Brigade (Political Social App), Update

Yet again, it's been a while since I posted here.  I started thinking about it...

Well, a couple of weeks ago I thought it would be interesting to try posting parables, but never got around to it.

More recently, I joined Brigade and had some thoughts I wanted to explore.  Brigade is a pretty new social media app, where you can post a position, choose to agree or disagree, and explain why.  It's in it's infancy, and definitely has some kinks to work out, but so far I'm enjoying it.

It means meeting people who are as interested in politics as I am, some of whom I can learn from and some of whom I can maybe contribute a bit of my experience to.

But...it's not so good at promoting discussions, you're kind of limited to agree/disagree and don't necessarily see the following remarks.  Not the best for an in-depth back and forth.

I read that the creators wanted to keep it simple, and I can see why.  I'm not sure they really should incorporate a forum or discussion board into the application.  But it would be a nice companion, a way of hashing out the nuances before selecting 'agree' or 'disagree'.

Baltimore, Counterinsurgency, and Why I am an Independent, Part II

I made the comparison between insurgents in Iraq and gangs.  Yes, I am aware that there are differences, very real differences.  But there are times when I think we should pay attention to the similarities.  This, btw, creates a similar parallel between counterinsurgency and policing.  (Since many African American communities feel like the police are an alien, invading force it's sometimes more apt than I'd like.)

Our classes on counterinsurgency talked about what makes a nation vulnerable to an insurgency.  There have to be grievances that the insurgent can exploit.  If the majority of the population doesn't have a grievance, then they are less likely to aid and abet an insurgent.  This, btw, is supposed to be one of the great strengths of a democracy.  Our first amendment specifically says we have the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

For a little more graphic detail - in the Algerian war for independence, the nationalists committed horrific acts.  The French were horrified, and reacted so strongly that they imprisoned and alienated Algerians who were previously neutral.  In so doing, they basically created the insurgency that would eventually defeat them.  (Opened up a whole bunch of issues that trouble the Algerians today, but that's a different story.) 

This isn't just wishful thinking, or naivety.  One of David Galula's famous laws of counterinsurgency is that "Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority."  Bad decisions on the part of a counterinsurgent can and will turn those neutral masses into outright hostiles.  Getting the population on your side, however, makes it harder and harder for the insurgent to hide.

Ferguson, Baltimore - these things could not have blown up the way they did if there weren't grievances to exploit.  The rioting seems to give people (who are unwilling to address those grievances in the first place) an excuse to ignore those grievances.  To blame it all on bad parenting, or stupid criminals.  

Now, I've heard questions about the Baltimore riots.  People saying it was instigated (whether by professional agitators or an overreacting police force, who knows?  I wasn't there.)  I've also heard that the vast majority of the protests were peaceful, and that it was the media hunt for a certain kind of story that has made the riots the face of Baltimore protest.  Again, I wasn't there.  I don't know.  The people saying these things seem to be locals, and seem likely to know more than I do.  And, let's face it, after seeing the media mangle Iraq I could totally believe that they'd focus on a few rioters and ignore the majority that didn't.

What I do know is this - yet again grievances are not being addressed.  They are sidelined.  Marginalized.  Ignored.  Stories about riots overshadow, by a great degree, the question of how someone who was arrested without force or incident could be dead a week later.

Whether or not someone has a criminal record should not affect whether he's alive a week after he was arrested.  It is not justice for a cop to rough someone up because they 'know' he's a bad guy...

Any more than it would be okay for a soldier to beat a detainee that they 'know' is al Qaeda.

Baltimore, Counterinsurgency, and Why I am an Independent, Part I

I would post about Baltimore, but I already put something up on Facebook and I don't feel like repeating myself.  I will say, however, that this article nails what I think pretty well.

I am blogging instead, because something I want to dig a little deeper into a passing thought.  My experiences in Iraq have turned me off the political parties (and the echo chamber of television news) pretty bad.

I like to call myself an independent. I believe I'm focused more on solutions...in public affairs we discussed evidence-based public policy, and I'm all for that.  I turned away from the political parties because I think they are so caught up in their rhetoric, their worldview, and promoting certain ideologies that they've lost touch with the real world and no longer represent the average American.

I can go into long explanations on the reasons why, but that would take too long and I don't have any good solutions to offer.

I could discuss this with almost any topic, but this is about my experiences in Iraq, so I'll stick with that.

It felt like both parties were trying to make Iraq a Vietnam II.  The same rhetoric, the same competing world views.  "Stay the course".  "Why keep losing American lives needlessly?"  "Violence begets violence, you can never win if you resort to violence" "We have to fight terrorists with overwhelming force"

Each statement is packed with all sorts of assumptions and beliefs.  Again, it would take too long to address them all.  Let me start with a few:

"Stay the course" - this goes back to the belief that we won every single battle in Vietnam but lost the war.  Why?  Because the American people lost the will to keep fighting.  If we had just stuck with it, we could have won.

