“War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.”
— Clausewitz, On War
The first and most fundamental principle of warfare is to know what your goal is. This applies to any type of war, anywhere, at any time, no matter what tactic is used.
Last year (this is a reprint, but one most readers probably haven’t read) I was one of the first people to predict that Israel would lose to Hezbollah—because Israel’s stated goal was to destroy Hezbollah as an organization. Given that during a nearly two decade occupation Israel had been unable to destroy Hezbollah it was laughably obvious that Israel wasn’t going to succeed this time. (It turned out that the magnitude of their loss was greater than I expected.)
In the Iraq War the US has a similar problem: the goals that were achievable have been achieved (overthrowing Saddam). But the goals that remain are unclear: creating a democracy friendly to the US, establishing permanent bases, making sure western companies have the oil contracts; and these remaining goals are probably not possible to acheive with the amount of military force and spending the US is willing to allocate. Therefore, it has been clear for a long time (since before the invasion) that the US would not “win” the occupation in any real sense of the word. Indeed, at this point, the US is reduced to praying it can leave and not have the country crack up in a hot civil war. That goal might be achievable.
So it is with guerrillas. Guerrillas have to know what they can do, what they can’t do, and what they want to do. The primary virtue of guerrillas is that it is hard to wipe them out. The primary weakness of guerrillas is that they aren’t all that good at straight up fighting; as a rule, a competent regular army will routinely hand out loss after loss to guerrillas; guerrillas have to be content with picking off isolated units, with causing pinprick damage like bombs and snipers, and with disrupting weakly defended supply and rear units. But in straight up firefights, with very rare exceptions, it’s usually pretty unpleasant to be a guerrilla.1
We can take Clausewitz a step further. War is less the continuation of politics than the failure of politics. Nations and people engage in war when they feel they can get something they want more easily or advantageously with force than through other means.
If people feel that the occupation of their country won’t end peacefully, then war is inevitable. If certain groups wish to impose their religion and know that it will not be allowed, then war is a route to their goal. If people want law and order and occupation forces are unable to provide it, then a new government is necessary—and if one cannot be obtained through peaceful means then it may be obtained through violent ones.
The failure of politics leads to war: the failure to provide law and order, the failure to rebuild infrastructure, the failure to provide belief in a promising future, the failure to align the interests of the occupation with the interests of the population. All of this sets up the preconditions for guerrilla warfare and rebellion.
Guerrillas in Iraq, for example, were fighting for when the US leaves. This was clear in the pattern of attacks, which throughout the war have been much heavier on opposing Iraqi groups and Iraqi “government” forces than they have been on Coalition forces. Enough pressure has to be kept on the US to make the US leave, but the guerrillas know they cannot defeat the US in conventional terms. They can only cause more attrition than the US is politically capable of handling. So the goals of the various Iraqi armed groups might be said to be “To convince the US to leave by making the cost of staying too high, and to be in a good position to fight for or negotiate for their place in Iraq after the US has left.”
In Palestine—another guerrilla war, for all that it is not called that—the goals of the two sides are as follows: for Israel, to crush the Palestinian resistance while establishing facts on the ground which will allow them to impose the most favorable settlement in a two-state solution possible; for the Palestinians, to not let the Israelis win.
Note that the Palestinian goal isn’t really to establish a Palestinian state. The Palestinians will take one if they can get a viable one, but they aren’t in a position to really pursue it. The goal is to not lose to the Israelis. (This is one reason why Arafat walked away from Clinton’s talks.) The Israelis have been occupying Palestine for decades now. They can clearly hang on for a long time. They aren’t going to be “forced” out; the Palestinians don’t have what it takes and the Israelis have a high tolerance for low level attrition losses.
The Palestine and Israel situation points out something important about the nature of guerrilla warfare: guerrilla warfare is the strategy of the weak vs. the powerful. Palestinian losses and Iraqi insurgency losses are much higher respectively than those of the occupying forces. They always have been. The guerrilla’s equipment is not as good. The guerrillas, in most cases, are not as well trained. They aren’t nearly as well organized. They are just not as good at fighting and killing. In fact, the superiority of the coalition over the Iraqi insurgency, or of the Israelis over the Palestinians, is so striking that one wonders how it is that neither can actually really defeat their enemies.
Let’s move to that next, with a quote from the greatest guerrilla leader of the 20th century , Mao Tse Tung:
“Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy’s rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live.”
