Arms and influence

Center of gravity

THEORY
When I was posting the other day, I used the term center of gravity. the phrase then rattled around in my brain, in large part because it's one of those terms that people who have studied military affairs for a while use without thinking. It's a trickier concept than it looks, so I kicked myself for not having included it in the "hallowed principles of strategy" postings I've made for the last few months. Today, I'll correct that omission.

The center of gravity, as its name implies, is the defining characteristic of a conflict. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it's the proverbial lynchpin on which victory and defeat turn. Every war has its center of gravity, which (like war aims) may change over time.

In conventional wars, the center of gravity usually has been the two contending armies. In the ancient and medieval worlds, the opponents would maneuver until they joined battle. The result of that clash of arms was swift (no more than a single day) and decisive, since one side or the other usually lost the military strength to continue the fight. Each side's center of gravity was immediately visible, as a single army on the march across a contested landscape. Think of Edward III's march across northern France, ending in the battle of Crecy; Alexander's march across the Persian empire, ending in the battle of Gaugemala; or Caesar's cat-and-mouse maneuvering against Pompey, ending in the battle of Pharsalus. Even if the campaign ended in a siege, the basic course of combat was the same: maneuver, a direct clash between two armies in a limited geographic space (a field or a fortress), a moment of climax (the enemy retreats, the city walls are breached, a starved population decides it can't continue), and capitulation.

The center of gravity isn't always the enemy's armed forces, however. In "political" wars, the center of gravity can be the political will to continue paying the costs in blood and treasure of further combat. As the often-quoted Harry Summers observed about the Vietnam War, the United States won every battle, but it lost the war. The United States could have continued fighting the NVA and NLF indefinitely, but it chose not to. (Which, of course, led to decades of arguing over whether that decision was correct or not.) In Nicaragua, the core political base of the Somoza regime, the army and police forces, defected, paving the way for the later Sandinista victory.

The center of gravity in conventional wars also can vary somewhat. The ability to continue fighting may hinge on the strength of the army, navy, or air force, but what maintains strength? On the western front of WWI, generals on both sides focused on the number of relative number of troops killed each day. In the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets needed the physical space to continue retreating until they could mobilize sufficiently to counterattack. In the Union campaigns against the Confederacy in 1864 through 1865, the emphasis had switched somewhat from winning a decisive set-piece battle to destroying the Southern economy.

The center of gravity may not be the same for both sides. For example, in the Ten Years War phase of the Peloponnesian War, particularly in the first three years, the center of gravity for Athens was its treasury, which determined how many years it could sustain Pericles' defensive strategy. Sparta's center of gravity, on the other hand, was its alliances: how well they held together; how much the war effort satisfied alliance politics for the Peloponnesians.

If the center of gravity does lie in the political or psychological realm, it's definitely harder to calculate the enemy's strength, or judge what's needed to strike effectively at this center of gravity. Defying the conventions of Maoist strategy, Castro switched the first two phases of a guerrilla campaign: the actual armed struggle in Cuba began before his movement built a large political base. He obviously guessed right about what he needed to do, but it wasn't as definite a calculation as, say, planning Operation DESERT STORM. Certainly, many military leaders have guessed wrong about the enemy's political center of gravity. Hitler, believing in the "terror from the air" theories of pre-war analysts like Duohet, thought that bombing British cities would force a British surrender. The Blitz stiffended British resistance, however, exactly the opposite of what Hitler had expected.

What determines the center of gravity? The status of military methods and technology, the war aims or grand strategies of the combatants, deliberate theater and operational decisions, and fate all play their parts. In the Chinese Civil War, the Communists originally tried to fight a conventional war. They paid for this mistake, but also learned that they could shift the emphasis from the balance of force to the balance of control. Pointing their energies at a different center of gravity not only led to the CCP's victory, but also inspired generations of imitators in other guerrilla wars.

PRACTICE
When I write postings on this blog, I often bemoan the non-discussion of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the general US counterterrorism effort worldwide. Americans can't afford to be incurious about these conflicts. Nowhere is that statement more relevant than the question, What is the center of gravity in these wars?

