The Power and the Money

A self-refuting argument for intervention in Syria

The pressure is mounting on the United States to intervene in the Syrian civil war. Yesterday the New York Times ran an op-ed from Bill Keller proposing the following plan.

“President Obama articulates — as he has not done — how the disintegration of Syria represents a serious danger to America’s interests and ideals. The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels — funneling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiating an orderly transition to a nonsectarian Syria. We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”

To his credit, Keller recognizes that success is not guaranteed. “It might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals. But that outcome is virtually inevitable if we stay out.”

In short: these terrible things will happen without American intervention. Thus we should intervene regardless of our ability to stop them from happening. That would seem to be a self-refuting argument.

I would prefer to be constructive. Keller’s plan leaves six unanswered questions.

1. What do we do if Assad does not negotiate? 
2. What do we do if Assad retreats into the Bekaa Valley under pressure from U.S. airpower?
3. With whom does he negotiate? 
4. Should the negotiations succeed, how do we keep the rebels from fighting among themselves?
5. How do we keep government supporters from continuing to fight even if Assad chooses to surrender?
6. How do we prevent ethnic cleansing in Alawite territories? 

These questions may have answers, although I fear that they will involve boots on the ground and a whole lot of money. I also fear that they may not have answers. Failure, we should remember, is an option.

“This old lady is worse than the one-eyed man”

That is what President José Mujica of Uruguay accidently said about President Cristina Fernández of Argentina when he didn’t know the mike was live. The one-eyed man, by the way, is her late husband and former President of Argentina.

“Esta vieja es peor que el tuerto.” In Mexico, in this context, the use of vieja would not necessarily be an aspersion against President Fernández’s age, meaning instead something like “The wife is worse than the one-eye.” I am told, however, that in the Southern Cone it translates to something more like “hag.”

Uruguay is not happy with Argentina. The tension goes back a long way (Canadians should appreciate the psychology) but the recent imbroglios began with this. Short version: Argentine activists blockaded a bridge between Uruguay and Argentina in anger over a big paper mill a Finnish company was building in Uruguay.

President Mujica’s predecessor, Tabaré Vázquez, considered going to war over the blockade, but quickly realized ... well, take a listen:

So much for sending the Uruguayan army over the bridge. (Plus, well, even a successful action would have worked out about as well for Uruguay as Pearl Harbor did for Japan: you don’t get a country to reopen its roads to your commerce by attacking them.)

Ex-President Vázquez is telling the truth about the seriousness of the conflict over the Botnia paper mill. In 2006, the Uruguayans told the American government that the Argentines were “fascists” and asked the U.S. for help. “A brother slapping another in the face needs a big uncle to put a stop to it,” said the Uruguayans, although they feared that Argentina would cut off gas imports. (The U.S. tacitly supported Uruguay.) In April 2007, in the face of Argentine threats, Uruguayan newspapers revealed military contingency plans should the plant be attacked, although the Uruguayan military attache in Buenos Aires later contradicted those reports.

In November 2007, Vázquez ordered the mill to start operations, with the blockade still underway. But the Uruguayans feared the Argentine response, so they secretly asked for closer military relations with the U.S. and stepped up security around the plant.

Uruguayan fears notwithstanding, war was not going to happen — the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires wrote: “There is absolutely no indication that GOA [Government of Argentina] is considering a military ‘solution’ to this dispute, and the GOA’s own military operational capacity is very limited. Any suggestions of a military ‘solution’ here actually brings about expressions of humor or disbelief. At the recent Embassy-hosted Veterans Day event, a military contact only barely jokingly said that as a matter of fact, right now, the GOU [Government of Uruguay] probably has more active and usable aircraft and other military assets than does the GOA.”

That said, it is ridiculous that Buenos Aires let the situation get so out of hand. With the plant running (and causing little pollution) the crisis passed, but the reverberations continued to mess up relations between the two countries. Argentina blocked Mercosur from funding a second frequency converter on the Uruguay-Brazil border. The converter would have let Uruguay import more electricity from Brazil ... freeing it from Argentine pressure. (As well as occasional power shortfalls: Uruguay wanted it for economic as well as political reasons. Tenders finally went out in 2011, without Mercosur money.)

Then the Argentines blocked joint dredging operations to maintain the Martín García canal, under the treaty governing the Rio de la Plata. The problem has kept big ships out of the Uruguayan port of Nueva Palmira. It looks like the dredging might finally happen, maybe.

Buenos Aires proceeded to add insult to injury by imposing import licenses on 6 percent of Uruguayan exports to Argentina. It also went after Uruguay as a putative tax haven and denied its national airline landing rights in Chubut. Then Argentina stalled on attempts to build a regasification plant to allow for LNG imports. (President Mujica announced on April 2 that a plant will go ahead “with or without Argentina.”)

The most recent insult was not aimed at Uruguay specifically, but angered Montevideo nonetheless: Argentina limited the amount of money that Argentines can take out of the country ... sucker-punching Uruguay’s tourism industry.

Uruguay tried to shoot back by delaying Néstor Kirchner’s attempt to become the first Secretary-General of the Union of South American Nations, but they failed. Kirchner took over the organization shortly before his death in 2010.

It has become about as dysfunctional a relationship as one can imagine between two democratic and culturally-similar neighboring states. Argentina fruitlessly and pointlessly bullies Uruguay; Uruguay impotently pokes back. Things will certainly not get any worse, but they also show no sign of getting better.

The next time a Canadian complains about relations with the U.S., point to the Southern Cone. It could be much much worse.

Not Happy To Be Right

It looks like I’ve won another bet with John Quiggin. February 2013 has come and gone, and Hafez Assad remains in power in Damascus.

If you’re interested in my analysis of the Syrian conflict — and, really, why would you be? — here’s what I wrote two months ago. Basically nothing has changed since then. Assad is still going to lose, it’s still going to take a long time, and a lot of people are going to be killed, maimed, impoverished or otherwise immiserated first.

For the record, here’s what I wrote back in August 2011: “Assad will still be in Syria, and still the leader of an internationally recognized (though very diplomatically isolated) government. It’s possible that he might be assassinated by then, but I don’t think it likely. I don’t see a blue-on-blue coup taking him out now, and I don’t think he’s anywhere close to cutting and running. Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely... the regime may well have lost control of large swathes of the country. Syria will probably be increasingly violent, impoverished, and immiserated. And Assad may well be — in effect — just a powerful warlord in a country that has a number of warlords. But he’ll still be there, and will still be at least nominally the head of state. More’s the pity.”

I’ve been arguing with myself as to whether I want to re-up the bet for yet another six months. I’ve won twice now; why not go for the trifecta? Well ... in my opinion, those first two wagers (Assad will last a year beyond August 2011; Assad will last another six months beyond August 2012) were sucker bets. That first bet was something like 10-1 in my favor. I could have lost, but the odds were quite firmly on my side. The next six months... eh, the odds are still on my side. But not by as much. It’s still a good bet, but it’s no longer in the candy-from-a-baby category.

But that’s not why I’m hesitant about betting again. 2-1 is still good odds, after all. But I’m getting a little weary of betting on the loathsome dictator who is plunging his country into blood and horror. “Oh hey, another week, looks like I’m going to take some more of John Quiggin’s money” is fun. “Another week, another thousand people mangled or dead in the Syrian meat grinder” is not. Wagering on the outcome is starting to seem tasteless.

That bet grew out of a debate in August 2013 about dictators. John Quiggin thinks that dictatorship is an institution in decline, and that the number of dictators around the world is likely to decrease; I think that it’s an institution that’s in reasonably good health, and that the number of dictators around the world is likely to remain more or less stable. It’s only 18 months since we started watching this, so it’s certainly too early to declare a trend. But... in that time, the number of dictators has not changed significantly. One dictator (Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia) died of natural causes and has not yet been replaced. Zenawi was an old-fashioned charismatic revolutionary. His replacement as President is a mild-mannered figurehead, with a junta of revolutionary veterans really running things from behind the scenes. Those sorts of arrangements don’t tend to be long-term stable, so let’s see how this evolves over the next little while. Ethiopia’s an interesting place, and I could imagine a range of outcomes, from “heading for liberal democracy! hurrah!” to “more dictatorship” to chaos.

Meanwhile, though, Presidents Bongo of Gabon and Gnassingbe of Togo — two authoritarian African leaders who inherited the positions from their fathers — have both been growing steadily more dictatorial. Bongo, in particular, seems to be evolving into a classic old-fashioned African kleptocrat. I put both these guys on my “borderline” list back in August 2011. Today I’d move Bongo, at least, into the full-fledged dictator category today.

So, no net change. It’s still early days, but I have to say there’s more evidence for a “dictatorship is doing fine, thanks” hypothesis than the “dictatorship is inevitably doomed” position.

Finally, let’s note that Syria is proving a useful cautionary tale for dictators around the world. You want to tacitly tolerate those street protests, people? See where that leads! You want to end up like Syria? Guys like Lukashenka of Belarus and Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan — both of whom were visibly jumpy about the fall of Qaddafi back in August 2011, and clearly concerned that the Arab Spring might be heading their way — have visibly calmed down since then. State-controlled media in authoritarian countries around the world have been quick to depict the Syrian conflict as a plucky Assad attempting to hold the breach against terrorism, civil war, foreign intervention and chaos. At this point the Syrian conflict has turned into a small but real net positive for dictators around the world, and will continue so for a while no matter how it turns out.

Drone wars

There has been a lot of recent controversy about America’s drone policy. That controversy is deserved. There seems to be something odd about the use of weapons of war outside a war zone. What are the rules? Where does it end?

When I think about it, there do seem to be clear rules and we know exactly where it ends. Only they are not the rules that the Administration has written down and they are not rules that any administration could openly admit to.

Basically, the United States will use drones in any of the areas where we would use any kind of military force to advance our interests outside of war. E.g., countries (or subareas of countries) that satisfy two conditions:

1. They are outside the reach of a legitimate, democratic and effective government;
2. The open use of American force would not embarrass a government we like or damage other American interests.

E.g., the U.S. will use drones to kill people in the world’s ungoverned spaces, just like it will use the Marines or the Army or any other element of national military force. But we will not use them to kill people in Canada and we will not use them in Colombia, albeit for different reasons.

These unwritten rules, I think, are why liberals massively support the use of drones to kill Al-Qaeda members in Yemen. I was surprised to discover that self-selected viewers of the Ed Show are okay with this policy. The support is there despite the risk to foreign civilians and even when the alleged terrorists are American.

The legality is strange (in essence, even American citizens in ungoverned spaces have no rights) but not, I do not think, new.

In practical terms, the difference between drones and F-16s or cruise missiles is one of cost. They can linger for more time than most manned vehicles and with no risk of losing the pilot. And they are more accurate than cruise missiles. That makes them easier to use. But it is not like the U.S. refrained from firing cruise missiles at Afghanistan or Sudan. Or, for that matter, sending helicopters full of Naval special forces into Pakistan.

None of this is to say that there is nothing new under the sun. Surveillance technology is different: ultra-high resolution photographs and bird or bug-sized flying spybots are in fact new things that need new rules. But those truly new things have not yet entered the public debate.

Drones as they currently exist are a matter of a change in scale but not a change in kind. The fundamental issues are no different and the unwritten rules are no different. If we are honest with ourselves, we know the rules and we know the limits. We just cannot say them ... and perhaps do not wish to admit them. After all, they amount to a declaration of sovereignty over much of the planet, within which the Constitution does not apply.

But once you realize that the limits are there, the lack of debate makes sense.

Why we fight

 This story comes from Business Insider, a serious website. In it, they say that a drill sergeant asked his recruits to provide him with a written explanation of why they joined the Army.

Well done, soldier! (And intel, too! Word.)

By the way, here is the original Reddit thread. If you have ever been in basic training of any sort with any service, you gotta read it. Heck, even if you haven’t. Especially this subthread. (I am still laughing.) Note that Looney82 is in fact the drill sergeant in question.

Randy McDonald reviews a science fiction novel

I was pleasantly surprised by John J. Lumpkin’s first novel, Through Struggle, The Stars. I’m normally wary of the sub-genre of military science fiction. Many of the more recent titles that I’ve seen appear on bookshelves aren’t very good books at all, titles written by their generally right-wing American authors who were much less interested in the art of writing than they were in creating crude nationalist propaganda. The need for a jihad against Muslims, the amusing fatal decadence inherent in the French (or, more broadly, Europeans), the underhanded cunning of the Chinese, the need for the simpler and more martial mores of the past to replace an immoral liberalism — all these tacks have featured too prominently in too many milSF books I’ve picked up for me to feel comfortable with the genre. To the author’s credit, he did a very good job of avoiding this pitfalls of milSF.

Through Struggle, The Stars is set in the starfaring future of 2139, decades after the development and deployment of technologies capable of creating stable wormholes between points in space light-years apart and antimatter-fueled starships capable of transporting wormhole terminuses to distant planetary systems made interstellar travel possible, and after a devastating asteroid impact on Earth gave every countrry capable of mounting interstellar colonization efforts the incentive to do so. Colonies from dozens of different powers are scattered among the nearby stars, different countries’ colonies clustering in different areas. China and Japan, apparently the dominant powers on Earth, are also prominent players beyond the Solar System. Of late, these countries have begun to drift towards war. In this dynamic, unsteady environment, newly commissioned American cadet Neil Mercer joins the United States Space Force and catches himself up in the various maneuverings of the United States as it and its leadership bring the United States and its allies into the Sino-Japanese conflict.

To my relief, no one is propagandizing for any country in this novel. Each of the actual and potential combatants have their good sides, but each also has their own flaws. Lumpkin has written a novel where China is probably the biggest power in the world, but it isn’t an obviously evil or threatening polity. Military fiction novels where the parties in a conflict are complex are inherently more interesting than ones where contrived conflict is created between Good Guys and the Evil Ones, if only because it makes it possible to sympathize with characters on all side that aren’t sockpuppets. Lumpkin deserves to be praised for his even-handedness.

Some of my fellow reviewers have pointed out that the world of 2139 is a world where not much seems to have changed since the early 21st century, politically and otherwise. China is an oligarchy with an expansive sphere of influence on Earth; Britain is an independent American ally outside of an integrated Europe where France seems to be a major player; countries in the global South like Brazil, India, and Mexico seem to be present only in passing, although Iran does make an interesting appearance. Culturally, too, the world of 2139 seems almost too recognizable and contemporary, a certain Hispanicization of the United States aside. These likely anachronisms did stand out to me, although they didn’t prevent my enjoyment of the novel.

I also liked the attention that Lumpkin gave to his material universe. Different worlds are not perfectly Earth-like, the colonization of distant exoplanets is a costly venture that isn’t universally successful, and attention has been given to the import of the location of different stars in different places. The planetography of some of the worlds visited is paid attention, and the nature of life on sai; he even gives multiiple explanations for Fermi’s paradox. (One of these explanations lies at the root of the Sino-Japanese conflict and the United States’ involvement in sai.)

The novel is definitely a good first novel, and a worthy one. I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 5. The novel’s website points to it being the first novel in a projected series, The Human Reach. I look forward to seeing followups, and to seeing this and other novels on the series on bookshelves. Well done.

I bought my copy of Through Struggle, The Stars from Smashwords for $US 2.99, but the novel is also available from Amazon and other online retailers.

Another review of a science fiction novel

Carlos Yu here.

Through Struggle, the Stars
A Human Reach Novel
By John J. Lumpkin
Copyright 2011 John J. Lumpkin
Smashwords Edition

The important things out of the way first: Through Struggle, the Stars is a solid, readable first novel. I would read this novel’s sequel, and I would consider reading an unrelated novel by this author. It’s well-paced and has moments of genuine dramatic tension, a B in a world without grade inflation.

Through Struggle, the Stars is military science fiction without being military pulp science fiction. It’s not a dumb adventure novel of the kind where your IQ points are used for target practice by the writer, and it doesn’t read like someone else’s fetish porn. Quite frankly, this is probably why it hasn’t found a publisher yet. The story is jingo-neutral, or close to it.

Lumpkin has put some thought into each of his set pieces and how they fit into the overall plot of the book. The space combat is realistic in that ships radiate energy like real physical objects, they move with very low accelerations, and they are very vulnerable to hypervelocity impacts. Lasers in space and as a form of artillery have important roles. Lumpkin abides by the constraints of his imaginary wormhole technology, and he uses the local stellar neighborhood as his playground. It’s not totally rigorous, but he’s put in some work.

There is a nagging problem with inconsistency in the setting, however. I’m not sure whether this would be picked up by the general science fiction reader, should such a person exist, but it jarred me. Simply put, the timescales are off. A social setting that would not be a bad extrapolation of today’s demographics in 2050 is given a date of 2139. Future institutions are immediately recognizable. Technological progress outside of the space applications sector has moved very, very slowly —there are no flashy advances in automation or genetic engineering, for example. Despite Japan  becoming a major power once again through its first mover advantage in space technology, economic convergence between the richer nations and the poorer nations has stopped. At the same time, interstellar colonies on previously barely habitable worlds somehow have reached populations in the millions and have been settled for decades, and there is significant commerce. Many nations have colonies.