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare
The relationship between locals and guerrilla troops is the most important point in Mao’s entire essay, and indeed the most important thing you need to know about guerrilla warfare, occupations, terrorism and insurgency. If the movement has the support of the population, they cannot be destroyed. Period. No matter how many you manage to kill, there will always be more. Now support doesn’t mean answering affirmatively to “do you prefer the guerrilla movement” in a poll, it means practical support: are locals willing to feed guerrrillas, hide them, and act as their ears and eyes? The general estimate is that if a guerrilla movement has between 10% to 20% of the population of an area behind it, until you can break that support of the population for the guerrillas, any victories over them will be purely temporary.2
This doesn’t mean national support. For example, if 20% of the population of California supported a violent succession movement, that would be sufficient to allow it to operate relatively successfully. For much of the occupation Iraqi, Shia have mostly not been shooting at Americans, but Iraqi Sunnis have supported more than enough insurgents to keep entire provinces in anarchy.
Let’s examine what having support means. If you’re a guerrilla leader, you must do everything possible to build the support of the population. In Iraq this has meant that such law as is provided is often provided by various militias: if someone rapes your sister, steals your car, or murders your son, you go to militias for help, and they help you. Sadr helped put some power back on line for Sadr city. But more than positive things, what it means is making sure that the enemy does horrible things to the population, but not too horrible. The killing of the mercenaries in Fallujah, for example, was a classic guerrilla move, carefully staged (including the pictures, which are clearly stage managed) to cause an American overreaction. That overreaction occurred, Fallujah was eventually effectively destroyed, and horrible atrocities occurred. Sunnis then learned to hate Americans even more. On a lesser scale, every time an American soldier frags some old man at a stoplight, every time a girl is raped, every time there is “collateral” damage that takes out a wedding, all of these are grist for the guerrilla propaganda mill. Mao is relentless in his writing that one of the major jobs of guerrillas is propaganda, and that every large guerrilla unit (bearing in mind this was in the early 20th century) should have its own press.
It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that if you don’t want to arouse more hatred, then doing things like torturing people, sweeping up large numbers of people who aren’t associated with the insurgency, and locking them up in a prison associated with torture from the old regime is working against your own goals: the equivalent of handing the guerrillas supporters on a silver platter. Any atrocity that is not sufficiently large to make a specific person think “there’s a good chance this will happen to me” isn’t just immoral, it’s stupid. It is aiding and abetting the enemy.
As an army fighting an anti-insurgency campaign there are two routes to take to deal with the population’s support for a guerrilla movement. You can try and win the population over largely with honey, or you can make the population so scared and powerless that they won’t, or can’t, support the guerrillas The second method is a heck of a lot easier, though the first method has been used successfully, most notably in the Malaysian Emergency.
Let’s talk about the easy way first. Scare and weaken the population into no longer supporting the insurgency. The primary method here is mass killing, and removal of the population to camps. If a city (like Fallujah) is a problem, you destroy it entirely, and you kill everyone in it, or at least every fighting-age male. This is one reason why US marines would not allow men out of Fallujah in the run up to the final assault. Do this often enough, and people get the message that supporting the insurgency is a really bad idea. And if you’re willing to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians, you’re bound to get a lot of the right people, along with a lot of the wrong people. Immoral? Of course, but it does work. Take other towns and cities which are troublesome but not quite so bad, and move their populations to camps. This allows you to control the population in such a way that they can’t support guerrillas.3 Both of these methods were used by the US in the Philippines on a large scale. They worked. Wiping out a huge chunk of the population also worked for Russia against Chechnya, notable for inspiring enough hatred to spawn female suicide bombers, who were mostly avenging male relatives or lovers tortured to death by the Russians; and for Turkey against their own Kurds, a campaign notable for wiping out entire villages, killing the men and raping the women. The camp strategy is currently being used by India against some of its indigenous guerrilla movements. A sufficiently ruthless commander could win the Iraq occupation in a few years, if given the green-light to commit massive atrocities and kill a few million Iraqis.
The ruthless strategy doesn’t work when you don’t have the stomach or moral imbecility for it (e.g., the US in Iraq), or when you don’t have the means to wipe out enough population (e.g., the Japanese in China). It also has the effect of wrecking the economy of the nation you do it to, which can be a negative, but doesn’t have to be. If you’re conquering a nation for its natural resources, you really only need enough natives to extract them, after all. And if there’s no other economy but your plantations, mines and oil fields, then that just means the workers are cheaper.
The “kill them with kindness strategy” is harder to pull off. It requires more men on the ground, and those men have to have fire discipline. The attitude of US troops that they’d rather make a mistake and blow away an Iraqi family is the exact antithesis of the sort of fire discipline required not to alienate the population. You must be willing to take some losses you wouldn’t otherwise take in order not to hand propaganda coups to the guerrillas
You need more men on the ground because you must protect the population from the guerrillas. If you aren’t committing enough atrocities, then the guerrillas will either try and taunt you into doing so, or they’ll commit them for you; this is the method behind the apparent madness of car bombs and suicide vests. The guerrilla in this case is saying, “If you ever want peace and order, if you ever want to feel safe, you will have to let me rule because the enemy can’t stop me. The only group that can stop the killing is us, because we’re doing it, and the occupiers are too weak or incompetent to stop us.”