To illustrate, answer the following question: To win the war in Iraq, the most important step is to...

1. Kill as many of the enemy as possible.


2. Secure areas that are home to people who might support or tolerate the enemy.


3. Carry out large public works projects designed to win support.


4. Remove a military presence that some group of people find offensive.

Don't worry, there's no 100% correct answer. Instead, the point of the exercise is to show the differences between how people might answer that question, and then this one: To win the global war against terrorist groups like al Qaeda, the most important step is to...

1. Kill as many of the enemy as possible.


2. Secure areas that are home to people who might support or tolerate the enemy.


3. Carry out large public works projects designed to win support.


4. Remove a military presence that some group of people find offensive.

I'm guessing that, whatever answer you picked the first time, you didn't pick the second. There's a strong case that the occupation itself in Iraq sustains the insurgency against the post-Baathist government, so a lot of you might have picked #4. However, the United States withdrew its forces from Saudi Arabia, but there are still many Islamists who want to kill Americans (including some Saudis). The United States might remove one terrorist talking point by withdrawing from Iraq, but that action, in and of itself, will have almost no direct effect on al Qaeda.

Obviously, the center of gravity is different in these two conflicts. But how often have you heard someone make that point? Or even present for discussion the four courses of action I just summarized?

Failing to ask these questions is worse than flying blind. It's tantamount to flying blind and without a destination.

Do no harm

IN THE NEWS
In case you don't have the link, or hadn't heard about the article, here is Robert Jay Lifton's article, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Lifton argues that, based on the available evidence, there's every reason to believe that American doctors attended the torture sessions at Abu Ghraib and other facilities.

Frankly, it would be surprising in the extreme if doctors had not participated. In nearly all cases of torture worldwide, doctors monitor the victim, look for signs of extreme distress, and generally advise the interrogators how far they can push the infliction of extreme pain. The US military doctors involved also apparently acted as a conduit for private medical information about the detainees, so that interrogators could find personal details they could use to further break down the prisoners' resistance. Don't say, "It can't get any worse," because it can: there's also evidence that doctors falsified death certificates for prisoners who died in custody.

I'm always ready to maintain some shadow of doubt about allegations this dreadful. However, I can't find fault with Lifton's conclusions. If you're serious about torture, you employ a doctor as part of the interrogation team. Ask anyone in Amnesty International--you know, the people who were up in arms about the Iraqi Baath Party's torture chambers, rape rooms, and widespread executions of people even mildly supected of political dissent, long before the Bush-Cheney crowd discovered their disgust for Saddam Hussein. Or, more to the point, Amnesty International members were working to bring attention to the fate of Iraqis imprisoned, tortured, or killed while the Reagan Administration was providing material assistance to the Iraqi regime.

Sorry for the outburst. I've just heard one person too many say, "How can you criticize the conduct of this war? What about the suffering Iraqis?" As is true of many dedicated Amnesty volunteers, I've known about Saddam Hussein's crimes for a long, long time. As deserving as the Baathist regime was of its fate, it matters how we removed it--measured by both the nature (torture or not?) and the consequences (enough troops to keep the peace, or not?) of our actions. We can't afford to be egregiously sloppy willfully blind on either account--and neither can the Iraqis.

(In case you've never read it, here's a link to Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors, which grapples with the question, How could German doctors have participated in torture and murder?)

Attrition and counterterrorism

IN THE NEWS
I finally got around to reading this provocatively-titled article, "In Praise of Attrition," in the summer issue of Parameters, the US Army War College's academic journal. What makes the title provocative is its astute identification of an assumption that military professionals have been making, somewhat unconsciously, ever since World War II. Maneuver, according to the orthodox view, is what wins wars; attrition, the slow erosion of the enemy's forces, is a lesser, and perhaps even irrelevant, approach.

Attrition sometimes appears on either the operational or the theater level. Operational attrition, like the fabled image of the meatgrinder tactics on the Western front in WWI, points to the enemy's armed forces as the proverbial "center of gravity". To some extent, the Soviets pursued an operational attrition strategy in WWII, especially after the German defeats in the Caucasus in 1942 and the battle of Kursk in 1943. The Stalingrad disaster tipped the balance of force dangerously, for the Germans. As the Soviets maintained the pressure of regular combat, the Wehrmacht could not replace its losses quickly enough.