This mismatch in timescales is a shame, because each part of Lumpkin’s universe feels realistic enough. If anything, his setting feels a little too contemporary — a scene involving a Mercedes and a brawl in a casino parking lot comes to mind.

The politics of colonization motivate the background of the plot — true terra nullius, there are no aliens so far in this setting. There is a worldwide belief in the necessity of developing colonies off-Earth to maintain cultural and biological survival due to the horrible effects of a near-future asteroid impact. This belief has merged with a resurgent nationalism. Policymakers also believe that wars between superpowers can escalate incrementally, perhaps because of the excellent defensive countermeasures in this setting, but I wonder if Lumpkin has in the back of his mind what happens when the conditions for deterrence through mutually assured destruction no longer apply.

The characterization in Through Struggle, the Stars was, for want of a better word, adequate. The soldiers are more fully realized than the intelligence agents. I didn’t believe in the motivations of the two principal Chinese agents, but it wasn’t because of “characterization through ethnic stereotype,” and they are presented as outliers. People die, and I am pretty sure that Lumpkin has read Tobias Wolff’s short story, “Bullet in the Brain.” (Go read it. It’s short.)

Through Struggle, the Stars is an emotionally cool book. It lacks some of the quirky outsider energy of classic science fiction, but it also lacks the same undercurrents of dogmatism and score-settling. This book is not about saving the world with a single grand gesture, or flipping the table over to reveal the rot underneath; it’s about conflicted people in the military and the intelligence services at a particular point in geopolitical history. I enjoyed how the Big Secret turned out not to have very much effect, although it is conceptually important.

I’m more than happy to answer any questions.

A review of a science fiction novel

A friend of mine, James Nicoll, asked me and a few other mutual amigos to review a self-published science fiction novel: Through Struggle, The Stars, by John Lumpkin. Somewhat reluctantly, I downloaded and read it. To my surprise, I enjoyed the read while remaining unconvinced by the scenario. I will also put up my friends reviews (all written separately). Here (with one change) is mine:

Through Struggle, The Stars is much better than a self-published novel has any right to be. It’s a tale of a war in the year 2140 between China and Japan, told through the eyes of a new officer in the United States Space Force. The USSF — which has inexplicably adopted naval ranks and conventions despite the name — exists to defend both the terrestrial United States and its interstellar colonies. The setting is hard science fiction, in the sense that the only gimme is a system of wormholes to allow interstellar travel. No aliens; space vessels rotate for gravity; and while they use fusion engines that we have no idea how to build the accelerations involved are tiny. The politics aren’t self-evidently silly and the populations of the colony worlds are sensibly low. In fact, it reads like the kind of novel that I tried to write as a teenager, only well-crafted.

From the tone of the above paragraph, I’m sure that you can guess that my overall review is going to be negative. Since the book has a lot of positive qualities, let me start with them. First and foremost, I kept reading! I am not the sort of person who finishes every book he starts. In fact, I finish only a small minority of them. Most of my reading is work-related nonfiction and thus mostly skimmed. As for novels, I’m a high-friction reader: the moment I have to work to maintain my attention, my reading speed drops quickly — and it takes very little to get me to quit. This novel I did not quit. That is an extremely good thing. 

Second, I very much liked how the majority of the American characters had Spanish last names. Finally, somebody who thinks about demographics! I also liked that they threw in Spanish catch-phrases, but just as that: catch phrases. That is exactly how Spanish survives after several generations. We learn (from a Senate vote) that the United States has at least 52 states by 2140 and the author opens the possibility that Cuba might be one of them. Normally, that would get my “silly future cliché” alert up, but the allusion is simply that one enlisted USSF person has Havana for a home town. That would be possible today. While I do not believe that Cuba will ever become part of the United States it is supremely easy to believe that the country will continue to have a “special relationship” with the mainland, up to and including free migration. So the throwaway line didn’t desuspend my disbelief — after all, add Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia and you’ve got 52 right there.

The characters were believable, if somewhat clichéd. Actually, “clichéd” isn’t the right word. They were believable enough for me to care about them (and therefore keep reading) but they weren’t distinct enough for me to really remember any details. The one exception was a Chinese gangster-turned-intelligence-agent, and he stuck with me because I didn’t really ever believe in him. He wasn’t a cliché by any means; he just seemed too much like an agent of the plot, a character created by “The Narrative” rather than a real person who naturally found himself involved with the other people in the book. (The phrase in quotes is a reference to Scalzi’s Redshirts.)

The politics were well-handled … but lacking. First, the portrayal of China as a quasi-democracy felt wrong. Such regimes first appeared in Latin America in the late-nineteenth century; they quickly collapsed (via coups or civil wars) or turned into full-on dictatorships. That pattern continued through the 20th century with a third wrinkle: several of the quasi-democracies turned quickly into real democracies. Mexico’s second dictatorship-in-drag collapsed in the 1990s; even in Turkey today, the “deep state” seems to be on its last legs. It strained my belief to think that China would be ruled by a century-old corrupt oligarchy 130 years from now. (A newly-minted corrupt oligarchy would be a different story.)

Second, the politics of the war were given disappointingly short shrift. It is indisputable that major inter-state war has gone into serious decline since 1945. It strikes me as very plausible that it could see a comeback. The novel provides a necessary condition: powerful directed-energy weapons make it at least plausible that politicians would believe that they could control the ladder of escalation. (The prevalence of robotic and precision weapons had a similar effect.) Logically, therefore, the war began as a limited conflict fought at sea and in space; one can imagine future audiences cheering on such a contest.

The problem is that there was something very pro forma about the backdrop. There is an interesting question about whether industrialized interstate war (limited or not) is possible in a modern democratic environment. Can modern democratic politicians capitalize on violence? Would modern audiences countenance unleashing death in their names for anything less than national survival? These questions are unaddressed. When the author reveals the reason the American president maneuvered the U.S. into the war, it comes as an anticlimax. (It depends on the FTL McGuffin.) There were some references to U.S. domestic opposition, but mostly in the context of “ethnic Chinese” congressmen objecting to a war with the madre patria. (Which is, I have to say, a silly idea — in a world where China has been rich for a century, there will be no discernable Chinese-American community have been little net immigration from China for at least as long. The descendents of past and current immigrants will have long since assimilated; second-generation outmarriage among Chinese-Americans currently tops 50%.) There is a subplot involving a Taiwanese independence movement that strained credibility. In short, the politics never became unbelievable — but they were underexplored.

Which brings me to the killer problem: the book read like it took place in 2012, 2030 on the outside. It was simply unbelievable as a depiction of life in 2140. The ground combat scenes, for example, read like they happened last week. (The main characters were a little too composed during the fighting, but that’s a different issue.) Sure, there were exoskeletons and lasers from space, but that felt like window-dressing. Nothing about microdrones, intelligent robotic “pack animals,” self-guided ammunition ... the tactics of ground combat were basically unchanged.

The same problem afflicted the rest of the book. There were passing mentions of self-driving vehicles, advanced drones, machine translation, advanced 3-D printing, computer interfaces implanted in people’s eyeballs and “the best genes that money could buy,” but none of that had any appreciable effect on the course of the action or the social background in which the characters operated. The author failed completely at giving the impression that the book took place in the future. Now, it is possible that the author is correct that by 2140 automation will advance, sensor technology improve, cyborgization continue, 3-D printing mature and gene modification become common among the rich ... yet with daily life remaining about the same as in 2012. (Along with military organizations, ground combat and democratic politics.) That is possible! And hell, as a small-c conservative, I would very much like it to be true. But it’s a tall order, and a writer who wants to keep my disbelief suspended needs to make the case. The author of this book does not even try.

As a coda, I had three other quibbles. First, while the space combat scenes seemed well thought through, I did have to wonder what all those people on board the ships were actually doing. Even if our 22nd-century space navies decide to keep human commanders in the loop rather than entrusting it all to the AI’s, one would think that the ships would operate with tiny stripped-down crews and lots of maintenance robots. If that’s wrong, I want to know why.

Second, the dynamics of space colonization didn’t make much sense, at least not on the surface. There wasn’t much commerce, so the motivation seemed to be non-economic. The few colonies we saw were not rich places, so there was some indication that the author realized the problem, but it wasn’t explicit. Nothing caused me to recoil, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn’t make sense about the scenario.

Lastly, there were a few dumb throwaways. A reference to helium-3 mining on the Moon. Ugh. A reference to asteroid mining. Slightly more plausible for a few rare elements, but double-ugh as something needed to power Earth industry. And then there was a major lacuna for a book about geopolitics: a bit about coastal protections for major cities was the only reference to global warming.

In short, the book succeeded as a yarn. But it failed as science fiction. Props for the Spanish last names, thinking through the dynamics of orbital combat, and avoiding (most) clichés. But minus for essentially writing “2012 in Space!” rather than something about the year 2140.

I would read other works by the author; he shows a lot of promise. I’m not sure that I would read other works set in the same universe, though. None of my objections require him to rewrite his background — just explore it in greater depth. The end result, however, won’t look much like the “2012 in Space” that we saw. Maybe Charlie Stross would let him bounce ideas around?

Comments welcome on any and all of the topics raised above.

Syria in 2013

So we haven’t written much about the war in Syria. Long-time readers of this blog may recall that back in the spring and summer of 2011, we were posting something about the Libyan conflict every couple of weeks or so. Why the relative silence?

Well, a couple of reasons. One, the Syrian conflict is complicated. Libya was a relatively straightforward military struggle, with clearly defined, mostly contiguous areas of rebel and government control. There were fronts and supply lines and any number of classic set-piece battles. You could look at a map and instantly have some notion of what was going on. Syria, not so much.

Two, there was a painful dearth of decent analysis on Libya. I called the date of Qaddafi’s downfall (late August) several months before it actually happened, and I did it using amateur methodology that any bright high school senior could have come up with. What’s striking is not that I got it right but that nobody else did, at least in the public sphere. (In retrospect, it looks to us that the Obama administration and the Pentagon had the same date in mind.) Syria, on the other hand, does not lack for informed commenters; you can begin at Josh Landis’ Syria blog, which is something of a clearinghouse, and then just start clicking through links. There’s enough good stuff out there that I don’t really think I’d be adding much of value.

That said, here are a few throwaway observations.

• Assad loses. The correlation of forces has begun to tilt against him; as with Qaddafi, he’s trying to climb a slope that is only getting steeper. The Russians are backing away (and never provided significant material aid), his army has shrunk down to an Alawite core with unreliable auxiliaries, he’s running out of money, yadda yadda.
• It’s probably going to take a while. Back in August 2011, John Quiggin bet me that Assad wouldn’t last a year; I won that bet. We extended it for another six months, to the end of February 2013. I expect to win that bet too. The regime still has real sources of strength — it controls the capital, has almost all the heavy weaponry, can still access cash and weapons via Iran, the Sunni merchant class hasn’t bolted yet. I don’t dare pick a date, but I think it’s still months and months away. Meanwhile, I’m sorry to say that a lot more people will die, and even more will be impoverished or immiserated. (To understand the dynamics, you could do worse than to read Che Guevara’s book.) 
• It’s not going to destabilize the region. Jordan’s stable in part because its neighbors are so screwed; Jordanians who might be inclined to rock the boat have only to look at Iraq and Syria to reconsider. Israel will be fine, at least until a new Syrian regime gets properly settled in. Iraq’s problems are driven by internal politics, not stuff happening in Syria. The one partial, limited exception is Turkey, where Assad’s clever stroke of liberating his Kurds is having some knock-ons. I can’t however really consider it “destabilizing.” The Turkish state is not at risk and the status quo in Turkey is very unlikely to change. (In fact, there are signs that the fallout from the Syrian civil war may be having a constructive effect.)
• In fact, a surprising thing about Syria is how little impact it’s had on regional and world politics so far.
• Boots-on-the-ground foreign military intervention remains extremely unlikely. No-fly zones or a Libya-style bombing campaign are conceivable but very unlikely any time soon. (There is evidence that Assad considered the use of chemical weapons, which would have prompted intervention, but the operational benefits from doing so were iffy at best and the strategic consequences all negative. This is unlikely to change.) 
• There’s not going to be an Alawite fortress state in the west. (Or at least, not for long.)
• What follows won’t be pretty. The Islamist Menace (UNDER THE BED AND ALWAYS EVIL) is one of the more tiresome tropes of modern U.S. politics. That said, some pretty unsavory types are coming to the fore. The longer the fighting goes on, the worse this is going to get. Post-Assad Syria will be a fissiparous place and probably pretty violent, and the many interests of outside parties aren’t going to make matters any better. When some sort of stability finally does emerge there’s no reason to think that it will be dominated by bien-pensant liberal democrats.

All of these seem pretty obvious, but I emphasize again that I’m not a Syria expert — this is that same “bright high school senior” level of analysis. If I turn out to be right about most or all of this stuff, I’m actually going to be rather annoyed with our foreign policy commentariat.

Las Malvinas no serán ... oh, just read the post

President Kirchner has recently tried to raise a ruckus about the Malvinas. The reasons have to do with domestic politics, but recent changes have done two things: they have made the islands far more tempting for Argentina and made it far less likely that the country could retake them.

The first thing is oil. On May 6, 2010, Rockhopper discovered oil on its infelicitously- named Sea Lion block just north of the islands. (Then again, Sea Lion was impossible, so maybe it’s a good name.) So far, seven of nine Rockhopper appraisal wells have come up positive. Production will start in 2017; estimates are that Sea Lion will eventually produce somewhere between 85,000 and 120,000 bpd. At $80 per barrel wellhead and $10 lifting cost, that would be about $3 billion per year in rents to scrap over. (Even fully costed at $50 per barrel, that would be a cool $1.3 billion.)

So there is something to fight about besides national pride. Of course, Argentina would need to have international backing if it was to sell that oil ... but the country has a big enough domestic market.

Nonetheless, any planning for a war would need very careful diplomatic preparation these days, much more than in 1982. Back then, Argentina was following a long line of actions that held that the “1945 line” did not hold for European overseas territories. Morocco could invade the Spanish Sahara, India could fight a war with Portugal for Goa, Indonesia could march into East Timor and Dutch New Guinea. Given this history, it was not (completely) crazy for the Argentine generals to think that the world would accept their victory. (And to be honest, I suspect that they were right: if they had won, las Malvinas hubieran sido argentinas.) 

But that is not the case today, even though plenty of countries support the Argentine claim. So problem #1 would be to secure enough backing to prevent the imposition of U.N. sanctions.

And problem #2? Well, military technology has advanced:

You got it. The Exocet, so devastating in 1982, is not worth much against a modern British destroyer. It gets worse. The U.K. keeps four modern Typhoons on-station at the Mount Pleasant air base in the islands; Argentina would need to take it out somehow with an air force consisting mostly of outdated Mirages and Super Etendards. (The Mirages are scheduled to be withdrawn from service this year, leaving a few Skyhawks ... a 1954 design acquired in 1997.) Add to all that the 1,200 men at the airbase and British access to intelligence. The result? No chance of success.

Well, there are always people ready to concoct James Bond-like plans where Argentina packs in a bunch of special forces into a civilian airliner, assaults the base from the ground and then dares the U.K. to take it back without access to an aircraft carrier. That scenario is silly. And even if it happened, expect the Argentines to be pounded from the sea and air.

In other words, even if Argentina assembled the necessary diplomatic support, a war will not happen because a war could not be won.

Syrian September

Four days ago, I wrote this:

Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely, though not out of the question; watch for Turkish agitation to create a “safe haven” in northern Syria or rebel attacks on Syrian Air Force bases and other assets. (That Turkish plane that got shot down a few weeks ago? Very probably a probe of Syria’s air defenses. As long as those are still working, military intervention will be hard and expensive. So if the rebels suddenly start going after bases and air defense batteries, then that’ll be suggestive.)

This morning comes the news that Syrian rebels have attacked and looted an air defense base in Eastern Syria. In fact, it looks like this may be part of a sudden shift towards attacking air defense facilities; there was another, separate attack on an airbase yesterday, and one last week that went unnoticed until now.

Now, there are other reasons for the rebels to be attacking airbases. The Air Force is widely and particularly hated — traditionally because it’s long been a stronghold of Alawite influence, more recently because of indiscriminate bombings of civilian neighborhoods. And air defense bases have surface-to-air missiles, which the rebels will be delighted to get their hands on. But multiple attacks on bases and air defense sites in a few days? Yeah, that looks a lot like someone has been whispering in the rebels’ ears.How this plays out... well, I doubt the rebels can severely damage Syria’s air defense capability. But they can definitely degrade it. A lesson going back for decades, to Algeria and Vietnam, is that it’s damnably hard to maintain air bases in the midst of a hostile countryside. (I’m writing this post in Belgrade, Serbia. Belgrade has a fascinating Air Museum out at the airport. It includes half a dozen German and Italian aircraft, captured during WWII when the Yugoslav Partisans launched surprise attacks on Axis airbases in occupied Yugoslavia. The Partisans didn’t capture that many aircraft, of course — most, they just blew up.) It’s not impossible, by any means — that’s another lesson from Vietnam — but the regime will have to allocate money (in short supply) and loyal soldiers (in dangerously short supply) to garrisoning its air bases. Over time, it will probably have to consolidate its air defenses in fewer sites and bases, making it strategically more vulnerable. So, definitely an ominous development.

