaintiff. There were court verdicts in only 6.7 percent of medical malpractice cases and, of those, 19.1 percent were decided in favor of the plaintiff. The vast majority, 62.3 percent, were dismissed, dropped or withdrawn in favor of the defendant.

So it’s true that there is a significant fraction of frivolous lawsuits—almost 2/3 of those brought, assuming that you class every one of the cases dismissed, dropped, or withdrawn as frivolous. But there is sure to be some such overhead in any civil court scheme, and I was unable to find a breakdown of overall costs for insurers to see how much would actually be saved even if you could eliminate all frivolous lawsuits. I couldn't say for sure, but am skeptical that it is practical to eliminate this overhead without unduly discouraging patients from bringing valid cases, and am further skeptical that there are enough savings to be had in this area to solve the problem.

The second possibility is that in those lawsuits where the plaintiffs do win, the awards are too high. This is the main target of tort reform, with the usual proposal being to cap possible awards at a certain amount above court costs and lost income. (Things like mental anguish, etc.) But, according to this report, only 1.1% of all cases which are won by the plaintiff involve an award of punitive damages. While the damages in these cases can be substantial, in the millions of dollars, if the occur in only 1% of the cases, they don't drive costs up that much.

According to this previously cited report (from an insurance group, so it's not biased against tort reform) report, the median medical malpractice award was 1 million dollars. Further:

About 52 percent of all medical malpractice awards, based on Jury Verdict Research data, now are over $1 million, compared with 34 percent during the period 1994-1996. However, medical malpractice awards are subject to considerable volatility and very large awards are often reduced on appeal. Jury Verdict Research data also show that while death was the most frequent claim, brain injury was the second most frequent and by far the most costly, with the median award at $4.3 million and the probable range of awards from $1.5 million to $12 million.

Assuming the highest possible award cited here as probable--12 million dollars. Further, assume the entire 12 million was a punitive award. If this occurs in 1% of all cases, with a mean value of approximately 1 million dollars per case (this is actually the listed median--the mean could be as low as $500,000), these high punitive awards contribute a grand total of 13.2% (or an absolute maximum of 26.4%, assuming the phenomenoally unrealistic mean of 500,000) of total jury awards. And that is the absolute highest possibility, with quite a few unreasonable assumptions to get there. So the crisis isn't being driven by punitive awards, although they do get lots of press attention. Reforming this could lower costs slightly, but it's not going to really solve the problem, assuming the statistics I've found are accurate.

Which leaves the third possibility. That if there's a problem, it doesn't lie with the number of lawsuits, with the size of malpractice awards, or with the greedy insurance companies. Rather, everything outside the medical industry is working just fine, and just as it should. So if there's a crisis, it's internal to the health care industry and will require either restructuring there, or else some outside assistance. But this post is getting very long, so I'll hold off on that until part III of this series, coming soon.

2003-01-10T12:51:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on medical malpractice, Part I

I’m surprised that the doctor’s “strike” in West Virginia hasn’t gotten more national attention. I guess the looming war with Iraq is taking attention away from it, but since tort reform has been a Republican party staple since the Contract with America and before, I would have thought they’d be all over this story, trumpeting it as a failure of the judicial system. It is an interesting case to unpack, though, with a few non-obvious wrinkles to it. Here's a good article from the Washington Post giving an overvview of the problem.

There are three possibilities here. The first is that the doctors are lying. Malpractice premiums aren’t that bad, and they’re just trying to squeeze some more money out of people or out of the government. I don’t think this is the case. The Post article linked above quotes malpractice rates of $80,000+ per doctor per year for many specialties. Doctors make a lot of money, but that is extreme. They really are feeling the pinch here.

A second possibility is that insurers are overcharging. The insurance companies are gouging the doctors in order to boost their profit levels. This is possible, but seems counterintuitive to me. Competition ought to keep costs down. For an existing insurance company with solid financial reserves, there is no barrier to entering the malpractice market, and no existing expertise that would allow any company to overcharge. The field is completely level—the only determinant for rates are actuarial calculations, and the service provided by any insurer is practically indistinguishable from any other. Unless there are factors I’m missing, it seems like this is a market where competition ought to drive prices down. [The statistics in this link agree, although it should be noted its an industry source, suggesting that medical insurers are actually losing a lot of money in the current climate.]

Which leaves the third option, that the cost of malpractice really has become prohibitive for doctors, and this cost is starting to drag down the entire health care industry.

Part II will consider the possible causes for this state of affairs, and potential solutions.

2003-01-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

There is no solution to North Korea

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo has been getting a lot of play about the recent problems with North Korea, slamming the Bush administration. It’s rather similar to Andrew Sullivan’s similar playing of the situation when North Korea’s reneging on the 1994 agreement was first exposed several months ago. Of course, Sullivan used the story to flog Clinton.

But what they both miss is that there ins’t a solution to the problem. Going in with the assumption that there is, and then considering any falling short from the this utopian future a failure is simply disingenuous. Marshall says that

We're in a very bad situation. The administration has sat us down at a card game in which we're holding a fairly weak hand.

No. We were already sitting at the table, and already had a weak hand. Clinton tried to play it with negotiations, essentially paying off North Korea in return for them not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. To my mind, it was a reasonable choice to make at the time. North Korea has so many deep problems that it was not ridiculous to think the promise of economic aid could be so valuable that it would make them forego the weapons development.

But then, as it turned out, North Korea wasn’t living up to their end of the bargain. They were taking the money and developing weapons at the same time. And they always had this choice. As Marshall points out, we really have no leverage over them. No diplomatic or economic ties, apart from the treaty aid, and no plausible military threat (this last point is why everyone wondering why we’re thinking of invading Iraq instead of North Korea is making a stupid argument. It’s because we can invade Iraq, but can’t invade North Korea without tremendous losses.)

So North Korea was free, at any time, to kick out the observers and jump their nuclear program into high gear. The only leverage we have is to cut off aid, which we did, to no effect. Marshall apparently thinks we should have kept this trump card in our pocket, despite the current demonstration that playing it has had no effect on North Korean actions.

Marshall is apparently claiming that it would have been preferable to continue propping up the regime with food and energy aid, while letting them pursue nuclear weapons in secret. Because, you know, since we stopped that approach, it’s resulted in them pursuing nuclear weapons in the open. I don’t follow the logic there. Either we help them get nuclear weapons, or we don’t. Either way, they’re getting nuclear weapons. And there’s nothing we can do or could have done to prevent it, if they were determined to get them, as they were.

Marshall has promised more installments on North Korea, and maybe will provide a clearer view of what he thinks a proper approach would have been. But from where I’m sitting, it looks like he’s simply flogging the administration for failing to achieve an impossible goal.

2002-12-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

Good news is no news

Any sports fan is regularly treated to stories about rich, spoiled atheltes. The latest legal peccadilloes of superstar athletes form a regular staple of sports talk radio. But on a day when one Ohio high school basketball player has become so hyped already that his team is having a game shown on ESPN, prior to his inevitable and long awaited jump to the NBA, here's a nice story about another Ohio basketball player that's a little more appealing.

2002-12-09T14:15:00.000-08:00

The real echo chamber

Over the past months, there have been proponents from both sides of the political spectrum complaining about the echo chamber effect present in their opponents. Whether it’s the echo chamber of the warmongering blogosphere or the conservative press and spin machine or the liberal anti-war idiotarians, it seems that each side is able to see and decry the tendency of their opponents to listen only to like minded voices, and ignore or turn into strawmen those who oppose them.

While this is certainly a real phenomenon, for me this weekend has illustrated a larger and more pernicious echo chamber—that of those who really pay attention to politics. This is a pernicious echo chamber not because of it’s effects on those inside, but because the majority are outside and either don’t know or don’t care.

What brought this home to me was the whole Trent Lott affair. I generally don’t spend much time on the internet on weekends, and rarely watch the network news programs. So I was completely ignorant of the entire issue until I took my morning stroll around the blogosphere, and found it all abuzz with the huge controversy. It was the big news of the day, and everyone was weighing in. I spent my weekend like everyone else in the country, and had no idea what the heck everyone was atwitter about.

But outside this tiny group of pundits and journalists, no-one cares. If you went to the mall and pulled aside the average person of voting age and asked them what they thought of Trent Lott, even if you happened to find someone who knew who he was, I can almost guarantee you none of them would have any clue about this recent flap.

And that’s a problem. On the one hand you have a vocal and involved political active minority, throwing around stories back and forth and building them up or tearing them down. In this insular little world, the biggest news of the day really is the Trent Lott gaffe. But for the 98% of the population who aren’t political junkies, the group that actually decides elections, this might as well not have happened. The echoes can be deafening inside the chamber, but outside they are almost inaudible, drowned out by the hum of everyday cares.

Forget campaign finance reform. It’s this widespread voter apathy and ignorance that gives money it’s influence. If you follow the issues, then a last minute barrage of TV ads by Congressman Porky Pilferer isn’t going to convince you what a great guy he is, no matter how many soft focus shots and meaninglessly vague platitudes they feature. But unfortunately, most people don’t care enough to become informed, and so can be manipulated by ads and propaganda. And that’s why politicians aren’t held accountable, because the only thing that matters is how many commercials they can get on the air in the final month of the election. You can be a racist or a crook, but if you have a big war chest and good name recognition, then you’re almost guaranteed re-election.

2002-12-05T14:15:00.000-08:00

Questionnaire

A week after we took time to give thanks for what we have, I think this questionnaire from Max Frisch's sketchbooks, 1966-71 (found on this nice website, which spared me the trouble of pulling it down off the shelf and typing it all in myself. Thanks, Douglass!) is a nice encouragement for self-reflection. It won't tell you what Byzantine emperor you would be, but you might still like it.

1. Are you really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive?

2. State briefly why.

3. How many of your children do not owe their existence to deliberate intention?

4. Whom would you rather never have met?

5. Are you conscious of being in the wrong in relation to some other person (who need not necessarily be aware of it)? If so, does this make you hate yourself -- or the other person?

6. Would you like to have perfect memory?

7. Give the name of a politician whose death through illness, accident, etc. would fill you with hope. Or do you consider none of them indispensible?

8. Which person or persons, now dead, would you like to see again?

9. Which not?

10. Would you rather have belonged to a different nation (or civilization)? If so, which?

11. To what age do you wish to live?

12. If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority? (Yes or no)

13. Why not, if you think they are right?

14. Which do you find it easier to hate, a group or an individual? And do you prefer to hate individually or as part of a group?

15. When did you stop believing you could become wiser--or do you still believe it? Give your age.

16. Are you convinced by your own self-criticism?

17. What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse?

18. Do you find the thought that you might never have been born (if it ever occurs to you) disturbing?

19. When you think of someone dead, would you like him to speak to you, or would you rather say something more to him?

20. Do you love anybody?

21. How do you know?

22. Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it?

23. What do you need in order to be happy?

24. What are you grateful for?

25. Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal?

2002-12-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

Movie review: Solaris

I went to see the new movie Solaris last weekend, and it took me a while to make up my mind about it. There was a lot of good things there and I felt like I should have enjoyed it more, but was ultimately unsatisfied. The story, in brief, is that George Clooney is a psychiatrist who’s sent to a space station where weird things are happening. (Minor spoilers ahead, if you’re planning on seeing the movie.) It turns out that the local energy field there is creating clones from the memories of crewmembers, and Clooney gets the chance to be reunited with his dead wife.

Only it isn’t his wife, since it’s based solely on his memories. It exists as a real person with free will, but its past is only his perception of her. He is then faced with the choice of staying with her or leaving, and the movie presents the audience (implicitly—it never comes out and says it in so many words) with questions about the nature of individuality and identity, and the difference between the person you are and the person others think you are.

Which is an interesting area to explore, but the problem is that it’s a philosophical question. And movies are not well equipped to explore philosophical questions. Movies are good at presenting drama, not ideas. If the drama brings up ideas, it can enrich the experience, but the core of the movie is the plot. Anything else is a misuse of resources. And the plot of Solaris isn’t nearly enough to carry the movie. Very little happens, and it happens very slowly. The cinematography is great, the visuals are great, the near future vision of Earth was wonderful, but the movie is hollow at the core because there isn’t enough drama to carry it. And ideas aren’t enough for a movie.

A book, on the other hand…well that’s the correct venue to explore these puzzles. The movie is an adaptation of a novel by Stanislaw Lem, and I’d bet that’s more interesting. But if you’re interested in these questions about identity, I’d recommend a different, little known novel. It’s One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand by Pirandello (better known as a playwright, author of such works as Six Characters in Search of an Author.) It’s a wonderful little book that you can read in the time it would take you to watch Solaris, and it’s far more interesting and thought provoking, and will reward you much more than the attractive but empty Solaris.

2002-11-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

Orwell, pt 2

The first post on Orwell can be found here. So Orwell was right on some big questions. Was he particularly insightful, or just lucky? After reading through the whole volume, it seems to me that luck played a big role.

Going through the entire group of essays, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Orwell was, in large part, a crank. He blasted anything and everything that came in front of him. The government was terrible, they were botching the war, the population was unserious, the patriots were all simple-minded Blimps, Gandhi was a simple-minded tool of the British imperialists, the working class didn’t know what was good for them, the upper classes were stupid and exploitative, the leftists were morally blind and naively utopian, while the rightists were reactionary. Even his literary criticism is very negative, as he dumps on Eliot’s later verse and claims Yeats’s poetry is spotty and loosely constructed.

As it turns out, this pattern of contrarian thought served him well in the interwar years, since the main evil during that time was precisely in allowing your thought to be captured by a movement, to get drafted into one of the two oppositional camps of Communism and Fascism. In that sense, he was lucky in that he lived during a period when his natural tendencies steered him towards the best path.

Orwell also distinguished himself by strongly supporting the war against Germany, despite what he felt were major flaws in British government and society. It’s this aspect of his war writings that many have found appealing during the present war on terror. It’s remarkable how similar some of the main currents of thought are, and Orwell’s essays denouncing the pernicious effects of leftist defeatism and anti-British sentiment could have been written a year ago, rather than 60 years ago. Sullivan in particular loved Orwell’s argument that the actions of British pacifists and anti-war demonstrators were “objectively pro-Fascist.”

Strong words, and reflecting an opinion that I happen to agree with. But they’d reflect better on Orwell if he hadn’t turned right around and used the exact same words to denounce the upper class right wing as also “objectively pro-Fascist.” Which brings us back to Orwell’s general crankiness and also his major weakness as a thinker (at least as displayed in this volume.)

For while Orwell was never enslaved by Communist orthodoxy, and he was enough of a realist to effectively denounce others’naïve utopianism, he nevertheless suffered from his own form of utopianism and constrained leftist thinking. The most constant thread in his war writing was his call for a complete system of national socialism for Britain, the complete nationalization of industry and redistribution of goods along a more egalitarian line. He went so far as to say that Britain’s only choices were to adopt a strong socialism or lose the war. And this vision infected his thought, as he several times lamented what he perceived as missed opportunities for revolution in England. Orwell was, more or less, hoping for a British version of the 1917 Revolution, without the subsequent Bolshevik takeover.

So while he was able to rise above simple anti-British reactions and saw that even as flawed as he thought it was, Britain was still infinitely preferable to Germany, he was nevertheless a very harsh, left wing critic of British society, and hoped for not just a reform, but an actual revolution to establish justice and socialism. While Sullivan and others have picked up his pro-war writings and ran with him, when you read all of his writings he comes across as a lot closer to Chomsky than to Sullivan or even Hitchins. (And like many of today’s crop of radical leftists whose thought is pervaded by their Vietnam experience, Orwell’s thought was profoundly affected by his experience in the Spanish Civil war, in which England and America refused to come to the aid of the Republicans, leaving Orwell feeling betrayed and assuming that, because of this, they were actually sympathetic towards fascism.)

His political writing constantly comes back to issues of class analysis. The upper class is made up of undeserving semi-imbeciles, who live on the backs of the workers and contribute nothing. The patriotic middle class is made up of Blimps, unthinking stooges of the existing order. And the lower classes have either been bought off or fail to recognize their true interests, and so have not yet risen up to overthrow the existing order.

So when you get down to the rare occasions that Orwell wrote positively about anything, he was profoundly misguided in his prescriptions both for winning the war and for reforming society. But these writings are not often dusted off. Instead, we remember him for his forceful denunciations. And when you’re against everything, there will always be a large overlap with anyone else’s opinions. Everyone is for one thing and against all the others, so most readers would end up agreeing with 90% of Orwell’s writing, since they are also opposed to most of things he decries. It seems to me that this, combined with the excellent quality of his writing, is the secret of his success and high reputation.

To put it another way, anyone will find plenty to agree with in Orwell’s writing, and he will likely have said it as well or better than you could yourself. But this very ubiquity of appeal also means that nothing is more likely to be true simply because Orwell said it. If you want to make an argument from authority, Orwell is not a good one to pick.

2002-11-25T12:46:00.000-08:00

Blogger, heal thyself!

In the mood to be a little snarky, I noticed this coup de grace that Andrew Sullivan delivered in a post attacking the latest editorial from Paul Krugman:

This guy used to have a brain. Now he only seems to have bile.

Just for kicks, I decided to go through Sullivan’s current postings. Right now (Monday, 3:30 EST), the posts from the top are:

A plug for the latest Kinsley column

An attack on a new French book release

Elucidation of a Bin Laden reference

Debunking of a 9-11 lie

Rip on Chirac and France

Multi-post analysis of purported bin Laden letter, attacking Islamicist ideology, linking it to Hitler, and working is a swipe at American media.