Theater attrition normally has a different target: the enemy's will to fight. Rather than eroding the enemy's "hardware," you focus on the softer side of the conflict: how long the enemy leaders or population will be willing to stay in the fray. Theater attrition is how the American colonies won their independence from Britain, and how the North Vietnamese won the Vietnam War.

The previous sentence implies that, in revolutionary conflicts, theater attrition is a common strategy. That's exactly the case: except in the cases of lightning political attacks, like coups, revolutionaries fighting for secession, the withdrawal of an invading army, a change of national leadership, or a transformation of the political and social order need to exercise patience. To win, the revolutionaries will have to convince a foreign power that it's not worth continuing the fight, erode their own regime's political base, or both.

The author of the Parameters article, Ralph Peters, makes a convincing case for why people in his former profession (he is a retired Army officer) need to take attrition more seriously. Not only will our enemies often try attrition against us, but we also need to be in the business of attrition--including in our counterterrorism efforts.

Where this article missteps, however, is identifying the kind of attrition we should be talking about when fighting terrorists. Peters implies that the center of gravity is the terrorist army:

With hardcore terrorists, it’s not about PSYOP or jobs or deploying dental teams. It’s about killing them. Even regarding the general population, which benefits from our reconstruction and development efforts, the best thing we can do for them is to kill terrorists and insurgents. Until the people of Iraq are secure, they are not truly free. The terrorists know that. We pretend otherwise.

This will be a long war, stretching beyond many of our lifetimes. And it will be a long war of attrition. We must ensure that the casualties are always disproportionately on the other side.

He's right, security is a key component of counterterrorism. It's also vital for counterinsurgency--the real character of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Peters' second mistake in an otherwise laudable article is confusing the two. (Click here for an earlier discussion in this blog of the differences.) The partisans fighting for the withdrawal of US forces--the majority of those shooting at American troops--are not al Qaeda terrorists.

Terrorist organizations have a nasty regenerative capability. No matter how many members of Hamas or the al-Aksa Martyr's Brigade the militarily-capable Israelis kill, more take their place. In fact, according to one critique of Israel's current counterinsurgency strategy, their focus on killing terrorists is, on balance, inspiring more people to join these groups than the number of terrorist leaders or operatives killed.

The Sharon approach to counterterrorism--kill as many terrorists as possible, give as little as possible in negotiations--is a lot like the pre-WWI military doctrine of the great European powers: hit the bulk of the enemy's army with everything you have. Once you've shattered that lynchpin, the rest falls apart. Unfortunately, the trenches zigzagging through Belgium and France were just as visible a symbol of a failed doctrine as the winding streets of the occupied territories today. It's necessary to kill terrorists, but it's not sufficient. As always, you need to be sensitive to the political effects, and not just fall back on the intellectually lazy response that, if the doctrine is failing, just apply it more vigorously.

Just plain bad news

IN THE NEWS
Doctors Without Frontiers (Medecins Sans Frontieres) is pulling out of Afghanistan.

They have good reasons. Someone, most likely the Taliban (who was certainly eager to take credit), has been killing its staff. No aid organization should require its workers to put their lives at more-than-likely risk, so MSF has decided to leave for the time being.

How many layers of tragedy can you stomach? The immediate loss of much-needed medical care? The continued anguish of Afghanistan? The fact that the United States left the remaining work in Afghanistan unfinished, underfunded, and unrecognized? The cycle of neglect that, as soon as Afghanistan stops being immediately important to us, we leave?

The truth is, Afghanistan is still immediately important. The Taliban and al Qaeda are still there. The country is still a major opium producer. Warlordism is still a source of instability and, perhaps more importantly, outrage and despair. The job's not done, and because of the US government's indifference, we've lost another ally who might have helped the Afghanis and the Americans out of a shared nightmare.

