The Power and the Money

Miscellaneous Saturday links

 Comin’ atcha from the Westside ... Medical Center in the very-creepily-named Plantation, Florida:

Department of Denominators: Really, the graph needs one, like, say, real tax revenue. I expect better.

Department of Thanks: “I want to express my sincere gratitude for your thoughtful discussion of the issues,” wrote Colonel Qaddafi in a letter to Congress. “We are confident that history will see the wisdom of your country in debating these issues. We are counting on the United States Congress to its continued investigation of military activities of NATO and its allies to confirm what we believe is a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973.”

Department of Trouble: Doug Muir made the good point that there must be reasons for the Anglo-French defense posture, since both countries spend significant amounts on their militaries. I would like to see this discussed seriously, for the simple reason that I do not discount the possibility that there is no plan, and NATO defense budgets are set simply out of a combination of momentum and interest group politics. Moreover, what’s the counterfactual? What would an alternate European defense posture look like?

Department of Panaceas: We’ll see if ending gerrymandering has an effect on California’s political woes. I doubt that it will, but I would also like to be wrong.

Department of Crime: There is less of it, and nobody really knows why.

Department of Bahrain: Things are very bad.

August and everything after

 Last post, I went out on a limb and said I thought Qaddafi would be gone by “August, plus or minus a month.” We’ll know soon enough if I’m right! Meanwhile: what then?

A couple of thoughts on post-Qaddafi Libya (PQL).

One, the dismount is going to be tricky. Much depends on how Qaddafi leaves the building. If he flees like Ben Ali, that’s one thing. If he’s taken out by a coup, that’s another. If it ends with rebel columns rolling into Tripoli ... that’s actually pretty unlikely. So, flee or coup.

Say it’s a coup. Then what? Qaddafi’s inner circle are still around. Say they can be sidelined. (How? Could get messy.) You’ve still got a functioning state government in Tripoli. And that’s great — nobody wants a Somalia on Europe’s doorstep. But whoever ends up running it, that state government is not going to be eager to hand over power to a bunch of scruffy rebels in Benghazi. (Never mind a bunch of Berbers. Ugh, Berbers.) On the other hand, the National Transition Council (NTC) — the guys in Benghazi — are reasonably going to ask why they should acknowledge the authority of a bunch of guys in Tripoli who, until last Tuesday, were loyal apparatchiks of the Supreme Leader. So, watch for some sort of National Reconciliation Council, possibly brokered by friendly foreign powers.

Two, legitimacy. PQL is likely to be a troubled place in various ways. Qaddafi did a pretty good job of crushing civil society. The country is divided by regions and tribes. Nobody has any meaningful experience with civil liberties or democratic institutions. Everyone’s going to be armed. A significant amount of nation-building type assistance is going to be required, and frankly it’s none too soon to start.

Meanwhile, who’ll have legitimacy? The NTC can advance a plausible claim if they’ve reached a clear point of military dominance — control over most of the country’s territory and population, Loyalists clearly falling backwards. They’re nowhere near that point today. Otherwise, legitimacy will have to come from, sigh, democratic elections. I sigh because those are likely to be... problematic. Libya’s a country that has never had anything remotely approaching a fair and clean election. And being in political opposition, in Libya, has not historically been a great career choice. So everyone is likely to enter this thinking winner-take-all, so our side must not be allowed to lose! Things could work out, but...

Three, God only knows what PQL’s foreign relations are going to look like. People are saying “pro-Western,” but what does that even mean? Late-period Qaddafi — since 2004 or so — may have deployed a lot of nasty rhetoric, but in actual fact Libya has been a mildly pro-Western neutral country for the last few years. Qaddafi had closed down his nuclear program and given up his obnoxious habit of interfering in neighboring countries. He paid off the Lockerbie fine (which it’s still not very clear he was actually responsible for), normalized economic relations with everyone, allowed foreign investment in his oil industry, and had pretty much given up on anything but token support for the Palestinians. By 2010 he had signed tax and extradition treaties with most of the major members of the E.U. Yeah, Qaddafi could still deliver multi-hour spittle-flecked speeches at the U.N. about imperialist aggression, but Libya was about as “anti-Western” as Iceland.

Anyway, PQL is going to be everyone’s friend at first. That won’t last. It’s a rough neighborhood.

Four, the Berbers. They’re the ones doing most of the fighting in the Western Mountains, down below Tripoli. Qaddafi has been dumping on them for forty years nonstop, so pretty much every Libyan under 60 has been indoctrinated with anti-Berber prejudice. I don’t think that’s going to magically disappear after Qaddafi leaves the building.

I do wonder how much aid is being offered to the Berbers, and of what sort.  If we arm the Berbers, it puts a lot more pressure on Qaddafi, which is great. But then the new government will have to deal with the fact that the Berbers have heavy machine guns and artillery stashed away in caves or wherever. (Because they’re not going to just hand them over once the shooting stops.) If the new government is wise enough to clasp the Berbers to their bosom, offer them some sort of limited autonomy, and buy off a majority of their elites with oil revenue, that might not be a problem. But if they reflexively fall into the groove of viewing the Berbers as dimwitted, treacherous primitives, there could be some trouble.