An attack on the “fusion of the multi-culti left and the religious right” which resulted in Pim Fortuyn’s murder

Letters quote

Attack on campus leftist

Attack on NYT bias

Linked article

Attack on BBC bias

Attack on the Catholic Church

Attack on NYT bias

Attack on Krugman

Attack on “leftwing depravity”

Swipe at Gore

Criticism of Ivy leagues for allowing anti-Semitic poet

Attack on BBC bias

Swipe at “Maxim culture” and reality TV

Critique of a poll

Attack on Islam

Attack on the Catholic Church

Praise of Eminem and South Park

Attack on Islam

Readers post

So, of the 23 items with actual comments from Sullivan that he has on his front page right now, 18 of them were criticisms or negative comments. The only real thinking on the page is the breakdown of the bin Laden letter, in which Sullivan comes to the remarkable conclusion that Islamicists are not nice people and don’t like the West or Israel.

Maybe blogs are the next wave, but they’re clearly no insurance against the descent from thoughtfulness into bile…

2002-11-22T14:07:00.000-08:00

Orwell

George Orwell enjoys an extremely high reputation as a political thinker and commentator, perhaps almost to the extent that he is considered the gold standard for political commentators. That not much higher praise that could be bestowed on a writer than to be called “this generation’s Orwell.” Andrew Sullivan, in the weeks following 9/11, praised Orwell and used some of his words to beat down left wing pacifists. Others have also invoked his name and tried to appropriate his prestige to their camp.

Given this high reputation, when I happened upon a volume of his collected essays and letters (Volume 2, 1940-43) at the library, I decided to pick it up. After reading most of it, I can certainly see why Andrew Sullivan found it so congenial, although in saying that it’s not praise of Sullivan but a critique of Orwell. Even so, there’s certainly something strange about Sullivan and other warbloggers (who tend to have a libertarian or conservative lean to their politics) trumpeting Orwell, who held opinions so far left that they wouldn’t even be on the scale in American politics.

Before getting into a discussion of Orwell’s writings, it’s worth asking what he did to deserve his brilliant reputation as a writer and thinker. It can be boiled down to a few major points. First, and most importantly, there was his denunciation of both the communists and the Nazis and unacceptable, totalitarian tyrannies. This was a remarkably rare insight in the 30’s—most thinkers saw the future as a conflict between the two systems and chose one (depending on whether they were leftist or rightist), remaining blind to its faults. The concurrent rise of both systems was not an accident, as for each the presence of the other provided an excuse for their own actions. The opposition of the two served to radicalize thought in Europe, much more so than would have been possible had only one of the ideologies been present.

Anyway, Orwell was able to get this question, really the big question of the interwar period, correct. And once the war started, while he was very critical of the British government, he did not let the proximity of its small flaws blind him to the much greater flaws of the far away Nazi empire. And he was very critical of left wing thinkers and pacifists who were morally blind on this point. (It’s this facet of his writing that Sullivan particularly enjoyed, and indeed many of his sentences could just as easily have been written about the situation in the West in 2002 as in England in 1941.)

Lastly, Orwell also backed up his words with actions, and fought in the early years of the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. He was not merely a talking head, but someone who was willing to take action.

So he was one of a select few thinkers who got the big questions right during this critical period. It is this fact, combined with his independence of thought and willingness to break ranks with the orthodoxies of both sides, which really established his reputation. Not only was he right, but he was able to write and present these opinions in his remarkably powerful and lasting works 1984 and Animal Farm. Add in the fact that he was an excellent writer of essays and occasional pieces and he certainly deserves a high reputation. But, as I’ll argue in the next piece, he was hardly a seer when it came to politics, and while he got some big questions right, he got some others wildly wrong. So that to a large extent, the praise he receives is based on a rather selective reading of his numerous works.

2002-11-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

One more note on terrorist warnings

Yesterday I criticized what I feel is some sloppy thinking on the part of those generating and analyzing terrorism warning. But there’s on additional note that occurred to me on reflection. Assuming that the analysts who are doing the worrying have thought it through, the fact that they believe there’s a possibility that increased message traffic or “chatter,” and the bin Laden tape being released could be correlated to an upcoming terrorist strike means that, despite some reports to the contrary, al Qaeda still has a fully functioning hierarchy. It has not been reduced to a collection of isolated cells, cut off from each other and from their superiors.

Consider: if al Qaeda now were simply 500 isolated cells, each would only communicate amongst themselves, or perhaps with one or two connected cells. If this were the case, even if an impending attack were signaled by increased message traffic, it would only be an increase on the part of 1/500 of the total group. It’s only when there’s top down planning or coordination that an upcoming strike by one group could produce an increase in message traffic more or less across the board.

Similarly, unless bin Laden is still either directing operations or close enough to those who are to know what’s going on, there’s no way for him to coordinate any release of a personal message with a future strike by al Qaeda.

So, reading between the lines and giving the US intelligence community the benefit of the doubt (which might not be justified, of course), it seems that they believe the operation in Afghanistan, while it may have degraded their operational capabilities, has not really broken up the al Qaeda chain of command

2002-11-14T13:48:00.000-08:00

Surrender, POW’s, and winning wars

While I criticized Niall Ferguson’s book The Pity of War below for sloppy argumentation, he does make quite a few interesting points along the way. One of the most interesting is his emphasis on the role that surrender plays in war. I think he makes a mistake in raising it to the decisive element—he claims that the main difference between 1918 and 1916 was that the Germans were surrendering in large numbers—but he makes the very good point that an important factor for soldiers making a decision to surrender is their likely treatment afterwards.

We generally think of the various accords about proper treatment of POW’s as being a humanitarian issue, making sure that people aren’t abused or mistreated. Ferguson points out that this is also a policy that advances your self-interest. If you are known to treat prisoners well, then opposing soliders in tight situations will be more likely to give up and surrender. In contrast, if you are brutal and torture or kill captured enemy soldiers, then they will fight to the death rather than surrender, which will make defeating an enemy army much more difficult.

And this is not a purely academic issue for western armies, something that only “savages” do. Ferguson shows that on the Western Front, the casual execution of surrendered soldiers was a relatively common occurrence. And not just in the heat of battle, but also on the way back from the front, or in follow-on, consolidation maneuvers.

Ferguson goes too far when he claims that a change in this situation on the Allies side, partially due to the incoming Americans who tended to treat POW’s better, was a decisive factor in the end of the war. I think his analysis is very limited and ignores the military situation on the ground—the Germans were being driven backwards, a situation that almost always results in increased surrenders—as well as other factors. But it’s nonetheless an interesting perspective, and one which may very well play out in a second war with Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered to the US forces and were treated fairly and eventually returned to Iraq. Any soldier serving now almost certainly knows one or more veterans of the first Gulf War, and knows that surrender most certainly is an option, one that carries few costs.

2002-11-14T09:18:00.000-08:00

Magical thinking and terrorist attacks

No, I’m not talking about magical thinking on the part of the terrorists; I’m talking about the CIA. This article from today’s Washington Post is a prime example of the questionable assumptions which seem to be driving US intelligence.

There are different kinds of magical thinking, but in this case I’m referring to a combination of the natural human tendency to see patterns, the assumption that correlation implies causation, and the tendency of people to find and remember data that supports a pre-existing position and to ignore contradictory evidence.

Put these three tendencies together, and you have the following:

The volume of threat information waned in the weeks following Tenet's Oct. 17 testimony, only to begin rising again over the last week to 10 days, sources said. The magnitude is again approaching pre-Sept.11 levels, these sources said.
"That threat environment level was high then, and it has not lessened," a senior administration official said yesterday. Factors contributing to the increase could include the threat of war against Iraq or the celebration of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began this week.
…
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads the Rand Corp.'s office here, said the tape "could mean that something has been set in motion."
"Bin Laden's appearances have always been carefully orchestrated, and unfortunately they've often presaged a major al Qaeda attack or development," Hoffman said.

Absent fairly specific threat information (which does occasionally come in), US intelligence has little idea when a terrorist strike is in the offing. But there’s lots of information, so the human mind constructs these assumed correlations, none of which, it seems to me, are really meaningful. “Chatter” has spiked. Well, yes, but it’s spiked before and nothing has happened. And does it always spike before any attacks? Here is perceived pattern number one, the most plausible of the lot. But I’m skeptical of it’s real value, although I don’t have the clearance or the access to look and compare if “chatter” levels have any predictive values. If they do, I bet it’s low.

Beyond the chatter, which at least has an operational basis to it, you have the proposed correlation of Bin Laden tapes with attacks. Again, I’m skeptical. There have been several tapes released since 9-11, and the only major attack, in Bali, took place during a period of silence. In the years leading up to 9-11, there were a number of tapes and appearances, yet I don’t recall any clear link with follow-on terrorist attacks. You add in the option of “major attacks and developments” and now the supposed correlation is so broad that you’re almost certain to fin something.

And the final canard—that attacks are chosen to correspond to significant dates—has the exact same problem but worse. There are so many significant dates that if you look, you can often find something. Yet many attacks still occur on completely meaningless dates.

Now, the US has avoided any major attacks since 9-11, so the intelligence agencies are apparently doing some things right. But I sincerely hope they’re spending most of their time actually analyzing real data, and are not letting these preconceived “patterns” interfere with their analysis, since they are so likely meaningles

2002-11-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

Revisionist history

I recently finished reading an interesting but flawed revisionist history of WWI, The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson. To keep with my policy of blogging everything two days late, here the week after Remembrance Day is a good time to comment on the book, and on revisionist works in general.

On the one hand, assuming you already have a good understanding of the period, a well thought out revisionist history can be tremendously rewarding to read. Either you are convinced and come to a new understanding of a historical situation, or else you are forced to defend your own understanding, which forces you to really master the details of your own position. So it can be a win-win, if the revisionist history is done right.

On the other hand, I go into any revisionist history with several ounces of skepticism. First, because there’s usually a good reason why something has become the conventional wisdom in a field. Unless some new information has come to light, the revisionist is stuck arguing against quite a large collected weight of authority. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong, of course, it makes this more likely. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to believe that hundreds of colleagues are wrong, and only you are right.

And second, because there’s more than a bit of self-interest involved in writing a revisionist work. If you can stir up a controversy, you’ll sell more books and make a name for yourself. Assuming the work isn’t too shoddy, even if you end up wrong, it can help your career and make a name for yourself. There is also a romantic pleasure in being an iconoclast, speaking out against authority and pitting your own thought against the world. And finally, while much weaker and hence less destructive than in art, there is a certain pressure towards novelty in all scholastic fields. Synthesizing, collecting, and narrating accepted facts is serviceable yeoman’s work, but to achieve renown you have to say something really new. And an easy way to do that is to challenge existing orthodoxies. (More valuable and much less common, as it requires some genius, is establishing whole new ways of looking at the world, establishing a new set of orthodoxies.)

Ferguson’s book in particular should set off alarm bells in the reader, since at the outset he puts forth his objective. Not to present one revisionist account, but to take on 10 different large questions about the war, and in each case to show that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and he is right. This is an amazing display of hubris, and right away makes me think that a couple of things might be the case. I wonder if he, either for careerist reasons or for the joy of being an intellectual rebel, didn’t overreach himself. Starting from a few good positions, and then deciding that he must overthrow all orthodoxy in the field?

First, some of the CW positions he’s overthrowing might not actually be the CW—he might be storming through an open door, so to speak. In other cases, his reasoning might be faulty—he might present evidence that does not support his grand claims of overthrowing existing positions. And he might be right on a few issues, or at least right enough to require some refinement of our understanding. (This is not surprising—history is hugely complex, so almost any straightforward explanation, as most CW is, is likely to be inaccurate in many details, even if it is right in the main.)

The Pity of War, like The Skeptical Environmentalist, has all these flaws, as well as the same occasional virtue. In my next post I want to focus on some interesting issues that I think he got right. But these hits were outweighed by the misses.

I don’t want to get into a laundry list of flaws, which would be unrewarding to write as well as read. But probably most disturbing is the shoddy reasoning evident throughout the work. In case after case, he presents evidence that is insufficient to back up his claims. He also seems to hold an odd, scientific view of history, where any explanation is 100% true, so that some isolated data points that don’t fit in are reason to toss the whole edifice out. But of course, history is complicated and contradictory, which is why it’s an art more than a science.

I think these flaws stem from the search for contradiction, the desire to be revisionist. He picks positions he wants to contradict and then filters the evidence to select pieces that support his position, rather than taking the total of the evidence and trying to fit it together in a more or less coherent way. This is one of the most fundamental flaws in human thinking—the tendency to filter evidence to pick out that which support our pre-existing positions, and Ferguson does this over and over again. Ferguson has apparently made a name for himself as a rising young historian in England. But based on this work and the fundamental problems in it, I doubt he produces much, if anything, that stands the test of time.

2002-11-08T13:11:00.000-08:00

Condi for VP? Don't bet on it

While it's not a 100% certainty, I'm surprised that the following quote from Bush's news conference yesterday hasn't gotten more play:

Q: Now that the 2004 presidential campaign has unofficially begun, can you tell us whether Vice President Cheney will be your running mate again? Or will you instead choose someone who might harbor greater presidential ambitions to perhaps succeed you one day?

BUSH: Well, first of all, I'm still recovering from the '02 elections, and we got plenty of time to deal with this issue.

But should I decide to run, Vice President Cheney will be my running mate. He's done an excellent job. I appreciate his advice. I appreciate his counsel. I appreciate his friendship. He is a superb vice president, and there's no reason for me to change.

I happened to be flipping around on the radio, and since almost all the music currently out stinks I ended up on C-SPAN listenting to this exchange. If possible, the President's delivery was even more adamant than the above quote suggests.

Now, there's still achance that Cheney would withdraw (or be pushed aside) for claimed health reasons. But I think the above quote shows that President Bush certainly isn't thinking that way. And since it's his decision, I'd say smart money right now is on Cheney staying on as VP for another 4 years, should Bush get re-elected.

2002-11-07T08:32:00.000-08:00

A few election thoughts

While the result seems dramatic right now, and the common pundit tendency to extrapolate for a generation from a single data point is making it out to be groundbreaking, I’m less convinced.

First, I think it was less a vote for Bush than it was a vote against the Democrats. As others have said, it’s hard to beat something with nothing, and the Democrats had nothing this election. They had no ideas except “grave concern” about Republican proposals, and you’re not going to win many elections when the best you can come up with is pointing at your opponent and saying “At least I’m not on of THEM!”

Josh Marshall is convinced that long term demographic trends foretell a future golden age of Democratic dominance, but demography means nothing if there’s no ideology there to back it up. The Democrats are badly in need of some leadership and ideas, and it’s not clear right now where it will come from. Daschle and Gephardt combined have roughly the charisma of a sea cucumber, and neither one of them has had an original idea in their life. The Clinton crowd was voted down by electors, and they weren’t that big on ideas either. While his moderation was important, I think Clinton’s political success was based as much on luck and charisma as it was on his politics. There are some things that can be picked up, but his gifts were individual, making him no better a model than Reagan, another president with phenomenal personal charisma. The main liberal groups that seems to be energized and have new ideas are the anti-globalization protesters and the Greens, and their ideas are really, really bad. And Gore? They might as well nominate Mondale to run again as Gore. I have some ideas, but no-one’s called to ask my advice.

So are the Democrats doomed? Not necessarily. Politics cycles quickly, and the Democratic position now looks no worse than the Republican position in 1992. And that seemed to work out pretty well for them, ultimately.

On the Republican side, I do think that a general comfort level with Republicans running the war effort helped them. I’m not sure it was the deciding issue, but it probably contributed. But it would be reaching too far to say this shows a real groundswell of support for a war with Iraq. And I don’t think the election indicates any clear support for their domestic agenda. The people weren’t voting in a referendum on privatizing social security or abolishing the estate tax. And as Vodkapundit noted, overeager pursuit of grand conservative policy objectives could seriously hurt the party. If the Republicans wanted to do one thing to help the Democratic party and re-energize them, it’s hard to think what would be more effective than bringing abortion back into political play.

But that might not be a serious possibility, since on the practical side, the effects are really limited. The democrats still have plenty of votes even with defections to filibuster in the Senate. So Bush needs to play smart, since right now he will, in voter’s eyes, have great responsibility for action without commensurate power to push legislation through. It will help with judges, but that’s a fringe issue for most, anyway.

So, while the talking heads in the media, before and after the election, anointed it “one of the most important of our lifetimes,” neither side should get to happy or despondant. After all, in just two more years it will be time once again for one of the most important elections of our lifetimes.

On a last peevish note, the CW seems to be that Bush made a huge gamble with his political capital by campaigning for Republican candidates. Really? If they had lost, would his position have been any worse than if he had not campaigned and they had lost? Is there any voter anywhere in the country who was wavering but has now lessened his support for Bush because he went out stumping? This whole argument seems idiotic to me. His campaigning was important and it helped the Republicans out a lot. But it was not a risk or a gamble—it was a no-lose proposition.

2002-10-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

Snipers, terrorism, and the Battle of the Atlantic

With the recent arrests of the two suspects, this article is bordering on irrelevancy, but this is my website and I like the idea so I’m going to write it anyway. If you need relevant, there has been widespread worrying that, even if the snipers weren’t terrorists, that terrorists and other copycats could pick up on the idea, making it a real ongoing national problem, rather than a limited local one. (I’m not convinced this is plausible, but that’s an article for another time.)

The sniper attacks, and terrorism in general, are in many ways similar to the German submarine offensive in the Atlantic during WWII. As with the sniper, the submarines would deploy, waiting in hiding for a defenseless merchant vessel to come along, which they would then attack and attempt to sink. As with the sniper, often the first warning of a submarine presence was the sighting of a launched torpedo or its impact. As with the sniper, the submarines were able to hide in a wide area, only coming in contact with allied forces when they made their attacks. And as with the sniper, once they had made their assault, the submarine’s goal was to escape undetected, while the allied forces would respond attempting to catch the U-boat and sink it.

These attacks, and the allied counter-attacks and defensive strategies, are usually referred to as the Battle of the Atlantic, and the Allied success in this area was a vital requirement for the war in North Africa and Europe. For the US to project power into Europe, to get troops and equipment to the theater, and to supply their own and allied forces, required control of the shipping lanes, or at least the reduction of attrition rates during shipping to a sustainable level.