More Iraq good/bad news

IN THE NEWS
Two roughly related stories from today's news:

• US officials are using bribes to deflect some insurgent attacks.


• 68 killed in another Baghdad car bomb attack, clearly designed to frighten people out of joining the Iraqi police.

Now, that's not the good news/bad news juxtaposition I wanted to make. Here's the real one:

• Good news: The bribes will work with some groups we're fighting in Iraq. Some factions are jumping on the anti-occupation bandwagon because (1) they'd look bad if they didn't, and (2) they stand to win a great deal of influence if they do. They can also win this influence through money, connections with the Americans, and related means, so what they lose from releasing hostages or scratching some roadside attacks, they gain from the bribes.


• Bad news: The bribes won't work with all groups we're fighting in Iraq. The parties behind the car bomb attacks are dedicated killers with ambitious goals--the end of the occupation altogether, an Islamist regime, the purging of Western influences. These factions are not going to be bought.

Once again, it's important to remember, there is no monolithic insurgency in Iraq. My sympathies to those who lost loved ones in today's bombing.

Principles of strategy

THEORY
I've taken a short rest from the "official" posts on the blog, the long-running discussion of time-hallowed principles of strategy and what they tell us about current events. That was the first phase in the extended discussion I had planned for this blog; the next stage is to get into the specifics of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary political violence of all sorts.

It's time to make the move to this next phase. It'd be appropriate to provide some kind of summary before leaving the principles of strategy. Happily, you can summarize these principles in a pithy fashion, much like you can squeeze the core formulae you need for a physics or chemistry test onto a 3" by 5" card. That signifies the maturity of a discipline, when you can make simple, declarative, useful statements, easy to summarize, while longer discussion might be appropriate to fully digest them.

So here's the list:

I. War and politics

1. War is, properly, the use of violence to achieve a political situation that didn't exist before the war.


2. War aims are often fuzzy, making it that much harder to achieve victory.


3. For this reason, and others, wars are often harder to end than they are to start.


4. War aims can shift during the war itself.


5. Declarations of war force a more precise definition of war aims.


6. Since war is a political instrument, it can and should operate within existing political institutions.


7. The US Constitution is better designed to handle the exigencies of war, including "little wars" or largely clandestine struggles, than most people give it credit.

II. War, power, and leverage

1. War is an instrument of both power and leverage, two competing interpretations of how nations (and other actors) get want they want in international affairs.


2. Since a country's ability to get what it wants depends on the context, leverage is a better guide to understanding international affairs than brute indicators of national power.


3. Power also does not explain baffling situations where nations with less power often have far greater influence than nations with greater power.


4. Doing something for its own sake--in other words, exercising national power because you think it's universally useful--isn't necessarily the right course of action.


5. Since power is a finite quantity, you should avoid exercising it too often, thereby advertising the limits of your power.


6. Alliances don't necessarily constrain power. In fact, like many contractual relationships in other spheres of human activity, they usually enable you to do more than you could have on your own.

III. Strategic levels and dynamics

1. Strategy actually has many levels: grand strategic, theater, operational, tactical, and technical.


2. Victory depends not only on succeeding at each level, but ensuring that each level contributes to the ones above and below it in the strategic strata.


3. A good strategy has to account for some degree of the unexpected.


4. Equally important is the existence of a thinking, reacting enemy. War is not an engineering problem, the exercise of resources against an inert target; it's a struggle between two adversaries trying to outwit and outfight each other.


5. You therefore need to think "a few moves ahead," by making an informed guess at how the dynamic of measure and counter-measure is likely to play out.


6. Maintaining the initiative--when, where, and in what form clashes occur--is critical to success.


7. Doing the unexpected--what is sometimes called "the indirect approach" is a technique for both maintaining the initiative and winning the measure/counter-measure battle of wits.


8. Strategies should be as simple as possible, and should include some redundancy (i.e., more resources than the minimum required, and more contingencies than just one).


9. The center of gravity defines the core features of a conflict--and, therefore, what it will take to win it.

PRACTICE
Principles of war aren't like the formulas you memorize in physics class, however. Like chess, the rules are simple, but it may take a lifetime to master the game.