Now, since this is the Middle East, it’s also possible that there’s a second game. The attacks on airbases may be a signal that someone — the Turks, the West — is getting serious about intervention. A signal to who, though? The regime is probably past caring. The Russians?

Syria: the next six months

Okay, so I’ve won the first bet with John Quiggin. More on that in a bit. Meanwhile: what lies ahead for Syria?

Well, the best summary I’ve yet seen can be found in this excellent article from our friends at the Crisis Group. It’s so good that I’m going to quote it at considerable length.

One is tempted to say that the regime has been uniformly cold-blooded and indiscriminate from the start, but that is not so. The conflict experienced several phases: from the regime’s political concessions, both half-hearted (which prompted stronger popular demands) and coupled with brutal repression (which further undermined their credibility); to its so-called security solution (which, by seeking to force entire communities into submission further energised the opposition and pushed it toward armed resistance); and, finally, to its so-called military solution (a scorched earth policy of rampant destruction and looting that turned what once was viewed as a national army into a broadly reviled occupation force).

With each stage, the regime burned yet another bridge, leaving it with neither way back nor way out. Just as the political solution undermined those involved in politics and the security situation wrecked the security services’ ability to operate, so did the military solution eviscerate the army’s credibility.

This strikes me as a cogent summary of the regime’s shifting strategies over the last 18 months. It’s largely forgotten now, but the Syrian government did attempt to make some minor political concessions, including local and municipal elections in 2011 that were (by Syrian standards) remarkably free and fair. If I were to point to a moment when the political strategy stalled out and failed, it would be the parliamentary elections held earlier this year. The government seems to have dithered at first, then decided that the purpose of elections was not to allow opposing views in the legislature, nor to co-opt moderates and broaden the base of popular support, but to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Baath party and the regime. The result was, unsurprisingly, a landslide “victory” for the Baath and a further alienation of moderate opposition.

One thing that’s not discussed is the regime’s strategy towards the Kurds. Short version: they’ve basically given autonomy and near independence to the Kurds in return for Kurdish neutrality. And they’ve done this by deliberately handing over power to the Kurdish faction that’s associated with the PKK, the anti-Turkish Kurds. This is a calculated risk, because it increases the probability of Turkish intervention in Syria. But it means that the Kurdish regions will be run by people who are violently hostile to the opposition forces that are backed by, or friendly with, Turkey. From here it looks like a thoughtful strategy that is, so far, paying off — while there are a few small Kurdish groups working with the opposition, the majority of Kurds look likely to sit this thing out.

As to what may happen going forward, the article offers this bracing analysis:

Of all the ongoing changes, perhaps the most significant and least appreciated is what, over time, has become of the regime. The one that existed at the outset of the conflict almost certainly could not have survived the spectacular killing of top officials in the heart of its traditional stronghold; street combat in Damascus, Aleppo and a string of other towns; the loss of important border crossings with Turkey and Iraq; all amid near-total economic devastation and diplomatic opprobrium. That, a year and a half later, its new incarnation not only withstood those blows but vigorously counterpunched sends a message worthy of reflection.

As its political backbone disintegrates, the regime is being reduced to its repressive apparatus, while the latter itself gradually morphs into an entity more akin to a militia than an army in both make-up and ethos. The regime essentially has been stripped down to a broadly cohesive, hardcore faction fighting an increasingly bitter, fierce and naked struggle for collective survival. It is mutating in ways that make it impervious to political and military setbacks, indifferent to pressure and unable to negotiate. Opposition gains terrify Alawites, who stand more firmly by the regime’s side. Defections solidify the ranks of those who remain loyal. Territorial losses can be dismissed for the sake of concentrating on “useful” geographic areas. Sanctions give rise to an economy of violence wherein pillaging, looting and smuggling ensure self-sufficiency and over which punitive measures have virtually no bearing.

That the regime has been weakened is incontrovertible. But it has been weakened in ways that strengthen its staying power. (emphasis ours)

The regime has been undergoing a very rapid Nietzschean “what does not kill us” evolution. It has become much less effective as a government — indeed, it may end up hardly being a government at all. But it has become much more effective at surviving. And this leads to a sobering conclusion:

There can be nothing more to expect from a regime that, by its very nature – never much of an institutionalised state, no longer genuinely a political entity – has ceased being in a position to compromise, respond to pressure or inducement or offer a viable solution. Which means that the traditional international panoply of actions, from public blandishments to condemnation, from threats to sanctions, is not about to work. And that, while one still can hold out hope for a “clean break,” that moment when the regime neatly collapses or surrenders, it hardly warrants holding one’s breath.

This leads to my own tentative prediction (which matches my co-blogger’s assessment): six months from now, Assad will still be in Syria, and still the leader of an internationally recognized (though very diplomatically isolated) government. It’s possible that he might be assassinated by then, but I don’t think it likely. I don’t see a blue-on-blue coup taking him out now, and I don’t think he’s anywhere close to cutting and running. Foreign military intervention is (for reasons I’ve discussed) unlikely, though not out of the question; watch for Turkish agitation to create a “safe haven” in northern Syria or rebel attacks on Syrian Air Force bases and other assets. (That Turkish plane that got shot down a few weeks ago? Very probably a probe of Syria’s air defenses. As long as those are still working, military intervention will be hard and expensive. So if the rebels suddenly start going after bases and air defense batteries, then that’ll be suggestive.)

Six months from now, the regime may well have lost control of large swathes of the country. Syria will probably be increasingly violent, impoverished, and immiserated. And Assad may well be — in effect — just a powerful warlord in a country that has a number of warlords. But he’ll still be there, and will still be at least nominally the head of state. More’s the pity.

Counting chickens, jumping guns

So I think my first bet on the Assad regime is looking pretty safe. For those of you coming late, a year ago I bet that Syrian dictator Bashir Assad would still be in power one year later — that is, at 5:00pm EST on August 31, 2012. John Quiggin of Crooked Timber took the other side. The loser will pay $50 to a charity of the winner’s choice.

A quick glance at the calendar will show that I haven’t won this yet. In theory, the rebels could storm the presidential palace tomorrow. Or Assad could get on a flight to Moscow next Tuesday bound for a long quiet retirement in a beachside villa outside of Uglegorsk. But I don’t think it’s very likely. Assad has some problems! But he’s probably not going to fall in the next 18 days.

Close followers of this blog may recall that back in April, I challenged John to a second bet: viz., that Assad would continue in office for another six months beyond August 31. He accepted. So it’s entirely possible that I could win this bet, but lose the second one. These things happen; let’s see how it goes.

Meanwhile, two things. First, you may recall that this bet arose out of a more general discussion on the topic of dictators and their place in the world of the early 21st century. I’m mulling over a “one year later” post on this topic. Comments and suggestions are welcome! Second, I have to think about what charity I’d like John to pay his $50 towards. Suggestions on this are most definitely welcome. (No, I’m not going to ask him to contribute $50 to the Scaife Foundation. Play nice.)

The French won in Algeria, and that is why Assad will lose in Syria

A few posts ago, I noted that the French won the Algerian War militarily. My co-blogger has scolded me for being deliberately misleading. He is correct. The discussions with Lebanese army officers that produced the post were actually discussions about why the French experience illustrates why Assad is going to lose.

The French Army had three key advantages that Assad does not have. Moreover, at least one of the reasons why De Gaulle decided to abandon that military victory also apply. First, what advantages did the French have that Assad does not? First, French troop levels (proportional to the Algerian population) were four times the levels that Assad can muster. In theory, Assad can call up reservists and increase draft calls. In practice, that will not work.

Second,the French Army could draw on the resources of the Hexagon. In effect, it was financed by a large industrial power. Assad has ... nothing, except in Michael Ignatieff’s fever dreams.

Finally, troops could not and would not defect during the Algerian War. No matter how far morale declined (and it actually did not decline all that far) defection was simply not in their opportunity set. That is not true of Assad.

There are two more differences, but they are actually an epiphenomena of the above three French advantages. The French could credibly commit to remaining in control indefinitely. That commitment reduced the willingness to fight among the Algerian population. (That commitment turned out to be wrong, of course ... but in 1958 it seemed much more likely that France would be sovereign in Algeria in 1968 that it does that the Baath Party will still rule Syria in 2022.) In addition, the French army had the resources to engage large-scale population resettlements ... something far beyond Assad’s reach.

In other words, the reasons why France won in Algeria show why Assad is going to lose.

The problem is that he is going to lose slowly. He can easily fight on for another few months, although the correlation of forces has turned against him. De Gaulle abandoned the victory because of international pressure and because there were no real advantages (other than access to oil, which the Evian Agreements let France keep) to hanging on. The first applies to Assad. The second not so much.

What could change that timeline? Large-scale support for the rebels, which still does not seem to be happening, or a coup.

I see no signs of a coup, but I am not a Syria expert.

Remember, France won the Algerian War

Really. It did. Militarily, the French army destroyed the FLN by the end of 1958.

Had France not possessed a democratic government, Algeria would have remained a part of France for a very long time. This has bearing on the Syrian civil war. Hopefully, Doug and I will have time to explain why in the near future. For now, we leave it as an exercise for the reader.

The rebels’ big problem is the lack of a unified chain of command. As a result, they screw up operationally what they win tactically. The regime’s big problem is a lack of manpower. Roughly 200,000 loyalist troops are trying to defeat 40,000 insurgents.

Consider the difficulties. It needs to stop the fighting from spreading further around Aleppo. (Rebels entered the city today.) It also needs to take on and reoccupy the rebel strongholds around Homs. Finally, it needs to prevent the rebels from operating freely around Idlib and Hama. That is a tall order.

The problem is that Assad is on course to defeat, but not quickly, and not against a unified force. There is no FLN ready to take over. There are only two ways to end it quickly, neither likely. One, outsiders can pick a rebel force and back it. Two, the Russians (or somebody) can give the Syrian army the resources it needs to massively expand the draft and go on the offensive without risking the areas it currently holds. (It is now trying to substitute capital for labor, by using artillery and helicopter gunships.)

I bet that Assad will make it to the end of the calendar year, just not really in power.

Another good reason Michael Ignatieff is not Prime Minister of Canada

He has a rather odd understanding of foreign affairs. This essay reads like a fever dream from a disillusioned neocon. Oh, wait ...

No, seriously, go read it. It is very odd. In its world, an allied Russia and China are backing the Syrian regime against the United States. You would get the impression that Bashir Assad is Ho Chi Minh. You wouldn’t learn that Russian “support” for Assad consists of, well, nothing. Sure, the Russian Federation has sold the Syrian Arab Republic a lot of weapons in the recent past, but that’s not the same thing as conducting “a proxy war between the Great Powers.”

Seriously, three attack helicopters is nothing compared to the massive amounts of materiel that went through Haiphong or over the Chinese border. Here is a CIA estimate of around 2,000 Soviet air defense personnel in North Vietnam circa 1965. There is also a frustratingly vague CIA estimate of Soviet military aid at the beginning of the war, but it gives some sense of the scale, and it dwarfs anything going to Syria. More information is in this 1968 CIA report about Sino-Soviet conflicts regarding military aid to the DRV. The discussion is over trainloads, for months, and massive airlifts, and shipments through Haiphong ... including potential Soviet military responses to a U.S. blockade.

And then the money document from 1968: go down to the last two pages. 2,230 artillery pieces in 1967! 70,000 tons of ammunition! 3,810 surface-to-air missiles! 123 armored vehicles! 700 vehicles from China, another 24,000 tons of ammunition, and 61 MiG fighter jets!

(By the way, did you know the U.S. operated unmanned drones in Vietnam? Page 2.)

Dude, that was a proxy war. This is Russia and China being annoying.

If you want some more serious intel about the Syrian civil war, this report is a good place to start. You also might want to check out this report about the Russian equipment used by the Syrian government. But Ignatieff’s essay is just completely goofy. Good thing he didn’t become Prime Minister. At least Canada doesn’t have the capability to act on the ahistorical bizarro-world musings of its head of government.

Partitioning Syria

We haven’t talked much about Syria lately. Here follows some speculation.

Assume for argument’s sake that Assad can’t defeat the rebels, but neither can they ovethrow him. Say a year passes, and the rebels get better armed and organized, and maybe they gain actual control over large chunks of land — but the Alawites stand firm around Assad, Russia and Iran continue their support, and no foreign military power is willing to actually intervene with troops on the ground or air strikes. What happens then?

Could Assad gives up much of Syria in order to consolidate his people into a new, Alawite-dominated state along the coast? It’s largely forgotten today outside of Syria, but exactly such a state existed under the French Mandate, from 1922 to 1936. The French did it in order to break up and weaken Syrian nationalism, of course, but older Alawites remember that their parents and grandparents were perfectly content under L’Etat des Alouites.

How to make this work? Well, there are three possible scenarios. Let’s game them out.

Scenario #1: The Lion’s Share. So you’re Assad, and you’ve decided to split the country in two. You want to get rid of as many treacherous, disloyal Sunni Arabs as possible, but you also want to keep as much territory as you possibly can. In this scenario, you make territory a priority.

Starting in the north, you try to hang on to Aleppo if possible. Yeah, a lot of Sunnis there. You’ll have to either placate, pacify or expel them. But Aleppo is the country’s biggest city, strategically important in all kinds of ways, and the center of its industrial base. So, keep Aleppo. Now draw a line just east of the Homs-Aleppo rail line. The bone in the throat here is Hamah — large city, conservative, Sunni, traditionally hostile to the regime. So evacuate the few friendlies — mostly the few local Christians — then bomb and shell it to rubble, then drive everyone out. (Did I mention that this scenario involves some vigorous ethnic cleansing? Because it does. Very vigorous. But when it comes right down to it that’s what you have an Alawite-dominated army for.)

You want to swing south to include greater Damascus: more industry, plus legitimacy. (We hold the capital!) As with Aleppo, you’ll have to do a lot of cleansing: omelettes, eggs. Some Sunnis will stay, if not loyal, at least neutral. If they’re economically useful, keep them. Draw your border sharply south of Damascus, because honestly you don’t really care about the Golan — let the other guys take up that quarrel with Israel.

You can’t get everyone inside the tent, so don’t go crazy trying. Let the Kurds in the northwest go hang; you never liked them anyway. You may or may not try to rescue the scattered Christian communities around the country — they’ve been junior partners in Alawite rule for 50 years now, and will be understandably nervous of coming under a Sunni-majority regime that’s likely to be Islamist. If they’re loyal, grab as many as you can. In general, you really need as many as possible of the non-Sunni Arab groups — the Christians, Druze, Circassians and other odds and ends — on side to make this work, so outreach to them should be an integral part of your strategy.

Natural resources: You’re giving up all the oil and natural gas in the east, alas. But you’ve got the coast — if you’ve played this right, you should have all the coast — and the pipeline terminal. You’re giving up ~80% of the country’s area, but a lot of that is lightly populated scrubland or desert. And you’re keeping most of the good stuff — the ports, the biggest cities, most of the industry, most of the water. And your new country is still respectably large: say eight or nine million people in an area of maybe 30,000 square kilometers, about the size of Belgium. In round-ish numbers, it’s maybe 30% Alawite, 40% Christians-Druze-Turkoman-Circassian-whoever — basically, all the ethnic and religious minorities you could convince — and maybe 30% Sunni Arabs. Your ruling ideology will be firmly secular and probably kinda fascistic.

Does this work? — Well, honestly, probably not. One, Syrian nationalism is a real and potent force, so dividing the country won’t be easy. Two, there isn’t really a natural borderline — “a few kilometers east of the M1 highway” doesn’t really do it. You’re kind of trying to pull a Chiang Kai-Shek without the advantage of being on an island. Three, you’ll have to expel a lot of people — millions of people — to make sure your new state is properly Alawite-dominated. I’m honestly not sure the Syrian military and security forces have the capacity to carry this out. Moreover, attempts to do so would invite large-scale external intervention.

Okay, so let’s try Scenario #2: Road to Damascus. This is the same as above, but with this difference: you give up Aleppo. In fact, you give up everything north of Hama. (You can still bomb and shell it, of course.) Basically, you’re just trying to keep Greater Damascus, the ethnically mixed (and relatively regime-loyal) mountains and coastal strip, and a corridor between them.

The good news is, this scenario gives you a more Alawite-dominated rump Syria; Alawites are now around 40% of the population and are the largest single ethnic group. The bad news ... well, there’s a lot of bad news. The Sunnis now have over 80% of the land, most of the population, a fair chunk of the industry, and long land borders with Turkey and Iraq. This is a recipe for protracted civil war, and it’s a civil war you’ll have trouble winning. The major strategic problem is that Damascus is 250 km away from your Alawite homeland, and there’s no good road or rail connection between them. You’re trying to hang on to a long, broken-backed slice of territory that doesn’t make any sort of strategic sense. Perhaps this scenario could happen as the result of long war followed by a peace of exhaustion, but it’s not anything you’d actually try to make happen.