As a guy who’s broadly sympathetic to oppressed ethnic minorities, I’m inclined to view arming the Berbers as a good thing. Today, they’ll use them to fight; tomorrow, why should they have to rely upon the kindness of a post-Qaddafi government? A cold-hearted realist, however, might suggest that having a heavily armed minority that (1) has serious historical grievances, that is also (2) causing problems for a (presumably) friendly and more or less pro-Western government in a none-too-stable post-conflict country, while also (3) sitting adjacent to a major oil exporting region and astride a major pipeline — might be, from that cold-hearted realist’s view, suboptimal. I have no idea which side the Obama administration is coming down on; I merely note that it’s not a simple question.

Thoughts?

The Correlation of Forces

 Doug Muir here.

Back in the day, the Soviet Union used to have a concept called “the correlation of forces.” Briefly, this was a metric made up of everything that determined relative power: military might, economic power, public opinion, internal divisions, political allegiance, and diplomatic relations.

I say “a metric,” but that’s a bit misleading. One reason the whole “correlation of forces” thing never quite caught on outside the USSR and its satellites was because it wasn’t a metric; you couldn’t easily break it down into a number or a set of easily manipulated facts. You could count tanks, planes and men with guns and produce cool-looking charts to (a) define and measure a threat, and/or (b) ask for a budget increase. But the correlation of forces couldn’t be quantified so easily. So it remained, in Western eyes, a bit airy-fairy; and after the fall of the USSR, it got more or less left by the wayside. (Here’s how far the phrase has fallen: it does not have a wikipedia page.)

That’s a pity, because it’s a useful concept. Consider, for instance, the current conflict in Libya. In military terms, Qaddafi should be doing okay. He’s still in charge of most of Libya’s territory, including its capital, and most of its population. He’s still got a much bigger army than the rebels. He has open supply lines through friendly neutral countries (Algeria, Chad) — which means that, although he’s formally under embargo, he can almost certainly import weapons, men, ammunition, replacement parts, and pretty much anything else he needs.

But he’s not doing okay. He’s losing. This is a war on three fronts — the east, the western mountains, and Misurata in between — and he’s been losing ground on all of them. Generals and ministers have been defecting. Foreign countries have been lining up to recognize the rebels. In Soviet terms, the correlation of forces has shifted against him — and is, at this writing, continuing to do so.

One way in which the correlation of forces is useful is that it illuminates positive feedback loops in a way that simple gun-counting doesn’t. If we have a battle, and I win, there’s not necessarily a positive feedback for me beyond whatever I gain from winning the battle itself. In other words, just beating Lee at Gettysburg, by itself, doesn’t help your cause very much. Sure, you’ve killed x number of men (tanks, planes) and presumably gained a better position on the board. But unless you’ve wiped out a major chunk of the enemy’s forces, decapitated his leadership, or laid his homeland open to invasion and devastation, you haven’t actually done much.

But if you think in correlation-of-forces terms — ah, that’s different. A lost battle can lead to bad economic consequences (the Confederate currency crashed after Gettysburg, and never recovered). It can lead to bad diplomatic consequences, to the surfacing of internal divisions, to the collapse of internal morale or the defection of unreliable minor allies. And these secondary effects can, themselves, affect the military balance of forces. In fact, a lost battle may itself be the result of economic or diplomatic problems — and may then cause more problems, which can lead to losing more battles.

I’m oversimplifying, of course. But it does provide a useful way of looking at what’s happening in Libya. Qaddafi is losing ground for a variety of reasons. His military is a bunch of unhappy draftees; morale is low. (Civilian morale is no better.) NATO is preventing him from using his air, armor, or heavy artillery, while also degrading his 4C. He has every reason to be paranoid about a coup, which means he must restrict power and personal interaction to a small trusted circle, which cuts down on his (already degraded) ability to process information and respond effectively.

Here’s my take on this: things are likely to get worse for him, because the more ground he loses, the more likely he is to lose more ground. He’s probably still able to launch counterattacks at the tactical level, so he may well be able to roll back the rebels in one or more areas. But he won’t easily be able to build on those victories, because they won’t change the underlying diplomatic, economic, or internal-political dynamics. To accomplish that, he’d have to win a major, crushing victory — retake Misurata, say, or wipe the Berbers off the map. That’s unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, rebel victories in the field do change the correlation of forces — they further depress Loyalist morale, make Qaddafi’s remaining foreign allies less enthusiastic about standing up for him, make major desertions more likely, and thus make Qaddafi ever more paranoid and isolated. Simply put, he’s trying to climb a slope that’s steadily getting steeper.
 