From what I've read, there is *some* evidence for this.  The North Vietnamese lost a lot of people in the Tet Offensive.  But I don't think we lost because we 'were betrayed at home'.  We lost because of bad leadership.  We lost because our leaders lost credibility.  The American people did not believe there was a viable plan, they felt we were stuck in a quagmire, and there was no real counterargument.  To bring this back to Iraq - "Stay the course" was a stupid leadership strategy.  Especially when any soldier over there could see that we were playing 'whack a  mole', losing areas as soon as we left.  The Iraq forces were a joke, and the great plan involved ignoring their weaknesses in order to prop them up and get the hell out.  The surge, as well as the changes in strategy, all constituted changes that should have been done even earlier.  And I think could have, if leadership wasn't stuck in a bubble and unwilling to consider alternatives.

"Violence begets violence, and never wins" - this was something I used to agree with, actually.  It made sense - you hit me, I get angry and hit you back.  We wind up starting a personal feud.  Heck, maybe it even grows to be a family feud.  Or a tribal one.  Or even national.  But I heard so many people use that argument to claim that the situation in Iraq was hopeless.  That there was nothing we could do.  That we should just cut our losses and leave.  Now, this may be hard to convince people of when we're back in Iraq again...but that is BS.  Let's start at a macro level.  If violence didn't appear to work, people would have stopped fighting millenia ago.  Don't get me wrong - I think it's sad to lose any culture, I think every different culture offers new insights into what it means to be human.  New ideas to play with.  I think it's sad for any culture to really die out.  But the modern world was created, in part, by the violence of the past.  Tribal migrations that displaced others.  These things are so far in the past, now, that it's hard to relate to the losses involved...but do you think the Duke of Normandy, if he knew what the history of England would be, would think invading England was a bad idea? This world view is the kind of thing that appeals to people who already believe, and will be completely ignored by the ones who don't.

I think what sticks in my craw, here, is the belief that violence never wins. On a personal level, I still kind of agree...but I didn't think the situation in Iraq was hopeless.  I do think there are situations where an army, with good strategy and good leadership, can make a difference.  I feel like pretending that isn't so actually makes it harder to be effective, because your refusal to understand and learn about warfare leaves you vulnerable to the ones who don't.  The issue, to me, was not that we were doomed to failure.  It was that the horrible decisions made by people who were supposed to know better had very real, and deadly, consequences.

Even worse...we had invaded a country, disrupted the established order, let loose chaos and violence...and then the people who believed this felt that the only answer was to abandon everything.  I find myself struggling to explain why this was so horrifying to me, so here's another way of putting it -

One of the articles I read discussed the viewpoints of Iraqis in a town that US forces repeatedly had cleared.  To them, the real crime was when we came in, cleared out the bad guys and then left.  Why?  Because the bad guys came back, and they killed anyone they thought collaborated with us.  And the next time we came around, there was no reason to believe we were there to stay, or that they wouldn't face threats from the bad guys as soon as we left again.

And these were bad guys.  This wasn't some nice little insurgency where the Iraqis were all working together to oust the evil imperialists.  The Iraqis were not rejoicing when we left, and welcoming back the insurgents with open arms.  (Or not everywhere, at least.  Obviously they had supporters and bases.)  This was Iraqis who were terrified of what the insurgents would do to them if they didn't go along.

I don't know if I could have morally supported us in Iraq, if we had been facing the Iraqi equivalent of a George Washington.  But all too often the ones we were fighting acted more like gangs.

Which brings me to Baltimore.  Since this has gotten long, I'll go into that in Part II.

Questions of the Day, II

My answer to the first question would probably be similar to Jim Collins' book, How the Mighty Fall.  But that brings up a follow-on questions:

Is the United States, today, in one of these stages of decline?

If so, what can we do about it?

Destiny Disrupted Mashup with The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power

I mentioned that mixing up a book on the history of oil with a book on why Muslims feel disgruntled with the world as it exists today was interesting...

Interesting, because you switch from a very geopolitical, grand strategy, business mindset to one that is more about...

Religion.  Meaning.  Pursuit of an ideal community.

I have to admit, I am projecting a bit of my own Catholic upbringing on to what I was reading about Islam.  I don't claim I actually understand Islam, but I think I have a better grasp of the appeal than a strictly secular look.