That leaves us with Scenario #3: The Alawite Redoubt. In this one, you pull back to the Alawite homelands — basically the coastal strip and the mountains behind it. As before, you bring in as many Christians and other friendly minorities as possible. Your new state will be majority Alawite, and it will make strategic sense and will be relatively dependable.

Unfortunately, it will also be small. Very small. Probably too small to be viable, given a hostile Sunni rest-of-Syria. Giving up Damascus means giving up international legitimacy — even the Chinese are probably going to switch sides once the rebels control the capital and 90% of the country. Your enemies will outnumber you four or five to one, and who will have most of the country’s resources and industry. NATO can blockade you until your enemies gather enough force to come over the mountains from the east and crush you once and for all. This could be the last phase of a civil war but, again, it’s not anything you should be actively trying for.

So, in summary, there are no good choices. Option #1 is perhaps the least bad, but it’s probably not within your reach.

What then should Assad do? Well, that’s a question for another post.

Betting on Assad, again

 Back in August, I made a bet with John Quiggin of Crooked Timber. He thought the troubles in Syria meant that Bashir Assad was going down soon. I disagreed. So we bet on whether the Syrian President would make it through a year. The bet has about four months left to run, but I have to say it’s looking like Assad will cover the spread. If you’ve been paying a bit of attention to matters Syrian, you’ll know that there’s a UN ceasefire in place; if you’ve been paying closer attention, you’ll know that this is mostly gravy for Assad, since it gives him breathing space and provides the possibility of muddying the waters by waiting for the demonstrators (or a conveniently placed provocateur) to shoot first.

I could be wrong! I’d be happy to be wrong. Well, happy-ish, since I don’t think that whatever follows Assad is going to be all that pleasant either. But really, this is a bet I’d be perfectly content to lose.

John Quiggin and I exchanged e-mails recently, and he said that while August may be looking sketchy, he still thinks that Assad’s departure is “virtually certain” and is “confident that he will go sooner or later.” Well, perhaps. But, you know, in the long run we are all dead.

Anyway. We also agreed to add a new bet on top of the existing one. It has precisely the same terms — $50 to the charity of the winner’s choice, bet is annulled if Assad dies or is killed while still in office — except that it will begin on September 1 of this year, and run until COB February 28, 2013. Basically we’re betting on the six months after the first bet expires.

And why am I so confident that Assad will stay in power? Well, pretty much what I said back in December:

Assad is not likely to flee the country; he’ll stand or die. The military and security forces are still completely dominated by his fellow Alawites. The Alawites are about an eighth of the population, and they’re absolutely certain that the fall of the current regime will lead to a genocidal bloodbath against them. Even if it doesn’t, they’re sure to lose their current privileged position. So the Alawites are not giving in, either. The reason the regime has not been able to crush the opposition yet is because there aren’t enough Alawites; they dominate the security services and the officer corps of the military, but the actual army is a bunch of poorly trained young draftees whose reliability is uncertain. So simply crushing the rebellion by brute force — as Assad pere did in Hama back in 1982, when he flattened the city to rubble and killed an estimated 20,000 civilians — is not as easy as it looks. But on the other hand, those conscripts can’t easily lead a rebellion either. It’s a recipe for stalemate: the rebels can’t easily be crushed, but neither will the Army turn against the regime.

So, none of that has changed. Syria’s economy has tanked; that hasn’t actually done Assad much harm. Russia has backed off a bit since the Russian presidential election, but it obviously still considers Assad a client, and will probably continue to support him as long as it can be done on the cheap. Iran is still a firm and reliable ally. NATO is not going to do anything. Israel has no desire to replace the hostile but predictable Assad regime with chaos or a bunch of Islamists. Turkey is unhappy, but has reached the limits of what it’s willing to do, at least for now. Yadda yadda, und so weiter, bla bla bla. As I’ve said, I’ll be happy enough to be wrong.

America has been at war for a long long time

 Rachel Maddow has a new book, Drift. I’ve skimmed it; it isn’t bad. In it, her contention is that for a variety of institutional reasons, it has since the 1980s become far too easy for America to go to war. 

The book started a debate between Kevin Drum and Jonathan Bernstein. Bernstein suggested, “U.S.-sponsored interventions of one form or another are hardly unusual, even before Maddow’s apparent jumping off point in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps the idea is that there was a golden age of sorts after Vietnam, but if so it lasted less than a decade. I’m not really sure it’s become easier to deploy troops for controversial missions or to begin interventions in other nations.”

Bernstein was supported by Armando at TalkLeft, who wrote, “That is not historically accurate in my view. The times getting into war was not easy was after wars that had been very costly and not particularly successful from the US point of view. Think World War I and Vietnam. Otherwise, going to war has been one of the great American pasttimes. I’m all for making going to war hard, but the history does not demonstrate that, except for isolated periods, that was ever really the case in the United States.”

Drum conceded the point, but suggested that there was still a difference between then and now: “So what’s different? I’d say this: it’s one thing to periodically wage brief, smallish military actions. The Dominican Republic occupation of 1965 falls into that category. So do Grenada and Panama ... the last couple of decades seem quite different. The Gulf War, followed by Somalia, followed by Haiti, followed by Kosovo, followed by Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, followed by Libya and Yemen, and all against a background of drone warfare that now seems all but perpetual, feels very different. It feels like we’re simply in a constant state of military action. In the last 20 years, there have only been three or four in which the U.S. military wasn’t at war.” Matt Yglesias supported Drum, adding that there might be an economic element: technology has made it cheaper and easier to project conventional military force, and therefore we do it more.

Bernstein is right. Everyone else, including Armando, is wrong. And none of it relevant to the argument in Drift.

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Between 1898 and 1902, American troops battled Philippine insurgents. Peace came to Luzon in 1901-02, but fighting continued on Mindanao until 1912. In 1904, the U.S. navy bombarded rebel positions in the Dominican Republic; eventually U.S. Marines wound up (with the permission of the local government) occupying the customhouses. In 1906-09, we occupied Cuba, although there was (to be fair) not much fighting. In 1907 and 1911, we deployed to Honduras to halt Nicaraguan invasions. Between 1912 and 1925, U.S. Marines actively hunted insurgents (the original Sandinistas) in Nicaragua. In 1914, we once again bombarded Dominican rebels; we also occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from getting to the government. Between 1914 and 1934, we occupied Haiti: unlike Cuba in 1906-09, that one did involve quite a bit of fighting. We did the same on the other side of Hispaniola in 1916-24. In 1916-17, we invaded northern Mexico after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus.

Then there was World War 1. After which ... 

In 1917-19, U.S. troops again garrisoned Cuba. In 1919, we landed in Honduras to protect a neutral zone during a civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, American forces blundered pointlessly around Siberia doing something or other, and sustaining a lot of casualties. For a few days in Guatemala, Marines saw combat during a civil war in that country. In 1925, we invaded both Honduras and Panama during periods of unrest.  In 1933 and 1934, we waved gunboats around Cuba, but no war was necessary, since we succeeded in overthrowing the government by what would today be called covert action.

And then, peace until 1941.

Counting ... between 1898 and 1934, the United States was at peace for all of ... well, never, actually.

It is true that only the Philippine War rivalled the Iraq conflict in terms of intensity. (World War One, obviously, was hugely worse.) U.S. force levels rapidly grew from 12,000 in 1899 to 70,000 in 1900, by which point U.S. combat deaths approached two soldiers every day. By most metrics, the war (fought by a small all-volunteer army) was as intense as the Iraq War — proportional to the U.S. population, the peak force of 70,000 represented a per-capita commitment twice as large as the peak Iraq deployments in 2008. 

Because the Philippine War lasted 28 months, as opposed to the 102 months of the Iraq War, the total proportion of Americans who served in the conflict was about a third of the recent level. The 126,000 soldiers who served in  the Philippines over the entire course of combat operations amounted to 0.2% of the U.S. population, compared to the roughly 0.6% of the U.S. population who served at least one tour of duty in Iraq between March 20, 2003, and the official end of combat operations on August 31, 2010. The combat casualty rate, meanwhile (excluding deaths from disease) ran at 596 per 100,000 troops in 1900, almost exactly matching the 2004-07 rate of 608 in Iraq. (Iraq casualty rates per 100,000 ran at 718 in 2003, 650 in 2004, 588 in 2005, 583 in 2006, and 610 in 2007. They then plunged to 199 in 2008, 135 in 2009, and 121 in 2010.)

But ... that is fine. The Drum argument does not hinge on the big wars of the past decade; rather it hinges on the continual small wars since 1989. In that respect, 1989-2012 looks pretty much the same as 1898-34: lots of small wars punctuated by two big ones. Nor does Armando’s argument hold up. World War 1 had little effect on the American government’s propensity for military intervention. It is true that the U.S. avoided a potential big war during the Mexican Revolution, but that decision was made before we entered WW1; before, in fact, it was clear that we would.

The history is both worse and better for Matt Yglesias’s argument, depending on how you interpret it. In the Dominican Republic, for example, early insurgencies depended upon the seizure of customshouses to gain resources: naval bombardment, therefore, presented a cheap means of intervention. In general, I would venture to say that Yglesias’s hypothesis is correct: cheaper war probably means more war. (Someone should test that!) What the history does not support, however, is the rather specifc hypothesis that military intervention is cheaper today than it was in 1898-1934.

Let me add that this has little bearing on Rachel Maddow’s overall argument. She wants to explain why the post-Vietnam reforms designed to make intervention difficult failed. She does not claim that 1989-2012 (actually, 1983-2012 for her purposes) is unprecedented or novel. Other readers in the blogosphere have extended her argument, however, and I think it is probably worth adding a little historical corrective.

Great debate attempt #6: The true unthinkability of interstate war in western Europe

 For various mostly-professional reasons, I have been thinking about war lately. (References: Winning the War on War and Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?) In an earlier discussions Jussi Jalonen argued that war will not disappear, but I was not convinced.

“Unthinkable” is an overused term. It’s usually used to mean  “awfully bad, and to be avoided.” Or, more accurately, “Too unlikely or undesirable to be considered a possibility.” That meaning, obviously, is hyperbole.

But there is a second meaning: impossible to imagine occurring in reality. That is a very concrete meaning. One can imagine all sorts of impossible things, but an unthinkable one is something that slips from your grasp when you sit down and try to think about how it might come about.

There are a lot of incredibly improbable things that are not unthinkable on a 50-year scale. Since this great debate attempt is about war, let’s give an example: a civil war in the United States. That is incredibly bloody unlikely even in a 50-year scale, I’d bet large sums against it, I’ll argue strongly that it won’t happen ... but one can imagine plausible scenarios. It reaches the first level of unthinkability (too improbable to be worth seriously considering) but not the second.

Proposition: interstate war in Western Europe has reached the second level of unthinkability. There is no set of imaginable circumstances that will lead a western European government to decide that it needs to kill citizens of another European government in an organized fashion.

Plus ça change, plus elle ressemble à un tas de debans de rue de Brooklyn

  A while ago, I discussed the problems of correctly implementing what should be, in theory, the world’s easiest counterinsurgency strategy for a country as rich as the United States: bribe your opponents. The U.S. has tried it in multiple ways; at best, it’s been a partial success, in the sense that things could be worse. But only partial. In October of last year, the Taliban hit the headquarters of the Panjshir provincial reconstruction team. When I was there in ‘06, Panjshir was quiet, well-protected by the local militia. That said, there were plenty of incidents like this, albeit not as deadly. Bribery is expensive, it is long-term, and it needs to be institutionalized (either formally or informally) in a way that aligns everyone’s incentives.

Are there lessons from history? Well, yes, but they’re not good. My co-blogger and I give you a report from 170 years ago:

The deceptive quietude of Afghanistan which followed the sharp lessons administered to the Dooranees and the Ghilzais was not seriously disturbed during the month of September 1841, and Macnaghten was in a full glow of cheerfulness. His services had been recognised by his appointment to the dignified and lucrative post of Governor of the Bombay Presidency, and he was looking forward to an early departure for a less harassing and tumultuous sphere of action than that in which he had been labouring for two troubled years. The belief that he would leave behind him a quiescent Afghanistan, and Shah Soojah firmly established on its throne, was the complement, to a proud and zealous man, of the satisfaction which his promotion afforded.

One distasteful task he had to perform before he should go. The Home Government had become seriously disquieted by the condition of affairs in Afghanistan. The Secret Committee of the Court of Directors, the channel through which the ministry communicated with the Governor-General, had expressed great concern at the heavy burden imposed on the Indian finances by the cost of the maintenance of the British force in Afghanistan, and by the lavish expenditure of the administration which Macnaghten directed. The Anglo-Indian Government was urgently required to review with great earnestness the question of its future policy in regard to Afghanistan, and to consider gravely whether an enterprise at once so costly and so unsatisfactory in results should not be frankly abandoned.

Lord Auckland was alive to the difficulties and embarrassments which encompassed the position beyond the Indus, but he was loth to admit that the policy of which he had been the author, and in which the Home Government had abetted him so eagerly, was an utter failure. He and his advisers finally decided in favour of the continued occupation of Afghanistan; and since the Indian treasury was empty ... Macnaghten was pressed to effect economies in the administration, and he was specially enjoined to cut down the subsidies which were paid to Afghan chiefs as bribes to keep them quiet.

Macnaghten had objected to this retrenchment, pointing out that the stipends to the chiefs were simply compensation for the abandonment by them of their immemorial practice of highway robbery, but he yielded to pressure, called to Cabul the chiefs in its vicinity, and informed them that thenceforth their subsidies would be reduced. The chiefs strongly remonstrated, but without effect, and they then formed a confederacy of rebellion.

The Ghilzai chiefs were the first to act. Quitting Cabul, they occupied the passes between the capital and Jellalabad, and entirely intercepted the communications with India by the Khyber route.

Macnaghten did not take alarm at this significant demonstration,regarding the outbreak merely as “provoking,” and writing to Rawlinson that “the rascals would be well trounced for their pains.” Yet warnings of gathering danger were rife, which but for his mood of optimism should have struck home to his apprehension. Pottinger had come down from the Kohistan, where he was acting as political officer, bent on impressing on him that a general rising of that region was certain unless strong measures of prevention were resorted to ...

Bad news from Afghanistan: In order to bribe people not to fight, you have to make sure that they stay bribed

 There is no shortage of bad news from Afghanistan. One new piece appeared in today’s New York Times. President Karzai has decided to abolish a northern militia currently paid for by NATO. This is a problem.

The above photo is not of members of the Afghan National Army. It is of Panjshiri militiamen in 2006, guarding the headquarters of the Panjshir provinicial reconstruction team. (In unrelated news, the Panjshir PRT was recently attacked by Taliban suicide bombers.) Afghanistan is loaded with armed militia, including the ones that make up the anti-government forces collectively referred to as the “Taliban.”

One strategy for establishing peace in a wartorn country is to bind armed militia to the state. You basically bribe people not to fight you, the government, or each other. In the process, you hope that you create lasting institutions that can create, over time, a legitimate chain of command that can permanently integrate (and subordinate) the formerly warring factions into the state. It is slow, it is painful, it can undercut other nation-building goals, but it is nonetheless vital to get it right. We botched it badly in Iraq, and paid quite a price. Of course, if you are going to bribe people not to fight ... sorry, integrate armed men into state institutions ... then you have to make sure that they stay bribed. That means that you (be it the local government or foreign overlords) have to make a credible commitment that the flow of benefits will continue as long as the militia obeys orders. By cutting off the flow of NATO money, Karzai has simultaneously undercut NATO’s ability to strike bargains and his own status as a credible partner.

There are reasons for President Karzai’s decision. Members of the Critical Infrastructure program (and the “Afghan Local Police” more generally, as the integrated militia are called) have been known to extort the citizenry, and they are not inside the chain of command of the Afghan National Police. The problem? Taking them off the NATO payroll is not going to get them to stop extorting the citizenry, or bring them under government control. Quite the reverse, actually. It is a dumb decision, and it bodes ill for other places in Afghanistan (like Panjshir) where independent militia have been de facto bought off.

It isn’t all bad. Karzai has (under pressure!) agreed to allow the Taliban to set up an office in Qatar from which peace negotiations can be conducted. But the President of Afghanistan isn’t exactly showing himself to be steadfast negotiating partner, and the decision to defund the Critical Infrastructure program bodes ill for the country’s post-American future.

POSTSCRIPT: There is some evidence that NATO was botching the integration programs, at least in the north. (The programs I saw in Panjshir in 2006 were well-run, but Panjshir is a special case on multiple levels.) Some salaries have not been paid. (This was a huge problem for the Afghan National Police in Nangarhar province back in ‘06; we dealt with it using a system much like the one that doesn’t seem to be working for the Afghan Local Police in Kunduz province.) The German government is worried about the lack of the long-term program to integrate the militias into the state’s chain of command. (The report to the German legislature can be found here.) Finally, here is the U.S. military’s investigation (written, surprisingly, by a one-star!) into allegations of human rights abuses by the Afghan Local Police, with recommendations for increasing American “command, control, and influence” over them. Of course, if the program is disbanded by the Afghan national government, then any hope of getting the militia under control goes out the window ...