That's why it's critical to keep the military from being "politicized," a neutral word for, "Telling politicians what they want to hear." The art of war requires a great deal of time and effort to master. That makes the answers to particular military puzzles not always obvious--or else, any armchair general would see them--and often, even inobvious to the vast majority of military professionals themselves. Revolutions in military strategy or organization wouldn't happen if you didn't have the occasional flashes of genius that people like Marius, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, or others could provide. Of course, that means the answers you get as a political leader from your generals and admirals may not make sense at first glance, and they may make you exceedingly uncomfortable.

That's the real reason why the Bush Administration's treatment of General Shinseki was abhorrent. Shinseki was doing his duty by giving his professional judgement about the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. If Bush's supporters want to cry foul about Lyndon Johnson's micromanagement of the Vietnam War, they need to be equally outraged at the treatment of Shinseki--if not moreso, since unlike Vietnam, there was a fairly clear measure of success in Iraq. Public order collapsed after the 2003 invasion, and it hasn't recovered.

A note of apology to Shinseki is in order--not just to ask for his forgiveness, but to signal to the rest of the people in uniform that their professional judgement is valued and heeded, not simply overruled because the man in the Oval Office wants to hear a different answer.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

IN THE NEWS
This article in yesterday's New York Times regurgitates a section of the 9/11 Commission report covering Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an al Qaeda leader captured in 2003. We should all be happy that Mohammed is in custody, since it's very likely, according to the report, that he was the person who concocted the 9/11 attack plan, hijacking airliners and crashing them into buildings. It wasn't his only idea, either. While many of his other schemes probably would never have left the drawing boards, if he had been free to operate as a terrorist entrepreneur, other groups than al Qaeda might have given Mohammed's other ideas a try.

What's especially interesting about Mohammed is his arms-length relationship with bin Laden and al Qaeda. Given its loose structure, al Qaeda was tailor-made in many ways for Mohammed. Many of the al Qaeda leaders are similar entrepreneurs, though perhaps more comfortable living within the group's command structure than Mohammed was. This same network, not hierarchical, organization has helped al Qaeda set up shop more easily in new countries where it wants to operate, such as the Philippines and the Sudan.

As in any entrepreneurial network, however, your credibility is all-important. Mohammed often strained credulity. According to the 9/11 Commission's report, bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders recognized a great deal of potential in Mohammed as an operational planner, but they also retained a lot of skepticism about him. Given his own interest in maintaining his status as an independent operator, there was a critical period during which al Qaeda wasn't sure about Mohammed, and Mohammed wasn't sure about al Qaeda.

Today, there are other conversations like those between Mohammed and bin Laden occurring--not just within al Qaeda circles, but in other terrorists groups. The most obvious conclusion (and you don't need to be on the 9/11 Commission to have reached it) is that we need better intelligence to detect these conversations as they're happening.

Then we need to do something about them. One important step is to deny someone like Mohammed credibility. The US government needs to look smarter than the terrorists, and certainly not dancing to their tune.

Which makes, yet again, Tom Ridge's continued content-free terrorist alerts a genuine fiasco. If they are based on "chatter," then the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds of today are chattering about how brilliant their ideas are, how they'll terrify the Americans, how personally important they are to the future of al Qaeda and other groups. If, indeed, there had been some vague intelligence about terrorist plots around the November elections, then the Ridge announcement of two weeks ago helps, not hurts, the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds out there. Sure, we need to roust a sleepy Mohammed from his safe house in Pakistan after he has seen his 9/11 brainchild come to fruition. We also need to discredit people like him before they become major players.

The rat's ass

IN THE NEWS
Years ago, I attended a conference of academics and policy professionals jointly interested in small wars. At the time, the State and Defense departments were using the term "low intensity conflict" to stuff some untidy conflicts--peacekeeping operations, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, etc.--into the same box. The result was far from perfect, and in many ways, illuminated more about the US government's discomforts with small, unconventional conflicts than anything common to the wars themselves.