The entire story of the Battle of the Atlantic, all the tactics and counter tactics, is quite interesting. For the mathematically inclined readers (don’t be scared—you only need to know probability and maybe Calculus I) I’d recommend this book, a declassified version of an after action report written by the US scientists who helped head up the anti-submarine warfare effort. There’s lots of fascinating information in there, as well as an idea of the ways that mathematical analysis can aid in military decision making.

Side note: Most people are aware of the Manhattan Project, and many know about the MIT Radiation Laboratory which helped refine and develop radar technologies during the war. But much less well known is the third major area of effort for US scientists during the war, the field of military operations research (OR.) In its broadest form, it was the application of mathematical and operational analyses to the specific problems faced by the military. The British pioneered the field in the years before the war, trying to figure out the best way to use the newly developed radar systems. The US applied these concepts in many fields, but particularly in anti-submarine warfare, forming ASWORG, the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group, which went through several incarnations but is still around today as the Center for Naval Analyses. (Look here and here for brief histories of military operations research.) In fact, this effort was so successful that it really spawned the entire new discipline of OR, and its sister field of systems analysis.

So sniper attacks have a real family resemblance to submarine attacks. Is there anything that ASW responses in WWII can tell us about effective countermeasures against snipers (and terrorism in general)? Well, sort of, if you’re willing to stretch it a little. There were three main tactics the allies employed to fight the submarine menace.

1. Stopping the supply—they bombed ports and German industrial centers trying to slow or prevent the manufacture of submarines or destroy them before they deployed.
2. Interdiction—for submarines entering the Atlantic from Germany’s Baltic ports, there were choke points that were small enough to be effectively patrolled, catching some of the submarines before they made it to the Atlantic.
3. Convoying, about which more below.

For sniper attacks, the first two tactics don’t really have that much to offer, although they are the methods of choice for combating terrorists. (Elucidation of this historical analogy is left to the reader.) Depending on the location, some police effort towards interdiction and early detection could bear dividends, but many areas have too many possible shooting sites for this to be very effective. Which leaves convoying.

Convoying was a simple yet extremely effective basic tactic for warding off submarine threats. Instead of having ships leave port in ones and twos, the Allies waited until they had a sizable number of ships, and then sent them out together. The most important thing that convoying allowed was the maximizing of defensive resources. The Allies only had a limited number of destroyers which could escort the convoys all the way across the Atlantic. There was a window in the central Atlantic that no land-based aircraft could reach, and in that window the convoys had only their destroyer escorts to protect them. (It’s wasn’t until later in the war, when the Battle of the Atlantic had already largely been won, that the Allies had enough small carriers—modified cargo ships that could carry a half-dozen aircraft for convoy protection—that integral air cover was available in the Atlantic.)

Escorts did not serve in a purely defensive role, however. To the contrary, their main purpose was not so much to prevent a submarine attack—the convoys were too large and the escorts too few to accomplish that task—as to make such an attack as dangerous as possible. (Again, the later innovation of escort carriers changed the balance here, as planes can search a large enough area to have a good chance of catching a submarine before it attacked.)

The goal was to have such a rapid and effective response by escorting warships that they could sink the attacking submarine. They used some technological advances to achieve this—namely sonar to locate submarines and the “hedgehog” depth charge launcher to sink a submarine if you did find it. (The hedgehog was a multi-charge launcher that would shoot a salvo of depth charges in a pattern. This spread of charges made a kill much more likely than an individual shot. One of the problems discussed in the OR book mentioned earlier was what pattern to use to ensure the maximum probability of kill against a target whose exact location was unknown.)

So, how does this translate to the sniper situation? Obviously, a complete convoy system for everyday life is impossible, and there’s not enough police presence to “escort” all such convoys even if it weren’t. However, the basic principle—that there’s safety in numbers—still holds. One reason the DC sniper was able to remain at large for so long was that he chose mostly isolated locations for his attacks. More people in the vicinity makes it more likely that there will be a good witness to the shooting, and also makes a response quicker. If someone is right there to call 9-11, the police can respond more quickly to try and catch them.

As with the submarine case, the most critical parameter is the response time. The initial shot establishes a rough position, but the longer you wait after the shot, the great the area of uncertainty is. If you wait too long, there’s no way to catch the sub (or sniper); you need to get a response force on the scene while the enemy is still in the area. The submarine had the advantage of being able to hide underwater; the sniper has the advantage of being able to “hide in plain sight,” mixed in with the rest of the traffic.

The ultimate goal, as with submarines, the best counter-strategy is to make the attack as dangerous as possible. Make escape more difficult, which means being aware so you can be a good witness and help to catch them. If you can swing the odds, then sniper will only be able to get away with one or two shootings, rather than 13. (The ultimate extension of this idea would be to have enough armed civilians that any group of people could, on its own, take immediate action against a sniper.)

2002-10-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

A little wild speculation

Everyone else is putting forth their theories on the DC sniper, so why not me? Like an LA TV station jumping to the latest car chase, I’ll pile on the story of the hour, to increase ratings during the all important sweeps week.

So, what do the events of the weekend—another shooting near Richmond, and a mysterious message left there—tell us? First, from the locations of the shootings, it seems to me more and more likely that the sniper is a resident of Northern Virginia, rather than suburban Maryland. While the first shootings took place in Montgomery county, the two far away shootings, designed either to muddy the waters for investigators or strike outside the police dragnet, both took place in Virginia—first in Fredericksburg and second in Ashland. A Maryland based sniper, looking to stretch the police, would be more likely to strike up in Maryland or near Baltimore, it seems to me. Striking another major urban area would also increase the total terror sown, so to the extent frightening people gets this guy off, the fact that he hasn’t attacked near Baltimore could be telling. Whatever the reason, the “center of mass” of the shootings is definitely down in Virginia now, rather than up in Maryland.

Further evidence of the Northern Virginia connection comes from the fact that the two most recent shootings, which were both at night, took place in Virginia. A shooter might be less likely to stray really far from his home for night-time shootings, since the additional hour or more of travel time would be significant. A last, more tenuous link to Northern Virginia is the location of Seven Corners. That is an extremely confusing intersection—as the name says, there are 7 roads in and out of the area. If you haven’t driven through the intersection 3 or 4 times, your chances of actually ending up on the road you want to be on, going the way you want, are not that high. And more broadly, as others have noted, the road system in Northern Virginia is not that easy to follow for a non-native. Unless you’ve lived here for a while, it’s very easy to get lost, something the killer would presumably like to avoid. My wild guess is that the killer was up in Montgomery County for his job, and went on the first shooting spree, which seemed a little more haphazard and less planned out than the more recent attacks. Now, more worried about getting caught, he’s planning things better and sticking to places he knows.

Also worth noting is that the while the Ashland shooting breaks the weekend pattern, it doesn’t refute the retail worker (or other weekend worker) theory. Since it took place late at night, the shooter would have had plenty of time to get there after a full day of work.

Now, on to the mysterious message with a phone number that Chief Moose alluded to in his latest press conference. There are three possibilities for who left the message.

1. It was left by the shooter or an accomplice
2. It was left by a witness who has some info
3. It was left by an unrelated person who wants to jerk the police around

In reverse order, the third option seems unlikely, for a number of reasons. First, the police presumably rapidly closed off the area, so access would be limited. So someone would have had to be right there and immediately made a spur of the moment decision to write a fake note for the police. It also couldn’t have been premeditated, since no-one in Ashland would have suspected the sniper would strike there. Add in the prosecution of the false witness at the Home Depot, and I think this option can be ruled out.

Option 2 also seems unlikely. If a witness wanted to give info to the police, this seems like a very strange way to do it. There’s the 24 hour tip line if you want to be anonymous, and if not, why not just walk up to one of the 100 police officers on the scene that night rather than leaving a note?

That leaves either the killer or an accomplice. If the killer left the note, he presumably wants to taunt the police. The phone number seems an odd touch, though. Why would the killer actually want to directly talk to the police? His actions and any notes would seem to be sufficient taunting. But it is a possibility.

That leaves the last, and most intriguing possibility, that an accomplice of the killer left the note. This fits what little we know. The accomplice could either fear for his own life if he made any more explicit moves towards the police on the scene or at a roadblock. He might very well want to communicate anonymously, too, in order to arrange some sort of a plea bargain. He might want a deal in place before he turned himself in, rather than just taking the plunge and trusting the court system to behave kindly towards him.

It’s very possible that an accomplice could, at this point, be getting cold feet and figure it’s only a matter of time until they get caught. So better to arrange the capture to your own advantage, rather than dying in a shootout or getting sent to the chair. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the killer was actually caught in one of the roadblocks around the Home Depot, but made it through, which could put some fear into either he or his accomplice or both. (Which would also explain the long delay until the latest shooting, and the remote location.) Unless the police were doing a complete, thorough search of every single car they let pass, it’s hard to see what good a roadblock could do. As long as the killer didn’t leave his rifle in plain view in the backseat, he’d be fine. Because if there’s one thing we can conclude with some confidence, it’s that the killer is not now driving a white van or truck, if he ever was.

2002-10-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

Embracing Defeat

That’s the name of an excellent book on the American occupation of Japan after World War II. Given the talk of a potential American occupation of Iraq, and the many analogies that are drawn to our experiences in Japan and Germany, I think the book is very timely. It’s good enough to be of interest at any time (It won the Pulitzer Prize last year, although that’s not always a guarantee of top quality), but is particularly relevant now, and I’d highly recommend it to everyone.

I bought it and read it after the September 11 attacks, anticipating an American occupation of Afghanistan, although the more I read about both countries, the less relevant I though the book was. And as events have turned out, the US has had a relatively hands-off approach in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. But Iraq looks to be different, and the book can give some idea of the problems that are likely to face any occupation, and the magnitude of the difficulties it would face.

Issues like the unavoidable paradox of trying to impose democracy through military force and fiat, for example. “You’re going to think for and govern yourself! And you better think for yourself the way I tell you to, or I’m going to censor your newspaper!” These inevitable tensions, as well as culture shock between occupying forces and the local population. The interplay between resentment, admiration, and envy. There are a lot of general features that would be present in any occupation that are here described in the particular case of postwar Japan.

There are certainly many significant differences between the case of Iraq and that of Japan, among them the existence of the emperor and a civil service that the US could take over and govern through, which made the US job both easier and less fruitful. But read the book and judge for yourself.

A word of caution—the book is not a narrative history. Rather, it is a sociological analysis. It’s organized by topic, rather than following the thread of events through time. I don’t think the book could be done any other way, and you don’t need to know the period in great detail to follow the book, but that could be off-putting for some readers. But if you’re curious about the possibilities of a US occupation of Iraq: what it might look like, the problems it might face, the success it might have, Embracing Defeat by John Dover is an excellent place to start.

2002-10-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

North Korean Nukes

There has been a lot of speculation about the recent announcement of North Korea’s ongoing nuclear program, but I think a lot of it is missing the point. Instapundit links to this piece by tacitus, which considers the possibility of military action. Instapundit's post, on the other hand, is similar a posts by Vodkapundit and a couple of others that present this announcement as a victory for Bush and his tough foreign policy. They ask why North Korea announced this now, and answer that North Korea has become scared by the Bush doctrine and the imminent invasion of Iraq, and don’t want to end up suffering the same fate.

I think these interpretations are badly flawed, for a couple of reasons. First, North Korea didn’t, out of the blue, make a public announcement that they had a nuclear program. They didn’t really come clean, of their own accord. What happened was that the American negotiator presented clear evidence that they were pursuing a Uranium enrichment program. At first they denied it, and then admitted privately to the US diplomats that, yes, you are right. The recent public announcement was not by the North Koreans, it was by the Bush Administration, revealing what the North Koreans told us in private.

So it wasn’t a confession. It was more an admission after getting caught in the act. North Korea had been pursuing this program in secret for several years, presumably trying to develop a weapon before the US became aware of it. But they also knew there was a chance the US would discover their efforts. And once that happened, there was no point denying it, so they didn’t.

Second, there is no chance the US will invade North Korea. They may deserve their spot on the axis of evil, rather than just being put there for affirmative action reasons, and it may be the case that we’d like to invade if we could. But we can’t, or at least doing so would require paying an unacceptable cost, so those saying “first we squash Iraq, then it’s North Korea's turn” need a reality check.

Why won’t we attack? Well, there are several very important differences between North Korea and Afghanistan or Iraq. The most important is the existence of South Korea, sitting right there over the border from the North. North Korea essentially holds millions of South Koreans hostage. If we start bombing them, they’ll start shelling Seoul, or launching missiles at Japan. Afghanistan was completely impotent to strike at US friendly targets, and Iraq has a minimal capability to do so. North Korea can easily inflict thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties on South Korea. They can do more than just sit around absorbing punishment, waiting for some US soldiers to attack—they can counter-attack the South.

Second, they have a powerful big brother in China. They are a Chinese client state and, as messed up as the country is, it’s still a real chit in international relations for the Chinese. They like having this crazy little brother that only they can control; it gives them power in the region. They would be a lot more opposed to an invasion of North Korea than anyone is to an invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. And they’re an important enough country that we need to take their desires under consideration, especially in their sphere of influence. And you always tread softly when it comes to conflicts with nuclear states.

Finally, the geography and fortifications of the Korean peninsula make it just about the worst place in the world to attempt to fight an offensive war. First, the country is very mountainous, which channelizes troop advancements along a few north-south roads. We can attack Iraq across an entire desert, from any of 4 directions. We can attack North Korea from 1 direction, along only a few roads. For Civil War buffs, think Burnside Bridge at Antietam.

But it’s even worse than that. Since the truce ending the Korean War, both sides have been spending the last 50 years fortifying their country. Artillery bunkers built into the sides of hills and caves, booby trapped roads and bridges, pre-targeted rockets and artillery, supply depots, marshalling points, minefields, airfields, machine gun nests and bunkers, etc. Everything that man can do to make a position difficult to attack has been done by the two Koreas.

And all this isn’t even considering the fact that North Korea may have already developed weapons of mass destruction, and unlike Iraq they have no shortage of targets to use them on if they feel threatened. So while they may talk about the military option, rest assured it isn’t going to happen, and wouldn't happen even if we weren't weren't focused on Iraq. Instead, diplomatic and economic approaches will be tried. They may or may not work, but you have to play the hand you’ve been dealt, and our hand in the North Korean game just isn’t that strong.

2002-10-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

Final shot, in the other direction

I've received several e-mail critiques of my posts on ballistic fingerprinting, which together have pretty much changed my mind. I now no longer think that the program would be worth the cost and effort it would involve. What has changed my mind?

First, Rob Lyman and another reader, Andy, clarified that the amount of scratching needed to alter a guns ballistic fingerprint beyong recognition is so little that the gun could be altered with no degradation to its performance. Andy writes:

Gun barrel dimensions are accurate to at best 0.001 inches and most
are far less precise. The markings are caused by
flaws that are 20-100x smaller.

So, one could easily remove 2-5x as much material as would be required to change
the markings without even taking a very good gun
out of "as good as new" condition.

That's a key point, and since the features are that much smaller, it wouldn't require any serious machining to alter the marking. (The objection that gun hobbyists can build a gun or re-bore their barrels is unconvincing to me, since it seems like most criminals would have neither the equipment nor the inclination to do much re-machining of their guns.) But you really could do it with a file or some sandpaper--no lathes or drill presses required. Lyman also mentions that the fingerprint left on the brass is relatively easy to alter too, as well as the important fact that two guns manufactured close together in time at the same factory will have very similar "fingerprints." They diverge when used over time.

This points up the problem of false positives, which would grow more severe with a larger database. The possibility of coincidence between bullets found at the crime scene and the gun of a suspect captured via other means is relativeley small. But if you just have the ballistic evidence, together with a very large database to look at, the false positive problem goes way up. So the ballistic fingerprints are less like DNA or fingerprint evidence and more like chips of car paint found at the scene. So it's most useful when used in just the way it is now--IDing the guns used in crimes after the fact, and linking different crimes together

This divergence over time is another potential objection to the system which has been raised. I'm still not sure how serious of a problem this is, but given the small feature sizes on the barrel, they could very easily alter on a time scale of a few years of use rather than a few decades.

And speaking of cars, both Stephen Commiskey and a fourth reader, David, point out that you actually don't have to register cars to own one, you just have to register them if you want to drive them on public roads. So the analogy I made was incorrect. When I'm wrong, apparently, I'm really wrong. David also seconded (thirded?) the points about the relative ease of modifying a gun's fingerprints, also pointing out that a national ID program would be a strong incentive for such modifications, while the spotty system in place now makes it less of an issue.

The final objection is the old standby that much of the crime in the country is committed with stolen or smuggled guns. But that, to me, is an argument to crack down more on gun smuggling and theft, rather than to throw up your hands and give up worrying about any guns at all, legal or illegal. Just as the argument that a suitcase bomb is possible does not, in and of itself, make a ballistic missle defense program a bad idea. If your windows are open to let a thief in, the correct response is not to leave the front door unlocked as well, but to lock the front door and close and lock the window as well.

On a final note, Vodkapundit linked to my original post and there are several comments there also criticizing the idea of ballistic fingerprinting, if you want more.

2002-10-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Kicking them while they’re down

Since September 11th, al Qaeda and other terror organizations have almost certainly been trying their hardest to carry off additional attacks against the US, but have been unsuccessful. Johnny Walker reported in interrogations than there were two successive waves of attacks planned to follow on the September 11 assault, but the vigorous US counterattack, combined with a stronger and more attentive US defense, have prevented any more major attacks, at least until now.