In which I double down on Assad’s survival

 Back in August, I made a bet with John Quiggin of Crooked Timber. Midway through a long comment thread, John said, “I’d be happy to take Assad as a test case. Doug sees him as a likely survivor, I don’t.”

I replied:

I like Assad’s chances. He’s not the brightest bulb on the tree, at all. But he’s not the sort who’s going to flee the country just because things have gone a little hinky, either. And he’s got some good cards in his hand. The military and security forces are totally dominated by his fellow Alawites; NATO is never going to intervene; the Russians are running interference for him in the UNSC; Iran is firmly on side; the opposition is divided and lacks credible leadership; the Israelis are quietly rooting for him; and the anarchy and chaos of postwar Iraq is still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Sure, Assad could fall. Stranger things have happened. I can easily imagine a couple of scenarios, especially if the West plays it smart. (Targeted economic sanctions for this one. No military intervention.) But I don’t think it’s the way to bet.

Come to think of it, why don’t we do just that? Side bet: if Assad loses power in the next six months — flees the country, overthrown in a coup, taken out and shot, what have you — you win. If he’s still in power on March 1, 2012, then I win. (If he dies or is killed without first losing power, or if he’s lost control of at least 1/3 of the country but is still clinging to power in the capital, we’ll call it a draw.)

Loser donates $50 to a charity of the winner’s choice. And if I lose, I’ll throw in a “Why I Was Wrong” post over at Noel Maurer’s blog, gratis.

John then said: “I’d want a year from now... the process is a protracted one.”

To which I responded: “[If] Assad does fall, I don’t think the process will be very protracted. He has all the top military and security commanders on side, and the dissidents have no guns and no hope of military intervention. So the most likely scenario would be an internal coup by his fellow Alawites — the generals and secret police deciding to throw him overboard. That’s going to happen fast if it happens at all. But anyway. Sure, I’ll go with a year. I’m betting Assad will still be in power at COB Syrian time on August 31, 2012. You’re betting he won’t.”

Over 100 days have passed since our bet. During that time, the uprising has continued without a break, and an estimated 2,000 additional people have been killed. In an unprecedented move, the Arab League has voted to sanction Syria. Even neighboring King Abdullah of Jordan — one of the least confrontational, most conservative of Arab leaders — has risen up to condemn Assad. The rebels have developed a rudimentary leadership structure, the Syrian National Council, with a command based in neighboring Turkey. The Syrian Army has seen a steady stream of defections. Syria’s economy is in deep trouble as trade has declined and tourism has vanished. Even Fareed Zakaria has changed his mind, writing, “I now think this regime is going to collapse after all.”

So what do I think now?

I think Assad will still be in power on August 31, 2012.

None of the things I mentioned in my original post have changed. Assad is not likely to flee the country; he’ll stand or die. The military and security forces are still completely dominated by his fellow Alawites. The Alawites are about an eighth of the population, and they’re absolutely certain that the fall of the current regime will lead to a genocidal bloodbath against them. Even if it doesn’t, they’re sure to lose their current privileged position. So the Alawites are not giving in, either. The reason the regime has not been able to crush the opposition yet is because there aren’t enough Alawites; they dominate the security services and the officer corps of the military, but the actual army is a bunch of poorly trained young draftees whose reliability is uncertain. So simply crushing the rebellion by brute force — as Assad pere did in Hama back in 1982, when he flattened the city to rubble and killed an estimated 20,000 civilians — is not as easy as it looks. But on the other hand, those conscripts can’t easily lead a rebellion either. It’s a recipe for stalemate: the rebels can’t easily be crushed, but neither will the Army turn against the regime.

Meanwhile, foreign intervention is right out. NATO is never going to intervene — see the reasons for that in this post — and the Russians are still loyal allies, running diplomatic interference for Assad while firmly vetoing any meaningful Security Council Resolution. In fact, the Russians just closed a major arms deal with the Syrian government, delivering a bunch of shore-launched antiship missiles. Which is not only a gesture of friendship but a quiet middle finger to NATO; if they do try intervening, they’ll have to deal with supersonic cruise missiles. (That thing where France parked the Charles de Gaulle a few miles off the Libyan coast so the big aircraft carrier could launch strikes all over the place? That would not happen in Syria.) Iran is still firmly on side. The Israelis are still quietly rooting for Assad. The only remotely plausible source of foreign intervention is Turkey — and while Erdogan is clearly very pissed, his country is not really in a position to launch a full-scale invasion of Syria. Support to rebels on the cheap, sure; and if the rebels were ever to gain serious traction, I could imagine a future where Turkey gave significant military assistance to them. But supporting the rebels is not without costs — Assad has made it clear that he’s going to counter tit-for-tat by supporting Kurdish separatists inside Turkey. Moreover, Turkish assistance alone is not nearly enough, until and unless the rebels can gain control of large chunks of Syria’s territory. And that’s not happening.

I’ll say again that nothing is certain and things could change. But I’m just not seeing how the rebels get to victory from here in the next nine months. If Assad does fall, the most likely outcome is that his generals or his inner circle take him out in a coup, blue-on-blue, hoping that they can save the regime by changing its face.

Incidentally, it appears that the folks at Intrade agree with me. They’re giving him a 90% chance to survive into 2012, a 67% chance to reach June 30, and a 55% chance to still be in power on December 31, 2012.

I’m not picking my charity yet. But I am saying that the deep dynamics of this struggle have hardly changed. I would give the rebels slightly better odds today than I would have in August — but “slightly better” here means I think their chances have risen from less than 5% to maybe more like 10%. It’s still long odds.

As noted before, I’d be tolerably happy to be wrong.  But meanwhile, yeah, doubling down.

Has war become more restrained?

 Two years ago, I discussed the idea that war was becoming much less common. It generated a spirited discussion.

Looking around at current wars, it seems as though wars have also become less destructive, and that seems to be entirely a product of restraint by the most powerful actors. Consider the following quote from a New Zealand defense analyst:

Counterfactual history does not have a good name, but it is particularly useful here. It is often difficult for us to imagine that past events might have happened differently; once they have occurred, they seem entirely logical, natural, and even inevitable, and we forget that they developed as only one of myriad potential options. As such, counterfactual history can be used to indicate how some of these recent conflicts might have unfolded had the West not returned to a ritualized and restrained way of war, but rather continued the trend toward totality exemplified by the World Wars. There is no intent to suggest that the counterfactuals described would have been better methods of fighting the wars mentioned. But we can devise better policy to the extent that we can reliably compare outcomes of rival courses of action.

In Vietnam, America might have unleashed almost the full power of its arsenal. Massive conventional forces might have landed in the north. Airpower might have been liberated from restrictive rules of engagement, allowing it to destroy almost anything that moved that was not regarded as friendly. An airtight blockade might have been imposed along the entire North Vietnamese coast. ...

In Somalia, America might have responded to the “Blackhawk down” incident with a massive escalation of force. Mogadishu might have been flattened, and the insurgent groups destroyed, regardless of collateral damage. In Kosovo, NATO might have quickly flooded the battlefield with armor from both north and south, accepting the risk of heavy casualties from anti-tank defenses in order to achieve a decisive victory and thus end perceived ethnic cleansing.

In Lebanon, Israel might have preceded a massive tank assault with a murderous artillery barrage reminiscent of the Somme, aiming to dig Hezbollah out of its holes with high explosives. In Afghanistan, a furious America might have dispatched a much larger invasion force to secure the border with Pakistan and then engage in sweep-and-destroy missions reminiscent of the Boer War, turning the mountains of Afghanistan into a depopulated wasteland. Finally, in Iraq, a much larger multinational force might have advanced more carefully, occupying and securing important cities with large garrisons, pacifying as it went. Once Saddam Hussein was defeated, the country might have been quartered in a manner reminiscent of Germany after World War II. A large occupation force would then have been maintained, one authorized to kill as many locals as required to ensure security and stability.

In other words, since the Korean War combatants have exercised a great deal of operational and tactical restraint when conducting military operations. (The Korean War was limited in its strategic goals, but operationally it was a total war.) The rest of the essay is confused, but the point holds. The recent Russo-Georgian War certainly follows the pattern.

The essay does not address the three important questions. First, how much is the operational savagery of the World Wars (and Korea) the anomaly that needs to be explained?

Second, is today’s restraint truly based in exogenous changes in norms (as the author avers) or is it a recognition of strategic realities that make the unbridled use of force counterproductive in terms of achieving national aims? Similarly, how could you distinguish between the two hypotheses?

Finally, does past performance predict future results?

The cost of revolution

  According to Friday’s New York Times, western companies now consider Libya open for business. That seems to be as propitious a time as any to add up the costs of the Libyan Revolution. I’m sure someone has done a more complete and detailed workup, but I haven’t seen it yet. So here’s a back-of-the-envelope, first-draft tally of costs.

Lives lost: The NTC claimed 30,000 dead as of September. Cooler heads suggest something like 12,000 fighters dead and maybe half that number of civilians. (This is assuming that most of the people currently listed as “missing” won’t be showing up, which strikes me as reasonable.) Either way, for a country with just under 7 million people, that’s a lot. It’s proportionately like the U.S. losing nearly a million people in six months, although there is a caveat to that comparison which I will mention below. Injured, harder to say, but probably comparable to the number of dead.

Refugees, let’s see. You have the people displaced because their homes have been destroyed, or because fighting raged through their town. The best current estimate seems to be from the IDMC, which puts the number around 240,000. That is not a small number.

Then you have the people forced out at gunpoint. There have been sporadic reports of clan-based ethnic cleansing, especially down in Berber country, where Qaddafi liked taking Berber lands away and giving them to pro-government Arab clans. The town of Tawergha seems to have been cleansed of at least 10,000 inhabitants. That one is getting lots of press because it’s right next to Misrata, where heavy fighting went on for months. But it’s a safe bet that more of this sort of thing has been happening further away from the cameras. At a rough guess, somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of the country’s population is currently homeless. Some of those will be coming home over the next few months, but there’s a large number who may never be able to go back.

Those are the internal refugees. (Internal displaced persons, or IDPs, in the lingo.) There are also at least a couple of thousand Libyans currently refugees in neighboring countries, mostly real or suspected Qaddafi loyalists who have fled to Algeria, Chad, and Niger.

Then there’s a much larger number of Africans who were guest-workers in Libya but who have fled now. That latter figure is really blurry, but it’s certainly tens of thousands. These guys were a significant source of hard currency for their home countries; that’s cut off now, as they probably won’t be welcome in the new Libya for some time to come. The collateral damage to the economies of Chad and Niger will be small but noticeable.

Infrastructure: the oil infrastructure took some damage but nothing lasting — repairs are already underway, and should be mostly complete within a year or so. And the fighting in Tripoli ended fast enough that damage was minimal. But several good-sized towns and two city have been heavily damaged. Misrata, home to over 300,000 people, was the scene of intense fighting for four months, and was hit with thousands of shells and hundreds of rocket attacks; Sirte, a smaller town of about 75,000, just finished several weeks of siege. The reconstruction bill will certainly be in the billions. (Our original estimate was higher, but my co-blogger and I went back and forth on this by e-mail, and we concluded that it will be less than $5 billion — probably in the range of a couple of billion, give or take.) Here is some satellite imagery of Misrata that gives a sense of the damage. The U.N. after-action report can be found here.

The above, of course, is why the comparison of a million American deaths doesn’t quite work: casualties and physical damage don’t scale linearly. A six-month conflict that killed a million Americans would almost certainly entail proportionately far more physical damage than the Libyan Revolution.

Exports: pretty much all Libya exports is oil. And plenty of it — around $40 billion a year in export earnings. They’ve just lost more than half a year of production, and will see reduced production for another year or so until all the damage is fixed. So we’re looking at maybe $30 billion in lost earnings. In the short to medium term it’s a hell of a hit — Libya’s GDP in 2010 was just $96 billion.

This is mildly worrisome for two reasons. One, Libya’s oil revenues have disappeared at exactly the time when the country needs a hit of hard currency — for reconstruction, for displaced persons, for medical treatments, for all the costs of war. And two, Libya is about to start its postwar transition to... something. Historically, revolutions tend to be followed by a period of disillusionment and disappointment.

Libya, however, is fortunate in two ways. First, the oil is still there, and will eventually be pumped, so we’re really talking about a present value issue — getting a dollar of oil X years from now instead of today. That may sound obvious, but it isn’t: Venezuelan heavy oil production took a permanent hit when production shut down for the 2002 strike. A similar thing would happen to Albertan in situ heavy oil production were it suddenly shut down (for the same reasons as in Venezuela) as it would in the tight oil formations of North Dakota and Texas (for quite different reasons). In that sense, then, Libya is lucky that its oil can effectively be “banked” by leaving it in the ground.

Second, the Transitional National Council now has access to Libya’s official foreign reserves. The Obama administration identified at least $37 billion in Libya government assets held with in the United States, and European officials found another $30 billion. We know the most about the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), which holds about $65 billion in assets. Its new head, Rafik Nayed, is facing a hell of a job in tracking them all down. About $5.3 billion appears to be invested in Africa, and according to Mr. Nayed, “We still don’t know where much of this money has gone.” Fortunately, another $19.2 billion appears to have been invested in cash, and at least $4.0 billion in blue-chip European stocks, such UniCredit (inasmuch as any European bank can be called “blue-chip” these days), Eni, and Siemens. Liquidating or borrowing against the LIA’s assets is not as easy as it sounds — Mr. Layed “won’t make any investment moves until a new board is in place” — but neither is marketing oil revenues. (Two months ago, EconoMonitor published a brief speculation about the future of the LIA: one of their worries was that it might be looted by different factions inside Libya. That is certainly a real fear, but it would also apply to oil revenues — or, for that matter, a continuation of the Colonel’s regime.)

But anyway: something over 15,000 dead, roughly the same number injured, a couple of hundred thousand people displaced for at least 90 days, a smaller but still large number displaced permanently, a couple of billion in property damage, and over half a year of oil exports.

Comments and corrections welcome.

The war that did not happen

 In an earlier post, I discussed the strategic nuclear balance on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The chief takeaway was that the Soviet Union possessed very little ability to threaten the United States in 1962. President John Kennedy was a hero not because he saved the United States, but because he took seriously the lives of the Russians and Europeans who would perish.

Here I want to draw attention to how lucky the world really was. A nuclear war that “spared” the United States (at least outside the southeastern cities within range of Cuba-based rockets) would nonetheless have been a horrifying event without parallel. Below is a BBC documentary from 1965 that gives a horrifyingly unvarnished view of what such a war (even had it occurred in 1962) would have entailed.

The movie has other virtues. The preacher around minute 27 explains why I strongly believe that conscription is a moral imperative for anyone who is not a pacifist. And it puts our modern fears in perspective. It is worth watching. (Credit to Charlie Stross.)

Thoughts?

Somalia irredenta

 Somalia is a desperately screwed up corner of the world — war, poverty, anarchy, mass famine. It’s also a significant haven for terrorists. So we’re likely to see it in the news a bit over the next little while. That being the case, I thought I’d pass along another one of my personal idiot tests. Here it is: anyone who discusses Somali politics without at least mentioning Ethiopia probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Something that mostly gets missed: Ethiopians are the traditional enemies of the Somalis. The reasons for this are complicated, but here’s the big one: back in the 19th century, Ethiopia clawed off a big hunk of Somalia. Sometimes called Ogadenia, it’s an Arizona-sized territory, mostly arid, with a population of around 4 million people, almost all ethnic Somalis.

This might have worked out OK if the Ethiopians had treated their new Somali minority well and integrated them. Alas: up until the 1990s, various Ethiopian regimes treated the Somalis of Ogadenia with varying degrees of oppression and contempt. The Somalis, of course, responded with guerrilla movements, insurgencies, and rebellion. At one point in 1977 the government of Somalia actually sent troops over the border into Ethiopia to help the Ethiopian Somalis try for independence, It failed, but you can believe it’s remembered in Ethiopia.

I said “until the 1990s” because the current Ethiopian regime — while dictatorial, brutal, and obnoxious in all sorts of ways — actually has a surprisingly good track record in Ogadenia. It’s given the Somalis there limited autonomy under traditional leaders, and has mostly quit oppressing them. This has gone far (not all the way, but far) towards appeasing their grievances. There are still anti-Ethiopian conspiracies in Ogadenia, but they’re fairly small (for now). It doesn’t hurt that Somali is currently such an anarchic hellhole that few Ogaden Somalis want to join up, nationalist sympathies notwithstanding. The Ethiopian government may be a brutal dictatorship, but at least it’s an actual, more or less functioning government.

But! On the Somali side, taking back Ogadenia — whether the Ogadenians want it or not — has become an unquestioned tenet of Somali nationalism. No right-thinking citizen can question it, and all political leaders vie with each other in the intensity of their anti-Ethiopian rhetoric. And as Somalia descended into anarchy back in the 1990s, various leaders decided to show their chops by supporting insurgencies in Ogadenia, raiding across the border, etc. etc.