In a sense this guerilla strategy is the mirror of the ruthless strategy. In the ruthless strategy the anti-insurgency force says, “We’ll keep killing, torturing and raping you in gross quantities till you stop supporting the insurgency.” when guerrillas do the same thing, it’s a retail version. (Although, as Iraq has demonstrated, the numbers can approach gross lots much faster than one would think. B52s aren’t needed to kill large numbers, they just make it easier.)
Safety is job one. If there is no safety in a country, the people will support whoever they think can provide it.
Job two is prosperity. The hard way requires that you flood the country with money, jobs and prosperity. Important people (tribal leaders, Imans, village headman, etc) should be getting rich. Ordinary people should have jobs. Farmers should find that crop prices are up (support them if necessary, for God’s sake). They should recognize that they are better off under you than they could ever be under the guerrillas
The goal of reducing support for the guerrillas isn’t just about aid, it’s about informants. To break an insurgency you absolutely must have informants. You need people telling who are the leaders of the cells, warning you of attacks, etc. And you must be able to protect your informants. Every time I read that in Afghanistan some villagers who had accepted NATO help, or who were friendly with NATO, or who taught girls, have just been killed by the Taliban, I wince.
Job one in the friendly way is protecting your people—not your troops, who are expendable, but your allies, especially local influentials in the population. It’s important to get this through one’s head: a soldier’s life is not worth more than a the life of a friendly local in an anti-insurgency campaign. Not if you want to win.
Create prosperity, maintain law and order. Recruit informants. Protect your allies.
So much for the strategy of an insurgency, pro or con. Let’s talk about the operational and tactical details, the stuff that determines whether Petraeus’s plan can work even in the short term, as just one example.
In general, guerrilla units disperse to operate: When the enemy is in over-extended defense, and sufficient force cannot be concentrated against him, guerrillas must disperse, harass him, and demoralize him.
When encircled by the enemy, guerrillas disperse to withdraw.
When the nature of the ground limits action, guerrillas disperse.
When the availability of supplies limits action, they disperse. Guerrillas disperse in order to promote mass movements over a wide area.
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare
When Petraeus flooded Baghdad with troops, what did the enemy do? They dispersed much of their force into the provinces. Dispersal operates at the highest geographic level like that, and at the smallest level. Let’s say you’re operating in urban environments and you encircle a group. They drop their weapons and disperse amongst the population. How are you going to capture or kill them unless people are either willing to point them out to you or you are willing to simply kill everyone? (Or every male, as the Marines did in Fallujah.)
Let’s say a guerrilla unit wants to move from city A to city B? Do they travel as a convoy? No, each man travels by himself, without weapons, in civilian garb, and once he reaches the city they regroup and are rearmed by local cells or just by the local black market. You can slow this process down by the sort of methods the Israelis use, of dividing the country into cantons and restricting movement between them, but you can’t stop it entirely (and remember that the Israeli occupied territories are tiny compared to Iraq).
Let’s say there are no good targets. You simply don’t fight. But unless your enemy has enough forces to garrison every part of the country in such numbers that you can’t defeat any group in detail, you control all parts of the country where the enemy is not and the population supports you.
What happens if the the anti-insurgency forces break up into smaller groups to pursue the guerrilla forces which have likewise broken up? Or what happens if you start putting small units in every little neighborhood, to provide law and safety. Sun Tzu and Mao tell us…
If we are concentrated while the enemy is fragmented. If we are concentrated into a single force while he is fragmented into ten, then we attack him with ten times his strength. Thus we are many and the enemy is few. If we attack his few with our many those who we engage in battle will be severely constrained.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Guerrillas concentrate when the enemy is advancing upon them, and there is opportunity to fall upon him and destroy him. Concentration may be desirable when the enemy is on the defensive and guerrillas wish to destroy isolated detachments in particular localities. By the term ‘concentrate’, we do not mean the assembly of all manpower but rather of only that necessary for the task. The remaining guerrillas are assigned missions of hindering and delaying the enemy, of destroys isolated groups, or of conducting mass propaganda.
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare
So if the occupiers divide their forces up, the guerrillas concentrate and attack in overwhelming force. Because guerrillas can move like fish in the ocean, which is to say, they can usually concentrate at the site of the attack without the defenders knowing because they don’t move as obvious formations of enemy troops, they will in almost every case have tactical surprise. It is a testament to US military superiority (and air and artillery) that despite multiple attempts to overrun various smaller US bases, the US has held on to them. But it is always a risk, because you can never tell when an attack is going to happen and the enemy knows when you concentrate (they can hardly miss it, with the population as their eyes and ears) but you can’t tell when guerrillas will concentrate and attack.