But, if the recent attacks, along with the synagogue bombing in North Africa, can be extrapolated to a trend, al Qaeda may, at least in part, be adjusting their strategy to attack lower value but less well defended targets. And unfortunately, the defenses are lowest in those countries that are poor, and so can’t afford the police and intelligence forces to prevent them. And not only are these countries the least well defended, they are also those that can least afford the cost of a terrorist attack.

It’s likely that the attack in Bali will eviscerate the tourist industry there and cause severe economic damage to Bali and to Indonesia in general. And if this strategy become more widespread, it will end up inflicting the worst damage on precisely those who are already suffering the most—those in the poor and developing world. There are Western interests there, which can be attacked away from the defenses of the continental US, but the real damage that will end up being done is to those host countries themselves.

Australia can survive with little adjustment without Bali; unfortunately the converse is not true—Bali cannot survive easily without Australians. As with AIDS in Africa, those hardest hit by calamity are, unfortunately, often those who were already the most miserable.

Update: Two bombs have exploded in the Phillipines, killing 6 and wounding 144.

2002-10-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

Second Volley

As I said, guns aren’t really a major issue for me, but Instapundit has another post at least partially responding to my last one, which deserves a reply. In addition to seconding the concerns about the usefulness of ballistic fingerprinting, he thinks that I was too dismissive of the fears of confiscation.

Perhaps--I was certainly too glib. But on the whole, I'm unconvinced. While it's true that registration would be a logical precursor to confiscation, I don't see that it's a necessary or even likely outcome. To me, registration is no more likely (and in fact, less likely) to lead to the confiscation of private guns than a law against partial birth abortions is to lead to the outlawing of all abortions. (Although I’m curious about Instapundit’s quote that “In fact, gun registration has consistently led to confiscation.” In the US, or in other countries? If it’s other countries, then it seems like the US Constitution makes those a very imperfect parallel.)

But in both the gun and the abortion cases, I think the slippery slope argument is used too easily, attempting to tar moderate measures with the taint of extreme actions. (A necessary line of argument for advocacy groups, though, since a majority in both cases support some limitations, while opposing outright bans.) Slippery slope arguments aren't always wrong, but taken to the extreme they render almost any action at all unacceptable, since most things taken to the extreme become evils. So they can be used to attack almost any position, which is one of the reasons I'm highly skeptical of them.

In this case, I don't think the slippery slope is all that steep, or that slippery. The political climate is not such that widespread confiscation could even be conceivable, and if it changed enough so that guns could be outlawed (ignoring the Constitution, for now), Congress would have no problem passing a registration law long before it got to that point.

To put it another way, I don’t think the passing of these restrictions now would significantly increase the chance of future, more severe restrictions being passed later. Nor is the current situation a clear and logical “breakpoint,” where adding a restriction becomes a change of kind rather than of degree. With neither of these two conditions met, I don’t think the slippery slope argument really holds water, so to speak.

2002-10-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

Returning target

Well, I am back from a wonderful honeymoon in Italy, and while I didn’t want to leave, it wasn’t because I expected to come home to a shooting range. But that’s the situation here in Northern Virginia. I don’t have much to add to the excellent coverage that other bloggers like Jim Henley have had of the ongoing case. At this point, my speculation is worth just as much as anyone else’s, which is to say not too much.

However, I’m a bit surprised that the related issue of ballistic fingerprinting has gotten so little attention in the blogosphere (although admittedly I’ve been trying to catch up and very well might have missed some discussions on it.) The only reference I saw was one or two dismissive comments on Instapundit.

Unfortunately, there seems to be remarkably little on the issue out there. The BATF which runs a national database to assist police forces has a pretty web page, but there’s little of substance there. A perfunctory search on the NRA webpage turned up no info on the technology at all. So, at the risk of venturing into an area where there are many others more knowledgeable than I, let me fire this first salvo out and see if the experts will come out of the webwork to clear things up for me.

Ballistic fingerprinting is a way to match up a bullet fired from a gun and/or the spent casing with the gun that fired it, based on distinctive marks that the gun makes on the bullet and casing. Pretty simple, in theory. This is the technology that has allowed the police in the DC area to definitively link all the sniper shootings together, as they all used the same gun. The idea behind a national ballistic registry is that all new guns should have a test bullet fired and the characteristics measured, so that, if the gun is later used in a crime, that gun can be identified and then tracked. Seems simple enough to me, and a common-sense proposal. Yet the President and, presumably, most gun-rights supporters oppose the idea. Why?

Ari Fleischer’s Oct. 15 briefing gives two main reasons, if you can pull them out from the evasions and irrelevant babbling that are any press secretary’s stock in trade:

Q There's a policy issue that emerges from the sniper attacks, and that's some gun control advocates are calling for a national ballistic fingerprinting system where every gun, before it was sold, would be test-fired, the ballistic fingerprint would be entered into a database, and law enforcement like Montgomery County and Northern Virginia and federal law enforcement could call on that. Does the President support that?

MR. FLEISCHER: There are a variety of technical issues involving the reliability and the accuracy of that program that bear looking into, and those issues will be explored. That would also, of course, involve an act of Congress and a determination of the will of Congress to make that happen.
But there are a series of steps that the President has taken that he believes can be very helpful and should be helpful on the federal level, principally involving giving local law enforcement communities and the prosecutors enhanced resources and more prosecutors so they can more quickly bring people who commit crimes with guns to account, hold them accountable, bring them to justice and try them before a court of law.

Q But on this issue, on ballistic evidence, the President has doubts about its reliability and accuracy?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, there are experts who have questions that have been raised about its accuracy and reliability. And those questions are rather -- or those issues are rather straightforward. And that involves, over time, whether or not this tracing technology remains accurate. The more a gun is used, the less accurate the tracing can become. The ability of somebody who obviously is in the business of committing crimes, and therefore wants to figure out ways to protect his ability to commit a crime without being caught, to alter the barrel of a gun -- such things as a simple nail file put down the barrel of a gun can alter the amount of tracing that's on a bullet, and therefore change the accuracy of the fingerprinting, very unlike any fingerprinting of human beings. A nail file cannot alter the fingerprint of a human. A nail file can alter the fingerprinting of a weapon.

Q These are arguments generally raised by defense lawyers. Prosecutors rely on this evidence. And I went to the ATF website today, after you mentioned these concerns the President has about reliability and accuracy, and the AFT, on its website for the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, where guns that have been used in crimes are finger-printed, says, as each fingerprint is different, a firearm leaves unique, identifiable characteristics on expelled ammunition. Is the ATF wrong?

MR. FLEISCHER: If you keep reading on the same webpage, I think you left something out. That same webpage continues to say, though no investigative tool is perfect or will be effective in every situation, the availability of an open case file of many thousands of exhibits searchable in minutes instead of lifetimes that would be required for an entirely manual search provides invaluable information. And that's what it does, it provides information that is crime specific.

Q About guns that have been used in crimes. So guns that commit crimes are in this database, but the President doesn't want all guns in that database.

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, again, that gets into the same issue as I got into with fingerprints. There is an issue about fingerprints, of course, as a very effective way to catch people who engage in robbery or theft. Is that to say that every citizen in the United States should be finger-printed in order to catch robbers and thieves. And these same issues are raised here. The President does believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own weapons.

Q Fair enough, so it's about liberty and privacy.

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, it's also about the other issues I raised, in terms of accuracy and reliability. These are all various factors of why this is not a simple solution or a simple matter. And certainly, in the case of the sniper, the real issue is values. And that's what is at stake here. The real issue is values. These are the acts of a depraved killer, who has broken and will continue to break laws. And so the question is not new laws; the question is the actions here represent the values in our society.
Basically, the President’s objection boils down to the concerns that (a)—the technology is unreliable, that you can modify a gun barrel; (b)—that doing so is an invasion of privacy. Instapundit referenced a similar argument to (b), absent the mind-numbingly idiotic “fingerprinting everyone in the US” analogy, deriding the ballistic fingerprinting idea as a backdoor way to national gun registry. Well, that isn’t really an argument for me, since I’m all for a front door gun registry, and in fact am appalled that such a system doesn’t already exist. The privacy concerns here seem to me to be minimal. Apart from the paranoid fantasies of imminent tyranny starting with national gun seizures, a national gun registry will be no more of an invasion of privacy than registering your car, which is already required.

The first objection is potentially more serious, but as I said, I was unable to find any substantive discussion of the issue. The claim is that filing down your gun barrel will change its fingerprint. OK, but will it make it unrecognizable? (A similar question applies to the gradual alteration of the ballistic fingerprint over time.) My guess is that messing with the inside of the barrel would be more like writing on top of existing text—you’d need to do a lot of scratching before the initial pattern was no longer recognizable. And will doing this much damage to the inside of the gun barrel degrade the weapon’s performance? If it makes the weapon less useful, then at least there’s some net gain to it.

This objection also assumes that criminals will be smart enough to do this. They aren’t smart enough to do it now, with guns they’ve used in a crime, so what makes people think they will do so in the future? Criminals can also wear gloves to prevent them from leaving fingerprints, but they don't all do that either.

It seems to me that the only downside to the proposal would be its cost—is the cost of fingerprinting each gun worth the benefit it would have in crimefighting? That I’m not sure of. But the BATF already has a database system set up, so there’s little start-up cost. And the marginal cost for checking each gun shouldn’t be more than a few dollars, which could either be passed on to the purchaser as an indirect gun tax, or directly funded out of the existing FBI or other budget.

Update: I should have thought to check Volokh for information on a gun-related issue. He links (via Clayton Cramer) to a California DoJ study about the issue which came to apessimistic conclusion, based on the difficulty with multiple positives. Basically, the computer sorting would produce so many possible matches, which then have to be sorted by hand, that a large database would become practically useless for finding a true match. (On a blast from the past side note, one of the listed major contributors to the study was the LAPD's own Dennis Fung, everyone's favorite criminologist.)

This could indeed be a deal-killer for the proposal, although it should be pointed out that the study, by my reading, was looking at shell casings rather than bullets, both of which can be "fingerprinted." It's also not clear whether this is a really tough problem or just due to poor software pattern recognition programs. Pattern recognition software is increasing in capability by leaps and bounds--something that doesn't work today could easily be practical in a year or two.

But the real bottom line is whether investing in a ballistics database is cost-effective. How much would it cost, and how much would it help? If I didn't think they'd already made up their mind and were just stalling for time, I'd say the new Presidential proposal to study the issue is the correct step. My guess, though, is that the "study" has predetermined conclusions, and the facts will be marshalled to support those known conclusions. But without some real analysis of the issue, right now what you've got are two sides with vague concerns, each of which can make a plausible case either for or against a database. Which tells you nothing except what their preconceived notions were.

2002-09-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

Time for a little R&R

As a note to my regular reader, I am leaving today for a vacation. A two week honeymoon in Italy, to be exact. And if you think I'm going to have the gondolier drop us off at the Internet Cafe Venizia, you're crazy. I'll return to my regular posting (or as regular as it gets) on the 15th or thereabouts. Ciao, and try not to start a war while we're gone.

2002-09-27T06:13:00.000-07:00

More than one way to skin a cat

There was a lot of good information flying around yesterday in the discussion of GPS jamming.One of the more interesting links was to a flight test of the DAMASK system, as a potential upgrade to the JDAM guidance suite. Here's the link to that report (found by Donald Sensing.)

Now, the article doesn't come right out and explain how it works, but this paragraph gives a clue:

DAMASK has also benefited from work performed for the Air Weaponry Technology Program. "Ten years ago in a Category 6.2 program we were looking at template matching as a means for achieving precision accuracy," notes engineer Mike Wirtz. "The target-template concept is an example of an early investment where the payoff doesn't show up for a while, but when it does it's well worth it." In DAMASK's case, the target template can be generated from synthetic aperture radar, photo reconnaissance aircraft, or a number of other sensor/platform options.

So, DAMASK uses what they're calling a template matching. What's that mean in English? Basically, it means that instead of simply flying to a fixed coordinate, the DAMASK seeker is fed a specific target profile--in this case generated either from a photo or from radar information. Then, the seeker looks around in the target area for something matching that profile, and if it sees something, it homes in on it and blows it up.

It's pretty much like something out of a Road Runner cartoon. The Coyote gets his Acme killer robot and shows it a picture of the road runner, and then it flies off looking for the varmint. Only in this case, the Air Force shows their killer robot a picture of a radar dish, or a missile launcher, and off it goes.

With this particular system, you still need to get the bomb (and seeker) into the general target vicinity--it needs to be close enough for the DAMASK system to see the target it's looking for in order for it to work. So the GPS/INS guidance system still has a role to play, getting the bomb inside the seeker radius. But a template based system has tremendous possibilities, and similar technologies are likely to be the next big thing in armament technology (if they're not already the current big thing and we just don't know about it yet.)

Instead of having to have UAVs out looking for targets, or recon teams radioing back coordinates, you just launch out a few hundred drones with instructions to "kill enemy tanks." And you give them each a picture of a tank, and they fly off to go look for something to kill. Add a radio to the hunter-seeker drone and it becomes a simple UAV, sending back target reports whenever it sees something, even if it's not high value enough for the drone to attack.

I'd heard bits of pieces about this sort of technology a few years ago, but I thought it was still years away from realization. But if they actually had a flight test, that means it's gotten to the point where they have working prototypes, which is pretty far along the development cycle. And what's most stunning about the report is that the advertised price for DAMASK is only $12,000 apiece, which is cheap enough to buy and install them in large quantities. At that price, it's not an exotic boutique type weapon, it's an everyday drop it whenever you feel like it weapon.

So if these technologies are that far along, the whole GPS jamming discussion could go the way of the dinosaur much sooner than the 15-20 years I was conservatively estimating in my last post. (Although there will probably still be some applications where you'd like to fly to a specific location. Especially if you're going to be using it close to friendlies. Having killer drones flying around is nice 100 miles behind enemy lines. It's a little less desirable if your own tanks end up in its sights. Which brings us back to the road runner cartoon...)

2002-09-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

GPS Jamming, Part II

OK, the previous post gave a quick overview of GPS jamming and why the report of the cheap Russian jamming unit isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. But the jamming of GPS signals is still a real concern. Iraq may or may not have the capability to really deny service over a wide area, but other combatants might, and Saddam might be able to do it over a more limited area, for example in Baghdad. Denying precision GPS bomb strikes in the city would make any combat there considerably more bloody, especially for the civilians trapped in the building next to the ones we’re aiming at.

So, how much of a concern is it in Iraq, and what can the military do about it there and in general? As Katzman notes in his article, it would make things a bit more difficult, but in the first Gulf War we fought with relatively few precision guided munitions and came out OK. So we could do it again. Precision guided bombs allow you to minimize collateral damage and also allow you to take out a target with fewer bombs. Jamming the GPS signal would simply mean more collateral damage and a slower degradation of Iraq’s military capabilities, as 3 or 4 airstrikes were needed to take out a bridge rather than just one.

A couple of caveats, though. GPS guided munitions are not the only precision weapons in the US arsenal. Laser guided bombs are also very precise, and they can’t be jammed the way GPS signals can. GPS bombs are preferable because they’re much cheaper and don’t require the pilot or a ground unit to get close enough to “paint” the target with the laser illuminator, but they are still a viable option.

Second, no US bombs or missiles rely solely on GPS guidance. Instead, they use a combination of GPS and inertial guidance---GPS/INS systems, as described here. Inertial systems work by measuring the accelerations that the bomb or missile undergoes. If you know the initial position and also know all the accelerations that you’ve undergone, you can determine the current position. Old ICBM’s used inertial guidance systems to guide them to their targets.

The problem with inertial systems is that they have a drift to them. The longer they stay on, the less accurate they are. When used in combination with a GPS receiver, though, you can have the two systems communicate and have the GPS system’s coordinates fed back into the INS system to compensate for this drift. Now, if the GPS signal is suddenly jammed, the missile or bomb will then begin guiding itself solely by the INS system. It won’t be quite as accurate, but it won’t suddenly veer wildly off course, either. If the INS system is good enough, it could fly quite a while and still hit close to the target coordinates.

This is why spoofing, while orders of magnitude more difficult than simple jamming, is so much more effective if you can pull it off. A jammed missile will still hit near its target. But if you a spoof a missile, you can send it anywhere you want to have it blow up.

Like everything, though, the better the INS, the more expensive it is. So guidance systems involve a tradeoff between jammed performance and cost. Right now, GPS guidance is cheaper than INS guidance, but INS performance is improving all the time. Right now good INS systems use ring laser gyros which are difficult to make and expensive. But continuing advances in micro-mechanical (MEMS) semiconductor-based gyroscopes will eventually make them good enough and cheap enough that they will supercede GPS and the whole jamming issue will no longer be a concern. To put it another way, our vulnerability right now is a window, one which is likely to close in the next 15-20 years.(This is, of course, assuming that pattern recognition software doesn't take over for bomb guidance first.)

You can also design a receiver to be more resistant to jamming. The press report previously linked to was hyping a Lockheed Martin developed jam-resistant receiver. I'm sure there are lots of fancy ways to do this, which even if I knew I couldn’t say anything about. But one simple method is to use an antenna that looks up rather than in all directions. The GPS signal is coming from satellites up in the sky, while the jammers are, presumably, located on the ground. So if you make a directional antenna that receives signals from above more strongly than signals from below, it will be more difficult to jam.

Two final notes, concerning specific comments in Katzman’s article. First, he mentions that the civilian GPS signal is used to track and acquire the military signal. This used to be true, but new GPS receivers can acquire the military signal directly. Second, he was concerned with whether other contractors had jam-resistant antennas like Lockheed, and if not whether they could use the Lockheed design. The answer to the first question is definitely yes. They might not work as well, or they might work better, but every contractor is aware of the problem and is pursuing solutions. But if one design was head and shoulders above the others, the military could probably license that technology and use it in systems for which Lockheed Martin was not the primary contractor. The defense contractors are very competitive, but they also cooperate on a lot of projects, so this sort of subcontracting would not be that unusual.