(BTW, I said that Ethiopians are the traditional enemies of the Somalis. That’s true, but the converse is not. Somalis see Ethiopia as an imperialist power that grabbed a third of their country and that remains a menacing, existential threat. Ethiopians see Somalia as an intermittent annoyance — sometimes negligible, sometimes an obnoxious nuisance. A rough comparison might be, say, Georgia and Russia.)

Anyway: back in 2007, Ethiopia eventually lost patience with this and invaded. Nominally, they were doing it to support the Somali “government” against “insurgents.” This was nonsense; the Somali “government” was just another armed group, and not one of the stronger ones. From Ethiopia’s POV, the invasion had nothing to do with supporting one group over another. It was more about throwing Somalia against a wall, hard. The idea was to demonstrate that Ethiopia was strong, Ogadenia wasn’t going anywhere, and Somali cross-border fun and games would carry a very high price tag. And arguably the Ethiopians succeeded at this, albeit in a way that generated massive negative externalities for all other players. A lot of people died, Somalia got even poorer and more anarchic, and the government that Ethiopia was “supporting” ended up even weaker than it had been, because they’d allied themselves with the hated Ethiopians. But the border quieted down.

Anyway: if nothing else, knowing the history gives you a useful bullshit detector. If someone starts nattering on about the conflict and either (1) never mentions Ogadenia, or (2) tries to frame the Ethiopia-Somali relationship as a religious conflict (as opposed to a classic nationalist-territorial one that Somali jihadism is making worse), then they’re talking crap.

More generally, you can’t talk about Somalia in isolation. That’s true of most countries, of course, but in the case of Somalia its lawlessness and open borders have encouraged all sorts of intervention, good and bad — okay, mostly bad — by outsiders. Kenya shares a border and mostly supports the government, but is wary because there’s a large Somali-speaking minority in Kenya too. (Back in the 1960s, the Somali government supported an insurgency in Kenya. It didn’t work out.) Eritrea supports the largest anti-government group, the Taliban-like Shabab, and other groups that are ferociously anti-Ethiopian. (That’s because Eritrea hates Ethiopia, and the two have their own little regional mini-cold war going.) The Chinese are quietly looking for oil. Even Uganda has a presence in Somalia. (Which resulted in Shabab blowing up a crowded restaurant in Uganda’s capital Kampala last year.) So it’s just impossible to separate Somali politics from regional politics.

But while Somalian politics is fractally complicated and dominated by violent conflict between different armed groups, Somalian political ideology is much more consistent: Somalia should be a united state, the state should be formally Islamic, and Somalia should recover its lost territories — most particularly, the Ogaden. The warring parties may disagree on the details (formally Islamic like Pakistan, or like Iran, or like Saudi Arabia? Attack Ethiopia right away, or wait until they’re weak?) but they’re in firm agreement on those essentials. Somalia has managed to maintain a very high level of intense, ferocious nationalism despite the near complete absence of a functioning state. This may explain why only Somaliland in the north has tried formal secession. And Somali nationalism is still going strong, despite the continuing political violence and some desultory attempts to imitate the Somaliland example.

Incidentally, the government — after a bewildering series of twists and turns — seems to be on the upswing at the moment; they drove the Shabab out of the capital last month. I wouldn’t count on that being a harbinger of much, but it isn’t a bad sign.

Department of Obvious: Syria is not Libya

 This has become a fairly handy idiot test.

Short version: intervening in Syria would be much, much harder and more expensive than intervening in Libya. This was true back in March, and it’s still true today.
 
(1) The uprising in Syria has never remotely approached the success of the uprising in Libya. Syria has seen a bunch of large, sustained protests and demonstrations. That’s great! But Libya saw the effective secession of almost half the country. By the middle of March, the rebels controlled the country’s second largest city. About a fifth of the country’s area and maybe a third of its population had passed completely out of government control. Major government military units had gone over to the rebel’s side. Nothing like that has happened in Syria.

(2) Syria has an actual, functioning air force. This is in sharp contrast to Libya, which did not. Syria actually has late-ish model planes, pilots who know how to fly them, and some semblance of a professional administrative and logistical infrastructure to support them. No, the Syrians couldn’t stand up to a sustained war with NATO — but they exist, and would have to be dealt with.

(3) Syria has an actual, functioning air defense system. Again a sharp contrast to Libya. As with the air force, it could be dealt with — but it would take time, and would likely cost casualties.

(4) Syria’s in a much, much more delicate and complicated location. Just look at a map. Taking Gaddafi out was relatively easy — Egypt and Tunisia just had their revolutions, and nobody cares much about Chad. But Syria? Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon. What a nightmare. Do I need to spell out why this makes everything much harder and more fraught?

(5) Assad is much less diplomatically isolated than Gaddafi. By 2010, the Brother Leader had managed to alienate or annoy pretty much everyone. Even the Arab League openly despised him. His nominal “friends” in the Mediterranean — most notably Berlusconi’s government in Italy — turned out to be fair-weather indeed. Russia restricted itself to tut-tuts from a distance. Only in Sub-Saharan Africa did he have any real allies left, and the plain sad fact is that Niger and Senegal just don’t count for much when you’ve got the United States, United Kingdom, and French Republic all lined up against you. With bombs.

Assad, on the other hand, is a respected member of the international club. He’s a dictator, but he’s not a flake. He’s a reasonable neighbor. (Well, unless you’re Lebanese. More accurately, a Lebanese of a certain political flavor.) The Arab League is never going to pass a resolution approving force against him. And the Russians are likely to veto anything in the Security Council — they’re much closer to him than they ever were to Gaddafi. They’ve had a small naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus since the 1970s, and they’ve sold weapons to the Syrians since forever.

In fact, the Russians were just closing a deal to sell Syria a bunch of Yakhont antiship missiles when the uprising started. The Yakhont is basically a bigger, dumber Exocet; a supersonic cruise missile designed to kill large ships from far away. Israel vigorously protested the deal, for fear Syria would pass a couple along to Hezbollah. (Hezbollah blew a massive hole in an Israeli corvette a few years back using a crappy little Chinese C-802, and my co-blogger will eventually post something about his research on the brewing conflict over Israel’s new offshore gas fields,  so it’s a quite reasonable fear.) Remember how in Libya, we had capital ships hanging around just offshore from Tripoli, and the Charles de Gaulle parked conveniently just a bit further out? That wouldn’t happen in Syria; even the faint possibility of shore launched cruise missiles would make any sane admiral pull his ships well back over the horizon.
 
Oh, and he’s got the Iranians on side, at least for the moment. I think the Iranians would switch sides in a flash, if they thought it was in their interest — but until they reach that point, they’re backing him firmly. (They just replaced their ambassador to Damascus with a hardliner with ties to the Revolutionary Guards.)

(6) Assad is much less physically isolated than Gaddafi. Libya looks like a solid block of territory, but in fact it’s like Canada — a long, thin populated strip and a vast empty hinterland. 90% of the population lives within 100 km of the coast. The civil war cut that strip in two, east and west. Gaddafi had an open path to the south, but as supply lines they were meaningless; an 800 km drive across desert, and then you’re in Niger. (A country whose major resources are under French control.) With NATO controlling the seas, virtually everything in Gaddafi’s territory had to come in or out through Tunisia, most of it on a single coastal road. The moment the rebels cut that road was the moment when everything changed for good.

There’s nothing like this in Syria, which has well-developed land links to all its neighbors except Israel. And most of Syria’s coast is actually Lebanon. Nobody’s going to blockade Lebanon. As with the air defenses, this is a solvable issue — but it makes everything much, much more difficult and expensive.

So, to summarize:

• Military intervention in Syria would be incredibly expensive and difficult, would have to overcome serious diplomatic obstacles, and would likely involve significant losses and casualties. This has always been true, and will probably continue to be true for some time to come. Therefore, it is very unlikely to happen.
• Because military intervention is unlikely, any uprising against Assad will have to succeed or fail without it, as did the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. I judge this unlikely, but that’s an issue for another post.
• If someone says “our intervention in Libya prevented us from intervening in Syria,” then you may immediately begin heavily discounting, or completely ignoring, anything else they have to say on the topic. (This goes double if they suggest that the reason is “Syria has no oil.”) If someone suggests that we should intervene in Syria, same-same.

I wish the Syrian people good luck in getting rid of the loathsome Assad regime. But the plain fact is, they’ll have to do it without direct military help from us.

Endgame in Tripolitania

 Ten weeks ago, I wrote this:

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...

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.

I said “August, plus or minus a month.” We’re now exactly halfway through August. So what has happened?

Well, after six weeks of relative stalemate, things have suddenly started to move.  (Above is a map that may help follow along; click to enlarge.) In the last few days we’ve seen the following:

— Rebels captured the high ground south of Misrata, putting the whole town out of artillery range and cutting the main route between Tripoli (the capital) and the big concentration of Loyalist forces fighting in the east. Gaddafi is now connected to his main field army only by a roundabout route, several hundred miles long, through some truly awful desert.

— Then the rebels captured Gharyan, which sits across the main north-south highway running from Tripoli down into Libya’s interior.

— Then, in a sudden surprise move, the rebels attacked the towns of az-Zawiyah and Surman, which lie on the coast 30-40 km west of Tripoli. Az-Zawiyah is actually a small city of a couple of hundred thousand people, and house-to-house fighting is continuing around the city center — but the key point is, they’ve cut the main coastal road from Tripoli west to Tunis. Thus, in the space of a week, the rebels have very nearly severed the capital from the rest of the country. 

—  The town of Tiji, Gaddafi’s strongest remaining base adjacent to the rebel-held Nafusa Mountains, fell to the rebels early this morning. If the rebels hold on to  Surman, taking Tiji means they’ve now put all Gaddafi’s forces in the northwest corner of Libya into a pocket, cut off from resupply or reinforcement.

—  And Qaddafi’s former Minister of the Interior just arrived in Cairo, with nine family members, on “a tourist visit.” 

Suddenly things seem to be moving very fast. It’s possible that Qaddafi could still launch a counterstrike, of course. But he won’t easily be able to undo the results of the past few days; for instance, even if he retakes the coastal towns, the rebels can still destroy highway bridges and overpasses, keeping the capital’s main supply route cut for days or weeks.

One peculiarity of this whole thing is that the eastern front — where the main concentration of government forces faces the main rebel army — has been almost static. The rebels have spent the last few weeks very slowly fighting their way into the town of Brega. Brega sits at the edge of a massive concentration of Libya’s oil infrastructure — pipelines, refineries, an export terminal. So it’s possible that the rebels have been deliberately going slow in order to minimize the risk of damaging large amounts of complex and expensive equipment, hoping that it will fall into their hands intact.  Whether this will work out or not remains to be seen.

Another interesting point: the rebel offensive seems to have been remarkably well coordinated, with major offensives in three widely separated fronts. As far as can be told (this is not certain) NATO forces seem to have been working quite effectively with the rebels, providing air cover and helping bring down Loyalist strongpoints. Someone fairly competent is running this show, it seems. It would be nice to know more.

None of this means that Qaddafi is finished — though at this point I’d be willing to bet money on it — and of course, none of it tells us anything about what will happen after he’s gone. That’s going to be a difficult, gnarly and complicated time, with a wide range of possible outcomes. 

Back in April I wrote that I opposed the NATO intervention. I still think it was a bad idea at the time, on both US-national-interest and humanitarian grounds. Let’s put that discussion aside for another post, though. I opposed the intervention, but given that it happened ... I think we’re doing okay. (For broad values of “we.” The Libyan people, the United States, NATO, most interested parties.) Here’s hoping it’s all over soon.

Another Libya post

 Various people have noticed that this Libya thing has been dragging on for a while now, and various explanations are being trotted out. But not by me! I was against intervention in the first place, but now that it’s happened I think it’s going reasonably well.  

What’s “reasonably well”? Isn’t Qaddafi still in power? Well, yes he is. But he’s also continuing to lose ground on every front. I already wrote about the “correlation of forces” notion; nothing has changed in the three weeks or so since then. If I stare very closely, it does look like the speed of disintegration may be slowing, which would be bad — but he’s still not winning any battles, morale in Tripoli is still low, and defections are continuing. A while back, I predicted that he’d be gone “by August, give or take a month” — in other words, between July 1 and September 30. I’ll stand pat on that.

Meanwhile, four quick thoughts.

(1) Most of the action seems to be taking place in the western mountains and around Misrata. The eastern front, out by Benghazi, has been relatively quiet. That seems a bit odd, given that Benghazi is the rebel capital and, presumably, the largest concentration of forces are located there. Thinking out loud: if the war ends after a string of victories in the west and central fronts, without anything much having happened in the east, you’d expect that to affect the postwar balance of forces in the country.

(2) France has resorted not just to arming the rebels, but arming them via large, random weapon dumps out of planes. This suggests some things, both bad and good. Bad: the French aren’t coordinating with Tunisia or the various rebel groups in the west. Good: the French chain of command (including, but not limited to, President Sarkozy) is getting anxious. Libya is a much bigger deal in France than in the U.S., and Sarkozy has an election coming up next year. (An election he’s currently favored to lose in a landslide, I should add. But ten months is a long time.) I don’t see Sarko caring to start his campaign without having resolved Libya — somehow. So while I’m ready to be wrong about September 30, I will be astonished if Qaddafi is still clinging to power by next February — the point at which the French presidential campaign really takes off.

(3) The fact that the Libyan rebels are willing to tolerate and work together with large numbers of armed Berbers strikes me as cause for cautious optimism. (Qaddafi spent 40 years demonizing the Berbers as dim, treacherous primitives who are Not Really Libyan.) Of course, the Berbers seem to be doing more than their share of the fighting. 

(4) Two big question marks: Egypt and Tunisia. Egypt is a poor country, and its military is no great shakes, but they’re so big that even a very modest intervention could have disproportionate effect. Tunisia is much smaller — but even Tunisia has half again the population of Libya, and they’re right next to the most intense theater of fighting. I have the strong impression that both countries are being very very cautious and moderate in their responses because they’re both internally unstable at the moment, having just come through their own revolutions. Still, it’s interesting that nobody in either country cares to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.

Let’s see how it looks in August.

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.

Libyan civil war oil update

 There have several important developments in the Libyan civil war, not least the temporary incursion into Tunisia and NATO’s decision to begin attacking Libyan state institutions. (The death of one of Gaddafi’s sons is a result.) These are important, but developments regarding the country’s oil industry are even more so. And so, this update.

Last weekend, government forces damanged rebel-controlled oil fields. How is not certain. Tripoli claims that British warplanes did the damage, but that seems unlikely to say the least. Wahid Bughaigis, the rebel oil minister, said that the damaged equipment included a generator, an oil tank, and several small diesel tanks to fuel the generators. The rebels say they will need at least a month to repair the damage.

The problem is that the rebels do not control the refineries or gasfields. They therefore need to import fuel, and that’s expensive. The Qatari government (working with Vitol, an oil trader) helped the rebels market one million barrels (for an above-market $129 million in revenue). The MT Equator tanker, carrying 550,000 barrels of that oil, arrived in Singapore for refueling on April 28, before steaming on to China. (China is being quite helpful where it counts.) $129 million, however, is not a lot in terms of rebel needs. Bougaighis said: “To put things in perspective, one cargo of gasoline of 25,000 metric tons costs us $75 million, so you don’t go far with $129 million.”

I suspect that he is wrong about that: 25,000 metric tons is around 7.9 million gallons, and I doubt they’re paying $9.44 per gallon. But I am sure that the rebels are facing energy problems. Benghazi used to get its electricity from natural gas supplied out of Brega. Brega, however, is in government hands. As a result, the rebels have cut electricity production in Benghazi by 25 percent to conserve fuel. Of course, in a country without anything resembling a smart grid, electricity cuts mean rotating outtages running as long as 3½ hours. Bughaigis: “We didn’t have this problem when the gas was supplied to the plants, but now we have to supply it (diesel) by sea and get it from the road.”

For what it’s worth, the U.S. cleared up (as best as it could) the remaining uncertainty about the ability of Americans to buy Libyan oil. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) declared that said transactions involving Qatar Petroleum or Vitol are permitted provided the entity in Libya is under the control of the rebel-backed leadership. Anyone dealing with Libyan oil purchases must supply a report to OFAC detailing the arrangements within 30 days. The practical significance of this is limited, however, since the Europeans opened the door to rebel oil sales some time ago.

In the Department of Obvious: Vienna-based OMV, which produces some 10% of its total oil and gas production from Libya (33,000 boe a day), is seeing its profits go down. Production at the Shateira oil field shut down at the end of February due to violent clashes between government and rebel forces. Libya provided 20 percent of the crude used by OMV refineries, but it has been able to buy crude from Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and the Black Sea region to make up for the slack. OMV will have to upgrade the refinery in Burghausen, Germany, to process non-Libyan crude, but it should be able to do that.