In addition to the dispersion and concentration of forces, the leader must understand what is termed ‘alert shifting’. When the enemy feels the danger of guerrillas, he will generally send troops out to attack them. The guerrillas must consider the situation and decide at what time and at what place they wish to fight. If they find that they cannot fight, they must immediately shift. Then the enemy may be destroyed piecemeal. For example; after a guerrilla group has destroyed an enemy detachment at one place, it may be shifted to another area to attack and destroy a second detachment. Sometimes, it will not be profitable for a unit to become engaged in a certain area, and in that case, it must move immediately.
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare
Again, if a strong force is attacking, disperse, find a weaker force, and re-concentrate to attack it.
Let’s wrap this up, letting Sun Tzu, who wrote the first known treatise on military strategy, start us along the path:
Being unconquerable lies with yourself, being conquerable lies with the enemy. Thus one who excels in warfare is able to make himself unconquerable, but cannot necessarily cause the enemy to be conquerable.
—Sun Tzu, On War
Guerrilla warfare is the strategy of the weak faced with the strong. It is also the warfare of an oppressed population against those who oppress them. These points can’t be stressed enough. Although a guerrilla movement needs nowhere near the support of a majority of the population, it can’t survive without substantial, popular support. The Taliban have many followers. So does the Sunni insurgency. So does Hamas. So did Hezbollah when they were fighting a guerrilla war.
Whenever you are fighting a guerrilla movement of any power, you are also, effectively, at war with part of the population. On top of the strategic and tactical implications already discussed, this has moral implications that should be carefully thought through, and even more carefully as the percentage of support creeps up and past 50%, as it does in many cases. Does the will of the people matter? Do you have the moral right to force them to accept what you think is best?
This is the case even of movements at less than 50%. Perhaps the majority of the population doesn’t support the guerillas, and thus you have a moral mandate to fight them, but why is it that a significant minority is so angry they are willing to support this level of violence? If you don’t understand that “why”, not only will you have a hard time defeating them but the phrase “tyranny of the majority” could have real resonance. Of course, the minority could be supporting the guerrillas because the guerillas have terrorized them into support, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they like you, either.
Guerrilla warfare is what the weak do when the strong have defeated them. It’s the moment when they say, “No, this isn’t over till I say it is.” At that point, you have a choice of putting the boots to their ribs untill they submit to occupation, or you can try and convince them that fighting you isn’t the best path to the peace, prosperity, dignity and self determination that all people want.
Or you can walk away, and let them rule themselves.4
War is indeed politics with an admixture of other means. Understanding those means, what their limitations are, what is required to use them and win, and the moral choices they will force on you, should be required of anyone who is in a position to commit a country or a people to war. Once let loose, the dogs of war often slip the leash of he who thought to control them.
Notes
Originally Published at BOPNews in slightly different form, back in 2004. Has been published in the Agonist and FDL at other points. One of my personal favorite articles I’ve written.
The picture at the top is of a female Kurdish soldier, almost certainly a guerilla, though I can’t say for sure. It is from this Kurdish gallery archive site, which is more than worth your time to visit.
Endnotes
1. Important aside: Hezbollah’s troops, while trained to operate as guerrillas, are regular soldiers. As one military analyst quipped to me “what do you call light infantry trained to operate as guerrillas? Special forces”. Israel smashed its face in against a heavily fortified special forces army. Puts it in a new light, doesn’t it?
2. In the Revolutionary war one estimate is that the rebels had about a third of the population, the Tories about a third, and about a third just wanted all the guys with guns to go away. Note that the rebels did manage to field a conventional army, with the strong support of France. It is generally a good sign for an insurgency if it can support a regular army alongside the guerrilla resistance, again, because guerrillas can only win by wars of attrition “to hell with it, it’s not worth it”, not through battlefield success. A regular army is not so limited.
3. Protecting the population may sometimes require setting up camps or fortifying existing villages. Because camps are used in the ruthless method as well, and because the ruthless method is used more often, they’re generally considered bad things. But they are usually part of the kinder anti-insurgency strategy as well, especially in rural areas.
4. The full text of Mao’s “On Guerrilla Warfare” can be found here. The section with most of the more generic advice (not particular to the Chinese/Japanese war) can be found here.
5. This isn’t always easy. For example, in Northern Ireland, the Brits would have loved to walk away. Problem was – the majority of the population wanted them to stay. Ouch.