In one memorable exchange, one of the policy types skewered one of the academic types with a question that has stayed with me ever since: "OK, I've been listening to you guys for days now. You have a lot of bright things to say, and you've clearly done your homework. But why should I give a rat's ass about any of it? What good will any of these fine papers you've written do me when I hit the office tomorrow?"

It's a great question--perhaps, in many respects, THE question behind this blog. If a theory can't help someone make a better decision, what good is it? And how well can military and civilian professionals function, if they're not aware of the implicit theories that shape their perceptions and actions--particularly if these theories might be wrong?

The "rat's ass" comment led me to trying the theory/practice format that you see in a lot of the posts here. Theory should inform practice, and vice-versa. If one isn't useful to the other, something is gravely wrong.

I'm raising the "rat's ass" question because of an adjective I've heard applied to the Middle East quite frequently, especially in the last three years: medieval. What, exactly, does someone mean by this description? Is it accurate? Is it useful?

I'll speak as someone who's a medieval history buff, as well as someone who follows current events. The short version is, The word might apply, but definitely not in the way most people probably use it. As always, there's a longer version, so please bear with me.

Clearly, what people mean by the term medieval is barbarous. For them, the world of suicide bombers, handless thieves, executed princesses, and wild-eyed jihadists resembles the caricature of the Middle Ages in Europe--a world of thumbscrews, judicial torture, burnt heretics, and crusade. There's a little truth in those notions, but a lot more untruth about the medievals--and about the Middle East today.

I've raised the often-voiced question, Why do they hate us? in several posts recently. I detect that often there's another, not-so-hidden question behind it: What the hell is wrong with these people?

At that point, you might posit some kind of "bad seed" explanation for the woes of the Middle East. Maybe it's a cultural defect, some dark instinct in Islamic or Arab culture that gets unleashed frequently. I'm not sure, if you ascribe to this view, what you do next. "Carthaginian peace" is out of the question, so what then? In other words, it's not just a bad theory because it's undoubtedly wrong, but it's also bad because it's practically useless.

Another explanation might be that Middle Eastern nations are either on a different track of political development than the West, or they're a few steps behind more "developed" nations along the same track we all travel. Social science from around WWII to the present day has preferred this kind of explanation, though there's yet to emerge a specific theory that everyone agrees is worth pursuing.

Before WWII, a great deal of political science focused on formal institutions--constitutions, electoral laws, etc.--to explain the stability of governments. If a government failed, there was some defect in the laws that stopped the rest of the mechanism from working. Government was a clockwork mechanism, whose efficiency and durability depended on the quality of individual cogs as well as the overall design.

The Nazi seizure of power threw political science into a kind of crisis, since the Nazis destroyed, among other things, the Weimar constitution, often cited as a paragon of constitutional wisdom. The clockworks seemed to be irrelevant--or, at the very least, they seemed to be part of a larger, functional entity.

This led to a flurry of explanations for why Weimar failed that all, more or less, depended on some larger societal factors. There were some "bad seed" advocates, searching for some deep, dark stain on the German soul. Sure, they said, Germany was the nation of Goethe and Beethoven, but it was also the nation of Spengler and Wagner. The mainstream of opinion about the Nazi seizure of power shifted to other explanations that seemed less condemnatory of all Germans, living or dead. The disruptions of rapid industrialization, a lack of cross-cutting institutions, insufficient time as a single state or a democracy to develop particular political habits--scholars rounded up these and other possible suspects for interrogation.

By the Sixties, many historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists accepted the view that there was some kind of common track of development that all societies took in their development. They evolved or matured in slightly different ways, and often at different speeds, but they all evolved in a common direction. This wasn't a new view--a lot of the French philosophes of the 18th century, for example, had a similar view--and it was common to people on the left, right, and center of the political spectrum. Marxists had their versions, but so too did people who felt that democratic capitalism was the final destination. There were even some radical right versions of this thesis, such as the "modern societies are ungovernable, democracy is doomed" advocates of the 1980s.

Pick your thesis. Whichever one you like, from Huntington to Skocpol, they all felt that there were some forms that you might call medieval, some modern, and others before, between, and after these two.