Department of Not so Obvious: Eni’s production is down 9%, but profits are up 15% on high prices. Since April, Eni production in Libya has been about 50,000 to 55,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, down from 280,000. (Libya accounted for about 10 percent of Eni's overall cash flow.) Eni said since April the company has been producing 50,000 to 55,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day in Libya for local electricity production, all coming from its Wafa facility. No Eni facilities in Libya have been damaged and are currently on “hot standby” ready to produce again once the situation stabilizes.

And finally, Department of WTF: Eni appears to have sent a tanker to western Libya to try to pick up oil from its production facilities. The Aqua got within a few kilometres of the Libyan port of Mellitah before turning away between April 20 and 21. (The booking from Mellitah to Venice probably cost over $500,000, including a risk premium to venture into Libyan waters.) It was there to load up 600,000 barrels of oil. The Libyan government, obviously, refused to let the Eni ship fill up. “They didn't want the crude to go, because they wouldn't have gotten any money for it,” said an industry source, adding, “They could use it to refine into gasoline.” I can understand why NATO would be happy to let the Italians give it the old college try (“Go get your oil! Just make sure that Tripoli knows it won’t get any money for it, 90% tax rate be damned.”) I am less sure as to why Eni thought it could possibly get its oil.

So there you have it. Nothing here changes the assessment that the rebels will win, but the government ability to strike at the fields is unexpected.

Europe goes to war

 Libya update: So far, both Doug Muir and I appear to be correct. The war has devolved into a stalemate, but casualties are only racking up in Misrata, where the New York Times estimates between 313 and 1,000 deaths thus far. That is a tragedy, but far less than it could have been.

Calls to send ground forces are growing, but the United States so far shows no signs of seeing any political pressures, domestic or foreign, to send American troops. The E.U. has signed off on a 61-page “concept of operations” to send roughly 1,000 troops to coordinate humanitarian relief, most likely in Misrata.

According to the Guardian, Eufor Libya “would be authorised to fight if they or their humanitarian wards were threatened.” The Guardian reports that the current on-call European battlegroup is mostly made up of German troops, but it turns out to be predominantly Dutch, although the Germans are involved. The other battlegroup is from the Nordic countries; predominantly Swedish. French units, in particular, are not involved. Inside a European Union that appears to be straining over economic adjustment and immigration, the politics of this will be problematic. (I for one would like Doug Muir’s insights here. After all, so far we’re both right!)

A French parliamentarian, Axel Poniatowski, has correctly pointed out that in order to be more effective, NATO will need to put spotters on the ground. Reports that the Europeans are running short of precision-guided munitions only make that more pressing; moreover, the Europeans may have to deploy helicopters, which means ground crews.

And that means a need to creatively interpret the U.N. resolution or go back and get a new one. France and Britain seem to disagree on this point.

This is an intervention that should be easy. The rub is that the Europeans really have let their military capacities deteriorate to a rather remarkable extent. Moreover, coalition warfare is extremely difficult; more so, when the allies do not agree. So far, the six bad results have been avoided, including the 7th possibility of prolonged attrition warfare. Conditions in rebel-held territory seem good, and the oil industry is getting organized. But the jury is still out.

On-ground-blogging from Libya

 Ryan Calder, a Berkeley Ph.D. student in sociology, is in Benghazi right now. He is keeping a blog, called Revolutionology, about his experiences in rebel territory. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the situation in eastern Libya, or the civil war.

Scariest quote, so far: “This is what a twenty-first-century ragtag volunteer army looks like. These guys are all heart, not much coordination, and no training whatsoever.”

Bad contingency #3 comes into sight

 How did Libyan troops manage to advance on Brega so rapidly? I am not surprised that the opposition fell apart; I am surprised that NATO airstrikes failed to disrupt regime movements. This looks like bad contingency (3): “rebel tactical incompetence leads to operational disaster.” Here is the best story that I have been able to find.  

People who have not served in a military force (or a similar large organization) can underestimate the importance of simple discipline. It will take a long time to train the rebels. If Allied airpower cannot keep the Libyan army from advancing even without communication and coordination with the ground, then the rebellion is doomed. That seems to be the problem: since the rebels have nothing resembling an organization, there is no way to distinguish between the Libyan military (given their new tactics) and the rebels. If the rebels were an actual military force, even a badly-trained force, this would not be a problem.

I have to admit to being surprised at how quickly the rebels have abandoned Ras Lanuf and Brega. The Libyan military is showing more cleverness than I expected.

For what it is worth, I would strongly caution against arming the rebels. Does anyone know of a source for Libyan information from someone with command experience? This is a time when a real warblog by somebody who knew of what they spoke would provide real value.

War versus non-war

 Americans have a problem with the word “war.” In the dictionary, war is an armed conflict between organized groups for political objectives. In the U.S., however, the word took has the connotation of absolute war, an interstate conflict aimed at the unconditional surrender of the other side.

To some extent this has always been true. Three of our five declared wars — the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War — weren’t aimed at unconditional surrender, but they were aimed at the territorial dismemberment of our opponent. Moreover, in all three cases, the declaration of war rapidly led to an escalation of American aims. The War of 1812 immediately became a war to drive Britain out of North America. The Mexican-American War started over Texas and ended in an American occupation — and were it not for Nicholas Trist the southern boundary of the United States would be several hundred miles further south. The Spanish-American War started with a very 21st-century “authorization to use force,” but Congress declared war after Spain declared it on us ... and soon enough the U.S. was in possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

What does this have to do with Libya? Well, Libya is a massive food importer. In a total war, even a casualty-averse total war, his enemies could starve him out. But we are not fighting a total war, and we obviously should not be fighting a total war. Since Libya imports about 75% of its food needs, this means that the U.N. is soon going to have to organize relief efforts at the same time that NATO is blockading his ports.

It will get stranger.

How it could all go wrong in Libya

 I seem to have been a bit sanguine about Gaddafi’s resources in my last post. The IMF reports that Gaddafi is sitting on a 143.8-tonne $6.4-billion pot of gold. If correct, that’s a lot of ready cash. 

If the war goes on much longer, and I suspect that it will, there are at least six bad contingencies:

1. Gaddafi leaves. Absolute chaos ensues;
2. Gaddafi massacres people in his territory in some bold and ugly way that the Western media can’t ignore;
3. Rebel tactical incompetence leads to operational disaster;
4. The rebels start to fall apart in their territory. Chaos ensues;
5. Rebels massacre civilians;
6. The Syrian government shells a rebellious town into rubble, killing tens of thousands and doing exactly what we intervened to prevent Gaddafi from doing.

In a perfect world, the U.S. and U.K. and France would have contingency plans for all of these events. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that all three governments do have a strategy: stay out and stonewall political pressures to respond. Contingency #6? Nothing to be done, impossible to intervene. Contingency #1? Pottery barn, not. Contingency #2? Already trying. Contingency #5? See no evil. Contingency #4? Time to declare failure; just like we did in Somalia.

The strategy is stay out; the tactic will be to stonewall.

The question, however, is whether “stonewall” is a strong enough political tactic to implement the desired strategy? Can we disengage if things begin to go wrong?

Why the Libyan rebels will (probably) win

 The Libyan civil war is set to be a prolonged one. Others have mentioned the rebels’ astonishing lack of discipline and training, and what thus far seems like their inability to establish even a chain of command. That can be rectified, however, if they can gain enough resources. In Libya, of course, resources mean oil. So what do the rebels control?

 

First, they have the Tobruk oil terminal firmly in hand. They took possession of the Zueitina terminal on Monday, bit whether they can hold that depends on events in neary Ajdabiya. The two terminals have an export capacity of 63,000 and 214,000 barrels per day (bpd), respectively, for a total potential export capacity of 277,000 bpd. The terminals are fed by the Sarir and Misla fields, which according to Agoco are producing about 95,000 bpd, down from 400,000 bpd.

Why is production so low? Agoco was not dependent on foreign expertise. The loss of contractors in the general flight when the civil war broke didn’t help, but it didn’t cause the decline. Rather, the problem is legal uncertainty. With sanctions biting, it wasn’t clear that any of the majors could purchase Libyan oil without opening themselves up to massive liabilities. In fact, that is usually the problem in rebellions and civil wars. When the legal situation is clear, oil companies are willing and able to operate in the most disordered situations—when it is not, they won’t touch anything with a ten-foot pole. Agoco’s management may have announced that it was on the side of the rebels, but that means nothing to the majors in the absence of Western policy. As a result, oil is sitting in terminals without tankers, and production is down since there’s no storage capacity.

This looks like it is about to change. In what may be the most significant development of the civil war since the Western airstrikes began, the rebels just declared the formation of a new “Libyan Oil Company,” and “the designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya.”  

This is really important. It means that a rebel government, recognized by France, now has an oil company and a central bank. The sanctions imposed by the United States (and in a weaker messier form by the Europeans, something that I complained about to a reporter last week) apply only to the Libyan national oil company and central bank. In the Treasury’s words: “Should National Oil Corporation subsidiaries or facilities come under different ownership and control, Treasury may consider authorizing dealings with such entities.”

The sanctions imposed on the central bank of Libya are similarly flexible: “All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person, including any overseas branch, of the Government of Libya, its agencies, instrumentalities, and controlled entities, and the Central Bank of Libya, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in.”

Libyan lifting costs are around $3 per barrel. At $105 per barrel, access to the two eastern fields could mean an annual income of $10.3 billion for the rebels. Now, that’s not likely—those Opex figures are misleading. (Libya earned $32 billion in 2010.) Still, even a quarter of that can buy a lot of merce ... er, private military training and uniforms and equipment to turn the rebels into a real army. Add some access to British and French special forces (to call in airstrikes) and they could win this thing.

They won’t win quickly. But with Gaddafi running on cash reserves, it looks as though they will win. At least as long as China and India and elsewhere stay on side.

No-drive zone and the Libyan civil war

 This is going to be ugly, but ground troops will not be needed. (With a caveat.) We can conduct enough sorties to impose a real no-drive zone between rebel-held territories and the west. The problem is that it looks as though Gaddafi’s forces have already moved into Benghazi. The rebels will have to root them out, and that could be ugly. (Preliminary reports look pretty ugly, but maybe not as much as it could have been.)

Minimally-trained infantry should be able to outflank government forces outside the cities, but the rebels seem to be worse than minimally-trained. Maybe this is my own experience talking, but they seem like mobs with guns, rather than a serious fighting force. The West could send in advisors, which would, of course, be serious mission creep. If it happens, I’d bet on the British doing it, not the United States.

The truth is, neither side the Libyan civil war appears to be particularly competent. (This should not be surprising.) In the words of a former RAF officer (and personal friend): “I think holding onto small cities was a mistake, the rebels have bogged themselves down there and waited for the fight to come. Ideally, defence should have been based on the ‘restricted block methodology’ (ie: Stalingrad) freeing up manpower to build SUV mobile platoons heading for Tripoli and locking the government in. Not rocket science, infantry 101 which concerns me about the skills of the regular Libyan NCO/Officers.” This graduate of Fort Benning, for what little that is worth (and truly, it is not worth much at all; the only times I have been in a combat zone have been as a civilian) concurs. Andrew Exum also concurs. (Oh man did his post bring back memories of digging. And getting tear-gassed. But I digress.) 

Historically, Libyan troops have performed very poorly at the operational and tactical level. From Arabs at War: “Junior officers exhibited little initiative, creativity, flexibility, or adaptability ... They rarely thought to manuever in battle, could not make combined-arms operations work properly, and regularly failed to scout or adequately secure their positions ... Information did not flow evenly across the Libyan hierarchy either verically or horizontally, with the result that few had the requisite information to adequately perform their assigned missions.” Strangely, maintenance was a serious problem, while logistics performed amazingly: the country maintained an armored division in Chad, a thousand miles away.

In this war, the logistical advantage is gone: the U.N. forces are going to make sure of that. In the east, you are going to have ugly ugly irregular fighting until the last of the Gaddafi forces are gone. In the west, though, it depends.

One smart policy would be to promise financial rewards to defecting Libyan forces, including foreign-born militia. With economic sanctions on, Gaddafi is down to paying to his troops from his cash reserves. He can’t export oil or gas, he can’t access his foreign assets. Libya is also an importer of gasoline (this is not unusual for oil producing countries). The rebels knew this, and hijacked vessels headed to Gaddafi-held territory, but now NATO navies are enforcing a blockade. Moreover, the Ras Lanouf refinery is damaged and on fire.

Another smart policy would be to call off the International Criminal Court and offer a blanket amnesty. I am sure that Venezuela would be happy to take the Colonel. (Once upon a time, I would have thought Saudi Arabia, and that might still be a possibility, even with the recent collapse in U.S.-Saudi relations.)

In short, the U.N. coalition is going to dismantle Gaddafi’s air defenses and enforce a no-drive zone. The rebels will root out government forces in the east in awful fighting to which the press will probably not pay much attention. Then we are going to get a waiting game. Even with sanctions, Gaddafi can hold out for a long time, especially if his troops think that the alternative is death. Thus, bribes ... but somehow I do not think that is going to happen. In short, we could have a long waiting game, unless

The wild card would be Gaddafi attacks on civilian populations in the west. If that happens, all bets are off. Perversely, that means a rebellion in the areas he currently holds would be worse for the U.N.’s ability to stay out than a long stalemate.

But here’s the good thing: the United States is not in the lead. Yes, we are providing right now most of the firepower. But politically, we are not in the lead. If this turns into a repeat of the containment of Iraq, the onus is not on us, and the decisions are not on us. If we draw back, the Europeans (honestly, the Anglo-French coalition) and the Arab countries will have to decide whether to keep on.

And you know what? As a nationalist American, I like that. I like being the biggest kid but not the alpha dog. The French moved out in front, the Arabs made the call, the U.N. granted the authorization, and we’re in it because we’re big and burly and feel solidarity. (Nobody reading this will understand this save for the few who went to grade school with me: we’re Jimmy, not Brandon.) And this, this is new, and this is good.

Egypt and airstrikes in Libya

 The problem is that the Egyptian air force is probably not up to the mission. Here are some (decade-old) quotes from U.S. officers on the quality of Egyptian air force training:

• “They know where to turn, and where to pretend to fire munitions, and who is going to win.”
• “They fly our planes and use our tactics, but you would never know it.”
• “Egyptian exercises are totally canned: they aren’t for training, they’re for show.”

In addition, the experience with Egyptian forces in Gulf War 1 was not very good. Egyptian maintenance was terrible: depot-level maintenance still needs to be performed in the United States. Worse yet, there occasions of Egyptian units effectively fabricating engagements when they in fact met no resistance. Finally, compartmentalization in the Egyptian military was awful; rarely was there any one single officer with full operational knowledge.

It is possible that things have improved, but it isn’t how I would bet. From a 2004 report: “More generally, the Egyptian air force cannot compete with the Israeli air force in overall battle management, the exploitation of modern sensors and targeting systems, electronic warfare, beyond-visual-range warfare, and in using precision strike and attack munitions. It also focuses more on numbers than sustainability, and has limited ability to sustain high sortie rates.” Admittedly, Libya is not Israel, but the chances are very high that Egyptians strikes would not be effective. Moreover, the Egyptian military has developed a commercial empire, with an entrenched officer class: historically, these are not things that are conducive to military effectiveness.

In short, if the U.N. is going to use airpower to stop the Libyan advance on the rebels, that airpower has to come from Western armed forces.

The historical roots of German pacifism

 One the potential points of confusion between historians and non-historians is that when historians say something like “history matters,” they do not mean “people today bear history in mind when making decisions.” Rather, they mean “past events constrained (or even caused) present decisions.” This subtle difference has caused confusion between my friend Doug and myself on multiple occasions. The confusion is clearly my fault, for the simple reason that if you confuse somebody, you are by definition being confusing.

Since the memory of the war is indeed alive and well in many places outside Germany (and I know at least two Germans who have been unpleasantly blindsided by this fact) it is a good thing that most Germans have a hypersensitive reaction to any intimation that they might use military force in response something short of a direct attack on NATO soil.

The question is, then, what drives Germany’s oddly hypocritical yet surprisingly powerful pacifism? There is much evidence that it is not historical guilt. But absent that, then, how can events six decades ago shape attitudes today? I’ll turn the floor over to Mr. Muir, lifted from comments:

Let’s take it from the top. The German Constitution specifically prohibits “Angriffskriege.” That translates as “offensive war,” but the meaning in German is a bit broader. “No Angriffskriege” pretty much precludes anything but self-defense.

Note that the Germans didn’t put this provision in themselves! The Allies insisted — almost literally at gunpoint — that it be included. The initial German reaction to this was something like “glum resignation.” But over time, they got more enthusiastic about it, and today it’s as important — and as central to their identity — as any provision of the Bill of Rights is to Americans.

Anyway: just a few years after its drafting, the restriction hit its first snag: how could it be reconciled with German membership in NATO?

Answer: NATO formally assured the Germans that this alliance was strictly defensive. The Bundestag then solemnly passed a law saying “the Constitution allows us to join defensive alliances”. Subsequent court decisions confirmed that, okay, this was constitutional. This was back in Adenauer’s time, when the judiciary was pretty conservative and inclined to defer to the executive on security issues. It’s anyone’s guess if it would have flown a generation later. But fly it did, and 50+ years later it’s firmly established as both precedent and policy.