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It’s said, too often, that the US military is the most powerful the world has ever seen. To be sure, that’s true in the sense of sheer destructive power, but it’s not true in terms of relative dominance.
The most dominant army in history, compared to its peer competitors, in my opinion, was the Mongols. (The Germans studied Mongol campaigns when they created blitzkrieg doctrine.)
The Mongols did not lose a war until they ran up against the Mamlukes, who defeated them by copying them, with a horse archer army of their own. Mongol armies moved faster than WWII tank armies, coordinated multiple armies across hundreds of miles, arriving at the same time at pre-chosen points. Their tactics in battle tended to inflict disproportionate casualties.
A large part of Mongol dominance was genius-level leadership. I can’t think of any major historical figure who was better at picking subordinates than Genghis Khan: not only was he never betrayed by any of his generals, his administrators were brilliant, and his generals were almost all, themselves, great generals.
More than that, the Mongols did not rely on battlefield supremacy alone. Genghis Khan used traders as spies, and before he invaded anyone, he knew who within that country was unhappy and ready to rebel as well as who the enemies of that nation were. Any internal or external weaknesses were exploited. After cities were captured, if they had resisted, he rounded up the men and used them as the first wave in the next city assault. His genocidal activities were terrible (though a reading of the actions of many of his foes shows him no worse than them, just more effective), but they were militarily sound: he did not leave large, hostile, unpacified populations in his rear.
The Mongols also often brought enemy military units into their own ranks, reorganized them, and retained their loyalty. Mongol armies, even in Genghis Khan’s time, were made up more of non-Mongols than Mongols. Even so, the Mongols won battles against fores who outnumbered them regularly: they were not a horde at the beginning, but were fighting more populous countries with larger armies.
The key weakness of the Mongols was, in fact, Genghis Khan. His particular genius at choosing brilliant subordinates and earning their loyalty was not shared by any of his heirs. When the last general Genghis picked himself, Subotai, dies, there are no more great Mongol generals.
Nonetheless, the Mongol successor states wound up controlling the largest chunk of the world before the British Empire, and unlike the British, conquered the core civilized parts of the world: China, Persia; indeed, virtually all of continental Asia. Europe was only saved by the death of the Genghis Khan’s heir (I remain unconvinced by arguments that the fragmented, easily played against each other, backwards Europeans would have been able to stop Subotai short of the Channel.)
Note further that the Mongols were able to rule those they conquered. They were able to create law and order; to put down rebellions, and so on.
The US army is a blunt instrument, incapable of winning what its masters want it to win (Iraq, Afghanistan); and it hasn’t been tested in main battle against a peer foe in a long time (China/Russians/Europeans). Theoretical overwhelming power is all very nice, but lets see how that fleet with its big, clumsy, exposed aircraft carriers (for example) does against someone like China who has been specifically gearing to destroy it, rather than against tribesmen or 3rd rate powers (Saddam’s Iraq) which had no means of fighting it.
A military must be judged by what it can do. The American military can destroy countries, it can blitz countries, but it can’t hold them. Dominant? Sure. Most dominant in history? No. And we’ll see what happens to its dominance when it is really tested.
Osama bin Laden had a thesis: his theory was that the Americans could be defeated if they could be convinced to occupy a Muslim country where they could actually be fought. He was right.
Which General or Military Theorist today will turn out to have had the theory that the US military can be defeated in conventional non-occupation war, who is right? Is it a Chinese theorist?
We’ll find out. All periods of military dominance end. The Mongols did, the British did, the Romans did, the Greeks did, and so on. The question is just when, and how.
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It really comes down to the balance between these two factors:
For every advance that the Ukrainian government made, it seemed to lose ground elsewhere. Angry pro-Russian crowds seized control of more government buildings in Donetsk, and pro-Russian forces in Luhansk, a city just 15 miles from the Russian frontier, vowed war on Kiev, declaring a curfew and seizing weapons inside a military recruitment center.
Which is to say, does Russia need to intervene or can the rebels, its proxies, win without it? The massacre of pro-Russian protesters in Odessa has likely hardened the lines: I’m betting that more and more of those who wanted to stay in the Ukraine but a federalist Ukraine, will want to just join Russia.
Meanwhile, the US and Germany have promised energy sanctions on Russia if Russia does invade. If real, those will throw Europe back into a full blown economic crisis, but US commercial interests desperately want those sanctions, even if they don’t have the ability to fill European natural gas demand right now. Not only is a future market, but the fracking boom requires higher natural gas prices than they have right now to make much of it profitable.
If Putin is to invade, it seems more likely he’ll invade before the election, though, of course, with fighting spreading across Ukraine, he could simply say that no fair, representative election was possible. Still, for him, before seems better.