Back in April, I said I gave Qaddafi “more than a month, but less than a year.” I’ll narrow that a little now — as of this posting, he’s got more than two weeks, but less than six months. Too vague? Okay, I’ll live dangerously: August, plus or minus a month. If you disagree, feel free to make your own predictions in the comments.

Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps? New York Times Edition

 Credit for the post title to Brad Delong.

Far be it from me to say bad things about the natural gas industry. But I can say bad things about people who shill for the natural gas industry. Today in the New York Times the paper publishes something that it never ought to have allowed to see print (or screens): this op-ed by Robert Bryce. It is the worst sort of cant: rhetoric designed to mislead by sleight-of-hand.

The basic argument is as follows. Renewables should be free to be green. Renewables are not free. Therefore, we should build more CCGT plants and nuclear reactors.

That’s really the argument. There’s this bizarre red herring implying (falsely) that it takes so much energy to build the steel in a solar installation as to make it as carbon-emitting as a natural gas turbine. Then there’s a second implication that it would be possible to greatly expand the number of nuclear power plants in the country without building high-power lines. Followed by a completely bizarro-world claim that the U.S. is short of empty land, or that 129 square miles is a lot of territory. (I have written about this elsewhere, although Doug makes a good case in comments that normal EPA review should still apply. But that is nothing compared to Bryce, who claims that they should not be built at all.) There is, of course, no attempt at either cost or carbon accounting.

I should add, of course, that he misrepresents the environmentalist position on nuclear fission. Only in Germany are greens universally opposed to it. Straw man, there, and irrelevant to his argument, inasmuch as he has one.

If he were calling for conservation and downsizing of energy use, he would at least be consistent, if IMHO incorrect. (I think the costs of photoelectric, solar-thermal and wind are worth the benefits, but there are costs.) Thing is, he’s not calling for conservation. He’s calling for more gas-fired plants. WTF?

Disingenuous, at best.

The Romans to the rescue?

 Anglo-French forces have begun making helicopter strikes from carriers in support of rebel operations. They join the Anglo-French air sorties (which now outnumber U.S. sorties by a growing margin) and the Anglo-French  ships that have been shelling shore targets in support of the rebels in Misurata. (War nerds should click the second link.) William Hague, meanwhile, was in Benghazi two days ago.

It is an excellent level of support. (Everyone should read this comment by Doug Muir, and this post by Alex Harrowell, at which point somebody should answer the queries they raise.) But four days ago one country put them all to shame, a most unexpected country: Italy. Yes, Italy. Home of the oil company that seriously thought it could reclaim its oil from Gaddafi. Home of one of the Colonel’s biggest friends. Land of the supremely bizarre “Friendship Treaty” between the Italian Republic and the Grand Arab Libyan Popular Socialist Jamahiriya. Italy!

Ever since Gaddafi demonstrated that he could hit rebel oil production, the rebel government has been hard up for cash. (The one tanker that they got out has finally been purchased by a refinery in Hawaii.) Legal confusion in the United States has held up the rebels’ ability to access Gaddafi’s assets, or use them as collateral for loans. (The recent sale of rebel oil to Hawaii is an indication that this fog may be lifting.) So how is the rebel government going to get the foreign exchange that it needs?

Enter Italy. Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, said Rome would, through Eni and UniCredit SpA, “provide the [rebel] council for the needs of the Libyan people with a huge quantity of fuel and a huge amount of money.” He added: “We are talking about billions of euros that is not money of the regime. This is money of the people of Libya. [These] important frozen assets can represent a very valid guarantee for this transfer of money to the Libyan people.”

In the absence of NATO forces capable of hitting irregular government troops far inland, then the only way to get resources to the rebels is to let them borrow against government assets. British training is all well and good, but the rebels need air support, and right now they do not have it outside a narrow coastal band. So ... Italy just won huge credit by offering cash. Stratfor likes to insist that the Anglo-French effort is all about securing petroleum contracts at Italian expense: if so, Rome just blew a hole in that idea. The rebels should look at Eni et al pretty favorably ... and the decision to channel the lending through Eni only reinforces that.

On the other hand, Britain seems to be training the rebels on the ground. Serious rebel training would obviate the worries about the oil fields, by allowing the rebels to coordinate with foreign air forces operating at high altitudes. (To be frank, getting the rebels into some sort of recognizeable — and hard to copy — uniform would help.) That will also be quite thanked.

In short, the postwar question will be: does concrete Italian financial support outweigh concrete Anglo-French military support? I suspect that given the legal mess, the former will prevail. But then again, I never did believe the idea that Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s decisions had been driven by a desire to have their national companies (particularly BP) seize formerly-Italian production contracts. That said, Rome seems to have found an easy (and almost costless) way to insure that its interests will survive the conflict.

It would be nice if the U.S. would move as quickly in unfreezing Libyan assets. It was a heroic effect to clear the Hawaiians to import rebel crude, but there is more to do. Britain and France, it is time to start serious lawfare.