The odd result of this is that NATO occupies a special constitutional space. Basically, if NATO does it, it’s presumed defensive — not Angriffskrieg! — and therefore constitutional.

In 1999, the Kosovo war forced Germany to thread a very narrow passage: they simultaneously argued that the war wasn’t “offensive” because it was in defense of the helpless Albanians, while at the same time carefully limiting German participation. (This is why, for instance, the air offensive made use of Belgian and Dutch airplanes, but not German.) The German courts subsequently reviewed this and — barely and grudgingly — agreed. [German Tornados provided air cover for the initial RAF assault on Serb positions and later attacked Serb air defenses.] 

This in turn provided a precedent for German participation in Afghanistan. Again, it was limited — no German troops storming Taliban strongholds. Arguably the Germans could legally do this, but the political leadership wisely decided not to stretch the envelope.

Note that there was a huge internal debate over Kosovo, and another one over Afghanistan. This flares up again every time Germans do anything new in Afghanistan (“Can we do that?”) or every time a German soldier is killed (“What are we doing there!?”)

Somalia, on the other hand, was easy. There’s a body of law going back around 300 years stating that anti-piracy actions are never offensive. The reasoning is that pirates are the common enemies of all civilized nations; hoisting the Jolly Roger is legally equivalent to a declaration of war against the world. Once you become a pirate, ships of all nations are free to attack you at will. So, there wasn’t much controversy over sending German ships to help. (In fact, there was a bit of relief — here’s something useful we can do, without having a wrenching internal debate!)

Which brings us to the President’s resignation. You said this happened because of the burden of history. This is partly true, but also very incomplete; it ignores the 65 years of history since the war. Germans didn’t think the President’s statement was wrong because Germany has a history of offensive, hugely destructive war. They thought it was wrong because Germany is a peaceful, lawful nation that would never do anything that might be “Angriffskrieg.”

Germany has an extremely strong self-image of itself as a nation that is peaceful and law-abiding. Obviously that has historical roots in the postwar settlement imposed by the Allies, but it’s comfortably outlived both the war and the settlement and is now a historical fact in its own right. The last withered, centenarian WWII veteran will probably drop dead around 2035, but the Germans of that day will almost certainly still be pacifistic and inclined to hand-wringing over most forms of military action.

Events six decades ago constrain current actions, even without the direct consideration of the actors. History matters, even when unremembered. 

Thoughts?

History matters

 It appears that Germany’s president has just resigned for saying, “A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”

The president didn’t say that the deployments in question would have to be unilateral, just that they would have to be. (The country in question does indeed have troops in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Lebanon, Kosovo, and Sudan.) The reaction is ostensibly over the implication that Berlin has troops in Afghanistan to keep trade routes open, but that idea is so obviously ridiculous that it is hard to believe that it is actually the root of the controversy.

If you are expecting me to speak badly of the political reaction to the comments, think again. Despite Angela Merkel’s wishes, history weighs heavily on many foreign views of the Federal Republic. I know Germans who have been dismayed to discover this.

That history, however, means that it seems to me entirely appropriate, even heartening, that the President came under such a firestorm. I would call anyone who denounced such an obvious comment in the United States an idiot. I would not have a whole lot of respect for someone in, say, Canada or France or Brazil who said likewise. But for better or for worse, Germany has a different burden than Canada or France or Brazil.

By the way, Germany won the Eurovision song contest! Who knew? That the Eurovision song contest was underway, that is. I didn’t.

UnMENDed

 Gah. MEND is back. For those of you who don’t know, MEND stands for the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, another well-acronymed rebel movement, if not quite as well-acronymed as the MILF.

Two things are not clear. First, why MEND’s command has decided to go back to ground. I don’t know, obviously, but there seems to be little sign that the Nigerian government has decided to back away from its cease-fire promises. For those of you who don’t follow Nigerian politics, President Umaru Yar’Adua has been sick in a Saudi Arabian hospital for a little over two months. This announcement may be nothing more than an attempt at warning shot over Acting President Goodluck Jonathan’s bow, although it sure is phrased in a crazy-threatening way for that. It is also something that MEND leaders have denied. Nonetheless, MEND has been saying for a while that they were dissatisfied with the way talks were proceeding, and there was a “warning” attack on a pipeline in December.

Second, whether MEND still has the ability to limit Nigeria’s oil production the way it did back in 2005. Most of its commanders accepted the cease-fire. They haven’t reneged.

That said, it is hard to see an upside in this news. Does anyone know more about what exactly happened in the negotiations? I honestly thought it was a done deal.

Beer, banks, and revolution

  Doug Muir observes that breweries and banks seem to survive civil wars.  Now, Doug would never tell you, because he’s modest, but it so happens that he has a friend who’s a little bit knowledgeable about the effects of political violence and instability on economic activity.  His friend has even written an entire book about banking and instability. 

So, is Doug correct that banks and breweries tend to make it through political instability?  Short answer:  yes. 

Long answer:  well, let’s examine the data from one of the worst bouts of political instability to afflict any country with a substantial financial sector and developed manufacturing, at least outside the benighted continent of Europe.  Between 1910 and 1929, Mexico suffered a revolution, two insurgencies against the winner of the revolution, a counter-revolution, a counter-counter revolution, a civil war among the winners of the counter-counter-revolution, a military coup, another bout of civil war after an attempted coup by the Secretary of the Treasury, a presidential assasination, three more attempted coups, and a third civil war fought by angry Catholic guerrillas with a penchant for dynamiting passenger trains.  Among all that, what happened to the banks and breweries? 

Let’s start with the breweries.  Mexico’s domestic industry was created almost overnight during the last decade of the 19th century, with local monopolies established in virtually every major city by the 1900.  One of the industry’s leading firms (the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc of Monterrey, Nuevo León) came to control 28 percent of the national market.  It went on to spin off a glass bottle making company (Vidriera Monterrey) that quickly established itself as a domestic glass monopoly.  The other two major breweries were the Cervecería Moctezuma (of Orizaba, Veracruz) and the Compañía Cervecera de Toluca y México near Mexico City.  

During the civil wars, armed factions viewed factories as strategic assets that could be used to generate income for the army.  What typically occurred in occupied areas was that a faction would seize the factories and run them for its own benefit, or it would threaten to do so unless the management made a “loan” to the revolutionaries.  In April 1914 the forces of Pablo González took control of Monterrey.  For most of the year González occupied and ran the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc, where he continued to employ the brewery’s workforce.  By November the company’s stocks of raw materials had been used up. 

At that point, having extracted what he could from the operation, González returned the factory, apparently undamaged, to its owners.   

The upshot is that while production dropped during periods of generalized violence — 1914-19 and to a lesser extent 1922-24 — the breweries themselves pretty much came through intact.  In fact, beer was such a good market that the Cervecería Modelo started up in 1925, while the country was still rather unstable. 

So what about the banks?  Well, the banks didn’t fare that well during the civil wars.  They were where the money was. Governments and revolutionary factions plundered their cash reserves, forced them to make loans, and engaged in the unrestricted printing of currency.  It did not do good things for the banking system, which by 1916 ended up in government receivership — although in many cases the Carranza government wound up with little more than a Mexico City branch office and some papers.  On the other hand, the governments that came to power after 1916, however, regardless of their stated ideologies, all recognized that they needed a source of credit in order to restore political order.  

    

It took a while to put humpty-dumpty back together again.  A private banking system came back to life, but a December 1920 banking panic caused most of them to fail.  In 1921, President Álvaro Obregón announced that twelve banks would be returned to their owners; only five were able to reopen.  The government tried to regain access to foreign capital markets by restarting payments on the foreign debt, but the civil war triggered by Treasury Secretary Adolfo de la Huerta’s revolt put paid to that.  On the same day the revolt began, Banamex (the largest private bank, and one that existed before the Revolution) transferred $13.5 million to the International Bankers Committee.   The government simultaneously borrowed $5 million from the Huasteca Petroleum Company against future oil tax liabilities, with the intention of using the funds to make additional payments on the foreign debt.   Instead, the funds went to fight De la Huerta.  The diversion of funds meant that the government had to borrow from Banamex to pay foreign creditors ... on July 2nd, 1924, the government gave up and defaulted once again, this time for good.

In other words, this was not a healthy banking system.  A snapshot in 1917 would have showed it as pretty much dead ... but no matter how you put it, five banks did survive (including the two largest) and the system schlumped along despite the occasional civil war.  The government needed the bankers too much to kill the system dead.  In fact, it went out of its way to reactivate bank lending in 1925.

So how did they reactivate the banking system in 1925?  That’s another story.  The moral of this story is that Doug is right:  banks and breweries can survive even extreme levels of violence. 

End it, don’t MEND it

  So it appears as though the Nigerian government may have finally negotiated an end to the MEND rebellion.  MEND stands for Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger river Delta, and it has caused both the Nigerian government and the world oil industry major headaches over the past decade.  This success produced a lot of breathless hyperventilating about the unstoppable postimperial chaos overtaking the world ... only a matter of time before they blow up the Lincoln Tunnel!  Or something. 

 
The Yorkshire Ranter (who sometimes comments as Alex on this blog) summed it up pretty well.  MEND was not an amorphous group interested only in chaos, a sort of budget version of SPECTRE.  John Robb runs a website called Global Guerrillas, which postulates that the future lies with such unstoppable nihilists, who will use what he calls systempunkts to bring down our complicated economic systems.  (Calling Ashton Kutcher!)  Posts like this one assumed that MEND’s main goal, like SPECTRE, is chaos.(His math, I’ll add, is pretty fuzzy.  1.4 billion barrels disrupted?  Huh?  The increase in the oil price engendered by MEND attacks was a loss?  Wha?  The money was, what, burnt?)   

Rather, MEND in fact had specific goals that it wanted to accomplish and a specific set of tools to accomplish them.  Once the Nigerian government realized this, and got its act together sufficiently to deploy a rational set of carrots and sticks, the rebellion ended.  Now, the Nigerian government needs to follow through on its promises ... but MEND and the like seem to be standard guerrillas.  Inasmuch as they slid into criminality, they were standard criminals. 

Maybe I’m too much of a small-c conservative, or maybe I’ve just seen the movie before with good old General Manuel Peláez, who wrote the playbook later followed by Jomo Gbomo et al.  (God, that Wikipedia article is terrible.  Ni modo.)  But the Yorkshire Ranter is neither, and he saw through it. 

Which bring me to a question.  Why the resonance of all the “chaos is upon is!” mongering, when that is pretty clearly not the case?  Brazilian drug gangs notwithstanding.

I am opposed to an air raid on Iran, but ...

  ... Matt Yglesias writes, catchingly, that “Give Up Your Nuclear Weapons Program Or Else We’ll Damage Your Nuclear Weapons Program!” sounds pretty ridiculous.  Which it does.  But he then goes on to argue:

Suppose I wanted Herf to give me $10. I figured maybe I could offer him various incentives in exchange for the $10. But it turns out that Herf is irrational or whatever and hell-bent on holding on to his $10. Reaching into his pocket and stealing $7 might have some merit as a response. But threatening to steal $7 in hopes of persuading him to give me $10 would be ridiculous.

The problem is that Herf doesn't have $10.  What Herf has is an uncertain plan to make $10 in the future.  Depending on how far in the future and the risk of failure, threatening to take $7 from him right now could be a powerful deterrent indeed. 

Me, I think that this particular Herf is unlikely to be deterred by taking away his $7.  Besides which, we don't know whether we'll get $7 from him, or just fifty cents.  So I'm not in favor of this particular pre-emptive pickpocketing.  But sadly for us doves, the general principle seems sound.

Ain’t gonna study war no more?

  John Mueller repeats in this month’s Political Science Quarterly an argument that he’s made before:  war is becoming rare.  Developed countries no longer fight.  Underdeveloped countries rarely fight.  Imperial wars have disappeared with empires.  And civil wars are becoming rarer. 

Even if you want to quibble with Mueller’s typology (maybe Gulf War 2 and Chechnya are imperial wars, the Rwanda-Congo interventions could be called interstate wars instead of civil ones, perhaps you want to call the Caucasian countries developed), the data are pretty incontrovertible. 

The world has become steadily more peaceful since 1989, probably since the mid-1960s.  Mueller has some ideas about the causes of this decline in bellicosity.  I hope Mueller is right.  For while honesty compels me to admit that I would like to add a third (and fourth and fifth) picture to the sequence shown above, I must also admit that I do not want any of those additions to see anything even resembling combat. 

Therefore I ask you:  in the case of war, does the performance of the past two decades predict future results?

Guest post #5: The Home Front on the edge of Empire

  In Finland, as we saw yesterday, the participation of local soldiers in the campaign against Poland ignited patriotic sentiments, at least among those who had served in combat:  “May our banner call the sons of Finland to perform the highest civic virtues still in the future, to fulfill their obligations and loyalty towards their sovereign.” 

Elsewhere in Europe, the bloody suppression of the November Insurrection aroused, well, different feelings. The Polish independence struggle became an immediate cause célèbre for European liberals. Casimir Delavigne, for example, celebrated the old Napoleonic brotherhood in arms between France and Poland in his exhilarating song La Varsovienne.  In the German-speaking countries, August von Platen’s 1831 sonet collection Polenlieder topped what later generations would call the charts.  

West European sympathy towards Poland, however, hardened Russian attitudes; even the Russian intelligentsia abandoned its criticism of the Tsarist régime and supported Imperial policy in Poland. The anti-European backlash culminated in Aleksandr Pushkin’s legendary (if somewhat unsubtlely-titled) poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia.”  Pushkin’s diatribe, in particular, should be familiar to a modern reader. 

(Uh, Jussi, you give us too much credit.  I’ve never heard of any of the works of music or literature that you’ve cited in here.  Then again, I hope nobody criticizes people in 2145 for their ignorance of, say, “Eve of Destruction” or “Bad Moon Rising.” Right?  Or am I excusing my ignornance?  —ed.) 

Russian officials still reference “To the Slanderers of Russia” in times of conflict.  During the 1999 Kosovo War, for example, the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, cited the poem in order to give a stern warning to the NATO countries.  Eight years later, in 2007, the Russians once again used the poem for propaganda purposes during the Bronze Warrior crisis between Estonia and Russia. 

Guest post #4: Heroes of the Empire

  The work of art that you see below is a painting by Robert Wilhelm Ekman, a pioneer of early national romantic art in Finland. Ekman is perhaps best remembered for his early attempts at the illustration of Kalevala, but this work, finished in 1848, invokes the memory of the Finnish soldiers who had fought and died in Poland seventeen years before. You won’t find this work on display in any museum; it is part of a private collection, and the owner prefers to keep it that way.

The painting depicts the young lieutenant Adolf Aminoff wounded on the ramparts of Tykocin on May 21st 1831. As you can see, the painting captures two ideals.  First, an officer who leads his men from the front, even at the risk of his own personal safety.  Second, his soldiers, equally ready to risk their lives by rushing to the aid of their wounded comrade. During the following decades, national romanticism claimed these universal ideals as quintessentially Finnish military virtues.  Emphasizing the importance of solidarity and camaraderie is always a natural choice.  After all, it doesn’t really matter what you’re theoretically fighting for, because putting your life on the line for your comrade is always a virtue.  

Guest post #3: Battle for the Empire

  The soldiers of the Finnish Guard joined the other units of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard in Białystok on April 11th, 1831. By this time, the Polish-Russian war had been raging for two months, and the insurrection was spreading, with violence and mayhem escalating on daily basis. On the same day as the Finnish soldiers listened Colonel Ramsay’s lecture on the Russian War Articles and the letters of protection issued to the Polish civilian population, one Russian cossack regiment massacred civilians in the small Lithuanian village of Oszmiana. The event was subsequently commemorated in Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poems.  

The Polish-Russian war was fought on two fronts.  In the south, on the eastern side of the Vistula, the main 100,000-man Russian army (under a Baltic German field-marshal, Hans Karl Friedrich Anton von Diebitsch) advanced directly towards Warsaw.  Meanwhile, in the north, Grand-Duke Mikhail Pavlovich’s units of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard (the Finnish Battalion included) approached the Polish capital from the northeast, through the dismal woodlands between the Narew and Bug rivers in Mazovia. You can get a rough view of the surroundings from the map.   (Click on it for a larger image in a new window.)

Diebitsch’s army crossed the frontier on February 5th, fully prepared to crush the Polish rebellion. Resistance, however, proved to be a good deal tougher than anticipated; as mentioned before, the Congress Kingdom had a large, professional standing army, which now proved its mettle. On February 25th, the Poles halted the Russian advance in the bloody battle of Grochów.  The Poles then began a counteroffensive. Lieutenant-General Ignacy Prądzyński, the Polish chief of staff, defeated the Russians at Dębe Wielkie on March 31st, and again at Iganie on April 10th. 

But wars, like baseball games, aren’t over until they’re over.