And as the deaths mount, Putin can simply claim that he is acting on a responsibility-to-protect (R2P) those who are being killed by Ukrainian military and pro-Ukrainian mobs. R2P is a Western doctrine, used to justify Western invasions; it must amuse Putin to no end to throw it back in the West’s face, not that the West has the grace to blush at its own hypocrisy, or even notice its own hypocrisy.
What’s happening in Ukraine is vastly important. It will determine the shape of the blocs facing each other down during the end of America hegemony, and as it is playing out now, it ensures that China will have Russia’s support and likely moves up the timeline for creating an alternate, non-dollar payments system. I expect future historians will scratch their heads in the same we do when looking back at the Kaiser’s mistakes isolating Germany in the run-up to World War I.
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I’ve been at this place for years, and the new place is smaller, so I expect it to be an extra fun move.
Really. Too much talk about joining NATO, and that’s too close to Moscow, plus the West’s unremitting hostility to Russia pulling the sort of stunts that the US pulls frequently, indicates that the West is a real danger and that if they waste this opportunity, they won’t get another one.
I’d advise Putin to go.
(For the thick, I hope they don’t, and I’m not a Russian strategist. Just saying that just as losing Sevastopol and Crimea was something Russia could NOT tolerate, that Ukraine joining NATO is an actual red line.)
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And so it begins. Russia is not restraining the separatists, the Kiev government is finally really sending in the troops, Barack Obama and EU leaders claim they will impose real sanctions and Russia and China are set to ink a deal to export Russian Gas to China, the world’s industrial heartland.
If the sanctions are imposed, for whatever reason (Russian invasion or not), they will force the creation of a second economic, non-dollar bloc. Russia is not Iran, and China is not going to cut off Russia to please the West, rather the contrary. The creation of a real non dollar bloc which can make almost anything people want, and which has access to essentially all key resources from oil to rare minerals, metals and food is an existential threat to the hegemony of the West and its allies like Japan and Korea.
Be clear, real sanctions will impose real costs on Russia, but they can bear them. They do not need to borrow money from the West, they cannot be Troika-ized. They have key resources that someone will buy, even if they can’t buy in dollars, because Yuan or rubles can, actually, buy most of what most countries need to buy.
Absent China, Russia cannot be isolated. Cannot. China is unlikely to cooperate. Sure, they could view eastern Russia near their borders as ripe, but Russia as a subordinate state in the Chinese sphere means they get everything they really need from the Russians anyway, plus backing in a military confrontation with the current developed world.
The Chinese are not stupid, they know that if a real war breaks out, it will be between them and America. They are the rising power, the naturally most powerful and militarily powerful state in the world, recovering from a hiatus of a few centuries where they lost their status. Russia has a lot to offer them, and the Chinese cannot be coerced by sanctions. Sanctioning China would backfire so hard that the US was go into a real economic collapse: China makes the goods. Sanction them, and they WILL break the patents and just make them anyway. Reestablishing the manufacturing and distributing base back to the US and its allies under such circumstances would be unbelievably difficult, especially as Russia, China and its allies control certain key resources like rare earths (other people could mine them in quantity, but don’t, because Chinese rare earths are cheaper and we are stupid and greedy.)
Russia is already planning how to survive economic sanctions: how to sell its goods in rubles. People will buy, Russia is too big a producer to ignore. If Europe doesn’t want the growth which comes from using Russian gas and oil, well, China and others will be happy to take it.
And once a second bloc is created, it will no longer be possible to pull stunts like breaking Iran with sanctions: the Chinese/Russian bloc will have a veto.
Over Ukraine? I guarantee that if this is done in 50 years historians will look back on this like we do on WWI—what were they thinking? The Balkans wasn’t worth WWI. Ukraine isn’t worth destroying American: Western, hegemony. Well, not for America. Others might think this is more of a good thing than bad.
But it is also the potential glide path to war, real war. WWIII.
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Free trade, as practiced, is designed to destroy local autonomy by making nations dependent on foreign goods, and by removing decision making from democratically elected bodies and pushing them to transnational tribunals, secret courts and laws which cannot be changed without opting out from treaties, something most countries are reluctant to do, because they need the trade once they are enmeshed.
Keynes believed that most production of basics should be local: you should manufacture most of what your country needs, in your country. You should also, ideally, be able to feed your own population.
If you can’t make what you need or what your people (and more importantly, elites) really want, then you’re screwed. In the modern world you need hydrocarbons, you need food, and you need the machinery which turns hydrocarbons into the industrialized lifestyle.
Your prosperous citizens probably want food your country doesn’t produce: summer vegetables in winter, possibly meat you can’t provide in large enough quantities, and so on. They want electronic goods like smartphones that due to patents are quite expensive, and which you probably can’t make domestically.