Final note: As I've said, I'm no expert in this field, so if I got anything wrong or missed any important points, please drop me a line and let me know so I can correct it.

2002-09-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

GPS Jamming, Part I

Joe Katzman (link found via Instapundit) at the Winds of Change posts this article worrying about the potential for jamming of the GPS-guided bombs the US is coming to rely on more and more, degrading our military capabilities significantly. I’m no expert, and in fact know just enough about the issue to realize my limitations and be wary of making overbold pronouncements, but I think I can add a little to the discussion.

First, the military is definitely aware of the potential problems of GPS jamming. There are plenty of smart procurement managers and defense industry engineers working on the problem. This doesn’t guarantee a solution, but whatever capability Saddam (or anyone else) has is unlikely to come as a surprise to military planners.

Katzman links to this old report of a cheap Russian jamming module, with the quoted ability to jam GPS at ranges of up to 125 miles, which sounds pretty bad. He then references this press release from Lockheed Martin about an upgraded, jamming resistant GPS module that they are selling. At the bottom of the article is the following quote:

Russia's Aviaconversia currently markets a 4-watt GPS jammer weighing about 19 pounds but capable of denying GPS reception for about 125 miles, Defense Daily reports. A 1-watt jammer can disrupt GPS signal acquisition for more than 60 miles. A 1-kilowatt jammer can completely disable military GPS receivers for about 50 miles.

An attentive reader will at this point be a bit confused. How can a 4-watt system have a range of 125 miles, but a 1 kilowatt system only has a range of 50 miles? The answer is that the first system’s numbers are for jamming civilian GPS signals, while the second is jamming military systems. The military GPS signal is designed to be more difficult to jam, and hence requires a much higher power to jam. Why is this so? A quick aside now in how jamming works (or can work.)

Any signal is transmitted at a particular wavelength, or range of wavelengths. And the signal will have a certain robustness—there is a certain signal to noise ratio above which the signal can be read and below which it can’t. (Noise in this sense is just a random background.) A conventional jammer works by just putting out a lot of noise—it raises the floor, attempting to put out so much noise power that it overwhelms the signal power you’re trying to read. Now, a power source gets weaker the farther you are from the antenna (and it goes down as one over the square of the distance), which is why a certain power has a maximum jamming range. The more power your jammer has, the longer its effective jamming range.

A second, more sophisticated form of GPS interference is spoofing. You set up a transmitter that pretends it’s a GPS satellite, and sends out bogus information that will confuse the guidance system into thinking its position is somewhere other than where it is. Regular jamming is kind of like scribbling all over a roadmap so a driver can’t read it. Spoofing would be giving him a roadmap with the wrong roads on it, so where he thinks he’s going isn’t where he really is going.

Anyway, there are a couple of different systemic ways to improve your resistance to regular jamming of the first type. One is simply to have a stronger signal. If your signal is twice as strong, there will need to be twice as much jamming noise to bring it below the lower threshold signal to noise ratio. A second way is to design a signal structure that has a lower threshold signal to noise ratio. Then, the same power signal can be read with more noise present. (I don’t know much about this—you’d have to find an electrical engineer who knows about signal processing.) And a final way is to move your signal around across a range of wavelengths, so that a jammer has to jam a larger portion of the frequency spectrum in order to effectively jam the signal, which requires more power. This can be done passively, automatically. Or it can be done actively—if the signal is suddenly jammed, you jump to another wavelength to try and avoid the jamming.

All of these techniques can raise the effective power needed to jam a signal. I don’t know if military GPS uses all of these, but some combination of them or some other technique I’m not aware of could be used to make the military GPS signal more resistant to jamming. So instead of a 20 pound, 4 watt system that can jam for 125 miles, you end up with a kilowatt system that can only jam military GPS for 50 miles. And it takes pretty good sized equipment to generate a kilowatt. For comparison, the largest radio stations in the US are 50 kilowatts, so 1 kilowatt is on the same order as a small town radio station. If you assume the power/weight ratio holds for scaleup, a 1 kilowatt system would weigh not 19 pounds, but 4750 pounds. It’s a large truck instead of a backpack, and costs a lot more than a few thousand dollars.

Instapundit asks if encryption could make the signal more jam-resistant. I don’t think so, but encryption does prevent spoofing—having a third party send out a false signal.

To be continued in part II: How does the military deal with jamming, and will it matter?

2002-09-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

Maybe we should check the campaign contributors list

If you vote for Republicans in this fall's elections, the terrorists will have won.

Update: Surprise, the blogger archive link seems to be pointing to the wrong place. Just go to the front page and scroll down. It's the post from Wednesday Sep 25 at 11:39 PM

2002-09-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

Great argument from TRB on deterrence

The TRB column in the New Republic had this to say about deterring Iraq:

Above all, it means clearly confronting the most serious critique of the administration's preemption doctrine: that Saddam can be deterred. The Bush administration has not adequately explained that Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. And it hasn't adequately explained that while deterrence "worked" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, there's no guarantee it would have continued to work had the USSR endured for another 50 years. (Even during the cold war, after all, there were some very close calls.) The United States relied on deterrence against the Soviet Union not because deterrence was foolproof but because we had no other choice: We could never have preemptively attacked the USSR; the costs would simply have been too great. But the United States can preemptively attack Iraq. Deterrence is no longer our only option, and it isn't our safest one.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as they say on the shady radio ads trying to get you to buy gold coins or whatever the investment of the day is. Deterrence worked for a while, but it was not a perfect system, so harkening back to it is not an argument ending slam dunk.

2002-09-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

Sloppy Reasoning on Iraq

I happened to come across two examples today of what I think are very sloppy anti-war arguments, which I thought I’d respond to, since no-one else has. The first comes courtesy of Maxspeak (via a link from the Poorman):

We need to enlarge the aviary to include those who urge the nation to war in an obnoxious fashion, at the same time bearing relatively little personal risk for the outcome, even if they have performed military service.

…
I do not make the foolish claim that rural folks are pro-war and urban anti-war. Obviously there are plenty of each in both places. I do maintain the risks differ by geography, and those in relatively safer locations with a yen to support military adventures ought to be a little solicitious of those in relatively less save ones. The front lines, after all, are different now.

However, this argument could equally well go the other way. I work in DC, and that’s a reason why I support action against Iraq, and (at least in theory) support the idea of other preventive strikes. This argument assumes the real issue of dispute, which is what course of action by the US will minimize the risk of a WMD attack against us. It might not be true in all cases, but for most of those who support a war, the primary reason why is the perceived threat of Iraqi WMDs. Despite the claims that war is all about oil, it’s not.

Those who support a war do so because they believe it will minimize the chance of a WMD strike on New York or DC, not because they don’t care if such an attack occurs. And if you believe this, then suddenly those who oppose a war and don’t live “on the front lines,” as Max has it, are the ones being cavalier about the risks involved with their favored course of action.

The second flawed argument is both less interesting and more common, and it comes to us courtesy of Hesiod at Counterspin Central:

And the Administration is, perhaps unconsciously, ADMITTING that it goes against our values by the very lies and distortions it is telling about the threat Saddam poses, and its hyposcrisy with respect to North Korea and Syria, to take two examples. Obviously it cannot be about nuclear weapons and threats to our allies, and It can't be that we are liberating a people from a horrible Arab regime that supports terrorism, because that is true for those two countries, and we aren't threatening them with invasion.

There are two glaring flaws with this argument. The first become clearer if you abstract a bit. Set “nuclear weapons” as condition A, and “horrible Arab regime that supports terrorism” as condition B. Hesiod is arguing that attacking Iraq because it is A and B is inconsistent because North Korea is A and Syria is B, and we’re not getting ready to attack them. But as anyone who ever had to do Boolean algebra and those little Venn diagrams in junior high can tell you, A and B is quite different from A or B.

This is a variation on a distressingly common fallacy in historical arguments. Often, for a given historical event, there will be multiple competing theories about why it happened. Usually, the real answer is that it’s a combination of the listed factors, but a normal argument is to try and debunk each individually. The answer can’t be factor 1, since it was present at other times and nothing happened. Same with factor 2, etc. While the revisionist, iconoclast historian ignores the fact that 1, 2, and 3 had never been present before simultaneously, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Basically, it’s ignoring the idea that each listed condition might have been necessary, without any one being sufficient. More deeply, it’s a sign of simplistic thinking, believing that everything must have 1 cause, which would always produce the given result. Stated that way, it seems ludicrous, yet you’ll regularly run across this line of argument in all sorts of contexts.

Anyway, Hesiod’s argument is doubly wrong in this case, since even if you grant that a good parallel exists for Iraq which actually satisfies both the conditions he listed—which it does in Iran [update--before anyone else corrects me, I'll note that of course Iran isn't Arab, so the parallel isn't perfect. But it's close, since they are a supporter of Middle Eastern terrorism.]—that this somehow delegitimizes any action against Iraq. But this is nonsense. Because even if you think that A and B together are grounds for a preventative overthrowing of the government, there still has to be some order in tackling opponents. You can’t do everything at once, but that isn’t an argument for doing nothing.

It also ignores what other special considerations might play into the choice of action, and what other actions are being taken with regard to North Korea, Syria and Iran. Iraq is a good first step because of the severity of its threat, the fact that it’s been in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and so international support is more likely, Iran is facing domestic troubles that might solve the problem for us, and so on. Hesiod’s argument is equivalent to saying that the US was hypocritical for invading Guadalcanal during WWII because the Phillipines were also Pacific Islands under Japanese control, and we weren't invading them at the same time.

While this bit of poor reasoning ("Why aren't we invading Pakistan and China?") is common among anti-war commentators, it’s actually an argument against one of their other underlying concerns, which is that the US is a loose cannon, governed by a wild cowboy, intent on invading and conquering the world to impose our hegemony through the barrels of our M-16’s. The fact that we’re not pursuing a military strategy with regard to North Korea, Syria, Iran, and other nations that might seem to fit the profile is strong evidence, in my opinion, that their view of the US and its foreign policy is wildly inaccurate. Military action is seen as the last option, one to be taken only when other courses of action have been tried and have failed.

2002-09-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

Imperialism?

There’s been a lot of sound and fury surrounding this essay over at the USS Clueless. You’ve probably already read it, but if not, I’ll explain. No, it’s too much. I’ll sum up: Den Beste argues that Arab cultures are structurally flawed and doomed to failure, which is turn leads to resentment. He argues that the societies are not capable of reformation, so that the only choice to change the status quo is to invade and conquer most of the Middle East, and impose reforms from above, remaking their culture in opur own image as we did in Japan. Dragging them kicking and screaming into the 17th century, as Den Beste puts it. The alternative is continuing the current situation in which the Middle East is a cauldron of hatred, generating terrorists who will continue to attack the US, both conventionally and, eventually, with WMD’s.

This position has been harshly criticized by Atrios, Hesiod, and Demosthenes, who characterize it as cultural genocide, and the Protocols of the Elders of Islam. They focus on his prescriptions for action and claim that they amount to something like genocide (or even genocide itself.)

But I think they’re missing the point. I disagree with the USS Clueless, but I think the real argument here is not about Den Beste’s conclusions, but about his assumptions. If you accept his assumption about the unreformability of Arab culture, then the choice is between ongoing terrorist attacks against the US (and Europe) and some sort of massive attempt at reconstruction, as Den Beste argues for. Simply arguing that his prescription for action is terrible, without at the same time accepting the other horn of the dilemma—strong likelihood of WMD attacks on the US—is a bit duplicitous. If you refuse to accept that choice yourself, then your disagreement is not with Den Beste’s proposed action, it’s with the logic that led him to that choice. (It’s also unproductive to take potshots at him for advocating genocide, without yourself coming out in favor of his proposed alternative, WMD attacks on America.) I’ll say that, if I accepted his premises, I’d accept his conclusions as well.

But I don’t agree with them. And neither does Hesiod and possibly some of his other critics, although that’s not clear from the main posts on the subject. (In Hesiod’s case, I know from reading his responses in various comments sections.) I’ve argued before that the best approach for the US is via cultural imperialism rather than military imperialism. In this sense, the US really is the Great Satan, seducing the populations of the region (and elsewhere around the world) to our way of life. Den Beste argues that the failures of those countries inevitably breeds resentment and hate. To some degree, but I think it also breeds envy and a desire to emulate our success and our way of life. It’s simplistic, but it’s more fun to go out ot a disco and dance the night away with beautiful women than it is to stay in, never see a woman not wearing a burqa, and hope to get a BJ from another truck driver.

I do support a war against Iraq for reasons of short term security, but in the long term I think our best policy is one of slow, steady erosion. Continue to let our culture—books, radio, TV shows—filter in to the country, seeping through the foundations. Support democratic movements and oppose tyranny. Over the course of time, this will produce the liberalization and change that Den Beste wants to accomplish via military occupation.

I also think this is the only option that has much chance of succeeding. Since this debate seems to involve dueling historical parallels (post WWII Japan, appeasement of Hitler, the Crusades), let me suggest another one: the Roman Empire. It dominated its territory militarily, politically, and economically just as completely as the US could hope to dominate the Middle East after a military conquest. But, despite consistent official opposition and occasional brutal repression, they were never able to prevent the spread of Christianity, much less contract it.

The examples are numerous throughout history—religions are not easily repressed by government or military action, up to an including massacres far beyond anything the US would contemplate. Look at the entire history of the Jews, the various Christian sects in the Byzantine Empire, the religious wars in Europe. I simply don’t see that a US occupation of the Middle East would be likely to suppress and destroy the well established Arab religious culture. If anything, such an organized attempt at repression would harden resistance and make the culture more resistant to change rather than more open to it.

Oh, if you've made it this far, I'd recommend you also read Eric Raymond's measured response to Den Beste's piece.

Update: A second piece over at the USS Clueless clarifies some things in his previous piece, and makes it clear that we don't disagree nearly as much as I thought when I first made this post. It's more a matter of degree than of kind--he thinks more military action will be necessary than I do, but both of us see gradual cultural transformation (via Barbie, as he puts it) as the main solution. Basically, it seems that I think the culuture is healthier and more capable of change on its own than he does.

Jane Galt also posted a nice response to my piece agreeing at least in part with the Captain (or at least playing Devil's advocate) that military action is a necessary precursor to cultural transformation, since the despotic governments in the region are able to resist outside influences by controlling the media. I still think enough seems to be getting through to effect change, but ulitmately am not qualified to make a firm judgement, since what I know is solely from secondhand news reports. And these are especially likely to be misleading in attempts to capture cultural moods and zeitgeists. If a journalists wants to write a story, he can. If you look for examples of Western cultural influence, you can find them, just as you can find examples of simmering resentment and dislike of the West.

2002-09-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

Can inspections work?

Brink Lindsey (link via Instapundit) recently wrote a nice column detailing some of problems which inspectors would face in Iraq, arguing that the likely resistance put up by Iraq would doom any inspection regime to failure. While I find that argument fairly convincing, I wonder just how effective an inspections regime could be even if Iraq did give them free access to anywhere they wanted to go.

Remember that the initial inspections didn’t just fail, they failed spectacularly. While some of it can be attributed to Iraqi intransigence, the inspectors were completely in the dark about the e4xtent of Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities until a defector told them about it. Iraq had literally tons of chemical weapons that they had produced and stored, which the inspectors had no idea existed. And they still never found them, and had to trust that Hussein destroyed them. So right off the bat, given this history, I think there’s a reason for skepticism. Tons of material are an awfully big needle to miss in this haystack. Given that bio weapons can be stored in quantities several orders of magnitude smaller than a useful stock of chemical weapons, and it’s hard to see what inspector could do, even if they were allowed to go anywhere they wanted.

Iraq is a huge country, and Hussein has had years to build secret facilities and to try and hide and disperse material all over the country. In fact, a recent report from a defector said that he was doing just that with his nuclear program. Anticipating the possibility of inspectors or spying, he’s split it up into dozens of small labs, each of which can operate out of a basement or small building.

So, let’s do some simple math. Assume an inspector team can travel at 30 miles per hour and detect any WMD’s within 50 yards of their travel path on either side (erxtremely generous assumptions.) Assuming a random search, simple search theory can tell you the probability that a given hidden facility will be detected. In this case, assuming the entire area of Iraq as the search area, and a single inspector team operating 24 hours a day (or 3 teams each working 1 shift), it would take a mere 2827 days to find half of Iraq’s hidden facilities. (Assuming I did the numbers right--I checked them but might have made an error somewhere. For those of you scoring at home P = 1 - exp(-S*t/A). P = prob of detection, S = search rate, t = time, A = area to be searched.)

OK, that’s not so good. But a lot of Iraq has been independent, so let’s halve the total area to be searched. And let’s put in 3 times as many inspectors (9 teams.) That makes things a lot better. Now you can find 50% of Saddam’s facilities in only 472 days. Better, but still far from reassuring.

Obviously, this is an unrealistic calculation. You could argue that the entire area of Iraq isn’t the real search area, but on that I’d disagree. As I mentioned, Saddam has had years to disperse and hide his WMD facilities, so they literally could be anywhere. Another factor is that there would be at least some intelligence helping the inspectors know where to look. On the other hand, Saddam will be moving stuff around trying to keep it from being found, so these two factors at least partially cancel out.

But, while there’s certainly a lot of error in these rough calculation, in my opinion, what this means is that even if inspectors are allowed unrestricted access to Iraq the only way we’re likely to find anything in Iraq is if someone defects and decides to tell us about it. How likely is this? I don’t know, but the inspections had been going on for several years before the previously mentioned defector came across and spilled the beans about Saddam’s chem. stockpiles.