In this spirit, I'll take a stab myself at identifying the political characteristics of medieval Europe:

• A social order predicated on explicit patron-client ties, ultimately perfected as the feudal contract.


• Nothing that you might call states in the modern sense. Instead, political authority was often limited to symbolic representation of the polity, leadership in war, and the power to tax and exercise other public fiscal instruments.


• The central government, such as it was, was dominated by powerful dynastic families. These family or clan ties often extended throughout society.


• In some cases, a body of electors wielded enough power to choose and remove top leaders. More commonly, these bodies acted more like advisory councils than legislatures.


• The central government negotiated with local leaders for their loyalty and support, often on a broader plane of the patron-client relationships seen, for example, between lord and serf at a local level.


• Religious faith often sanctified these ties.


• However, since religious authorities could withdraw their blessing from political leaders, declaring their authority null and void by command of God, there was an inescapable friction between temporal and spiritual authorities.

Does any of this picture apply to the Middle East today? Maybe.

The other day, I read the indignant comments of bloggers about Iraq's list of 43 newly-minted ambassadors to other countries. The names of these ambassadors have an oddly familiar ring. Since the sons (and one daughter) of the prominent families of Iraq dominate this list, the appointments look like blatant cronyism.

Yes, and...? It's hard to imagine an Iraq without the extended families, clans, great houses, call them what you will, playing a dominant role. Certainly the new/old Iraqi elites haven't hit the level of the Saudi royal family and its allied families (like the bin Ladens). Iraq is still a society in which family ties add a level of trustworthiness to political relationships, so it's not surprising to see this outcome. (On a side note, President Allawi and Foreign Minister Zehari were apparently at odds over the list before it was announced.) Saddam Hussein, who tried at times to 'modernize' Iraq, was himself "the man from Tikrit"--dependent not just on his own family, but allied families from the Tikrit region, to run the Iraqi police state.

None of these political realities make the Iraqis incapable of governing themselves, nor are they unworthy of a shot at a real democracy. However, if the Iraqi polity--the government, the political culture, the social and economic groupings, the whole enchilada--are not at the same stage of evolution as, say, Norway or Portugal, it's unreasonable to expect a monumental transformation of Iraq--just as it took time for England, say, to perfect its own "constitution" (in the Bagehot-esque sense of the word).

In fact, if you believe in some version of the political development thesis, it's to the credit of Middle Easterners that they've come as far, and as fast, as they has in the last century. And, of course, you can say that with no condescension at all--just give that credit where it's due, to reformers and revolutionaries alike.

After this long drive through medieval history, the last several decades of thinking in political history, and current events in Iraq, we arrive at where we started: the proverbial rat's ass. You can agree with my description of the Middle Ages, or not. You can see similarities between the Middle Ages and the Middle East, or not. However, if you agree with some part of this argument, you can see its utility in practice.

For example, what helped the development of European nationalism? One answer is, the armies of Europe. The army of a sovereign recruited soldiers from different regions of the same proto-country and gave them common experiences, skills, and habits--and, of course, common loyalties. Troops raised from Gascony, the Languedoc, Brittany, and Normandy learned to fight alongside one another, in a common cause, as Frenchmen. Similarly, someone interested in the future stability of Iraq might want to encourage the Iraqi authorities to "mix and match" their troop assignments, instead of maintaining units recruited from a particular region or sect.

That's an observation worth a bit more than a rodent's posterior, I think.

Simone, we hardly knew ya

IN THE NEWS
Serendipity is just another word for, I have no idea what the Fates have in store for me.

Case in point is the readership of this blog. Typepad lets you see how people get to your blog, and not surprisingly, Google and other search engines figure prominently. After all the carefully worded, borderline scholarly pieces I've written here, guess which keywords show up most often on Google searches that lead to Arms and Influence?

#1: Thomas Schelling.
#2: Simone Ledeen.

Now, the first name was apparently a bit of, um, inadvertant genius, apparently. I would have never guessed that a lot of people were looking up Thomas Schelling or his book, Arms and Influence, on the web. But, apparently, they're out there.