Your elites want a vacation in Paris, a home in London, a German car, a French mistress, a New York Apartment, and a variety of luxuries that their own country doesn’t make.
If you want or need these things; if you do not have a taste for what your country can produce, in terms of basics and luxuries; if you do not ensure your country can feed itself, generate electricity and make cars or other forms of transit, you MUST do what those who control the trade regime want you to, or you will find yourself cut off from all these things.
Distributed production of necessities (which includes basic lifestyle goods and luxuries and machine goods) is anti-democratic and anti-national control in a world where the primary decision making units which are amenable to pressure from the commons, whether democratic or not, is exerted almost entirely on national and local units.
If you want to not do austerity when the Troika demands it, you must be in a position to tell the Troika to go stuff itself. If you have made yourself vulnerable, by losing your ability to feed yourself; by not developing local industry or exporting it; by your citizens acquiring a a perceived or real need for foreign goods; or by your local elites wanting to be “transnational elites” who want foreign luxuries and who feel as at home in Paris, New York and London as in their own country, then you cannot refuse to do what those who control the trade and international monetary regime tell you to do.
This is always the devil’s bargain offered in international regimes: “you can get all the stuff we have if only you open up”. It’s true, and for many countries it works for a while. The less you had, the shorter period it works for (countries who only have to be convinced to give up their ability to feed themselves by switching to cash crops and forcing subsistence farmers get a few years), but once you’ve given away your autonomy, the deal will, at some point, always turn bad. Those with the whip hand, will always eventually drive you down unless you have as much power over them as they have over you.
And knowing that your elites are no longer yours, but theirs, they will always find someone to do it for them, because your elites will be eager to sell you out for the flat in New York, the vacations in the south of France, the German automobile, the French mistress, the Swiss boarding school for their children, and for the fine luxury goods their own country cannot make.
If you get yourself into this position, you must overthrow your elites, and you must figure out how to become independent again. You must make deals with other blocs: the Russians and the Chinese, for the transition period, and figure out how to move your production of what matters back to local, and if you no longer can, how to feed yourself. You must inculcate in your elites and peoples a desire for what you make locally – local lovers, the food of your nation, the luxuries you can produce.
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The BBC has admitted that Assad will remain in charge of Syria.
Now I have no mandate for Assad, by all evidence he’s a profoundly evil man who delights in torture as a way to send a message. His excesses in this area are such that I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally gets off on it, but the fact of the matter is that the rebellion has made Syrians worse off. Period.
I will note that when Hezbollah committed its forces I said then that Assad would probably win. What’s worse is that any moron ought to have known that Hezbollah could not allow Assad to fall because if Assad fell, its lifeline to Iran would be severed. The forces which were arrayed against Assad either had to win quickly enough that Hezbollah couldn’t turn the tide, or they had to cut a credible deal with Hezbollah, which due to both ideological reasons and because of the preferences of their backers, they never could. Well, or they had to intervene directly: Western air support as in Libya.
There is no point, if you are are unhappy with your domestic regime, in accepting Western aid to overthrow it at the moment, not unless you’ve got a plan to bite the hand that feeds you. The reason is that the West is no longer exporting prosperity, and hasn’t been for some time. Excepting (sort of, very sort of) China, the last countries to get prosperity from the West were a few Eastern European ones; before that, the Asian Tigers.* Instead the sphere of prosperity based on the West is in contraction, just ask the South of Europe, or Ireland. (The Chinese sphere is another matter, though they have problems too.)
Even if you win your revolution with foreign aid, a la Libya or the Western Ukraine, you aren’t going to be offered a good deal: the Ukraine is still going to get shafted by the IMF to the tune of a 50% cut in pensions, a 50% increase in gas prices even before Russian price increases, government austerity and selling off the crown jewels of energy companies and arable land to foreigners. Libya is a bloody mess: again, however bad Qaddafi was, he was better than the current situation.
There is no real money; no real resources, for prosperity to be spread to new nations by the West and its allies (like Japan). The new money being created is heavily leveraged debt piled on the back of countries who already can’t pay, money they’d be better off without.
So, don’t play with the West. Don’t take their money and aid in overthrowing your corrupt government, unless you know exactly what you’re doing and plan to to turn on them and align with someone else. If you do, your country will be worse off.
Though, perhaps you should take their money. Personally, I mean. You can get rich yourself and then escape your country, if you’re a traitor.
Non-traitors, however, shouldn’t touch Western or Saudi money for revolution.
*One might argue that the West has rarely offered prosperity to those it backs in revolution, Latin Americans would certainly agree, but it’s not quite true: the Koreans did, the Poles did, some other East Europeans. However, now they not only don’t offer prosperity, they offer the prompt austerity and debt driven destruction of your economy.