If I were Saddam, I’d be stalling just like he’s doing now, for as long as possible, and then finally cave in. Let the inspectors in, and let them search where they want. They’ll find a lot of stuff, but they won’t find everything. Act contrite, let them declare victory and go home. The sanctions are lifted, and two weeks and a few hundred petrie dishes later you’ve got just as large of a stockpile of bio weapons as you ever had. And the designs for nuclear weapons still exist in your engineer’s heads, so inspections would do little to hurt the nuclear program. The problem after inspections will be just the same as it is now—getting enough fissionable material. Chem weapons might be lost or tough to remanufacture, but they’re not that nasty anyway.

2002-09-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Flight 93

Instapundit has linked to a couple of stories about the last minutes of Flight 93 a couple of times over the past few days. There's this story, which says there's a 3 minute discrepancy in the cockpit tape the FBI has released--that it ends 3 minutes before the actual crash time. This has fueled speculation that the plane was actually shot down, and that after a missile hit, it damaged the electrical systems enough that the black box stopped recording. Then, today, he linked this article which shows that the airplane was largely intact at the time of the crash, as proven by seismic data. This, it is claimed, disproves the shootdown theory.

A few quick notes. First, a missile hitting a jetliner would not necessarily blow it into pieces. Missiles, particularly air-launched missiles, don't have warheads that are that big. The warhead on a sidewinder is only 20-25 pounds. This makes sense--the heavier the warhead, the more fuel it uses to get up to speed, and hence the shorter the range of the missile. A bigger missile also weighs down a plane carrying it more. So you want a missile warhead to be just big enough to shoot down an enemy plane, but no bigger. (The tradeoff calculation is not the same for a land-based SAM, since land vehicles can easily carry much larger weights. So you can "afford" the cost of a bigger missile more easily.)

Anyway, the 20 pound warhead on the sidewinder could blow off a wing or the tail aerofoil, but probably wouldn't be large enough to shatter the main fuselage of the plane. It’s also a heat seeking missile, which means it would hit one of the engines, which on the 757 are located under the wings. It might take a wing off, but would be far enough from the fuselage that it would blow it into pieces. So the plane would probably still be largely intact at impact, even if it had been shot down. (Of course, this sort of fatal but not catastrophic damage might not be enough to shut off the black box either.)

Now, let's examine that 3 minute time lag. Does that make sense as a falling time for a disabled airplane? I don't know the terminal velocity for an airplane, and frankly I'm too lazy to track down all the data I'd need to calculate it. However, I do know that the terminal velocity for a skydiver, with arms outstretched, is about 125 miles per hour. That's a person maximizing their drag, while a plane is designed to minimize drag, so I think this should give us a lower bound on the terminal velocity. At 125 mph, in 3 minutes a plane would travel a little over 6 miles, or 33000 feet, to be exact. That’s pretty high, the full cruising altitude for a jetliner.

I don’t know the exact altitude of the jet in its final minutes, but this interesting report (which also corroborates a struggle in the cockpit or a pilot trying to knock people off their feet) from a piper pilot has him seeing the plane and able to make out banking movements and even see the United colors. Pipers don’t fly that high, so if the pilot and passenger could see it that well, I don’t see how the plane could have been flying above 15,000 feet or so, and was possibly much lower. This report also indicates that the plane dove significantly before its final moments. From these pieces of information, it seems to me that the plane would have been much lower than 30,000 feet. Even if you assume a final dive angle of only 45 degrees, in 3 minutes at terminal velocity, the plane still would have descended over 20,000 feet.

So, the 3 minute lag in the tape is not, by itself, evidence for a shootdown. The 3 minute mark doesn’t match up with an expected time for the plane to fall, so it doesn’t fit neatly in with a theory that the plane was hit by a missile at that point, shutting off the black box recording. On the other hand, there might have been some other information on the tape that the FBI didn’t want to get out, or maybe that 3 minute mark was a convenient cut-off for the tape. If they wanted to chop an end that might indicate a shoot-down, you need to find some other point to stop it at—maybe the 3 minute mark made a good break point.

To my mind, the best evidence for a shootdown is the nature of the debris fields, with large debris found in one or two remote locations from the main crash site, in a discontinuous pattern. This debris includes one of the engines, consistent with the idea that a missile hit one of the engines (or the wing.) This could blow the wing off, or damage it enough that it was quickly ripped off, which in turn would result in a quick crash for the plane. (Here is a comprehensive site detailing support for the “conspiracy” theory.)

Now, Glenn goes on in his article to state that:

I've found the shoot-down / coverup theory rather flimsy anyway. I don't see how to put the pieces together in a way that makes sense. Why would the government lie about shooting down the plane? They were getting flak, readers may recall, for not shooting down the others.

I completely disagree with him here. I think the shootdown/cover-up story makes perfect sense. The government wouldn’t have wanted to admit to anything right away. They weren’t releasing any information at first. And the choice of shooting down an airliner was, while correct, pretty catastrophic and probably not information they’d immediately volunteer. Remember, right after Flight 93 crashed, they weren’t even officially admitting it had been hijacked.

But we know that, by that time, the president had authorized the shooting down of any hijacked planes. And fighters had been scrambled to intercept the airliners. They missed the flight that hit the Pentagon by a matter of minutes. A short time later, it's likely they would have intercepted Flight 93. If they were going to shoot it down, they’d want to do it in an isolated location, like the area where it did go down. So all that information is consistent with a shootdown theory.

However, information soon began leaking out about the heroes of Flight 93 and their fight for control of the plane. At that point, the story was simply too good, and too inspirational, not to go along with. The nation was in deep shock and for many, the acts of the passengers on Flight 93 were inspirational and helped to get us over the shock of the attacks and on to determination to get those responsible. “Let’s roll.” Once that story came out, there was no way the government could admit to shooting down the plane. If they had, it would have pulled the rug out from under the American people who had been inspired by the passengers, as well as opening the government up to massive criticism for shooting first, and dooming the heroes on the flight before they could save themselves (if they could have.

So there was definitely a real motive there. However, I'm not sure a cover up could have worked--there would have been too many people in the loop most likely. I think that is the best evidence against a shootdown--that too many people would know for it to be kept a secret. You're still left with the odd debris field, but that might have come about through break-up of the plane or even a bomb on board. So I'm confidently uncertain about what really caused flight 93 to crash.

But regardles of what actually happened, it doesn't take away from the heroism of the passengers on the flight. Even if they didn't force the plane down themselves, or if they failed in their attempt to retake the plane, they still provide us all with a wonderful example. Because they made their choice and fought back. In less than 2 hours, they took in the information they had and made a decision to fight. That is still heroic, and still inspirational, no matter what actually happened to cause the flight to crash.

2002-09-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

Anybody awake out there?

I can't believe this isnt' the biggest story in every single newspaper around the country. MSNBC had this quote in their article on the Palermo Senator, the ship that was detained and searched outside New York:

The search of the M/V Palermo Senator was based primarily on intelligence suggesting a ship matching its description could be carrying nuclear material or a nuclear device into the United States, the officials said.

And that's it. That's the only place I've seen this little factoid, and most papers barely covered the searching, if at all. Even if it was just a search triggered by unusual radiation background, it ought to be a huge story. Add in the fact that, apparently, intelligence sources have concrete intelligence (definite enough to finger certain specific ships) that al Qaeda is smuggling radioactive material or even a nuclear bomb into the country. But nobody's picked up this story.

Hello? Any reporters out there? Those of us near the likely blast radius of a nuclear attack would be interested to know a little more about this. Instead, it was 24 hours of wallowing in pathos on 9-11. Fine, but whne there's breaking news, maybe you can spare one of the 285 reporters you had intererviewing survivors to go and, say, maybe pull the string on this whole imminent nuclear attack on the US thing. I'm not a newspaper editor, so God knows I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that this could be a pretty big story here.

And while you're at it, maybe you could have spared more than 5 seconds and 1 column inch to the 2 rumored hijackings and the bomb threat in downtown Columbus. If it wasn't for blogs, I'd have never heard of any of these stories.

2002-09-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on the parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that siezed and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.

"Aftermath," Siegfried Sassoon

I was on my way to work, crossing the Wilson bridge when I heard. In the gap between songs I flipped to another station, and the morning show DJ was talking about a collision in New York and a plane. I was confused, but imagined a small plane, an accident, confident in my secure naivete. Then the second plane hit and we all knew it was no accident. Bits and peices came through on the radio, and 10 minutes later when I was at work, I more or less knew what had happened.

The news website were all clogged up, as I tried one after another. I got most of my information from a sports bulletin board, which that day had a more serious topic. Those who were at home watching TV passed info along. I remember instants in time. The first time I was able to get through to a website--I think it was the LA Times, and saw the pictures. The horrible, high definition explosions against the blue sky. I remember when someone posted that the first tower had fallen. It seemed unreal, but I knew then that the second tower was doomed as well, so when the word came that it too had collapsed it was not a shock but the inevitable end act of the tragedy.

Then someone said the Pentagon had been hit, and soon after that it had collapsed. I knew that couldn't be right, since I've been to the Pentagon and I knew it was far too large to destroyed by one airplane. At that point I got a call from my girlfriend, now fiance, who was working up in Baltimore. She was much more frightened that I was, and urged me to go home. I felt safe, though. Not since, but that day, being in a target rich environment like DC was a protection. A terrorist would go for the White House or Capitol or one of the monuments, not my obscure building miles away. I was more worried about my brother, who works in a skyscraper in downton Chicago.

There was one TV in a lobby of my building, and I went and joined the small group there, watching the images--the second plane hitting from 5 different angles, the towers coming down, the fire at the Pentagon. I quickly had my fill of that, but waited, hoping for more information. There were more planes in the air, there were 2, there was 1, there was a crash somewhere in Pennsylvania, but that wasn't related (yeah right), then maybe it was targetted for Camp David (huh?) At this point, the TV was simply passing along rumors, and didn't even seem to be filtering them through common sense. All they could offer was more slow motion horror, and I'd have my fill of that later.

Somone had previously passed around word that the CO of the facility had given everyone leave to go home. I went out and got in my car, but the entire base was in gridlock--I went to the south gate but it had been closed, leaving only one exit, a long wys away. I knew that would take hours to get to , so I parked and went back to my office. I joined a few people from my research group huddled out by the river. No-one wanted to say anything, but neither did anyone want to be alone.

Across the river you could see the cloud of black smoke rising from the Pentagon. What struck me most was the quiet. Usually there is a steady stream of planes taking of and landing at National, but that day there was nothing, except for a lone private jet which took off while we waited. I never did find out who was on that plane.

When I went back to my office, I got another call from my girlfriend, who couldn't believe I was still at work, or that I hadn't called my mother. She demanded my number, so she could call. Her officemate piped up in the background and said *she'd* call my house if I didn't, so I gave in, and promised I'd go home soon. I called my parents and left them a messge letting them know I was fine. Shortly after I returned home and, like the rest of the country, spent the evening in front of the TV.

One of the channels brought on a bicycle messenger who had snuck into Ground Zero (they were already calling it that) and so I saw the first eerie images of the pile, the wrenched facades still standing, like a memorial. There was only that, and the floodlit panorama of Ground Zero, crawled over by lines of workers, cranes and moving equipment, the first and most immediate response.

The anger came later, but that day was one of shock and sadness, the foundation of the resolve that President Bush captured with his speech. A few quiet phone calls to friends and family--no-one had much to say, but it was good to be connected. Then sleep.

2002-09-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

High threat level

CNN is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has put out a threat level orange warning, which is the second highest warning level, indivative of a high level of risk of a terrorist attack. This meshes with a series of other incidents which, after a long lull, seem to be coming thick and fast. The arrest of a man trying to bring a gun onto a plane in Sweden. The break-in at the utah weapons facility. The theft of 300+ pounds of ammonium nitrate in Texas. The videotaping and, possibly, scouting of the Washington monument (which happened a few weeks ago but was recently reported.) The increase in network "chatter" reported by intelligence sources. The attempted assasination of President Karzai. The plot to bomb the US Army base at Heidelberg.

None of these are conclusive, and even if it is a true pattern it looks more like a series of smaller, unrelated attacks rather than a big coordinated one like last 9-11. Of course, we wouldn't hear anythign about that until it either happened or the plot was foiled, so that might not mean anything. But there does seem to be a significant uptick in enemy activity going on around now, so be careful if you can.

2002-09-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

Wargames, invasions, and fleet sinkings

Reports of the outcome of a recent wargame, Millennium Challenge, sparked a tempest in a teapot (amply discussed over at Quasipundit or Shouting Cross the Pacific, IIRC) a few weeks ago. But the Guardian sensed a chance to get a few kicks in, has come a little late to the story with this article (found via Vodkapundit), spotlighting the Red force commander and critic of the experiment) Gen. Van Riper. There are a number of issues tangled together here, with several big misconceptions in the mix.

The first and most prevalent misunderstanding is that this wargame was a dress rehearsal or test for an upcoming invasion of Iraq. It wasn’t. Wargames like this, integrating real forces with computer simulations and predicted future capabilities, are very difficult to plan and this one has literally taken years to set up and organize. In other words, it’s been on the drawing board long before and action against Iraq was planned.

Another clue that it’s not intended to test for an upcoming invasion is in the press releases, which detail that the wargame is intended to simulate conditions as of 2007. That means they were not limiting themselves to current capabilities on either side, but were projecting what they would be able to do in the near future.

The idea that it’s intended to be a simulation of an upcoming invasion is apparently based on the fact that the opposition country is a Persian Gulf dictatorship. There are several reasons for this choice, though, which have nothing to do with any imminent action. First, you want your experiment to accurately reflect the capabilities of a likely opponent. The best way to this is not to make up a whole new geography and a fake country from whole cloth. That would take too much time and would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, they piggyback on the billions of dollars of effort that the various intelligence services have already committed to just that question—projecting future threats. Second, and less importantly, a semi-real opponent in this sense also keeps players’ heads in the game.

Getting on the meat of the criticism of the experiment, the point that has been most highlighted, the sinking and subsequent “reconstitution” of the main blue fleet, is a complete red herring. The experiment control did exactly the right thing, in this case. And the article gives the explanation for this, in a quote from one of the Air Force generals who helped to run the thing:

"You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?" General Pace asked.
If they hadn’t reconstituted the fleet, they would have been wasting all the millions of dollars that it cost to set the experiment up. Van Riper complains that they weren’t interested in learning anything from the experiment; but if they’d left the fleet dead, then they really wouldn’t have learned anything, because the game would have been over.

Van Riper’s complaints about later issues, that he was overly constrained in his operations and that the experiment control disallowed some actions and forced him to do some other things that aided blue, are potentially more troubling. But the fact that he complained about the fleet issue makes him an untrustworthy source. He clearly doesn’t understand the underlying point of the experiment, so it’s very possible that his later complaints are equally unjustified (although maybe not.)

It’s worth noting that being a great soldier and rising to the level of a 3 star general does not thereby make you an expert in experimental planning or analysis, even if you were the CO of a department that planned a lot of wargames. The type of scientific thinking and focus on rigorous tests rather than ephemeral outcomes in simply not that common in any walk of life, including military commands. That’s why they give some officers special training and hire outside analysts who have scientific background to work on these issues. And I can think of plausible reasons for each of the decisions Van Riper took offense to—it seems possible to me that he got too caught up in trying to win the game, and lost sight of the underlying purpose, which was to test out new ideas and concepts.

On the other hand, I’m sympathetic to his claims that a lot of the military’s new proposed doctrines and the “revolution in military affairs” are a lot of hot air—pretty power point slides and no substance. At its worst, this sort of future concepts planning can be a collection of platitudes, clichés, and obvious points strung together in high sounding phrases, which at the core are essentially meaningless.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know from the outside which side—Van Riper or the official Pentagon position—is the correct one concerning Millennium Dragon. Without knowing in detail what the experimental plans were, what concepts they were trying to test, what measures of effectiveness they were using, and seeing the after action analytical reports and reconstructions, you can’t tell whether the game really was so fixed it was worthless, or whether all the constraints were reasonable. I’m hopeful that the experiment planners and analysts didn’t end up gaming the game, and instead will bring clear thinking to the evaluation of the concepts and tactics that the Millennium Challenge were supposed to test.

2002-09-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Deterrence

An important part of the debate around Iraq centers on their possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and the possibility for their use. The pro-invasion side sketches out a nightmare scenario where Hussein acquires nuclear weapons and gives them to terrorists who then blow up Manhattan. Alternatively, he passes along bio and chemical weapons for similar terrorist attacks.

On the side opposing invasion, a common argument is that this won’t happen, because deterrence will prevent it. The threat of a US nuclear counterstrike would prevent Iraq from passing along any WMDs to terrorists.

I think the anti-invasion argument is misguided, for reasons which I will discuss below, but I also think the threat isn’t quite as bad as it is often made out to be. Basically, if Iraq does acquire nuclear weapons, there is no way that Hussein would give any of them to a third party. According to most discussion I’ve seen, the biggest bottleneck in acquiring nuclear weapons is not technology or engineering, it’s simply getting your hands on enough suitable radioactive material.

Given that, Iraq (or any undeveloped country) will be seriously constrained in the number of nukes they can produce. Iraq would likely only be able to make a few, maybe half a dozen. And they would be the most valuable things in the nation, and a tremendous source of power and prestige for the country. There is no way Hussein or any other leader would give away such a rare and incredibly valuable commodity to an unreliable third party.

That doesn’t mean it’s not something to worry about, however. If Iraq were to acquire nuclear weapons, they would then be able to deter the US. We would be limited in our ability to directly confront them, since there would be the threat of a nuclear attack on our troops or on Israel. Which is bad enough. But chemical and biological weapons are different. Once you’ve figured out a good process and weaponized a biological agent or chemical, then it’s not that hard to produce it in relatively large quantities. The inspectors found tons of stuff, literally, in Iraq after the first Gulf War.

This poses two threats. The first is that a country with this technological capability could pass along that expertise to a terrorist group. A meeting or two, a scientist slipping off or “defecting,” and suddenly a country has given a tremendous aid to terrorists in pursuit of WMD’s, essentially untraceably. The other option is for Iraq (or some other country) to simply hand over chemical or biological weapons to the terrorists. These can be effective in small enough quantities that, again, it would be difficult or impossible to trace.