The second name...That's a bit of a surprise, too. On one of my more frustrated days, I cited an article that profiled Ms. Ledeen and other Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) staff members. According to this news item, these people couldn't quite claim to have made up in youthful enthusiasm what they lacked in genuine (and much needed) expertise. This wasn't the only case of "only the underqualified need apply" that I'd seen; in one case, a senior IT person in the Department of Homeland Security turns out to have received a degree from a diploma mill. (You'd think information might be kinda, sorta important for homeland security. As Steve Martin used to say in Saturday Night Live sketches like "Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber": Naaaaaw.)

Ms. Ledeen posted a response to my piece about her. It was a pleasant surprise, since one of the reasons I started this blog was to start building some substantive bridges between the political extremes in the United States. I'm still not 100% sure that Ms. Ledeen's credentials exactly matched what was needed, nor am I convinced at all that the Administration did its job recruiting more qualified people for posts in the CPA.

I am confident from corresponding with her that the Post did Ms. Ledeen a disservice. She has more to her resume than they indicated. And the Post certainly downplayed the physical risks that Ms. Ledeen and others faced.

She has a short piece at this link that summarizes her response to the Post article and other comments about her. I appreciate her patience and open-mindedness during our exchange in the comments section of this blog.

Cities that start with B

IN THE NEWS
Everyone has their fingers crossed that Baghdad and Beirut have nothing more in common than the fact that their names both start with the letter B. However, the recent spate of kidnappings has a lot of people spooked. Will Iraq collapse into the kind of grinding, bloody, daily bombings, firefights, and kidnappings that Beirut suffered in the 1980s? Since kidnappings are all that's left to complete the picture, perhaps there's reason to be concerned.

Iraqis have their reasons for violence, but their not exactly the same as those of the Lebanese militias. The Lebanese civil war had its roots in the country's constitution, which had fixed representation in the legislature for every ethnic group. Over time, the Muslim birthrate outstripped that of the Christians, increasing pressure for a constitutional revision that never occurred. Add to this already explosive mix aggrieved minority groups like the Druze, outside meddling from Iran and Syria, and the exiled PLO leadership, you're left with a situation so bad that it would have been amazing had Lebanon not had some kind of civil war. What made the situation worse, of course, was the Israeli invasion, followed by the abortive US peacekeeping mission. The tragedy of Lebanon, once a model of Middle Eastern prosperity and civility, was overwhelming.

Kidnapping in Lebanon quickly became an effective political tool. All a group needed was a bit of ruthlessness and cunning, some identifiable Westerners (who were all over Beirut), and some safe houses, and you had the basic tools for gaining leverage far beyond the size of your organization. Some of the hostage-takers in Beirut were significant players, like the Hezbollah; others were minor leaguers, who saw how effective hostage-taking could be as a political weapon.

Baghdad in 2004 isn't quite Beirut in 1984. The clan and sectarian divisions In Iraq are not as deep or bitter as they were in Lebanon. The engine for much of the violence in Iraq is the US/Coalition occupation--but, of course, we have to be careful to note that some of the people fighting the US today will not automatically lay down arms once the Americans leave. Now that the Baathist regime is gone, there is no political poke in the eye like the Lebanese constitution. (But it's worth noting Lebanon's cautionary tale about setting electoral quotas for particular groups.)

Iraq, unfortunately, has reached a point that Lebanon once did: factions are seeing the undeniable effectiveness of kidnapping. The Philippine government wasn't keen on keeping troops in Iraq for too much longer, but the kidnapping of a Filipino national certainly hastened their departure. Since there is no effective police force, and a lot of foreigners, the opportunity is clearly there for many groups to grab quick notoriety and leverage.

Once again, we have to fall back on the Iraqis to deal with the political violence in that country. And again, it all comes down to basics: people willing to give us information; people familiar enough with the language and the culture to know what to do with this information; the ability to provide safe passage to people going about their daily lives; decisions about what necessary to spread that security through ever-larger portions of Iraq. Once the kidnappings gain momentum, they're hard to stop. The White House has made Iraq more important than Lebanon ever was. That fact doesn't negate the political reality, however, that an increasing number of Western (or Egyptian, or Filipino) hostages creates.