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Sustained high profits, in free market economics, are considered the sign of an uncompetitive market. De-fact if an industry or business makes high profits regularly, and certainly if they do so for more than a decade or so, the market is not competitive.
The response to that should be political: either make the market competitive, or if it’s the sort of market which can’t be or is too much trouble to be made competitive (most utilities, if you’re sane; certainly utility distribution; any insurance required of almost anyone; roads, etc…) then either make them government run, or heavily regulate them.
Cable companies in the US make 97% profit on their internet provision — they are an unregulated oligopoly which is also damaging America’s competitiveness with their lousy product. Cell phone makers are another unregulated oligopoly because of the interlocking patents which make it very difficult for others to make almost the same smartphones for literally a tenth the price and are a strong argument for reducing the length of patents, getting rid of algorithim patents entirely, and for mandatory licensing at low prices.
Banks and financial firms, with their ability to create money out of thin air by lending, and to bounce various debt instruments back and forth to stack leverage, are the ultimate in abusive oligopolies. They are granted the ability to literally make money, and should be expected, in exchange, to work in the public interest, not to enrich themselves, impoverish the public and go running to government for bailouts when they manage to mess up a sure thing.
The general level of profits in a society should, actually, be pretty low. 5% plus inflation is a good level to aim for. If high profits are available in parts of the economy, every other business gets starved for cash, as money runs to the high profits. Economics says that those opportunities should run out and there should be a regression to the mean, but in oligopolistic economies with strong protected works and vast amounts of government corruption, that doesn’t happen—until there is a crash, at which point the most profitable businesses are bailed out, because they used their profits to buy government.
Individual businesses want high profits, but societies want low profits, and should view sustained high profits as a sign of economic illness which requires intervention.
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Are far harder problems than most of the problems of the hard sciences. Why people do what they do, under what circumstances is a problem of vast complexity, and we don’t have the necessary models. The models we do have (such as evolotunary psychology, and our abysmal knowledge of neuroscience), while powerful, are incomplete, and overly simplistic at capturing emergent behaviour, especially in groups, let alone the effect of culture.
That’s not to say we don’t know a lot, I’m hardly a great expert and I could teach many years worth of courses just with what I know, but we do not have the level of predictability the hard sciences have. It also hard to falsify social science due to problems setting up the experiments, and when you use real world data, it’s hard to isolate variables.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that social sciences — and many humanities, are ideological enterprises which have an effect on the real world distribution of goods: who gets what. They are used to justify distribution of goods: of the things people want. When “hard” sciences, like biology, are used in this way, they too cross over into the ideological social science bucket and generally cease to be hard sciences.
This is because the “ought” is, so far, impossible to separate out of the humanities and social sciences. Ethics and morality are always lurking, and efforts like Skinnerian behaviouralism have all, so far, failed. Humans are cussed, and complex, and reductionism only works in the most broad based and caveated sense, again, largely because of the effect of culture. Say that all people are greedy, or selfish, or kind, or altruistic, or driven to pass on their genes, and the cultural anthropologist, or the pyschologist, will find you exceptions. Humans biology imposes drives on humans, but the ways in which we satisfy those drives, or subliminate them, or even fight and deny them, is, if not infinite in theoretical terms, then infinite in practical ones.
All of this makes the problems of the social sciences vastly difficult, and far less progress has been made than most think. Even neuroscience, which is not a social science, has teased out only a few mechanisms and has little understanding of how they mesh together. In practical macro-terms, when dealing with problems of social organization that are province of sociology, economics, political science and mass psychology, we are not much more wise than the Ancient Greeks, and on certain issues, perhaps less so.
One should be wary of the experts. It was not so long ago that pyschiatrists were mass lobotomizing people and treating them for homosexuality. It is today that they are vastly overprescribing psychoactive prescription drugs to young children (and everyone else, especially upper middle class women.) Following neo-liberal economists prescriptions has led to 40 years of stagnation, a financial crisis and a long depression for the developed world (yes, that’s what we’re in.)
The social sciences are still in the dark ages. As with medicine in the dark ages, occasionally a gifted, wise or brilliant practitioner (usually applying souped up folk medicine) could do more good than harm. You must look, carefully, at each individual social scientist, and decide if you trust him or her, because the degree and the discipline means little. It is how the practitioner combines the knowledge that matters, the knowledge is not currently in reliable, formulaic form, nor is there even a reliable method for creating formulas in the most cases (case studies and regression statistics have utility, but it is limited.)
So, ye who would enter the social sciences: know that you will be responsible for making it work, it doesn’t work as it’s given to you.
And you who would consume it, be even more wary, for this is the dark age of social science, in which we pretend it is science, when it is still art.
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