And that’s why the deterrence argument breaks down. Deterrence presupposes that you know where an attack came from, that you know whom to retaliate against. But terrorist intermediaries allow a country plausible deniability. They insulate any leader from the actual acts of murder and terrorism. The despot can sit secure in his country, like a mafia godfather, pulling the strings but never allowing them to be traced back to him to give a just cause for war that the UN would find acceptable.

Consider—if Saddam Hussein had supported and helped plan and finance the Oklahoma City bombing, the first world trade center attack, and the 9-11 attacks, would we know? I think the situation would look pretty much identical to the way it looks now. A few hints, some shady unknown suspects, a John Doe #2, some unconfirmed and unexplained meetings in Prague or the Phillipines, a planner who may or may not be an Iraqi intelligence agent, some fringe journalists and bloggers making connections but generally dismissed as conspiracy theorists. This is it—whether or not Iraq had any involvement, if and when they do it will look just like the past 3 attacks looked. And that’s why deterrence won’t work.

2002-09-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

The question of coups

So, putting together the info form my last two posts with a few more I facts, I think I’ve come to a satisfactory explanation for the lack of military coups in early modern Europe. The first fact is that the armies in ancien regime nations were very small. They simply weren’t large enough to dominate a country the way armies now can. For example, around the period of the American Revolution, the English Army had only around 50,000 regulars worldwide—in England, the New World, and their various outposts in East Asia. Paradoxically, the weakness of the central governments actually protected them from a military insurrection, since they didn’t have the money or logistical capability to support a large standing army. So the armies that did exist were not completely pre-eminent even inside a country, where local militia organizations could wield a similar strength.

The fragmented nature of the military commands accentuated this weakness. For most soldiers, their everyday allegiance was to their captain (or maybe a colonel) who was responsible for paying and provisioning them. This would make it difficult for a high officer who might theoretically command a large enough force to topple the government to actually command the loyalty of the troops to carry out such a task.

The third major piece of the puzzle is supplied by looking at the actual make-up of the officer corps. It was primarily aristocratic, made up of those who had a vested interest in the status quo. They had a vested interest in preserving the existing governments, since it was those governments that raised them to their privileged place. Almost by definition, an hereditary aristocracy will be strongly conservative.

Finally, related to the third point, is my original hypothesis of the strong sense of legitimacy of the kingships in most countries. This legitimacy derived from the same source as the legitimacy of the aristocracy, so the nobility couldn’t directly challenge it. And in the cases where the kings were overthrown in England, France, and Russia, it triggered years of civil war and discord with, in two of the three cases, an eventual return to monarchy.

Unfortunately, none of these factors can really be transferred into a modern developing country. The central problem is exactly that there is no government which the people feel has a strong claim to their loyalty. And the militaries are generally large and centralized. Decentralizing the military could decrease the chance of a coup but at the cost of increasing the chance of civil war and general collapse, so that’s not really a viable solution either.

2002-08-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

Ancien Regime Militaries

In my last post, I talked about one interesting difference between ancien regime and modern militaries. A more fundamental difference, and one which both (in my opinion) answers my previous question and makes it hard to learn anything applicable to modern armies and society, is a reflection of the fundamental feature of the old regime. That is the role played by the aristocracy.

In ancien regime militaries, the great majority of the officer corps was made up of men of noble birth. Up to 90% of the officers would be nobles, with the percentage higher at higher ranks. Nobles would usually enter the service with a commission and would also be advanced through the ranks much more quickly than the few commoners that made it that far. For example, in France at one time regulations required a commoner to serve as a captain for 10 years before he could be promoted, while a noble only had to serve 3 before being eligible for promotion.

The one area where this didn’t hold was in the engineer and artillery branches, where commoner officers were much more common (although still usually in the minority.) Perhaps because these fields were seen as ignoble, or less noble than the direct hand-to-hand combat engaged in by the army. In contrast, the officer corps cavalry which was seen as the highest and most dashing military order was almost monopolized by the nobility. Engineering and artillery also required a bit more technical expertise, perhaps also discouraging nobles from entering those branches. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that before the Civil War West Point concentrated its military training on exactly those fields—engineering and to a lesser extent artillery—that were open to commoners back in Europe.

Even worse, promotions were only loosely tied to merit. More commonly, they would from special favoritism from the king or from higher officers, or from bribery or simple purchase of offices. This presented two problems for the armies of the time. The first was how to motivate troops if they knew they had little chance of promotion, and the second was how to ensure at least a modicum of effective leadership when patronage was dictating who became colonels and generals.

France came up with a pair of reforms to solve these problems, which were later copied by most other countries. The first was to institute a parallel track of positions at the company and regimental level which would be subordinate to the captains and colonels, but which would promote based on merit. The regimental officer was referred to as a lieutenant colonel, which is presumably the origin of that rank. These positions would allow some expertise to be developed at middle levels of command without sacrificing the ultimate control of the nobility.

The second idea, which I believe was instituted under Louis XIV, was to institute special orders of merit, decorations and awards which could be given to soldiers who showed outstanding ability. These were a way to recognize excellence among commoners and reward it without actually having to promote any of them.

2002-08-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

Military Entrepreneurs

One of the more interesting things I’ve learned from my current reading on early national militaries is how loose their organization was, and the general laxity of government oversight in the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, the system that most European (especially Western European) countries adopted has been referred to as military entrepreneurship, in which individual captains raised and ran military companies in a similar way to running a business, as a profit generator.

In brief, in this system the most important functional unit was the company, which was commanded by a Captain. The central government delegated almost all daily authority down to this Captain, and left him in charge of recruiting, supplying, and paying his soldiers. The government then paid the Captain a fee based on the strength of his company to cover these operational costs. It was in some ways a modification of the mercenary system, with the added feature of nationalism, with troops for the most part drawn from a particular country or, in some cases, from a designated region.

The way things were run made it easy to abuse the system, and captains would routinely pad their rolls with non-existent soldiers or wouldn’t report desertions. The government tried to counter by having muster days where the company had to show up at its full listed strength, but it was easy enough to find a few warm bodies to fill the ranks. Because of these loopholes, heading up an infantry company could be a good way to make money. It reached the point that companies (and later, regiments) were viewed as personal property, and were bought and sold as such.

The abuses were present at the enlisted level as well. Since officers received benefits from having soldiers enlisted in their companies, a life which wasn’t that attractive to most, they’d pay bonuses to get people to enlist. (Not so different from today, actually.) However, as long as it didn’t get too bad, they didn’t really mind desertion, since they could keep collecting pay for the AWOL soldier and pocket it. So it was not uncommon for soldiers to migrate around serially enlisting and deserting to collect the enlistment bonuses.

Obviously, the system was far from ideal, but the governments simply didn’t have the reach or organization to do anything better. In fact, a prime mover in the growth of government power and bureaucracy during this time came about in an attempt to organize and keep track of the army, to prevent flagrant abuses such as padding the rolls. The government set up oversight administrations which in turn started to keep records not just of company strengths, but actually began matching up and tracking individual soldiers. Just one of the many ways government power and growth was driven by military necessity.

2002-08-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

Making Friends and Influencing People

Yesterday’s Washington Post had this rather depressing story about the conditions in Kabul. The influx of refugees, combined with the affects of war and Taliban rule have left most of the city without proper sanitation or clean water, which in turn leads to health problems and a generally poor standard of living.

As Fritz Schrank noted a little while ago, lack of clean drinking water is one of the biggest yet most easily solved problems facing the Third World today. And in this particular case, I think the US could be missing a big opportunity to win the local population’s (and the same thing could be done elsewhere) sympathy.

Namely, they should emulate the policies of some of the Roman Emperors and Popes. When Rome outgrew its water supplies, they built (or rebuilt, in the case of the Popes) aqueducts to bring fresh water to the city. And in this, as in their other public constructions, they made sure everyone knew about it, by building monuments, gateways, and public fountains which told everyone just who it was that was responsible for the public works.

It seems to me the same sorts of efforts could both help the Afghans and help the US in the region. Ship in a bunch of Army Corps of Engineers types and have them construct some sewers and wells aqueducts, whatever’s needed to solve the problems in Kabul (and elsewhere.) And make sure that all the fountains and wells and other construction projects (schools, roads, houses, etc. could all be constructed with the same principles in mind) have “Constructed by the United States of America and President Harmid Karzai” carved in big, permanent stone letters for archaeologists 2 millennia hence (and all the citizens in the meantime) to admire.

Everybody wins. The citizens of Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan benefit, the US benefits by undertaking such high profile improvements in the people’s lives, and President Karzai benefits by being seen as the facilitator and implementer of these good works which will strengthen the citizen’s loyalty to him. I think it’s this sort of nation building, rather than sponsoring conventions and mounting military patrols, that would ultimately provide the most benefit for everyone involved.

2002-08-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

Fascinating piece on the West Bank

Via Sketch, I found this wonderful series of photoessays on conditions in the West Bank. I think this work does a lot to cut through the propaganda of both sides and gives at least some feel for the real conditions on the ground, and some of the everyday issues that are missed in newspaper and TV coverage. It's full of little nuggets, such as the way in which settlers and Palestinains duel in planting olive groves and pine trees to lay claim to territory. A few big things jumped out at me.

First, the collection of maps and various peace proposals helps to explicate Palestinian oposition to Oslo and the Camp David plans, more so than simple quotes of land percentages. The maps also point out the true nature of the settlements, which were designed and intended to carve up the Palestinian territory and render any peaceful two state solution impossible. Whether they were explicitly modeled after them or not, these settlemtns are designed to serve the same purpose as the Roman colonies in Italy. First, as stated, they act as geographic berriers to carve up the West Bank into non-contiguous, isolated territories. Second, they serve as fortress-like strongpoints, dominating roads and villages and serving as bases for Israeli military activity. Basically, they are a tool of attempted colonization and expropriation, rather than suburban sprawl into cheap, unoccupied land.

And the essay on roadways was also fascinating, illustrating the way in which the two communities of settlers and Palestianians, while they exist in the same two dimensional space, are actually overlaid on top of each other with little if any points of connection. They each live and travel along their own network of roads and villages, with no connection or communication between them.

Go read it all. It will be a far better use of your time than reading one more essay about the barbaric Palestinian death cult or the terror-sponsering zionist entity of Israel.

2002-08-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

Armies, Society, and Governance

I just started what looks to be one of those nice used bookstore finds, Armies and Societies in Europe: 1494-1789. This covers the period which saw the huge and vital shift of the army from an impermanent popular levy, in which every citizen could equally be a combatant but there were few if any true soldiers, to the age of modern, professional, standing armies. The military shifted from being a subtask for society at large to being a separate force separate from the general population.

It’s an interesting transition to read about in its own right, but I’m hopeful that it might also shed some light on the current instabilities around much of the third world. It seems to me that, in the broadest terms, the major problems facing the third world are corruption, tribalism, and the lack of effective civilian control of the military.

The lack of civilian control results in the many coups and military dictatorships which dot the developing world. These dictatorships then often play off ethnic tensions to maintain power, or fill the military with the leader’s fellow tribesmen. And the dictatorships can also give rise to corruption both by example from the top down, as with Zaire, or by so impoverishing the country that mid-level bureaucrats use any means they can to line their own pockets. And all of these problems then form a simmering, swirling mess that has sucked many countries down into a whirlpool of suffering and poverty.

In Europe and America, this problem has almost never arisen—Napolean is the closest example I can think of to a leader that seized power in a military coup since the Renaissance, although I’m sure I’m forgetting someone. [Insert: as indeed I was. See below for a correction.] But on the whole, the militaries in the now-industrial world have kept their place subservient to civil authority, despite having the capability to seize control.

I’m hopeful that looking at the history of the armies in the west will give insight into why they have remained loyal to the governments, while across much of the rest of the world, the military has instead taken over the reins of power. My best theory going in is that it was a byproduct of the Kingships in Europe. Since the leaders were felt to rule by divine providence, this suppressed rebellions since regicide was seen as too great of a crime. This then built up a pattern of obedience that was strong enough that it was never broken—the idea of a military coup was seen as impossible. While most third world countries, as arbitrary constructions without a strong sense of national identity, don’t have this history. (Which also exacerbates ethnic problems, since the local ethnic attachment is felt to have greater force than the national attachment.) We’ll see if this idea holds up, and the book will probably spark one or two more essays here. I’m sure you’ll be waiting with bated breath…

Update: Duh. Dan Hartung of the excellent lafefx blog (who unfortunately updates as infrequently I do) writes in to remind me of Franco and the Greek Colonels as two more examples of military coups in the developed world. Simple ignorance of Greek history made me overlook the Greek example, while lakck of reflection led me to miss Franco. Whether lack of knowledge of lack of thought is worse is left up to the reader to decide. Either way, thanks to Dan for the correction.

2002-08-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

Democracy and the Middle East

Well, this is a positive development. The US is now tying additional aid to Egypt to democratic reforms. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a trend—the US is a major aid supplier to several countries in the Middle East, especially Egypt and Jordan. As such, this should give the US substantial leverage to press for reforms in those countries, just as our aid to Israel gives us leverage to pressure their government. However, up to now that particular lever has never been tested.

There are two caveats that have to be mentioned, though. First is that this decision only affects additional aid to Egypt; it doesn’t touch the existing aid of almost $2 billion a year. As such, Egypt is putting on a brave face and vowing they won’t give in to pressure. If not, then perhaps the US needs to start chipping away at that pot of regular aid, actually decreasing it rather than just freezing the level. There might be some diplomatic issues there—I believe the aid was agreed to as part of the Camp David Accords, and I don’t know the exact terms of the agreement.

But one area that the US has consistently fallen short has been holding our nominal allies accountable. It was true during the Cold War, and it remains true in the Middle East—if you are willing to play nice with the US, we will look the other way when you torture and imprison your own citizens. Obviously, in regions where there are no palatable options, if you want any friends you need to make some compromise of ideals to reality, but that doesn’t mean you must simply accept the status quo without exerting some pressure for reform. Hopefully this action is the first step towards a new policy of encouraging reform among Middle Eastern (and other) governments.

The second caveat is more serious. And that is, as mentioned in the article, that Egypt has been an ally in the US effort against terrorism. And the US would prefer not to lose that cooperation. However, as Daddy Warblogs has discussed, the two goals of promoting democracy and opposing fundamentalist Islam may not, in the short term, be compatible. There is no reason to think that democratic regimes in Egypt, Iraq, or Iran would be very sympathetic to the US. The major opposition groups to the Egyptian government comes from hardline Islamicist groups, so chances are any democratic reforms will have the effect of giving these fundamentalist groups greater influence.

However, as I’ve argued before, I think a push for more freedom is, in the long run, the best policy. Right now, the autocratic regimes are quelling any dissent, which tends to channelize opposition to the governments towards the more militant and extreme groups, namely the Islamic parties. This repression also will make the break, when it comes, more violent. Like levees blocking floodwaters, keeping dissent suppressed will make it manifestation that much worse when it finally breaks through, as it did in Iran.

Liberalization and democratic reforms would, first of all, hopefully help drain some of the appeal and power from hardline opposition groups, lowering their chances of ultimately seizing power. While this might not work, at the very least getting the US on the right side of the issue will increase the sympathy of the populace. There are two big issues that alienate many Arabs from the US. The first is the US’s backing of Israel. The second is the US support for the indigenous dictators. The financial and military support the US provides for these autocratic regimes naturally makes any leaders in the street that oppose those dictators anti-US.

Ultimately, if we want to see any long-term reform in the region, we must be willing to risk short term instability and setbacks. Dictatorships don’t transition seamlessly and peacefully to democracies. They didn’t in the west, and they probably won’t in the Middle East. They need to go through their own revolutions to fight through to reform.

The status quo is obviously not a good situation, so simply attempting to preserve it is not an appealing prospect. Once that fact is accepted, the US can hopefully position itself to really be the beacon of and promoter of freedom and democracy that we like to style ourselves as. And in the long run, I have faith that democratic regimes will make peace with the West. People don’t like war, they don’t like being repressed, and they don’t like poverty.

Update: Combustible Boy has also commented on the topic.

2002-08-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

Science, Falsification, and Validity

Most people are familiar with the canonical method by which science proceeds—through the proposal of a hypothesis and experimental tests to attempt to disprove it. What’s sometimes less clear is why this is the method chosen—are scientists perverse in that they prefer to disprove things rather than prove them? Leaving aside for a moment the fact that this description of scientific progress is rather idealized and not all that accurate when compared to what many scientists actually do, Demosthenes discusses in a long post why the method of falsification is a better grounds for the advance of knowledge.

He explains it in terms of the idea of satisficing, which is accepting limitations in data and seeking an outcome that is "good enough," rather than optimal. A finite data set doesn't allow you to achieve a perfect optimization--there are always multiple possible courses of action that will satisfy your goals. Applying the idea to the scientific method, this boils down to the fact that no matter how much evidence you have that supports a given hypothesis, this is not enough to absolutely prove that hypothesis is true, because there might be other hypotheses that fit the observed data just as well. On the other hand, a single good piece of data that violates a hypothesis is enough to disprove it.

So if you want to be sure of yourself, the best way to proceed is to come up with as many possible hypotheses that explain the data as you can, and then get more and more data to try and eliminate them. At the end of the day, the hope is that you will find one single theory which fits all the observed data. You don’t stop there, but you can now provisionally accept that theory. It’s not proven true, but it’s proven useful, which is ultimately almost as good.

There remains the possibility that future discoveries will expose shortcomings in your existing theory, which will require its modification or the shift to a new explanation that differs in significant ways. However, this isn’t a wholesale overthrow—a theory only becomes accepted if it is the simplest explanation that fits the data over a wide range.

