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.
Why the resonance of all the “chaos is upon is!” mongering, when that is pretty clearly not the case?
I dunno. An even better writer than Robb who's been on this track is William Langewiesche, formerly of the Atlantic and now of Vanity Fair. Great writer, great researcher. And yet, in his book on maritime happenings, The Outlaw Sea, even he trots out the well-worn memes of "Al Qaeda has a navy!" and "the Straits of Malacca are in danger of being shut!"
That was all written before the current Somali piracy flap was front-and-center in the western media (not that admittedly said piracy hasn't been going on at a lower level of intensity for awhile). So how come we haven't seen the Islamic Courts Union or AQ make much of an effort to make the pirates a franchise? Could it be that, just like MEND, it's about the money, not the chaos?
Posted by: Colin | November 17, 2009 at 09:22 PM
As to where the whole "chaos is upon is" thing comes from, I think we can safely blame Robert Kaplan's 1994 article "The Coming Anarchy" for the current version. Kaplan declared that West Africa was going completely insane and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
It became conventional wisdom so fast that almost every book about Liberia and Sierra Leone from the 90s has a section on how Robert Kaplan is full of it. (Some of them don't mention him by name but still snipe at him.)These specialists are really, really angry about how Kaplan convinced the chattering classes to completely write off a continent.
Of course, Kaplan is the same person who declared that every country on Earth was going to face death and chaos except Israel, which would have peace. I think the only reason he's taken seriously is that he rode the anti-Fukuyama backlash all the way.
Posted by: Tzintzuntzan | November 19, 2009 at 03:27 PM