First - what I consider a fairly significant difference.  See, I spent 11 of my first 12 years in school at Catholic institutions.  I am pretty familiar with concepts like the "Kingdom of Heaven", the "Church as the Body of Christ", etc.  But early Christians thought that Jesus would bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth in their lifetime, and when that didn't happen our concept evolved to a more spiritual understanding.  The Kingdom of Heaven is what we will find in the afterlife.  And the whole "Church as the Body of Christ", for me at least, was tied in with what we were taught about the Reformation.  That is, the Catholic Church grew materialistic and corrupt...leading eventual to the Protestant movements and the Reformation to help make some much needed changes.  So my Catholic upbringing talked about how Catholic believers form a community, the 'body of Christ', and that there is a back and forth discussion between these believers and the official leaders of our church. 

Islam is, in many ways, different.  There's no Pope, no formal institution for making clergy.  But there are similarities, as well.  Ways that the religion recognizing who is legitimate and who isn't.  A belief in the community, etc.

So what stood out to me as perhaps the most significant (and new, even though I've studied this topic for years) difference was the notion that Muslims are seeking to create the ideal community in the world.  I immediately thought of it as the "Kingdom of Heaven", but I admit I'm throwing Christian concepts at it.  They're pursuing this not in the mystical, spiritual fashion we Christians have developed...but in a much more real, earthly way.  Part of the benefits of having your founder live and lead for a significant period of time, instead of dying early. 

The appeal of the caliphate is the appeal of building that Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.  And whoo-boy!!!  What an appeal!  You go tell Christians today that you're building a Kingdom of Heaven, and see just how many perk up and take notice.  (They may be skeptical, and may not join, but most will at least want enough of an understanding to decide if they should believe it or not.)

It actually reminded me more of the founding of the United States of America.  If you read about our early history, there was this notion that we were embarking on a grand experiment.  Building a new and better society.  This place where "We the People...in order to form a more perfect union..."  (Though we, in the United States today, are beset by a feeling that we've lost that.  The rich and powerful have taken over, the union is not so much about "We the People" as it is about the 1%...etc. etc. etc.)

Mixing up a book like Destiny Disrupted with a book like The Prize brings home some of the complaints I've heard about our culture.  INTERNAL complaints, mind you.  Complaints I heard growing up, surrounded by that Catholic upbringing.  Complaints that we're superficial.  Materialistic.  Focused on status.  Forgetting that there are more important things in life than  money. 

To a certain extent, I dismiss those complaints because of that upbringing.  Because I know that there are many, many Americans that are concerned with living a good life.  That there are sound reasons for separating our public and private lives, but that if I went and talked to any American about religion or spirituality or whatnot that there would be plenty to talk about.  (Though NOT, thank God, all of them agreeing with the views of Christian Conservatives.  So many of them give religion a bad name.  I probably am influenced, again, by that Catholic upbringing and teachings like Matthew 6:5.  I'm basically skeptical of anyone making too public a display of their faith, because it seems more like they're trying to show off to everyone else how faithful they are...and the truly pious keep it more private.  They live a good life, without any fuss or need to publicize how good they are.)

Yet the book on oil sort of brings the complaints back, because they show how much we compartmentalize our lives.  John D Rockefeller  was a Christian.  Yet the decisions he made as a good businessman were not necessarily the decisions of a good Christian.  (Though given that I only know what I've heard in history, and nobody knows someone in and out, I will not presume to say that he was or wasn't a good Christian.  I just want to say that the decisions he made as a businessman could have been very different from the decisions he made as a Christian.)

Our modern life is more...isolating.  Alienating.  People don't feel like there's as much meaning to it.  The fights over class and wealth are tied into this superficially...because when you're barely getting by on your income it's hard to feel like doing a good job matters.  If you do a good job, all you're really doing is putting more money in the pockets of those who already have plenty...and even if you're working two jobs, you will probably never get to that level of comfort and security.

The fight against terrorism isn't just about fighting a horrible misinterpretation of religion.  It's about providing a competing alternative, one where people can get that meaning and fulfillment, that sense of community so many of us need.

One that shows you can build a 'Kingdom of Heaven' that isn't harsh and controlling, that reminds us all that God's also about mercy and compassion.  (Though allegedly ISIS does that internally, what with providing healthcare and other goods for their community.  Still...from what I hear you don't want to face the punishment for breaking their rules.)

I could talk plenty about my own (competing, alternative) interpretation of what such a society would be like...but that's sort of personal and I don't think anyone else is very interested in it.  It's the sort of thing best done as a discussion over coffee, or late at night.  All that would be a digression.

Main point is - the appeal of the caliphate and anti-Western attitudes goes back to some very real gaps in our society.  Gaps that we, living here, know we can fill in a variety of ways...but in ways that do not necessarily show in the public sphere.

Question of the Day

Why does it seem inevitable that nations who rise will also fall?