Normally, new data that contradicts the existing theory comes from a different realm of experience (an obvious example here is quantum mechanics.) The new theory that explains this data is usually more complicated, but still reproduces the existing theory for the previously measured regimes. It must, since the data from those regimes was consistent with the old theory.

Since this is the case, for many applications it will make more sense to use the previous theory, even if it is not completely correct, because it is accurate enough in the realm you’re interested in. (Relativity is another example—strictly speaking, every calculation in mechanics that doesn’t compensate for relativistic effects is wrong. But it’s usually not worth the trouble to make the more complicated calculation when it only changes your answer by 0.00001%.)

Getting back to the idea of satisficing, I’ve seen this concept used as the basis for a critique of science and the scientific method. We’ve taken lots of data, but that data could be fit by an infinite number of hypotheses, so we are unable to draw any conclusions from it. Therefore, science is not a valid method of arriving at truth, all knowledge is contingent, postmodernism reigns supreme, and Toni Morrison is a better author than Tolstoy. While the final conclusion is obviously flawed, I’ll limit myself to the critique of science, which I think fails on two counts.

The first is that I think it radically underestimates the amount of specification that even a relatively limited data set can give. There just aren’t that many hypotheses, in most cases, that are available to explain the data. The great majority of scientific work is in the details of applying relatively well understood broad theories or phenomena to new situations. If you see a novel energy transfer effect in a solid, there are really only a half dozen or so processes that could explain it, each of which is fairly well understood in some contexts. So you’re not starting from a blank canvas with infinitely many potential explanations. Most often, you’re working withing the framework of existing theories, which severely constrain the possible explanations. (And even in completely groundbreaking work, the data tends to be pretty specific. There just aren’t that many different kinds of mathematical functions or differential equations that can be used to model the data.)

As a side effect, this limitation of hypotheses also means that many working scientists don’t have to rigorously look to disprove alternatives—if your choices are relatively limited, looking for evidence in favor of one hypothesis often amounts to the same thing as attempting to disprove all the others. It’s a bit of sloppy thinking, really, but the paucity of possible explanations allows many scientists to get away with it.

The second point was hinted at above in describing the way a new theory supercedes an old one. Science, by its own admission, is not an attempt to arrive at Truth. It’s an attempt to arrive at a valid explanation which has predictive power. That is, I want to come up with a theory that explains existing data and will allow me to predict the result of experiments in the future. A scientific theory only gains acceptance if it works, in this sense. Any alternative hypothesis which equally fit the data is, by definition, equivalent to the accepted theory. They produce the same predictions, and hence are interchangeable. So even if there were infinite alternate hypotheses, they’d all be equally good explanations of the world, rather than being equally bad.

At worst, a scientific theory that has gained acceptance is a really good approximation to the situation in the real world. It makes predictions which are as accurate as we can measure, which is functionally equivalent to a perfect theory. But even once we are able to measure situations where the theory does diverge from measurements, the old theory is still good as a rough (or not so rough) estimate. It doesn’t suddenly become totally wrong; it becomes slightly wrong, but usually still very useful.

In fact, in physics, a lot of work is directed towards generating theories that people know in advance are wrong. A theorist will make lots of approximations—treat all bodies as speheres, all distributions as Gaussians, etc.—in order to try and generate a bottom line result that will give a rough approximation. Because you’ve fudged a lot of details, you know the fit won’t be perfect, but it’s still a victory is you can figure out that, say, the heat capacity of the solid should depend linearly on the temperature, rather than on the square root of the temperature. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, the devil is in the details and you can’t get good results by assuming everything is spherical. But sometimes you can, and that’s a victory for science, rather than an evidence of its shortcomings.

2002-08-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Civil Liberties and the War on Terror

For the most part, I have been skeptical of the concerns expressed from both sides about the erosion of civil liberties by the War on Terror. For the most part, I thought these were slippery slope arguments at best and simple paranoia at worst. Apparently, I was wrong.

The Justice Department has now attempted to repudiate the fundamental right of due process and are refusing to even discuss with a Federal judge the case of a US citizen held as an enemy combatant. This is outrageous. Ashcroft (and a decision this important was certainly vetted by him, if not by the President) is now claiming that the US government has, or should have, the right to lock up any US citizen for any time they like, without the presentation of any evidence or a court appearance. If they claim that you are an enemy combatant, then you have no right to due process, or any other rights, for that matter.

Now, I’m not opposed to dealing with foreign nationals captured in Afghanistan in a special, extra-judicial way. They truly are prisoners of war, whether we want to call them that or not, and as non-citizens, they are not necessarily entitled to the full protection of US Constitutional rights. However, a US citizen is another story. Regardless of the circumstances of his capture or the nature of the accusations against him, Hamdi should be entitled to due process. There is no reason not to give it to him.

It’s noteworthy that the Justice Department has failed to present any rationale for their refusal to comply with the judge’s order in this case, beyond claiming “you can’t make me do it! Nyah, nyah, nyah!” If they had a good reason, I’d be willing to listen to it. But they apparently don’t, so it’s hard to reach any other conclusion than that the Justice Department wishes to erode one of the most fundamental rights of US citizens.

2002-08-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

Secrets, Lies, and Polygraphs

I’ve run across several critical responses to the FBI investigating Congress for leaks of secret (technically, it was almost certainly Top Secret, for what it’s worth) intelligence intercepts prior to September 11. Joshua Marshall covers all the bases in several posts, although I first saw the main line of argument from Kevin at leanleft.com.

There is a valid concern here, but I think these sharp critiques are an over-reaction, and either miss or minimalize two vital points. The main argument against the FBI action is that investigating those Congresspeople that are, at the same time, investigating the FBI for its failures leading up to September 11 will have a chilling effect on that investigation. Marshall also says that, well, leaks happen, so it’s silly to get worked up about it, and why this one out of all the leaks?

Taking these one at a time—will the FBI investigation deter the congressional investigation? I’m skeptical of this point; in fact, far from cowing them, I’d think pissing off a powerful senator could make the investigation much more acrimonious. But say we grant that point. Why does it matter? The fundmanetal principle here is public overview of intelligence activities.

Any democratic society has a problem when it comes to dealing with sensitive information. For intelligence gathering to be effective, much of it, and all of the means used to gather it, must be kept secret. But if they’re kept secret, then the public has no way to judge their effectiveness, and hence the intelligence activities become divorced from democratic feedback. The compromise that the US (and I assume most other countries) has is that elected officials, both in the executive and the legislative branch, are granted oversight. Basically, a select few officials, who are elected and hence, in theory, represent the public, are chosen to watch over the FBI, CIA, and everyone else.

It’s this set-up that Marshall and Kevin are worried could become compromised. But I think the system is in far more danger from congressional leaks than from the intimidation of legislators. If intelligence agents find that sensitive information they brief to Congress makes it out to public, their response will simply be to stop telling Congress about much of what they do. And once this happens, then the oversight function is lost and you end up with things like Iran-Contra. So if you’re really worried about keeping intelligence agencies in line, the great threat is not from them leaning on Congress, who has plenty of power to resist any strong-arming; it’s from irresponsible Congressmen compromising the national security to butter up a reporter.

Which brings us to the second point Marshall made. Why be concerned about this leak? Well, first of all, as Marshall skates over quickly, the entire investigation was begun at the urging of several Congressmen, which kind of deep-sixes the whole “the FBI is browbeating Congress to stop their investigation” argument. Beyond that, though, this leak is particularly damaging because of what it revealed.

Intelligence assets are the gift that keeps on giving. If you can monitor an enemy’s communication, then you gain an incredible advantage on them. This leak, revealing specific words spoken by al Qaeda operatives, revealed to them both that they themselves had been identified (if they didn’t know that), and more importantly that the US was somehow monitoring their communications. So, this channel will now be closed and we will get no more information from it.

A recent example will illustrate the point. The US was able to tap in and monitor satellite phone calls that bin Laden made, without his knowledge. However, as part of the trials of the first Trade Center bombers, the US was forced to reveal transcripts from some of these calls, which let bin Laden (and everyone else) know that their satellite phone calls were not secure. So they stopped using them, and a vitally important source of intelligence was lost. If that information had been kept secret, the US might have learned of the September 11 attacks in advance (although this is unlikely), but they almost certainly would have been able to locate and capture or kill bin Laden in short order afterwards.

I don’t know exactly how the FBI (or CIA) was able to get the communications that were leaked, but now, unfortunately, whoever was being listened to knows. And now all the rest of al Qaeda probably knows as well that, say, their Hotmail accounts aren’t really anonymous.

Adding insult to injury, this leak served no purpose. From previous information it was already well known that the FBI made numerous screw-ups in the months leading up to September 11—this was just one more example, and not a very good one at that. So the leak was (maybe) tremendously damaging, with no corresponding benefit to anyone.

And Marshall’s point that “leaks happen, relax and let it happen” is simply laughable. Murders happen too, but that doesn’t mean that the police should stop worrying about trying to stop them, or investigating the ones that have occurred.

2002-08-05T14:38:00.000-07:00

How good is the Constitution?

Demosthenes, who’s writing one of the best and most interesting blogs out there, provides a link to this book review in the New Yorker. The book, and the review, address the US Constitution and ask how good the government that it outlines is. The answer: not very good, at least according to the reviewer Hertzberg.

I agree with one of the basic points—that the founders weren’t infallible and that raising the Constitution up to the level of Revealed Word of Political Wisdom, all-knowing and all-foreseeing is unjustified. However, I’m less convinced by the specific arguments in the article.

First, the grounds of the argument they (the author Dahl and the writer Hertzberg) make against the Constitution is to judge it on how democratic it is:

Dahl's premise is that the Constitution ought to be judged by "democratic standards"—that is, by whether it is "the best that we can design for enabling politically equal citizens to govern themselves under laws and government policies that have been adopted and are maintained with their rational consent."

But basing a critique on this point—that the Constitution has some undemocratic features—is not saying anything new. All the commentary I've ever read indicates that the founders explicitly designed the government, and the Senate in particular, to be partially insulated from public opinion, and so to provide an institutional conservatism, an inertia to oppose any changes.

Starting out saying that the criteria to judge the system on is the stated democratic one is already assuming the most important point in the debate--just how responsive should the government be to the public? Taken to the logical extreme, this approach would advocate giving everyone in the country a log-on to US-legislation.com and letting everyone vote on each bill proposed. And if you don’t support that idea (which I think would be a disaster), then you’ve ceded the main point and the question is no longer how to maximize the democratic nature of the government, but how to design a government that will produce the best governance, something very different.

Personally, I’m pretty happy with the levels of insulation between the mass will and actual enactment of legislation. Remove that and we’d have had a flag burning amendment and an amendment forcing everyone to say the pledge of allegiance every day, not to mention all the nifty handouts people would likely vote themselves.

Second, the particular examples cited in the article are unconvincing. The review focuses on slavery, an issue that hinges on practical politics at the time of the Constitution (as the writer admits.) Plus it’s a feature that’s been done away with, so is no longer relevant, except to demonstrate that the Consitution was not conceived in perfection, but can improve itself.

The other main example given is the Senate, which certainly is undemocratic to the extent that small state voters get a greater voice in the Senate than voters from large states. But the argument that this produces pernicious results is somewhat weak. The main supporting point made is that many worthwhile bills fail to make it through the Senate. While it's true that the Senate is the place that bills go to die, the article fails to make the case that this is because of the equal representation provision.

I'd bet that the Senate's oppositional power comes more from procedural considerations, namely the ability to filibuster with a 40 vote minority. That's the real undemocratic feature in the Senate.

He also falls in with the (somewhat) outdated idea of small state vs. large state interests, which is a dynamic that is changed by a two-party system. Unless small states tend towards one party or the other, the Senate seat apportionment doesn't bias towards any particular platform.

Finally, the article makes a circumstantial case that a US federal style government is not a good form, since so few other countries have adopted it, and some that have tried it have failed. The problem here is that the article commits the error of presenting non-normalized statistics. Without some control group or comparison, the numbers quoted are meaningless. How many governments with direct representation have failed? And what about the leverage gained by small minority parties in a proportional representative system? Is it more democratic to design a system that gives disproportionate power to small parties that represent only a tiny proportion of the population? The article never says, and so, while it raises some interesting questions, fails to convince me that it’s answers are the right ones.

Update: Demosthenes responds with two points. The first is that I haven't really answered the objection that the Senate is undemocratic. That's true--I haven't answered it because it's self-evidently true. But I'm not sure what the significance of that is. As I said, the issue is whether this is a feature or a bug. And the fact that the US has survived and thrived under the Constitution is good evidence that the government as designed works pretty well. To argue against it then requires, in my opinion, to show how the undemocratic nature of the Senate has produced pernicious effects. The article, in my opinion, didn't do a good job showing this. The main example they came up with (difficulty of getting bills through the Senate) is better explained by procedural factors than by the non-proportional representation.

The second, more interesting point, is whether the US form of government is appropriate for export. The original review also attempted this, but they did so through one of my pet peeves--throwing out statistics that are supposed to prove something but actually show nothing because there is no reference point for comparison. Deosthenes mentions that studies have shown US style governments are prone to collapse through gridlock. I can believe that, and such studies would be vitally important in any attempt at nation building.

On the other hand, these studies are also a bit irrelevant to a discussion of the Constitution, since it's not designed for other countries. It's designed for the US. And it has worked well here. It is complicated and baroque enough that I could certainly see it faling to thrive anywhere else, but it works for us. And while the reviewer has some theoretical objections to the form of government, I think a thoughtful conservatism would hew to Burke's admonishment to retain those things that work, and not to tinker with government in a vain attempt to perfect it, if the forms you have work perfectly well. Your changes might not be improvements, and for that questionable gain you're sacrificing the weight of tradition, which commands obedience through habit.

2002-07-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

I say Gee-had, you say Jy-had…

A fascinating exchange about the meaning of the word jihad is ongoing between several blogs. Start here for the original post by Muslimpundit Adil, then go over here for the reply by Aziz Poonawalla at unmedia (link via Demosthenes), and finish off with this quick gloss by H.D. Miller at Traveling Shoes, which hit some of the points I wanted to make. Go on and read them, then come back. They’re better than anything you’ll find here anyway.

OK, now that we’ve got all that linking and reading out of the way, I can but my way into the discussion. First of all, I’d second H.D. Miller’s point that just reading these can at least partially give one a flavor for the modes of Islamic argument, and way the Koran and Hadith can be reference to support arguments. This is important, since this form of argument underlies the development of Islamic law and practice—it’s the connecting structure between the holy book and tradition of Islam and the actual practice of Muslims in the world, which is what’s most of interest.

I think the argument can be confused, however, because there’s really three distinct facets to the argument, and what is true in one area might not be true of all three. First, there’s the question of what jihad meant historically. Second is the question of what jihad means to Muslims today. And third is what the limits of the meaning of jihad are in the future—is there any flexibility for it to come to mean something different?

This is not just an abstruse theological discussion, but a vitally important practical one. The call to jihad is one of the most important duties for a practicing Muslim. It’s not one of the five pillars of Islam, but is at a level just below that. So jihad is a central part of Islamic life. What it means to Muslims is a strong commentary on the nature of the religion and it’s past and present. And what it can mean gives limits to the development of the religion in the future. If jihad can only mean armed holy war, then a strong case can be made for the proposition that Islam is an inherently violent religion. On the other hand, if jihad can equally well mean (or is even preferably interpreted ads) an internal struggle, then the call to jihad says nothing about Islam’s violence or political prospects.

Adil, who started the discussion, seems to me to be arguing mainly the first point, and takes the position that the dominant historical meaning of jihad has been armed conflict, holy war. The idea of the inner, personal struggle as jihad, in Adil’s view, is a later invention by moderate Muslims who are more interested in pulling the wool over the eyes of westerners (and themselves) about Islam’s true nature than in really explicating what the Koran and the Hadith teach.

Aziz responds by saying that Adil has not really refuted the idea of jihad as inner struggle, and that while it may not be accepted in some lines of Islamic interpretation, there are other interpretations which accept this distinction.

H.D. Miller then gives his own two cents, opining that, while jihad may have mainly meant armed struggle in the initial expansion, the later idea of jihad as a personal struggle was also widespread. But that this idea does not have a strong basis in the Koran or Hadith.

So what does it mean? After reading this debate, and from what I’ve read of Arab history, H.D. Miller’s interpretation seems to fit the facts best. Namely that jihad was originally primarily about armed struggle, and hence this is it’s primary meaning when used in the Koran and Hadith. Since Islamic argument depends so strongly on historical arguments from authority, this gives proponents of violent jihad a strong stance in any argument, and a potential appeal to Muslims.

But the springing up of the alternate interpretation of jihad, both historically and in moderates today, muddies the water. If sincere and devout Muslims can preach that the duty of jihad can be interpreted as a struggle for personal perfection, then this interpretation, even if it has a weaker textual basis, is obviously possible. It does exist and is accepted by many, even if it isn’t the majority.

So on the key question of the future of Islam, the moderates by their very existence show that violence is not inherent in the system. And it seems that the goal of those of us who support the US should be to encourage the moderate position and to strengthen it, rather than attacking it and trying to tear it down to score rhetorical points for a hawkish approach. This doesn’t mean that no Muslims support a violent holy war against the West. Obviously some do. But the task is to marginalize them and to strengthen the hand and the position of the moderates.

Attacking Islam indiscriminately as a violent religion and condemning all its practitioners is both questionable intellectually and disastrous practically. A war of the West against Islam would radicalize the populations in the Middle East and be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the hawks, since then the great mass of Arabs would, of necessity, become hostile to the US and the West. Instead, the most effective and least costly path would be to find and embrace our natural allies, no matter how few or marginalized they are (and I don’t think they are that few), in the Islamic world. In any battle of values, which the current war ultimately is, this “fifth column” is our most potent ally and contains the seeds of victory and the hope for the future.