The Prize, Thoughts

I wanted to take some time before posting my thoughts on my recent reading material, partly because there's so much to it.  Once I start, I think whatever topic I begin with will crowd out all the rest.  As I mentioned yesterday, breaking up the reading for this book by mixing it with Destiny Disrupted also changes the perspective a bit, and offers some interesting insights.  Yet if I start discussing that, I will miss some basic points I wanted to make about this book, in and of itself.

So.  Reading this book was a bit like working on a complicated 'connect the dot' pictures.  I already had connected the dots for individual areas, but this book provided a much larger context and scope that helped create a more coherent picture.  In some ways, that meant I was aware of how much was glossed over.  It's over 700 pages of reading material already, so of course they had to gloss over some history. 

What I found most interesting was the way he tied the oil industry to economic recession (and boom).  I had heard the term "oil choke collar" already, and knew it embodied this notion that high oil prices choked off growth because people had to pay more for gas.  What's interesting, to me at least, was that the book made it sound like this was known and widely accepted economics...yet even today news articles make it sound like this is a new and untested concept.  (Or perhaps that's my take on it). 

The thing of it is, I remember hearing about 'stagflation' and what it did to Jimmy Carter's presidency.  And I know all about the Reagan years, and the belief in trickle down economics and that deregulation boosted the economy.  Yet, if this book is to be believed, none of that mattered.  Nothing Jimmy Carter did hurt the economy, nothing Reagan did really helped the economy.  It was all about the oil market. 

I want to emphasize this a bit more, because so much of our political debate is tied in with the belief that it DID matter.  We hardly touch on the oil price at all (other than to grumble as consumers, of course.)  Sure, I heard about the 'oil choke collar'.  In one place.  Maybe I'm just not reading enough economic news?  If this was widely known and accepted, I would expect an entirely different national discourse on the state of our economy.

But perhaps that's also because of the strange history here in the States.  We produce oil.  Yet we consume more.  So the independents of the oil industry have a larger say in what we do.  Sometimes to odd affect - given how crucial oil is to national security (can't fight a war if your tanks and planes are out of gas) you would think conserving the secure supplies in our own nation would be important.  Instead, for a period of time, we actually had tariffs to encourage domestic consumption.  And said it was for national security reasons!!!

I also am pondering this whole concept of 'rents'.  That is, the price of oil (more than any other commodity, perhaps) is so market driven that the difference between the cost of producing a gallon and the retail value of that gallon can be huge.  Can, not necessarily is.  I'd heard before that the oil industry has to spend a lot more to invest in developing new sources, etc.  I know they waste a lot of money drilling dry holes, trying to discover oil.  Plus there's the upkeep to the infrastructure, and labor costs, etc.  I've heard that's part of why state-run oil industries don't stay competitive over the long run.

Yet it's a funny type of expense, because it's the kind of thing that matters in the long run.  In the short run,  if you don't want to spend the money on those sorts of things, the difference between the cost of producing a gallon and the cost it sells at can be pretty large.  So the book focuses a lot on what happens to these 'rents'.  How the oil producing countries wanted to take a larger and larger share of those rents.  How tariffs and taxes in the importing countries can transfer the 'rents' to the pockets of their own governments.

The book did an excellent job of explaining how expensive it is to search for oil.  The argument over who should get what (the essence of politics, according to at least one of my classes) is eerily similar to the arguments over intellectual property rights.  The industries that took on the costs of finding and developing oil should get some profit off it, sure.  Just as one would hope the creators and artists who make something new should benefit and get credit for it.

Yet at some point, it's reasonable to believe that they have earned 'enough'.  That the risks and challenges they faced were well compensated, to the point where they are not entitled to more.  (In intellectual property, there's reason to believe that too stringent a policy will destroy creativity and stifle innovation.  That's why a limit is sometimes set for when those rights will expire.)

If you apply that to the concessions given oil companies, at least at the beginning, you can see why the exporting countries felt like they didn't owe the oil companies anything when they nationalized the industry.  Now you're getting into the murky history of colonialism, nationalism, and whether the country where natural resources are found should benefit directly from the resources within.  There are entire books on this topic, so I don't want to get sidetracked too far.

Another dot connected - I had heard Osama bin Laden was mad at Saudi Arabian leadership partly over how oil was used.  I think he wanted to drive prices up?  Anyways...this book connected a few dots there, as well, as it discussed the "oil weapon" and attempts by oil producing countries to use it.

So oil 'rents' seem to be a key concept here, and one well worth considering when looking at international politics.  Yet there are consequences, too, to gaining too much from the rents.  I recall reading about 'Dutch disease' in some of my economic classes, and though this book never mentioned it by name it did touch on it when discussing the effects of oil on national economies. (Again, this is where the United States would be an interesting comparison study, as a producer as well as consumer.)

All in all, a good book to read with plenty of food for thought.  And it's only part of the story.